Whatever your thing is lay out your standards that are going to get you to live like an Olympian and then stick to it everyday...
BITS 'N' PIECES
Here’s the deal: motivation doesn’t work; it’s fleeting, it comes and goes. So what happens the day you’re not motivated? You’re not going to work? No! It’s about discipline. It’s about consistency. It’s about laying out standards that you live by and the standards never change. Your standards, by the way, could be different than another person’s. Just be consistent; don’t do it for three days, don’t do it for a month. Whatever your thing is lay out your standards that are going to get you to live like an Olympian and then stick to it everyday. Especially because 70 percent of the time, you are not going to be motivated. But the idea is you do it anyway. Supposing it’s about you waking early every morning. Write what you’re going to do on your wall, tell everybody you know you’re going to do it, and stick to it. One trick is to set your alarm and put it on the other side of the room. When you wake up, you got to get up and stumble over everything; you’ll probably wake up by the time you get there. If you want to go to bed, just tell yourself, “Alright, I can go back to bed after I splash water on my face and I put my sneakers on.” These are low threshold activities that would serve as triggers before you begin your task because you’d not be returning to bed then. Or you could ask a friend to come over every morning at whatever time it is you need to get out of bed – 6:00 AM, 7:00 AM. Naturally, you’d be embarrassed if you are not awake by the time they come meet you so that’s another way to be held accountable.
Compassion has many faces. Some of them are fierce; some of them are wrathful; some of them are tender; some of them are wise.
First, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognise also that I’m not separate from this suffering. But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we actually aspire to transform suffering. And if we’re so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. Another essential component is we cannot be attached to outcome. Because any attachment to outcome would distort deeply our own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe.
Now compassion is an inherent human quality. It is there within every human being. But compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity and fear. And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralysed by fear. In that paralysis, precisely, our capacity for compassion is also paralysed
A person who is cultivating compassion, when they are in the presence of suffering, they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do. However, they return to baseline a lot sooner. It makes them resilient.
Also, many of us think that compassion drains us; in reality, however, it is something that truly enlivens us. It really enhances what’s called neural integration. It hooks up all parts of the brain. Another thing about compassion is that it enhances our immune system.
Dalai Lama once said, “Love and compassion are necessities. They are not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” But it is not only humanity that won’t survive; all species on the planet would be affected.
