Then, in that deliciously synchronistic way that things so often happen, I came across this article by Zig Ziglar. And I liked his perspective so much that I thought I’d share it …

Laughter is a great stress reducer. If you have never read Norman Cousins’ account of his experience of self-healing as described in Anatomy of an Illness, I encourage you to do so.

When diagnosed with an incurable illness, he brought a movie projector into his hospital room and watched reel after reel of old classic comedy movies, laughing himself into hysterics. He found he could relieve his otherwise significant pain on a consistent basis through laughter.

That practice, along with some other novel therapies, resulted in his healing. He left his prestigious journalistic career and taught on the faculty of a major medical school about the power of the mind and emotions in healing the body of disease.

Next to love, laughter has been described as the second-most powerful emotion we can express. It has been said that laughter is like internal jogging - it stimulates the respiratory system, oxygenates the body, relaxes tense muscles, and releases pleasure-producing chemicals in the brain.

You cannot laugh and be mad, laugh and be tense, laugh and be stressed. Laughter is low-calorie, caffeine-free, and has no salt, preservatives, or additives. It’s 100 percent natural and one size fits all.

Laughter is truly God’s gift to humankind. You can get high on laughter but never overdose. Laughter is contagious - once it starts little can be done to stop it. Laughter never felt bad, committed a crime, started a war or broke up a relationship.

Laughter is shared by the giver and the receiver. Laughter costs nothing and it’s non-taxable. Laughter is a trend-setter. If we can find ways to laugh first thing in the morning, it may in fact set the trend for the rest of the day.

Let me close by telling you the most important use of laughter I have ever discovered: The ability to laugh at ourselves. I stopped taking myself too seriously years ago and it was the best decision I ever made.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m still serious about what I do. But not so serious that I can’t be the first one to laugh when I mess up (which happens all too often - it’s why I spend so much time laughing!).

When you’re the first person to laugh at yourself, you leave little room for others to laugh at you.

So today, and tomorrow, I will be laughing. Lots.

After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later: the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money, but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theatre in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

Joshua Bell playing incognito in the Metro Station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste, and people’s priorities.

So what are the question raised? In a common place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

Do we walk past miracles simply because we are not expecting to see them?

With thanks to Steve Nobel  www.stevenobel.com

If you have to ask for permission, then permission may well be denied, and you end up unable to do whatever it is you want to do.

But if you just go ahead and do it, without waiting for permission, it may all work out just fine. And if you do end up having to ask for forgiveness (if everything’s gone tits up) well at least you got to do what you wanted to do, and you learn the invaluable lessons that failure always brings.

The question is really: who is it we have to ask permission from? How often is that person actually ourselves? And ourselves we have to forgive …

So many people are living lives of quiet desperation, putting up with so much less than they deserve or want, unable to follow where their heart’s desire wants to lead them, ignoring the quiet urgings of their soul’s longing to move towards the life of their dreams. They may envy those brave souls who ‘go for it’, but they can’t do it themselves.

But this fear ain’t real. It’s not the ‘pursued by a sabre tooth tiger’ sort of fear. It’s just a chimera - the ‘what if …’ (’what will people think?’, ‘what if I cock up?’, ‘what if I end up looking ridiculous?’) fear that saps energy and creativity.

And it’s all just a trick of the ego, a mechanism for keeping us stuck in the past and repeating the same monotonous, self-defeating patterns over and over again. It’s our shadow side -  what Debbie Ford calls ‘the voice of our wounds, of our heartache and of our deep resignation and hopelessness that it won’t work for us or that we can’t do it.’

The trouble is that if that voice wins, we go to our grave never having lived our full potential or shared our gift with the world. Doesn’t everyone deserve that? Isn’t that our birthright?

Each one of us contains the seeds of something great - a unique perspective, a bunch of special gifts. And confronting our shadow is the fastest and easiest way to reclaim our power and step into the person our soul longs to be.

So if you’re contemplating working with a coach, or going to some transformational seminar, or embarking on any sort of personal development program … and you feel scared … then consider taking it as a sign that you’re heading in the right direction, moving toward your evolutionary edge. Don’t let your fear win. Love it. Hug it. Understand that it’s just a 3-year-old, a 5-year-old, a 10-year-old stuck inside of you.

And trust the part of you that wants to grow - because you’ll never be truly happy and fulfilled until you do.

Where DID all those negative recurring thoughts and beliefs and habits come from? You might be surprised if you really take the time to look!

Ask yourself this question: are you more scared of staying the same or of doing the work you need to do to reinvent yourself as the person you TRULY are?

Mood swings. They’re like the weather or the climate. Do I get upset when it rains? Do I beat myself up when the heavens open? No! Do I let the weather stop me? Am I a ‘fairweather player’? - NO! Does it mean that there’s something wrong when the weather is bad? - you already know the answer to that one if you’ve been paying attention.

