Category: Inspiration

If you are anything like me, you will be improving your ability to do this for years if not decades to come. So start doing this and while you are improving your ability with this, continue with the remaining steps.

From a philosophical perspective, you get that on which you put your attention. Happiness or sadness are alike a state of mind that the individual chooses with which to approach life.

If I were to sit here and think enough about sad things for long enough I am sure I could make myself feel depressed. I don’t wish to live life depressed so I know not to do that.

I remember 40+ years ago when my wife’s and my first pregnancy resulted in a stillborn baby, we received a card from one of Julie’s cousins who wrote, “I try to remember it is not what happens to us in life but how we respond to it that shapes our life.”

At that time if my wife and I failed to make the deliberate decision to move on, if instead we chose to sit and grieve over that loss we might never have tried again and gotten the three wonderful beings we call our children, their spouses and our 6 grandchildren. Scary thought!

Most people do not know that what they think about is under their own control. Most people run on automatic, giving rent-free room to whatever thought pops into their head. They do not know that they can make conscious, deliberate choices about what thoughts they choose to entertain. Just like you choose what movies to watch in order to be entertained, you can choose which thoughts you entertain and which you kick to the kerb.

The thing to recognise is that what stays front and centre in your mind is what you keep thinking about. If a sad, depressing or harmful thought pops into your head there is no reason to entertain it in your mind any more than you would entertain a burglar who came in through an open window in your home. Just as there are several options to get the burglar back out of your house and onto the street, so there are several options to take your attention of the dark thoughts that invade your thinking.

First thing to do is recognize that it is a dark thought that is not welcome, then take your attention off it. Deliberately and with malice aforethought, direct your attention onto something else. It could be your ‘to do’ list for the day, an upcoming event, a project, your major goal in life, doesn’t matter what, just redirect your attention. Every time you do this it will build your mental ‘refocus’ muscle.

You didn’t know you had that muscle, did you? It is not a physical muscle but a no less valuable function of your discipline. I am guessing quite a few times you’ve been to told to focus or concentrate but nobody has shown you how to refocus or divert your attention from something. Many is the story or movie told about people who let negative thoughts occupy their attention with disastrous consequences but never have I seen anybody place the proper attention on learning how to refocus.

I deliberately choose not to think about the sad things that happen to me or destructive responses to harms done me. I do the following:
Confront the true cause of the problem,
Take responsibility for what part I had in creating the situation,
If appropriate, warn others,
If necessary and possible, do what I can to handle it then
Move on.

I take my attention off it and focus on the good in life which the main stream media news take great care to avoid.

If you read the newspapers or watch the news you are paying them with your money and your time. STOP DOING IT! Stop thinking black thoughts. Whenever your thoughts start to go there, instantly redirect them. Look at something. Strengthen your “refocus” muscle!

For a few minutes every day, practice deliberately changing what you are thinking about to something else. Do this until you become expert at changing what you think about any time you wish.

In a month that alone will make you feel a whole bunch better!

Next skill to improve is to reduce the time between when the black thoughts come in and you refocus. The faster the better. The goal is instantaneous. Thought comes in, BANG! Refocus occurs. This is a lot easier to accomplish when you have a burning desire to achieve a goal on your basic purpose line.

When a city or society is confronted with riots resulting in violence, destruction and death of it’s citizens, its not surprising when law-abiding citizens ask, “how could this happen?” or “why are people so violent?” or “what is wrong with the youth of today?” All sorts of explanations, justifications and unusual solutions are advanced, but they rarely provide the answers or uncover the root causes of the problems.

To gain a broader understanding, we must look at a quite different long-term factor that has been an insidious cause of deteriorating social and family standards and conditions.

In the 1940s, psychiatry’s leaders proclaimed their intention to infiltrate the field of education and the law and bring about the “re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong.” G. Brock Chisholm and British psychiatrist John Rawlings Rees, co-founders of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), bluntly told their peers at the time:

“If the race is to be freed from the crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

Governments were eager to implement new ideas and ideologies of the “new psychology” as society recovered from the devastation of war.

The attempt to undermine morals and consequently the deterioration of society and the family unit can be traced back to the influence of psychiatry in these different fields.

In its formative years, WFMH conferences were held in London in 1940 and 1945 where the leaders eagerly laid out their goals and objectives. Rees proclaimed:
“We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine.” Dr. John Rawlings Rees, “Strategic Planning for Mental Health”, June 18, 1940

Canadian Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, President of the WFMH in 1945 proclaimed:

“The re-interpretation and eventually (sic) eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith… are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy. The fact is, that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely.” Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, 1945

To help get happiness back into our society, check out this little booklet:
https://www.thewaytohappiness.org/

From Larry Meredith:

I saw this years ago, and it’s a great story!! Very well worth the time to read and share!

Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb
ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience!

One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, ‘ You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!

‘How in the world did you know that?’ asked Plumb.

‘I packed your parachute,’ the man replied.

Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude.

The man pumped his hand and said, ‘I guess it worked!’

Plumb assured him, ‘It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.’

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, ‘I kept wondering what he had looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat; a bib in the back; and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said ‘Good
morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.’ Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent at a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Now, Plumb asks his audience, ‘Who’s packing your parachute?’ Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. He also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory – he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety.

Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what isreally important. We may fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone onsomething wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason.
As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize people who pack your parachutes.

I am sending you this as my way of thanking you for your part in packing my parachute. And I hope you will send it on to those who have helped pack yours! Sometimes, we wonder why friends keep forwarding jokes to us without writing a word. Maybe this could explain it! When you are very busy, but still want to keep in touch, guess what you do – you forward jokes. And to let you know that you are still remembered, you are still important, you are still loved, you are still cared for, guess what you get? A forwarded joke. So, my friend, next time when you get a joke, don’t think that you’ve been sent just another forwarded joke, but that you’ve been thought of today and your friend on the other end of your computer wanted to send you a smile, just helping you pack your parachute.