Three (3) More Articles Coming Out This Month – To Supercharge your Transformation Efforts… What’s Next?

1. The detailed link between our Thoughts, Feelings, Emotions, Actions – and the Quality of Life We Will Live as a Result.
2. What are Your Own “Key Stones“?: The role that pivotal Thoughts, Actions, and Habits play, which will release a flood of similarly empowering ones.
3. How to Best Cluster Your Empowering Habits – In this article, I explore 2 crucial times of the day, when focusing on habits can have the greatest impact.

David Lee Madison, Jr.
~Nate – street name
~KnavetheMage on Twitter
~ZenNinja
~Nate Love
~Dreamweaver
WordPress – Synergy, KnavetheMage, suprememasterjedi
Copied from my WORD documents in Boulder, CO
Wednesday, December 25, 2013 – 18:06

 

 

“A Letter to Dad”

(The names have been changed to protect my friends’ rights to privacy.  Additionally, I have avoided giving too much detail, which might identify my friends, in case someone they know reads this blog.)

This was an email I sent my dad tonight, who has Multiple Sclerosis.  He’s been bed-ridden for a year or more; and his last email says that the disease has progressed to the point where he is now waiting for a nursing home to open up and take him.  When I was just a boy, he was my best friend.  As I grew older, our relationship grew more and more strained, until we stopped communicating all together for a very long time.  Just recently, after speaking with my close friend about his extremely caustic relationship with his mother – I began giving him advice.  Of course, if you are willing to give advice, you should be willing to take it…if it applies.  It did.  I needed to attempt to heal the relationship between my father and I, somehow.

He is going to pass away at some point, and I didn’t want that to happen before I had a chance to say how I really felt about him and what impact he had on my life.  In the past I had focused so much on my own pain and misery, that I could not really see what was going on.  I spewed hatred and bitterness everywhere I went.  I hated myself.  I hated my father.  I hated my mother.  I hated the world; and I didn’t trust anyone.  The miracle is – how did I ever manage to become removed from all of that and begin my healing?

Something greater than me has stepped in.  I am sure of it.  And so, in the spirit of generosity and appreciation, I say with a very warm heart, Thank you, whoever or whatever has watched over me all of these years.  I know that you were there; even if I couldn’t feel you at times.  You have guided me, protected me and brought me to this place and time of forgiveness for myself and for those who I felt did me harm when I was younger.  If there is a God; then this bit of song which I love to sing applies, here, I think:
~Our God is an Awesome God- He Reins… from the Heavens Above, with Wisdom, Power and Love – Our God is an Awesome God!~

To Dad:
Remember when I was at one of the foster homes; and you recorded two cassette tapes of songs on my birthday?  You would spend a few seconds to introduce the next song coming up.
I really appreciated that.

I think I wore those tapes out, playing them over and over and over again.  Each time I did, I thought about coming home again.  It got me through some really tough times.  Thank you.

My friend Sam went through some very traumatic stuff with his mom when he was just a kid.  She nearly killed him several times, driving drunk.  He literally, had to, as a kid, grab the steering wheel out of her hand, so they wouldn’t drive into a concrete divider on the highway; and shake her awake.

When he tells me this stuff, I let him talk for a bit, because he needs to speak about it.  He needs to acknowledge it.  But after a time, I begin to steer him toward what he wants to get out of his relationship with his mom, now.  Now is all we really have.  And I hate to see him waste his, now, on bitterness, so I have repeatedly asked him to focus on the things that were good between him and his mother.  Over the course of a few weeks, he has increasingly been able to do so; and what started out as hate, and anger and all the why’s of why she did this to him as a little kid; and why can’t she just admit some of it…..he’s starting to feel the love he felt and has wanted to feel for so long, for her.

As a man, I have had to make really tough choices:

One of those choices led me to walk away from a girlfriend/friend who kept drinking and drugging, because it was keeping me from being able to stop, myself.  I still like her and think about her.  I care about her; but I had to do that in order to get my own life straight.

