How to STOP Wasting Your Life.

July 30, 2008

Now that you have identified whether or not your life is in major need of a change, you can begin to take the necessary steps. On this path of change, however, you cannot forget the skills that brought you to this realization. You must be ever-vigilant of your own thoughts and destructive patterns. Catch yourself when you begin to spiral into thoughts of negativity, break the pattern before it becomes too much to control, and continue to be honest with yourself. The good news is that half the battle is won. You have decided that a change is needed and that you deserve to make it. That is a big decision! You’ve had the courage to say that you have been wasting the precious time you’ve been given on something that doesn’t suite you. You’ve decided that you will no longer do that. It sounds so simple and yet takes so much dedication. The bad news is that only half the battle is won. You will spend the rest of you life fighting the other half, for the other half IS life.

I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that once you make these changes your life will start coming up roses. It doesn’t work that way. There will always be new things to try and those new things will cause uncertainty and sometimes fear. You will try and fail and you will spend countless hours wondering how to do it better next time. Many people call this state of being, unhappiness. Its real name is LIFE. That trepidation you feel when trying something new, that is life. That failure you experience when attempting to succeed? Life. The excitement of success? LIFE. Those emotions are life. Not one or two of them. All of them.

It is when we stop finding things to be excited about that we become depressed and dissatisfied.

Embrace the joy of life in all its wonderful, happy, annoying and downright crappy ways. Learn to see the perfection of it all, for it is all perfect. Learn to internalize the saying “all is as it should be” and you will find that while life may not always come up roses, you will certainly enjoy its not-so-rosy moments more.

Finding You Calling

I do not believe in a life’s purpose. I find the whole notion to be far too simplistic and foolhardy on the part of a creator. Why give us all a purpose at which we could fail, or simply choose not to fulfill? Seems like a tricky proposition for the fate of the universe, wouldn’t you say? The idea of a life’s purpose is a relic from childhood Sunday schools where they taught that God had a special plan for all of us. I’m not saying we’re not all special or distinct, but I don’t think God was dealing out hands in the great card game of life.

All that said, dedicating your life to a purpose is different from a divinely ordained purpose. One was given by a mysterious creator who wanted you to figure it out before the time bomb of life ran out. The other is a personal passion that you have turned into a life’s work. Don’t worry about whether or not you are doing “God’s Work.” If it was so important, God would have been more straight forward about it in the first place. When you find something you wish to do that makes you happy and gives you an inner feeling of peace, you are doing God’s work.

Now you just have to find what you want to do . . . well crap. Not as easy as you were expecting, huh? For most of us, it isn’t. When we were kids it was all too easy to come up with thousands of things that we wanted to have, be and do. Now we struggle to come up with anything at all. Part of this difficulty comes from a fear of failure. Most of it, however, is simply a loss of imagination. When you were a child it was easier to stare out at the world and see it, not in it’s physical form, but in its unmanifested form. There’s a reason.

In EEG studies, Dr. Ervin Lazlo has found that children under the age of five stay in a constant state of alpha brainwaves. These are the same brainwaves that occur in adults when we meditate and connect with the universe. Children are in a constant state of connection and a constant state of imagination. They see the world not as it is, but as it could be. And that’s not some feel-good, Bobby Kennedy-esque slogan, I mean it literally. Children see the world in its unmanifested form! The reason adults feel as if they lose their imaginations as they get older is because of the shift in their brainwaves. As we grow up, our brains no longer work solely in an alpha state, but shift permanently into beta waves. It wasn’t that we fell out of practice or that the world took it away from us. It was a shift in consciousness, or away from consciousness, as we grew.

But the important question is, can we get our imaginations back again? The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it will take some time and effort to relearn what we forgot. I have devised a list, short but sweet, of ways to do just that:

1. Meditate - I have spent, and am still spending, a lot of time on the subject of meditation as I have yet to fully understand and utilize it. There have been times however, when my meditations have been wonderfully powerful tools. Learning to quiet the inner chatter of the mind and sit with rapt attention given to the Universe is invigorating. You come away from the experience witnessing brighter colors and heightened awareness. What also follows is a period of greater creativity. I personally find that my writing comes with limitless ease when I can relax my mind into this state.

Meditation is a means of stepping out of your own way and returning your brain naturally to its child-like state of alpha waves. It moves you from the world of manifested reality into the world of pure potential. It moves you, in essence, from the here and there into the everywhere. You connect into the Zero Point Field of possibility.

