God... you're a funny bastard God....

I'm sure I'll get a lot of hate mail for that title, cursed as a blasphemer and lose some fans over it, probably by the same people that swear I'll go to hell for eating meat on Fridays yet hide and protect kid touchers the world over... but whatever, it feels like a weird morning already, so we might as well pile it on.

Besides, anyone that knows me will also know that despite the fact that I don't believe in organized religion of any kind, I am in fact extrememly spiritual, so to get out of sorts over that statement is to completely misinterpret its meaning, which people do every second of every day. God IS a funny bastard, and the joke is on all of us, but today I mean that in every good way possible.

I've already mentioned in my post "A Deeply Personal Note..." (which many of you loved) that everyone of us must be able to express ourselves and feel like we matter to the world around us in order to feel well adjusted and good about who we are. And in my piece "A Real Man... A Great Man... and the Man Cave" I talked about how we all need to feel as if we are accepted for who we are right here, right now, exactly the way we are without having to do more or be more. (Though it was slanted for men, the same applies for women as well)

At the time that I wrote each of those pieces I was feeling really good, but in the days and weeks in between I found that I'd lost all of those feel good moments and fell into a deep down cycle, and this one was BAD, the worst I'd had since I was 19 years old and lost 35 pounds in a matter of three weeks. I know Ed Burns makes fun of the down cycle in his flik "She's the One", one of my favorite movies (I'm a big Ed Burns fan), but they really do exist for all of us.

According to Dr. John Gray, men and women alike go through a cycle where they go from feeling really good about themselves to feeling really bad and need new affirmations that they matter to the world around them and are accepted and great just the way they are right now every 28 days or so. (Amazingly like the menstrual cycle) So not only does the down cycle exist, but its normal for every one of us to go through it. Its just that some of us feel it more than others depending on where we are in life, how we've been taught or are equiped to deal with things, and our brain chemistry.

So what the hell does this have to do with God? Well, as I said, I was caught up in the worst downcycle I can remember in the past 15 years, which is saying a lot considering some of the things that have happened in that time. And just when I thought I couldn't take it anymore, sure enough, one after another, I was put in position after position and given example after example to show me just how great I am right here, right now, just being who I am. And I was able to see, through the eyes of people around me, how much I do matter.

As always, I use experiences in my own life to try to get you thinking of similar experiences in yours. Isn't it amazing how something always seems to happen, as if it came out of nowhere, to bring us exactly what we need exactly when we need it? And it seems to happen every single time. We've all had this happen to us in our lives, the Rolling Stones wrote a song about it.

So last night as I drove home from dinner at a friends house, I couldn't help but reflect on all the of the things over the past couple of days that showed me just how much a part of other peoples lives that I am, and how much of a difference I really do make in those lives. Last night's dinner was one more way of showing it to me. And it all came just as I thought I had nothing left in the tank. It made me smile. And I couldn't help but blurt out as I got onto the highway....

God... you're a funny bastard God....

And here's another thing that proves the point of all I had to say today... my buddy who I had that dinner with last night... this guy is great and he doesn't even know it. He can't see it for himself. And I'd bet that I can say the exact same thing about YOU reading this right now. Its up to all of us to show each other how great we are, and how great we can be. Those of us that have people who do that in our lives don't need God, or the Tao, or the Force or the Universe, whatever you want to call it, to step in as much and do it for us. But it will if we need it to. It just waits till the last minute when we need it most. Its our job to make sure we get to people before they need it that much.

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find... you get what you need.

 

And for those of you keeping score... we all need to feel like we're accepted for who we are right here, right now, and thats good enough without having to do or be more, and we need to express who that person in the right here right now is, and know that who we are and what we do matters to the people around us. But no matter who we are or where we are in life, every 28 days or so we're going to go from feeling great to feeling like crap, so it's important to surround yourself with people who accept you for who you are, allow you to express yourself, and show you how much you matter to them. Likewise, its just as important that you accept the people around you for who they are, allow them to express themselves, and show them that THEY matter to YOU..... its a running tally....

How much better would we all feel if we all did that? Life would be one giant lovefest... YEEAAAHHHH!!!!

Later People!



Join my fanpage John LaSota - Writer

Or our creative team's page The Mad Doser Presents

And if you need a healthy helping hand from a Personal Performance Consultant

Coach LaSota

It's all in how you carry yourself

An usual night of dreams that felt like reality and reality that felt like a dream led to waking to what so far has appeared to be a perfect morning, the sort that fills you with a calm, peaceful feeling, which is exactly what I needed to start me off the right way and get into what I wanted to talk about today.

