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Whether you are at a point in your life where you believe this or not it has proven true for many people. What you think affects your reality. Your experiences, your influences, and your beliefs from childhood can and DOES influence your choices and decisions as an adult . Here is just one person's story. I feel this could be valuable information for any and all that are about to have a major life change in the regards to finances / wealth 7 Ways Money Memories Can Affect Your Finances By: Christine Mathieu Posted on Feb 22, 2013 Growing up, my grandmother was a master seamstress, and I always had beautiful clothes without ever having to pay for them. My taste for fine garments didn’t change as I got older, but it was a shock when I had to begin paying for them myself. I can still hear my mother telling me, “You have champagne taste on a beer budget.” I could have taken this as a warning to not spend money that I didn’t have. Instead, it felt as if I’d been told that I was no longer deserving of the finer things in life, which sent my sense of self-worth into a downward spending spiral. The consequences: $8,000 of credit card debt—along with disappointment, anger and blame. As children, we begin to form our beliefs and attitudes about money through value-laden messages that are passed on to us by our parents, grandparents and society. In my work as a Financial Life Planning® Advisor, I call these “money memories.” What Money Memories Can Teach Us Delving into our money memories helps us to gain insight into the things that have consciously and subconsciously influenced how we think and feel about money—and how we handle finances. In order to move forward and navigate life with greater financial confidence as adults, we must look back. After all, a belief is nothing more than a thoroughly practiced thought. By asking yourself these seven questions, you’ll begin the process of self-reflection—and learn a great deal about the ways in which you handle money today. 1. What is your earliest money memory? My own is of receiving an allowance. My sisters and I completed our chores and did what was expected, yet there was a point in time when we were no longer compensated. The work continued; the payments stopped. I realized many years later that my penchant for intermittent work, and a lack of a steady paycheck, echoed this experience. I thought that my work wasn’t good enough for steady payment, so I didn’t make it a priority. What can you learn from your own earliest money memory? Is there a connection that can be made between this memory and a current behavior? 2. How was money used in your family? Was it mainly used to reward, punish, survive, impress, control, help others, have fun, buy love, reach goals or something else? I have a client who grew up having only positive experiences with money. She earned an allowance (and sometimes a trip to the ice cream store!), and her parents donated to their church and community on a regular basis. By having no financial struggles or hardships as a child, my client developed a positive, constructive view of money—and a strong foundation for wealth. 3. What was your family’s financial status? Did you consider your family to be rich or poor? Why? Once you have your answer, the next question to ask yourself: “What does being rich or poor mean to me?” This will help you to define what true wealth means to you. Does having large sums of cash make you wealthy? Or is being wealthy synonymous with being happy? 4. What were your parents’ spending and saving patterns? Growing up, my mother never spent money on herself—everyone else’s needs and wants always came before her own. Now that I look back, I realize that her self-deprivation made me feel less valuable; if she didn’t deserve treats, neither did I. So I did the opposite, becoming a compulsive shopper to prove that I was deserving. Family money baggage is a serious thing. We tend to take the beliefs about money instilled in us from our parents and carry them with us for a long time, if not always. 5. When did you start earning your own money? Did it make you feel independent, powerful or uncomfortable? And how do you feel about earning money today compared to when you first began as a kid? Most of my clients say that they felt independent and empowered. For the first time, they were free to make their own choices. It wasn’t about the money—it was about the emotion. For many of us, how much we earn determines our sense of self-value. Could it be that when we were children we were more focused on how we felt versus the cold hard cash? If you are happy with your earnings, rock on! If you aren’t, what would it take to make you feel better? 6. What career messages did you receive? Were you encouraged as a child to dream big when it came to choosing a career or were you told to play it safe? I have several clients who are artists, and many of them struggle with the limiting belief that fame and fortune come after death (see: Van Gogh and Gaugin)—that during this lifetime they are doomed to starve. How is your career or vocation valued? 7. What do you expect from money? One of my personal affirmations? “I want enough money to do what I want whenever I want!“ I want money to give me the ease of choice. From there, everything else can fall into place. If money weren’t an issue, what would you do with your life? By taking money out of the equation, you get to the heart of what you really want—and then you can figure out how to get there. Christine Mathieu is a Financial Life Planning® Advisor and the author of “From Wisdom to Wealth: Insights to Creating Your Path to Wealth.”

