Blog
By Dr. William K. Larkin on March 10, 2010
We h
ave the idea that a relationship will satisfy a lot of our "wants." So much of our desire for a relationship with another person is based on wanting to heal a "hole" of loneliness, couched in the belief that everything would be so much better if we just had someone to share it all with. Then we get someone and they don't want to share what we want to share or they don't want to share what we want them to share at the time we want to share it. They don't "come through" for us.
There are many reasons for a relationship, even with an animal. The "other" does something for us emotionally that we need to learn to be able to do for ourselves. What they "give" us is something we have not yet given ourselves.
We want to share times and moments and events in a relationship with someone with the idea that doing so will make them as "shared," more meaningful
. If they would just "show up" and share it! How many times have you wanted to share something with a mate who is snoring, so you just decided that you would enjoy it yourself, on your own? Just because you may be in a relationship doesn't mean, as you well know, that this person will "show up" to share the evening, the sunrise, the vacation, the movie, or just the evening news, when you would like them beside you.
We are always living in a fundamental relationship with ourselves, to some degree of richness and completion, or the lack of it. We treat loneliness as something that only someone on the outside of us can heal or deal with. Loneliness is only something dealt with from the inside out. Loneliness is not about finding a soulmate. It's rather about finding yourself at home for you.
Most of us assume that we are good at feeling positive emotions, good at being happy. Most are not. We need to practice being with ourselves, feeling positive emotions, and most of all we need a whole new discovery of the reality that we need to "learn" to be happy. It just doesn't happen and it never happens because someone else does it for us.
Love is a wonderful thing when someone else doesn't have to fill the cup of what we lack inside ourselves when we have not grown up e
nough to provide it for ourselves.
What about touching, embracing, love-making and just plain sexual gratification? You can't really give these to yourself. There is a great myth in the novels of love and the movies that treat all of this like a drug that fills in our deepest loneliness. Ecstasy and the bliss of love-making, just like the rest of life, happen after you have come home "to you" and found your home in the Source of you that dwells within you. We are "one" in many expressions of love, but the oneness starts by finding it in yourself.
Want "you."
By Dr. William K. Larkin on March 1, 2010
They are too important in the overall picture. To remove them would be to tear out of you a part that is intended to be an important sign post and signal.
Your character defects, your weaknesses, are the other end of the same stick which is your strengths. It's all on the same line of energy, just at separate ends. When you are heading into a DownSpiral, you will play to your character defects. When you are in an UpSpiral, you will have a greater tendency to play to your character strengths, especially if you know what they are. In fact, if you know what your character strengths are and you know that you need to stay in an UpSpiral to play 
to them, you are more than likely going to do that. It's just easier.
Focus on your character defects and getting rid of them and they will grow. Worry that God hasn't removed them and you get frustrated, irritated, and stuck.
Shine the light on their opposites, which are your character strengths, and your character strengths will grow and grow and grow infinitely. In fact, they can grow to a "genius" level if you feed them and grow them over 20 years.
There is an interesting twist here that I have noticed in researching various 12 step addiction movements. One of the steps is to be willing to have your character defects removed by God. It just says "willing,"
which is very important. It doesn't say brood over them if they aren't removed and use that as an excuse not to grow and live the fully-lived life.
Your weaknesses change very little over a lifetime because they are signposts pointing you in the direction of your strengths, which are infinitely malleable.
Think about this: your weaknesses are the opposites of the strengths you haven't claimed and moved into flexing and growing. They are also reminders when you get off track to go to your strengths rather than to play with the fire of your character defects. Your weaknesses are fire alarms. Don't remove them. See where they point you and learn to grow from them.
By Dr. William K. Larkin on February 25, 2010
Street gangs in o
ur cities concern us. Gangs form around poverty and powerlessness as a form of support, especially among young people. Negative support and hate seems better than no support at all. The idea of roving gangs creating havoc and violence and gaining power from their numbers is something we abhor. To increase their sense of size and power, oversized jeans, big thick belts, metal piercing flared nostrils, facial tattoos, T-shirts and jackets sized larger than the person exaggerate and give an impression of working very, very hard on dominating and creating respect from fear. And the death toll from young people on the streets just keep rising.
