THE RIPPENING EFFECT

For those that I want the best for and for those whom I love, I want you to suffer. I want you to stand up for your beliefs and face the consequences of your success.  I want you to build plans that fail over and over again. I want you to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I want you to meet the right person at the wrong time. I want you to work for the kind of dream that would be the pinnacle of your purpose and have it failed.
Yes, you heard me right, I want you to lose your job you worked hard to build, I want you to lose so much money you doubt you will ever pay your bills. I want you to realize that you had trusted friends around you and turned out to NOT be the people you thought they were. 
I want you to get passed up for a job, miss financial opportunities, and I want you to get disconnected from your presence, your philosophy on life, forget all the work you have done for yourself, and doubt your self-worth.  
I am gripping my fist because I want this for you so much. I want you to do the work for others and abandon yourself in the process. I even want you to fall on your face and allow self-doubt to creep in, leaving yourself feeling "it's all your fault" while abandoning yourself so your impostor whispers in your ear, you are worthless.  
So here we are, feeling the incomprehensible amount of loss and pressure to stop the bleeding, feeling unappreciated, not valued, and doubting your mere existence while feeling everyone else has abandoned you.  But was it that everyone abandoning you or did you just abandon yourself somewhere along the way and are you bleeding on people who never really cut you? What if we were able to change this narrative and adopt a more empowering story to tell ourselves? Why do I even want you here in the first place? Because this could be one of the most profound experiences, I can ever wish for you. 
In me, I had to seek where I began. Then began again.  Today, when I reflect back into my mental mirror and look at the man I am continuing to build. I remind myself that we are still ripening and growing.  I tell myself; " I hurt you; I abandoned you, and I didn't show up for you. I will never do that to you again.  I know the volume of pain I brought upon us to make me this calm, but I am building you, and I will always continue to build you until we die, together. As Elkhart Tolle says, "There is the "i" and there is the "me" and they need to communicate properly. 
That insecure and uncertain little boy with the former versions of me can all come out and play, be loved for his flaws, and see the castle we built for us and for the people we love. It's time we let that little boy come out and see how much we accomplished and have done. " I reach out and hold that little boy's hand and look into his eyes and say: " It's working out for us young man and we are just getting started". This is where I found my footing to grow. 
If I am going to build that man we deserve, I step back and consider " what would I put you through to make the man I want to be?" It wouldn't be easy times, or quick wins, it would be struggle and challenge to reach things just outside of my grasp. I would continue to do that as we tear and rebuild the muscle of character to create the man that I want to be. Intelligence is the rate of learning, so the quicker I can upload the right information, the more intelligent I can ultimately become. There are building blocks and bits of information I uploaded into myself, and we can only take in a small fraction of the hundreds of thousands of bits of information we receive to create our college we derive meaning from, so below are a few elements I have learned along the way to build the man I am proud of. 
  First off, we are alive.  We have our physical limitations, occurrences, situations, placements, but we are alive!  Our meaning we associate is all within our mind, an illusion that we made important. We attach meaning to what we tell ourselves about what a thing means to us, but to have our philosophy shaken to its core, broken, and stress tested will anchor the fortitude in what we really choose to believe and what we choose to experience from the focus we put towards in life. I am a believe that we don't experience life, but rather we experience what we focus on in life.  
We are all bad ass when we are fed, rested, and have a plan, but it's when we are tired, hungry, thirsty, and in that place inside our mind where we absolutely do not want to be; is where we get to truly get to test our mental agility and philosophy.  
This is where we get to experience our fortitude. 
  The illusion of loss is as profound as your mind interpretating what the experience means to you and what he actual reality of the experience means to us.  Afterall, there are two different parallel occurrences happening, the reality of what is happening, and what we are telling ourselves is happening and we are only afforded the action of what we do and not the result of what we do, 
There is a duality here that is subjective to the truth to objective reality and it colors perception, which leads me to beg the question; what if emotion was an indicator of charge rather than something we feel we should act upon? " If we feel it, it must be true"... What if we look at emotions logistically rather than a means of subject matter used to bypass intellect? 
    Always show up as the best version of yourself. Make the choice to allow the most authentic version of you, radiate from within. When you show up and it’s just not right for someone, honor that they communicated to you in the best way they knew how and let go knowing that there was nothing you could have done.  Lean in and meet them where they are at in that space in-between the place where we find the: “I can, and I cannot”. 
