Month: March 2017

El Matador State Beach – California – USA (by Michael Chen) 

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El Matador State Beach – California – USA (by Michael Chen) 

Live. Love. Explore: The Way of the Traveler

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You’re reading Live. Love. Explore: The Way of the Traveler, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better…The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

Theodore Roosevelt

Have you ever looked in the mirror and thought, “I’m living someone else’s life”? I have. The realization came as I watched The Motorcycle Diaries, a romanticized version of Che Guevera traveling across South America relying on the kindness of strangers. The movie touched a spark in my soul. It woke me up. At the time I was a broker in the city of London, severely depressed and ready to give up on everything.  Sounds melodramatic, I know.  But it also happens to be true.

I would stay in my house and when I wasn’t sleeping I was self-medicating. It was a profoundly unsustainable way to live. Despite being surrounded by millions of people I felt completely alone. I had lost all form of human connection and I desperately needed it back. The pain forced me into a decision that would change my life forever.

I quit my job and decided to live by a set of ideals I now call the Way of the Traveler. A set of ideals that first germinated on a hilltop in Nepal but came to life on the rain-slicked streets of London.

What is the Way of the Traveler you may ask? Well, it means something different to each person but for me, it meant giving up on my externally successful life and trying to escape the internal pain I was hiding from others.  It became a way of life. I left my house, and my life (including all the pain that came with it. I hoped). I decided I was going to travel the world trying to connect with others face to face. Human connection was going to be my fuel…

What the Way of the Traveler tries to do is to help you determine where your passion truly lies and how to take steps to achieve your dreams. It creates a jumpstart to help you find the courage to live ‘your’ life. The beautiful one waiting for each and every one of us…

Leaving your job and family isn’t the only way to take the first step toward your dreams. What I will say is taking small risks is often the only way to get started. If you want to become a writer you can’t just say, “I’m a writer” and hey presto you become Orwell overnight. You have to be willing to take that first very important step; it’s a risky one, though. It’s admitting you’re not happy with your life. For me acknowledging that I wasn’t happy didn’t change things right away. After many nights of self-pity, I found the courage needed to change.

And you can too.

I fought through the fear and I left for my travels around the world. That trip would spark what would become my life’s goal of traveling while helping others feel empowered and feel seen; Viscerally seen by another human being until we find the strength to see ourselves.

So often we try to convince ourselves that we’re not good enough to dream, let alone work toward achieving our dreams. I’m here to tell you if this is what you think you are mistaken. If no one believes in you, know that this Englishman does. He may not know who you are, but he believes in your right to live magnificently. Truly magnificently.

But there is a cost to living fully. And that cost is that people may not like your choices. They may not like your newfound magnificence that shines as brightly as the brightest star. That’s the risk you take… Are you in? Or are you going to go back to the sadness and the boredom? The beauty of this life is that ultimately you get to choose.

The Way of the Traveler asks that you allow yourself to determine what your wildest dreams are. Do you want to become a doctor, an actor, or a world traveler? Nothing starts until you take that first leap into the unknown! It sounds cliché to say this but I’ve met so many people who once they move past the mental block of negativity that’s stopping them begin to soar. Magnificently.

What are 3 things big or small you could do today to start realizing your dreams? Maybe it’s going back to school, or writing one page of your screenplay a night. Whatever it is unless you embrace your ability to chase the impossible it will never happen. And then the magnificence that is waiting patiently to shine will be lost. Maybe forever.

Although the Way of the Traveler asks a lot of each of us, there’s no way to do this alone. This means we have to take a realistic look at those around us. When you tell people your wildest dreams, do they laugh and discourage you, or are they supportive and push you? If they don’t support you it may be difficult to completely take them out of your life. But what you can do is not let them get in your way and surround your self with likeminded people who support your dreams.

I call them accidental heroes! Find them. And keep them close.

When you find your accidental heroes; it will take energy and love to keep them around. If you’re there for each other and share the pain it takes to achieve your goals nothing can stop you. Do you have people like this in your life? Who are they?

