The Power of the Mind

The Power of the Mind: Can We Change who we are?

Does humankind have a bright future ahead? Our technologically-advanced age has brought a bevy of benefits, one of which is the ability to communicate with people all over the globe in real time. Take the internet, for example, it has become the most effective way of making your presence known to millions of people out there. Dreams can be realized. Wealth can be gained. Your message can be heard. All the latest news is at your fingertips. The internet is a great resource to get us out of our seats and out there, meeting people, using the information we’ve gained, perhaps to better our circumstances. Are there people out there realizing their dreams? Absolutely! But there are also many people who fall through the cracks, due to choice and circumstance among other things. We get stuck living our ordinary lives in fear of opening ourselves up to living life in a different way, where we take risks in order to achieve what we want most. And we ask ourselves, so is this really it? When the answer’s right there on all those screens we look at 24-7, we try to find more ways to fill that cavity, the space where once our dreams and imagination once resided.

Then again, some people are totally happy with their lives. They’ve got their families and careers to fill up their days. Well, it is the American/Canadian dream y’know! Life is good when you’re part of the blessed middle-class, and you know the direction you’re heading. But then why are so many people from this particular class packing auditoriums to see personal development speakers like Tony Robbins, registering for Oprah and Eckhart Tolle’s “Awakening your Life’s Purpose” on-line classes, joining consciousness-raising and wealth-generating organizations like HUB (Humanity Unites Brilliance), reading up on The Secret and The Laws of Attraction, and watching one of the most successful documentary films of all time, “What the Bleep Do We Know”? Well, maybe, just maybe, people are looking for something more than just the ordinary. We’re looking to regain our power and rediscover our true potential in the face of so much outside stimuli telling us how to live and what to believe. We want control of our lives again, and the people and the philosophies above might help us get closer to our personal truth.

Tony Robbins, the gentle giant with a big voice and powerful persona, has reached millions by selling millions of his motivational books and lectures. He was recently in Toronto presenting his “Unleash the Power Within” weekend-long life coaching session. Tickets ranged from a whopping $800 to $1200, but, as explained by Robbins himself, this was a way to ensure that people were self-motivated and committed from the start. All he had to do was give them that extra push because if he could survive the doldrums of an unfulfilling existence, which is what stirred him to get cracking, then anyone could. His best-selling book “Awaken the Giant Within”, in short, is probably the bible of motivational psychology, although there are others that come in at a close second. Tony reveals in his book how to take control of every aspect of your life including your emotions, your health, your relationships, and your finances through a solid and practical step-by-step approach.

He helps us identify our values – even in the process of identifying those values, we may cross out some pre-existing ones, and shows us how to strengthen our values through changing our limiting beliefs and taking action. He tells us to set clear and specific goals, so when we take action, action that is in harmony with our values, we know exactly what we need to do.

“Values guide our every decision and, therefore, our destiny. Those who know their values and live by them become the leaders of our society…We must remember that all decision making comes down to values clarification.”

Throughout the book, he encourages us to keep our eyes on our goals, and to stay positive, as a positive outlook increases the chances of bringing us that much closer to our goals. Not just that, but positive thinking gives us the motivation to get up everyday and keep giving our best to ourselves and to the world.

Another rising star, closer to home, who echoes Tony’s self-empowerment principles, is Danish Ahmed, also a personal development speaker and the founding Canadian member of HUB, Humanity Unites Brilliance, a wealth-generating community whose main focus is to make a positive impact on the world by creating wealth for local and international charities and non-profits. Danish has accomplished a lot. He has produced short films, written a best-selling book called “Dictionary of Distinctions”, organized positive networking events, is currently working on an inspirational feature film called “What is Possible”, and is a partner of the new wellness centre in town, Universal Light Centre, which offers courses in yoga, dance, and the healing arts.

Danish was inspired to make a move and change the course of his destiny through learning from people like Tony Robbins. Like Robbins, he too had to overcome some pretty serious obstacles in his life, being an albino, and having faced sexual abuse and poverty growing up. He did it through determination and discipline, focusing on the desire to have a great life, and to live that life everyday. Danish feels that the reason why it’s so difficult for people to change their circumstances is because “they surround themselves with the media that condition them to be mediocre”. In order to lift ourselves from our quicksand couches that swallow every piece of ourselves, always leaving the remote in plain site, we have to learn the psychology of taking action and moving in the direction of our goals by practicing it on a daily basis until it becomes second nature. It’s part of creating another pathway in the brain, a pathway that will take us down a different road, one that will bring us closer to our life’s purpose. Like Tony, Danish is not out there to convince people who won’t listen. He surrounds himself with like-minded people, people who also feel the urgency to change for the better, and start living a life with purpose and optimism.

