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LIGHTS (12)
It is fairly easy to be in a bad mood. All too often we are slammed by misfortune, large and small. At these times we feel the darkness of the world intensely. What to do?
- Bad moods increase when we sulk in our corners convinced that no one cares. If you crave solitude, quiet time will calm and lighten your spirit. But do have a visit with a friend or two. Going it alone is a recipe for craziness, for then we really get to believing our "nobody loves me" script.
- Where would we be without our friends? "I count myself in nothing else so happy, As in a soul remembering my good friends." (Shakespeare)
- A bad mood may be triggered by a thoughtless person. Why are their words more important than those of the dear ones who really care about us?
- Many of us keep waiting for someone to make our day. I hope that will happen for us. Here's a surer bet. Think about someone you know who really needs a fresh burst of something wonderful. Make their day. It will make your day. Why not make someone's day every day?
- Do not add to your misery with unbridled anger. Most of the time, when all is said and done, aren't we glad we held our tongue? It is far harder to fix our lives after a burst of anger, than it was to unleash the beast inside us in the first place. The beast usually makes a bigger mess.
- We can all be so guarded, aloof, defensive, and hard. This is understandable. We get hurt and hardness is an automatic process that occurs to protect us. "I am a rock, I am an island, and a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries." However, let us praise softness and treasure the sweet man, the soft woman, the tender child and those who bravely warm this world with hugs and rapt attention and love. Be brave: be soft.
- All pain is valid. The purpose of crying, complaining, whining, bitterness, resentment, self-pity, grumbling and a sour spirit is to let us know that we are in pain and something needs fixed. We are not meant to be, in any way, lepers of the soul, unable to feel pain. Our nerves feel the slightest pain, as a defense, as a warning, as a sign that we are truly meant to be healthy and happy.
- Sometimes you just have to feel sorry for yourself. If possible, time how long you are going to be in the feeling sorry state. You don't want it to consume you.
- Ask yourself whether your bad mood is less than, equal to or greater than the problems you are enduring?
- Enjoying life is better than feeling sorry for yourself.
- Feeling sorry for others and doing something about it is the easiest path to happiness.
- Value the life you already have in the ways that it is fine. It is hard to feel the loveliness of the life you have built. After all, did you ever see a TV commercial that showed your home, your job, your peeps, and your smiling face all wrapped up in a red ribbon as if it was the best Valentine's Day present imaginable? Maybe all that you have is priceless compared to a Lexus?
- Gratitude is key. Perspective is everything. I remember when I was a little boy I broke my femur, which is not the highlight of a little boy's day in the summertime of baseball and hide and go seek. I remember sitting in the family car outside the hospital as my father went to check on something. When he came back he got in the car and told us that another little boy had his leg cut off that day in a farming accident. I looked up at the sky and felt nothing but unbelievable sadness for that little boy, wherever he lay, and I wanted to give him all my toys and all my future girlfriends. Later as they set my leg I cried like one who had broke his leg, but not as one who would never get it back.
- Endurance is sometimes the only path to better.
THE EMOTIONAL ELEGANCE CLUB
If you want less procrastination, clutter and confusion in your life...
If you want more wisdom and light...
If you want lots of personal help making your life a masterpiece, then The Emotional Elegance Club is for you. Check out the testimonials, the sample dispatches, and all your options in what follows.
WAITING
If you grew up in the kind of home they write books about, you learned to wait. You waited in deprivation, guilt, misery and a pain that soaks to the bone. You can get so used to this pain that you do not even notice it. It is the air your breathe. It is normal. You sit there. It's not like you wait for it to get better, you just wait. And so people who grow up in that kind of home are experts at delaying their recovery. They are too patient. They can endure for days, weeks, months, years and decades what would drive someone else crazy in an hour.
What are you sitting with? What are you sitting in? What are you enduring?
If you have repeatedly screwed up something in your life, you also learn to wait in that misery, expecting things to be no different, hardly believing that they can be different.
