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The Truth Behind Falling – And Being – In Love

Holding Hands

There is nothing like falling in love. Your whole self, body, heart, and mind, yearns for the person you are in love with. You want to be with them all the time, you wonder what they're doing or what they're thinking when you are not around them, and the whole world just seems like a better place. There's only one problem.

You can't, and won't, be falling in love forever. At some point, if you want to keep the relationship, you have to go from falling in love to being in love. If you're already at that point, you might want to read The Secret Killer Of Relationships or The Very SImple Secret To A Happy Marriage.

Falling In Love

Falling in love is the beginning (and can sometimes re-occur later, but I'll get to that)… it's that place where the other person, your significant other, can do no wrong. Everything about them is beautiful, fascinating, and you can't get enough of them. Any time your focus is not fully on something specific, your thoughts drift to the newly significant other in your life.

At this point, everything is new… every day together brings new revelations, new learning, which make you feel like you're getting more and more "inside" the other person. You let each other in deeper than the surface, and there is always a constant feeling of growing closer, an observable closing of the mental and emotional distance between the two of you.

That is a huge part of the greatness of falling in love… getting closer at a visible rate. It's also part of why it can't last forever. Eventually you are close enough that even as you grow closer, it's not as visible, and so it feels like you have stalled, or even like you are growing apart. When you are (bad, but understandable, analogy coming up) a mile apart, and you get 10% closer, that's a huge distance. When you are a foot apart, and you get 10% closer… that's a lot harder to see.

So does this mean that you have reached that point where you love each other, but you are no longer "in" love?

No… when you are growing closer at a very visible rate, that's the "falling" part of falling in love. When you are already close, and moving closer by inches (or even fractions of an inch, eventually), that's when it changes to being in love. It doesn't mean you're no longer in love, it just means that seeing results of your efforts, where you see the relationship grow, is not as easy, and so you need to find other sources of motivation as well.

Being In Love

Being in love is where it starts taking conscious involvement to keep the "in love" part without the falling. Now, instead of falling in love, you need to start being in love. You will have to go out of your way to keep yourself in your partner's thoughts (and make sure that they stay in yours!). If you don't go out of your way, it won't mean anything.

What does it mean to "go out of your way"? Going out of your way can mean different things to different people, but the important thing is that you are devoting the two things that you can't possibly acquire more of to them. What two things? Time and attention… you can't get more time and you have only a limited amount of attention to invest during the time you do have. Giving time and attention, therefore, is the universally recognized way to convey someone's (or something's) importance to you.

When you are falling in love, and everything is new, it's easy to devote an enormous amount of attention (and with it time) to your significant other. New things always have a draw on our attention… it's part of being human, and part of our survival instinct (you have to determine whether or not something new is a threat, after all). That's why it's also easier to stick with a new diet, or a new workout, or why you may find you love a new dish or a new restaurant. Once something (or in our case, someone) become familiar, however, it requires a conscious decision to dedicate mental energy (attention) to that thing (or, as I said, person).

When you combine that advantage of newness drawing our attention with the visibly growing closeness of the relationship, it makes giving more attention to the relationship a no-brainer. It doesn't require much in the way of conscious effort, because not only is your subconscious driving you to make sure this "new" thing is not a threat, but the rewards are blindingly obvious.

Once you get to the point of obviously diminishing returns, however, you start to notice that the same amount of effort doesn't move you the same amount closer. At the same time, the subconscious drive to categorize anything new as "threat" or "non-threat" fades away, leaving you with much less "drive" to devote attention to the relationship. Other things start to claim your attention, drawing it away from your significant other.

I mentioned earlier that your partner needs you to give two things in order to keep being in love, as opposed to just loving each other (the difference between soul mates and good friends). One was time, the other attention. Out of the two of these, time is the easiest to give, attention the most important.

Attention Is Money

Despite the phrase above, attention is far more important than money. Attention is the currency by which you show how much you value something. You've heard the saying "time is money" but time without attention means nothing. Whatever it is that you do, it's highly unlikely that they truly pay you for your time… they really pay for your attention across time. They pay you to write, to watch a security monitor, to serve burgers… whatever it is, they may pay you for the hours you do it, but if you don't "do it", whatever it is, you don't get paid.

