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Written – Tuesday, 25 May 2004, 5:15:42 pm.
One year ago my life was full of strife, I was overweight, unfit, excessively tired with lots of stress embedded deep into my very soul, and panic appeared to be my middle name. I drank coffee like it was life’s own nectar and smoked cigarettes like they were logs to keep the fire in my head going which in turn set aglow my bloodshot eyes. I have no idea what my blood pressure was at that time but it must have been impressive, in a negative way. I was thinking that the world had nothing left to offer me, I felt burnt out, tired and alone, even though my family lived with me
I had done what society expected of me, I worked late nights, I gave up most of my social life, listened to the hype of the new millennium, believed in the system and like many before me and many who will follow after me – I fell flat on my face, totally exhausted, broke, with no-one to turn to. My debts were piling up, my house needing many repairs, my car off the road, needed money to feed and clothe my family. My wife left and it was my 4 children and I to deal with our depressing life and survival. We were truly alone.
I had been caught up in the river of technological computer hype that was flooding the world, and down that river I went on a raft that could barely hold water, but I had faith, after all it was written, everywhere there were the signs, this was the hyperspace, the dot com era, a time to earn the fast buck, the hype was building up a gigantic dam that was rising up to flood the world with glorious money, money for everyone who was there taking the trip, nobody could lose according to the many experts that were found on all those web sites that streaked around the golden globe of wealth. But the dam busted before it was full and my raft and many others sunk into oblivion.
What could I do? I could drown my sorrows, but I had, had enough of sinking. I needed a hand out of the river of despair, not to sink into it deeper. I struggled on with not much promise of success. What about the next turn, the river of Hope?
Many, many people fall into the trap of the miracle of modern society, the entire world was caught in the American Dream. You are told that if you put in a dedicated effort, set goals, do long hours, don’t give up, make sacrifices, then the world is your oyster, the rewards would pour in and all that was left for you to do was to count the money. It didn’t happen, I made many changes to my life and other peoples lives, I helped lots of people, but the end result was the same, all that work came to nothing (for me and my family), and if I continued to struggle to conquer the juggernaut of success, I was bound to fall into an early grave.
It was time to sit back, take some desperately needed time out and think, rest, meditate and pray for answers. My writing from 2004 onwards is about how I changed my life and how I can offer you answers (hopefully) before you fall into the same trap, if you are already as I was a while ago then you will find this book to be helpful while you try to mend your precious life, and get back to reality and to those who love you most, your family and God.
One of the main things to think of is that you are very important and whether you have dependents or not, you have to look after you. This is not to say that you should “treat yourself” before your family, what I am trying to say is while you are looking after dependents you must be sure that you are being looked after as well. You can make sacrifices, but never sacrifice more than you have.
A great many people have been quoted saying that people cannot be changed once they have been born to poverty, or gone to ruin. This is a false statement, all and any person can acquire a different attitude to life and living, it takes some work and a will to do it and the ability to know what good results are to be had from this change. Its really about re-educating oneself with positive helpful information. This will take some effort on the students part (you), but the effort to change is no worse than the effort that those who live in struggle don’t already have.
By turning your efforts to a different direction you can live a better life, happier and content that you are really doing your best for yourself, your family and mankind. Many people have read that some people were born to poverty or to a bad childhood and went on to greater things, but very few of us know how to make the changes to achieve this somewhat daunting goal.
What’s in it for you? A better life, better health and a happier existence. To achieve this happier existence you will need to read good mature life material, but always try to keep in mind that this is an action book where you need to turn the essence of these words into mental and physical work, if you don’t then their will be no rewards for you. You have been warned!
If you have been through anything like what I have you would have discovered that it was a very soul destroying adventure, its very hard to have confidence in yourself when it feels like the entire world around you is against you, and in some cases it may even be your own family.
Its hard to hold your head up when you feel that you have made mistakes or made a fool of yourself even when you had the best intentions in mind but they still turn out wrong. Many of us suffered as children and were not guided into being well behaved, confident adults that we should be and because of this we spend our adulthood suffering in confusion and trying to figure out why we do the things that we do. Life to us seems to hold confusing meanings which we wrestle with ourselves privately to find the answers. These private conferences never come up with any results that will help us because we are not of the correct frame of mind when we approach them. So its a never ending circle of wandering frustration.
