Lifestyle & Personal Interests

Following My Heart (All the Way to Mexico…)

following my heart

About a half hour north on a dirt road off the highway is a small tin roof stand selling Coco Frio, ice cold, fresh coconuts. We stop for a drink. They slice off the top of the green football sized fruits, plop in a straw and the cool watery liquid slides down into the depths of my heated body. It’s the rainy season and oh, so hot and humid. I feel a breeze from a passing car, my eyes following it with longing. Any breeze is a sacred gift.

We drive another hundred meters or so to another dirt road, this one guiding us far from the sounds of the highway into rolling fields and then…the jungle. It surrounds the river like a lush elegant cloak, vibrating with life, with energy, with humidity I can taste. We drive through mud, rocks, even fording the river once or twice. We get out, gather our back packs already wet with heavy air, and begin our trek. The birds tempt me to miss my steps. What color was that one? The plants whisper secrets. I am glowing with intrigue, hardly able to act like a normal human being. It’s all too much for my senses to hold in with composure. And then, we see it.

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Eckhart Tolle’s Guide to Writing

writing

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

Recently I was listening to an episode of the Oprah / Eckhart Tolle podcasts. Tolle described how he writes, and I was struck by the simplicity and peacefulness of the process. If you ever experience writer’s block, or if the words you do write feel forced, this guide may prove to be the solution for your troubles.

The following is a summary of how Eckhart Tolle writes:

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Keeping a Journal Can Change Your Life

keeping a journal

Have you ever started keeping a journal – perhaps starting on a particular milestone like your birthday, or January 1st – only to give up after a few days or weeks? Like many projects which we’re initially enthusiastic about, writing daily or even weekly in a journal can all too quickly become a chore. After all, what difference can it make to write down words that no-one but you will see?

There are several ways for keeping a journal to change your life, and I’ll show you how to achieve each in just ten minutes a day. Still think it’s not worth it?

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How To Unleash Your Creative Genius

creative genius

James M. Higgins, author of 101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques: The Handbook of New Ideas for Business,defines creativity as the process of generating something new that has value. Creative ideas run the gamut from new associations of existing ideas, elements, or concepts, to radical breakthroughs which extend the boundaries of human knowledge and create paradigm shifts. That is, you don’t necessarily have to make a quantum leap to be creative; you can begin by finding ways to improve an existing product, or by modifying a process to make it more efficient.

Creativity can mean identifying an untapped market for an existing product, finding a new solution to a problem, finding creative ways to resolve a labor dispute, and so on. In addition, creativity is not the sole domain of the arts—whether it’s painting, theatre, music, architecture, dancing, literature, and so on—but is important in any field, from medicine to business, and from engineering to economics.

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Why You Should Move Away

move away

Well, it has been a week since my last post – an interlude far longer than I normally plan. It has, however, been a big week for me. A week of big decisions that will affect the rest of my life. This past week I committed to moving overseas for a number of years. We leave in 6 weeks time. My fiancee, Kathryn, is from Vancouver and we are moving there so that she can be closer to her family after having lived in Australia for 3 years.

The following are some reasons why you might consider moving overseas:

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