Sometimes elegance is there when we take that shrewd, sharp fast turn in a different direction. We do a U turn, we say "No!", we follow the bright light that says there is hope, we start over, we get sick of something and wipe our hands of some long-hauled misery.
Some things can be different. You don't have to always wait.
CLUTTER
One of the reasons we have clutter in our lives is that we are not clear about what we really want to own or do. A master is first known by his limitations, yes, but what if we do not know what we want to master or who we really want to be? It is easier, less defined and less scary to be a generalist. It takes so little effort to buy one hundred things in the next few months. It takes a lot of effort to save a village in the next few months. It is easy to read The New Yorker every week. It is harder to read a scholarly publication and work towards the expert status your are seeking. Clutter covers fear. Clutter covers our vagueness.
TESTIMONIALS FROM SOME OF LAST YEAR'S MEMBERS OF
THE EMOTIONAL ELEGANCE CLUB
"Get ready to be peeled open like an onion...but, don't worry - Bob Beverley will put you back together again whole and better than when you started! His Emotional Elegance Club is like taking the first step in the right direction for a more elegant future, the one you always had in mind, but didn't know how to make happen. Take a hard look at what you're doing backwards, and what you're doing just right. Bob is a compassionate yet honest and 'in your face' mentor when needed. If a change needs to happen, it will become obvious to you. I was fortunate to be in the Club this year and will deeply miss the daily emails and interactions. I feel ready to make changes, be more accepting of others and I definitely know myself more intimately after participating in the Club. Thank you, Bob!"
Katie Hogan
www.KevinHogan.com
Network 3000 Publishing Corp.
"Bob Beverley's EE pieces are aimed like a rifle shot into the heart of our often times detached, mindless, perfunctory existence.
Beautiful notions, soul stirring and provocative, which light a fire and help pull us up from dull mediocrity through introspection and by providing a genuine insight into the quiet gnawing tribulations of humanity. His words often help us to better cope, understand and empathize with our lives and those who are in it. ....he does it from a place of love.
On occasion, it seems the message was a bit circuitous and could be shorter and more direct (not a big price to pay); however, truth be told, I say that about almost everything."
Michael Milea, Martell Strategic Funding, New York City
"Over the last ten months I have received 244 Emotional Elegance emails that included ponderings, deep-in-the-soul questions to be answered, amazing quotes, life lessons and sage advice, and that has been on top of my weekly dosage of The Dig. Not once did I file those emails away in my Emotional Elegance folder until I contemplated the depth and sincerity of what I was reading, and often times learning. I've gone back in my filing system to re-evaluate a situation, forward a word of advice to a friend, or just to remind myself of something necessary.
I wouldn't recommend the club to anyone that thinks that by simply reading Bob's wisdom it will change them; his words invite us to action. Bob challenges us to use this newly acquired wisdom, to apply it, to conjure it, to treasure it and to take the next steps into making life more elegant, more rich, and more beautiful."
LB, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
"I have tears in my eyes!!!! I don't want this to end!!! Thank you thank you soooo much!!! I thoroughly enjoyed getting your daily messages. Your EE enhanced my life so much. For me, I was able to take your EE and explore more of myself in therapy. I was able to go deeper. Your EE's brought up a lot for me, because you had a way of expressing in words some of the feelings that I had deep inside of me, but I didn't have the language for."
Karen Proctor, Pleasantville, New York
THE EMOTIONAL ELEGANCE CLUB
Emotional elegance is my term for living with peace and love and self-delight and a gracious, Zen like moment to moment attentiveness.
Simply put, the trick towards emotional elegance is three fold.
First- we improve our lives so it will be easier for us to be happy, calm, centered and focused.
Second- we do everything we can to prevent past hurts and fresh hurts from embittering us.
Third- we are cautious not to let any elegant part of our lives make us arrogant and unconscious of others.
Ask yourself:
- Do you want to be more emotionally skillful with yourself and others?
- Do you want to be happier and more confident and more courageous?
- Do you want to handle criticism better?
- Do you want less anxiety?
- Do you want to learn a thousand moves that will put you in a far better place in the depths of your soul?
