The Best Years of Your Life… Now!

I have a confession to make. I’ve blamed my childhood for issues I didn’t want to take responsibility for as an adult… Sound Familiar?

In my search for the cause of certain quirks, which I attributed to “just being my personality”, I was able to point (with help from the Intentional Prosperity™ System) to specific childhood experiences which I was the victim of.

Aha! It was something that happened to me at a point in my life when I was least able to protect myself from it’s effects. Hey, when you’re young, you don’t have a lot of experience and wisdom to handle those constant trial and error experiences. You get affected. I mean, that’s what childhood is about. Finding out what works and what doesn’t work. It’s a time of life when everything affects you.

The challenge, once you “discover” the source of your quirk: Do you use it as an excuse or do you fix it and move-on?

Believe it or not there’s a growing number of people who actually embrace victimization as a valid excuse for their continuing problematic life experience. As a victim they are not responsible for their actions now, as adults. Okay, I even bought into that one for a while. Call it my misplaced sympathy which bordered on enabling bad behavior. Then one day I woke up to a simple yet profound realization:

The trajectory of my life has resulted in a number of experiences which constantly tested the boundaries of what I thought I knew… what I actually believed… and what I wanted to believe. These experiences have been continuous since I was a child. As I got older I had a greater amount of experience I could rely upon as a means of sorting out the “ultimate” meaning. You would think this would give me a much greater overview and capacity to deal with the challenges of day-to-day life.

Not true.

The betrayal and victimization of a childhood incident continued to influence and flavor how I was reacting to things. I was unconsciously reinforcing my own victimization… punishing myself again and again as if I was reliving the childhood experience.

Wait a minute! I’m doing this to myself?

I was refusing to take responsibility for my own life. Because now, as an adult, I had the power to forgive myself, forgive others and dissipate the lingering emotional ghost of a (long forgotten, recently remembered) childhood incident. My refusal to view my childhood experience from my adult perspective had two unintended consequences:

1. I was chaining myself to a point in time where I was victimized by an emotional reaction based on inexperience.

2. I compounded the emotional damage by still blaming that poor kid’s experience for issues I was refusing to take responsibility for now as an adult. Which means I was blaming my inner child!

The victim mentality blames the child inside and continues to punish the child because the adult refuses to take responsibility for changing the perspective of the memory. Yes, changing the perspective. As an adult with years of experience and wisdom we can finally let our child out of emotional prison. We have the power to pardon the prison sentence.

Of course, doing so requires you to take responsibility for how you feel, think and act. You must have the courage to look back in time and see your life as a set of experiences.

It’s a detached way of looking at your life which enables you to become more connected to your true self.

-Bob Baran

A couple of years ago when I was releasing some of my CD albums, I was able to make contact with someone who had a big effect on my early music career.

I hadn’t been in contact with him for thirty years.

Through the internet, I was able to find him and send an email. When I received his response it was as if thirty years hadn’t passed. Our mutual love of music was still an important part of our lives. Even though we had taken very different life paths, it was good to make this contact.

I was able to thank him for his powerful affect on the direction I took with my musical career. He was surprised because our parting thirty years earlier was the result of the clashing of two immature twenty-two year-old egos!

I didn’t appreciate or fully understand his unwillingness at the time to play “other people’s music”. He was only interested in original music. It wasn’t too long after we parted ways, back then, that I too came to the same conclusion about music: I was going to write and produce my own.

In fact I made a career out of it.

Being able to share this with him gave me great joy. Being able to reach out to those who, you see more clearly with the passage of time, have had a positive affect on your life, is a wonderful way of honoring those who you may never be able to thank.

It helps you to put things into perspective and gives you the joy that comes with expressing gratitude to someone who may never have realized they had a positive influence on your life.

It’s good for you and good for them!

-Bob Baran

On my passion unlocks prosperity website one of the most read articles, month after month is titled “Fear of Happiness”.

The essence of the article is that people are afraid of happiness because losing it, after having it, may be more painful than never having it in the first place.

A case in point: Someone who has been through the painful breakup of a relationship. Do they remember the wonder and joy of those precious moments when love touched their hearts? What is usually remembered is the awful disbelief and pain that comes when the love between two people dies. The suffering and pain is what becomes associated with happiness. Not the feeling of happiness itself.

Because we want to avoid pain we avoid situations which can bring us pain. If you want to avoid the pain of unhappiness, avoiding situations which bring happiness is actually protecting yourself from pain and suffering. Fear of happiness is fear of the inevitable unhappiness that follows.

Does this sound insane to you?

It does to me. In my case, some pain and suffering were necessary steps taken on the journey to greater happiness. Attempting to find happiness in the wrong situations was responsible for whatever unhappiness I experienced. Yet, many people, having been scarred by the wrong situation, become convinced that they are not destined for happiness.

