I have the opportunity to work within our local prison system and was spending a bit of time thinking about some of the opening conversations I would have with these men. The reason for my involvement is to help create a powerful new paradigm for them so that long before the gates on the prison opened and they walked out, these men were already free.

What struck me powerfully is that as an inmate of a prison, your loss of freedom is tangible, but for us that have "freedom," our prison is not so obvious. As an inmate, you can see the guards, the gates and the barbed wire. You see the other inmates dressed like you, showing no vulnerability like you, using the same language as you, all following the rules of the prison society with little or no choice in things being any different. Every day you are reminded of your crimes, every day is filled with guilt, loss of freedom, loss of choice, and in order to function we push those feelings down so all we are left with is anger, resentment...

Over the years I have read references on how powerful words can be, from the bibles caution of an unbridled tongue, to philosophers recognition of the power of the spoken word to literally create our world.

But really now, they are just words, aren’t they? There are two points we can look at when it comes to explore this topic, one from the world of quantum physics, secondly from the study of the brain. Physics tells us that there is no true reality, that there only exist “waves of possibilities” and that reality only happens when we focus on a certain point in space, when we “decide” on one course of action or another, thereby eliminating all other possibilities for the one we focused on. 

The key here is there were other possibilities but we decided to choose “one over the other”, for better or worse. So how do we make these choices?

Why do we make the bad ones over the good ones at times? It has been a question I have been asking...

In the past twenty years or so I have found myself drawn into the positive mindset movement. I grew up in a religious household, and though I loved the spiritual concepts and moral guidelines that were passed down through generations via the bible, I felt somewhat constrained by religious dogma, or mans attempt to put his rules on how to be a spiritual being. So I went on a journey of discovery, trying to discover if spirituality did indeed exist outside conventional Christianity. To my delight, I found a sea of philosophers and new thought leaders who spoke of spiritual ideals with refreshing clarity, pointing out that spirituality did not exist inside a building, an image created by man, nor by a single book , but that spirituality existed in each and everyone of us, and part of the journey in life was to slowly expose our spiritual essence, layer by layer, until all that is left is our enlighten self.

Oh, but this journey has not without its challenges. Enamoured by the sweet...