Here are just some of Danish’s words of wisdom:

“When we learn to love ourselves for everything that we are, we learn to love others for everything that they are."

"As we generate and give love freely to others, we create the energy within us that attracts more love into our lives."

"Every moment has the possibility of endless choices. Every moment is choice."

"It's impossible to feel unfulfilled when we're helping somebody else."

"If you want to improve in something, then learn about it and have it be part of your conversations."

For more information on Danish and his life-changing projects, visit www.ordinarywords.com.

There are scores of self-development books focusing on the power of belief, ranging from the practical to the spiritual including Vancouver author, Eckhart Tolle’s best-selling Oprah-endorsed hit, “A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose”. You can read a review about it by Stephanie Zubcic in the June issue of Futureale. The book and the successful online class with Oprah and Eckhart encouraged millions of readers to let go of their limiting desires, desires based on ego, and “awaken” to their true selves by staying in the moment and reaching for their higher selves in every situation. Also, books like “The Secret” based on the hit internet documentary of the same name and “The Laws of Attraction: The Basics of the Teachings of Abraham” by Esther Hicks explain how our thoughts control reality, and that by changing the way we think, we can change our circumstances to create positive results.

One of the most ground-breaking explorations on the thoughts-reality paradigm was elucidated in the hit docu-drama film “What the Bleep Do We Know”. It started out as a low-budget independent, but then went on to win numerous independent film awards, and eventually became one of the most successful independents of all time. It was well-received at various film festivals, but it also had its critics, who labeled the film as a pseudo-scientific attempt at making sense of our world. The film claims that there is a strong correlation between thoughts and our physical environment, that we can actually shift the energy in our environment just by thinking of changing it. The film combines studies done in quantum physics with consciousness-raising spiritual practices. What we believe or think to be true is manifested in ourselves and in our environment. The makers of the film also came out with a sequel “What the Bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole”, which explored the theories presented in the first film even further.

It’s quite a powerful belief that thoughts can change reality. All of the people mentioned above are proponents of that wisdom. The overall message is that positive thinking creates positive results in your life and the lives of others. But it’s not always easy to think positive in the face of events and situations that threaten our survival. When cancer patients are told they only have six months to live, those words have significant bearing on what they think and do in the next six months. Likewise, people in war-ravaged countries face an even greater challenge where questions about their own humanity are raised everyday under the threat of violence and death. Others who have experienced severe trauma in their childhoods, including physical and sexual abuse at the hands of someone they trusted, may not find it so easy to suddenly put a smile on their faces and ‘think positive’, but some of them do find a way. Tony Robbins mentions in his book how people with Multiple Personality Disorder, recently renamed as Dissociative Identity Disorder, not only change who they are, but also what they look like as they move from one personality to another to help them deal with the abuse. If one of the personalities is afflicted with an illness, it won’t show in the other personality. Perhaps this is further proof of how powerful and complex our minds are. In Uri Gellar’s book, “Mind Medicine”, he writes about his metal-bending gift, and points out the fact that we only use a small part of our brain, and that it is possible through meditation to unlock its hidden gems to unleash the power Tony Robbins talks about. Furthermore, the Placebo effect has been around since the beginning of the 20th century. It is based on the idea that patients are told that a drug will cure them of their illness or provide temporary relief of their symptoms, when in actuality, the substance is nothing more than a sugar pill. Studies have indicated that patients taking the placebo experience an improvement in their condition or performance.

Of course, there are skeptics who say all this talk about making something happen just by thinking it is nothing more than new-age drivel. Although the naysayers do recognize the power of self-motivation, they are definitely not going to be waiting in line to welcome this way of thinking with enthusiastic applause. The medical establishment, the drug industry, and mainstream media thrive on our willingness to look for answers outside ourselves, look for quick fixes, and remain too distracted by our illusions to seek and question knowledge ourselves. What a catastrophe it would be for these industries if people began looking for answers and healing within themselves.

In short, the idea that we have healing built into our systems, that our lives can change for the better regardless of what we might have suffered or are suffering, and that there are no limits to what we can accomplish is quite a propitious one. So forget that there’s a higher power above making all the decisions for you. According to supporters of thought-controls-reality, god is within you. I guess the only way to find out is to go ahead and give it a try. You never know, you might bend more than just metal.




Written by Shazia Islam
Copyright © 2008 Shazia Islam. All Rights Reserved.