JULY 2018
KARATE TRAINING SESSION AT HANSHI’S SATURDAY AUGUST 18th. MARK YOUR CALENDARS. MORE INFORMAITON WILL FOLLOW.
CONGRATULATIONS to the students who earned promotions: Junior Yellow Belt – Michael & Nikolas Hollman, Petey Donica Junior Green Belt #2 – Madeline Ridge, Dylan Schulze Junior Purple Belt #1 – Daniel & Rachel Tankel, Anthony Coletta Junior Purple Belt #2 – Izzy Donica Senior Brown Belt #3 – Angelina Goncalves, Kyle Coletta
As summer is beginning. School has ended for the year. Vacations and time with family and friends become an important part of the next few months. After reading about perfect moments, I recreated a synopsis of the author’s thoughts. What most excites you?
“Creating Your Perfect Moments” from “The Perfect Moment” by Andy Andrews
Once you start noticing your life’s perfect moments, there is only one thing you are going to want to do—create them intentionally. How many times have you planned an afternoon with your family or friends that you thought was going to be perfect, only for some unforeseen interruption or setback to derail the whole occasion? If planning perfect moments rarely works, how can we go about creating more of them? It’s simple: we create an environment conducive to perfect moments. The first step is to determine what this environment looks like. These three questions will get you started!
- What excites you more than anything else?
- What people do you particularly enjoy being around?
- If this were your last day, what would you do?
Based on your responses to these three questions, one may see the type of environment where most perfect moments would occur. After answering these questions, you may also find that your current life situation and your perfect moment environment are not aligned. It could be that the beach excites you more than anything else, but you live in a highrise in the city. Or maybe a relationship just ended with the person you want to be around and love the most.
Look at the circumstances of your life: What’s holding you back, and what can you do?
Beyond attempting to create “perfect moments”, it is important to be aware of what is needed to live the life we are intended to have. Let your passion lead you to your purpose. Decide what makes you happy, find a way to do that now. Work through fears and blocks that are holding you back. Finding that life is more than being mindful of your thoughts or transcending your ego. It’s about being able to tune in to your own inner compass and determine what feels right for you. The result is the ability to live abundantly and create your life as you dream it. It often requires a leap of faith to confidently declare that you deserve to be abundant, happy, and free. But that leap means the difference between a whole life and holding yourself back out of fear.
Mastering the Three Great Illusions – “Valuable Secrets to Present Moment Awareness” from The Best Is Yet to Be by George and Sedena Cappannelli
Three illusions significantly limit our lives and prevent us from living the life we were born to live. These are control, safety, and security. Learning to master them can be your next and most important step on this journey.
Control
In this world where science and technology are revered, many of us live under the illusion that we can control things—our physical environment, our financial future, our careers, and in some instances, even the people around us. Yet, if we look closely at the most important events in our lives, most of us will admit that for all intents and purpose, life has been outside of our control. We did not control our birth, and the majority of us will not control our death. Even the basic physical functions that allow us to stay alive—respiration, digestion, elimination, and circulation—are autonomic. And some have suggested this is a very fortunate thing.
If you look closely and without ego at your life, you will also admit that many of the really meaningful and consequential events you’ve experienced fall into the category of surprises, unexpected events, and what Carl Jung called synchronicity—”chance exceeding probability.” Here are some examples: the moment the love of your life showed up; the day your career took one of its most surprising and beneficial turns (a turn which might have seemed negative at first); changes in your health that prompted you to adopt new practices and sometimes even a new way of life; chance encounters with people you did not like at first and who later became your close friends; unanticipated intersections with allies and mentors; and sudden flashes of insight and inspiration that brought you wonderful gifts.
Control is pretty much a fabrication, a kind of hoping against hope on the part of a species that likes to think it is “master of the universe” but for whom this complex thing called life remains pretty much beyond comprehension.
Safety and Security
What about safety and security? Many of us spend our lives in search of safety and security as we do trying to exercise control. In fact, if we are honest, we will admit that we cling to this holy triumvirate of control, safety, and security with a tenacity that ranges from the compulsive to the obsessive. On the surface, of course, some of us appear to succeed in our relationship with safety and security. We accumulate a certain amount of wealth and use it to erect buffers between us and the world: gated communities, 401(k) plans and other investment accounts, special insurance policies, extra health coverage plans. With all those buffers in place, we appear, at least on the surface, to be pretty safe and secure. If you look a little closer at these conditions, however, you will also discover that just like control, safety and security are illusions. For no matter how much money we have, how many private clubs we belong to, or whether protective gates surround our communities, no matter how many special health plans or insurance policies we own, in the end, none of them truly protect us from aging, illness, loss of loved ones, intersections with unhappiness, loss of meaning and purpose, and ultimately our own deaths, and none of them ensure that we will be more loving, generous, and conscious.
Surrender Is the Key
Instead, surrender, acceptance, and trust are the real keys to a successful life. This does not mean throwing in the towel and rolling over on life or not paying attention to the upkeep of our homes, payment of bills, making and monitoring investments, taking care of our health, nurturing our relationships, or ordering our affairs. Surrender, acceptance, and trust are not synonymous with indifference, inattention, and disinterest. As many wise beings before us have said, we do the best we can do, hold the highest thoughts possible, live life according to our truest set of values, and ultimately trust in the flow of life and in the higher order of things.
Indeed, a very wise old man, a master sculptor from Spain named José de Creeft, who was still carving and modeling remarkable pieces well into his nineties, said, “It is not our job to worry about the music. It is our job to become the best instruments we can so that the music of God can play through us.”
