Living On Purpose

Mask collection at Dennis Pendleton's studio

During January this year I was attending watercolor painting classes. Currently I’ve been compelled to create papier mache masks. I’d like to start the next sentence with “It all started with…” but in truth, I just don’t know how far back down memory lane to go in order to pick a starting point for my current phase.

I’ve made things all my life. When I was a latchkey kid in 4th grade, I’d come home to an empty home and decide to do a drawing or craft project. One time I made a 3D rainbow with rolled colored paper going into a bunch of cotton balls to represent a cloud. My father took it to work the next day and there it stayed. Ten years later when I visited his office, the rainbow mobile was still hanging from overhead cabinets. “Dad, you STILL have that?” I protested. Now I know how he felt. I still display the basket one of my children made in jr. high seven years ago.

Over the years I’ve done ceramic painting, advanced bead work, needlepoint, a homemade craft pillow, some consigned portraits, wall stencils, custom framing, photo retouching & printing on a wall plaque, ceramic tile design, silkscreening, paper making, and countless Christmas ornaments. I like to avoid idle hands, but I also delved deeply into meditation during my twenties. That doesn’t count for being idle, even though you’re not moving. You’re giving your brain a challenge during meditation.

Back to today. I have recently read the book Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation by Jeff Brown. It is kind of like a self help book, but much more like a roadmap illustrating one man’s journey into healing old emotional wounds to attain higher levels of emotional freedom. It got me thinking about the masks all humans figuratively wear during different phases of our lives. For example, say you’re wearing the mask of bravado and don’t even realize it.  If you stop acting the part of overconfidence and allow your vulnerability to show through, are you still you? Are you so attached to your mask that you identify your SELF with it?

I’ve decided to spend a week to actually create physical masks that illustrate this point. I made a nonedible bread mold of my face from an aluminum foil impression of my face. I varnished it after a week of drying time and can use it as a template to make a set of similar papier mache masks to paint in six to nine very different personalities. In case you haven’t heard of it, “papier mache” is a technique where you rip newspaper and dip it in a mixture of flour and water with the consistency of pancake batter. Lay the wet paper over the mold and let it dry. Repeat two to three times, let dry, then cut out eye holes and holes for elastic with an exacto knife. Then decorate with colored paints, sequins, feathers, yarn, raffia, or whatever you please. As you can see, this is a very labor intensive project I’ve taken on.

If I remove the mask from my face, I’m still there. Who am I, really? If I put on a mask that looks like the wounded child, perhaps it will allow me to access the deeply buried wounded child within me and heal some old emotional wounds. Of course, I could just do standard voice dialog and access my wounded child without the show/play/drama of using a prop, but I have a deep inner knowing that this particular prop would really accelerate my progress. What about you? Would wearing the mask of a particular part of you help you access memories you had previously buried?

Three masks from Dennis Pendleton's collection

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?

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.

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

I like to have clean floors. According to Twitter, I’m not the only one! Since it’s Saturday there were pages upon pages of entries with the words “clean floor” in Twitter search today! Weekends are housecleaning time!

Usually, the first chore I do each morning is to sweep the floor, or ask my older son to sweep it. Last night my younger son, 3 years old, decided he wanted some sugar. He grabbed an opened bag of large-grain cane sugar that I carelessly left where he could reach it.

*Stop the presses,* you say, “I thought the Liveonpurpose girl was all about not eating sugar!” Yes, yes, I have preached that in the past, and will in the future. I like to pat myself on the back when I buy the unbleached cane sugar, but it’s only a step up from refined white sugar. The fact is, our family slows to a grinding halt without it. Husband needs sugar and milk in his morning coffee. I take it in my green tea.  I use cane sugar or brown sugar to sweeten the children’s oatmeal. Okay, I’m done making excuses, I love sugar. But I have educated myself on what it does to my body and I use it in moderation. There. Done. On with the story.

…carelessly left where he could reach it. Of course, it spilled all over the floor! Despite the efforts of my older son who generously cleaned it up without being asked, I could still feel the grainy sugar under my feet.

I swept some more until I couldn’t see any more grains on the floor, and since it was night, went to prepare for bedtime.

The next morning I awoke and climbed the stairs to behold all the sugar on the floor I couldn’t see the night before. The sunbeams were pointing out the imperfections on the floor for me, so I could easily clean it up. (Allegory, anyone?)

This is a case of  ‘as without, so within’, but a little mixed up. The light needs to come on in our heart/mind to point out the emotional things that need cleaning up within us. I didn’t kick myself in the rear for not being able to see that sugar the night before. I didn’t chastise my older son for not sweeping all of it when he tried, either. I simply said, “Wow, now I can see well enough to clean this up properly.” The process of self-observation and  self-inquiry turns on the light in your heart/mind.

Self-observation is all about developing the watcher in your mind. This watcher simply observes you react to everyday situations. Oftentimes, just the act of watching yourself make decisions or reactions is enough to curb a behavior that doesn’t serve you any more. Sometimes you need to take it a step further and engage in self-inquiry, such as doing The Work of Byron Katie that I mentioned in the previous blog post.

