Q: After leaving the US and traveling to all these places, why did you return to the US? TODD ANSWERS: For me, a peaceful or happy life, which could be found in a cave or a forest, meditating in solitude, is not the point of life. My purpose is to look back and feel that I built great relationships, built financial stability for my family, and lived a life filled…
Most of us won't make it into the top 1%. Statistically, that's impossible. 99% of us will not reach that level of success. But here's the key: the more we understand ourselves, the more we can create a unique experience tailored just for us. This is where true success lies. If we strive to be in the top 1% of being our authentic selves, we all have the potential to…
Children see everything as new, everything is mysterious and they're curious. Adults jump to conclusions, and we're certain, and we already know everything. So to get back to that childlike wonder, we have to focus on the cause of that, which is our comparative mindset. We compare this moment to the last. We compare this thing to the same thing we saw yesterday. But every moment is different. The light…
I think the first step on the path to enlightenment, the 10,000-step path, should be called false enlightenment. Because we have these little glimpses of awakening, and we feel like we’re enlightened, and then someone who is cruel or unkind or unthoughtful pulls us right back down to reality, makes us mad and furious. And instead of realizing we’re not so enlightened after all, we try to cut out everyone…
The more obsessed, committed, and certain we become, the further we get from peace, love, and truth. In reality, there are no sides to be taken. There is no good side and bad side. There are no good people and bad people. These are just our minds striving to create mental models of the world. They are illusions. These mental models can be helpful, like when they tell us that…
We are killing the present moment every time we relive a memory, wishing it were now. When we are stuck in the past, when we are reliving our childhoods in our minds over and over again, longing for those simple, better days, this is common when we had an idyllic childhood and maybe our lives turned out differently than we expected. Or we just long for those days that were…
We often notice that when people are faking positivity and pressuring positivity, we tend to find that this is really a desperate cry for help. Because they are unable to face reality. They want to face a fantasy. And it’s a fragile and unstable happiness. I’m going to say something a little controversial — but it’s true: toxic positivity doesn’t actually exist. What we usually mean when we say “toxic…
You’re making yourself suffer because of the expectations you placed on the world. We rarely want to look inward. We rarely want to accept that we are fully responsible for our own state of mind, our well-being, our peace, and our contentment.Everything man-made in this world was first imagined. Someone saw it in their mind, drew it out, gathered the resources, and others joined in that vision, and it became…
Nature can be our greatest teacher if we learn how to listen correctly. It can teach us patience, its beauty can inspire, and we can understand its (and ours) nurturing, loving way. We don't have to go off and meditate in a cave for 30 years to become aware of our place in the cosmos, either. Our nature, our true nature beyond all our societal programming and upbringing, can be seen…
Imagine a person standing with their arms stretched out to both sides. Someone is standing on each side of this person pulling their arms in opposite directions with all their might. This is how most of us live. We’re living in a constant battle between two opposing forces. It’s a state of constant stress — the tension from our mind almost being torn in half. On one side is what we crave,…
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