    Embrace what is felt, show compassion, honor your moment-to-moment peak experiences, find what was great, and absorb what you learned. Finally, take your energy back and love them enough to let them go. You got to show yourself just how wonderful you can be to someone. Be proud of yourself and continue to model the kind of love you want to receive. If someone cannot meet you there, love them enough to let them go.  They no longer get to experience you.  It’s going to feel uncomfortable and by design, it is supposed to feel uncomfortable. It’s not that someone decided to not lean in, it’s that you got to see just how great of a person you can really be to someone, so be a good person, be a good man. 
There is a very realistic expectation that you will be let down again and again. Remember, we are a flawed species that make mistakes, even down to our replicative telomeres in our DNA which can't replicate with 100 percent accuracy, so why are we going to expect others to replicate with consistency?  So, when someone lets you down again, know you have the capability to get through it.
Attachment to the outcome is also an illusion that if we get something we will be something. Attachment comes with the disbeliefs that we will be happy once we get the idea, or the story, the partner, or the thing. We will not know if we will be happy once we get the thing but what we know is that we can embody happiness in the present moment.  Besides, how can you even sustain happiness if you're constantly chasing what you are missing?
The illusion of loss is our own responsibility, and I believe that other than our stories, I do not think we ever truly own or lose anything, rather it transforms.
Everyone has a story, and you may never know the story they are writing or even be able to translate the language they choose to write their story in.
Do not judge anyone by the story or chapter you walked into.  Love them enough to let them go, so they can continue to write their most compelling story.
Love is boundless, it will never be found because it’s already within us. It’s radiant, warm, and it breathes the life of enoughness. We are love. 
Your commitment to your relationship with yourself is one of the best decisions, only you can make so why not live a fun, sexy, adventurous, creative, purposeful, and meaningful relationship with yourself?
When you fall down (and this will happen) observe yourself, once again, in that familiar sinister, dark, and doubtful place. It’s that place where the remaining trauma runs free and where the trauma lives, tearing at your core fabrication to be noticed.  Feel it, see where it came from, and see where it is going, then see it through to get over it.
The next time you fall, what will it mean this time? What relationship will you have with it? What new boundaries will you establish to protect you? Are you going to continue to be the result of your coping mechanisms and your own submission to what attracts your trauma or are you going to listen to you and let go? Are you bitter or are you getting better? Victims are punked, clowned, and used by their traumas, hero's use trauma as fuel for momentum so others may have a stepping stone to bypass trauma. Uprooted trauma can sometimes look like the apartment of an evicted tenant. The walls have holes, the floor is dirty, the bathroom wasn't cleaned, you need someone to come in and clean it. 
Look deep into the previous versions of yourself and those stories you have told yourself. The stories of suffering, victimhood, and the stories where you abandoned yourself in the pursuit of approval, validation, love, and connection. 
I do not recommend abandoning yourself to seek something that has already been within you this whole time.  I also do not recommend leaving yourself to fit someone else's narrative or even mold into someone else's frame, just to fix someone in exchange for the illusion of being indispensable enough so they will not leave you.  Their development is not your responsibility but the responsibility to your relationship to your abandonment / avoidant attachments... Your inability to open your heart, be vulnerable, risk being seen or hurt, is your relationship to avoid illusionary pain of the future masquerading as anxiety. When I understood this and let it go, I found my "Fuck Yes" energy. 
What is your relationship to pain, what is pain trying to tell you? I remind myself to stop seeking happiness externally. Even Buddhism describes that as soon as you place self-worth externally you are bound to lose it due to the duality of life. Go into the pain and sink into the feeling of pain.  It's your teacher, let it transform you from within. Embrace pain, even pulling positivity from it is fighting against it. Process though the pain, Breathing the pain upward is trauma wanting to surface.  Let it surface and release the trauma. There is no tool that will ever keep you in a state of happiness. you will go down again but by the virtue of non-attachment, you align with your soul. Pain is just a sensation.  We succumb to its means when we make it mean something to us. Reassociate pain to mean something else other than your worth, validation, or identity. Create the reference experience that you stood up for yourself and you processed trauma.  This will be a reference experience to silence your imposter.
Take your focus back onto you. give yourself compassion, unlearn the habits that reinforced the stories you told, and let go of the shame. Replace and re-write the most empowering story of that experience and let go. The things we can't control happening to us are the opportunities for us to practice letting go. Those older versions of you are not you anymore.  You are a learned you.  This is where the fierce, unyielding, and the present version of yourself will rise and rise again. Besides, don't we all want something fierce?