This applies to relationships, too. Giving time without attention is sort of like leaving a seventeen cent tip at a restaurant… it lets the other person know that you didn't forget, you just didn't think they were worthy of more. It's insulting, whether done consciously, as with the tip, or subconsciously, as with spending time with your significant other without giving them your full attention.

When you give someone time, without attention, you are telling them that they are low on your priority list. It doesn't matter whether you intend for them to be or not… you are showing them, with your actions, that they are. You can show someone that they have your attention in many ways… communication is an extremely important one, but there is also buying them something (probably the least effective way), making them something (the more it reflects the fact that it is something YOU created, the better), or doing something with them (ie going out to dinner and/or a movie).

All of the ways listed above can show your attention, but if you don't show your mental involvement, show that you were thinking of them specifically, the value drops. For instance, when you buy something for your significant other, if you don't take the time to buy something that they specifically like (for instance buying roses when your wife prefers tulips), it loses some of its value… that doesn't mean it has no value, just less. The same goes for making them something… if you don't show that you were thinking about them when you made it, it loses some value. If you do something with them, and keep taking phone calls, it takes away some of the value.

Communication is a special case. By the very act of communicating, you are giving them some fraction of your attention. Different forms of communication show different amounts of attention, and also show how much of your attention the other person has to different degrees. Email, for instance, doesn't require much attention, or show how much attention the other person has, unless it's a long and involved email, which could STILL have been written across time, and thus be less of your attention. Instant messaging, on the other hand, still doesn't require a lot of attention, but shows how much of your attention the other person has a little better, because they can see how long you take to respond. Voice communication (ie a phone call) is better yet, as it requires more attention, and they can hear in your voice how much of your attention they have. An in-person meeting provides them with the most attention, and lets them read your body language as well to determine how much of your current attention they have.

The Difference

What it boils down to, then, is that the difference between falling in love and being in love is that you can't fall forever. Eventually you have to move from falling in love to being in love, from the easy part to the part which requires your conscious effort. It IS worth that effort, though… being in love still moves you closer, and still builds your relationship and love higher. It just exchanges speed for depth… it goes back and fills in all the little chinks that falling in love passed over.

You can also fall in love all over again. This usually happens when you let your partner slide from your attention for too long, and then something wakes you up to that fact. All of a sudden what was old and familiar is new and different. You close the gap that opened up between you, and now have that momentum to keep you going once you move back to being in love once again.

Again, falling in love is absolutely wonderful. It is an amazing experience, and one you will likely always remember. Being in love, though, has depth and duration that falling in love is not capable of producing.

Falling in love gets you to the starting line. Being in love is the rest of the race. And when you win at being in love, you win big.

Author

September 26th

Awareness, Communication, Energy, Growth, Motivation, Perseverance, Priorities, Relationships

One Man’s Change – Overcoming Depression

You may want to read A Potentially Fatal Mistake, the article that lead to this one.

When I was younger, I had great self-esteem, but horrible self-worth. Just because I was confident in my abilities didn't mean that I thought those abilities made me worth anything. Other people had worth, and always took precedence over me, because I didn't have any worth.

This low self-worth lead to me being depressed. I was depressed to the point where I didn't really feel emotions, didn't really care about anything, for years… about 5 – 6years, actually. Near the end, it was bad enough that I couldn't sleep more than 45 minutes a night, I thought about dying every day, and finally was ready to go through with it.

I went to the hospital because of the side-effects of such low amounts of sleep (seeing things move when they weren't, etc.). While I was there, I finally told someone who could help me about how I felt, and they ended up sending me to another hospital, where they gave me Prozac and a medicine that helped me to sleep.

I was on Prozac for 30 days, and in that time it cleared out the depression enough that I could take a good look at myself and my life for the first time in a LONG time. I realized that I was keeping myself depressed by my thought patterns… I would dwell on the things that made me feel bad, almost wallowing in the negativeness of it all.

So I made a decision. I changed my thought patterns… when my thoughts would start to go down that path of negativity, I instantly stopped them. I'm not saying that this is something that everyone can just instantly change, but that's what I did.

