If you are the kind of person that gets angry regularly, that tells you much about you. If you are often sad or melancholy, same thing. If you are basically a happy person, same thing.

However, often one emotion “masks” another, so we might walk around appearing, even believing, we are happy for example, but it might be hiding a deep sadness.

Clowns know this. Any truly great comedy has a tragedy at its root. Laugh or cry, those are our two choices when faced with life. Clowns get us to laugh about the pain in our lives. Look at Jim Carey’s movies, for example: The Truman Show. It is very funny, but the story is tragic. Laugh or cry.

So underneath it all, that emotional map, does it control us, or guide us out of our personal woods to fields of joy? So what emotions control you? What feelings do you avoid? Even avoiding emotion is a form of control, the emotion we seek when we do that is called “numbness”. It is often a blanket of emotional concrete covering a raging fire of emotions.

For better or worse, the only way  I’ve seen that works to really grow into the person you truly are, is to look within and loosen the knots of the heart. Emotions are not good or bad, they are our inner guidance system. It’s up to us to learn to use the tools Life has given us.

There is slow boiling anger, like hot lava from a volcano. There is the anger that comes like a sudden storm and destroys whatever is in its path.

Then there is anger like acid rain, that slowly drop by drop eats away at us.

I’m sure you can come up with different anger types on your own.

The thing to remember about anger we are usually angry at something, because of something.

Think about it for a moment. Think back to when you were last angry. Weren’t you angry at a situation, person, perhaps yourself or another, an event? Wasn’t the anger about a value or belief you had that was challenged or broken? Either trust, expectation, self-esteem or something like that?

If you look beneath the surface of that anger, beyond the surface reason you were angry, was there another person you were angry with? Very often it’s us. When we are angry at others we are often angry at ourselves too. For being such a fool, for trusting that person, for believing them, or for the injustice of the situation. Whatever it is.

Anger is a fantastic tool then- it allows us to clearly without any doubt see what we feel about ourselves. We then know exactly what to clear, what hot buttons to release, what we truly believe about the world.

So next time you get angry, bless it, since it is guiding you to deepen and expand yourself. But only if you take action and learn the lessons anger wants to teach you. If you run away, you’ll just end up doing it again.

Having upset some readers, let me explain why. Because often when we start our journey of personal growth we are looking for something extra, something we want to be, which we believe is “outside” us in some way.

Either it is something in our personality we want to add or remove, or it is an experience we wish to move away from or towards. Or even people we want to become or not be like.

This has it all arsy-versy or inside out. The truth is WE already are the very best in us, we’re simply not letting ourselves see it, feel it, believe it and even less be it.

The journey then is different, it is more a process of unlearning and releasing ideas and beliefs rather than adding new ones. of course, a few new techniques and skills help to learn to drop the old. That is what this site is dedicated to.

The trick, however, is to BE the person inside, not just thinking it, or even believing it, but living that reality as a fundamental fact of your world.

How do we do this, crazy as it sounds? The answer is surprisingly simple, we already are that and far more. It is our negative emotional beliefs about ourselves and the world that stop us from seeing it.

Clear those and the real, deep, true you will naturally shine forth.

This ability to be centered in being our true self will carry us through the bad times and allow us to fully enjoy the good. If you want to really take control of your life and find and live your dreams

If you want to have a life of brilliance and joy, it starts with creating that world “inside” now. In India there are millions of people who have pretty much nothing. Lots and lots of nothing. No food, no water, no clothes and no prospects. Your life in comparison, no matter how hard it may be, is a paradise compared to that.

Yet, many of those millions smile easily and happily. It is not because they are smoking something you are not, it is simply that you and they have made different choices about how to deal with life’s adversities.

The difference is that when we grateful we are more open to something good happening,  rather than just griping about the mortgage not being paid or whatever the problem is. We create a vibration that the universe responds to. It responds to all our vibrations, so let’s choose the good ones.

In Lynn McTaggart’s amazing book “The Intention Experiment” she explains that science is finding that our intention affects the world around us in a measurable and provable manner. It all boils down to coherent emotion. The best way to develop coherent emotion to start creating the world we desire, is gratitude.

It creates a space within us for more beauty and joy. Doesn’t that sound a whole lot better than whining and moaning? The moaning will only give you more things to moan about, but the gratitude will bring you more things to be grateful for.

Try this exercise for a week and see how you feel: write down every evening 10 things you are grateful for during the day, they can be as “small” as you liked the sun shining on your face, to as large as you want. If you find it tough to come up with 10 things, then that says something already doesn’t it?

I’m grateful you’ve read this and for every day of my life and all my challenges and problems that teach me so much and how to be a bigger, better version of me.

“Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.”

