Living On Purpose

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.

Aaaah, that was a month just for me. I finished the Living on Purpose telesummit hosted by Adoley Odunton.  I don’t know how she did it, but she lined up some incredible speakers for this month long conference (mostly 1 call per day, but some days had 2 calls) about living on purpose. Each interviewee was asked “How do you define living on purpose?” And each answer was different! I witnessed Adoley grow and mature in her confidence as an interviewer and I myself did a lot of learning and introspecting.

After hearing over twenty speakers reflect upon purpose, I’ve come to understand it better. I started this blog by stating that it’s not as important to know your “life purpose” as it is to make your daily decisions with awareness. I still believe this, yet now it’s much more refined.

Here is a mashup of different answers from this series; I love it!

You’re living on purpose when:

• your core values match your daily behaviors
• you feel you are living “in the flow”
• you’re taking action on your values
• you have isolated and learned to  express your passions (like dance, art, teaching, science, comedy, meditation…)
• you give service and value to the world
• you feel you’re growing and evolving as a human
• your heart is in coherence
• you are living in alignment with your soul values
• you are doing what you love
• you are living in alignment with the reason your soul incarnated
• you are growing into the fullness of who you are
• you surrender to the purpose for which you were born
• you are connected with your guidance

As you can see, many of the speakers who answered  ”what does living on purpose mean to you” talk about alignment. We’ve got to feel we have a yardstick by which we measure our daily decisions. We use this proverbial yardstick to find out if our behavior is in alignment with our core values, our passions, our reason for coming to Earth.

Even if you haven’t given yourself a “statement of life purpose,” (and it’s not at all a prerequisite for living an exquisitely beautiful passionate life,) you use your inner guidance that you’ve already set up to gauge your daily behavior.

Many of the presenters spoke highly of meditation. When you go into a quiet space in your mind, you allow yourself to connect with your guidance. The regular practice of meditation can help you clarify your goals, passions, and purpose — simply by being quiet! The funniest one-liner from the entire month: I came out of the womb with existential angst! From Marci Shimoff, author of Happy for No Reason, a study of 100 unconditionally happy people. Marci (who I recommend in my book suggestions and in my ebook) said that she didn’t get the titles for 2 of her books until she set aside some time for a silent retreat, which was completely against her talkative nature. But there, in the silence, she could see what she should do next, and the book Happy for No Reason was born.

Another big theme I saw running through the speakers’ messages was to learn how to ask for what you want. When you get very clear with yourself about what you would like to experience, you are helping yourself to get it. It makes sense! If all I do is complain about how much I dislike this or that or him or her, I am reinforcing to myself my dislikes. I pull people in to my life who also love to complain, and we can commiserate together instead of planning our fantastic alternative lives.

At least three of the speakers spoke highly of hypnosis. Ninety percent of teachers ask students to do affirmations to help change their lives, but subconscious beliefs hinder the conscious mind from making those changes. (from Jeneth Blackert, New Wealth Teacher) Dr. Robert Anthony described our mind like a captain and his crew. The captain is the conscious mind and the crew is the subconscious mind. I would guess that mutiny is when you can’t tell yourself what to do for any reward in the world using your conscious mind because your crew has run amok! Hypnosis, then, would be the method to talk to the crew directly, bypassing the critical factor gatekeeper of your mind.

Your intention makes things happen, and gratitude is the fastest way to bring about positive change in any situation.

Now I can understand why people extol the benefits of finding a mission statement for their lives. I always considered it overkill, like trying to extract too much meaning from a hot dog or something. (Make me one with everything! ba-dum-bum.) Knowing what your purpose in life is seems grandiose at first, but if you can identify what your passions are and what your values are, and what you really want out of life using tools like meditation and/or hypnosis and/or a life coach, then your “life’s purpose” begins to crystallize. Once you have that, all your subsequent decisions get easier because you suddenly have a yardstick!