It worked. When those 30 days were over, I didn't suffer from depression any more. I was cured, and I no longer needed medicine to help me. Removing the cycle of negative thoughts removed the negative emotion of depression, and freed many of my other emotions, to some degree.

A couple years later, I had depression come back… I had allowed myself to fall back into the cycle of negative thoughts. Again, I needed a little help to clear my head, so I went to the doctor, told him of my previous experience, and asked for Prozac again.

It was the same story… I took it for 30 days, and during those 30 days, I really thought about what was going on, and I realized that I had only taken care of half of my problem the first time. I had dealt with the negative thought cycles, but not the problem behind them, which was my low self-worth.

What I found, with all that thinking, is that I had value intrinsically. I was worth something because I was a person… it had nothing to do with my intelligence, my looks, what I had or hadn't done. I had worth simply because I was a person.

I had felt this way about others all along. Everyone else had worth, regardless of who they were and what they had done. Not only that, but they all had equal worth, though some of them had more importance to me, being people I liked or loved or both (yes, you can certainly love someone without liking them). In other words, the worth had nothing to do with anything specific to the person, it was theirs by virtue of being a person.

And that value was mine, too. I was also a person, and I also had worth simply because of this. That revelation, along with fixing my negative thought patterns again, made my changes permanent this time. Since that time, I have been depressed, yes, but it has lasted, at most, a few hours.

Now, different people may have different reasons for thinking that every person has value. My "why" is that I believe that all of the universe is a part of God, including each person. I believe that God's universal awareness is present in, and perceives through, each person. So, in essence, any time you deal with any person, you are dealing with God, also.

I think it would be awfully hard to believe in God, and believe you are dealing with Him, even if indirectly, and think that the person that He is in has no worth. In fact, God's worth is so overwhelming that any difference in an individual's worth, if it exists, is insignificant in comparison with the worth that God being present in them adds… so every person is of equal worth.

In case you're wondering, I am Christian, but I think my understanding and beliefs are considerably different than average… you can feel free to ask about them, if you want, just send me an email (you can click my name at the top of this post to find my email).

Author

September 20th

Awareness, Beliefs, Feed Your Mind, Growth, Healing, Perseverance

The Subconscious Mind In Control (AKA Habits)

What Habits Are

"Habit" is a word for an area where your subconscious mind controls your actions in the absence of input from your conscious mind. Most of your every day life is controlled by habits… you have a habit of breathing, sleeping, waking, etc. When most people talk about habits, though, they are referring to ones where you are aware of the habit but still relinquish control to your subconscious. Smoking, drinking, gambling… these are things where the decision to do it is made by your subconscious, and your conscious mind, while aware of what you are doing, is nothing but an observer.

There are two things you should know when looking at habits from this viewpoint. The first is that if your conscious mind involves itself, becoming more than an observer, it can break (or change) that habit. The second is that even if you do decide to make a change, but don't give regular attention to maintaining the change, you will allow that area to slip back to your subconscious mind's control. If you have established enough of a different pattern, that won't matter, because the subconscious will continue along the new pattern, but if you slip before that new pattern is set, your subconscious will go back to its old ways, and your habit will return.

Now let's get something straight… not all habits are bad. Taking a shower every day is a good habit, as are brushing your teeth, chewing with your mouth closed, and exercising. Smoking can even be looked at as a good habit, if the benefits outweight the costs… it's just that the costs for smoking are cumulative, and quite high over the long term, where the benefits are NOT cumulative, and only valuable over a very short term. So one person may consider something a bad habit, where another might consider the same thing neutral or even good.

How Habits Form

You form habits by repeating the same response, or a very similar response, to the same, or very similar circumstances. You form your habit of breathing by exhaling when your lungs are empty of oxygen and inhaling when they are empty of air. You form your habit of smoking by picking up a cigarette in certain situations, which can then expand if you start doing so in more situations. Doing something one time is seldom enough to form a habit… it usually requires tens, hundreds, or even thousands of repetitions.

Performing the same action in response to non-similar circumstances can peripherally reinforce a habit that is forming, but the impact is small. That is, if you have a habit of smoking first thing in the morning, and you smoke one at lunch time, that isn't really enough to expand the habit to smoking at lunch, and if you have smoked a few in the morning, then smoke one at lunch, it is unlikely to cement the habit of smoking in the morning, either.