Sometimes we will hit setbacks on our way toward happiness. For me, it was ending up right back where I fought so hard to escape, behind a desk (or my slab of wood as I like to call it…). It’s important that during these times we take the time to stop and see the magic. My moment was seeing a homeless chap holding up a sign that read, “Kindness is the best medicine”. This one moment catapulted my next travel adventure of driving a vintage yellow motorbike (with a sidecar) across the globe giving life-changing gifts to unsuspecting good Samaritans. Kindness is a two-way street. It’s not just about receiving kindness it’s also about profoundly giving it away. Like its confetti.

When we find ourselves disconnected from the things and people we value most we need to take a minute to see how far we’ve come. Don’t be deterred by failure. Failing is one of the best learning lessons we can experience. It gives us an opportunity to stop and reflect. The best way to move past failure is to turn it on its head, turn it into a success.

Remember the only reason we failed was because we had the courage to try in the first place.  Just ask Winston Churchill, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. about failure. Their lives were filled with roadblocks but more often than not it was their successes that shaped our world.  If you can change your perception of what failure is you can face any setback thrown at you.

Following your passion is not easy; you will have days where you want to give-up. Many days. On these days I say reward yourself for all the hard work you’re putting in toward living your greatest life. You deserve it! When I find myself in this state I turn my favorite song on really loud and I dance. I dance and I don’t stop dancing until I feel better. I believe you can tackle anything, just keep your head up and dance.

Grab life by the arm and never stop dancing.

Ready for more?

If you’re interested in learning more about The Way of the Traveler my book Live, Love, Explore: Discover the Way of the Traveler a Roadmap to the Life You Were Meant to Live, published by Readers Digest, is available online or at your local bookstore.

The Kindness Diaries a 13 part series that documents my worldwide sidecar adventure is now streaming on Netflix: http://ift.tt/2mdjLYP

About Leon Logothetis: 

Leon Logothetis is a global adventurer, motivational speaker, philanthropist, and author of the bestselling memoir The Kindness Diaries. He gave up his job as a broker and his home in London for a life on the road. Leon has now visited more than 90 countries and traveled to every continent. He is the host of the TV series Amazing Adventures Of A Nobody, which is broadcasted across the world by National Geographic. Leon has documented his travels for numerous media outlets including Good Morning America, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Outside, Good, Psychology Today, and The New York Times.

You’ve read Live. Love. Explore: The Way of the Traveler, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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4 Step Guide to Letting Go of the Past

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By Leo Babauta

We’re constantly struggling with the past, in so many ways:

  • Mistakes we’ve made that we regret or that make us feel bad about ourselves
  • Anger about something someone did to us
  • Frustration about how things have progressed up until now
  • A wish that things turned out differently
  • Stories about what happened that make us sad, depressed, angry, hurt
  • An argument that we had that keeps spinning around in our heads
  • Something someone just did (a minute ago) that we’re still stuck on

What if we could just let go of things have have happened, and be present with the unfolding moment instead?

What if we could let the past remain in the past, and unburden ourselves?

What is we could see that our holding onto the past is actually hurting us right now … and look at letting go as a loving act of not hurting ourselves anymore?

It can be done, though it isn’t always easy. Here’s the practice I recommend, in four steps.

Step 1: See the Story That’s Hurting You

In the present moment, you have some kind of pain or difficulty: anger, frustration, disappointment, regret, sadness, hurt.

Notice this difficulty, and see that it’s all caused by whatever story you have in your head about what happened (either recently or in the more distant past). You might insist that the difficulty or pain is caused by what happened (not by the story in your head), but what happened isn’t happening right now. It’s gone. The pain is still happening right now, and it’s caused by whatever story you have about the situation.

Note that “story” doesn’t mean “false story.” It also doesn’t mean “true story.” The word “story” in this context doesn’t imply good or bad, false or true, or any other kind of judgment. It’s simply a process that’s happening inside your head:

  • You’re remembering what happened.
  • You have a perspective about what happened, a judgment, a way of seeing it that has you as the injured party.
  • This causes an emotion in you.

So just notice what story you have, without judgment of the story or of yourself. It’s natural to have a story, but just see that it’s there. And see that it’s causing you difficulty, frustration or pain.