Do you see the image of the floor below? The morning sunbeam is neutral, simply showing me what is there. It isn’t mad that the sugar is on the floor! It’s just a light. This is how you can approach your emotional work, like you’re simply turning on the lights. There may be a mess there that took years to build up, or there may be simply a little spill. In either case you are to be commended for taking action once the lights are on. One step at a time, done with love, will clear the heart for the future.

When web site developers are building code for an online application, like a proprietary shopping cart, they need to know exactly what the application is supposed to do before they even start. They need to know who the audience is, what the end goal is, whether there will be volume discounts, whether the opt-in email list will be offered before or after the sale, and exactly how many steps the user should see during checkout.

As the developers near completion, and testing begins, managers will ask for new functionalities that nobody anticipated in the beginning. This is called “scope creep.” Now the developers have to go back to square one and try to hack in the new function without completely rewriting the entire application. It’s a patch, because deadline is coming.

Then, two months after launch of the application, users are demanding their own control panel so they can change details about themselves easily (just pretend this wasn’t written in the first place). Now the developers have to take code from another source and make it work with their own application. It increases the “bugginess” of the application because of some loopholes and perhaps not enough time built into the project for testing.

After a year or two of changes to the code, the developers feel it would just be better to start over, taking into account all these new features, and rebuild from the ground up. It would be a cleaner application all around. But budget constraints disallow this approach, and the application must make do as-is.

This is my allegory for how today’s society has been built. Systems and governments and political divisions have all been put into place piecemeal. Our society is built patchwork style, with lots of loopholes and bugs. People are falling through the cracks. People are losing their lives, their livelihoods. The bugs in this system run so far down and there has been so much scope creep in the infrastructure of our daily lives that it only makes sense to me to make a fresh start.

For instance, I know that to combat depression, a person’s diet needs to be clean, and free of highly processed junk foods and refined sugars. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to make a living doing what he enjoys, whatever gives him a sense of purpose in his life. To be free of depression, a person needs to be able to communicate with his family members calmly without fear of an emotional blowout (often these blowouts are due to poor nourishment in the first place, which predisposes a person to fits of rage…)

But when I try to envision living like that in this society, I draw a blank. I go to work, I want to eat lunch, but there are no alternatives to fast food; nothing I can grab in a half an hour that fits into a “feel-good” diet…unless I really work hard at preparing lunches at home, which I don’t. I send my children to school, but they also do not have a healthy choice for lunch at school and they’re overwhelmed by soda machines and candy sold in the school store. Anytime I want my family to watch TV, I have to subject them to false advertising, violence, foul language, lack of morals…ok I’m sure you get it by now. Unless I extricate us from society, how can I make healthy lifestyle changes work, especially when the rest of my family is resisting any changes?

This is what an “intentional community” is all about. Wouldn’t it be nice to build your own society with a higher purpose in mind? Yes, there are monasteries, there are ashrams. These are communities centered around spiritual growth and connection to God. What if you wanted to include anybody who is hurting because of today’s society, regardless of religious views? Could it work? It certainly gets complicated. In mentally building my own “simcity” I realize I’ll need stores that only stock whole foods; nothing refined. I’ll need either our own tv channel or no tv at all. I’ll need schools that don’t treat children as cattle moving towards the guillotine, but as real individuals with infinite potential. I’ll need a medical care system that is radically different from what we have now, with no insiders’ links to big pharmaceuticals. Hmm, get rid of the bribery, the lies, the coverups…Wow, we really need to start over it seems!

But then remember that everything is already just as it’s supposed to be, because of God’s divine plan. Of course, we have free will to do what we want with our lives. It is by our own choice that we come to a healthy lifestyle; not because our parents forced us to move into this intentional community far removed from society’s current reality. And it is by our own choice that we come to know God, or reject God, or deny God, or whatever. Once a viewpoint is forced upon us we tend to resist it, don’t we?

Take M. Night Shamalayan’s movie, The Village. click for a full synopsis–a spoiler.
Although fiction, we can see from this story that a forced intentional community can feel like paradise for a while, but then something always happens to spoil it! In the movie, the village elders “ferociously” protect the secret that their little idyllic village holds. And then the illusion they worked so hard to protect is shattered. They wanted to shelter their children from violence, and it was violence that shattered their world yet again.

So, while we live in our patchwork web application of a life here in society, we can bring positive intention to our selves. Truly, the answer to straightening out the twisted web of society is to love one another, then although the web of society remains the same, our perception of it is changed. To crawl out from the darkness of depression while encompassed within it seems very hard, much like you just need to start over; yes, a fresh start! But the way to do it is start by loving yourself, accepting yourself as you are, and exercise your free will to choose a better life for yourself.

I am extremely alarmed at the rates of obesity in the USA. The very core of our lifestyle needs to be changed to combat this “killer at large.” I have a feeling that we as a nation are running on autopilot, and only do what is convenient. Another problem contributing to obesity would be the way so many people have to work several jobs to survive, leaving them with no time to cook or exercise. But it’s time to wake up from autopilot and bring some attention to our health, through our diet.

