to an
Earlier Point
Even those, like me, who KNOW that failing to breathe full breaths brings nothing but bad health and bad luck and that full breathing brings success, cash and happiness -- STILL forget to breathe, at least 30 times a g.d. hour. So When you're monitoring your breathing and, more important, the gaps in your breathing, keep a number tally of how many times your breathing becomes shallow. Try to get your number as low as possible. Think of some kind of reward system and stick to it for when you improve upon yesterday's number.
Any enjoyable thing in the world can be a prize for some difficult task if you have the honest discipline to be your own rewarder. Take control of your objects of enjoyment and use them to propell those actions which you are reluctant to take up but which you are reasonably sure will increase your position in the future. Doing good deeds and extending positive energy, for example. Reward yourself -- by doing something you like in and of itself -- only after you have actually accomplished some kind effort-expending task. If you can read ten pages in 10 minutes, you get a unit of pleasure. Or, if you write that chapter, you can watch the game.
You are a piece of work that must be worked on and improved. You must also coax yourself into evolution. There will be a natural resistance to such improvement -- in fact, there is an undeniable pull to devolve in all of us that we must resist. The truth is that you are nothing but a process and you function at your best when you are positive process and your conscious mind has a say in what you are crafting yourself into. The way the conscious mind takes control is by exercising moral dominion over the goods that the other, more controlling mind covets. It is the conscious, non-sleeping mind that should be doling out those goods according to when you truly deserve them. There is always something to be done to earn this or that good, always something you'd rather not do but should (something that you might easily do for a small reward). In the successful person, the conscious mind convinces the reactive, more primitive mind to submit to the reward-matrix which the conscious mind imposes. The conscious mind convinces the primitive mind by demostrating unequivocally to the primitive side how the conscious subjugation of it (this subjugation is often called "discipline") leads to more, higher-quality pleasures for the entire organism. I call this not-easily swayed, intertia-prone, primitive reptile mind in all of us the Procrastinosaurus, for obvious reasons. If it had its way, I would do nothing but eat ice cream and smoke cigarettes all day long.
TODAY's WISDOM ARCHIVES