Jamie Fellrath | Practical Mindfulness

Without even thinking about it, I did something that one of my favorite gurus suggested I never do, and that's "breathe a sigh of relief." This past weekend was a very busy one for me - all good stuff, but busy.  Saturday morning, my wife and I took our kids to the Ohio Renaissance Festival and had a great time.  Saturday afternoon, I went to help set up for the Sunday morning Walk Now for Autism Speaks event.  Sunday was the event, and then Sunday afternoon I was a speaker on bike commuting at the 10/10/10 Work Party at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Reynoldsburg, Ohio .  It was all great stuff and I got to share a lot of wonderful experiences with people all weekend. Then Sunday night, before going to bed, I posted this on my Facebook page . Wow...survived the weekend. Ohio Renaissance Festival, setting up and participating in the Walk Now for Autism Speaks, and speaking on Bike Commuting at the great 10/10/10 event in Reynoldsburg. I'm whooped, bu

Over the weekend, the University of Notre Dame (my alma mater) was playing Purdue in the first football game of the year. I was enjoying the game, watching with my son, and then this advertisement for the University came on. Autism // Fighting For // University of Notre Dame I was moved nearly to tears to know that my alma mater was working to help Duncan with his challenges in life. Thank you, Dr. Joshua Diehl, and all your staff for the work you're doing.

To continue a discussion I started on Facebook about the cancellation of Breakthrough With Tony Robbins : This saddens me. Breakthrough with Tony Robbins is a great show. It's about Tony Robbins helping people help themselves, which is what people really need to see. I mean, I like shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as much as the next sap, but those shows are still about giving stuff away, period. Tony's show helps people solve their own problems and in the process gives advice on how to do it for yourself.   And it can't get an audience.   Why do you think that is? Is it because some people see Robbins as a huckster who made money on infomercials, even though his products work and are proven to do so? Or is it because people don't want to be told that they can fix their own problems?  Or is it some other reason?   Discuss.  Please. I'm really curious about this.

One of the best ways to help yourself to progress with personal development type goals is to keep a journal.  Keeping a daily record of things you learned, discovered, encountered, things that affected you in some way, and even the people you met is a wonderful tool for marking your progress as you move down the road of life.  It allows you to see the big changes over time as you make little changes in your daily routine, and to realize that you are indeed making progress. That being said:  I'm a HORRIBLE journaler. The basic problem is that I forget to do it.  I haven't made it a positive habit in my life yet, and for whatever reason, it's just not something that I've found a good method to make myself do it. That is, until now.  Introducing OhLife .  OhLife is a journaling website.  It's totally private, no one else can read your journal unless you give them your password.  And here's the best part:  it sends you an email every day at 8:00 pm (adjusted f

Last night, I didn't get a lot of sleep.  My nearly three-year-old daughter seems to have an inability to go to sleep by herself if she wakes up in the middle of the night, and she comes in to our room to either hop in bed with us or have one of us come back to her room to lay down with her.  So last night it was my turn, and I didn't have a very good night's sleep because of it. As a result, I was slow waking up this morning, and with it not being a workout morning I slept in about an extra half hour instead of getting up and getting my day underway properly.  Bad news.  And the practical upshot of this is that I'm feeling more cranky than normal (I'm usually not that cranky, period). During my bike ride, then, which was going along very pleasantly with some beautiful cool weather and not too much of a negative breeze slowing me down, I came across two ladies riding ahead of me.  As I caught up to them and was getting ready to pass them, we hit a stop light.  I

There's no doubt that goals are important.  They give us focus and purpose as we move through life, and give us something to strive for. But just as important is having a reason to complete those goals.  Without a big enough "why," our goals are useless to us.  There's no reason to get them done if we don't have a really good and powerful reason to want them to get done.  And the reason can be "good" or "bad." One of the reasons I want to develop some residual income, for example, is so that I can help get my family some freedom to do things like travel.  Both my parents and my wife's live in the western US, now (Arizona and Washington) and we'd love to be able to get out and visit them.  I love to travel anyway, as does my wife, so this is a big goal for me.  A big "why." Another goal I have is to get into outstanding shape.  And there's not any other reason for that than I want to look good and feel healthy.  Hones