Doris Day

And yet… and yet… How much juice would life have if all we have is resentment and bitterness? If you want to see the value of forgiveness in your life and how powerfully it can transform you, try this following exercise:

Think of someone who has hurt, perhaps badly. As much as you feel safe to do so, feel the feelings that this person makes you feel (angry, resentful, hurt, afraid, abused, what ever it is)

Now, simply allow yourself to welcome that feeling. yes, welcome it. After all, you’re feeling it anyway now, right? So what difference is there if you welcome the feeling? This does not mean you have accept or condone what was done to you. Simply welcome the feeling. OK so far?

Next, ask yourself this question: “Could I let go of this feeling?” Whether you answer Yes or No, is not that important, as long as you are being honest with yourself.

Next, even if you answered No above, ask yourself, “Would I let go of this feeling?” Again, Yes or No. No dithering, maybes, or becauses are allowed.

Lastly, ask yourself “When?” When would allow yourself to let go of that feeling of hurt? Now, how do you feel? A bit lighter perhaps? If you do, you’ve just put the power of forgiveness to work for you.

I can think of no better authority on the power of forgiveness than Nelson Mandela, and this is what he said about forgiveness:

“When you forgive, fear has no power over you, that is the power of forgiveness”

Nelson Mandela

Now your other choice, is be trained as an architect and be paid only $70,000 a year for 8 hours a day,  for the rest of your life. You get to be involved with every new project and work in exotic locations, but you still only bank in $70,000 a year.

Which would you choose? Does the 100K look tempting or the $70K. Why? One is a life of dull, routine boring security and the other is a life of creativity, meaning and challenge but for less.

I guess most people would say the 100K looks pretty damn good, especially in the midst
of a financial crisis. But really is that true?

The smart guy in the back is saying, “well, I’d sign up for the toll booth thing, live cheap and invest the rest of the money and retire early”. Sorry, can’t do that, you must work in the job for at least 15 years.

That’s not fair! You say, you did not say that up front! Maybe you want to change your choice? Well, life can also be like that, either we don’t read the fine print or simply things change.

Who said life was fair anyway? It certainly does not come tatooed on a baby’s backside. A life of meaning is far more fulfilling than one without. Would you agree?

The choices we make in our head every day determine what kind of life we are going to have tomorrow and the day after. Our mindset and attitude are the only thing we have absolute control over yet most of us neglect learning how to develop this critical, vital side of us.

So we carry acres and acres of junk in our head. The Power of Simplicity is about releasing the junk and allowing us to lead richer, more fulfilled lives.

Do reptiles love? What kind of a question is that? Well, it’s a very important one because there is a reptile inside you. Yuck! Yep, it is called your “limbic system” it is the part of the brain that we inherited from our dinosaur ancestors.

Think like a reptile for a moment, what would you fear, what would you be interested in? How would you feel when you saw something new? Let’s assume for the moment that our awareness of reptiles is correct and that they are relatively free of finer feelings like love, joy and happiness, they are largely motivated by fear, hunger, sex and self-preservation.

Imagine you are still that reptile, and you see something new. How would you react? Either ignore it, unless it moves (it might eat you) or attack it first, just in case but chances you’d just move away because of the fear of something unknown.

Now step back into “you” again. How many times has your inner reptile made you react the same way? You see, we think we are all one thing: a human being. But we are made up of thousands if not millions of different parts. Our brains are at least three major parts: the reptile brain, the mid-brain (emotions) and the higher brain (rational thought). That’s just the brain. If we zoom right into our cells, yes deep in there we have DNA, but DNA cannot directly interact with the body without RNA. So in some sense DNA is “foreign” to the body. The cells are made up of other parts which each evolved from different sources too. All our genetic heritage is passed on from the female side generation after generation, in a part of the cell called the mitochondria. Think about that one for a bit!

Our being the sons and daughters of Eve is absolutely right. If you trace back any of our ancestors you arrive back in Africa about 20,000 generations ago. That is just the blink of any eye, so really, we are all African. The genetic difference between all members of the human race is barely measurable. The chimpanzee, our nearest relative, is on 2-3% different from us.

So what’s with the evolutionary tour? Back to the brain, the limbic system is aware in a very vague way of other parts of the brain and frankly all it really cares about is survival. Not rich, happy or fulfilled. Survival. That’s it baby.

The mid-brain has a richer emotional life and is aware far more than the limbic system, but it views life through an emotional lens. And there were we thinking our brains are purely rational. They absolutely are not. In fact, thought is often a action STOPPER rather than an action TAKER.

Want an example, when you are at a store and the attendant comes over and starts to sell to you, if you are marginally keen, what’s the most common phrase people use? I’ll ____________ it.

Notice that interesting second word? No emotions there. Thought tends to lead to more thought. Did you not get the phrase? I’ll think about it.

