Kevin it’s good to see your latest post. As always I welcome the opportunity to sharing my thoughts and welcome your opinion of them. Gosh where do I start?…from the beginning, DUH 🙂

For me, the practices I use to change my mental models start with a basic philosophy about how I approach life, and I may have told you this before so I apologize if it seems redundant…that is, the ONLY reason I wake up each and every day is because I have been given another chance to do things right and to do the right things. Ans as I look at what I call my How Did I Do Report card at the end of the day, a review of how I engaged life, I promise it is not a 4.0 GPA. When I recognize where I fell short I use that as sort of a Euclidean vector to get me from where I am, point A, to point B, with point A being where I need to recognize the need for change, and point B being a destination that makes me abetter person. Confused yet ? 🙂 It is doing what I call making a correction in direction, tantamount what a captain does to ensure his ship gets safely to the desired destination. I think about how I interact with life every day, literally. I do this because quite some time ago I realized that many undesirable expressions of my behaviors and thoughts developed day one of my life by being exposed to the only universe that I knew-my parents. As a newborn my mind, being primitive, was open to how and why things are. It is because the only known universe to me was my parents and what they say and did was the truth. As I got older, a part of my mind then became sort of a modern memory area of my brain. To me it is this part of the brain that contains my memories, my experiences. As I grew older, of course I questioned things. How dare me! I questioned why I behaved the way I did, why I said the things I said, etc. It all came back to the source of what I was exposed to from day 1, my parents. Fast forward to 15-20 years ago. I did not like all that I said or did in days gone by so I felt a need for a correction in direction. I asked, where did all this crap come from? My parents. AHA! I could have said, oh well this is just the way I am but that is entirely unacceptable to me. But it was not enough for me to know that. There was something more to it. Again it came down to my psyche and as soon as I realized that what I was saying, doing, etc, was a useless game called blame. I passed off many things by blaming others, i.e. parents. But soon I realized that only goes so far. To say “I did this because of…” or I said that “because of”…might have some validity to a certain point. Still, it is blame.  As the saying goes, “first time a victim second time a volunteer.” After dwelling on that, I then realized there is in fact a difference between blame and cause and effect, not that the latter is the get out of jail card disguised as blame. The jury is still out on that. In the mean time I can can use cause and effect and say, “sure X was the cause and Y is the effect. For me that has its limitations as well. So what are the practices that help me to change my mental models? I dismissed what I was taught from day 1 as the truth, what I was told, what I witnessed, as merely a product of someone else’s beliefs, they were not representative of what I now believe. From there I sort of acquired, if you will, a blank canvas by which I can paint a picture that defines who I am, how I want to be, how I want to engage in life, etc. The experiences that I was exposed to for many, many years following my birth, although were evil for the most part, were very beneficial to me in that I am able to reflect on them and use them a powerful tool to affect change.

I am not sure if what I said is helpful to you but you are truly one of the extremely very few who I let inside that deep, and I allow that without hesitation, fear, or suspicion. Thank you for the chance to allow me to do that and answer your questions.

I hope that you and yours are doing quite well. Stay in touch. I think there should be aTiny Buddha retreat we can go to, to share our thoughts and learn. I think Anita can make that happen:)

Wishing you well…

Pearce