No matter what business we're in, there's a point where we're all in "sales." And that doesn't necessarily mean that we're trying to actively coerce people into buying something they don't want, but rather we're trying to get our point across and let our opinion be known in a way that people will act upon our words. If we're looking for a job, we're selling our personalities and skills.  If we have a job, we're offering opinions on the best ways to do things based on our experience.  And even in our lives, we're offering opinions about things we've enjoyed or found useful to our friends and family.  It's just the way we live in a world where we don't have some sort of hive-mind allowing us to just act - we have to influence others or we don't really exist in the world. And for people whose self-confidence is low about giving opinions, this can be a real challenge in being an effective person in the workplace, h

If you're a Twitter user, you're probably aware of a tradition/practice that takes place on Fridays which are called "Follow Fridays." By marking your tweet with a hashtag of "#FF" or "#FollowFriday", you then let the world know of a person that you're referring to as a good person to follow on Twitter for some reason. Now to be fair, I think a lot of people are using Twitter's Follow Friday tradition poorly.  They simply send out four or five tweets full of names of people who've started following them recently, with no reason why or what they offer.  And that's done two things to me: one, it makes me ignore those tweets because they're almost incomprehensible; and two, it annoys me to the point where I've stopped following a few people because they do it constantly. I like to do my Follow Friday tweets with something a little different in mind: I do it to show gratitude.  Showing gratitude is one of the very basics

I recently read Darren Hardy's new book The Compound Effect .  This is a book that I wish I could give to EVERYONE I know, it's that powerful.  And it clarified for me a number of things I knew, but didn't necessarily realize that I knew. The book is about how to create a number of small, positive habits and actions that will add up over time to make a big impact, but one that will probably not be seen immediately.  In America, we tend to look for the BIG change, the next BIG thing.  We want to do something all at once and have a huge impact.  And we also perceive that things happen that way. But they don't.  It just SEEMS that way. I've been on a diet plan called the Primal Blueprint for almost two years now.  It's a low-carb, "caveman" type diet (and I highly recommend it) with some other fitness and lifestyle points attached to it.  But for a long time it seemed like nothing was happening with it.  I'd been riding my bike to work for a lo

A Randy Gage retweet this morning got me thinking about how we deal with setbacks in our lives.  Here's the Tweet: RT @ markshaw : Totally agree: When things go wrong look in the mirror, not out of the window thanks @ jasoncobine Let's look at how we deal with the setbacks in our lives.  It's very easy, and even a little comforting to some people, to be able to look at a setback and find other people to blame.  And it may be that other people took a role in helping that setback happen to you.  No matter how hard we try to be conduits for positive energy and bring good things to everyone around us, there are some people whose defenses simply can't be overcome with what is good. Finding fault with other people around us affects our prosperity momentum in a number of ways that I'm going to call the Energy Conduit .  Let's go through what your mind feels when you blame someone else. 1.  First, we get angry and seethe with rage for a bit.  Getting angry damages

I've been sort of smacked in the face with the use of relics in the past few days.  Now this isn't a reference to any specific religious relics - I'm not being flogged with St. Sebastian's bones or anything like that.  No, the relics I'm referring to are those that remind me of the promises I've made to myself.  J.B. Glossinger talked about relics a bit today in his Morning Coach podcast on the "Depth of Creativity."  He described them as a way to touch your spirituality or ground your spirituality in yourself, and they can be religious reminders or otherwise - whatever serves you best. I have a few relics that I keep with me daily.  One is a Livestrong bracelet.  Yeah, that yellow one that Lance Armstrong wears.  I initially started wearing it because I thought (and still think, for that matter) that Lance is an ultra-stud and wanted to support him in his quest for the Tour de France title(s).  But as I've moved through life, the quote "L

One of my favorite and most regularly-read websites is Elephant Journal . It's ostensibly a yoga and Buddhist website, but they really break into a lot of topics such as the environment, pop culture, general health issues, and more. And it's part of the more that I'm writing about today, as a follow up to their article: " Walking Your Talk: How Do You Treat The Waitress? " A few years ago, when my family and I were vacationing in Tampa, we had dinner with some friends who met us at the hotel we were occupying at the time.  Now we'd been at this hotel for the better part of a week at this point and had gotten to know some of the staff there a little bit.  They'd always given us great service and been cheerful about everything they did, and we showed them our appreciation via tips and general friendliness.  In other words, we'd created a nice relationship with the folks working there. We sat down with our friends in the lounge/restaurant area that

