The Least Sexy Key to Success

Many of us who are on the path of spiritual growth and personal development are observant to the fact that we are not exactly where we would like to be.  Some of us take that thinking process to a new level and design our life and goals exactly like we would love to see it manifest.  Even fewer take it to the next step.  This next step is one the most overlooked, if not the most overlooked step to reaching our dreams.  It is that of an intense and unwaivering level of discipline.  It is easy to talk about where you would like to go and who you would like to become but so few are willing to create the discipline in their lives to actually make it happen. You must create discipline in your thoughts, words, and deeds and among all the layers of your life. If you truly want success in all domains of your life, you must create the discipline and mechanisms to demonstrate that.  Show me how you are in the weakest area of your life and you will show me your life.  

Many people are strong and disciplined in their financial life and attract mass amounts of wealth, yet they don't exercise or eat healthy.  Others are disciplined to workout and eat healthy but have no professional motivation and live paycheck to paycheck.  Others have a great social life but their spiritual life is in shambles, while others have an amazing spiritual life but no one to share it with.  You get the point.  Discipline is like a muscle.  When you exercise your discipline "muscle," you become stronger in all areas of your life.  Let me give you an example.  I love to eat and I love to eat healthy.  I eat super clean and healthy 90-95% of the time but I also choose to cheat every once in a while. The key word is choose.  I choose to cheat with my meals occasionally.  I am all right with that when I choose it.  What I can't live with is when I act out of impulse and I become a victim to my vices.  One of my vices is pizza.  Delicious, thin crust, New York style pizza.  It is one of my true food loves. Occasionally I choose to eat it, but usually I choose to not even surround myself with pizza because I know I will be tempted to eat it.  Sometimes, however, I go to a restaurant that has pizza to challenge myself and strengthen my discipline muscle.  I go there and choose a healthier option to prove to myself I am stronger than my vices.  It encourages me and builds up my self-confidence in all areas of my life because I take control and don't allow food to have power over me. Can you see how this level of discipline will benefit me in all areas of my life? 

I am totally committed to continuous and constant develop in all the domains of my life; spiritually, mentally, socially, physically, financially, and personally.  I am committed to creating the life of my dreams not only for myself, but as a commitment to be a role model and inspiration of what is possible to my community. While it is very important to celebrate our victories and successes in one area of our life, it can be equally as devastating on the other side of the coin to ignore our weaknesses and inadequacies in the weaker areas of our life.  Commit today to create an intense level of discipline in your life.  Commit today to never again allow your vices to rule your life.  Commit today to begin to be the person you would love to display for the entire to world to see.  When you bring that level of commitment and discipline to your life, you eliminate the addictions to your vices, and actually create the freedom to do and create the life of your dreams.  Think it. See it. Visualize it. And then go out and create it.  The world is yours for the taking.

Love,

Matt

The face of inspiration

Life is made up of a series of magic moments.  These are moments that move, touch, and inspire you in a way that your life will never be the same again.  These moments may come from a song, an experience, everyday interactions with people, a movie, or many other seemingly insignificant things.  Every moment has the potential to be magical if we open our mind and heart and pay attention.  I just had one of these moments this morning when I went online and came across the beautiful and moving story of Zach Sobiech.  This is a story of a boy who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and was only given months to live.  He decided he was going to leave his mark on the world and wrote a touching song called “Clouds.”  The boy was so inspiring they decided to do a documentary on him.  I watched the documentary this morning and was moved in a way that I will never be the same again.  Here is what I learned:

1 “You don’t have to find out you’re dying to start living.”

           

Many of us live our lives putting off to tomorrow what we would love to do today.  We live by the “Some day…” motto.  Some day I will travel to the places I dream of.  Some day I will start to exercise.  Some day I will change my career to something I would love to do.  Some day, some day, some day.  The devastation of “some day” is that it may never come.  We never know what tomorrow will bring.  We need to live today in 2 ways: as if tomorrow will never come and in a way we want to be remembered by our family, friends, and society forever.

2 Decide to make people happy.

            

There is no greater life than dedicating and committing your life to something greater than yourself.  I have found there is no greater joy than dedicating myself to a life of service to humanity.  Everyday I walk into my office and dedicate myself to delivering the highest quality of care to my patients with a level of love and presence unmatched anywhere in the world.  Do I accomplish that?  I am not so sure but I hope my patients feel my level of love and intention to make a difference in their lives.  I also try to do this in every aspect of my life.  Serve the people around you. Make them happy, and it will be impossible for you not to make yourself happy in the process.

3 Tell the people you love that you love them and tell them often.

            

Do you know that feeling you get when someone you love says “I love you?”  You know, the feeling like you are the most amazing and most important person in the world?  And I am not just talking about the “love you” you may hear in passing.  I am talking about the fully committed and present “I Love You” that makes your heart melt.  I thought so.  People feel the same when you do it to them as well.  Love is meant to be shared.  Don’t keep it to yourself.  If you don’t tell them, they may never know.  And by that time, it may be too late. 

