There are no short cuts to a healthy diet

After spending the past few days reviewing, prioritizing, and organizing your time and tasks, you now know how managing these things increases your focus and direction. How you spend your time shapes your whole life; Repeat after me: Multitasking is not mindful. Commit to doing one thing at a time and doing it well. It is supported by refusing the emotional seduction of other people's upsets and problems. It also involves a willingness to allow the world to work out its own problems and destiny. Reactive involvement and intervention in the world can be better left to people who have a different calling. A good person is one thing; Enlightenment is another. You are responsible for the effort and not the result, which is up to God and the universe. Nonattachment is not the same as indifference or detachment. Misunderstanding it to mean that the development of detachment is required often ends up as flatness or Apathy. In contrast, nonattachment allows full participation in life without trying to control outcomes. Accept that everything serves a purpose. Forty years is a long time; Actually, that time frame is a fallacy. You're probably less than twenty years old in work years. You probably started seriously working for a living around the age of twenty, give or take a few years, and this means you are only at about the halfway point of your work life. At age forty, you probably have more work years left in your life than you have already worked. You have worked for twenty years and still have twenty-five years or more to go until retirement.

Think back on how long it seems to you that you have been working. Think about how long it takes for your children to grow up. We humans are blessed with really long lives if everything goes well. We have much longer than we act like we have. First, identify what distracts you--social media, office gossip, or compulsively checking your email. Second, schedule these distractions into your day (yes, really); Set a timer or use your distractions as periodic breaks from the work that needs to get done. What are your major distractions? When will you schedule time for them? How will you ensure that you get your most important work done without distraction? Check your schedule Schedules and calendars are essential tools for managing your fixed, flexible, and free time. Scheduling a commitment is a small but crucial step when turning your intention into action. This step brings your ideas out of your head and into your day; Acceptance is the great healer of strife, conflict, and upset. It also corrects major imbalances of perception and precludes the dominance of negative feelings. Humility means that we will not understand all events or occurrences. Acceptance is not passivity but nonpositionality. The development of a spiritual ego can be avoided by the realization that spiritual progress is the result of God's Grace and not our personal endeavors. Avoid false gurus.

This cannot be overemphasized. The naive spiritual initiate is easily swayed by trappings and reputations of spiritual figures and the charisma of those who have many followers. Without the spiritual awareness of advanced states of consciousness, the spiritual seeker has no means of guidance, and popularity clouds judgment. At this time in human history, not a single guidepost can be relied upon other than the kinesiologic test of the actual calibration of the level of consciousness of a teacher, organization, or teaching. You have time. The next five or ten years are going to pass anyway. Go ahead and pick yourself some good problems to handle in order to make these years interesting and productive! For instance, a person might be thinking of going back to school and starting a different career, but then tell herself that at age forty-five she only has a few years left until retirement. It will take five years or longer to get the degree she wants. What would be the sense of making the investment of time and money if she will have so little time to enjoy it? By then she thinks she would have practically no time left to make a living from her achievement. The reality is that at age forty-five this woman has at least twenty work years left. Even if it took her ten years to get her degree, she would still have ten years to devote to her new occupation. Ten years can be a long time. First, decide to use either a paper planner or digital calendar. Begin by blocking off your fixed time, then work your way backwards. This might include work hours, meetings, and other scheduled activities. Starting with what you know creates parameters for the rest of your schedule, like building the edges of a puzzle. Next, arrange your flexible time based on what needs to get done at some point in your day or week (though not necessarily at a specific time). You might consider things like exercise, meal prep, or running errands.

The space that remains is your free time to fill (or leave open) as you please. Free time is for family, play, and self-care. Avoid the dangers of hyper-scheduling yourself; How do you want to spend your time and energy? The naive are impressed by outward piety and claims of supernatural powers, paranormal feats, and fanciful titles and special spiritual garments. Serious spiritual students are encouraged to verify each teacher or teaching according to the calibrated list of Characteristics of Integrous Teachers and Teachings in article 8. Q: What is the value of being in the physical presence of the consciousness of the teacher? A: Within your aura is much that you have learned in this world, most of it nonverbal, which you cannot share. You don't have enough time to sit down and describe to everybody everything you've ever known about life in a linear way. The total of your entire life and all the collective wisdom and experience exists as an energy field. When you share that which you have become with others--simply by being with them--they pick up the energy field of all that knowingness. That's how it is that the spiritual teacher transmits the state of Enlightenment via an energy field. The aura of the advanced, realized teacher has within itself the collective wisdom throughout all time. There is no amount of world time in which all of this can be laid out in a linear lecture. In material terms, do you know how much money you can make in ten years? Money: Let's say your education for your new career takes four years and costs you a hefty $40,000 in loans. To make it an even worse case scenario, let's say you are fifty-five by the time you get finished. If your career change or higher degree results in an increase of only $10,000 a year in income over what you were making before, you will increase your earning power by $100,000 in present day dollars over the next ten years until retirement at sixty-five. Even taking out the $40,000 plus, say, 8% interest for loans over the next ten years, you are still left with more than an approximately $40,000 increase on your investment. Now re-compute the potential gain if you are only thirty-five, or forty-five, and you will see what I am getting at.

There's more time left and more money to be made than you probably feel there is. What about the problem of getting the money to pursue your dream in the first place? It's not that there's no money available anywhere. There's quite a lot available for good causes and new projects. Does your schedule reflect this? Why or why not? What priorities or activities do you want to add to your schedule? Where might these fit in? What do you want to do in your free time? Set boundaries Saying yes to one thing means saying no to another. If you constantly put others first by saying yes to their wants and needs before your own, you'll find your priorities pushed so far back that you can barely see them! Setting clear boundaries and expectations--with others and yourself--ensures that you say yes to your priorities. Exercise your personal accountability by reflecting on the goals and priorities you've mapped out this past week; You could extract some principles from it, but the principles are only basic ones. Whatever is speaking to you right now is the accumulation of the influence of teachers going back to the Buddha. So the energy field of the Buddha is here, now available (calibrates as true). That which is speaking to you right now is empowered by all the great teachers who have ever lived. Every great teacher who has ever lived leaves the power of that field within the collective consciousness of humankind. That is why humanity progresses.