By the way, I added a new widget to my sidebar on the right. During this series of conference calls, I was inspired to design something that would sum up what it means to live on purpose. See my print on demand store in the link on the sidebar or here, using the domain I bought just for this idea: http://www.iamlivingonpurpose.com

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’ve discovered that owning my own business changes the way I approach the job itself.  It’s really my husband’s business, but I’ve taken a lot of responsibility for it.  Today I spoke with another business owner, and he began complaining about how most employees don’t care about anything. He meant that the employees don’t take care to make sure his business grows or is viewed as reputable.  It’s natural, I’ve seen it all my life. An employee just has a job; he’s “only working there,” and only cares that he gets his paycheck.

It has been said many times before by many a motivational speaker that if you treat your job as if you only work there, you’ll never advance. If you give everything you do in your job 100% effort, not only will you gain a good reputation, you’ll probably be eligible for promotion sooner.

Let me tie this concept together with personal growth. If you go through your life blaming others for your troubles, and not taking responsibility for your feelings, you’ll slow your personal progress. That’s like treating your body and your life as if you “only work there” or are “only living there for now.”

Owning your feelings and owning your decisions in life helps fast-forward your personal advancement. If you treat your body and your life like you’re running your own business, you’re bound to take better care of yourself. And part of owning a business is doing the distasteful tasks like bookkeeping, checking in on the bank account, and trying to figure out where you’re spending your money and if you’re making a profit. Well, you’ll be making a “profit” in your life if you do the mental bookkeeping tasks of reviewing your habitual behaviors, finding out how you waste your energy, and understanding how/why you make your decisions.  Use your emotional guidance system to tell you if you’re in the black or red of your emotional life. (That just means you check in and evaluate how often you feel bad and how often you feel good.)

That was my quick insight for tonight, as I drove home at 8 p.m. because our work truck broke down and I was catching up on lots of office details. If you live it like you own it, everyone will see the difference in your perserverance and dedication, and your confidence will rise, too.

As a few of you know, I’ve taken a break from Live on Purpose while I sort out some things with my home life and the family business. I had an amazing transformational experience at Big Mind (a method of self-inquiry) and I’ve also started a new level of Holosync brain entrainment to further my transformation.

Holosync has a way of making issues disappear, whether you knew about the issue or not. Doing Big Mind with a facilitator is a great way to bring light to issues you didn’t know you had, or to the reasons you have the issues you know about.

For instance, during the Big Mind process, I realized I had big issues around the subject of caring. Suddenly I remembered all the men in my life who had told me that no one in the world could care about me as much as they did. Why did each of my boyfriends say that to me? Perhaps I had not been able to care about myself; perhaps I had neglected the art of self care. Perhaps when I was a small girl in a very impressionable age, I made a coping method to deal with my mother’s chronic depression. Maybe that coping method was to internalize the idea that it’s not safe to do anything to upset mother for fear of her threats of suicide or her mood swings. This led to me giving up my own sense of self in order to be the peacekeeper and not upset mother. This way of thinking may have worked in the moment as a child, but I’ve outgrown it now and it no longer serves me. It’s way past time to slough off the old way of thinking about my Self.

I see that radical self care seems to be very popular in the media now. There are books about it, seminars and workshops about it, public conference calls about it. So what does it mean to engage in self care? Where’s the line between self indulgence and self care? I think it begins with listening to your soul; with getting still long enough to hear the faint cries of the Self to the self. Where have you compromised your values? Where did you stuff your talents? One message I’ve been getting over and over is that of talent. If you use your God given talents, it will free your soul, but if you stuff your talent and neglect to use it, it may eat away at your soul.

