What is real?

What is the truth?  What is reality?  I do not know. 

All I know is that whatever it is, it can only be found in this moment.

The Source

Listen to silence to hear all sounds,
observe stillness to begin all changes,
yearn for nothing to fulfill all desires.

Prisoners of Life

Party all night and you’ll feel depressed afterward

Cry all night and the sadness dissipates

Joy and sorrow are both energy, expend them and they’re no longer there.

Most people focus on obtaining the positive while avoiding the negative.  They look for fun things to do endlessly to keep the joy up while trying to forget the sad times in their life.

What they end up with is nothing but negative energy within them.  Since as soon as some positive energy appear, they use them right away.  They laugh and giggle, dance and celebrate, and feel like being on top of the world.  While the negatives are being tucked away, suppressed, unexpressed.

So what do they do?  They desperately search for more pleasures, things that they can feel good about, just to balance out the negative energy that they have stored for years on end.  They simply cannot stop, as the consequence of being flooded by the negative buildup would be devastating.  

They become prisoners of life. The negative, what they are afraid to feel, is the prison. The positives are treats and drugs that provide a temporary escape from the cruel reality, a hellish world that they have created upon themselves unknowingly.  And so they run in circles perpetually in the self-created prison, chasing pleasures while escaping from pain.

The Void

When you feel bored, you want to find something to do right away to fill up the void, be it your phone, junk food, etc.

For once, try not to do it. Taste the emptiness within for a bit. And something you haven't noticed before would emerge. It may be a solution to the problem that has been troubling you for a while, a feeling that you're avoiding to face, a body ache that reminds you to adjust your posture, or just a silly childhood memory that pops up out of nowhere. Whatever it may be, it is definitely worth the time to take note of.

The Answer You are Looking for is Within the Problem

Notice any tightness in you body. Watch it for a moment..... Voila, it relaxes itself.

You wanna relax? Notice how tense you are.
You wanna be happy? Notice how miserable you are.
You wanna change? Notice what you want to hold on to.

Everything is related.

7 obstacles stopping you to start something new (aka why we don't like change)

When you have more resolve than doubts and fears, nothing can really stop you from striving.  This post is not about strengthening your resolve, but to explore the antagonist that is in the way.  Here are 7 obstacles that are stopping you from doing what you initially wanted:

The habitual underlying

In physics, the principle of inertia tells us that an object tends to preserve its present state whether it be resting or moving, meaning that it’s more difficult for an object at rest to move than a moving object to keep moving.  It resonate with the idiom, "first step is always the hardest”, and the old Chinese saying, “all things are difficult at the beginning” (萬事起頭難).  And a quote from Thomas Fuller says, “all things are difficult before they are easy”.   

Or, in a more casual form, “keeping your shit together is HARD, but GETTING your shit together is harder.”

It's hard to start a new project; hard to get rid of that old habit; it's just hard to accept change.

Are they all the same phenomenon?  And WHY is it so damn DIFFICULT to start or change something?  I’ll explore the issue in the next post.