Comments on: Hitting the jackpot doesn't mean instantly becoming happy.

By: Alan

Alan — Tue, 03 May 2011 11:58:05 +0000

Hi Erica
4 years on and I’ve just found your site!
I found your post emotionally draining, because it graphically expressed the feelings and inner thoughts I’m living with daily.
Without boring you with detail, suffice to say that my family is in deep crisis, and the victims are my 3 little girls, 6,9 and 11.
From dreams of giving them the life I never had, I live with daily guilt that I’ve let them down, and can’t see a way through.
At the end of the day, we should all deal with who we are as individuals. It’s too easy to blame external factors for our own decisions and actions.
In fact, in the short term, money would resolve our immediate crisis, but putting that aside, we have to move forward. We we move on, one thing travels with us, always, ourselves.
Learning to live with yourself, trust yourself and respect yourself, can be a long uphill journey.
Thanks for you clear article above. For today, at least, it has helped me gather some of my thoughts.
Regards
Alan

By: Sheta

Sheta — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:49:59 +0000

I’ve just recently started reading your blog – great stuff! However, I find it curious that you don’t seem to answer comments to your posts, which is something every “blog for money” blogger I’ve seen so far has insisted was crucial. I wonder if you have a policy on this or if you just don’t have time?

I really like this post, and it reiterates many things I already practice in my life. I’ve been disabled since 1991, and so I’ve had a long, long time to discover myself. I’ve had 2.5 years of schema therapy to help me understand my reactions to things and to change inappropriate or triggered responses into constructive ones. I feel, after 20 years, that I’ve finally learned enough insight into myself and my effect on other people to step forward with confidence and bring my service to people who need it. I’ve built toward this business for over a decade while I scraped by. It’s a calling.

I am very pleased, lol, to discover so much here in your advice (in other posts, as well) that I’ve already implemented. My instincts can’t be too bad!

By: Ramiel G. Rashidi

Ramiel G. Rashidi — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:32:29 +0000

Just read and responded to your email new website. Congrats on everything, and best wishes for the future.
Before starting my company, I had a 3 month phase where I had to re-evaluate life, and what I’m doing. It ended up with my sitting in a closet practicing with meditation between 2 to 7 hours a night for the next three years. I thought I had really become self-sufficient and in control of my energy before all hell broke loose when I experienced what I could only call a heart-opening which lead to 3 months of every tangled emotion, trauma, fear, anger, anxiety, depression, sadness, etc just coming one at a time like tornados. It was an emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually cleansing and detoxifying time.
You know you are on the right track. Your Meditation reminds of something similar I do… I address where I have left my energy in the past, or bottled down in unconsciousness. When you manage to bring awareness to those repressed energies, that seeing or “owning it” has an element of loving yourself in it which that alone will transmute that old stagnate energy into present aliveness and self-love. A word I learned to describe this is “recapitulating your energy”.

Anyhow, I hope you are up for getting together for lunch!

– Ramiel

By: Maria

Maria — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:53:41 +0000

First off, congrats on selling your business!! That’s quite an amazing accomplishment!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think it’s so true that no matter how rich, how thin, how attractive a person is they will always have their own struggles and problems to deal with. For a poor person, being rich seems like the ideal solution to everything but for someone who has money they deal with their own set of problems and worries about the future.

I think nobody should judge anyone without really looking at the bigger picture of it all.

BTW – I think I’m going to have to use some of those techniques for meditating and getting rid of guilt. As a wife and mother, I constantly feel guilty whenever I make even the smallest of mistakes and it’s funny how even things that made me feel guilty from years ago when I was a kid sometimes come haunting back to me now as well, so I can totally relate to that!

By: David Huberman

David Huberman — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:03:32 +0000

Release guilt? Meditate bad feelings away? Pshaw! It’s much more fun to go through life all neurotic, scared, and high strung (take it from me!). *nods solemnly* I’d rank “jealousy” up high on the scale of worthless emotions, by the way. Guilt can be therapeutic while jealousy is just ebil.

By: Christopher Mahan

Christopher Mahan — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:35:17 +0000

Damn Girl you’re coming out swinging on the writing. Couldn’t you have let us have a small, innocuous piece on tidying up post sale-of-business accounts?

In other words: Most Excellent. Keep at it.

On your advice on guilt: Indeed.

Read Mushashi’s Book of Five Rings then Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. They both ultimately deal with the issue of knowing oneself fully.