And this brings me to my present challenge. My talent may be producing fine art that explains my spiritual awareness, but I don’t make time for it because of the busy-ness of the business. Or my talent may be in writing, or designing, or any of the other things I dearly love but don’t engage in because of the family business. So I’ve decided to drop the drama of deliberating and just start taking baby steps. My life will work itself out. Up until now I hadn’t owned my position of admin in the family guttering business because my heart was elsewhere. In these past months I decided to fully own it and take steps to do the job much better than before, despite my distaste for it. I’ve hired an accountant, an organizer, gotten an office and a smart phone, and devised a spreadsheet file to help keep track of work orders. We’ve had a banner summer and fall.

For now my self care is listening to Holosync, taking time to exercise, and stepping away from situations where I know I’ve lost my center. I use my emotional guidance system to make decisions on whether I should do something or not. I sketch every once in a while, and for now that’s good enough. What about you? Do you engage in conscious self care?

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.

As I was listening to the recorded interview of Micheal Neal and Bill Cumming on The Big Chat, I was reminded of a blog post I made in the summer of 2005.

Bill was telling a story about his mentor, and one day he had made a statement to the effect of, “I hate bigots.” His mentor Mr. Boothby quickly corrected him: “That would make you the problem. Unless we learn to love the bigot this (struggle) will never change.” Every group of people needs to know that their value in the world is a given; it does not have to be achieved.

Here is the story I remembered upon hearing this:

You People from my older blog The Pixellator: Up Close, 2005

I took a customer call today at work and input the sale. Once it processed, the customer engaged me in a conversation. He told me all about how A.A. had changed his life, that he’s on a mission to “convert” more alcoholics, and how he, in the back of his mind, kind of wished there were more alcoholics so he could teach A.A. methods to them. Then he went on to describe how he thinks Christians can never understand the depths of despair and darkness that the worst alcoholics endure, and he said, “You people will never understand…”. I had not disclosed to him what my religious beliefs were. I asked him point blank, even interrupting him mid-sentence, “who do you mean by ‘you people’?”

He replied, “Could I call it namby-pamby Christians?”

I stopped listening to him, but he went rambling on, and I signaled for my coworker to make the phone ring!

Now, here is my reply, which I seem to always think of way too late to be of any use.

Once a person allows his mind to separate himself from others by classifying people into groups, he becomes blinded to the fact that we are all unified as a group called Humans.

We all like to rationalize about how people are. What that does is allow us to distance ourselves from the incredibly hard work of self-criticism. Please, everyone, when you catch yourself thinking, “you people,” let that be a signal to yourself that you have some introspection to do!

This little story still rings true for me; no matter the differences between two groups of people, as long as they separate themselves into “us” vs. “them” our dualistic, therefore combative, world-view will dominate.

I have been interacting with some teenagers in recent years, and some of them seem to think that “respect” has to be earned. As in: someone else has to do or be something worthy for them to give their respect. Perhaps that’s true in gangsta movies, where the druglord uses domination tactics to intimidate people into submission, but it’s not really respect; it’s fear.

I think respect is something you give to all humans by virtue of being alive. Admiration is earned.

A person’s value, their self-worth, is not to be tied up in the things they have or do, it’s just a given. Your value to the world is intrinsic to you, by virtue of being a human.

So, back to the us and them mentality.

Why do I have introspection to do when I blame another group for the problems in the world?

When you put it this way, isn’t it a little clearer that “us and them” is another version of the blame game? And when we blame others for our problems, we are sidestepping our personal responsibility to own our problems. Blame mentality is easier on the mind of the accuser than introspection.

This blog post does not offer solutions to anybody’s problems. I’m simply offering a new view: take the shift in mentality to look inside yourself first. See if you’re genuine, or elitist, or judgemental, or whatever. Then watch that part of you, don’t condemn it.

During the past several weeks, I have been introducing you to a few outstanding individuals who are doing big things towards living a purposeful life. Do you remember these two?

Michael Neill and his Genius Catalyst web site and Feel Happy Now book and movement.

Bill Cummins and his “What one person can do” program and Boothby Institute.

