Life is not rocket science

Practicality or passion - what do you choose?

Image by [ r ♥ c e y t ♥ y ] {I br♥ke for bokeh} via Flickr

Given the choice being practical and being passionate, what do you choose?

If you've made that choice in the past, are you glad you did, or do you regret your decision?

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Persistence pays

Last night I watched the finale of season 5 of 'So You Think You Can Dance', and it taught me, once again, how it's so important to stay persistent in pursuing your vision.  The woman who won had 8% of the support prior to the final performance night, giving her slim chance of winning, but that blossomed to 45% after those final performances, assuring her the victory.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

For those who aren't familiar with it, So You Think You Can Dance is for dancers what American Idol is for singers.  Hopeful dancers compete under grueling conditions for several weeks, learning and performing dances in a variety of dance genres while America votes for their favourite.  On Wednesday night, the top 4 dancers competed - 2 men and 2 women in the Kodak Theatre, and then America voted. 

Two of these dancers - Brandon and Kayla have clearly been the technical dance stars of the season.  Jeanine's technique is phenomenal, but not quite up to Kayla, but she far exceeds Kayla with her personality.  The last dancer, Evan is a good dancer, but nowhere in the league of the other 3.  But he has cute cheeks that are just squishable, as has often been said on the show, and as a result, he has had the lead in most online votes.  And that's what this show is about - the favourite dancer, not the best dancer.  Most people thought that Evan was going to win it, whether they thought he should or not.

Anyway, Jeanine came up as the underdog, always peforming well and strongly, but not quite blowing people away like Brandon and Kayla did, or charming people as Evan did. That's why, going into the top 4 performance show, she only had 8% of the vote.

But did she give up?  Ever?

No.

Every week, she worked incredibly hard, mastered her routine, whether it was in her genre or not, and just delivered.  Then, on the top 4 performance show, she pulled out all the stops, and took phenomenal chances in her solo to blow everyone away. 

The result?  A 500% increase in her vote and the crown of 'America's Favourite Dancer'.  And she grew so much as a dancer over the season that she was certainly entering the caliber of Brandon and Kayla by the end.  A well-deserved championship.

The moral of this, for me, is that she never waivered from her dream. She stayed steady, even when she seemed to be at the back of the pack.  And it all turned around in one night.

What happens around us is just feedback.  As long as we stay focused and emotionally vested in our vision, we keep moving forward.  The moment we give up, we've lost it. 

Kudos to you, Jeanine!

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True faith

True faith is when you are grateful for something before it has come into your life.

Pulling up the shoots to see if they're growing

I recently had a profound experience that provided me with a deeper understanding of what it means to 'let go of attachment' to what you're in the process of manifesting.  And the bottom line is faith.

The basic process of creating your reality is that you focus on what you are providing to serve the broader universe, on what you want and then you 'let it go', freeing yourself from all attachments to what you're asking for to live in the moment, having faith that what you need is already coming. 

In a previous post I explained the Law of Uncertainty, and of how it applies to manifestation.  Simply put, you can focus on the now, your goal, or on the path to get there, but not all at once.  The problem is, most people want to know not only their goal, but how they're going to get there and when.  And the Law of Uncertainty in manifesting says that you simply can't know all of that.  Things change too fast, and there's so much beyond your control that you could never chart the course ahead of time.

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It's the old adage of the farmer going out to pull his shoots up to see how fast they were growing.  In doing so, he killed the shoots.  Instead of doing that, a good farmer has absolute faith that the shoots will grow into his/her crop, and does what (s)he needs to do and can control right now to make that happen, whether that's fertilizing or watering  the crop, weeding, getting a good night's sleep or whatever.  The effective farmer knows that there's a great deal that is outside of his/her control, and focuses on what (s)he can do right now, trusting that whatever else needs to happen will happen and the plants will grow.

If you set a goal and are constantly trying to figure out how it's going to happen, you're pulling up the shoots - you don't trust that you'll realize your goal, and so you take yourself away from doing the things that you can and need to do right now to make that goal happen - and kill your chances of realizing the goal.

In our control-hungry world, it's a challenge to trust, have faith, let go and do what you can right now, and yet that is exactly what is needed to make miracles happen.

Do you have faith that what you want is already happening, or do you need to know how?

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

Living the voyage

Lately I've been posting about living the joy in life, and one passage that truly captures this for me is by Phillips Brooks:

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Think of life as a voyage. 

The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him. 

The morning and the evening sun, the moonlight and the starlight, the endless change of the vast water that he floats on, the passing back and forth of other ships between him and the sky, the incidents and company on his own vessel - all these are pleasant to him; but their pleasure is borne up by and woven in with his interest in the purpose for which he undertook the voyage.  That lies beyond and that lies under the voyage all the while. 

He is not sailing just for the sake of sailing.  He would never have undertaken the voyage for his own sake. 

Another man, who has no purpose beyond the voyage, is vexed and uneasy.  He is so afraid of not getting the best out of it that he loses its best.  The spots and imperfections in its pleasure worry him. 