Step 2: Stay with the Physical Feeling

Next, you want to turn from the story in your head … to the feeling that’s in your body. This is the physical feeling: it could be tightness in your chest, a hollowness, a shooting pain, an energy that radiates in all directions from your solar plexus, an ache in your heart, or many more variations.

The practice is to turn and face this physical feeling, dropping your attention out of the story your head and into your body.

Stay and face this feeling with courage — we usually try to avoid the feeling.

Stay and explore it with curiosity: what does it feel like? Where is it located? Does it change?

If this becomes unbearable, do it in small doses, in a way that feels manageable for you. It can get intense if the feelings have been intense.

But for most feelings, we see that it is not the end of the world, that we can bear it. In fact, it’s just a bit of unpleasantness, not all-consuming or anything to panic about.

Stay with it and be gentle, friendly, welcoming. Embrace the feeling like you would a good friend. You’re becoming comfortable with discomfort, and it is the path of bravery.

Step 3: Breathe Out, Letting Go

Breathe in your difficulty, and breathe out compassion.

It’s a Tibetan Buddhist practice called Tonglen: breathe in whatever difficult feeling you’re feeling, and breathe out the feeling of relief from that difficulty.

You breathe in not only your own pain, but the pain of others.

For example:

  • If you’re feeling frustration, breathe in all the frustration of the world … then breathe out peace.
  • If you’re feeling sadness, breathe in all the sadness of the world … then breathe out happiness.
  • If you’re feeling regret, breathe in all the regret of the world … then breathe out joy and gratitude.

Do this for a minute or so, imagining all the frustration of those around you coming in with each breath, and then a feeling of peace radiating out to all of those who are frustrated as you breathe out.

You can practice this every day, and it is amazing. Instead of running from your difficult feeling, you’re embracing it, letting yourself absorb it. And you’re doing it for others as well, which gets us out of a self-centered mode and into an other-focused mode.

As you do this, you’re starting to let go of your pain or difficulty.

Step 4: Turn with Gratitude Toward the Present

As you feel that you’ve let go, instead of getting caught up in your story again, turn and see what’s right here, right now.

What do you see?

Can you appreciate all or some of it? Can you be grateful for something in front of you right now?

Why is this step important? Because when we’re stuck on something that happened in the past, we’re not paying attention to right now. We’re not appreciating the moment in front of us. We can’t — our minds are filled up with the past.

So when we start to let go of the past, we have emptied our cups and allowed them to be filled up with the present.

We should then turn to the present and find gratitude for what’s here, instead of worrying about what isn’t.

As we do that, we’ve transformed our struggle into a moment of joy.

My Upcoming Course: Dealing with Struggles

I wanted to let you guys know about an upcoming video course that I’m launching next week — it’s called Dealing with Struggles, and I’m very excited about it!

This course is aimed at anyone who has struggles:

  • Anxiety about life or social situations
  • Frustrations with themselves or other people
  • Difficulty with procrastination
  • Trouble forming new habits or quitting old habits
  • A feeling of unhappiness with ourselves
  • Struggles with finances, clutter, productivity, health issues
  • Stress about work, life, relationships

As it turns out, we all have struggles.

This video course will aim to get to the root of our struggles, and learn how to apply mindfulness practices to work with them.

It’s a four-week course, with two video lessons and two mindfulness practices a week … and it will start in April. More next week!

http://ift.tt/2nAE7Iq

Something Intricate and Fierce

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I, who seemed to myself full of things to say, who had all of Shillington to say, Shillington and Pennsylvania and the whole mass of middling, hidden, troubled America to say . . . some terrible pressure of American disappointment, that would take a lifetime to sort out, particularize, and extol with the proper dark beauty.

—John Updike, in his memoir Self-Consciousness

Rabbit at Rest is one of the very few modern novels in English…that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce and not feel the draft.

—reviewer Jonathan Raban

John Updike was born eighty-five years ago this week (March 18, 1932) in Reading, Pennsylvania — model for the city of Brewer, capital of Updike’s fictional universe and battle zone for his theme:

My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. Something quite intricate and fierce occurs in homes, and it seems to me without doubt worthwhile to examine what it is.