It strikes me that many of us learned, very early in life, that there is a HUGE payoff in drawing attention to the fact that we are sad. There used to be real value (in most cases) in complaining to mother that you are sad/upset/depressed - whatever. My guess is that a great many of us got to experience our mother’s love through her sympathy whenever we complained of being hurt or upset. And what is it that we want more of (and then some) as human beings?

Being loved.

If we experience being loved as a consequence of expressing our complaints, is it any wonder that we get addicted to complaining and insisting that there is something wrong?

Hardly.

But that’s fine. Nothing wrong there. The problem arises when we notice that as we grow up, very few people in our lives are REALLY interested in our complaints. We have the experience of being sad or whatever, complaining about it, but then NOT getting the love we expect when we press the complaint button.

Let me quote one of my favourite passages from “The Book of EST” by Luke Rhinehart:

“Look. If we put a rat in a maze with four tunnels and always put cheese in the fourth tunnel, after a while that rat will learn always to go to the fourth tunnel to get cheese. A human will learn to do that too. You want cheese? Zip zip zip down the fourth tunnel, there’s the cheese. Next day you want cheese? Zip zip zip down the fourth tunnel and there’s the cheese.

Now after a while the Great God in the white suit moves the cheese to another tunnel. Zip zip zip goes the rat to the fourth tunnel. No cheese in the fourth tunnel. The rat comes out. Goes down the fourth tunnel again. No cheese. Rat comes out. Goes down the fourth tunnel again. No cheese. Comes out. Down the fourth tunnel again. No cheese. Comes out. Eventually the rat will stop going down the fourth tunnel and look elsewhere.

Now the difference between rats and human beings is simple: THE HUMAN BEINGS WILL GO DOWN THAT FOURTH TUNNEL FOREVER! FOREVER! HUMAN BEINGS COME TO BELIEVE IN THE FOURTH TUNNEL. Rats don’t believe in anything; they’re interested in cheese. But the human being develops a BELIEF in the fourth tunnel and he comes to MAKE IT RIGHT TO GO DOWN THE FOURTH TUNNEL WHETHER THERE’S CHEESE IN IT OR NOT. The human being would rather be right than get his cheese.”

Not getting the cheese when we go down the fourth tunnel or not getting the love we expect when we press the complaint button is very confusing. Funny thing is, because human beings prefer to be right above all things rather than have things work for them, we get angry and confused when things that once got us a payoff no longer do so. Instead of going: “oh well - that didn’t work - let’s move on to something else”, we do our level best to MAKE IT WORK.

The first instinct is to think that we’ve failed to communicate our upsetness and then go looking for causes, reasons, contributing factors in order to make our upset real. Give it some REAL gravitas - THEN people will understand and give you the love that you have been conditioned to expects - right? How do you think psychologists/psychyatrists/councellors make their money?

However, in day to day life the strategy still doesn’t work. It doesn’t take long to realise that people - although they may make sympathetic noises - aren’t really ‘getting it’.

The real problem and unworkability arises when some part of us realises that we have entered a zone of incongruity - a zone where we are being run by habits, false expectations and just plain old ‘being right’.

Except it does not occur to us that way. It simply occurs to us as if the laws of our existence (complaint > love) have been transgressed - and the transgressor is … the person who is not ‘getting it’.

At which point the ‘transgressor’ experiences something very strange - either an increase in complaints directed at THEM … or a withdrawal of communication - to put a finer distinction on it; a sulk.

What has happened here? Frustration. The complainer has experienced failure to obtain love by one of the normal channels therefore there is something wrong. Something must be to blame. There are two people involved. One or both of them must be to blame. Next thing that happens: one or other of them are made wrong. Sometimes both (universal wrongness).

And here we are at the ‘Dangerous Corner’ or ‘tipping point’. Depending on the situation , the listener will experience being made wrong for no apparent reason an quite reasonably defend themselves or walk away (of the two, neither is the path to peace) or the complainer will make themselves wrong. Both pathways can runaway to unpleasant outcomes. Because the complainer is in the zone of incomprehension they find that there are no words to express what is really going on. The fact is they don’t know what is going on. They experience a blank, a wall of ‘wrongness’ that is impossible to express. What, after all, does a rat in a cage  that has been trained to expect cheese in the fourth tunnel experience the day there is no cheese in the fourth tunnel? Is there an equivalence in Rat World to “there’s something wrong  here”?

The thing is, WE know, observing the rat, that there is NOTHING WRONG. Running down the fourth tunnel does not mean cheese.

We made that up.

How would it be if we got that complaining about our upset does NOT get us love. That we made it up.

What would it make available if our upset, just like the weather, simply is?