These two speakers will be leading a free webinar on Tuesday the 19th at 11 am pacific.  Don’t worry if you’re at work during that time, because a recorded audio will be sent to registered participants. I would like you to go register right now to hear these awesome speakers for free. Even if you can’t free your schedule during that time slot, go register. Here is the information about the call:

The Big Chat Presents…

a free, LIVE Webinar

with Michael Neil,  Bill Cumming and YOU
TUESDAY, MAY 19TH, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern

for a conversation about LIVING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

• How does one need to think in order to be successful in any economy?
• What is the key to feeling peaceful no matter what is going on around you?
• What are the brilliant problem solving approaches used by two master coaches?

Based on questions about what is most important to you right now….

Register here for the Big Chat Webinar and you’ll get the webinar details and special code to join.

You can join via the web or phone and the call will include live Questions and Answers with two brilliant coaches!

This call will be recorded, and will be made available at no charge to everyone registered.

Overcoming fear seems to be the topic of the week, as The Women Masters conference call was on living a fearless life, and on a separate blog Happy Lotus, Nadia isolated the movie Defending Your Life as one that masterfully deals with the topic of overcoming fears.

Wikipedia introduces fear:   Fear should be distinguished from the related emotional state of anxiety, which typically occurs without any external threat. Additionally, fear is related to the specific behaviors of escape and avoidance, whereas anxiety is the result of threats which are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable. Bill Tancer’s top ten list of fears as culled from search engine keywords consisted of flying, heights, clowns, intimacy, death, rejection, people, snakes, success, and driving.  In general, people appear to be most afraid of two things: the threat of pain or death, and the threat of social rejection or isolation.

I think it is fear of  “the threat of social rejection or isolation” that drives us all to adopt strange and dysfunctional coping skills. We’re quirky. We have baggage. We are eccentric. We are trying to feel as though we fit in to something. Isn’t the entire field of counseling/therapy devoted to helping people get over their fears?

The web site that was introduced to me this week on The Women Masters call was Fearless Living by Rhonda Britton. I had never heard of her before, even though she’s managed to appear on Oprah several times, she’s written four books, and she has a daytime reality drama, Starting Over. (I don’t watch very much daytime TV!) But I know just from the short bit I heard from her that she is authentic! In fact, getting to your authenticity was a big topic in her call. How can I live authentically if I’m stuck battling my demons by constantly resisting that which I’m afraid of? I can’t. One can’t dream of living a life of purpose when shackled by fear. Check out her programs and books because I know she helps people step by step.

I have issues and baggage! For me in this moment, the act of keeping this blog titled Live on Purpose is my way of holding myself accountable for my own evolution. It forces me to grow beyond my comfort zone, it allows me to converse with wonderful people I would have never met, and it keeps me constantly seeking out new information in the topic I love dearly, self-growth!

I remember that I posted a video from Isha last year, and I decided to check in with her Youtube channel just now.  Looks like her movie “Why Walk When You Can Fly” is ready! She says, “we are not our thoughts, we are not our fears, we are not our emotions, we are so much more than that!”

I had fun creating an RSS feed page sponsored by Alltop. It was fun and easy, and you can create your own based on what you like to read the best.

http://my.alltop.com/liveonpurpose

I love that you can see a preview of the post as you hover your mouse over a headline. If you like the special mix I made, go ahead and click “share on Facebook” or “Share on Twitter” if you have these accounts.

At the top, I have links to positive psychology and happiness web sites. Then I added some mental health news links. There are a few sites devoted to depression and bipolar disorder. Then there are some law of attraction and spiritual evolution blogs, followed by neuroscience and nutrition sites.

This wraps up all of my interests relating to Live on Purpose in one tidy RSS page!

I built out my ebook Sad For No Reason based on many of these topics, especially nutrition and depression. If you want to read more about what you’ll find in my ebook, see my new sales page about it either by clicking “Live on Purpose Home” at the top of this page, or use the below link:

http://www.liveonpurpose.info