We just don't like the idea of roving gangs on our streets.
We don't like them at all.
Add to that loud, in-your-face rap music, vulgarity and pornographic lyrics and we fear what in the world can come next.
The gangs on our streets are a perfect symbol of negativity. And we hate them.
What a perfect image they are for what goes on in our own heads. The lyrics and power-driven pagan drum beats are a perfect image for our own self-talk and our negativity. When our negative thoughts gang up and when they put on "clothes" larger than they are, when their rhythmic beat is a drum in our heads, we wreak a greater violence on our own sense of self than roving gangs of kids could ever do. If anyone else beat up on us like we do, we would want them shot.
Street ga
ngs mirror, on the outside, the "gangs of negativity" on the inside of our own heads.
When negative thoughts gang up on us, what they tattoo on the brain is a greater violence than anything roving our streets. Our culture has created on the streets, the negative gangs that rove in our brains.
There are gangs of negative thoughts that "rove" the streets of our brains, sometimes with great, great freedom. Sometimes, we haven't done a thing to stop them.
There is another gang in town, another gang on the streets of our brains and it is the louder and louder sweet pulsing beat of:
Gratitude, love, peace, joy and hope.
The pulse of these emotions grows in size when they increasingly take over the streets of our brains and return freedom to one's self-image.
There is a war in the streets of our cities and there is a war in our brains. Let's heal the streets of our cities by healing the negative gangs of thought roving in our own minds.
Can you imagine a world where everyone belonged to an UpSpiraLife Group and worked together on increasing their UpSpiral Score? I really cannot imagine it on my own. My consciousness just can't wrap itself around that. But I can, with all of you holding it in your consciousness as well. When we capture our thoughts and turn them to gratitude, love, peace, joy and hope, there will be no gangs in our heads or on our streets.
By Dr. Donald B. Johnson on February 15, 2010
This is a month whe
n we celebrate, among other things, the birthdays of presidents, the Chinese Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day, and the beginning of a forty day period in the Christian calendar we call Lent. In this month of only 28 days, we get to experience it all-the greatness of well-known historical figures, the hope for a better "new year," and the glories of love, all wrapped in the shroud of one Wednesday this month which seeks to persistently remind us of our mortality.
And so in a month of conflicting energies, what is it that I want for myself? Where am I going to choose to place my focus? What am I going to choose to celebrate?
The immediate answer is easy, at least for me. I'm casting aside the "morbidity" of February. I'm in no state of denial about it; but I have a choice either to celebrate the physical end of my life by focusing on it or to exalt the power of who I am NOW, always expressed so perfectly in my unique combination of strengths. I've learned to choose the latter. It just feels better, it just raises my UpSpiral, it just makes me more and more clear about the power of the "real me." Knowing consciously that I have a perfect set of strengths, built in and ready to go, always at hand for any and all situations, is my February Valentine's gift to myself. Bringing those strengths "home to me"...applying them to me...knowing that they're mine, always and forever...making them real in my own life...that's the gift this month. It's that simple.
One of my top 5 Signature Strengths is "the capacity to love and be loved." So in this month when the culture around us focuses largely on love and relationships, I'm using this strength as a challenge for myself-in how many ways can I express love for myself? How can I love myself more? What does "loving me" look like? How does "loving me" feel? And then, how can I reflect this love I have for myself outwardly to others? To my family? To my friends? To the many communities in which I participate? Too often we think that strengths are to be used only "out there," for the good of others. Now there's certainly nothing wrong with "spreading the love." But without a sense of how I express this "capacity to love and be loved" to myself, there's really very little to give. It's just that simple.