I think it’s a cop-out.

Everyone I know who has found happiness had to pay a price. True joy and fulfillment always comes with some bouts of unhappiness along the way. Ask any one of them and they’ll tell you it was worth it. Finding what makes you happy, for the long term, is always worth the risk of a little unhappiness in the short term.

Being unhappy means you’re on the wrong road. Just take the next turn and get on a new road. The road to happiness!

-Bob Baran

I was contact by an old friend recently.

She had confided in me a few years ago about serious apprehensions, regarding her fiance and marriage. I recall asking some pointed questions. Lke: “What are your reasons for considering marriage”? Based on the answers, I cautioned her not to jump into marriage. She was young and from the perspective of of someone 30 years her elder, many things would change in her life in the next two or three years. “Give yourself some time”, I said.

She didn’t listen.

Less than three years later she has a child and is living alone. When she contacted me she made a reference to our previous conversation: “You kind of predicted this, didn’t you?”…Sadly, I explained to her that you can often accurately predict the outcome of a situation based upon the reasoning given for the actions taken…

In other words, it was no surprise to me.

Your attitudes, opinions and beliefs create a kind of predictability to your decisions and actions. The situations you then find yourself in are the ramifications of those decisions and actions. It doesn’t require a psychic to accurately predict how something is probably going to turn out… Especially when those decisions are being made based upon the ever shifting, easily manipulated attitudes, opinions and beliefs which is the foundation of “immaturity”.

Sorry kid, your reasons for getting married had little to do with the profound commitment two people make to each other… As I recall, you didn’t understand that part of it.

Your reasoning was destined to quickly collapse with a little bit of life experience. You see, only now are you finally beginning to question yourself. What is becomming important to you now had very little to do with your decision 3 years ago. Back then you were honest with me but couldn’t bring yourself to speak with the same honesty to the man you decided to marry.

Which means you were not able to feel safe being honest with yourself.

You got caught up in the whirlwind of the adventure. (of getting married) Once the wind calmed down and the day to day stuff of life took over, you found yourself in a place you didn’t want to be. You were married but still felt alone. The connection you wanted to have with your man just wasn’t there… It never was there and you knew it before you got married…

There is a great life lesson here:

You must become honest with yourself and always acknowledge the truth you know and feel. The fear of losing something or someone has been the reason for more misery than any other factor of human existence. You have an opportunity to get in touch with your true self now. It won’t be a dramatic awakening… it will happen in steps. You need to guard and protect this new relationship, as you begin to make friends with this “person”. She has been waiting and is ready to be your best friend.

Look in the mirror and say “hello”!

-Bob Baran

Sometimes a good person can hold onto a bad feeling which takes on it’s own life. I’m talking about a “grudge”.

Having a grudge is a symptom of feeling betrayed and wronged by someone. The grudge builds over time because you are unable to address this situation with that person in a manner that brings closure. So you continue to replay the situation and every time it happens you are still powerless to change the outcome.

No matter how you think about what took place it will always turn out the way it does.

You were hurt and betrayed by someone… and a part of you wants get even. You want them to feel the same pain you feel.

Because you physically are unable to do that (which is good!), you do it in your mind. Where it festers and robs you of your energy. Pretty soon you are surprised at how this grudge begins to color many other aspects of your life, like your attitude and expectations.

Now it’s time to do something for yourself.

You must decide to break the control, the person or situation which caused the grudge, has over you. That’s right you are still under the control of what has now become just a memory. There is only one solution which will once and for all free you from the shackles of this unresolved memory.

FOGIVENESS!

Only you can use the power of forgiveness to, once and for all, break the “loop”. Replaying the memory of the unresolved situation that has now become a painful memory. It’s probably not even a memory anymore it’s just a feeling.

Forgiveness is actually your way of really getting back at the person who wronged you! How is this possible?

When you are able to think about a situation or an individual with a complete lack of emotion (dispassionately) you have taken back the control you lost to what triggered the feeling associated with the person or situation. In other words you and you alone can have the final “say so”. You have the power to make the situation finally go your way.

Forgiveness gives you the ability to say “I’m through with you…because I now feel nothing what-so-ever about you or the situation…therefore I win!”.

Forgiveness does not absolve anyone of responsibility. It only acts as means to free yourself from any further pain. I’ve written an article on forgiveness you can read here. The principle of forgiveness is covered in depth in the 24 lesson “Intentional Prosperity™ Essentials” online interactive program.

I believe forgiveness is a powerful healing process that is always in your own best interest…because it puts you back in control… and one of the reasons a grudge continues to grow over time is because the anger you feel gives you a false feeling of control… Only forgiveness really puts you in control and allows you to have the final “say so”.

So forgive and keep forgiving until you have no emotional reaction to the person or situation with which you been holding on to the grudge with.

-Bob Baran