How Habits Change

There are two kinds of change that can happen with a habit… replacement and removal. Replacing a habit is FAR easier than removing it.

When you replace a habit, what you do is change which action is fired when certain circumstances trigger a habit response from your subconscious. Basically, you have trained your subconscious to fire off a habit when certain circumstances arise. Replacing a habit simply points that trigger at a different habit, such as chewing gum instead of smoking. That's relatively easy, because all you're doing is choosing a different habit to fire, rather than trying to change the whole subconscious pattern of responding to those circumstances with a a habit.

Removing a habit is the other side of that coin… it is conditioning the subconscious to STOP responding to a certain set of circumstances by firing a habit trigger. This is mostly done by altering the way you perceive the set of circumstances. If you want to remove a habit of swearing, for example, you could train your subconscious to look at the circumstances where you would normally swear through a filter of "What if my baby was here?". Even this doesn't actually remove the habit trigger, though… it simply keeps your subconscious from seeing the set of circumstances that trigger it.

That last is why people who form a habit of smoking, then quit, can one day pick it up right where they left off. They changed their perception of the circumstances for the time where they quit, but then their perception goes back to, or close enough to, the old set that fire off that trigger. Abra cadabra… your habit is back!

The ability for "removed" habits to return is one more reason why replacing habits is more effective… even if that set of circumstances arises, it fires off the replacement habit, not the original. I haven't really looked into replacement FOLLOWED by removal… that might be a relatively effective technique, so that even if you backslide it's only to the replacement habit, not the original.

Conclusion

The reality is that if you want to alter a habit, the first thing you must do it become consciously aware of it. After you become aware, you have to make a conscious decision to change, and you'd better have motivation for the change, too (and internal sources of motivation are by far the strongest, most persistent sort). Then you can work on replacing the habit or removing the habit trigger.

Don't expect instant results when trying to change habits. Chances are pretty good that you'll have a fight on your hands for at least two weeks… often much longer. Just keep your focus on now, on the progress you have already made, the changes that you already have, not on the permanent change that is your goal… it'll make it much easier to stick with it.

Four Steps To Boosting Your Creativity (And Confidence!)

Some people, it seems, are born so full of creativity that it comes out of their ears. Others feel dull and lifeless. What is the difference between the two? Is creativity something you can learn?

The answer is both yes and no. The truth is that everyone has creativity in their soul and that you cannot actually teach creativity. What can be taught, however, is how to awaken the creativity that is already inside you.

First of all, let's consider what creativity is. Some people are creative with regards to formal art, like painting. Some are creative when it comes to writing. Still others are creative when it comes to music. And, of course, some people are creative in other ways.

The first thing to understand when you are seeking to ignite the creative fire inside of you is that creativity is NOT limited to what are traditionally considered creative activities. While some may be creative in music, art, or writing, others may be creative in seeing new uses for existing tools, in seeing what would make a good photograph, or coming up with new dishes.

If you want to see an example of someone who took their creative urge in a direction that is not generally considered a "respectable" form of creative expression, look at the art of Julian Beever. He took sidewalk chalk to a level that most people would never even imagine, and is famous worldwide for it. So don't worry that your particular form of choice is one that isn't generally associated with creativity.

There is one thing that all creative people have in common. They are all passionate about what they are creating, about the very act of creating. That passion is one of the very things that scares off people who don't feel they are creative. When you are uncertain of your talent, you may be hesitant, and that hesitancy can make you kill your own creative impulses.

So you've made the decision that you want to light the fire of creativity within you, that you want it to burn bright and high. Here are four steps to lead you in that direction.