Ten Steps to Genuine Self-Acceptance By Marcia Sirota, MD Where do genuine self-love and self-acceptance come from? We get these things by soaking up all the affirmation our parents give us when we’re little. Also, our parents model their good self-worth to us. What happens, though, if our parents didn’t give us what we needed? Are we doomed to forever feeling inadequate or unworthy if our folks were neglectful toward us or unaccepting of themselves? The good news is that a person can develop self-love at any stage of life. Like learning a language, it’s easier to do as a child but it’s absolutely possible to do as an adult, using the following ten steps: The first step is to recognize that any neglect, abuse or lack of protection you experienced as a child had nothing to do with you and everything to do with your parents’ limited capacity for giving love. If your parents mistreated you it was not an indication of your inadequacy but rather, of their failings as parents. It is a mistake to judge yourself based on their poor parenting. Too many people walk around with the incorrect assumption that they are undeserving of love, success or happiness today because they failed to please their parents. The truth is, good parents love and accept their children regardless of their behavior or attributes. In fact, everyone deserves good things in life, regardless of whether or not they had adequate parenting. The second step is to grieve the loss of what you didn’t receive as a child, and begin to give yourself all the love, care and support you needed then and still need, today. In this way, you can start letting go of your past and being there for yourself. You’ll become your own “good parent” by making some time each day to engage in supportive and affirming self-talk. Thirdly, take a good, clear look at the choices you’ve been making; forgive yourself for your mistakes and set your intention to make better choices in the future. Self-esteem isn’t about complacency or leniency toward yourself but about compassion. An attitude of laziness or irresponsibility won’t help you develop self-esteem, but striving to be a better person will. In the fourth step, you must recognize your negative self-talk. The judgments and criticisms we receive as children are internalized and become the “inner critic” whose negative messages are so familiar that often, they’re unrecognizable. You’ll need to begin identifying all the things you say to yourself that undermine your self-confidence and self-acceptance. One such way is to ask yourself, “Would I talk to anyone else like this?” When you recognize the messages of the inner critic, you can begin to contradict them, one by one. Remember, nobody needs to be perfect, and that being good enough is good enough! The fifth step is to trust yourself that you have what it takes to live your best life and to handle each challenge as it arises. Self-trust leads to confidence, and greater self-esteem. The sixth step is to face your challenges head-on. Avoiding difficulties leads to a sense of helplessness, which develops into anxiety and shame. Dealing with your challenges leads to a sense of mastery, and pride in your accomplishments. The seventh step is standing up for yourself in your relationships and letting the important people in your life know what you really need and feel. Confrontation might be scary, but it will separate out your true friends from your false ones. Improving your good relationships and walking away from the bad ones will make you feel empowered and will heighten your sense of self-worth. Being a genuine person is a necessary eighth step in developing self-worth. If you put on a persona, no-one can know or love the real you. If you are genuine, you’ll experience esteem-building love and affirmation from the people who are close to you. Self-soothing is the ninth step: You need to be able to comfort and reassure yourself when things are difficult. If you can’t do this, you’ll end up using food, alcohol or other addictions to self-soothe. These choices will create shame, whereas constructive self-soothing will build self-confidence and self-love. Being a self-centered, thoughtless or greedy person won’t enable you to feel good about yourself. On the other hand, being kind, generous and patient with others will benefit them and enable you to feel good about yourself. Being a loving and giving person is the tenth and final step in building genuine self-acceptance. Marcia Sirota MD is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist practicing in Toronto Canada. Her areas of interest include overcoming compulsive eating and other addictions, unblocking creativity and healing PTSD. She is the founder of the Ruthless Compassion Institute, which is dedicated to promoting the philosophy of Ruthless Compassion.