When we make mistakes we often take it out on ourselves or somebody else in our moments of self frustration. Its like living life with no answers, just many confusing questions that make us feel helpless and alone, silently sweltering in our own lonely misery. Even with our family around us we have nobody to turn to, because nobody wants to hear of our weaknesses and we are not that keen to explain our frustrations and weaknesses to other people anyway, least of all our family who we want to look up to us, not down on us and believe that we are failures. Living like this is not good for any soul, its a kind of personal suffering that can’t seem to release us and let us live a happy existence, it clings to us and drags us down everytime we feel that things may just start to be going good. We end up where we started.
Sometimes we say stupid things, sometimes we do stupid things, and we punish ourselves by thinking that we are stupid all the time or (to protect ourselves) we blame somebody else. Either way we don’t find any answers and this sad pathetic feeling continues to bring us down and never lets us up for some fresh air and the promise of happiness which each and everyone of us is entitled to.
When we are down in the dumps we can think of that famous statement “There is nowhere to go but up!” and that where we should be heading, upward, to a complete and happy life. And to do this we need courage, the courage to try, and the courage to keep trying and not give up.
What we need to do here is rebuild your life, we can do that by re-educating your mind. Not the way it was done at school, we will use a much more positive approach, designed to get your life back on track and back in working order. We will look at your mind and what it needs to feel refreshed, we will give it new life. We will work at blending your new attitude, your refreshed and re-educated mind and reborn soul and put them altogether to give you as a person new life so that you will once again believe in yourself.
A person who feels defeated, feels destroyed. But feeling defeated is just a feeling, and any feeling can be replaced with another, more positive feeling – this is another goal that I have for you, I have a desire to give you new life and replace all the negative, soul destroying thoughts that you may currently have and replace them with happy, loving, joyful thoughts. But most of all I want to help you see the future as something to look forward to, something you want to be part of.
I write to help those people who have gone through life with a low opinion of themselves and those having not much confidence in themselves and all that they do. Remember this is how I helped myself and I can vouch for the methods used here, if it worked for me, it can surely work for you. If you are currently being supported by the government then you will find this a helpful system to guide you back to a feeling of self worth and from there, back into the work force. Something no government system has been able to do.
We are going to look deeply into the internal circuitry of our souls to find out who we are and how we can lead a more relaxed and prosperous existence. Any suggestion of failure should not be considered in your endeavour to ‘get back on the road’ to life and recovery.
To change your internal thoughts from the negative to the positive when visual things around you are showing you that things are not so good, it can be a struggle at first. I saw my house needing repairs that I could not afford and lowing my pride to ask the government to help me feed and clothe my family were at that time negative and disheartening things to do. But now looking back on those times I see it differently, I understand that my family needed food and money and I am very grateful that the government was able (and wanted to) help us when the going got tough. This meant that I could still look after my children and still home school them, these things meant a lot to my children and I.
When things get tough and we have to struggle we must realise early in the game that some things have to be done even if we don’t want to do them, and even though your pride may hurt a bit you must forge ahead and do what needs doing. A parents pride should never be the cause of the parents children going without or suffering, our roles as parents is to provide in what ever way that we can (within reason and honesty) for our young ones who do not have the capacity to provide for themselves.
My love and concern for my children far outweighs my personal pride and I assume that this is the same for most parents. On my discovery of my true self and how to fix up the mess that we were in I discovered the real meaning of life and how we can live without all the trimmings that mankind is used to. I had to make a few sacrifices and make decisions that I thought that I would never make, but my pride in my ability grew along with my inner strength as a human being. I discovered many of the beliefs that I had left behind many years ago, and learnt that I could do without many things that I had gotten used to.
My health had suffered over the past 6 years and I was now on a long but constant journey to improve my physical state and get it back to where it was many years ago. I let my imagination go and discovered many different ways to improve my health and my families health at the same time.
My relationship with my children, which suffered over the last six years, has improved in leaps and bounds. I played with my children, exercises, talked, and sang with them. Our home was not the best in the neighbourhood but it had fun, laughter and the pure joy of us all being together as one. We worked hard with our family problems and I often asked my children for their input on family matters. We are all part of this family and we all needed to know we were all trying to look after each other.
One of the things I want to attempt here is to take you back to sometime in your past, this was a special time for you, it was when you were young and ready for life. It would probably be before you left your parents home, your old home, your old security. This was a time when you were mentally fresh and ready to forge ahead and enjoy life. Everyone goes through this in some way and we want to take away the things that have led you to the mistakes that you have in your life today. When we are young we are influenced by many things and many people, these things and people can help us make choices for our best interests or to the negative.