Did you know that our mental state – that is, whether we are stressed, depressed, or anxious, – is a reflection of the foods we are or are not eating? To get to the core of our purpose, we must put attention on the physical pillar of life. Our mental health and physical health are intertwined!

Here is the press room for a documentary about the nation’s obesity problem. It’s called “Killer at Large” and I learned of it from the second link, a blog about the possibility of rating junk food advertising to kids.

Killer at Large Press Room

Rating Junk food advertising to kids

CDC obesity. Men approx 31%, Women approx 33%, children 2-19 approx 16%.

Patient, heal thyself!

Most Americans consider the managed health care system that uses allopathic physicians (western doctors) as the only form of health care, but there are other methods of healing: chiropractic, alternative (or eastern medicine), massage and many varied forms of bodywork, just to name a few.

The body is capable of healing itself if we reduce the stressors to it. If we are to create our health on purpose, then of course, we have to give attention to our bodies, in the form of the proper nutrients, exercise, healthy mental attitudes, the proper rest, etc.

Read about Sherry Williams, a cancer survivor profiled on Dr. Weil’s web site. She describes her discovery of how stressed her life was:

Through self-discovery, I realized my health is more associated with my lifestyle and how I chose to cope with things than anything else.

As I look back over the two years prior to my cancer diagnoses, I was clearly overwhelmed, stressed-out, sleep-deprived, and had failed miserably at recognizing it. Living the fast-paced life that society forces upon us leaves us thinking this is the way it is supposed to be.

And then, she reveals the lesson she learned through her cancer diagnosis:

The body can actually heal itself if it is fed and nurtured properly. Unfortunately, often illness has to hit us – in my case, four times – before we are forced to stop and evaluate.

Living Well Using Weil

Through my personal experience with different alternative medicines, I have found that chiropractic care can help your body heal itself by reducing spinal pressure on your nerves. Every major organ in your body is governed by the nerves that emanate from your spinal cord. The body will manifest problems in the organ that corresponds to the nerve where excess compression exists.

Many people think a chiropractor is someone they turn to only if they’ve got a neck problem like whiplash or other injury related problems in the back. But I’ve been seeing a chiropractor for therapy for six months now, and I believe everyone could benefit from the special “brand” of chiropractors who belong to a group called Maximized Living. All of the doctors associated with this group receive consistent training. The link below is not an affiliate link. I am not being paid to endorse this group.

Maximized Living Click on “Find a Maximized Living Doctor”.

And, while we’re on the subject of purposeful healing, here is a special treat. Do you remember the movie Patch Adams? He is a real doctor with big dreams based in Virginia, USA. He’s the clown doctor who believes patients need to laugh and feel appreciated and cared for when they are in treatment. From his web site:

In spending this amount of time with patients, we found that the vast majority of our adult population does not have a day to day vitality for life (which we would define as good health). The idea that a person was healthy because of normal lab values and clear x-rays had no relationship to who the person was. Good health was much more deeply related to close friendships, meaningful work, a lived spirituality of any kind, an opportunity for loving service and an engaging relationship to nature, the arts, wonder, curiosity, passion and hope. All of these are time-consuming, impractical needs. When we don’t meet these needs, the business of high-tech medicine diagnoses mental illness and treats with pills.

So there you have it, straight from the doctors’ mouth! All the ingredients for good health are in the quote above. To live your life on purpose, incorporate things into your life that will bring you health, as described by Dr. Adams. Read about his vision for a totally free hospital, below.

Gesundheit Institute, Patch Adams

I saw James Arthur Ray in person at an event in Aurora, CO a couple of months ago. He really got the crowd fired up, and I could tell his mission was to attract people to buy tickets to his weekend workshop. All well and good to hustle a bit, but how’s his message?

He’s had an eclectic background and has gathered quite a bit of wisdom over the years. He has molded his wisdom into a method and is now teaching it: Harmonic Wealth. If you are depressed because you are broke, or because you are out of shape, or because you don’t have the relationships you dream about, or because you haven’t achieved the education you wanted, there is an answer for you at his web site and in his book. I have dreamed of tailoring a teaching course just like this one. He has done an excellent job (and the typesetting of the book is above average quality, if you ask me, a typesetter!)

Harmonic Wealth is like the outline for a quality system of living that eradicates stress, frustration and depression. Of course, you have got to be willing to do as Mr. Ray says, though, and I warned you, he’s eclectic! I’ve known about him for years, and in fact, the quotes (Thought of Power) from his newsletter often adorn the pages of my main Live on Purpose site in the top banner.

He teaches that you have to resolve your emotional issues first in order to heal yourself, and I’m all for that. In fact, that’s the entire basis for this Live on Purpose web site. If you spend the energy to heal your emotional wounds, you can think differently, in ways you never could before, and you expand. When you expand, you take in more, learn more, and therefore you can give more. You can bring more awareness to your thought patterns, and you can pinpoint the types of thoughts that don’t serve you, and release them. So I built this site to point you to different ways you can actually accomplish that. Harmonic Wealth is one method/system to help you live your life with more purpose.

Check out the Harmonic Wealth web site