How We Get Programmed The following excerpt is taken from the book Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme by Richard Brodie. It is published by Hay House (April 2009) and is available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com Chapter Eight How We Get Programmed “There are two kinds of people in this world: those that enter a room and turn the television set on, and those that enter a room and turn the television set off.” - Raymond Shaw, the protagonist in the movie: The Manchurian Candidate Here’s the chapter you’ve all been waiting for. It’s all about how to manipulate people, using memes and genetic buttons, into doing exactly what you want them to do. Heh-heh. You know what a meme is-a thought, belief, or attitude in your mind that can spread to and from other people’s minds. You know that we human beings are the medium for the evolution of memes. You understand how evolution works by natural selection-survival of the fittest. And you’ve seen how our own genetic evolution gives us buttons: tendencies to pay special attention to certain things-especially danger, food, and sex-which helped us survive and reproduce in prehistoric times. Now comes the scary, upsetting part. In this chapter, I’ll show how we get programmed by new memes and start to discuss what we can do to prevent being infected by unwanted programming. Meme Infection We get infected by new memes in three ways. I’ll introduce each of the ways now, then discuss each in more detail later. - The first way we get infected is through conditioning, or repetition. If we hear something repeated often enough, it becomes part of our programming. Advertisers and salespeople know this well. Any good book on sales will tell you that most customers don’t buy until they have been asked five to seven times. It takes that many repetitions to implant the Buy me meme in the customer. - The second way is through a mechanism known as cognitive dissonance. When things don’t make sense, our minds struggles to make them make sense. Imagine, for example, that a friend is upset with you, but you don’t know why. You have two memes that conflict-that are inconsistent: friend and upset with me. You resolve the conflict, or dissonance, by creating new memes, by rearranging your memetic programming so that things make sense again. Ah, Bill’s upset because he’s paid for lunch the last three times, you might conclude. Right or wrong, you now have a new meme about Bill and lunch that will influence your future behavior. I’ve heard it said that geniuses develop their most brilliant original thoughts through self-imposed cognitive dissonance. As you might guess, then, as a programming method it is particularly effective with intelligent people, because you actually believe that the new meme is your own idea. - The third way new memes enter our minds is by taking advantage of our genetic buttons in the manner of the Trojan horse. As we have seen, because of our nature there are certain things we tend to pay special attention to, such as warnings of danger, cries of children, and sexual attractiveness. We are susceptible to bundles of memes that push our buttons to get our attention and then sneak in some other memes along with them. Simply getting programmed by new memes isn’t the same as catching a full-blown mind virus, but viruses of the mind take advantage of one or all of these methods to make their initial inroads into our minds. At the end of this chapter, I’ll put it all together and show how these various ingredients combine to make viruses of the mind. Conditioning Conditioning-programming by repetition-is the easiest way to acquire memes that don’t push any of your buttons effectively. For instance, if you want to learn French, you listen to people speaking that language as you study the lexicon. At first it just sounds like people clearing their throats and moaning, but after many repetitions, you begin to be programmed with distinction-memes. Soon you can begin to distinguish French words and sentences where there was meaninglessness before. Remember elementary school? Learning to read and write? Memorizing the multiplication table? I have two memories from first grade. One is being incredibly bored by doing arithmetic problems over and over and over again. The other is being incredibly frustrated by the teacher’s reading of the same page of “See Spot run” over and over and over again. Frustrated or bored, it didn’t matter: conditioning by repetition works Elementary-school programming by conditioning was not limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic. We pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America every morning. Repetition. Conditioning. And there’s one thing all native-born Americans know for sure: the United States is one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Right? That patriotism didn’t spontaneously arise in each of us out of our spiritual nature: we were programmed! And it wasn’t presented to us as a reasoned, logical argument: we just said it and heard it enough times and-poof!-it became one of our beliefs, our values, our memes. Long-term prisoners can become “institutionalized”-they become so conditioned to the culture inside prison that they no longer want to live outside. They try to get back in once they’re released. There’s no reason to think that the long-term conditioning of a bad job or a bad marriage doesn’t have the same effect. Children typically get programmed with religious beliefs through conditioning by repetition. Whatever the religion, children go from zero beliefs to full-fledged faith, or as “fledged” as they get, by being told about the divinity of God or Jesus or David Koresh over and over again until it becomes real-those memes become programmed. If you listen repeatedly to religious speech, after enough repetitions you will actually begin to notice God and His works where there was just chaotic life going on before. What was formerly chance becomes a miracle. What was pain is now karma. What was human nature is now sin. And regardless of whether these religious memes are presented as Truth or as allegorical mythology, you’re conditioned just the same. In psychology, the word conditioning often refers to implanting association-memes. Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to associate the ringing bell with yummy food. When the Coca-Cola Company pays millions of dollars to show you young people in bathing suits having a good time drinking their products, they are conditioning you to associate good feelings with their brands. The repetition of that commercial creates association-memes in your mind so that when you push your shopping cart down the soft-drink aisle, you get an irrational urge to buy Coke. It’s possible to override that urge through conscious intention or the fact that other memes are stronger, but the urge makes a difference in their bottom line* or they wouldn’t be spending the money. _____________________________ *At least they think it makes a difference. They may be fooled by their own memetic programming! More on this in Chapter 9. There’s also a term for the use of repetition to create strategy-memes: operant conditioning. Viewing commercials or listening to bells ring is passive; it involves no activity or strategy. When you behave in some way and that behavior gets rewarded, that is operant conditioning. The reward creates and reinforces strategy-memes. The classic example of operant conditioning is teaching a rat to run a maze. At first, the rat just wanders around. But soon he discovers there is a yummy piece of cheese tucked away in one corner-a reward. Quickly, the rat learns to run directly to the cheese rather than just wandering. We use operant conditioning on our children constantly: grading their schoolwork, praising them when they do things we like. The repetition of these rewards conditions the children to behave in a certain way. It creates and reinforces strategy-memes that, if we are good parents and teachers, will serve them as adults in their pursuit of happiness. However, operant conditioning can be used for many other purposes besides training you to pursue happiness. Whenever you’re in a repeated situation in which a reward is available for certain behavior, you are being conditioned. Cognitive Dissonance Another programming technique is creating mental pressure and resolving it-cognitive dissonance. Why do high-pressure sales tactics exist even though people universally despise them? As with any “why” question in the world of memetics, the answer is: because the meme for it is good at spreading. Salespeople get infected with the high-pressure sales meme and go about acting on it, regardless of whether it’s the most effective means at their disposal. There’s no question, however, that it does work on some people some of the time. High-pressure sales work by making you mentally uncomfortable-by creating cognitive dissonance. You enter the situation with some strategy-memes that make you resist buying: perhaps they are something like Look before you leap or Shop around before you buy. The salesperson programs you with a meme making it attractive to buy immediately: If I don’t buy now, I’ll miss a window of opportunity or even simply If I buy now, the salesperson will like me. There are two ways to release the pressure caused by cognitive dissonance: buy in or bail out. If you bail out, it’s likely to be because you’ve resolved the dissonance by creating a meme such as The salesperson is a jerk. But some people buy, creating instead a meme like I really want to buy this. Once you create that meme, it’s yours, and a smart salesperson will reinforce it by telling you what a smart decision you’ve made and even calling a few days later and congratulating you on your purchase. Cognitive dissonance can be used to create a meme of submission and loyalty to whatever authority is causing the dissonance. Fraternity hazings, boot camp, and some religious or spiritual disciplines put people through difficult tests and may demand demonstrations of loyalty before releasing the pressure. That creates an association-meme between the demonstration of loyalty and the good feeling caused by the release of pressure. Prisoners of war have been programmed to submit and be loyal to their captors through this method. One interesting result of research in operant conditioning on people is that it works better-creates stronger memes-to give the reward only occasionally than it does to give it all the time. That could be because withholding the reward adds cognitive dissonance to the operant conditioning. So a truly manipulative meme programmer will withhold the reward most of the time even if the subject performs flawlessly, knowing this will create stronger programming. The ramifications of this research are interesting. People often say that the teachers who made the most difference in their education were the tough graders-the ones who withheld the A’s much of the time. The occasional A reinforces the Work hard meme more than the constant A because it adds cognitive dissonance. Talk shows are filled with people who stay involved in relationships they say are awful most of the time-perhaps the conditioning and dissonance of the occasional reward in a cruddy relationship reinforces the strategy-meme Stay together more than it does in a relationship that’s good most of the time! Trojan Horses The Trojan horse method of programming works by getting you to pay attention to one meme, then sneaking in a whole bundle of others along with it. If you’re an intelligent, educated person, you may be thinking, Wow! You must have to be pretty gullible to fall for that! Tell that to the Trojans. There are any number of mechanisms for doing the meme bundling. For one, a Trojan horse can take advantage of your instinctive buttons, pushing them to get your attention and then sneaking in another agenda. The simplest example of a button-pushing Trojan horse is the advertising truism “Sex sells.” Why does sex sell? Because the sex pushes your button, draws your attention, and acts as a Trojan horse for other memes bundled into the advertisement. Of course, danger, food, crisis, helping children, and the other buttons all sell, too, if not quite as well as sex. Much more on this in Chapter 9. A Trojan horse can also take advantage of the strategy-memes you’re currently programmed with having to do with learning or believing. For example, people who have the strategy-meme If I trust someone, believe what they say are susceptible to new memetic programming coming from people they trust. People who have the strategy-meme Believe things consistent with what I know; be skeptical of all else are susceptible to new memetic programming that seems consistent with what they already know. If you’re programmed to believe what X says because it is the voice of God-where X is a person, a book, or even a practice such as meditation-you’re easily programmed with any additional memes that come from X. The simplest bundling technique, one used frequently by politicians