Living On Purpose

The more I estimate houses for gutter replacement, the more I liken rain to thoughts, and gutters to critical thinking skills. I can’t help it.

You know, it drove me nuts that when my husband first started his rain gutter company, all he would talk about when driving through residential areas was gutters. He would point to that house and say, “They need new gutters.” He would point to another house while driving 35 mph and notice that it didn’t have gutters at all. Or he could even notice when downspouts were missing from the gutter installation.  This is selective vision at its finest.

Now I’m doing it, too. “Oh, their gutters are leaking. ” “Sheesh, none of their neighbors have 3×4 downspouts, but they do.”

In theory, you need gutters on your house to safely direct the rainwater away from your foundation.  Water has a way of damaging concrete, especially standing water or constantly dripping water that forms puddles at your foundation. Without gutters, before you know it, you’ve got cracks in the walls and your front porch has sunk several inches.

Critical thinking skills are needed to help your decision making abilities. Meditation is needed to help quiet the mind and direct thoughts.  If you let your mind run amok with every distracting thought, you’ll damage your values, ethics, morals, etc. (Don’t they call these traits a good foundation? See where I’m going…)

Gutters are installed on a house near the end of construction, yet they are critical to guarding the safety of the first thing constructed: the foundation and walls. Critical thinking skills are developed late in youth; I’d guess around the time a child becomes a teenager or a little before that.  It is critical thinking and meditation together that actually guard your mind from falling prey to false logic. Cracks in the “foundation” of the mind appear as a mismatch between values and behavior, inappropriate acting out, inappropriate risk-taking, inability to deal with anger and fear constructively, which then could lead to depression.

Guiding our thoughts is like directing rainwater safely away from the foundation of a house. The rain falls on everything indiscriminately. We all have all sorts of thoughts. Some are happy, naughty, fearful, angry, loving, regretful. Just as you’re not afraid of the rain (uh, unless it’s acid rain but that’s another analogy altogether…), don’t be afraid of your thoughts. Develop your watcher during meditation and then continue watching your thoughts with curiosity during the day.  You’d be surprised how much emotional progress you can make by simply making observations about your thought process.  The rain gutters don’t judge the rain that flows through them. The purpose of a gutter is to reduce the stress to the foundation. The purpose of meditation as well as critical thinking is to reduce stressful thinking.

Gutters full of muck

Sometimes leaves and muck fill up the gutters and stop the flow of water. You clean the gutters out and then rainwater can once again be directed safely away from the house instead of spilling over the top of the gutter reservoir. Respectively, our mental health and emotional health needs attention every once in a while, too.  Clean out the muck every once in a while and you’ll be happier in the long run!

Long before I started this Living on Purpose blog, I had an internal mantra: “I am not my thoughts.” I knew in a conceptual way that thoughts were things and they were not the same as ME. For instance, I don’t have to believe I am a bad person if I notice a “bad” thought float through my brain. I don’t have to believe my thoughts. Most of them are not even my own, anyway, if you buy the concept that the brain is like a radio thus making thoughts like stations.

This was only the groundwork, or a foundation, for some more “unlearning” to take place. As we grow up, we learn the types of behaviors that we can do to get us what we want. Then when we realize these behaviors don’t serve us anymore, we have to drop them or stay stuck. I like to think that I’m in the middle of “unlearning” how to behave.

Byron Katie, author of Loving What Is, recently said in a teleconference interview: “Smoking quit me, overeating quit me.” Why? Because she faced her own truth and questioned her own thoughts. She looked long and hard at her own beliefs and realized that it’s optional to believe debilitating thoughts about yourself or others. Once chronically depressed, she now describes her life as “heaven.” She has done the work of self introspection and now teaches others how to do the same so they can experience freedom from toxic thoughts and beliefs, too.

Last year I interviewed Carol Skolnick about her work as a facilitator of The Work of Byron Katie. If this topic interests you, I invite you to read the interview here:

Interview with a facilitator of The Work

Here is the main Byron Katie web site, full of video interviews of people going through the self introspection process:

The Work of Byron Katie

On this resources page, find the sidebar that says “downloads” and print the worksheets there. Have several “Judge Your Neighbor” worksheets available and the next time you’re mad or irritable or depressed, fill it out and do The Work for yourself!