- Do you want "real" help, not slogans and clichés that implicitly blame you, while the teacher presents his or her perfect life and rubs it in your face?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then here is one more.
How would you like to achieve these goals with the help of a highly sought-after psychotherapist with 30 years in the trenches, and who has himself worked through these same issues?
Here is what one person said about my approach:
"When a therapist admits he's as broken as anybody, you should seek him out. Why? Because you will get empathy without judgment. And that is a powerful recipe for healing." —Mike Morgan, world-renowned sales copy writer
It would be nice to think that you are just a machine with a simple On/Off switch and all you need is a firm "Just Do It." But you are a complex soul with unimaginable depths, contradictory passions, foggy dispositions and some notable elements of fear, guilt, shame and despair. And so, like me, like us all, you need lots of support, guidance, affirmation, applause and the occasional boot in the hello! You need to see the light despite the darkness.
Well, now you have the opportunity for lots of light to come your way.
I invite you to join me in "THE EMOTIONAL ELEGANCE CLUB" —a club for searching souls who want to make their life resonate with quality, emotional ease, self-confidence, love, wisdom and peace.
Listen to something very important, very real...
It is easy for you to feel empty, insignificant, lonely, and overwhelmed in our "Bowling Alone" culture. It is easy for you to drift with a busyness that covers over quiet despair and fear. It is easy for any of us to die with our music still inside us—even though our life might look fine on the outside. It is easy to be stuck, blind to possibility, and unaware of better options. It is easy to be lost.
The Emotional Elegance Club is like a boxing club to fight these enemies. It will be a space filled with lots of light, personal touch, clear direction and the making of meaning—to help you get back on track and stay on track. It is a creative playground that will help you fill in the gap between where your life is now and where you dearly want it to be. (Every human being has what psychotherapists call their "ego ideal" which is the ideal picture of how we want our life to be. The closer you live to your ego ideal, the happier you will be.)
Here is how we will fill in the gap...
The first step is knowing where we are. You will receive a simple evaluation form to fill out, where you can quickly have an eagle's eye view of where your life is lacking and where it is shining. When you send the elegance-evaluation form back to me, I will read every word and send you a personal reply with suggestions and resources to smooth your path to a better life. (And, by the way, this is all totally confidential—just between you and me.)
The next step is naming your specific, targeted goals and dreams—such as "I would like to be less defensive when criticism is sent my way." Every week we will correspond via email about your progress and every week I will respond. (There is nothing like weekly support to get us heading powerfully in the right direction. We are very shaped by what we do every day and every week.)
You may also elect to take a Myers-Briggs test as well as a FIND YOUR STRENGTH test that is based on research with thousands of individuals. Each test measures only positive things about you, so there is nothing to be afraid of—and, by the way, it took me years to realize that playing to your strengths is one of the indispensable shortcuts to success. And, sometimes, we do not even know our strengths!
You will be receiving The Dig every week, as usual...but I will also send you a new dispatch about elegance which will come to you almost every day with a stream of thoughts, quotes and ideas that come from my thirty plus years of psychotherapy work. Maybe it's my age, but I feel much more hungry to pass on to you in a steady flow all the teaching I have received from the masterful people and rich experiences that have shaped my life. This will flow to you like a river.
I am going to send you more material on spirituality and religion that I have in THE DIG. I do not believe easily, yet I find much in the Jewish/Christian tradition and other sacred spaces that can help us live better. Our culture is not very literate when it comes to our religious heritage, and I want to alert you to the diamonds of insight and wisdom that you might be missing.
If you feel the yearning and need for more assistance, you may opt to receive one book hand-selected for you every month that will offer gems of insight for your elegant journey. That will be ten books in total coming your way.
If you want even more time with me, more personal touch, and the most light from me, then you can also choose to have a monthly one hour one on one phone call with me to help you attain your goals. The session can take place in person, if you can travel to my area. This would be ten one hour sessions in all.
Obviously, this Club is not for tire-kickers, complainers, and people looking for quick fixes. This involves commitment, time, energy and a do-what-it takes mentality. This is your emotional life at stake!
