About a month ago I was in Mexico, and stopped by a street vendor who was selling lunch.  I asked her what she was selling, and found out that it was some type of cows stomach and intestines offering.  Now, I’m not much of a vittles kind of guy, but I figured, when is the next time I’m going to be in Mexico at some random market, and have the opportunity to eat slow cooked cow stomach and intestines?  So I tried it.  And didn’t like it at all.  And now I know not to eat it again if I ever have the opportunity.

Then this week, I was invited to join a friend for “Hot Yoga,” which is basically Yoga in a room that is heated up to 105 degrees.  Honestly, when she asked me, I thought to myself, no that really doesn’t sound like something of much interest to me. Sweating hard doing Yoga.  But then I thought, why not.  It’s an experience, and how often do I have the opportunity to try a new experience?  So I did it.  And you know what?  I liked it.  Not enough to go back tomorrow, but enough to seriously consider going back in the future.
So never skip an opportunity to try something new.  You never know what you’ll learn from the experience, and you will definitely expand yourself, learn about yourself, and have an opportunity to retreat from the boredom of the mundane life that we all typically fall into if we just repeat the same patterns over and over.

Humans like to take sides.  It just makes life so much easier.  Democrats or Republicans.  Mets or Yankees.  Choose a side, and no further thinking is needed about the subject.  However, in reality, life is much too complex to really take sides.  For most decisions, there are competing factors at play that need to be examined.  So how do we determine what areas in our life need examining?  Find those areas of ambivalence that you have.  Ambivalence is your minds way of telling you that you aren’t so sure which way to go.  So by examining the underlying reasons behind you ambivalence, you can then better understand yourself, and in doing so, make a mature decision about what do with whatever situation you are faced with.

Most people seem to fool themselves, due to a simple false assumption.  They assume that life is supposed to go their way, and when things don’t, they get frustrated and the normal reaction is to fool themselves into thinking that the problem is somewhere else which means that the solution to their problems always eludes them.  However, by accepting that life can be hard, and taking things as they come, one can then look at life – and oneself – straight in the eyes and do the real soul searching that is needed to get to the depths of oneself to find the answers to whatever is bothering them that might be so evasive.

Ask yourself how many decisions in your life you have made that were not greatly impacted by the question of “what would another person think or want me to do in this situation”.  This other person could include family, friends, or total strangers, and could include assumptions planted in your psyche when you were younger by these same groups of people.  When you allow this to happen, you are enslaving yourself to the whims of others.  Free yourself and make your own decisions.  I can promise that you will never look back.

I just learned this lesson, and I have to say, it’s by far the most valuable thing I have learned in the past few years.  If you think about it, our actions are the physical manifestation of the conclusions of very complex thought processes.  So if we want to understand the underpinnings of why we do what we do, we can simply ask ourself, “Why exactly did I do that?!?”.  (I have found that this exercise works best with pen and paper and allowing for a free flowing question and answer style dialogue.)  In asking and then answering the question of why, you will be forced to reverse engineer your thoughts, emotions, and assumptions that got to you the outcome of whatever action you chose – and bring you closer than you have ever been to your core self.