and trial lawyers, is simply saying the memes one after the other, in decreasing order of believability. The credibility of the first statements seem to carry over to the unsupported ones. For example: We all want freedom! We all want democracy to work for everyone!We all want every American to have the opportunity to pursue the American Dream! And we all want a national health-care system that makes that possible. Now it’s a bit of a stretch to conclude that federal management of health care has anything to do with freedom, democracy, or the American Dream, but juxtaposing the statements like that seems to turn off people’s natural skepticism. Bundling the statements together like that is one form of a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique known as embedding, or packaging memes to make people more susceptible to them. A related NLP technique is anchoring: taking some image, sound, or sensation and linking it to an unrelated idea. For example, a political candidate who gestures at himself when talking about a rosy future and at his opponent when preaching doom and gloom is actually anchoring good feelings to himself and bad feelings to his opponent. The repeated bundling of the gestures with the good and bad feelings creates association-memes in your mind, which will later influence the way you vote. You can use anchoring on yourself to quickly put yourself in a good or enthusiastic mood! Close your eyes and imagine a time when you were excited and motivated. Create a vivid mental picture. Now, when you are immersed in that motivated feeling, lightly scratch the pad of your index finger with your thumbnail. You’re anchoring that state of mind to that sensation. Open your eyes and come back to the present. Repeat this a few times over a period of days or weeks, and you’ll find that next time you want to motivate yourself quickly, a gentle scratch of the pad of your index finger with your thumbnail will get you in the right mood. As with many of the techniques in this chapter, embedding and anchoring are used a lot by sophisticated salespeople. The whole point of sales is to influence people’s beliefs-infect them with certain memes-for direct economic gain. It’s natural that we’d see many effective meme-spreading techniques used by salespeople; for that reason, many of the examples in this chapter have to do with selling. EVOLUTION EZINE

CONTROL THE BREATH * CONTROL THE MIND - CONTROL THE MIND * CONTROL THE BODY SECRETS OF BREATHING Primarily, we are to contain a definite amount of air, to counteract the law of gravitation which pulls us to the earth. At sea level the pressure is about 16 pounds to the square inch, and this is to be equalized by t he intake of air. That is why the lungs never empty all the air they contain. Their total capacity is said to be 250 cubic inches, but they only empty 150, so that there always remains 100 cubic inches of air within them. For this reason, if it is desired to clean and refresh the lungs, very prolonged outward breathing is the most efficacious. Nature’s way of refreshing us is to cause us to collapse limply into a chair and sigh out a long breath. In breathing we absorb the Oxygen from the air into our lungs to be used for the production of heat and energy through combustion with the substances contained in our food, and we exhale the poisons as Carbonic Acid Gas. In a normal human being there are approximately sixteen to eighteen breaths per minute, each taking in thirty cubic inches of air. Each breath consists of inhalation, exhalation, and a pause, the whole process taking up the time of four heart-beats. The correct muscular action is as follows: The lungs are contained within the basket of the ribs, the whole resembling a balloon, which inflates at the intake of breath and deflates at the exhaling. There is a muscle at the base of the lungs which is to contract them upwards at the inhalation, but in most people the muscle is inactive. In correct breathing the whole chest is uplifted at the intake of the breath, and this raises up all the internal organs from their stagnant position. At the exhalation the diaphragm muscle, earlier mentioned, contracts again upwards, dragging up still farther the organs below. Correct breathing in this manner will exercise a continuous gentle massage and stimulation of the digestive organs, thereby ensuring perfect action of the alimentary canal and eliminating the use of pills and drugs. Another important aspect of breathing is the rate at which we breathe, the ‘frequency’. The whole of life is built up by the means of different speeds of vibration, and therefore the rate of motion of anything is the most important factor about it. We cannot therefore, overestimate the significance of the speed and rhythm of our breathing. It is certain that all who wish to obtain any degree of control of their health, character, or circumstances, will first begin at the very foundation of their lives–their breathing. It is said that if the breathing is changed from the normal 16-18 to about 26 light breaths per minute it will be impossible after a short time to feel pain. That is why in the heat of battle terrible wounds can be received without feeling them at all. It is also why many great feats are accomplished under the stress of excitement. The breath quickens, the blood heats up, and this drives the ego slightly out of the body, so that sensations are little felt. Extreme indulgence in alcohol has the same effect. We can do and suffer things in ‘hot blood’ which we can never achieve in ‘cold blood’. Martial music is designed to quicken the breath and the emotions. So is the color red on flag and uniform. It is quite impossible to become excited if one breathes slowly. By slowing the breathing down to 10-12 per minute it will be found impossible to feel excited, irritable, or ‘nervy’. If the breathing is reduced to a deep slow rhythm of 10 per minute, for 5 minutes, the brain will become marvelously clear and ready for work. If the breathing can be dropped to an even three per minute all the bodily vibratory activities will become so subdued and harmonized the more delicate psychic perceptions will be discernible, giving us what we call ‘inspiration’, instinct or premonition. Breathing is always to be performed through the nose, quite silently, steadily, regularly and without strain. While breathing the mind is to be focused on the highest ideals and aspirations. Slow, deep. Gentle breathing will cure insomnia, nerves, blood-pressure, fear, brain-fog and bad temper.