Many of us were raised with the belief that one's goal in life was to be "well-rounded," to excel in a number of areas, to develop a broad repertoire of thought which would produce a kind of ideal personality. It has been described as being the "Renaissance" man or woman, a "jack-of-all-trades." Much has been written in positive psychology lately about this belief, because what it really expresses is the opposite of using one's strengths. The Gallup Organization has done some significant studies in this area. In the area of relationships, this "jack-of-all-trades" approach has come to be called "rounding." It's the belief, now confirmed by research, that the goal of "being all things to all people" is not only a myth but is also essentially destructive to the development and growth of healthy relationships. It promotes compromise and self-defeating behavior. And you can also "round" yourself- by closing yourself off from receiving the gifts that others bring to you, or by simply not engaging the strengths which you already have. Instead, let your unique set of strengths "shine" in every relationship, including your relationship with yourself. It's "you being you," engaging your strengths, that produces the most enduring and healthy relationships. "Rounding" means you shrink from the authentic expression of your strengths for some perceived gain in being "all things" to "all people" in "all situations." What's really happening is just the opposite. You're simply being "less than yourself." The real power in relationships is to see how your strengths complement those of others, to see the synergy in the combined power of your strengths with those of others, and to love and appreciate yourself all the more for knowing your own giftedness. 
How are you "rounding" yourself? How are you "rounding" others?
So go ahead this month and admit it. You can't do it all by yourself. You really can't be that "Renaissance" personality, going it alone. Your're not the "Lone Ranger." But with your strengths engaged, you can be true to yourself and to others, and in so doing, shine as who you really are!
By Dr. William K. Larkin on February 9, 2010
Our 
greatest addiction is to negativity. It is at the core of every addiction. Worry is a false trap that feels like solving a problem when you're really just spinning your tires in the mud. Just a few negative thoughts that take a wrong turn in your thinking can lead you down a road that is all too familiar. As much as we know about the cycle, as much as we study it, and as much insight as we gain into this negative cycle, it is most easily called a DownSpiral. Little captures its essence more than the concept "DownSpiral."
The addiction to negativity will find its attachment and its "fix." These are what we use to try to make ourselves feel better. It works a while and then leaves us "flatlined," bland, bored, hopeless, and feeling empty.
I have heard people say that they never get their hopes up because they are afraid of being disappointed. Can you imagine an adult who is afraid of b
eing disappointed? So you're disappointed, so you go on to the next thing. There is an enormous abundance of "next things." I used to tell my daughter, when she would experience the latest "lost love," that boys were buses: another one would be along in 20 minutes. I also told her that when the right bus came along, and that it surely would if she believed it would, that she would also recognize the right bus. The only caveat is that if you choose to worry and be negative, you will miss the bus.
Pretend that you
r life is a big house that has just been finished and you are given a check-list by the creator. Rather than finding out everything that is wrong and checking it, it is your job to write down everything you like about this life that you have been given. Don't miss a detail that is in place. Don't miss one single pretty thing. Don't miss your breath, don't miss life. Don't miss one good taste. Most of all don't miss the larger picture. 98% of everything you worry about doesn't happen and the problems that seem looming for you today, most likely won't be around in a year.
Throughout the day you have within you a "virtual valium" and that is simply this: you can pulse "peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace" and it will work for you. What you choose to feel is what you will live in and what you will create. Feel a little bit of peace and pulse it over and over and over again. If you can't feel it, think it, think it, think it and the great Universe will be right "back at you" with peace, some way, some how, just how you need it.
And if you are arguing that it doesn't happen that way, join one of our free UpSpiraLife groups and DO THE WORK there, and it WILL happen.
By Dr. William K. Larkin on February 1, 2010
Everyth
ing starts with knowing what you want. We have all been given messages about wanting too much, about the greed of our wanting, about how holy it is not to want. My parents used to tell me that I had a "champagne taste on a beer budget." Nothing has changed. I still do. Only the budget is better and what I want is still more expensive. In life we often get the message that we will get what we need but not necessarily what we want. Or someone may have told you, "All you do is want, want, want; you're never satisfied with what you have." That's right. While I am deeply grateful everyday for everything I have, I am never satisfied.