Your partner wants to feel your presence. sync your connection with your through open body language, sincere facial expressions, and vulnerability.  Feel her pain and joy in your heart and reflect it back.  It's not about 100% understanding every feeling and thought a woman is processing and expressing. That's not even possible half of the time.
It's about understanding her emotional state and holding her there... right there. Then she feels seen and understood... and, above all, safe. She may want you to feel that you feel her on an emotional level rather than fully understand her on a rational one. So, relax and tune into her. Your presence is enough. That's how we learn to listen in love.  

In me, even though I seek that one last deep loving connection with the last relationship I want to be in, travel the world, give preference, give the most incredible experiences, show up with vulnerability, authenticity, and create that safe container for her to be fierce and unyielding, I have also let that go.

Happiness is not the stories I want to tell myself about how the future is supposed to be but harnessing where I am at now and how special the present moment actually is.  That all being said, I have been able to realize many dreams and goals I have set out to achieve, So I still hold on to the belief that we can create even more realities for our dreams. Resistance is your compass. What is your relationship with the present moment. Do I treat this moment as an enemy or obstacle.  I do not need to get to another moment. Men, Surrender to the now and to the moment. Be a channel to be open and she will open to you.  Among her, is the Devine. The place where we all originated. A place where she wanted humanity to be in a state of being, where she wants the best for us, to be loved, and to play. We will lose our footing along the way, but we can always go back to that inner child in us. Here is the place where happiness can be found again. 

be immovable when emotions arise with others. Don’t compromise goals with a partner. Give her what she needs, help her focus on things she can control. Listen, see, hear, and understand her when she gets upset or when emotions arise. Set the tone, let her feel your loyalty, trust, and devotion. Do not be a nice guy or try to get along, create tension, and keep your boundaries intact.

Sometimes we want to save the day by offering solutions to the problem. Or by asking her multiple questions, not for her own sake, but for himself and his own anxiety of not understanding what is exactly happening.  It's more an incantation to exercise his own feelings of shortcoming and failure - based on an expectation he put on himself - then it is to support her in sinking deeper into her feelings...And then the destructive circle of feeling misunderstood, attack and defense, not feeling enough and adequate, emotional distance, and giving up on each other starts again.

 

The stories other people write are not your responsibility nor are their traumas that they project or perceive the world in. The cynics get to be right, and the optimists get to be rich.  the winner's mindset sits in between two contractions, paranoia of the present unknown and the unshakable belief of the future. The mere tension between the two makes them hard to beat today and hard to outlast tomorrow. 

There is a lonely place between the people you left behind to pursue your dreams and the people you will know when you reach your dreams.  Even the ones that routed for you in the beginning, may despise you when you achieve your goals....When that happens remember, you are standing on top of their mountains as you continue to get to the top of yours and you remind them of the goals and the person they gave up on. This is where a mindset of regret and despair can reside.  Have compassion for them. They may be looking back at the person they could have become and realized they are not that person. That makes NOW the time to change. I think my older self will appreciate this in retrospect. 