It’s these kinds of choices, I feel, which make the difference between a boy, and a man; or a girl and a woman.  When you told me, that I had the makings of being a leader, I couldn’t see it, all those years ago.  All I could see was that I was unpopular, felt confused and no girl seemed to want to be with me.  I tried to change all the outward stuff, hoping that that would somehow change me and that people would want to be close to me.  In time, I saw that changing my outward appearance, was a very SMALL part of changing the conditions in my life; but where I would need to focus most of my attention, would have to be on my character.

I came to this conclusion very slowly and very painfully, when I started looking for a way to avoid being poor; and instead, studied the ways of the wealthy.  I gave up, for the most part, reading fantasy and science fiction; and began a steady diet of self-help books.  It was a painful process, because the last thing I wanted to really do, was to change myself – that takes courage, conviction, commitment, consistency and discipline – all of which, I was sorely lacking, at the time.

Some of these books would have exercises to do.  I wouldn’t do them.  The most I would do, was imagine doing the exercise.  Yet, I kept coming across these books that told me that if I really wanted to change, then reading the book would not be enough.  I would have to take action.  Because I had created a habit of reading these kinds of books; I kept coming across this message, until one day, I picked up a pen and piece of paper and tentatively began an exercise in the book I was reading.  But as my courage grew and my yearning to change grew stronger, I did more and more of these exercises. – And the course that this has set me upon has been so powerful that it literally changed my life.

So, yes, I am becoming a leader; but I am certain that I could never have done so, had I not been in pain.  It was the pain that forced me to take a look at myself, that caused me to have such a burning desire for change and transformation, that I would become intimately acquainted with fear, and what it takes to overcome it – or pain, and what it takes to push through it.  How could I ever have hoped to lead people, if I had not gone through my own hell?  How could I ever have related?  Even if I tried, what advice or real-life problem-solving action could I have taken?  If I had tried to rely on some text-book knowledge that I had read out of a field guide for leaders – the most I would have accomplished, was regurgitating what someone else wrote – with no thoughts of my own that had been congealed over time and experience.

Facing failure after failure and learning that that is not the end; has given me the ability to not see myself as a FAILURE, but more as a scientist, who will eventually find what he seeks.  I may have gotten people to follow, but as soon as REAL problems arose, my lack of character would have shown through and people would have lost faith in me; and maybe, even, themselves.  If I am in a crisis situation in the future…I cannot afford for this to happen.  Lives might be at stake; or something greater.

So, looking back on my life, even though the lessons have, at times, been very difficult – I am extremely grateful for having had the opportunity to have gone through them.  Most people would never say that – And that is precisely why I will be a leader among leaders.

Most of that has to do with how you brought me up:  Your advice.  Your quotes like, “If man thinks he can; or a man thinks he can’t – he is generally right”; and “A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still”.  Your love of knowledge and being more than just average.  Your love of the mind and logic.  Your multiple interests.  Your curiosity and playing with science.  Your anger and passion for life.  Your jokes and lighter side.  Your wanting to teach other people what you had discovered…Your need to think for yourself —- I watched that, and began to incorporate it into my being at an early age.  I didn’t know what was happening, but I was being transformed.  My little body and mind and heart were going through an alchemical transformation; yet, I was unaware.

So, I want to thank you.  I want to thank you for the time when we were watching a football game; and you smelled something burning and grabbed a hot frying pan with your bare hand; had to go to the sliding glass door, slam it open and dump it outside on the deck.  You acted without worrying about your fears; got a second or third degree burn for your bravery and selflessness.

Later, while I was in the Marines.  My corporal had dove into the water and the other corporal froze when she realized that he was in trouble.  I acted without thinking, endangering my own life, getting my glasses knocked off; and having the water pull me down in between the big stones of coral…ripping my my back to shreds and my hands and my feet, after bracing with all my might, so I wouldn’t be sucked under.  Even after all that – after having failed to help him and nearly dying, myself, I still went and crawled back over to him and pulled him out of the water.  I calmed my mind and noticed that if I used the tide, it would buoy up his body weight and would be able to pull him up onto the rocks, safely.

These are things I did not share with you; or if I did – not the whole story.

I just want you to know, that I am the kind of man I am, mostly, because of you.  Words cannot express all that I feel for you, though in this email, I have tried.

