Mastering your stress

If you truly want to live a life worth living, you must be willing to spend time asking yourself the difficult questions.  What does it even mean to live a life worth living? What is it going to take for me to be rich; in body, mind, and spirit? Yesterday was a day I became rich beyond what I ever could have expected, and it has nothing to do with money.  As I sit on the balcony of my 35th floor condo sipping a freshly brewed mint white tea and looking out over the city as the storm clouds are moving and absorbing the peaks of the buildings as it passes, I reflect on a powerful experience I had in the office yesterday.  In our office, we focus just as much on education and empowerment as we do on the physical aspect of clearing neurological interference and restoring maximum expression of life through the detection and correction of subluxations.  After an amazing and packed morning of seeing patients, we had our quarterly blockbuster workshop called Mastering Your Stress.  It was a powerful afternoon where I shared the five keys to mastering your stress.  I would like to share one of those keys with you. 

It is the concept of "Losing yourself in service to others."  The concept is this.  Live your life with a sense of awareness and consciousness that you are always looking for ways to be of service to humanity. We live lives that are so distant and disconnected from everyone around us.  We are constantly on our cell phones and iPads.  People even push old ladies out of the way because they are in such a rush.  We let doors slam in other people's faces because we are not paying attention.  We ignore the attention from a child and we are so self-absorbed and worried about our own problems, we miss out on the opportunity to be of service to so many people that are in need around us everyday.  And I am not talking about the once a year food drive or the once a year volunteering at the homeless shelter. Those are both powerful things that I believe should be done by everyone, however, what would our society look like if that attitude was taken everyday by all people in some small way?  What would your life look like if you took every opportunity to share a sincere smile with someone, hold a door, or even carry the groceries for an elderly person as you walked out to your car? What would your life look like if you look for opportunities to compliment people and listen to someone who needed you to lend an ear? These things and many others only take a moment or two and can have a ripple effect more profound than you could ever imagine.  This a practice and an awareness I've been incorporating into my everyday life. These things take no more than a moment out of my day, yet provide a level of fulfillment that could not be achieved any other way.  It is as if stress disappears when I lose myself in service to others.

As I shared this message with the crowd in my office yesterday, I was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to talk about being of service while I was actually being of service. It had a magnified effect on myself and was at that moment that I realized how powerful it is, for the giver and well as the receiver, to dedicate myself to a life of service.  If you truly want to transform your life, dedicate yourself to a life of transforming those lives around you.  It is impossible to make a difference in the life of another without yours being positively touched in the process.  Now get out there and make a difference.

Love,

Matt

Moments that transform your life

Life is made of magical moments. Magical moments that inspire you and moments that challenge you.  Magical moments are moments that bring tears of inspiration to your eyes.  They show you what's possible in life.  They show you the thrill of overcoming a challenge and the heart of helping someone to reach higher and farther than they ever thought possible.  The gesture of extending a helping hand and words of support and overwhelming love for another individual.  Many of these moments can be found in movies and now viral videos circulating all over the Internet. Moments like when a boy with autism was playing the last game of his high school season, became the high scorer of the game, and his teammates lifted him up and celebrated his success.  Other moments like the Dick and Rick Hoyt story, where an inactive father discovered the joy in the eyes of his son with cerebral palsy when they raced together and since has performed countless marathons and triathlons together.  There are stories like these all around us.  The beautiful thing is that we can use this inspiration and create magical moments of our own.  All it takes is a bit of awareness and the willingness to put in the effort to make a difference.  Don't let everyone else make all the magical moments for people while you sit watching from the sidelines.  It can start from listening to someone in need, volunteering for an organization, or even just smiling more at people.  In a world that is diluted with so much technology and emotional distance, people are yearning and craving for more love, attention, and focus.  Give it to them.  Get out of your head and into your heart.  Make your life a life of service to humanity and you will never regret it.  

The two biggest human needs are growth and contribution.  When you contribute, you grow.  It can happen no other way.  Also, it is impossible to give with receiving in return.  Sometimes the receiving is not a direct tangible outcome of your giving, but what you gain in fulfillment for making a difference far outweighs any tangible items you could get anyway.  When you give with an open heart, it is as if you connect to another spiritual dimension that you could not reach any other way.  We create our lives with these magical moments.