Find Your Creative Calling

If you want to awaken the creativity within you, you have to find something that you enjoy, something you resonate with, something where you have the kernel of a flame of passion. This doesn't have to be an "approved" form of creative expression, it can be anything. There are even creative criminals, though I would advise against that path.
Make Small Changes

The second step is to start pushing your creativity in the area you have chosen. Take a step off the beaten path, and do something differently. Do it differently than you have done it before. Do it differently than the official "prescribed" way. Change it and make it your own. It doesn't have to be anything big, even small steps will help build up your courage for bigger steps later.
Build On Those Changes

The third step is to take encouragement from your small experiments and take a bigger step. Change a major component of something, whether it's the process for doing something, or changing the actual end product. You can't grow without change, so if you want to grow in creativity, if you want to light that fire inside you, you have to feed it, and it runs on pieces of old routine and "safe" ways of doing things.
Evaluate What You've Built

The fourth step, and the last one that I can guide you toward, is to look back and evaluate the changes you have made. Did things improve? Did they grow worse? How did it make you feel to make those changes… did it make you feel uncertain but more alive? Look back and learn… learn which changes were beneficial and which ones weren't, but most of all, learn that change is the only path for growth.

Some people are blessed with creativity burning bright from the time they are small children. Some people are not… some even have those flames of creativity intentionally doused by parents or teachers who think they are being "realistic". Even those who are born with the fire inside, however, sometimes find that the fire has burned low, and they need to re-ignite it.

Whether you are building the fire of creativity for the first time, or simply trying to build it back up to where it used to be, always remember what that fire burns as fuel: routine, "safe" places (where you are not mentally or emotionally challenged), and fear of failure. So break pieces of those things off and feed them to the fire! You'll be happier, more creative, and more confident in no time.

I have created a new contest! One lucky subscriber will win a free copy of The Secret.

Click the link below to enter:
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Author

August 22nd

Fear, Feed Your Mind, Growth

You Are Who You Choose To Be

Signposts - Choices

You are who you choose to be. That can be a difficult pill to swallow. It means that you are responsible for yourself and everything that you do. All the good parts about you, and all the bad, are of your own choosing, though you may not be specifically aware of the choice (or choices) that led to specific traits.

It is also difficult because it is difficult to accept the power that gives you. If you have the power to control who you are, then anything you can no longer blame anyone else, including your parents, for whatever traits you don't like about yourself. If you can control how you react to any given situation, then any time in the past that you have responded poorly, it was 100% your fault. That's a very unpleasant concept, and makes it difficult to accept the power of conscious choice. If you don't accept it, then you can continue to deny the blame… though that doesn't mean it belongs any less to you, you can at least deny it, even to yourself.

You're making the choice of who you want to be already, whether you know it or not. Your conscious mind makes the choices, but it can lie to itself, though not to your subconscious. You can tell yourself that you want to be this way or that way, but not really mean it, down at the level where thoughts turn into concrete decisions and actions. You may say you want to be generous, for example, but below that, you may have a fear of scarcity that keeps you from acting out what you say you want.

When you accept the conscious power of choice, you take the power from these lower layers, where such fears dwell, and bring it up into your awareness. Now you can take those things that you say you want to be and consciously examine them to determine if that really is who you want to be, rather than something you think you should be because others tell you so. If it's truly who you want to be, then you can take it from just words, and turn it into a decision, and embed that decision in the bedrock of who you are.

How long it takes to do that depends on how truly you have let go of the concept of powerlessness. When you have truly let it go, and completely understand and accept that you are who you choose to be, change, even drastic change, can be nearly instant (referring to a change in who you are, not what you are… changes to your physical body will still take time, though quite possibly considerably less, since you will not be conflicted and fighting yourself). If you are just beginning, it may take several times making the decision to add or remove a trait to really embed it deeply.

Once you accept this power, it also leads you to the knowledge and acceptance that all of your emotions come from inside you, too. You choose which emotions to feel, and how strongly, though often your choice may not be "I'm going to be extraordinarily happy right now", but something more like "Those circumstances will no longer bring anger or pain". That's not to say that you can't make decisions about how to feel and make them instant, but it takes more work, more energy, and therefore is not as common.

After you've accepted the power of conscious choice, and experienced it for a while, you are almost certain to be more at peace. In fact, it's hard to NOT have that as your default state. After all, if who you are, what you do, how you feel and react, if everything about you is your choice, what is there to be conflicted about? You may lose your peace from time to time, when you slip and give up your conscious choice, letting your subconscious back into control, but as soon as you return to conscious awareness of choice, your peace will return.

