Think Queerly

I cannot make you angry. A politician cannot make you angry. A friend, partner, or your dog cannot make you happy.

Only you can choose your feelings based on your behaviours and beliefs.

Your feelings are your own, and they are based on your unconscious patterns and beliefs.

Seeing the truth of this requires self-compassion and mindfulness.

Self-compassion allows you to feel kindness towards yourself to gently consider why you are feeling the way you are, in response or reaction to a situation in life.

Mindfulness is the practice of witnessing what is happening in the moment of your feelings and to question your patterns of behaviour before choosing how to respond.

When you clearly see and accept the truth and fragility of one’s ego for its identification with external things, like possessions, you will see this only serves to create separation from others.

The ego expresses me, my, and mine; my rightness versus your wrongness.

Compassion, on the other hand, expresses acceptance, connection, and care.

Ask yourself, “What was most helpful from today’s episode and how can I apply it in my life?” Perhaps journal about it right now, or make a note to come back to it later.

I’d love to hear how this went for you. Drop me a line at https://darrenstehle.com/contact

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Religions are constructs of the mind used to control the minds of the many.

There is a reason why the bible refers to followers as sheep and the spiritual leader as a “herder.” Even the language of religion communicates corralling and controlling.

If we look deeply within ourselves to study the nature of consciousness, we discover that we are all connected.

We all come from the same place: this planet, earth. We are of nature like every other creature, plant, and organism.

When we realize that we are all connected, there is no need for spirit, the illusion that props up the construct of religion.

When you look out into nature, what creatures lay prostate observing religious practices?

Going into the darkness of your consciousness to bring forth the inner light of your humanity is what will truly save you.

You can awaken within the limitless nature of your consciousness — you don’t need to follow a limited and dogmatic construct in the form of religion and ideology.

Remember that even with your eyes closed, you can still see something within your visual field. In other words, you are not blind to your conscious awareness.

See things as they truly are, not for an illusion created by others to control your perceptions.

Read the post here:

"We Don’t Need Gods or Religions to be Spiritual"

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Taoism is known for using metaphor, paradox, and dualities to express the natural world and the natural order of reality. Sometimes people find it confusing trying to understand the relationship between, for example, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ within the relative nature of the universe as described in the Tao Te Ching.

The mutually arising duality in this context of this episode is humility and egocentricity. Human behaviours like egocentricity and self-importance, when taken to the extreme, have created every inequality imaginable.

Some politicians are exceptional leaders. Others put themselves into the position of politics for self-aggrandizement, personal gain, power and control. Trump has assumed the later and is an example of someone who is a significant danger to an equanimous and peaceful humanity.

Read the article on the Ascent on Medium:

Radical Humility: An Antidote to Donald Trump's Arrogance and Self-Importance.

P.S. After you've listened to this episode let me know what was most impactful and how you'll apply it in your life: https://darrenstehle.com/contact/

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• How do you look beyond what you believe to be true, fixed, or finite?
• Sometimes what we see is not what we see.
• We most often understand polarities from extreme ends. I propose we shift our focus and look to the middle ground.
• Recall what I talked about in Thinking Queerly, Week 1, “Divisiveness Is an Illusion on Either Side of Balance,” what is the single point of origin, the middle-ground, the gap in-between both sides of the argument, polarity, or binary.
• Within gender identities, the middle-ground is humanity.
• In something more complex like a debate or an argument, there is no way that both sides could have a logical argument in which side understood each other if they weren’t in fact coming from the same middle ground!
• Just because you think you know how things are, how do you know for certain? What are you seeing which is proof of what you are seeing that is factual and provable in reality?

Read the article here:

"When You Change the Way You Look at Things, the Things You Look at Change"

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The simple act of compassionate, open-hearted listening reduces the threat response for another person talking. As a result, the energy of the person speaking is mirrored back to us in ways we are not conscious of but that we sense and interpret as providing safety. 

This feeling of safety (the lack of threat) diffuses the potential for opposition and argument and offers the opportunity to foster and cultivate new relationships

https://medium.com/the-ascent/what-happens-when-you-dont-participate-in-arguments-or-controversy-c443b1e33743

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Welcome to my new, year-long series, “Thinking Queerly” —  a revisiting of my book, “Think Queerly: Meditations & Critical Reflections On Liberating Humanity.” Over the next 52-weeks, I will be selecting and re-working what I hope are the most impactful 52 passages (there are about 110) to dive deep into the well of metaphor — the place of paradox where queerness dances unabashedly.

After each “passage” I intend to resurface from metaphor and paradox with a clear explanation of what it is I wish to share, with an invitation to practice what I trust will be insightful.  

Read the article, "Divisiveness Is an Illusion on Either Side of Balance"

My purpose is to teach open-hearted personal leadership to cultivate a more loving humanity. Subscribe to my weekly, Queer Thoughts Newsletter and I will send you copies of my free books designed to help you improve your life and well-being.

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The beauty industry — which includes cosmetics, fashion, weight-loss and body-building programs — is dependent upon a conventional concept that ugly is something universal and quantifiable based on what you don’t have. This becomes a system in which one’s perceived beauty is never good enough by comparison and needs to be continually improved.

Through repeated advertising of images that the beauty industry tells you are beautiful, we begin to believe it unquestionably. The models representing brands or thirst-traps on Instagram are promoted as ideals and objective representations of what the perfect body or perfect face should look like.

The more we see these images, the easier it is for the concept of what is beautiful to falsely appear as objective truth.

Read the article on Medium, "Beauty Is Judgement In the Eye of the Beholder." 

1. So you want access to new and exclusive content about human-hearted leadership and personal transformation for queer-thinking people… Subscribe to my VIQ premium podcast feed. It's like having a mindset coach in your ear for a year but for less than the price of a private coaching session!
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— Darren Stehle

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I used to think that self-sabotage made sense until I learned how to see it differently through neuroscience. 

The way we have used language to come up with such a term is a shameful way to critique and judge yourself! But if self-sabotage isn’t a real thing, then why did we come up with the term? What’s the reason for not doing what you know you need to do to get what you want in life?

First, we need to address the shame associated with the idea of self-sabotage. To get over this shameful error perpetuated by personal development and to finally toss the concept in the waste-bin, we need to understand the difference between shame and guilt.

Read the article on The Ascent on Medium, "Self-Sabotage is the Shame-Filled Mistake of Personal Development."

1. So you want access to new and exclusive content about human-hearted leadership and personal transformation for queer-thinking people… Subscribe to my VIQ premium podcast feed. It's like having a mindset coach in your ear for a year but for less than the price of a private coaching session!
2. So you want more clarity and insight… Find out what’s holding you back from getting what you want and what to do about it with this 90-minute Clarity Session.
3. So you want transformative, private coaching… 4 months of Deep Coaching with me, can get very intense but the payoff for you is more personal freedom, clarity and direction, accomplishing your goals, making a difference and living a more joyful life. Click here if you’re committed to freely creating the life you want.

— Darren Stehle

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Instead, we only need to look at nature and the natural order of things to be reminded of how the world works. By the fact that we are part of the world — that we are the *stuff* of this world — so too will our delusions of power and control be washed away — whether that be in the form of social evolution or annihilation.

Read the post, The Way of No Contention: One of the 6 Principles of Human-Hearted Leadership.

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