Resources page at The Work

I’d like to pass on a great post from the Manifest Mastermind blog about being on purpose at work. Thanks for finding me on Twitter, Manifest Mastermind!

Working and Being on Purpose Manifest Mastermind, co-creating your dreams and desires.

In summary, we need to check in to our internal guidance system, also known as our emotional guidance system, to find out if we are on purpose in our work. No one else can tell us if what we are doing is right for us.

“You  know your purpose when you have a clear understanding of how you want to feel and what experiences contribute to those feelings.”

This statement, from the Mastermind blog post, summarizes what I heard countless experts tell me on the Living on Purpose teleseminar. First, get clear about what you want! Block out a morning or afternoon to really focus on what your best day would look and feel like. Write down what experiences you want from your life. Ask for certain feelings to come about like this: (the following statements were notes from telesummit call with Hans Christian King.)

I would like the experience of joy in creating artwork please.

I would like the experience of satisfaction in my means of employment please.

You get the gist. Change it up how you like it.  So here I am on Saturday, feeling trapped by my own negative thoughts. I know like I know I’m not supposed to be replaying these thoughts over again, but they’ve taken hold! I’ve tried distraction by housework, music, internet browsing. But the thing that really changed my negative mindset was writing that statement above. It’s all about focusing on what I do want. It’s such a trap to re-play what we don’t want, isn’t it!

So try it next time you’re stuck in a rut. Write down what you really would like to experience.

Since I am the Live on Purpose woman, I figured, “How could I NOT listen to the Living on Purpose Telesummit” Adoley Odunton is hosting? I think it has been two weeks already (halfway done). It’s a mixed bag of speakers all adapting or trying to adapt their particular message to the theme of Living on Purpose.

Here are some of my favorite speakers so far.

Barbara DeAngelis.

I had not heard her name before. Her presentation, presence, and personal power blew me away. She has been my absolute favorite speaker so far and I’d recommend her books, lectures, and consultations if you are searching for some clarity. She asked, “Who shows up when you show up?” She is referencing your vibrational being, as well as the emotional baggage you’re carrying. Then she stated, “To make sure YOU show up, do the work!” She is referencing the emotional work of healing old wounds, clearing old emotional blockages, and clarifying what you really want in your life. Your body is like your radio, picking up broadcasts from the infinite. If your radio is rusted and the batteries are dead, you won’t be able to pick up any signal at all. If you keep your radio in good working order and it is clean, with new batteries, you’ll be able to easily tune in to the messages being sent to you. (Your life purpose, your goals, your values, what you should do next…). Barbara thanked us for letting her have another opportunity to give away her “bundles.” She asked us to re-define our measure of success and purpose to this: When you can give away your bundles, you’re a success. What are bundles? They are the messages we download (from our higher self? from God?) that get transmuted into our life purpose. They are the inimitable message of truth that we can pass on to other seekers.

From me, Jessica:

Yes, we must all do the work. It’s quite uncomfortable at times to face our shadow self. But I wonder what’s worse: the fear of facing our shadow or the pain manifested in our body from never facing the shadow and letting it consume us. Trust me, in the long run it’s more painful to never face those painful memories and emotional wounds.

Raphael Cushnir. I had never heard his name before, either, but his presence and clarity blew me away.  He’s like the spokesman for the emotional guidance system. He calls it “emotional connection.” When you are facing an emotionally painful situation, if you can learn to embrace the pain and really feel it instead of sweeping it under the rug in an effort to hide it, you’ll  pass through the pain and it will be able to change YOU for the better. Emotional connection is a rarely taught skill (from his site):

“Mere emotional intelligence is not enough. For maximum benefit we must directly and consistently connect with our emotions. In particular, we need to connect with the emotions we routinely avoid, resist, or attempt to dismiss. It’s these emotions that possess the key to our greatest goals. And learning to connect with them is a rarely taught but essential skill.”

Raphael was able to speak eloquently and succinctly about some difficult topics.  Sight-unseen, I’d recommend his books to anyone. Even though I was at the laundromat during his call, his message was so important to me that I grabbed a paper and pen to take notes:

We are either in acceptance or resistance to our emotions. If you try to change for the better when you are in resistance, it will fail. Emotions are messages sent from your brain to be experienced in the body. We need to take the elevator downstairs to connect with our emotions. It can’t be done solely in the brain through knowledge of an emotion! If you try to control what you feel regarding a particular emotion, you’re already resisting! We don’t get to choose what we will feel or how long we’ll feel it; we can only choose to accept it or resist it. When we resist a particular emotion, it remains unfelt. A trick that unfelt emotions use to find their way to your body is to act like a magnet and draw people and situations close to you in order to bring up again and again feelings we vowed not to feel. Ah, misery! You can be sure that underlying all repetitive emotional patterns in your life is a resisted emotion.