Dave

David Lee Madison, Jr.
~Nate – street name
~KnavetheMage on Twitter
~ZenNinja
~Nate Love
~Dreamweaver
Wordpress – Synergy, KnavetheMage, suprememasterjedi
Copied from my WORD documents in Boulder, CO
Monday, December 16, 2013 – 01:27

“Do You Have a ‘Relationship Language’ Solidly In Place?”

What I’ve found, is that we need to learn to speak the same language and use the same definitions when dealing with another person.

What that requires is a Relationship Language.  A what?!  A Relationship Language – a language or a set of definitions that both parties agree on beforehand – before they get into their first argument. 

What I mean by that, is that any single person has their own definitions of words and combinations of words, and gestures, and what that means to them, based on their past experience, culture, family and what they’ve gone on to learn.  But whenever two or more people gather together, issues can arise from the simple fact that each person has their own unique definitions drawn from unique experiences, and often people assume that they know what those definitions are, when they really don’t.

An example of this is when somebody replies defensively, “Hey.  It’s simply logic.  It’s common sense.  Anyone would know that.”; or “What do you mean you don’t understand?! – I’ve been telling you for the past half hour what I mean!  How can you honestly stand there and act like you are this dumb!?”

Ouch….Looks like these people need some “Non-Violent Communication” (NVC); or at least a common way to communicate, so that both parties can be relatively sure that they understand one another.

The thing is, people tend to assume that the other person can read their mind.  That’s too bad, because a lot of heartache could be avoided, if they would just take the time, sit down, and explain what they really mean by the words that they use.

Take, for example, my friend and I having an argument over the issue of the word, “work”.  It’s a simple word, not that long; and when you say, “I’m going to work”, most people know what you mean.  But when you refer to work as something other than your job; then things can take on a different meaning.  I’ve argued that by labeling something you might like to do, as ‘work’, simply because you’re getting paid for it,  it could cause you to have negative feelings associated with what you like to do!

To some, “work” means struggle, effort – ‘blood, sweat and tears’ – ‘by the sweat of your brow shall you toil’, (according to the Genesis, in the Bible).  But work could also simply mean the result after you put energy and action into something.  What if you really like to dance…stripper, hip hop, whatever; but you get paid to do it.  Is it still considered, ‘work’?  For some, it would be.  For others, it would not.  Some people might say it was a hobby that they got paid for.  If you are an escort or a Gigolo and you love to have sex…but you get paid for it – Does that constitute, ‘work’? –  Well, it wouldn’t for me.  But that’s just me.  And that’s just my point…everyone has a different definition and a string of definitions for every single word or symbol.  Figure out what that is; and you’ll be communicating like you never did before.  They’ll say something like, “It’s like you’ve known me my whole life!”, or “I was just going to say that!”, or “Wow, those are some pretty powerful psychic abilities you have there.  You read my mind!”

Let’s take another example. – A rather simple one that we’ve all heard:  A young salesman comes up to a lady, and says, “Can I help you, MAM?” – Boy! – Did he just stick his foot in his mouth?  In her mind, she’s going, “Oh, I look old enough to be called, ‘MAM’, now, do I?” – When this guy may have been raised in the South where it’s well known that boys are taught manners at a very early age; and this is simply a word of respect for him.

One last example here:  Remember high school math?  Maybe you’re still there learning about the ‘Order of Operations’.  Sound familiar?  If not, I’ll jog your memory for a moment:  The ‘Order of Operations’ can be remembered using an acronym of PEMDAS…Parenthesis, Exponets, Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract. – And the reason why students are taught this is because there are times when a person is doing a math problem and they might come up with a different answer, having added, before they multiplied, possibly.  There has to be a standard, shared language across the board, so that when people say I did such and such and came up with this result; other people can follow them exactly to get the same result.  Imagine the chaos different car industries might go through if they tried to use the results from someone who didn’t know their ‘system’.

The small amount of time that you spend learning what your potential spouse’s Relationship Language – your friends’ or even someone you just met – will pay you back many times over and save you countless arguments and all that time trying to explain yourself while you are both angry or frustrated and not in your ‘right mind’.

