Awareness and Purpose

Well, there is officially a “movement” going on about finding one’s life purpose. Jim White, author of What’s My Purpose? and creator of The Circle of Success, a customized, yearlong leadership and management transformation process has launched a blog about finding one’s life purpose. He’s looking for a million people who want to commit to finding their life’s purpose. I was the 92nd person to comment, and to date, there are 218 comments; all from people affirming that they are committed to the same goal. He will host a free teleseminar this Saturday, July 12, and it proves to be interesting.

What’s my purpose?

In order for a person (let’s say you) to arrive at a state of being where you can find your purpose (and live it, to boot!), there has to be awareness. This kind of awareness is internal, but it can start with external things. If you find yourself living on automatic, it will be beneficial to begin to develop a new habit of watching your thoughts, and even watching what you do with things (like the toothpaste cap, your keys, or the top to your peanut butter). If you realize that you’re thinking about stuff unrelated to what you’re doing while you perform daily tasks, (and then just focus on the task at hand) you’ll lose less things!

Zen philosophy: When you’re sitting, just sit; when you’re eating, just eat; and so on. According to Zen, existence is found in the silence of the mind (no-mind), beyond the chatter of our internal dialog.

Did you know that even the act of acknowledging your troubling thoughts can help you feel better?

The zen tradition focuses on bringing awareness to the breath during meditation. This, in turn, brings more awareness of the types of thoughts and reactions you’re having throughout the day. You can begin to actually watch thoughts, label them, choose to follow them or drop them. Wow, with thousands of thoughts happening during the day, this seems tedious, and lots of people give up after being overwhelmed.

There is a method of meditation, however, that is not so tedious, and can help you gain awareness like a Zen Master. It uses binaural beats to train the brain as you wear headphones and listen to a soundtrack, and after time your brainwave patterns become more symmetrical, meaning that you are calmer and not as easily swept into drama as before. I’ve already written a testimonial about my experience with Holosync here.  It really works for me. If you want to skip my testimonial, and read about Holosync from the source, here it is: Centerpointe.