While riding down High Street this morning, I passed the Greek Orthodox Church south of the Short North, and noticed a small sign on one of the exterior spotlights (the ones that light up the church from the outside).  The sign read "Please clean up after your pets."  My mind began to wander a bit as I went from "man, people need to take responsibility for their pets" to "but what about pee? I bet that light would corrode from being peed on over and over by dogs." Yeah, kind of gross, I know. But it led me to thinking about an article I read in Success Magazine a couple weeks ago (the one with Steve Jobs on the cover).  The article was a preview to a new book by the magazine's publisher, Darren Hardy, and was called "The Compound Effect."  Hardy pointed out in the article that success isn't made up of doing hundreds of things once, but rather doing a few small things hundreds of times . Simple, isn't it?  Let's look at this

In a case of clear clairvoyance on the part of MorningCoach.com 's owner and podcaster J.B. Glossinger, today's podcast was about sleep. I say this because I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night, and it's affecting my day even beyond simply being tired.  I was up late watching a movie I'd wanted to see for a long time and was just released in the US.  But the long weekend combined with some sketchy sleep during said weekend combined with simply not getting enough last night has made today pretty lethargic in a lot of ways. I'm not motivated at all.  I'm feeling sort of queasy. I didn't do much personal evolution work today other than listen to the podcast.  I'm having trouble getting my mind around my job today.  I'm uttering the phrase "oh, whatever" way too much.  And I'm letting too many negative thoughts enter my head without trying to flush them out. Sure, we're not always going to get enough sleep.  But to go do

Today's Morning Coach podcast was a very good one, with an introduction to the topic of "Struggle."  Everyone has struggles in life, but it's important not to judge the struggles as problems and instead to see them as opportunities. We can sit and moan and complain that our lives are filled with too much struggle and change.  We might get past those struggles with some work, and then sit back, exhale sharply, and say "whoa, glad that's over."  And we might even get a small sense of satisfaction out of having beaten that struggle. Or...we can look at that struggle as what it is: an opportunity.  Every struggle in life can be used to learn and grow. Having money problems? Learn better money management, or find new ways to make money.  Or both. Having health problems? Research your problem above and beyond what the doctor tells you - you might find different ways to regain your health to even better levels than before you were sick.  You may even d

This past weekend, my family and I went up to Cleveland to watch our friend Sam Felsenfeld run the Rite Aid Cleveland Marathon .  Sam is running 60 marathons in 2010 to raise money and awareness for Train4Autism via his charity Operation Jack (named after his own Autistic son).  My wife was going to run the 1/2 marathon in Cleveland, but an injury put her on the sidelines, so we went up to experience it and support Sam. One of the things that many self-improvement experts talk about in regards to creating motivation and putting yourself at a higher vibrational level is to put yourself among those types of people.  And you could not do better at this than to hang out at a marathon and cheer on the runners as they complete this awesome event. Now this is not to make less of running shorter races at all.  As you may recall, I ran a 5K a couple weeks ago to gauge my fitness level  and I enjoyed it a lot.  But there's something about the people who have put in the time and work to

As I get older, I'm finding that I have increasingly less tolerance for the marketers of the world, the folks who want us to poison ourselves or take care of ourselves wrongly under the guise of health.  And it's all just to make a quick buck. Now don't get me wrong: I don't believe there's anything wrong with money, but what's really more important is providing value to the world.  If you provide value to the world, the world will provide value to you in return.  And that's not saying that you'll get rich, that's saying you'll have a life that is happy and rewarding.  The rewards may be financial, or spiritual, or they may be a number of things.  But they all supply energy to us - whether it's financial energy, emotional energy, what have you. But the modern world increasingly has little to do with treating ourselves well.  We're told that we're treating ourselves well if we buy a new car, or get that new pair of running shoes, o