So in the end, we usually make emotional decisions and then justify them afterwards. Just ask anyone who just bought product X over product Y. It boils down to the fact that they liked one more than the other. The features and knobs and whistles all justified the decision, they did not make the decision. We had a series of beliefs about that product being a better fit for us than another one. You know what? Someone walked into the same store just after you did, and for them product Y was so obviously better than X, only a fool would by X. Who’s right? Neither or both. Take your pick. Both had beliefs about something that caused them to take action and buy something.

So what about our larger lives? What role does belief play there? Beliefs can then stop us from doing things too. Let’s say you have a strong belief that you can’t swim (forget the “because’s for the moment”) well first off, you can’t swim because you have a negative belief around swimming which you can justify with lots of reasons and secondly, because you believe that chances are you’ll stop yourself from learning to swim. So of course it’s true you can’t swim!

Now let’s apply that to money. Oh no! The dreaded M word. Not THAT one boys, the one around the green stuff. There are few subjects on which there are more experts than around money. Everyone has an opinion about how to get it, who should or should not have some and so on. Frankly, there are probably more opinions about money than sex.

Why? Well, because it is an essential ingredient to living in the 21^st century, it is the means by which we can live our large dreams and achieve the kind of freedom deep down we all believe we can have. But up pop our beliefs and either say we do not deserve that life, or cannot have it because there is not enough to go around, or the rich are greedy bastards (and hey, who wants to be labeled a greedy bastard). Ever heard the phrase the “filthy rich”? In that belief world you have to be filthy to be rich. Who deep down really wants to be filthy if that’s what it takes to be rich. Filthy anyone? That comes before the rich.

How about “money is the root of all evil”? That’s another good one. Being bad is one thing, evil is entirely another. Bad is more of an attitude thing with a bit of non-conforming going on. Evil is deliberately and consciously setting out to harm others. Just reading that probably gives you the willies. Now imagine how your reptile brain reacts to that one! That’s a pretty strong danger signal, wouldn’t you agree?

It is our deepest, hidden beliefs that are guiding our lives. We are not even aware of these beliefs most of the time. Yet, there they are guiding us with the precision of a laser bomb to our target. Is our target destruction or happiness? Depends on your beliefs about you, money, relationships and all the rest.

You see, our reptile brain is alive and well, so are all the other parts of us. Our emotions, our feelings, our conscious thoughts and our subconscious beliefs. They are all operating, but if they are all working with different goals and agendas, is it likely that you’ll get to where you consciously want to go?

I didn’t think so either. The process of clearing out and harmonizing these parts of us is called spiritual growth. Well, spirit is perfect already, but that is the subject of another post.

In fact, it has been so powerful, it is going to be the next book. So what is the big deal?

Well, the more I looked at it and the more I read what others were saying, the sub-conscious mind seems to be to be the key to it all. The conscious mind is really not a major player in our lives except in one area. It allows too much crud to get into our subconscious.

You see, the sub-conscious is where all our potential lies burried amidst all our beliefs and attitudes. But if we build a set of beliefs that hinder us, our potential has little chance to shine. So what does all this have to do with the conscious mind? Well, one of its most important jobs is to filter what goes into our sub-conscious. Ah! You didn’t know that did you? I didn’t either until I completed John Kehoe’s amazing Mind Power program.

So what’s the big deal? Well, the sub-consicous does not understand negatives, does not have a sense of humor and is imprinted with highly emotionalized thought. So for example, you watch a horror movie, some part of that “junk” will leak into your sub-conscious. Perhaps you will be a bit more fearful, or develop a deep fear of certain things. Let me give you an example, many years ago, when the movie “Jaws” came out (it was about this Great White Shark attacking a village in New England) my brothers went to watch it. I was too little at the time to watch it with them. Now we lived in Mexico which is not short of beautiful beaches. Which we used to go to a lot. For a good six months at least after watching the movie, both of them were much more reluctant to go into the sea. Where before, they had leapt in with abandon at the first chance.

Now here’s the kicker, it also affected me too, but not as much. For years (and I mean years) I also used to check out the sea before I went in, looking for sharks. Was it rational? No, because Great White Sharks do not frequent the beaches I used to go to as a boy. But it is a great example of how our conscious mind failed to stop junk going into our sub-conscious.

Once its in there its pretty hard to dig out. So what if you have beliefs around money, relationships or health for example? Would that not impact you just a little?

These beliefs have sometimes been called transparent beliefs because we cannot “see” them. We assume the world is a particular way and we’re sure of it.

There will be a free eBook up on the site in a couple of days covering this more depth and it is part of the forthcoming book. You’ll find it shocking, astonishing and very useful. Check back soon for your copy.