A Life of Limitless Promise and Possibility
Dave’s Ten Rules for Life
- Be in love. Love is the most powerful of all our emotions when recognized, honored and nurtured. Being in love does not mean you are excluded from it if you do not have a partner in your life. Love is far more expansive and versatile than we imagine; it has few limitations. You can be in love with your life; I certainly am. Or, be in love with where you live, your friends, with what you do in life, a hobby, a pet, your job, anything. Just be in love and objectify being in love or you condemn it to a loss in conceptual illusion. The outcome is to find something to be passionate about in a big way. It is the act, the intention of recognizing what you are in love with, and absorbing yourself in it. Luxuriate in love, and all that entails. You will begin to feel it in yourself, your life, in your physical being. When this happens, you will begin attracting more love and more people who are in love than you could ever predict. If you want to surround yourself with great people, be in love, and great loving people will find their way into your life. I promise this; love attracts. You will become greater, and more loved, when you keep the company of great people, because all great people want to be loved, and want to give love. I do not believe greatness in life is attainable without love. The key to the circle is, love.
- Be grateful for your blessings. I define blessings as “good things,” which make me happy, that give me time and ability to live, as I like. As I grow older, health is a big blessing for me and it is high on my list of what I am grateful for. Spend time each day taking inventory of the blessings you have in your life. Do not spend time inventorying the negative—the world and many in it will do that for you, and if you let them, they will drag you down into the negative alongside them. Do not let this happen! Focus only on your blessings. We all have blessings. We all have tremendous opportunity in our lives. Make room for more blessings, count them, list them, think on them, link them together or single them out, it doesn’t matter. Constantly smile and say, “Thank you” for them. To whom are you thanking? It does not matter to whom. Thank God, thank your friends, thank the universe, thank the world, thank yourself—key is the outward act of acknowledgment, of gratitude, and thankfulness. The principal is that of a grateful and humble heart that routinely openly expresses gratitude for all that you have in this life. Objectify this and I promise you the list of blessings will increase exponentially. It is that timeless law of attraction. The more time you spend focusing on the positive, the more positive you will bring into your life. For me, “focus” is defined as the process of removing it from conceptual illusion by objectifying it, inventorying it, speaking it, and openly expressing my gratitude for it. There is not a day that passes that I do not express gratitude for my blessings. I share this with my wife, and she with me, and it never gets old or awkward. We are grateful for what we have in every aspect of our lives.
- Be grateful for the people in your life. Acknowledge others daily. Every day, I send an email, or write a short note to someone in my life thanking them for their friendship, their partnership, their love, their excellence, their leadership, their abilities; anything. It often catches them off guard. People don’t expect others to acknowledge them, which is why I love doing it. You are not doing this to kiss someone’s butt; you are doing it to bring a little light and positive energy into their lives. You are sharing what you have in life by uplifting them. I don’t care if those I acknowledge respond or not, many never do. Frankly that makes me smile all the more, thinking they are confused by it. Some may be confused by the expression, even suspicious of the motive, but who doesn’t want it, or appreciate it? I love taking a few seconds to send a colleague a note telling them how proud I am of them, how grateful I am for their friendship, what an honor it is to work with them, or know them—anything. It doesn’t have to be a long note, just something acknowledging them for something. You will be surprised how wonderful you make them feel just by sending them a few sentences. And, in so doing, you will change their life, and feel equally good for being the catalyst. This I promise.
- Be healthy. Each day, take care of your health; it isn’t difficult to do. Do something, anything that contributes to your health. Exercise, be a body in motion, move your spiritual and emotional body forward with your physical body. One foot in front of the other for just a few minutes a day will increase your quality and length of life—it is a scientific fact. Make a commitment to yourself that you will eat and drink properly, as well as rest. Life is too short as it is; so don’t let bad choices shorten it or complicate it while you still have it. Make good choices, healthy choices about what you do with, put into and add onto this physical body. If energy is everything and everything is energy, then wear what makes you feel good, and that will be what makes you look good. Why? Because that is how energy works. Long ago I adopted the phrase, “If it is good for me, then it will taste good.” Believe me, the mantra works. Making what is good for me taste good is half the battle and I will not accept any opposite interpretation of it for myself. For example, if a food is detrimental to my health, I don’t confuse the signal line by constantly reminding myself how much I love ice cream. Instead, I reverse the thought; I see ice cream, as a damaging food that hurts my body and shortens my life, and therefore, it cannot possibly taste as good as I used to think it did. This strategy works for me, and it will work for you. I have such a negative connotation associated with it that it does not in any way draw me to it any longer. Try this strategy for yourself. It will work to help build healthy practices that will help you better care for you.
- Be good to you. Each day, do something nice for yourself. Take a few minutes to work on something that is important to you. Each day, set aside some time to write, or fix stuff, call, buy, treat, or lavish yourself in whatever you feel contributes to your personal advancement and enrichment. If you don’t do this, you will be plagued by thoughts that you are robbing yourself of the things that make life enjoyable. For me, an example might be a tool I want for sculpting. Some of the tools are rather expensive, hundreds of dollars for a chisel. If I buy it outright, it impacts my funds, and it might cause me to go into debt. If I do without it, I feel like I am missing something, if I buy it with money I do not have, I feel guilty about that. In this example you can see how I can take one step forward and impact myself with two negative steps backward. So, my act of doing something positive for me might be to set aside a small dollar amount each day until I have what I need to make the purchase. Okay, this may be a corny example, but it is just an example of how I treat myself without adding more negatives than positives. Figure out how the process best serves you, but do something each day that contributes to YOU. It is important to acknowledge you, and love you in this life.