Incidentally, when you have this state of conscious awareness of choice as your normal state, other people will notice. People may turn to you for leadership, since they can see that you have it together. They may come to you with questions and problems, some of which you may wonder why they thought you could help. They are likely to give you trust, often trust far beyond what they should give someone they know to the extent they know you… you may find strangers telling you things they would be better off keeping to themselves. Most of all, they will see you as someone they should emulate, which can bring positive or negative responses.

Acceptance of that awareness, the power of conscious choice, is good for you and good for others. It can bring peace and harmony to you, as well as improving your ability to make choose the path that is best for you in any number of circumstances (the best for you in the sense that it fits who you are the best, not in the sense that it brings the most gain to you in the eyes of the outside world). It shows other people that "people" can learn to respond to situations in the way they choose, rather than just letting their subconscious respond. It shows them that ongoing, lasting peace is attainable by someone they know, not just some Tibetan monk chanting in a Buddhist temple. It might even lead them to the knowledge that they, too, are who they choose to be.

Update: On a personal note, I went through this process of realization and becoming aware the first time around ten years ago. At the time, I had been suffering from severe clinical depression for years, though I had never been treated for it. My depression caused me to sleep very little, until I was down to about 45 minutes per night, which causes all sorts of interesting experiences after a few days (or weeks). It got to the point where I was hospitalized, and for the first time given medication to help (I think the medicine they gave me to let me sleep helped nearly as much as the anti-depressants). I was given a month's worth of Prozac, and that really helped… it pushed back the funk far enough that I could actually think clearly. It was at this point that I began (I still have slips) to acknowledge control of my own thoughts, feelings, and actions. Since then, I have had one major backslide into depression (which was around seven years ago), where I needed medicine to help. Again, I only needed one month's worth of aid from the pills, and I got my mind straightened back out. Since then I have had a few slips, including one just the other day, but now they only last hours. I have taken ownership enough that it has changed my subconscious mind's natural reaction to bad things, where instead of dwelling on them, I consider them and let them go. I can't even begin to accurately describe how much of a difference that makes… it's an absolutely amazing change.

I have created a new contest! One lucky subscriber will win a free copy of The Secret.

Click the link below to enter:
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Author

August 14th

Awareness, Energy, Free Will, Growth, Healing, Subconscious

The Not So Well Travelled Road To Peace

Most people can barely find a moment's peace in their hectic lives, yet others, who accomplish the same amount, simply radiate peace at all times. There is a simple but difficult step that will move you from the former group toward the latter.

It is hard to find peace. There are few, if any, people who will deny that. There is a reason why it is hard to find peace… and that's because you lose the peace in your seeking. Peace is inside you, in your heart and in your mind. By seeking peace, you are looking at it as outside of you. Since it is, in reality, inside you, you will never find it by seeking it.

Yet those people mentioned in the first paragraph have "found" peace. They did so by learning that it was inside themselves, and giving up seeking it. You have control of virtually everything inside you, and can have more or less of it. Yet when you move it outside of yourself, you lose control of it. This is true for peace, happiness, sadness, anger… even mental focus and creativity. As soon as you make it something other than you, you lose the ability to control when you will have it and how much of it you will have.

When you seek for something to bring you happiness, you are, by that very act, placing the happiness outside of yourself. You're saying "If only I had that, I would be happy". When you say that, you are wrong. Even if you are happy when you have "that", by tying your happiness to "that", you allow someone else to take it away by taking away "that".

It works similarly with anger. When you allow something outside of you make you angry, you are giving up control of something internal. Others can control you by doing whatever it is that makes you angry. You can take that control back by understanding that it is truly your choice to allow them to make you angry, that if you merely reframe the situation, it would not make you angry at all, and therefore it is not the situation that is making you angry, it is your perception of it, thus taking control back for yourself.

When you look inside yourself, to who you truly are, and accept that true self, you can have peace and happiness at will. All you have to do is turn back to the you that is inside, rather than the outside persona that you assume for the benefit of others. Any time you turn away from that internal self, and seek validation from outside yourself, you are giving up control of your own internal self. You are giving it to people or circumstances outside yourself, allowing them to decide whether you are at peace, sad, happy, angry, focused or distracted.