Here’s how to recognize and release resistance

1. Be aware of an emotional contraction in the body. (pain of some sort)
2. Put gentle and close attention on it. Allow physical discomfort to be experienced.
3. Let the emotion move through you so it can dissipate.

Your attention is the surfer. The emotion is the wave. Emotions are the royal road to spiritual realization. Move from resistance to acceptance!

From me, Jessica:

Through my life, I’ve often toyed with the question:  ”What comes first, emotional healing or physical healing?” These two speakers corroborate with my conclusion that emotional wounds must first be healed before the physical body can reach optimum health. I still bat the debate around in my head every once in a while, like tonight. Perhaps healing the physical body first can become the catalyst for emotional wounds to offer themselves up for potential healing. What do you think?

I was watching videos of EFT technique this morning and I came across a video compilation of testimonials for EFT. It shows three people who have experienced relief from long term depression after working with an EFT practitioner. EFT is short for Emotional Freedom Technique, and it is a system of tapping on specific points of the face and hands. I am only just learning about it for the first time this year. This video fits right in with the aim of Live on Purpose, and that’s why I’m including it here. It’s a technique to dissolve the intensity of emotions surrounding your issues.

Here is a video with an explanation of how to do EFT from an advanced practitioner.

I have recently found the author SARK, which is an acronym for Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy. So many people who participated in the call where I met her were raving about how she changed their lives; so I decided to go to the library to check out her books. I found two: Transformation Soup and Succulent Wild Woman. She’s authored plenty more, and all are hand written (that’s right, handwriting! She didn’t choose a font, unless someone decided to turn her handwriting into a font and call it SARK) with little drawings interspersed through the pages.

If you are on a healing journey in your life, I’d recommend her book Transformation Soup: Healing for the Splendidly Imperfect written in 2000. It starts out:

My mother is no longer the problem…now what?

And SARK explains about how she dedicated her early life to blaming her mother for her problems. She experienced abuse as a child and spent 9 years in psychotherapy on her own healing journey. At one point her therapist suggested that she stop talking about her mother during therapy! Her response:

I felt like I’d fallen out of a plane without a parachute, and finally managed to say, “What will we talk about then?”

Transformation Soup then goes on to explore the different healing modalities SARK has come across as she describes them with wit, wisdom, humor and pun-ny drawings. This book will help you during your own healing journey, for sure.

Succulent Wild Woman: Dancing with Your Wonder-full Self from 1997 is a book about exploring your creativity from all angles, but there are bits of everything in this book, and it’s quite hard to say what it’s about! Journaling, love, self-acceptance, erotic robots, feeling safe, being alone, how to paint, healing, motherhood, body image….this book really is an exploration.

On the call from thewomenmasters.com, SARK said, “All growth comes in spirals and layers.” That’s what I was aiming for when I designed my spiral shell wallpaper. (Use that link to go to the main wallpapers page and scroll to the 2 with shells on them: the 3rd and 4th from the top.) SARK clarifies what self-love is: you loving you so you can love the world more. Also, she said she supports people learning about their biochemistry as a way to heal oneself.

That’s what I was going for when I wrote Sad For No Reason. People go to therapy for years and years; some show great progress while others show little to none. Why? Is it the extent of the damage done in the first place during tender formative years? Or is the lack of progress due to biochemical deficiencies that short-circuit our brains’ ability to heal iteslf and accomplish creative problem solving? This is what I explore in Sad For No Reason. What I found astounded me and I hope it will astound you, too. When given the appropriate amino acid supplements and when the diet is cleaned up, the very people who struggled with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or irritability for years with no progress during psychotherapy, could suddenly make leaps and bounds of progress in counseling.

Back to SARK! She has now become the self-proclaimed master of re-framing problems; so much so that she jokingly said her next store will be called “SARK’s ReFrame Shop”. You stop in, tell her your problem, and she’ll re-frame it into some kind of opportunity. That’s the trick; to find the opportunity within your current problems. So, say your creative dreams out loud, hug yourself daily, use her web site PlanetSark and her daily inspiration telephone line (1-415-546-3742 for a recorded message from SARK) and continue your journey to becoming a Succulent Wild Woman (or man).