Many people were told to save their money for a rainy day. I was interested to observe that the rainy day always came to take what they had saved.
We have to get clear about what we are wanting because the mind and the brain are always creating whatever that wanting might be. If the wanting is on a subjective level, we are creating it. The Mind as a creative force is unimaginable. Scientists have tried to recreate models of the power of the right hemisphere of the brain and have simply given up. There is no way to quantify its power to produce, to store, to calculate, and to create.
If you want to get out of this life, if you've decided that you're tired of it and that your life is basically over, there is an illness that will cooperate and help you do that. If you're lying to yourself about the level of your happiness and you're really just treading water, and you'd simply like to escape, you're a perfect vibration for some dramatic thing, usually an accident or an illness. We powerfully create our worlds.
I want health, wealth, happiness and love and I want to live in an UpSpiral of love, peace, gratitude and joy. I want to learn and share, in an elegantly simple way, means of growth that move others to higher levels of happiness and joy. I want to add to making the planet a happier and more harmonious place. I want to see thousands and thousands and thousands of UpSpiraLife Groups all over the world and I want
to see thousands of VisioNavigator coaches, teaching all over the world, the simple message that there is a vision of passion for every life.
I want you to feel totally free to want what you want, regardless of what it is. So long as it harms no one else, want what you want. Oh yes, I also want a red Porsche and a black Toyota truck with an extended cab and I'd like the plastic liner to already be in the truck bed. AND I would really get a kick out of getting all of this in these troubled economic times... so filled with abundance!
By Dr. William K. Larkin on January 26, 2010
"Dwelling" is a word that expresses "being with" or spending time immersed in a thing. I can remember a time in my life when I spent a lot of time dwelling on negative things. I just thought that everyone did and that it was natural. If a negative thought or a negative idea came up, I just spent time dwelling on it. I would think about it, I would "think it through." I would muse for a long time thinking about this or that negative thing and I was driven by the question, "why?" I saw myself as a considerate, careful, penetrating thinker, and I was driven by successful "problem solving" and by the goal of always finding a resolution. It was as if I took on not only my issues and problems but also those of everyone else, and I had to find the mental energy devoted to all of it. I would dwell so long on some of these seemingly significant issues that my feelings would quickly follow...into a DownSpiral.
Today I don't ask "why" very often. Especially when it is something negative; I rather ask, "what is the good that can come of this?" I don't often get the answer right away, but I always get the answer just because I've asked. I am no longer resolution-driven because most things don't have a resolution right at this moment. They usually get resolved but not very often by my direction intervention. Things just happen along the way. I am also not problem-driven, b
ut I am interested in finding out how my strengths, applied in an UpSpiral of positivity, give me resilience and bounce-back.
Where your mind dwells is a choice. I choose to dwell on what is positive and good. I choose to dwell on what I really want. Sometime ago, I made a choice to "dwell" on smiling and asking every cashier and service person how they were doing and how their day was going. I started to chat when I was standing in line and I always told the clerks waiting on me to have a great day. When I was dwelling on resolution and problem-solving, I never had time for the clerks or the cashiers. I was too busy dwelling on the larger problems of the world.
The clerks who wait on me are happier, I'm 
sure. I know that I am. And when I forget to do this, I just go back and start practicing "positive dwelling."
Your mind will dwell on the negative as long as you choose to let it, or it will dwell on the positive if you take little, active steps to go there.
The decisive factor is this: make your day at least 3 times as positive as it is negative and you will flourish.
By Dr. William K. Larkin on January 18, 2010
...positive ones. But-- and this is a big "but"-- negative feelings have less impact and you feel them for a shorter period of time when you have a reservoir of positive feelings. Negative hits do just that; they "hit" in a way that kind of knocks the emotional air out of us. They are quick or they are sudden and then they grow. They are the bullies in your emotional playground. Dependent upon the degree of the threat which the negative represents, the hit varies, but negative emotion is stronger in its immediacy than is positive feeling. However, here is the good news! Positive feeling is non-linear. This means that the more your reservoir of emotion is filled with the positive, the more it will appear, especially when you need it.