I've been working with the Men's Health Ultimate Iron-Free Circuit Series workout recently. Basically, it's seven different bodyweight exercises done without rest, alternating between an upper- and lower-body exercise, then rest a minute, and do the whole thing again. You start with two sets. . And, I've been getting good results from it. I added a third set of it today and the results I'm feeling are really good. Definitely feeling it more in my shoulders, from the extra sets of close-grip and t-pushups.  But I also felt it from an exercise that I didn't think I was getting much out of, but was doing because it was part of the routine. It's called the inverted hamstring. I figured it was getting me some good balance work and that was about it.  But today, I really concentrated on doing it slowly and keeping my balance all the way through it.  It's still not as exhausting as some of the exercises, like the aforementioned t-pushups, but today I

Morning Coach has been doing a series this week on Belief.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Morning Coach , JB Glossinger is the creator of the Personal Evolution system in which he helps you to improve your life a little bit each day via regular podcasts and workbooks to help you manifest the life you desire. I've been listening for a long time now... a year and a half or so! And I love getting that positive boost of energy each morning as I ride to work. But as I said, this week's topic has been belief, and the power of belief.  Belief that we can achieve the things we want is key to getting them.  I think that's a pretty simple concept: if you don't believe you can achieve something, well, then, you're right.  But you can make yourself believe them and not limit yourself by your beliefs. But today, the specific belief-related topic was Action.  JB pointed out that many people believe you can manifest your dreams simply by having great enough be

I'm not a runner. Seriously, for the most part I really don't care for pounding the pavement on a regular basis.  I don't really like sports that I have to worry about proper hydration and nutrition schedules during the race, or whether I need to replace my shoes because I've run 500 miles in them, or anything like that.  I enjoy trail-type running at times but don't really live in an area where it's a regular option.  So for the most part, I really don't do it very much.  I ran cross country the fall of my freshman year in high school and screwed up my knees, which negatively affected my swimming season that following winter (and swimming was my primary sport in high school).  I never ran it again after that. So running and I have a live and let live relationship.  I recognize that some people do really well with it, and are able to turn their lives around with it.  For a great example, go and read a bit about Operation Jack .  And my wife is turning in

One of the very important parts of my life is Autism.  Not for me, specifically, but for my son, Duncan. Duncan is five and was diagnosed with autism in late 2008 after a series of tests and evaluations we underwent with him.  My wife, Jennifer, and I knew something was up with him because he wasn't developing at the same rate as other kids his age. It wasn't that he was slow, he was faster in a lot of stuff but slower in others.  His memory was fantastic - he startled his daycare teachers by knowing all the planets, in order, when they were working on a solar system mural for their classroom.  And he learned his numbers and letters (and even shapes and animals) really early. But he had a lot of trouble with what we thought was hyperactivity, repetitive behavior, and inattention, and that was what led us to seek the help of the ECRN+.  Early Childhood Resource Network is an organization of the Central Ohio YMCA that helps families as they look for answers with their child

One big goal of mine is to compete in and complete all the obstacles at the Spartan Race in Boston, on August 28, 2010. The Spartan Race is described on their webpage as follows: The Spartan Race is for athletes and people who are tired of the tedium of the usual races and workouts and yearn to recapture the spirit of an adventurous age. This international race is set up to test not only the strength and stamina but the cunning and creativity of each athlete’s warrior essence. Participants will confront obstacles ranging from extreme to absurd that gain their inspiration from sources as varied as Spartan training, Navy SEAL training, American Gladiators, Eco-Challenge and Ironman. If you win a Spartan Race, you're invited to the "Death Race" in Pittsfield, VT, in October - where there's a longer version of this sort of race. As I said, my goal is simply to complete all the obstacles and not come in last in my heat.  My challenge, then, is to get my body to the p

Welcome to my page.  My goal here is to share a bit about me, what I do, what my passions are, and where I'm going with my goals and plans.  I invite you to contact me via one the links on my many websites if you have questions on any of these things.  I would love to help you get healthier and wealthier and live a life that you want to live!  I've been a martial artist in the Korean mixed martial art of Gongkwon Yusul since October 2019, and achieved my black belt in November 2023. I train at Central Ohio Martial Arts under Master Laura Clements and love the art. I'm hoping to become a fully-accredited instructor within the next two years.  Before I was a post-COVID work-from-home type, I'd been carless since 2004 and writing my blog Carless Columbus since February of 2006. It's a little out-of-date now, as I haven't been posting there much for the past few years, but there's a lot of good info there if you're so inclined. I'm a carless-commut