 Some people will choose to write horror stories, comedic stories, dramatic stories, adventure stories, romance stories, they get to write any story they choose.   What's amazing is that you get to choose what kind of story you want to write! Why not make it significant? Perhaps we should not speak with the stories of depression about ourselves and speak with the stories of anger amongst others. 

Men, I know we can identify with anger on all levels.  It is an emotion that meets significance when being angry because we can feel strong, we get certainty because we know of an outcome of the effect to anger, we can get community because we get to be noticed, but insecurity of being angry as a default to reacting to something only shows your one emotion you have the deepest relationship towards.  The angry insecure man at the bar will be seen, heard, and understood, but will lose his footing. You already lost the fight your about to get into, or lose the interaction you were having with someone, or lose yourself along the way to the anger loop.  I get it, you don't know of any other emotion or haven't developed a good relationship to all of your emotions, maybe you were told the other emotions were not what made you a man.  Maybe you got your needs met only by being angry because you can feel anger, you can see the reactions others give you.  There is no courage in being that angry person.  In me, it took a lot of brutality and violence to make me this calm. For the angry men out there and so few talk about anger, but the pain you are holding onto doesn't serve you and it especially doesn't serve you now. It's time to give yourself compassion, unlearn, and let go. Men, this might be your journey towards a happier and more fulfilling life.  We can find meaning in the difficult things we try, not just succeeding at them.  That is why I seek the difficult things. 

 I choose my hard.  It's hard to be broke its hard to be wealthy, it's hard to want more, it's hard to have less.  Choose your hard!  I have learned that just because something is hard, doesn't mean its valuable. Did you choose to do the thing because it's hard to get or because its valuable? What does valuable mean to you?  This is where I have found the experience of hard, and my relationship to what is hard became the embodiment to succeed at things that appear to be hard. Even when we are on our way, we might find the alchemized compulsion to be seen to be moving towards greatness, let it go, and clarity could be found. Remember, give yourself permission to let go! you don't need it from anyone else.  besides, why would I take direction from someone else that doesn't know me as well as I do?  This also goes with criticism from others when faced with adversity. Why would I take their advice.  Check in on this journey, do you have the agility to not listen to your mind when your mood is low? The old saying goes" you shouldn't go shopping for food when you're hungry"...

It is axiomatic that the basis to build us is there and how we can map it in a mental blueprint.  This hardship indeed can be re-oriented for empowerment but remember, are you doing something just because it's hard or because its valuable. Just because it's hard doesn't make it valuable.  Choose your time as a currency you spend wisely and value your depleting energy as source for agency. 

People will see your trophies but not the training grounds you bleed on.  Let them, your stoic virtues will anchor in fortitude with presence and your attraction will radiate. Richard Star once said, people are jealous of what you got but not how you got it.  I tend to agree with this. Nobody wants to become someone, but everyone wants to be someone. become a good man, make mistakes along the way, learn, and thrive!

I think self believe is overrated, generate successful experiences over and over that see the true beauty of life along the way. Out work yourself doubt. that will cancel your imposter. do this and other will follow. from time to time, I like to live as if my ancestors are living vicariously through me. I think about how proud they would be of me, how envious they would be with all the resources they didn't have, and how proud THEY, would be for all of their arduous sacrifices they had to endure. That is why I enjoy the challenges of the outdoors.  Take your reference experiences and cultivate the world you want to live in. 

I have found that embracing to healing back to homeostasis and into a growth relationship with myself as a commitment to the lifelong journey rather than a temporary action just to fix something. When I look at myself and say I am building you, it means I will always work on you and never abandon you.  Committing to this balance has opened my heart to allow genuine connections to naturally grow and leave along the way. 

You're connected divine energy with someone will allow vulnerability and compassion to radiate from them as they support and embrace your journey.  I am not going to let a rare opportunity pass me by knowing my boundaries and requirements.  The people that meet those requirements are so few and if I am seeking the last relationship I will ever be in, I choose to be vulnerable. 