Take yourself back, this was a time when I will assume that you hadn’t been deeply influenced by your friends, society and the harsher side of life and that all influences after that time were not deeply inset into your mind. I am assuming that you were not involved in drugs, alcohol, cigarette smoking and the like. This is a time when you were young, healthy, and happy – innocent. You read good books, your games with your friends were harmless, you got on with your parents and you thought that they were there to help and love you. You were mentally and physically relaxed with the dealings of the world and you were confident that the world was not there to harm you, in fact it was a time when you felt the world and yourself were going to have a very happy relationship.
Your body was youthful and strong, your physical health was excellent. Your mind was young and ready to receive positive information, your love for life was fresh and new. After this period in your life many of your dreams, thoughts and hopes were dashed away in the storm of life. You were taught to cope with life the way society wanted you to.
Where your body is concerned we will guide you to getting it back into or close to the condition that it was when you were younger, but this time we want your body to be stronger, more flexible and easy to use. If you are handicapped in anyway then please do your best to do as we suggest, you would probably have exercises that have been given to you from your doctor so we suggest that you do them often to obtain the fitness that you need.
This will not be an easy task for most people and you may shed a few tears in the process, but this is the path we need to take to bring us back to your current age with a new physical and mental attitude and a good feeling about yourself and what life has to offer you.
Improve physical fitness.
Improve self esteem.
Got to bed early.
Be organised, yet free of the strictness of a timetable.
Relaxed in mind and body.
Be happy and helpful.
One way to look at it is like this.
You are at this tender age and life is good. Slowly we pick up negative influences or negative habits and each negative thing and habit is a small piece of armour, like the Knights wore in ancient times. As we grow older we add pieces of small negative armour to our bodies, piece by piece, until we are weighed down by this armour. It doesn’t protect us like the Knights armour did, it loads us down and each piece of armour feeds us negative statements or remembrances from the past. Its like this armour is like heavy lead.
Finally we walk around with this tremendous weight on our bodies, we slump when we walk, we have lost the zest for life that we should have.
The sparkle has left our eyes. Our hair has lost its shine and life. Life is now a heavy burden. Those that we are supposed to love dearly, become part of this heavy burden. The job that we once thought was exiting becomes part of this burden, you wonder “Where has life gone.” Self pity may seep into your brain, we may be jealous of other peoples happiness, we may feel defeated with the weight of that heavy armour. We may meet new people with suspicion and treat our old friends with contempt. We talk about them behind their backs, this for some sad reason makes us feel good because we feel unhappy and miserable. We grow tired and listless.
By making positive changes to our life, piece by piece, we will be removing that heavy armour and the end result is that (to some degree) we will be the person we once were, the person described above who was ready for the joys of life. We can start again, be reborn, we have learnt from our mistakes, we are older and wiser – these are advantages that we can use in our new start, our new beginning. We listen to other peoples suggestions, but we are influenced by what is “cool”, we know better now, we know now that a suggestion is just that, a suggestion, we don’t have to act on other peoples suggestions.
We have a choice this time, we are not immature, we have grown and with that increase of age we are stronger and more intelligent, we have learnt from the harsh channels that we have travelled down, – this time ‘we are’ ready for life and we will accept it in both hands and mold it to the way we truly feel it should be for us. Responsibilities don’t hold us down and make us unhappy and we are pleased to take on the new challenges that life will throw at us. Happiness can be ours, and its there for the taking. But it will take work and a continuous effort on your part to succeed.
When we are brought down in the fight for survival our courage is dampened, we feel that the fight for survival is lost. We need to build up that courage again and face the fears that we have created in our minds. Sometimes its hard to face the people we once new because we may feel ashamed because of our failures, we fear that they may laugh at us and they don’t know that this is just a space of time that we are going through until we start over again.
In this world there is a great push for people to be independent, for us to show our stuff, prove to the world that we are something – we had better be fast or we may “miss the boat”.
Rush, rush, rush, the big push is on – show your independence, be somebody. This type of talk has never appealed to me at all, I prefer, and I suppose most people ‘really’ want to have a family and a dream that includes their family. This, “go get it” kind of talk is creeping into the school structures around the world, I can only guess that the people who promote this type of lifestyle are trying to help people, but advising people to ‘live for themselves’ and show their independence is to my way of thinking setting these young people up for the fast lane and a very unhappy existence.
“Everyone has the right to be independent, everyone has the right to do as they wish, as long as they don’t step on their brothers or sisters toes!”
– James M Sandbrook.
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