Updike made that comment in a 1966 Life magazine interview, the author just a few years into his half-century, sixty-book career. The most celebrated of his two dozen novels feature Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the Brewer High School basketball star who, as his city and region decline, finds prosperity as a car dealer. Published at ten-year intervals from 1960 to 1990, the four-book series tolls a bell for the Middle America that Rabbit, in an often frantic zigzag path, both pursues and flees.

At the opening of Rabbit Is Rich, third book in the series, Harry stands gazing out of the showroom window of his Toyota dealership, convinced that “the great American ride is ending.” At the end of the fourth book, Rabbit at Rest — like the third book, winner of the Pulitzer Prize — Harry consents to dress up as Uncle Sam for a hometown parade; as he mingles with the crowd at his old high school, the “glory days” past competes with the uncertain future:

He expects to come across his old girlfriend, Mary Ann, as she had been then, in saddle shoes and white socks and a short pleated cheerleader’s skirt, her calves straight and smooth and round-muscled . . . springing into joyful recognition at the sight of him. Instead, strange people with puzzled Eighties faces keep asking directions, because he is dressed as Uncle Sam and should know. He has to keep telling them he doesn’t know anything.

Rabbit’s prolonged decline ends in Florida, “death’s favorite state.” Updike’s own death in 2009 was sudden, coming just a few months after his annual checkup revealed stage 4 lung cancer. After hanging on as long as possible in his Massachusetts home, he was moved to a local hospice — described by Adam Begley in his biography Updike as “a mildly pretentious, tastefully landscaped example of suburban-sprawl architecture, a place he would have skewered in exact and loving detail” in the Rabbit books.

Updike’s death is one of six discussed in Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End. Roiphe describes Updike’s “Creeper,” one of a number of poems he worked on over his last weeks (collected in Endpoint: And Other Poems), as perhaps the most graceful expression of a peaceful death that I can think of”:

With what stoic delicacy does 
Virginia creeper let go:
the
feeblest tug brings down
a sheaf of leaves kite-high,
 as if to
say, To live is good but not to live — to be pulled down with
scarce a ripping sound,still flourishing, still stretching
toward the sun — is good also, all
photosynthesis abandoned, quite quits. Next spring 
the
hairy rootlets left unpulled 
snake out a leafy afterlife
 up
that same smooth-barked oak.

Whatever Updike’s own politics — biographer Begley notes that Updike on his deathbed rejoiced at President Obama’s inauguration — some commentators say that Updike lives on as spokesman for embattled Middle Americans, whose current angst and anger he saw coming: “Revisiting Updike’s Rabbit novels is a rendezvous with prescience, for no collection of postwar fiction could help us better understand how working-class populism — in the form of Donald Trump — prevailed on Election Day 2016″ (Charles McElwee, The American Conservative magazine).

 

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2nOfnvN

Hocking Hills State Park – Ohio – USA (by Tabitha Kaylee Hawk) 

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Hocking Hills State Park – Ohio – USA (by Tabitha Kaylee Hawk) 

mikenudelman:The Model 3 will be Tesla’s biggest test yet.

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Dietrich | Untertrifaller Architekten Design a Contemporary Home in Bregenz, Austria

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This beautiful house covering an area of 210 m2 distributed in three levels and located in Bregenz, Austria, was designed in 2016 by Dietrich | Untertrifaller Architekten. It is located on a green hill with wonderful views over the surrounding countryside and Lake Constance. The exterior in wood and concrete seems to merge with its surroundings, an immense green area of tall trees that borders the house. Upon entering, a..

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💙 Red Rose on 500px by Alan A Gilmore, Baltimore,…

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💙 Red Rose on 500px by Alan A Gilmore, Baltimore, USA☀  Canon… http://ift.tt/2dhbF87

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💙 Colores de Urederra on 500px by Pruden Barquin,…

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💙 Colores de Urederra on 500px by Pruden Barquin, Bilbao,… http://ift.tt/2e0BWu0

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💙 NOCHE DE HERMANOS on 500px by Jorge Alonso, Durango,……

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💙 NOCHE DE HERMANOS on 500px by Jorge Alonso, Durango,… http://ift.tt/2dyYArZ

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