The Law of Attraction

I've been spending quite some time on self-help books, the more memorable ones to myself lately are:
- What's the Colour of Your Parachute (2008)
- The Seven Whispers by Christina Baldwin
- The High-Heeled Healer by Ann Marie Woodall
- Simpleology 101

It takes me a long time to finish each, and I haven't really finished each of them. The High Heeled Healer in particular was very interesting. I did almost every one of the suggested exercises in the book. There are numerous times when I surprised myself with what I put down as the answer. I might want to go through the whole book again, and look through the answers again, perhaps describing the transformation it had led me through.

But right now, I just want to speak of a recent incident which I find rather "shocking" in a good way. I was back in Malaysia last weekend, and ripped Chyi's CD - The Unheard of Chyi. Well, just felt like doing it. I've got that CD for a year but had never listened to it.

On last Saturday, I played the songs on my laptop. Then I went to search for her info on the Internet, and I found that she had recorded a buddhist CD in 2004 - Tibetan Mantras, or 佛心 as what the album is known in Chinese. This caught my attention, as how all buddhist mantras caught my attention. So I downloaded the songs from Baidu. It contains mantras like 大悲咒 and 南无观世音菩萨. On last Friday & Saturday, I also did metta meditation, after stopping for almost 1 year.

Ok.. then on Sunday, we (my colleagues and myself) were supposed to go to Xikou. When I reached their hotel, one of them suddenly changed her mind and we all agreed to go to Putuo Shan. On the way there, I learned that Putuo Shan is one of the 4 main mountains for Buddhist pilgrimage in China; Putuo Shan is for Guan Yin.

I felt like.. this is too much of a coincidence. I must have been having the Buddha and his teachings in my heart all these while, planting Buddhist seeds now and then.. that I deserve to see Guan Yin in such an unplanned circumstance..

I'll continue to plant the seeds..



~ttg~

Dream

I woke up sometime last week, with this message very clear in my memory. I was staying in an old inn, and I received a message, as below:

There are friends who have arrived
These are those who require your attention

The language is kind of "antique". But I haven't really figured out if this message is of any significance to my life right now? Perhaps I should take note of any "newcomers" in my life, and pay special attention to them..

~ttg~

Customer Service

A very basic rule of customer service is to treat everyone with equal treatment.

Today, someone (in Ningbo, China) lost a customer because the customer made a remark - your shoes are pretty expensive, is there a reason? The salesperson thought that the customer wants to bargain, and changed her attitude almost immediately. Saying that this is a special price, you can walk around and see if you can find anything of this prize and the size you want. The customer walked away. The customer was me.

Well, I didn't dress that well, just in jeans and t-shirt as I was staying nearby. Probably she thought I'm kind of poor to dress like that since this is city centre. But, I stayed just like 2 corners away, less than 5 minutes walk and I just walked out to get dinner, and I wanted to grab a pair of shoes. I had prepared money to spend, and I wanted to buy a pair of shoes. She just lost a customer with that kind of attitude. I ended up buying from her neighbour, a pair of shoes of the same price. Though the design is not as nice, and there were quite a number of better looking designs but my size was no longer available, the salesgirl mad a sincere effort to check out the sizes and the designs for me. I was happy, and I bought from her.

In China, the customer is the king. People imitates the designs very fast - whatever was in fashion, or whatever is on sale, pretty soon the whole street will carry the same designs. No wonder the Chinese people don't really care if they offend the sellers, because they know there'll always be better bargains out there, possibly better.

~ttg~