The Club will run from March through December, which will give you enough time to improve your life in a profound way, without undue pressure or panic.
You can join the Club at different levels, depending on the amount of light and assistance you want to receive.
THE BRONZE LEVEL
This is the entry level to the Club where you will choose to receive my teachings about emotional elegance which will be delivered to you almost every day for ten months—and it will be flowing with deep waters of psychotherapy, spirituality, and wisdom from all the streams that I have found or come my way. The entrance fee is $397.00, or $50.00 per month for ten months if you pay over time.
THE GOLD LEVEL
At the Gold level you will receive the Elegance Review form, the weekly progress update via email, the Meyers Briggs test, the Find Your Strength Test and my teachings about emotional elegance. The entry fee for Gold Level is $597.00 or $70.00 per month, for ten months, if you pay over time.
THE PLATINUM LEVEL
If you feel the yearning and need for more assistance, then you can join at the Platinum level. In addition to all the benefits of the Gold level, you will also receive:
one book hand-selected for you every month that will offer gems of insight for your
elegant journey. That will be ten books in total coming your way.
The entry fee for Platinum level is $797.00 or $90.00 per month, for ten months, if you pay over time.
THE DIAMOND LEVEL
If you want even more time with me, and more support, then you can sign up today for the Diamond level. In addition to the benefits of the Gold and Platinum level, you will also receive:
—A monthly one hour one on one phone call with me to help you attain your goals. The session can take place in person, if you can travel to my area.
This would be ten one hour sessions in all.
The entry fee for Diamond level is $3097.00 or $320.00 per month, for ten months, if you pay over time.
For now, let"s review all the support you can receive:
ELEGANCE REVIEW FORM
WEEKLY PROGRESS UPDATE VIA EMAIL
MEYERS BRIGGS TEST
FINDING YOUR STRENGTH TEST
THE EMOTIONAL ELEGANCE DISPATCHES—an almost daily flow of light from me to you
10 BOOKS HAND-SELECTED FOR YOU
10 ONE ON ONE SESSIONS
As I said above, it's a club filled with lots of light, personal touch, clear direction and the making of meaning—to help you get back on track and stay on track.
You may wonder why I am offering this opportunity to you, when I have more than enough psychotherapy business to fill my life with value and meaning. I will candidly tell you, asking only that you respect my honesty, sincerity and frankness.
****I want to help make the world a kinder, more loving space. I can help people be more emotionally savvy. We can do better than we are doing!
****I am still sick of all the self-help talk that blames victims and ignores how hard it is to live well. We all need lots of support and I can offer that support without implying that I am superior to you and have my act totally together.
****Despite the fact that I am very tolerant about religious and spiritual matters, I know that "sick" religion can harm people and delusional spirituality can waste lives. So, I am going to speak up on these matters, more than I ever have before.
****I have spent well over half a million dollars in therapy, supervision, coaching, books, magazines, and courses in order to live a more elegant life. Each month I spend a lot of money to keep myself sharp, energetic, well fed in the brain and well supported in my soul, in order that I "do no harm" and offer "real" and deep help to people. I value wisdom almost above anything else, and want to pass more of it on to you.
****I have a lot to say and I do not want to die with the music still in me. As the testimonials below indicate, people find me to be very insightful about the human condition, so I consider it my duty and privilege to spread my light.
****Very frankly, I spend too much time reading marketing material, as this happens to be my favorite addiction. So with the ongoing creation of The Emotional Elegance Club, I am forcing my hand to make my life more of how I want it to be. Less marketing stuff, more writing, more giving, and more reading of literature, psychotherapy, philosophy, and spirituality and religion. More light for me and you, with light from the marketing world thrown in too!
I can't wait for you to join The Club. Register Today.
If you have any questions, write to me at Bob@FindWisdomNow.com or call me at 845-417-5486.
To your elegant success,
Bob Beverley
NEXT WEEKI write about "LIGHTS" (13).
Chat then;
Bob Beverley
P.S. Sharing wisdom is like offering someone a glass of fine wine. I'd be honored if you pass THE DIG along to your friends.
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