Depression is sometimes the result of unresolved anger. Anger can be tricky, because sometimes it manifests as constant crying, so you think you’re sad or depressed. This was the case for me, when I was in my teens and twenties.  I thought I never got angry. However, I cried many times a month.  Today I had a tiny breakthrough, and I want to share the general process with you, without the details.

You can have a staring contest at your anger until it backs down. I just figured out that I spent a decade changing my behavior to avoid my husband’s anger and I’ve been expecting him to do the same for me, like it’s noble or something. My insight is that when I get angry, I expect others to say, “I can’t stand to see you this way; if it means that much to you, I’ll stop the behavior.”

That’s how it happens on TV, right?

But no such thing has happened in my life, yet I still continue feeling anger when I see behavior I don’t like in my husband. If my anger does not change his behavior, isn’t it just hurting ME? Isn’t it just driving him to secrecy? My family leaves me alone when I’m angry. Who wants to cross paths with a charging rhino? Nobody comes to pat my back and make me feel better; that’s up to me. So, here’s how I did it today:

I looked at my anger like it was an object. I became curious about the anger itself. Could I see any patterns? Was this anger helping me? Oh, I knew there were four questions I was supposed to ask….what the heck were they? I couldn’t remember them. But I remembered that husband and I were both expecting our anger to change someone else’s behavior. By looking at my anger this way, I shifted my focus from the person/behavior I was angry AT to the anger itself. Then it left. My anger simply dissolved. It took me 20 minutes. Now I can focus on the rest of my day.

Working with anger this way to dissolve it does not mean I endorse the behavior that got me riled up in the first place. It doesn’t make me an enabler to that behavior, either. The phrase, “I’m in charge of my anger” doesn’t mean that I have to sweep it under the rug, hoping it never comes out. It does mean that I have a responsibility to turn my anger into something constructive in my life and not let it gnaw at my mind and knot my muscles for weeks.

I think it’s time for a massage.

Nearly a year ago I began the Live on Purpose blog on April 27, 2008, with a post about Christopher Reeve, who truly lived a hero’s life. In the post, I was trying to define what I think living on purpose is all about:

After starring as the hero in the movie Superman, he was injured in a terrible accident and became paralyzed from the neck down. He struggled daily to regain control over his limbs. It took six years for him to have control over his index finger. Of course he suffered from bouts of depression during that time. He explained that he has good days and down days like everyone else. During his journey, however, he and his wife used their fame and their funds to start the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation for Spinal Cord Injury, which has helped thousands of patients with spinal cord injuries. So even though he suffered a debilitating accident, he turned it around and found his purpose, and lived purposefully as best as he could.

This weekend I had a chance to meet a survivor who has embraced the very thing that took away the life he knew, and then turned it into purpose.

Major league baseball pitcher Dave Dravecky attends the same church as I do, and he spoke to the congregation during service this past week. Dave Dravecky had just begun his major league career for the San Francisco Giants when he was diagnosed with soft tissue cancer in his pitching arm.  He went through radiation treatments, hoping he could make a comeback, and in ten months, he did. He got on the mound again to pitch after his cancer went into remission. But later, his arm snapped as he threw a pitch, and he was carried off the field in a stretcher, never to return. His pitching arm and shoulder were amputated on June 18, 1991, and Dave was left with no sense of worth at all.

What do you do when all you ever wanted was to play major league baseball and cancer steals your future away from you? What do you do when everything you thought you were gets ripped out from under you? How do you define your true worth?

Dave and his wife fell into debilitating depression.

Dave battled his demons, his shadow, and could not understand how to show the deep emotions that surfaced in a healthy way.

Dave told the congregation this week that he was raised catholic, but that didn’t mean he knew what Christianity was about. He said, “I was challenged to think beyond this thing called religion.” He took up his faith, and learned how to draw strength from the Lord, to pray, and to ask for prayer, and then he “ascended out of the valley of suffering.”

He was able to turn it all around through his faith. Now he travels across the country re-telling his tragic story and offering hope to those who are suffering. His closing statement was, “Cancer has been a blessing in my life.” It was the cancer that helped him grow spiritually.

