PoM 269
Spiritual investment report:
Greens are down yesterday, while organic fruits and raw nut butters were up.
Cardio Exercise is through the roof, but strength and flexibility showed no movement yesterday.
Service is at an all time high and is leading the current surge.
Fun, plain damn fun, is right behind service in driving this recent spiritual peak.
Reading books is experiencing a market correction, whereas writing books is showing significant growth.
Even the typically uninteresting bond/meditation market is finding spiritual investment dollars that are laying the foundation for long term growth.
All in all, the outlook is positive for returns in steadily rising bull market.
PoM 270
When I started drinking beer, smoking cigarettes and having sex…my ears changed.
This is what I heard when people began to pray:
Oh Heavenly Father,
We just want to thank you for our many boring, tepid, insipid prayers where we say absolutely nothing honest to You that makes us look bad.
And we ask you for the opportunity to drone on, in endless meaningless talk, hiding behind platitudinous ramblings, that keep us from opening our hearts to you in any meaningful way.
We do this in in Jesus’s name, hoping that in our spiritual sloth we can hang all the responsibility on becoming moral ourselves, on His shoulders, so that we don’t have to do anything or give up anything that makes us feel uncomfortable or look weird to our friends.
Amen
PoM 271
I was asked to write about: “Three pounds of Crazy”
First, in typical FA fashion, I am 67 years old, 5 feet 9 inches tall and yesterday I weighed 131.6 pounds.
I got my first food plan from my first mother in law, a Catholic mother of 8 children.
“If I gain five pounds…I just start eating less.”
That worked really well from about 34 to 57 years old and I stayed stable at 142 pounds
Then my business required that I shoot lots of videos, nearly 1000, and I asked my sponsor about losing ten pounds, and he agreed.
When I got to 132 as a sober, stable goal weight the 5 pound margin was too loose and I found that 3 pounds worked better.
It’s important to acknowledge that I am trying to ascertain God’s will around food and not trying to manipulate numbers in some ideal business/like-paradigm where I am the master of my destiny due to my intelligence, discipline and hard work like I was in a Tony Robbins version of FA…
I am a food addict and I am powerless…really!
So, here are the physical food boundaries I have observed after three decades of nightly 10th steps: When I am above 132.8 I start looking fat.
I don’t like looking fat because when I am fat I also look old and beat up.
I make jokes about God “restoring me to vanity” to make people laugh and find God more attractive, but the truth is that being fat lowers my self-esteem, which is a very unspiritual thing.
So there’s the boundary 132.8 pounds…a line in the sand, a bottom line.
What I notice is between 129.8 and 132.8 is a good, sane, moderate place for me, over the long haul.
I can even go to 127.8 and start looking like Mick Jagger in his youth, but below that I start looking like I am in stage four radiation treatment.
Now there needs to be some flexibility…and I have found that my body can adapt rather quickly.
Yesterday I ran 10 miles. It took three hours. I loved it and I got to call many of you on the phone yesterday. That is a blessing for me to be able to serve and take care of myself at the same time.
But, I was dehydrated and I gained four pounds at dinner…but nearly half of that was water.
So, I need to be merciful yet firm with myself.
The most important thing for me to remember is that I am “bodily and mentally different from my fellows” and that, for me, I need God’s direct help, all day, every day, three hours at a time.
PoM 272
You can be content without having peace of mind, but you can’t have peace of mind without being content.
PoM 273
Four things that bring peace of mind fairly consistently:
Running long distances until my mind tuckers out.
Counting my breaths and surrendering my thoughts.
Washing my wife’s dishes and counting my breaths and surrendering my thoughts.
Listening to the notes while playing the guitar…instead of thinking.
There are many more...but these will work just fine to start.