One of the things that has always calmed me down, and if you know me well then you know how very important that is, is taking pictures. Normally I stay away from taking pictures of people and stick to shots of sunsets and nature, shots like this one here that I took with my point and shoot

But the shots that I always wanted to get kept eluding me because I just wasn't equipped with the proper tools, which meant that I was going to have to actually get a professional grade camera to shoot things like this

I took this shot this past Saturday while wondering around testing the new camera, and MAN did I need to do so with the way things were going. I needed to be calmed more than ever. But in my travels the random events of life seemed to open up to show me some things that maybe I needed to see.

I have no idea who these people are, but he had just proposed to her as I happened to walk by, and they asked me to take a picture for them so that they could remember it. It was nice to be a part of their special moment, even in a very small way, so I took one of my own.

For whatever reason, I've always been a guy that people have done that with. I get asked to take pictures for people all the time. There constantly seems to be someone coming to me for directions, even when I'm in a city that I've never been to before. We don't approach just anyone for this sort of thing, you know that as well as I do. Every one of us has been in a similar situation before, and you have to have a certain comfort level with the stranger you're asking just from how they appear to be.

Well, 93% of all communication is in our body language. We literally say way more to the people surrounding us by the way we're standing around and the look on our faces than with any of the garbage that flies from our mouths. That aura, that energy that emanates, speaks to everyone in proximity.

When I saw this woman in the picture above me she was working with small children, helping to make their day at the park a fun and memorable one. I happened to pass three times while snapping my photos, and with each pass I couldn't help but notice the calm and easy demeanor she displayed and the softness about her. This picture does nothing to do her justice, but even here you can see that in her face. There was a grace, an elegance about her that just melted my heart, and though I doubt very much I'll ever see her again, instantly I thought I saw someone special and it stirred a change in me.

Our chance encounters with the people that walk in and out of our lives are often not a thing to latch on to and hold, but an opportunity to change the way we look at things, what Marianne Williamson calls miracles in her great book A Return to Love.

I'm always talking about the lack of a certain something in our starlets these days, which of course filters down to all the women in our society, that ladies like Olivia De Havilland (up top) had so much of that it poured from them on the screen and moved you.

Where are the Princess Grace Kelly's of the world, the kind of woman that even 30 years after her death the very mention of her name still echoes the embodiment of the word her parents chose to call her by.... Grace.

Or Ingrid Bergman, who you really could believe great men, the Victor Lazlo's of our lifetime, would endure almost anything to get back to, to live for, to inspire them to fight for a better world, or give it all up for.

And of course my all time favorite, Audrey Hepburn. They just don't make women like this anymore.....

Except they do. A chance encounter with a random girl just being herself opened my eyes to something that I either didn't believe that could ever exist again, or perhaps that I had been looking in the wrong places, at the wrong people, for all along. And I began to think about myself, casting the same light on who I am and the way that I act that I had been burning the ladies of the world with.

I've stated in the past how John Wayne was once the embodiment of what is was to be the American man and how as a kid growing up this is what I too was supposed to be, why I often act the way that I do, rough and tumble, out there for everyone to see, A MAN BABY, YEAH! But the truth of the matter is that I'm really probably more like Ash from Army of Darkness in all the wrong ways

"Are all men from the future loud mouth braggards like yourself?"
"No, just me baby.... just me"

Dr. Wayne Dyer always says that you do not attract what you want into your life, you attract what you are, something I firmly believe. When you carry that into the people in your life, if you act like an animal, you'll attract other animals. Act like ghetto trash, you'll attract ghetto trash. Act like Ash... you get deadites

So it's really no wonder that this is the type of woman that I've been finding when I look.

But the woman at the park had me inspired to be more than what I've become, to find all the best parts of myself and have that be the face that I show to the world. In NLP we have a technique that we call modeling, and by that we mean to find someone that displays the characteristics that you want to have yourself and model the way that you behave after the way that they do it. And if you want classy, elegant women in your life, then you have to be more like a man that would be in the same circles of that sort of person. You have to be Cary Grant.

Well, I'm not nearly that good looking, nor am I suave or sophisticated. I may be too much of a Shanty Queens slob sitting on the curb, rough around the edges to hope to pull that off naturally without coming off as try hard. But that doesn't mean I have to be loud and obnoxious either, and I find that when I'm at my best, it's when I'm being the strong, quiet type that takes care of his responsibilities and doesn't worry about the rest. So I may be better off as the Ed Burns type

Well... maybe I don't have his looks either, but if you want to attract a better quality of person in your life, then you have to be a better person. And it's all in the way that you carry yourself. So rather than worrying about who's out there and how good they are, instead concentrate on who you are and how good you can be.

Then the truly beautiful ones will find you.
So who do you want to be?

Later people