Those are the differences of the ways in which men live.  One man forgets his own life in the purposes for which his life is lived, and he is the man who grows richest and brightest.  Another man is always thinking about himself, and so never gets beyond himself into those purposes of living out of which all the fullness of personal life may flow back to him.

Amen.  Your thoughts?

Where is your joy?

Randy Gage recently wrote a blog posting about making the time to find and connect with the joy in your life, and he is so bang on.  Whether it's focusing on accomplishing goals or on connecting with what gives life meaning, we can become too obsessed with the goal or the seeking and forget to live.

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Joy is not dependent on the economic climate or money or anyone else.  The simple joys of life are available to us all.  When I look at the sparkle in my son's eyes, or at a beautiful sunset, or hear the birds outside, they are all doorways to stepping into the now and into joy.

If we don't make the time to do this, all we have left are the struggles and challenges.  The irony is that all of these little moments of joy and peace can more than regenerate us from all the struggles and challenges we face and take on.  We just have to allow ourselves to stop and live life.

What value is the goal if you've missed the journey?

What are the fleeting moments of joy that you can take a moment or two to step into?  Who is there in your life that you share moments of joy with?

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?

Rules 6a and 6b

Yesterday, I asked the question, "Is life, in the end, simply the balance between living purposefully and allowing ourselves to live fully in play and joy?"  I was reminded then of two simple rules a friend of mine told me about a long time ago:

Rule 6a: Don't take yourself too <insert appropriate expletive here, if desired> seriously

Rule 6b: Don't take others too <insert appropriate expletive here, if desired> seriously

Two very simple rules for keeping your grounded in the fundamentals of what life's about in the search for meaning and purpose.

That's my 2 cents. What do you think?

Are you too serious?

Sometimes we can take our work on creating meaning and purpose in life far too seriously, and we can take life far too seriously, and I think that works to the detriment of all of that work.  Life is about joy and rejoicing in life, and, by extension, living purposefully and living a meaningful life also must be about joy.  If we lose our joy, if we lose the playful innocence of our inner child, then we've lost it all.

Is life, in the end, simply the balance between living purposefully and allowing ourselves to live fully in play and joy?

How to rewrite disabling beliefs

I recently went to a workshop that promised to teach you how to totally overwrite adisabling belief with an empowering belief, for yourself or others, in just a few minutes.  Let's just say I was skeptical.  And I came away wonderfully suprised.

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Over the past 30 years I've explored many, many psychological and spritual processes for self-growth and healing.  I'm a master practitioner in NLP, I've explored shamanism for year, you name it, so the promise of this workshop certainly raised my eyebrow.  However, a very dear friend and mentor had highly recommended this to me, and I'd been intrigued about it from a book I'd read recently.  And, most importantly, my intuition told me to go, so I went.

The modality is called Psych-K, and the elements of it come from many disciplines I'm familiar with - NLP, muscle testing, whole-brain thinking and so on.  However, I've have not yet encountered such a simple, elegant, powerful constellation of these building blocks before.  Not only that, the processes ('balances' as they're called in Psych-K) include what are called ecological checks, to ensure that the beliefs you 'install' are appropriate for you as a whole being (because we are complex systems).

Our conscious minds, seen as 'processors', operate at about 40 bytes per second, and our subconscious minds operate at about 40 Million bytes per second, so our subconscious, with all our pre-programmed beliefs, is really what's in charge.  Saying affirmations over and over is like going at an iceberg with a toothpick.  The Psych-K balances rewrite the iceberg.

There's no psycho-babble, no anal-yzing why the dis-empowering belief wasn't there in the first place - just checking if the belief is safe and appropriate and then badda-bing, badda-boom, rewriting the software in your subconscious mind.

Bottom line: I'm really, really impressed, and I recommend this workshop highly.  I think I can say that it's the most powerful non-spiritual approach to self-healing I've encountered in over three decades of exploration.  It rocks!

That's my 2 cents. What do you think?

When you are ready...

There is a saying that 'when you are ready, the teacher will appear.'  That applies to far more than teachers (in whatever sense of the word) - it applies to resources, challenges - and friends.

Image by 'Pong via Flickr

My experience has been that we attract who we are and what we need into our lives, and it's wonderful when those two coincide. 

Recently there's been a lot of 'stuff' that I've been working through (read: life), and I've just recently connected with two brand new friends who really get and who I can really talk with as if I've known them my whole life - in the first conversation - and one has been through almost literally the same journey.

What's even more wonderful in today's internet-connected, social media world is that we're no longer restricted to our geographic boundaries.  One of those two people I mentioned is thousands of miles away, and yet we are in the same place in life, with conversation spurred by comments each made online.

This is a magical age we live in, and all we have to do is trust that we will bring to us exactly what we need, whether it is a teacher or a friend who will understand us as nobody else can right now.

That's my 2 cents.  What do you think?