Love,

Matt

Thoughts from 30,000 feet

This very moment I am flying back to the USA over the same ocean that I crossed a little over 2 years ago to begin another chapter in my life in a land far, far away.  It was a decision that I made completely on faith.  There were no guarantees of what was waiting for me in Singapore.  The level of uncertainty was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life.  I was moving my life 10,000 miles away, alone, with only the potential of making an income. Nothing was guaranteed.  I didn't even have a set salary.  I had no where to live and only the bags I was allowed to check in on the plane.  I remember very vividly sitting in the dark cabin of the plane on my way to Singapore via Japan.  It was on the leg of the flight to Japan that I met a very interesting man who had a 30 year career as a brick layer from Pennsylvania and was on his way to Japan to train with a Ninjutsu master. I had never heard of Ninjutsu before but apparently they are quite the badasses.  I was literally overwhelmed with a gamut of emotions ranging from fear to excitement to peace, strangely enough.  It was something I never would have thought I would have done in my life.  My life was always about playing it safe.  I would challenge myself but in a way that still felt safe.  I would put myself in challenging situations to grow but nothing even close to uprooting my life and moving across the world with not much more than faith that things were going to work out for the best.  


Fast forward 2 years, and I am on the same flight going in the opposite direction for a visit to my home of where this major decision was first made.  It is amazing to me how it all started with a decision and a commitment.  As I reflect on my life, I realize that the most of the powerful experiences I have had all started with a major decision taken in full faith.  I am not referring to a decision on what to eat for dinner, although I guess in a way those decisions can effect the direction of your life in some way.  I am talking about making major decisions that scare you.  Decisions that take your breath away.  Decisions that make you feel sick to your stomach but you know in your heart that it is the path that must be taken.  The most powerful experiences in my life, and yes that includes the painful and not so pleasurable ones, all began this way.  They all began by stepping out of my comfort zone into the unknown.  They all began with a decision and a commitment to stand by that decision. 

Many times we shy away from making these types of decisions because of fear.  We fear that the pain of stepping into the unknown is going to be more painful than what we already know.  Even if we aren't fully happy with our current circumstance, the fear and uncertainty of something new and different is enough of a deterrent to steer us way from what could be a wonderful destiny.  We seek the comfortable and the known and miss out on what life has waiting for us in the vast, yet potentially wonderful world of the unknown.  If we truly want to experience the amazing gifts of this world, we must venture out of our cocoon and seek a bit of adventure.  If there is a piece of you that is yearning for growth and opportunities for greater fulfillment, take a step into the unknown.  You just may surprise yourself with what you are capable of.

Love,
Matt

What if you knew you could not fail?

What would your life look like if you woke up every morning with the belief, no, the knowing, that miracles were going to occur in your life?  How would your attitude change if you held the intention that love, abundance, and peace was waiting for you just around the corner?  What would you do today if you knew you could not fail? The truth is that it is impossible to fail.  It is impossible to not have miracles occur in your life.  And it is impossible to not be surrounded by love, abundance, and peace.  It all comes down to perspective.  Many of us live our lives in the past or the future.  We obsess about past mistakes or occurrences and/or we worry about what the future is going to hold for us.  We live by the "if/then" mantra.  If I make more money, then I will be happy.  If I find the right person, then I will experience more love.  If I get a better job, then I will be more fulfilled.  If I can just get figure out my whole life, then I will have more peace.  There are two problems with the "if/then" mantra. Number one is we are living from the outside in.  We are basing our life's fulfillment and happiness on outside circumstances and other people.  Number two is that even if we happen to get what we think we are looking for, there is always more.  There is always more money to be made, more love to experience, and better jobs to be had.  Which only leaves us with fleeting senses of happiness, fulfillment, and love which are none of those things at all in actuality.  True happiness, fulfillment, and love are omniscient and all pervading parts of our very being.  They are not things that can be experienced in moments of extrinsic fulfillment.  They are only things that can be experienced intrinsically at our core.  Love and happiness are not things that you get.  They are things that you choose.  Whether you are single or in a relationship, it is a choice to experience love.  Whether you have lots of money or very little, it is a choice to feel abundant.  Whether you are a street sweeper or a CEO, it is a choice to feel fulfilled.  The beauty is when we can find fulfillment in the little things.  When we can find love, fulfillment, and happiness in a cup of coffee, a book, or even a challenge in our life, we shed our layers of crap and open ourselves up to the gifts that life has to offer.  When we can look at a challenge, be grateful for it, see the love in it, and ask G-d to not free us from a challenge until we have learned everything we need to learn to grow into the person we would love to become, we begin to manifest the life of our dreams.  When we live with the belief that everything that happens is exactly what is supposed to happen to lead us in the direction of our destiny, we connect more and more the source of all things and the more we can connect with that source, the higher we raise the frequency at which we vibrate, and the more we become co-creators of our life.

What would your life look like if you were literally grateful for everything? How would you feel if you held the impenetrable belief that literally everything that happened in your life was serving you in the best way possible?  The way we do this is by softening our hearts and opening up to the two most powerful things in the universe: love and gratitude. As Pierre Tielhard de Chardin once said, "The conclusion is always the same:  Love is the most powerful and still the most unknown energy of the world." Tap into the infiniteness that is love and watch the world transform around you.

Love, 

Matt