To move from always seeking and never finding to never seeking and always having, take control back for yourself. Understand that everything that you do, and everything that you feel, is inside you. Everything is your own choice… and if everything is your own choice, then all the power to choose who you are is yours, too. You are that which you choose to be.

Remember that…

You are that which you choose to be.

I have created a new contest! One lucky subscriber will win a free copy of The Secret.

Click the link below to enter:
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Author

August 13th

Awareness, Beliefs, Feed Your Mind, Free Will, Growth

Seven Deadly Sins Now "Slightly Injurious"

Seven Deadly Sins

You've heard of the seven deadly sins? Well, they are deadly no longer. With the (relatively) simple techniques listed below each of the "deadly" sins, you will reduce their damaging power. Once you have mastered the techniques, the once deadly sins will be only slightly injurious.

Lust

Lust is actually one of the easiest sins to reduce in power. All it requires is that you picture how you will feel one week after you actually achieve whatever it is you lust after. Lust is purely a desire for things, and things never truly fulfill desires. It is often driven by the temptation of forbidden fruit. Once you picture having had what it is you're lusting after for a week, the intense feelings of lust are likely to fade away (assuming that you actually get your mind PAST the point of achieving the desire).
Gluttony

The solution for the sin of gluttony is actually very similar to the one for lust. Lust and gluttony are very closely related… lust is strong desire for one thing (this can include people… when they are the object of lust, you are viewing them as things, not people), where gluttony is strong desire to have one thing (see note above) over and over until the point that it is all used up or you have had so much of it that more will make you sick. The solution is basically the same, but not so distant in the future. Imagine how you would feel at the point that you have completely stuffed yourself (either literally, in the case of food, or figuratively if your gluttony applies to something else), and then being forced to do whatever it is five more times. It will most likely make you sick at the thought of even doing it once.
Greed

Greed is not quite so easy, though it's certainly not impossible. It, too, is related to lust, but it is a lust after more and more things, rather than after one thing, or after one thing repeatedly like gluttony. This one is more difficult because it involves changing the way you look at things. In order to beat greed, you have to take a look at what actually brings you enjoyment. If you are honest with yourself, you'll find that having things never brings long term enjoyment. It is the journey toward achieving goals (such as having this or that) that brings more long term enjoyment and fulfillment… but if you only focus on the having this or that, you're throwing away the enjoyment of the way there. Greed never leaves you happy, because as soon as you achieve one thing, you become greedy for the next.

A simple technique to learn this different mindset is to write down every night what three things brought you the most enjoyment, made you the most happy that day. If you continue this for any length of time, not only will it make you happier (as you realize there are good things every day), but you will notice that "things" rarely end up on your list, with it being far more likely that experiences vastly outnumber things.
Sloth

Sloth, or laziness is hard to banish but it is easy to remove the sting. Sloth can easily be countered by learning two new habits: first, find a place for everything to, as I usually put it, "live", and second, take care of every task you can as soon as you become aware of it.

Having a place where everything "lives" means having a place where that specific thing, like your keys, or that type of thing, like bills, go any time you're not actively using them. This virtually eliminates lost keys, misplaced (and therefore late) bills, etc. It keeps where you live and where you work relatively neat and tidy, and makes it easy for you to find what you're looking for quickly when needed.

The other half of this, completing tasks as soon as you become aware of them, does away with the laziness part of sloth. I, personally, am a procrastinator by nature. I have generally removed the detrimental effects of this on my life by not allowing myself to put off tasks at all. That means not even for a few minutes, and especially not until the next day. If I put it off a little bit, then it's easy to keep putting it off. This is also true for getting up out of bed in the morning, from my experience… if you get up immediately when you wake up, you are alert immediately, and have no problem functioning. If you delay, hitting the snooze button, it makes it harder to get up, even if you purposely allow yourself thirty minutes for this "waking up" time.
Wrath

