When it comes to living with spirit, there are three important ingredients.

1. The first is the power of silence.
2. The second is Quietening down mind noise.
3. And the third is turning up the megaphone to 11 out of 10.

Sure?

EDIT

Many people think that this process of living with spirit and the three important ingredients are in the mind and focus solely on that aspect of their life.

But the mind is not experienced in isolation.

Your body and your environment, impact your mind just as much as your thoughts do.

As an example, if you hunch your shoulders, you will feel sad. If you open your shoulders and look up to the sky, you will feel happy.

These feelings, although not thoughts, and not reliable, influence your thinking.

And therefore, when it comes to the power of silence, mind noise and the megaphone, your body has a powerful influence.

Then again, your mind and your body do not exist in isolation.

You are not removed from your environment. Your environment basically are those things around you that you are attached to. For example, if you are sitting at your office desk, you may not notice the clutter, but the clutter is caused by the fact that you have papers and items that you value enough not to put away. And therefore they are influencing your thinking.

THE POWER OF SILENCE

In approaching the power of silence, learning how to be with yourself, it is really important to recognise that there is always a duality going on inside a human being between what’s going to happen (or is happening) and what they thought would happen. For example, you might stand on the scales and be shocked that you’ve put on weight. But at the same time you’ve drunk a couple of beers or enjoyed some ice cream once too often. So the power of silence, although sometimes learnt sitting in meditation with no disturbance is more about the ability to exist in a world where your expectations are in line with what is taking place.

Either that, or you learn how to quickly adjust your expectations to the reality that’s going on.

This power of silence is particularly important in dealing with other people, especially those you wish to influence. When you throw your power out the window and become emotionally involved with people, and therefore reactive, any sense of the power of silence is lost. It is far wiser to understand human nature, and how it works, and therefore be able to play the game of life, rather than be played by it.

The Power of Silence does not come by sitting still. Nor by running around solving the world’s (or your) problems.

First in achieving the power of silence you must accept that speaking makes you weak and listening makes you strong.

Then will come the question of whether you are listening or actually comparing what someone is saying to what you expected them to say?

To take the power of listening one step further and achieve the power of silence, it’s wise to ask yourself, the question, “where do I get my expectations of people and human behaviour from?”

It is a very very intriguing process. We get our expectation of how people will behave or should behave through education, and that education is not always accurate. And it needs to be adjusted. That’s coaching 101. Re-alignment of expectations.

Sometimes we get our expectations of others and ourselves from our own early childhood, the projection of our parents, and other times we get it from being with people we admire or those we dislike. So cleaning up expectations that are not real is a big chunk of achieving the Power of Silence.

Ultimately our expectations form a cardboard cut out of what we expect people to do and behave, and we hope like hell they all fit through it. The shock comes when they don’t. The power of silence can only exist when that cardboard cut out gets very large, and 99.99% of all people pass through without touching the sides. This is called human nature and it comes from wisdom. This is coaching 102.

Another word, for the power of silence is detachment.

Anything we are detach from does not influence us. It’s very hard to be detached from people, especially those we wish to engage with or support us along the road. And this is where the second principle of living with spirit comes from which is stop the mind noise.

STOP THE MIND-NOISE

Emotionally reacting to people or worrying about people or stressed about people or stressed about worrying about people or worrying about stressing about worrying about people all comes into the one topic called mind noise.

Ultimately worrying about people includes ourselves.

The closer we get to somebody in terms of love and intimacy the more they will emotionally disrupt us if things don’t go as we planned.

To become a master at the game of life, one must learn to play the game of emotions.

All emotions exist within all people.

They are always targeted at the future. That means people are always moving in the direction of their highest value, and will engage with you if you buy into their plans. If you contradicted plans and expect people to do what you think is important which is not important to them. You’re going to increase the mind noise between you and them. That mind noise transport sit self into all aspects of life. So emotional disturbance with one person becomes emotional disturbance with life. Shutting down this emotional disturbance, mind, noise, is a vital part of enjoying life and keeping your eyes clearly focused on where you would love to be rather than reacting to where you are not.

Turning up the Megaphone

Finally, communication is one percent verbal. The rest is non-verbal. If you are thinking that your words have more power than your thoughts, you are the equivalent of a person who gives a balloon to a hedgehog.

People feel you long before they hear you. People know you, no matter what you say. Your behaviour is a better indication of who you really are, then your words. But neither of these to, your words, or your behaviour come close to equivalent power in influence than your thoughts. Your thoughts are not emotions. Your thoughts can be judgements that lead to emotions, they can be inspirations and enthusiasm that lead to your destination, or they can be random, mental diarrhoea. You get a choice, you get a choice as to what you think. Many people think that what they think doesn’t matter, and they mask it up with what they say. But we’ve all known to many people who say one thing, mean, something completely different, act, something again, completely different and justify it as if they had no choice. We never trust the words of a human being. Only the naive do.

Turning up the megaphone to 11 out of 10 means you value what you think, greater than what you say. But you also value how you think more than what do you think?

That means that your megaphone (power of thought) is a-moral. If morals and ethics, govern your thinking, then you are valuing what you think more than how you think. That becomes a serious problem.

Dictatorships, mind washing, religions, terrorists and prisons are designed to tell you what to think. They only work if you have no interest or control over how you think.

So let’s go over it again;

The power of silence. This is not a static silence but a mobile silence. It means you are not drawn in to the goings on around you. Or in more simple terms you’re not surprised by what is going on around you nor are you surprised by human behaviour. You understand human nature.

The elimination of mind noise. Again this is a tool kit for handling the emotional reactions we have when our expectations are not met and we are in the process of growing and learning about something we’ve never experienced before. My noise is things like worry, anxiety, sadness, frustration, overwhelm and anger. If you can’t control your emotions you can’t control your life.

Finally, the causation of the megaphone. The transition from valuing the words that come out of peoples mouth including your own, the emphasis on behaviour as a measure of any form of predictability of human nature must be put to the sword. What do you come to appreciate is the power of presence. As you master the power of silence you will recognise that that we cannot live in a vacuum. Therefore when we eliminate my noise and we get strength at being able to exist in silence we can then enable ourselves to fill that silence with the noise that will transmit to others.

When you commit to living with spirit, you transcend the idea that you are subject to the environment you in and instead you cause it. This means you make a lot more noise. You are not passive. You fight the idea that the wind can get blown out of your sails.

More than self-reliance this is where you cause and create the joy and the excitement of living. You recognise that if you don’t take control of the steering wheel of the bus you will be sitting on the back of someone else’s bus. Everything from that day that you react to cost you. So to live with spirit is to live assertively. It is recognising that you do not achieve anything alone and therefore you must cause collaboration and investment by others in what you are doing. You cannot do it alone.