I have found that the life that normal people live is the life the ultra-rich and successful are envious of and attempt to buy. Would you be wallowing in the mud as a turtle or embalmed as an item in time in the highest office? Once you’re sufficiently disappointed by your external success. People don’t really know themselves and it’s not authentically grounded in their being. Forced leisure in retirement is not fulfilling, I have tried it. I enjoy struggling towards some personally relevant goal.  This is my idea of happiness through work.  It takes time to reverse the abuse of the cultural interject of what happiness is supposed to look like, just to realize who they are sufficiently to identify something to replace that with. merely, wanting more and more items to fill a void or to feel like someone is soo..., " level 1".  "Level 2" is the tragedy is that some people actually get what they think they want only to ask themselves what wrong with them. Once someone is sufficiently disappointed in some sort of external achievement from believing they will become or be someone once they get the things, is only one less place to look for happiness.  Then the realization that happiness is found inside themselves and they just wasted all this time and effort chasing what was already int them. but unless they find out on their own, then they will think I am full of shit, which I am ok with.  Religions and philosophies speak of this...The fisherman at sea has all he wants as he can provide for his family and teach the successors how to do it. 

 

There is one more thing. Something that we don't have to build from the architects of our adversity. It's unyielding and mis understood. Its raw, wild, and untamed.  I call it our Fierce! The place within us where we roar a lion's pride into the universe with unshakable ferocity.  We can be the architects of our own adversity, but we can also reveal our fierce.  It's already within us!

In the end, When the future comes to the now, I look left and right. I see who made it and who disappeared along the way. I see the people who got the chance to join the incredible abundant journey and also got to see who has stayed on-board.

I choose to know the friends that know the volume of brutality it took to make me this still. I see the friends that know the pain it took me to become this compassionate. The kind of friends that know how dangerous we really are but choose to temper our unshaken fortitude from reaction, desire, and temptation. The few that already fought with the vigor of a 1000 on the battleground just for principle rather than an idea.

We get to look back and say That really was living wasn't it". In hindsight the fears you had at the time were not worth having but at the time you had no certainty those were salient. What you see in retrospect is how you should have felt had you known what was going to occur. The golden years never seem to happen in the present but in the hindsight. So how do you capture the now? View the present with a historian's frame. Is me 5 years later going to cringe what I am doing now? Detach from the internal fog and live with your friends.  

In the end, when it’s time to finally let go, our stoic virtues anchored in scripture will speak volumes to my tribe and to my Valkyrie.  We have already arrived and been here for really long time. All I ask is from you is to know us. I look forward to the oldest and the wisest version of myself.  I choose to believe he will be proud of my younger self.  I gave him compassion, love, set a container of virtue, abundance, and a transcendence to embody a younger stronger body with the wisdom of our short presence on this weird rock propelling through space, this transient time travel, I call presence.  

In my last moments, as my eyes become heavy and gravity becomes so dense I am no longer in function of my physical form, I would know that the people I love and got to experience the best version of me.  The version I knew how to show for at that time. They also got to hear the best of our stories, but it will be the people that connected deeper into me, that helped me write them. 

Show up for yourself as the best version of you. Be the person you are proud of. Continue to strive for greatness. The lives you will change and the abundance you receive will be as clear as a reflection on an icy clear morning mountain lake. You will also be the reflection along the way for all the people that you made happier than they would have been without you.  What you shared, the experiences you gave, the things you built, and the opportunities you connected for them are all your indicators of abundance you have given back to the universe.  I know I do; it's a legacy worth living for and a legacy worth dying for.  

My physical form dies, and my impact is reduced to the one thing that prevails over all things and the meaning to the universe, the basis of all the things I fought for, dyed a thousand deaths for, praised, poured, given, received, and lived my life for.  This is what I call love.  We come from love, and we leave with love. Love prevails over all things and love is what leave for you, fair trade.