I’ve discovered that the worst time to try and be logical with someone is when you are in the thick of a heated argument.  Rationality seems to go right out the window; and people get incensed over the stupidest things, when they should be trying to make their relationship stronger.  I mean, that’s the whole point, right?  – To remain in the relationship and to grow together; not split up because someone felt butt-hurt over a technicality, right?

So, do the right thing and think about the words you use and what they mean to you; and when things are going all cozy, start this conversation with your friend, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, significant other…whatever. You’ll be glad you did; I promise!

David Lee Madison, Jr.
~Nate – street name
~KnavetheMage on Twitter
~ZenNinja
~Nate Love
~Dreamweaver
WordPress – Synergy, Twitter: KnavetheMage, suprememasterjedi
Copied from my WORD documents in Boulder, CO
Saturday, December 14, 2013 – 16:27

“My Jar Analogy as a Basic Blueprint for Understanding Key Success Principles”

“My Jar Analogy as a Basic Blueprint for Understanding Key Success Principles”

I have often thought that the concept of the rate of growth and desire to speed up that growth, could be best illustrated by the analogy of a tiny man or woman in, and at the bottom, of a jar when they are born.

 

Below, I will attempt to examine this further:

 

The jar is a metaphor for the set of conditions and circumstances we are born into.  The bottom represents the time and place of our entering this world.  The small person represents us, as we learn and grow and apply what we know and have learned.  The sand or clay represents challenges and opportunities presented to us on a daily or even more frequent basis.  The stones simply represent bigger opportunities or challenges.  The lip of the jar represents the point in time when we are able to get past our set of circumstances, thought patterns, or habits.  The outside of the jar represents the rest of the Universe or almost limitless possibilities waiting for us to grasp once we learn certain lessons and achieve certain applied skills.

So, imagine a man trying to get out of a jar; but the only tools he is given is that of gradual grains of sand or clay being dropped into the jar from above.  One would think that it would be much faster if you put a bunch of stones in instead, as stepping stones.  That is the solution that seems to come to mind quickest, once we become impatient for things to change in our lives.

 

In order to do that, though, we have to build from the bottom – up.  We have to create with what we were originally given.  Take a poker player for a moment – the best ones, I’ve been told, are not necessarily the ones with the best hands; but the ones with the best strategy and know how to read people and circumstances and to even bluff at times.

 

I know that I’m mixing metaphors, here, but if you stay with me for a bit more, where we’re headed may become more clear…

 

So, there you are: a tiny man or woman, at the very bottom of the jar (at birth).  Life begins tossing in grains of sand or grains of clay.  If big boulders dropped on us, they could instantly kill us.  Now, imagine that we can let this stuff continue to fall on our heads, and bury us alive; or we can somehow make room and step on those grains,(skillfully spread around and stacked upon one another), once they make it to the bottom of the jar.  We begin to do this, and soon, we are standing on a nice foundation that we’ve even managed to smooth out.

 

Now, let’s say that as time goes on, we decide that we’re no longer satisfied with these itty-bitty grains of clay and want to move faster in our life; so we beg for huge boulders again.  Besides, getting smashed in the head, what happens if we have actually been able to build with these boulders or stones and now are leaping merrily up the mountain?  What happens if we miss-step and fall all the way back down to where the sand or clay is?  – We get battered and bruised along the way down.  We may even die while smashing from rock to rock, until we finally cease our descent.

 

Yet, we haven’t discussed the other dynamic going on, here.  Eventually that little person grows into a bigger person, stronger mind, will, imagination, knowledge base, and sets of skills.  If we take this into account, as well, then, we see that our rate of success can merge almost seamlessly with our rate of growth.  And when I speak of growth; I’m not just referring to going from a child to an adult; but am including the things I mentioned above, as well.  Eventually, when you’ve gotten big enough, you will be too large to fall into the cracks of those stones.  In essence, your person or soul or life power/personal power will be big enough so that you will actually NEED larger sized grains of sand/clay; or even stones.

 

1)  Please leave a comment or tell your story, or just give an example from your own life, if this resonates with you.  All are welcome!