- Be an Academic. This title isn’t something reserved for people working at universities, it is a title you deserve and can have if you will set aside time each day for adding to you knowledge base. Spend time learning doing something to build your experience Rolodex. Learn to speak another language, learn to play an instrument, learn to sculpt—do something, anything to increase your intellect. Go after the degree you never finished, or an advanced degree just because you can. It is a new world out there; take advantage of it. You can take a course of study online, or as a CD or DVD learning process. Commit to never getting into the car or on an airplane that you do not have a book on tape you can use to expand your mind. Spend time learning something you thought you could never learn. It is unbelievably fun to relearn, or learn for the first time subjects you never touched during your formal education. There is an entire world of learning at your fingertips, so engage everyday and learn. Don’t allow yourself to stagnate mentally. Keep growing, learning, experiencing, and you will feel really good about yourself. Do it in small bites, or bite off more than you can chew. Just commit to doing something to improve your mind now.
- Be a Worker. Do whatever it is that you do to earn your way in this life. Each day you are expected to work and earn, do it well. Devote yourself to this task; honor the responsibility given you, and the opportunity you have to earn a wage. This is an often forgotten responsibility in life. I remember reading something from Oscar Wilde wherein he said, “I have responsibilities in this life, and every luxury must be earned and paid for.” Commit each day to excel in your chosen profession. Promise yourself you will honor your commitment to your employer. If you work for yourself, do the same. Promise yourself you will give honestly and graciously for the money paid you. Even if you do not like what you do in life to earn a living, you have an obligation to do well whatever it is that you agreed to do for compensation. Do it, do it well, and do it gratefully. If you don’t like what you do, obviously find another job as soon as you can. But for the time you are at it, be the best there is. I promise you recognition for it. It may not come from your employer; we have all had bosses like this. However, anytime we are committed to being our best self, we will feel good about it. And, because energy is everything, when we are hard at work being our best self, every life we touch directly or indirectly, will feel it, and feel good about it. When we resonate greatness in any part of our lives we cannot help but shift some part of the world, and in turn that makes us feel good!
- Be someone who reflects. Take time each day, at the end of the day to account for your thoughts and deeds. Look back and inventory what you have done this day to be great, to be your best self. Use this inventory to outline what you can and will do better tomorrow. Like the rest of this list, nothing is new here. You have likely heard all of this before. The difference is you now possess an understanding of exactly how powerful you really are. You are not just you anymore—are you? You have experienced something that has gifted you with a new set of eyes, and new and complete comprehension that you are connected to the matrix field, to the waveform expression of all things, across a universe, and other universes. You are perhaps only now beginning to listen, and hear, but you fully recognize you are omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. And, this awareness has come through a shared experience in a class where you were given undeniable and irrefutable evidence that you are more than the physical world would allow. Reflect on this and consider how this tool will enhance your life, and how you now live it. It is reflection that gives us the mental and emotional fuel to do the right thing always. This personal inventory of thought and action is critical; it is the scaffolding upon which all else we do is presented. Without it, we have no roadmap, no selected route. We have only a blank map, following any path in any direction—and that condition defines being lost.
- Be an Objectifyer. You know what this means. It means to journal your life. It doesn’t count if you don’t write it down. Thoughts are grand, we love them, and need them, but they are nothing but conceptual illusion. To give them power, to use them as tools for manifestation, you must capture them and objectify them. You must write them to make them real and useable. Writing them is the first step toward action. In class we discussed the power of words recorded in digits, pixels, and how handwritten words are more powerful. Therefore, never go anywhere that you do not have a journal to capture thoughts. And, that can be your “electronic device” as an initial capture mechanism. Later, when you are doing something for you, you can transfer your electronic objectification into your Journal. Writing, journaling your life experience is part of being your best self, and because of it, it makes you feel good.
- Be Worshipful. Acknowledge there is something more than you taking part in your life. For me, this is God. I take time every day to express my gratitude to God for what I have in this life. You do not hear me talking to you about this in class because it is not my right to impart my beliefs on you. You honor me with the teacher’s chair for a short while, and I feel I must honor that gift by being neutral in expressing my beliefs. Each of us must find our own path, and decide for ourselves what we will acknowledge as a higher power in our lives. It is not correct for me to use the podium to blanket you with my beliefs. Therefore, whatever path you choose to walk, and whomever or whatever you chose to acknowledge as the higher power in your life—do so each day. Commit to expressing gratitude for the guidance and wisdom gifted you by this “authority.” Engage in the practice of prayer, of meditation, or whatever form of communication you use to commune. Never miss an opportunity to reverently and with open heart acknowledge there is a plan that placed you in this life, which gave you the opportunity to make a positive and loving difference in this existence. You were placed here to learn and grow, to perfect yourself through experience of doing in the physical, emotional and spiritual worlds before leaving this life and moving into the next existence. For me, I am incomplete, and without integrity if I cannot take time to acknowledge this before God. Find your path and place for this objectification, even if it is recognition of your self-power in this life, or of the random or deliberate outcome of the physical universe. Honor all paths of worship so long as they do not harm, and stand clear of the criticism and guile that drives so many to hatred and narrow thoughts. Objectify your relationship with this power, and acknowledge what guides and empowers you each day.