If you will make positive feelings a low-grade, chronic, ambient background, a sound track of your life, it will take over the negative more quickly and the 
negative will last less and less time. Think of those times when a negative thought, feeling or reaction was something hung around all day long until you slept it off. The antidote to the toxin of negative feeling and thoughts that are unwanted, and the "hit" that seem to give us out of nowhere at time, is to practice positive feelings. Rehearse them, live in them, say them, think them, journal about them. Make a list everyday of what you're grateful for. And this is not a big load of positivity I'm asking for. I'm not asking you to be so cheery and bubbly and always so perky that someone would like to stick a cork in your mouth.
On a scale of 1-10, join me this week and feel love, peace, gratitude, joy, and hope, or any one of those feelings, at a "2" or a "3" or a "4." Just a little, just enough to keep your real smile going. This is really what you are doing. You are tipping an inner scale, something like an inner teeter-totter, and instead of going up and down, you are moving 
the fulcrum of the teeter totter so that the emotions with the most weight are positive.
There is NOTHING in your life that doing this won't affect. When you get to a positive place, you are much more capable of figuring out what the negative feelings are about and what do with them. You never solve the negatives from a negative place.
So practice and create the positive reservoir that describes where you live inside, because that reservoir, either positive or negative, creates who you are.
By Dr. William K. Larkin on January 11, 2010
...
is the opposite indication of how positive you can be. Consider how quickly you can have a little bit of a negative emotion and how fast you can get there. In an instant, someone can say one little thing, do one thing and zing, you are easily, on our scale of 1-10, at a "3" or "4" or more on negative scale. Then consider how long you think about that negative thing, how much play you give it, how much time you give it, running it over and over in your head, nursing that negative emotion, maybe even being obsessed with it. We can make a negative emotion last for a long time. Then consider how you can begin to think of other times like this one and get angrier or sadder and more upset. You can intensify any negative feeling with great ease.
To the degree that you can do that with the negative is also the capacity that you have to do it with the positive. Everything you can do
with a negative emotion - feel it instantly, give it duration over time, and intensify that negative emotion, is everything that you can do with a positive emotion. All you have to do is practice positive emotions as much as you have practiced negative emotions. It takes some time, it takes some practice, but you can stay in an UpSpiral of positive emotion to the degree that you have decided to be there and to the degree that you have decided that it is important to your life and your health, your well-being, and your life-satisfaction.
Most of the things we get negative about we can't change. In fact, most of us keep busy trying to push 
hard against "what is." What we are negative about usually just isn't our business. The things that bother us the most usually change, over time, without our doing a great deal about them. The only reality that you can change most rapidly is YOU and your response to negative events. Use every negative event as a cue to practice the Emotional Gym. Feel a little bit of love, peace, gratitude and joy every time there is something that is trying to convince you to get "your nose out of joint." Put your nose back and plug the frontal lobes of your brain into place. These are the lobes that help you make the choice about which emotions you want to live.
The emotions you live make you who you are. What is your choice today and this week?
By Dr. William K. Larkin on January 4, 2010
I also 
used to think that there could be a stretch of bad days that would come to an end and then I'd have a stretch of good ones. I thought the "blues" were just a normal part of life and that the melancholy of those days made me more sensitive and creative. The truth is that they just made me a "downer" to be around and gave me an excuse for not knowing that I could grow a positive mind and become a positive person. In short, I didn't know that I could grow my consciousness.
Then I decided to give up studying illness and getting over my negative core beliefs and started to research the relationship to consciousness, positivity and growing a positive mind, the higher states of wellness, and to increased levels of consciousness.
In 2009, I 
had maybe one or two half-bad days and they weren't even half-bad, because I knew how to get into an UpSpiral of consciousness and positivity. You can live a life with fewer down days, and eventually with none at all. That journey has emerged into the new 12 Step Group for everyone-the ANI UpSpiraLife Group. Click on the "UpSpiraLife" Tab on our website and learn more!