2)  AND – if you know how to get rid of the annoying hidden characters which keep showing up at the top of my blog, from Microsoft WORD – help!

 

And thanks for taking the time to read my blog!

 

David Lee Madison, Jr.

~Nate – street name ,

~KnavetheMage on Twitter

 ~ZenNinja

~Nate Love

~Dreamweaver

WordPress – Synergy, KnavetheMage, suprememasterjedi

Copied from my WORD documents in Boulder, CO

Saturday, December 7, 2013 – 9:32

 

A Focused Mind

As a kid, I was always curious – always getting into some kind of a trouble, or rather, should I say, adventure?  The classroom left me needing more.  I wanted to explore the world around me, but the rigidness of school frightened me.  I escaped by creating a world, set apart, all my own, in my imagination.  This world had certain rules.  One of them was:  I was always the hero.  The other was, I had to fight against something.  The last, unbending one was…I always got the girl.

With such an imagination, I was bound to see the world in a much different light than the rest of my classmates, and even my teachers, might.  I’m remembering back to one particular day, when I must have been either in, second or third grade, in Chesterfield, Virginia.  I had heard that you could take a magnifying glass, and by focusing it just right, you could light things on fire.

Well, as you can imagine, this made my little, pyromaniac-heart, go pitter-patter with gusto.  I set out to find whether this was true or not.  My first few attempts were utter failure.  I had spotted an empty, white cigarette pack, and awkwardly tried to angle my wrist so that the light from the sun would shine on it.

At first, I couldn’t even tell where the light was, how far away the lens needed to be – whether I was too close, or too far away.  But I kept at it, and eventually discovered that sweet spot, where you hover delicately – your hand inching in and out just slightly to focus light into a spot.  Only my spot looked more like the shape of a fan, or imagine a dot with rays shooting out from one side.  And even when I finally managed to get that spot pretty circular – the paper, cardboard of the cigarette pack, still wouldn’t burn – no matter how long I held my hand in place!  What a bummer…

As the minutes turned into a half hour or more, I began to see a pattern forming, for, I had given up on the pack for the moment, and wanted to try out my new-found spot producing lens on stuff like leaves and wood and stuff.

I picked up a green leaf and focused the sunlight.  Nothing seemed to happen.  Next, a piece of grass – still, no change.  Finally, I saw a dried up ol’ leaf and experimented on that.  Suddenly, something miraculous began to happen before my very eyes:  Where the spot of light was focused, I could have sworn that there was a dark circle forming on the leaf!  Staring at the spot of light for so long took a toll on my eyes, and so I rubbed them and moved the light away to check.  Sure enough, where the sunlight had been, now, was a charred spot a bit smaller than the spot of light that I had used.

Such a small victory; but such a sweet one!  I played around more and more, until I came upon this old brown log.  Almost immediately, I saw the effects:  Yet, this time, something even more amazing happened:  After focusing the light for, maybe, oh, 10-15 seconds, I heard this quick little muffled, “poof!”, and a red flame popped into existence, seemingly, right up out of the wood, itself.

Well, I could tell you that I was surprised and delighted, but that wouldn’t even BEGIN to describe how I felt right at that critical moment of discovery.

As a child, I learned a very powerful lesson that day:  That energy, focused, can effect things, where normally, no appreciable difference could be detected.

I carry this lesson with me to this very day.  As an adult, I still tend to believe as a child.  So you could say that I live in a fantasy world; or you could say that I simply have a strong mind and know how to utilize my imagination to the fullest.  Either way, what I’ve found to be true, is that a focused mind acts on thoughts nearly the same way that that magnifying glass worked on sunlight.  I’ve done a lot of private research on this.  Among the sources have been books on the practices of Yogis, martial artists, people who have mastered something of themselves, or a certain craft.  I have read a whole fwoplusal (my word, coined for exactly what I was trying to express) of material on the, “Law of Attraction”, numerology, the Tarot, hard sciences, meta-sciences, philosophy and such.  But what struck me as the most powerful evidence that any of this be true, was the massive number of wildly successful people who claimed that it was so.

To a focused mind; and all that jazz!