Did I ever point out the importance of staying calm? Ah yes, I did here. Not very long ago! I’d like to point that out AGAIN. Why? Because I will share an incident that shows how important it is, and how I am still a student myself in learning and practicing all the personal development stuffs I talk about. I did not follow the rule of staying calm, had a huge screw-up, and I am going to pay for it. Seriously, I’m really going to “pay for it.”

There is this closely-related person in my life that just has a niche of getting on my nerve and making me angry every single time. I cannot comprehend him and his actions and most of the things he does disturb me greatly. I’m not sure if our energy vibrate on two completely opposing spectrum but I seem to always get “out of sync” around him. And today I let things get to me again. I got annoyed and kind of pissed off and got behind my wheel… Tragically, I caused some significant damage to my beloved Scion tC.

Basically I let his negativity get to me. I let him disturbed me and chose to give up my calmness, which is bad. I cannot blame him because he is the way he is, so the mistake is on me not being able to keep my calmness. I made a BIG boo-boo.

The lesson? Don’t get behind the wheel if you are pissed off! Okok, that IS true but what I REALLY want to do is to re-emphasize the importance of calmness and stillness in mind. It is important because it will minimize the possible mistake we can make and enable our best performance in any moment.

Alright, I made my point above and am not casting any blame for what happened. I am over the incident. It caused me turmoil right after it happened, but I am glad that I was able to let it go promptly to continue on “business” and regain calmness soon after. I understand that I made a mistake and I learn and I will be responsible for it…which means I have to pay and fix my car…

Gaaaaaaa…#@#$^%$@!#

Just kidding, what did I say again? :)

Don’t we all have the feeling that a lot of things in life is out of our control, especially when we are younger? I say yes to that. Back in my “unaware” days, that’s what I thought. Here, I ask that you also ask yourself the same question and if your answer is yes, please accept my sincere request that you take a few minutes to read what I have to say.

Here is my bold statement – the idea that “most things in life are not in our control” is bull, wrong, and misleading. I will even say, “We often give up that control ourselves.” Sound silly? Here is my reasoning.

We give up control because we are scared. We are afraid of responsibility. Because, IF we do think that we are in complete control, it implies that whatever happen to ourselves, success or failure, is of our own doing. And who wants failure. In this society, we have come to think of failure as a bad thing. When we fail, we ourselves become failure and stuck a failure, which is not true. Consequently, if we are in control, our sense of security and identify can easily undergo scruitny. It is just easier for us to justify ourselves when we claim not to be in control and not responsible. If anything bad happens to us, it is not our fault and just blame other things and people, which is why we complain and frequently hear complaints. The obvious easy way out.

There are factors and human traits like sheer laziness that keeps us from making any change and leads to us giving up control over life. We could doing it “sub-consciously” and that is exactly why we must make a conscious effort to NOT give up that control and make things happen in life. In order to do that, we must first begin to adopt the mentality – we are 100% responsible for our own reality, who we are and what happen to us are the direct results of our own thoughts and actions.

Other things that will help to take control of our own lives:

• Becoming aware
• Keeping an open mind
• Conquering fear
• Keeping a calm and still mind
• Learn how to change ourselves

I hope this is helpful!

Something happened in the morning today that I think is really amazing. Here’s the background of the story…

Last week Thursday, my manager inquired if I want to attend a conference happening next week for a day. What an opportunity to see what’s out there, so of course I said yes. I quickly faxed in the registration materials on Thursday, and we all know where this is heading… Indeed! They did not receive the registration in time, so I had to re-register. I re-did the paperwork and was waiting for this elderly female rep. to tinker on the computer but were having some “technical issues” here and there… When she finally finished, here is the conversation:

Lady: Hmmm, do you medidate?
Piggy: Uh…not really… I practice…
Lady: Practice?
Piggy: Practice to stay calm.
Lady: Are you married?
Piggy: No…
Lady: You know what, your wife is gonna be a happy wife cuz you stay so calm.
Piggy: *smile*

This is the conversation literally word for word, that I jotted down immediately when I got the chance because I think this is amazing. Why amazing? It is amazing because the other person can sense that I’m very calm (sense it enough that she wants to point it out), and that is exactly what I try to consistently do – having a calm and still mind. And this also proves, what’s inside of us will create the image and impression that others have of ourselves.

I think this is a great personal victory :)

From most of the personal bloggers’ perspectives, eating out is a waste of money. I don’t disagree with that, but here is my take on the topic of eating out.

Just like everything, it has its pluses and minuses and let me state the immediate ones.

Pluses:

• Convinenience and time saving (no preparing, no doing dishes)
• Good tasting (I am a decent cook, but there are just better things out there…)

Minuses:

• Health concern
• Usually cost more money

After stating the pluses and minuses, now we can make a decision. Personally, I value my time very much and along with laziness, I just don’t want to deal with all the chores concerning cooking. My day is so heavily packed that I simply decided that it’s better for me to eat out most of the time. I concluded that grocery shopping, preparing ingredients, cooking, and then doing dishes will just end up taking so much of my time and energy.

Another thing I have going for me is that I do not have a family yet. I believe once you have a family, cooking and dining at home will become a much more cost-saving option simply because of the economy of scale and people to split the chores with. I actually used to cook when I was living with another family member, ah, the joy of being a chef. That was a great motivation…

With more people, buying is bulk is also very feasible without meeting the result of spoiling excessive food, which I hate when happens because of how it is just such a waste of food, and we all know that there are people starving at different parts of the globe out there.

So in conclusion, one must judge their own situation to decide if eating out is more benefical option based on some of the variables stated above.

In the past two years as I learned fitness/exercise/gym as a habit, one thing that is very pertinent in life is that – If you don’t use it, you lose it.

One doesn’t have to be a kinesiology major to understand that. My experience has been that even if it has just been a week of inactivity, I notice a deline in my weight training (very obvious) or cardiovascular performance. How do I tell? The answer is the amount of soreness I can feel. Even more obvious is the immense soreness + pain whenever I start some new training. And hence, the need for us to emphasize on consistency of exercise. To avoid the benefits that we have worked so hard to archieve, it’s best to continue to do something at least, even just to maintain a moderate level of the benefits. In addition…

The idea of “If you don’t use it, you lose it” does not only apply to fitness and health. On my path of exploring and learning singing myself, I continuously discovered that many of the causes for my difficulty to produce more beautiful tone are muscular apathy of head/facial area muscles. It is over time when I consciously practice these muscles that I am able to improve.

Actually, not only is this the problem for people trying to learn how to sing, but this is the problem for people between ethnic group learning a foreign tongue. Certain languages only require us to use certain facial muscles. It is one of the many reasons that when we try to learn a new language that we have difficulty with announciation. What we need to do is to practice using all the muscles on our face :)

Well, another thing is that us humans have a tendency to be lazy and use less, or just enough, muscle to perform a certain task. That is exactly why we need to re-learn deep breathing for our health, and also exercise our mind to maintain our mental sharpness, and of course, exercise our body to make sure we don’t lose those muscle.

In fact, I would go as far to say that everything in our body is governed by this concept of “If you don’t use it, you lose it”. Therefore, everyday we need to consciously use every part of our body and push it to improve, expand, and realize our potentials!