I wish I could tell you the best way to meditate, but I have yet to find it for myself. There are, however, no shortages of books and Internet articles that would be glad to detail any number of methods. Pick one and go with it. If it doesn’t do anything for you, try something new. Personally I enjoy sitting comfortably, closing my eyes and actively listening to the silence around me. When you actively listen, your mind cannot interject thoughts or judgments, it’s too busy listening to the unmanifested silence. There is power in that silence.

2. Seek To See Everything Differently - Every day, look around you and start to find ways in which the world could be other than it is. Right now, I’m sitting at my desk look over my computer at the ?Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? poster I brought back from London. Before I started this article, I took a moment to envision how it could be otherwise. Harry could grow horns, Hermione a mustache. I imagined the poster as painted by Dali. It was great fun and it only took a few seconds.

If you can make a habit of this sort of playful thinking in your free moments, it will become like weight training for your imagination; the more you use it, the stronger it will become. Don’t bog yourself down with trying to imagine your life getting better, or visualizing piles of money. That will come later, for now just have fun making the world a strange and wonderful place. No one has to know what you’re doing, just have a good time and see what you can come up with. You will probably surprise yourself with the level of clarity and creativity you will achieve.

3. Suspend Your Disbelief ? It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who described poetic faith as ?that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment? and I couldn’t put it better. The world has grown more and more cynical with the passing years and that has stunted our collective imagination. We no longer look around at our world and wonder what impossibilities we might make possible. Just think if man had accepted that we could never fly! Or that the atom was the smallest thing! Disbelief is like a virus that can infect you slowly but surely. Squash it now and reconnect with your childish side.

Next time someone tells you their idea, take a moment and suspend your disbelief even for the briefest of moments. Regardless of whether or not it changes your opinion of the situation, wonder what life would be like it their idea would work. Imagine all of the ways in which it could succeed and then make you judgment on its viability. The idea might indeed be ludicrous, but the seconds that you have taken to imagine it differently will change you drastically.

Once you can bring your imagination back to the forefront of your mind, you’ll have no trouble finding your passion. It will seem so clear, it will be ridiculous that you hadn’t thought of it earlier. This may take some time, so be prepared. Let yourself feel easy and free, let your passion flow to you in its own perfect time. I know that this is easier said than done, but no one said living your life on purpose was easy. It will come only when you relinquish your need for it.

Letting It Be

Now that you know what you wish to pursue, at least what you want to pursue right now, let it happen. This is by far the hardest thing you will ever do, but it will seem so easy once you’ve done it. If your goal and passion is to become an oil painter, you must let yourself paint not for the fame or the glory of it, but for the joy of painting. Let your talents flow from you with nothing else in mind but to give them perfect form to give them away to others.

It is when we become attached to the outcome of our works that we find them to be ineffective. When your mind gets bogged down in the ideas of money and success and fame while you’re trying to create something beautiful, this cannot help but taint it. When you focus on the outcome of your actions, you live in the future and seek something better than you already have. You struggle for something you feel you need, which demonstrates a lack. This only brings you more things to struggle over and more things to lack. Remember, that which you think about expands. If you keep your mind focused upon the joy of creation and sheer simplicity of your work, you avoid these thoughts of need and lack. When you accept your now as it is, see it as absolutely perfect and want nothing more from it, you will suddenly being to receive more.

To being to work from this mindset, you must first ask the question, “what good may I do with this project?” If it is a painting, imagine who you are painting it for and the point of painting it for them. What do you wish to give to them? This is important because it is in the giving that you will see your creation come to life. For me, my creation is this website. I offer up these writings because I enjoy writing them and I feel that I might be able to help those who feel lost or trapped in their own lives. When you stop your resistance to your life as it is and your fears as they are, you open up the door for genuine miracle making.

Embrace the passion that you have found as an act of selfless creation and begin to ask nothing of your work but simply to flow through you with ease and joy. Beyond that, let it go where it will. What you give will always come back to you in greater numbers than you empowered it with.

A Life on Purpose

Your life doesn’t have to be lived by the rules of some unseen fate. You have the choice to live your life any way you feel. If you want to deny your passions or refuse to seek them out, there is nothing wrong with that. Your life will continue on the way it is now. There will always be good times, they will never leave you. You will always have enough to get by and you may never feel you lack for anything. But if you are one of Us, who cannot conceive of an ordinary life, then I encourage you to follow me down the path of passionate creation and unabashed giving. It is not always an easy road and it is not always a pleasant road, but you will find that you can create real magic in your life by tapping into the power of your pure potential and living it every day to its fullest.

Posted in Being Proactive, Consciousness, Creativity, Fear, Goal Setting, Happiness, Motivation, Providing Value, Self Improvement, Success, The Mind