si dawson

That video seemed to make every­thing click for me! It all made such per­fect sense, espe­cially after ques­tion­ing my new raw and emo­tional state. Funny how clear things can become in an instant, after years of con­fu­sion. Im really inter­ested in the EFT you speak of though…

She's an incred­i­bly clear speaker, I agree.

re EFT, I sug­gest fol­low­ing the link on the right hand side — that's a site I put up for busy peo­ple — to explain the basics of EFT as quickly as pos­si­ble. Have a play with that, see if it makes sense to you. If not, come back and shout at me :)

Si, I know (ok, sus­pect per­haps) that this blog focuses more on EFT and your self-improvement jour­ney than is prob­a­bly rep­re­sen­ta­tive of your life in gen­eral, so this response is prob­a­bly redun­dant, but read­ing through this entry made me won­der just how long you're going to try to improve your­self before you become happy with your­self? I mean actu­ally accept your­self for who you are, not for who you might become?

I realise it's a process every­body does to some degree, and I'm not say­ing it's a bad thing. I accept you for who you are already, faults and all. It's what makes you You.

Just so you know. :)

Of course, I don't nec­es­sar­ily accept ME for who I am — like I said, we all go through the jour­ney in our own ways. I think I just answered my own question.

A more spe­cific ques­tion then, is "do you have an ulti­mate goal in mind, when you'll stop self-improving?"

See? I knew there was a rea­son we've stayed friends so long.

These are all excel­lent ques­tions. I'll see if I can pro­vide some excel­lent answers.

I'll start with ulti­mate goal. For the last cou­ple of years it's been "healthy rela­tion­ship" (which mostly worked — although, of course, every rel­ship has two peo­ple, so it's never quite that sim­ple). Ini­tially though, it was all about get­ting my finances sorted — my $$ were messed up because my head was messed up about $$. This has taken a bit longer than antic­i­pated (lots of fam­ily his­tory to wade through). As I've stepped along the jour­ney though, the goal has become more spir­i­tual in nature — essen­tially, "inner peace", ie, imper­turba­bil­ity, ie, zero neg­a­tive emo­tions. Yes, this is pos­si­ble. And, yes, I see it get much closer each day. A "fin­ger in the air" guess is that I have maybe 5% of the neg­a­tive emo­tions I had two years ago. A lot of the time I am sim­ply ecsta­t­i­cally happy. I do realise this sounds unrea­son­able or impossible.

I accept myself a LOT more than I ever have before. I'd say com­pletely, but I have a nag­ging feel­ing I've missed some­thing small. I'll clear it today, then I will :)

You are com­pletely right. Accept­ing your­self is a very impor­tant step to take. Amus­ingly, this is often much, much harder to do than say. For me, due to per­fec­tion­ism, an inbuilt neg­a­tive slant (much both reduced these days), it's been a par­tic­u­larly long journey.

Now, hard­est ques­tion for last. Being happy (although yes, you were just talk­ing about being happy with myself).

What I've learned as I've gone along is that being happy is more than just "not hav­ing any neg­a­tive emo­tions". You can go from –10 to 0 (which I've been doing), but that doesn't take you to +10 (happy). Part of this is being a very prob­lem focussed kind of guy (instead of solu­tion focussed). Part of this is hav­ing a "focus on/look for what's wrong" atti­tude (and yes, problem/wrong are sub­tly dif­fer­ent) — upbring­ing & habit there.

Iron­i­cally, even just focussing on what's right, instead of wrong will take you a long way to being happy. It occurs to me as I write this that I haven't spent very much time at all work­ing on chang­ing this, & I should have — would have made every­thing else much eas­ier — but even then, it wasn't until I realised that I was cling­ing onto my pain that I also realised how eas­ily I could let go of it — so, part of me was delib­er­ately mak­ing things harder on myself. If that makes sense.

Also, once I got on this jour­ney, I also realised "I can change ANYTHING". So, a lot of it is less about not being happy with myself, and more about

If I could live with­out this, would I?

and often the answer is yes. Then, once you clear out neg­a­tives, you start asking:

If I could live with this IN my life, would I?

and you start putting in pos­i­tive stuff.

If you COULD have per­fectly mature, per­fectly bal­anced, calm, happy, fun rela­tion­ships with every per­son you meet, would you choose to?

If you COULD be per­fectly abun­dant (with zero effort), would you choose to?

IF you COULD be peace­ful, bliss­ful, and per­fectly present in every moment, would you choose to?

It's less about not being happy with myself. More about see­ing these as worth­while, and pre­vi­ously damn near impos­si­ble goals that are now (with this new tech­nol­ogy & tools — eft, releas­ing, raw, etc) quite achiev­able in a very finite timeframe.

Since the basic life expectancy (with­out major med­ical break­throughs) of peo­ple our age is 125–150, this means at least another 100 years of life (bar­ring acci­dent). I fig­ure it's well worth spend­ing a lit­tle time to live another 100 years feel­ing so, SO much more won­der­ful, every moment of every day.

It sounds like you're con­tin­u­ously mov­ing the tar­get for the final goal as you self-improve (and as you achieve a bet­ter idea of where you want to get to), which would mean you'd never com­plete the task. Which may well be a wor­thy goal in itself — to self-improve until your last moment on earth (at 150 years old — I like your stats!)

Me, I'd prob­a­bly just take the easy way out and do what you hint at in your reply — to become less of a per­fec­tion­ist and accept me with all my faults instead, hehe..

Actu­ally, I've decided to live longer than your pithy 150 years — some time ago I decided to become immor­tal. There's no way for any­one to prove to me that I'm not. :) So now since I have such a long future ahead of me, I take things a bit easier.

Take care, my friend…

I'm ok with enjoy­ing the jour­ney. As a friend once said to me "You've got to remem­ber to stop and eat the daisies." Finally I'm listening.

I've made a con­scious choice to live a life of Areté — an ancient Greek word that means virtue or excel­lence but has a deeper mean­ing.. “con­stantly striv­ing to reach your high­est potential.”

And yes, I wasn't plan­ning on dying at all either.. but that's a whole OTHER story *laugh*

ps. you look great for your age, MacLeod.

Uncanny! I was just watch­ing High­lander ear­lier today! Espe­cially uncanny given the size of my movie collection!

Yah canny doubt a real Scot!

Also, I was peep­ing in your window :)

Here's to *lov­ing your­self* through the process!

Amen.