Although Zach just passed away a few days ago on May 20, 2013, just shortly after his 18^th birthday, his spirit lives on in the millions of lives he has touched through the way he lived his life.  Our lives are determined by the choices we make everyday.  Choose powerful choices and you will live an extraordinary life.  I know Zach did. 

Love,

Matt

Pursuit of Your Destiny

Picture from Rumi's Facebook page

The only path to lasting fulfillment and true happiness is living our life wide open.  There is an old Buddist saying that goes something like this: Pain is inevitable but to suffer is a choice.  When you live you life wide open, you are living your life from a place of complete vulnerability.  You are living your life congruent with your truest self and out on display for the whole world to see.  For many, this is a scary place to be.  When we live with an emotional and mental armor on, it is easy to make excuses when someone doesn’t like us or respect who we are.  We rationalize it with excuses because they don’t know who we really are.  We put on a display as to what we think looks good and what is socially acceptable for fear of people not appreciating our truest self.  The problem is that this is exactly what blocks us from achieving our greatest destiny.

The challenge here is two fold.  First we have to figure out who we are as individuals.  What are our highest values, beliefs, and behaviors?  What are our loves, fears, and insecurities?  What are we good at, not so good at, and downright terrible at?  Being in touch with ourselves at our core is not just acknowledging our strengths and just being positive.  It is understanding and accepting the good, the bad, and the ugly about ourselves.  It is understanding who we are deepest at our core and surrendering to that.  When we surrender, we accept all that is about our self exactly as it is.  We literally fall in love with our self.  We fall in love with our strengths and our idiosyncrasies.  We fall in love with our physical and emotional self and all that we are.  Only when we fall in love with ourselves in the now, or in the moment, are we able to see where we want to go.  Let me give you an example.  Imagine you are driving down the road on a clear night. The road is beautifully lit by the moon and the stars.  You can see all around you and determine the direction you want to move.  Now imagine a thick fog rolls in and interrupts your present moment.  You can’t even see right in front of you so it will be impossible to determine the direction you want or need to go.  Surrendering in the moment and falling in love with yourself is exactly what is needed to clear the fog.  It creates the clarity in your mind and your heart to allow you to see your path clearly and without judgment. This path can only be achieved by living your life wide open.

The second part is sharing yourself with others.  This comes from integrating this exciting and new love you have for yourself with humanity all around you.  This is accomplished by revealing your “naked” self to the world by living your life from inside out.  What you do and say is determined by who you are on the inside.  This is scary because what if people don’t like you?  What if who you are is not good enough for the people around you?  Even worse, what if the newfound person you find yourself to be does not connect with the people you have always been closest to you in your life?  These things are scary.  These are the barriers all of us on the road to personal discovery and self-mastery have to pass through.  This is where pain is inevitable, yet suffering is optional. 

Life is going to throw its set of challenges at you.  Some of these challenges will be physical.  Others may be spiritual, financial, emotional, or social, but most likely it will be a combination of all of these.  If your life does not accompany some type of pain, you are not living your life wide open.  However, pain does not have to be accompanied by suffering.  The way we transcend suffering is to do two things:  pass no judgments and fully accepting what is occurring in the moment and attaching an empowering meaning to a challenge you are currently facing.  Let me share with you a personal story.  I am incredibly passionate about exercising and movement.  I love to work out and move my body.  A passion of mine has always been weight lifting.  Recently, I have had some old as well as new injuries surface that have forced me to take a break lifting heavy weights.  It would be really easy for me to judge the situation as bad and create a depressing meaning for the pain I have to go through physically and mentally, at not being able to practice my passion for lifting weights.  Or I can release the desire to attach judgment to my situation and instead create an empowering meaning behind what I am going through.  I have chosen the latter.  This has actually been an amazing opportunity for me to practice yoga, gymnastics, flexibility, balance, and body weight movements.  It has allowed me to strengthen myself mentally at overcoming challenging situations, and it has given me more experience at connecting with myself and sharing this meaning with other people.

We are all given the same opportunity everyday: to choose exactly how we would love to live our lives.  Are we going to live our lives from a place of joy, abundance, and empowerment or from a place of lack, scarcity, and self-deprecation?  Connect to your truest self and watch your life unfold.  When we stop making excuses for where we are in life and start taking a stand for the life we would love to live, mountains will move and oceans will part for you.  There is nothing more powerful than people who are connected with themselves and who attach themselves to a mission and purpose greater than themselves. Do not wait until tomorrow to live your life with passion.  Begin now.  It is the only time that exists anyways. 

Love,
Matt

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