Wrath, generally referred to as rage today, is essentially very nearly mindless anger. It is anger that is so overwhelming that it outweighs your common sense, causing you to overreact. It usually is caused by suppressed mental or emotional pain (which can be any negative emotion or hurt). The solution is to deal with these suppressed issues, and once you have dealt with them, deal with any new issues that come up as soon as they come up (see the procrastination part under sloth, above). If you don't have any suppressed issues, you will find very little anger at all, let alone so hot as to deserve the name wrath.
Envy

Envy… envy is the result of a mindset saying that you can't have something. It is very difficult to be envious of something that you feel like you can have, if you want it and are willing to work for it. If you have a Ferrari, you don't envy someone with a Mercedes. If you have a beautiful, loving wife, you don't envy someone else that has a hot girlfriend. Defeating envy is like defeating greed, in that it requires you to change your mindset. You need to make two changes, the first being stepping back and looking at what you really want, which is often not the same as what you think you want if you don't take the time to actually think about it. The second is to realize that you can have just about anything you want, you just have to deal with the work necessary to achieve it and the consequences of acquiring it. If you shortcut the work by stealing it, for instance, there are consequences of that action.
Pride

Pride, the seventh and final sin on this list… pride is a result of thinking that people are of different values, and that those values are related. What this means is that you think that one thing or another makes someone better than another person. It could be intelligence, money, good works, or social status… it could be pretty much anything, if you think that someone with more (or less, for that matter) of whatever standard it is is a better person because of having more (or less) of it. The secret of defeating pride, then, is to realize that each person is a complete individual, and that their value is not related to anyone else. That even includes yourself… your value has no relation to anyone else's value. The only method of evaluating yourself that makes sense or is useful at all is how close you are to becoming who you choose to be… and this is true for others as well. You cannot truly evaluate the value of someone else, as their true value and even who they truly are cannot be measured by external things, not even using their attributes (like intelligence) and actions together, as you cannot know the true extent of the former, or the true reasons behind the latter.

Since you cannot compare your worth to anyone else's legitimately, there is nothing about which to have sinful pride. Pride only comes from thinking your value, at least in a certain area, is higher than that of others. If you give up that idea/belief, there is no pride (other than pride in one's progress towards one's own goals, which is not sinful, I think).

So there you have it: seven sins, and seven ways to defeat the power of those sins. There are even a few links scattered throughout to more in-depth writings on the topics. So the promise given at the beginning is now kept. If you do what has been suggested above, you will soon see the benefits/results.

Author

August 6th

Growth

How I Made My Website More Sticky

Being a web developer, I had previously run A Miracle A Day on custom software that I wrote. It had most of the commonly used features, and provided for my needs, as well as giving me a chance to learn how to write blog software. It was written in Ruby, running on a Postgresql database. It had come to my attention when viewing my website stats, however, that my site was not "sticky" enough… that is, much too large a number of people viewed the site and then moved on to the next.

I asked some others with more experience (and traffic!) than I what I needed to do. They suggested several changes to make, most of which had to do with the design (layout). Upon reviewing how much time it would take me to make those changes, versus how long it would take me to implement standardized blogging software, and the benefits of each, I decided it was time to switch over to the more standard software. I am now running Typo, an open source, Ruby based application. This actually has the best of both worlds… it's standardized software, but open source and written in a language with which I am already familiar, thus allowing me to modify it (which I have done) to fit my tastes better.

Now, on to why this affects you, the reader. Any comments written previous to the switchover date (July 24th, 2007) did not transfer over. This is unfortunate, as I consider getting feedback one of the best parts of blogging, if not actually THE best part. I like to write things that help others, but I appreciate doing so even more when I actually know that it DID help someone. I even appreciate it when someone disagrees with me, because it stimulates my mind to think more about it, and at greater depth. So comments are extremely important to me, and it bothers me that I'm losing them, but I don't know of any reasonable way to transfer them… the system I used for the comments is too incompatible with the new system.

On the positive side, however, all of the articles transferred, although the dates are the date of the transfer, not the original date of posting. The only exceptions were a few very short (as in a couple sentences) announcement posts I wrote, and didn't deem worthy of transfer. So those few articles were deliberately discarded, not lost.

So, now a request for anyone reading this who has previously viewed this site. Please leave comments in response to this post about what you think of the new design as compared to the old one, or if there's any further changes I could make that would enhance the usefulness of the site as it now exists.