Dave started the Outreach of Hope, a non-profit resource organization that strives to offer knowledge about cancer and depression as well as prayer for those who are suffering.

One of the missions of the Outreach of Hope is to provide resources that address the spiritual and emotional issues of suffering. We desire to make these resources available to those on the front lines of encouragement who can then pass them on to the individuals and families they serve in their medical office, support group, hospital or community.

Last week I intuited a quote, “Notice what gives you your sense of self-worth. Be careful that it comes from your soul, not the outside world.”
Dave Dravecky said, “My worth is not in what I do, it’s in who I am.”

It’s an important distinction. Please, look at your reactions carefully. Ladies, is your self-worth wrapped up in how well you can cook dinner? Is it wrapped up in your willingness to help/please others at your own expense? Men, is your self-worth wrapped up in how much money you can bring home? Is it derived from your ability to provide for your family? You’ll know where your self-worth is because if that one thing is taken away from you, you’ll feel deflated and worthless. Don’t wait! Amend the situation now. Make sure you spend time in meditation upon your spirit, or upon your God. You are always worthwhile as a human being. It doesn’t matter if you’re recovering from surgery or fully able-bodied.

I offer this inspirational story as an example of the flowering of purpose in a life racked with pain. It CAN happen. Please, don’t stop looking.

As the “Live on Purpose” lady, I come across all sorts of interesting projects, books, and blogs related to purpose. Today I learned about an ongoing project called “Project Purpose” by Patti Roney from a Twitter friend Dyann Lyon.

So far, the project asks participants to show gratitude every morning by listing out the things we are grateful for. This creates a warm glow in the heart and sets the stage for the rest of the project; to use creativity and hand write letters to people in our lives every day.

Give it a try, and if you can’t commit to writing letters every day for 90 days, just try it for a week.  See if you feel lighter in spirit by doing this. As Dyann Lyon says,

“It is very hard to get depressed, negative or down when you are in a constant state of gratitude!”

Project Purpose by Patti Roney

Gratitude Room by Dyann Lyon

I had the opportunity to see the documenary, “Processed People.” The message is simple: to have good health, eat food, not food-like things, and exercise.” And oh, how hard that advice is to follow in today’s society!

Just look at the line-up of DOCTORS who were interviewed for this film! Processed People: Experts

The obesity specialist doctor has observed that when people are put into a controlled environment, namely his clinic, and they eat a healthy diet and exercise every day, then health problems disappear. Cholesterol drops. Blood triglyceride levels drop. Diabetes goes away. Cardiovascular health returns. How completely simple: eat a plant-based diet and exercise to be healthy. Yet it’s difficult to carry out!

Experts in the film also noted that every system in the body is improved by a proper diet, including one’s MENTAL HEALTH. Depression is often cleared up when processed foods are removed from the diet.

A processed food is one that has had all the natural nutrients stripped out of it, and then synthetic vitamins are added back in. That would be anything bleached, like white flour and white sugar. And that would be anything pasteurized, like commercial milk. What does that leave us with? What can we eat now that 90% of our daily intake is now no better than poison?

That leaves whole foods. Yes, to reduce your depression, or even to make it disappear, you will help your therapist greatly if you just eat whole foods. Then you will be thinking clearly, free of false moods brought on by nutritional imbalances and deficiencies, so that your therapist can help you make real progress! I have a deep feeling that just like judges who say, “I hope to never see you in my court again!” therapists also will be happy to help you through your problem with a send-off like this, “I hope you don’t have to come back! Have good health!” (Although I can’t vouch for all therapists. I would hope they got into the profession to really HELP people move through problems)

Here is a quote from Processed People that I thought was eye-opening:

You either spend time exercising and eating right, or you spend time in the health care system trying to treat the problems that resulted from you NOT spending the time to exercise and eat right.

To your strong will power!

p.s. I almost forgot to talk about the reason I named this post “trends in medical care.” The movie made a point that our health care system has failed us.  It is now nothing more than a disease care service. It does nothing to educate the public how to eat right and exercise. It promotes taking pharmaceuticals to cure all ails, but doing that is simply treating the symptom and not going to the root of the issue and really curing the illness. Doctors, especially the big disease specialists, are getting rich off of doing procedures, not from giving goodwill classes to educate their patients how to live healthy. It is up to each individual to take charge of his/her health and health issues through research and knowledge.