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

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!

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!

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?

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.

I am nearly finished writing an  ebook  all about the dietary reasons some people may end up depressed. What we eat or refuse to eat can determine whether we will feel weepy, grumpy, or irritable later! Of course, nutrition isn’t everything when it comes to clearing up depression, so I have posted an outstanding interview with a facilitator of The Work, a process of self-inquiry that has helped lots of depressed people. If you haven’t yet seen the interview with Clear Life Solutions about The Work, it’s online now:
Interview with Carol L. Skolnick

One of my favorite authors in the self help arena is James Lane Allen, author of As a Man Thinketh. I point to all the reasons why I love this philosophy of life on this page:
As a Man Thinketh

Both of these pages are about self-inquiry, or self-examination. This is a very important part of spiritual growth (or however you want to call it: growing up, maturing, evolution of the soul…). When I am no longer afraid to face the very parts of myself that I am hiding from, I can move past any emotional blocks stopping my growth. I love the feeling I get when I actually notice that I’m not bothered by something that years ago would have sent me to my room crying. All the time I spent with various meditation styles has paid off, but I’m nowhere near done! All of us are works in progress.

As you may or may not know, I’ve used meditation for much of my adult life. When I found Holosync back in 2003 or so, it saved my marriage! I had sunk to such negative thinking in terms of my marriage, that all I could focus on was a separation. Once I began using the Holosync CD, I could change my thinking and solve my problems from a different angle. I have stuck with it over the years, although recently I seem to be having technical difficulties in keeping a functional CD player in the house because of my “curious” toddler. I believe that Holosync also gave me the courage to build and write this web site, because I have grown in numerous ways over the years I’ve been using it.

So it is not lightly that I recommend this program to you. I am an affiliate, meaning that the company Centerpointe will pay me a small commission for sending you to try their program. So with all honesty, I send you to a new video Centerpointe has created to explain their program. Take some time to watch it, then order their free demo or the first level risk-free, if you want to experience results like I have experienced.

Meditation Benefits Video at Centerpointe

By the way, Bill Harris of Centerpointe has agreed to add some special, unannounced bonuses for my readers, so please make sure to use this link so he knows you’re with us. I want you to get all the extras he’s promised to my readers.

Now, here’s just a “taste” of what The Holosync Solution can do for you…

1) It can allow you to effortlessly reach states of super-deep meditation–even the very first time you use it…

2) It can dramatically accelerate your mental, emotional, and spiritual growth, giving you the results you always THOUGHT you were supposed to get from meditation (but, if you’re like most people, never really got)…

3) It creates healing of emotional traumas and self-imposed limitations forever, even for people who have been unsuccessful with other methods…

4) It actually slows the aging process by stimulating the production of many neurochemicals and other substances in the body that are associated with longevity, well-being, and better health…

5) It can dramatically raise your threshold for stress and cause stress-induced dysfunctional feelings and behaviors (including anger, depression, fear, anxiety, substance abuse, and many others) to fall away…

6) It can increase your self-awareness, inner peace, and happiness, as well as your ability to connect with other people and create successful relationships.

If you’ve tried meditation, or some of those other personal growth approaches that just didn’t deliver, or want to go MUCH deeper, with faster results… or if you just want to grow and improve your life at an accelerated pace, I know you’ll love The Holosync Solution.

I don’t recommend things to my friends and clients lightly. But I’d be doing you a grave disservice if I didn’t urge you in the strongest possible terms to check this out.

There’s no risk to check it out, and I know you’ll be glad you did.

Remember, you can get a FREE Holosync demo CD, a FREE Special Report, and a special offer to try The Holosync Solution program, at no risk, by going to:
Meditation Benefits Video at Centerpointe

I found an archived news article on the BBC about meditation. I find the tone of the article curious, and a little funny. I have accepted meditation into my life for the last twenty years as a matter of fact, and although I don’t do it every day any more, I know it focuses my brain, lowers my stress and blood pressure, and can increase my immune function. Since all this is ingrained in my mentality, I find it humorous to read an article written for a different audience; one that does not believe mediation could help anyone. It’s called:

Meditation ‘Good for the Brain’ BBC News, Feb. 5, 2003.
(imagine someone using air quotes when they say Good for the Brain, and rolling their eyes!

There was a small scale study comparing two groups of people; those who were just trained in mindfulness meditation and those who never meditated. After eight weeks, the meditators had more activity in their frontal lobes, and more antibodies after a flu shot. So the doctors say…

“There is increasing evidence that meditation is a useful and, for some people, a powerful therapy…”

This statement is like saying that getting rest is good for you when you have a cold, or that scientists have finally validated that cranberries really do help with urinary tract infections, or that doctors now finally believe that vitamin c can boost your immune system.

People have been meditating for thousands of years. There are as many types of meditation as there are variations of tea. You know, there is chamomile, black tea, green tea, bancha tea, earl grey, english breakfast, lemon zinger, rose hip, matcha tea, and so on. Just like you take an immunity tea when you feel a sore throat coming on, you can do a different form of meditation for your different moods or phases in life. Those who want to lose the ego usually start with transcendental meditation, but those who need to lower their blood pressure may try mindfulness meditation; a form of thought dropping. You can use meditation as a tool in your life to help you get where you need to go. That includes lifting depression, reducing your blood pressure and stress, reducing anxiety, reducing cholesterol, and solving your problems with more creativity!

If you want to read more articles about meditation in the news, I have a page dedicated to that:

Meditation and your health in the news

Judging from what we learned from the last post about the Global Consciousness Project, the Peace Intention experiment, also spearheaded by a “What the Bleep” interviewee, should prove to be a viable and noteworthy research project.

It’s going on now, and each day at a specific time you log in for ten minutes only, to focus positive intention on a war-torn area. Lynne McTaggart from “What the Bleep” is leading this experiment and will show us by comparing violence statistics from before and after if we were able to reduce violent crimes by ten percent, simply by our intention.

“How could my intention here affect those people in that war-torn area?” my husband wondered. He said, “but they can’t see us or hear the meditation! What good could it do?”

Deeply religious people throughout the centuries have believed in the power of prayer, but only now is the mainstream scientific community able to have a platform where the funding is available for experiments of this type. Scientific paradigm is shifting, and more attention is being placed on practical applications for the lessons learned from quantum mechanics. Why not? Why not try to see if we can reduce violence by our intention? Is it futile? Our random number generator experiment shows intention may not be the most steadfast and efficient way to reduce violence, but it can be done. Statistically speaking, there is a good chance that there will be less violence committed this week. Do you want to save a life? Do you want to live with a purpose? Try it.

Try it now. We’re mid-way through the experiment. Their servers will count how many people log in to do the ten minute meditation each day, and her team will get data from that war-torn area about violent acts committed.

The Peace Intention Experiment

The scientist John Hagelin appeared on interviews in “What the bleep do we know?” He explained a project dealing with random number generators. The thing these machines do best is to randomly throw out the digits 0 or 1, like flipping a coin. Teams of researchers around the world have these random number generators and they run them during specific world events. Amazingly, the findings are that at times when the world is focusing on a single event (like the O.J. Simpson trial, or the September 11 tragedy in New York) then the random number generators become less random. They throw out statistically either more 1’s or more 0’s.

This brings up the question, “Does human consciousness affect the world?” While not a complete answer, or even a definite answer, the trend scientists are finding with these machines is that when meditators gather together for group meditation, there may be a calming effect on the environment.

There have been many world meditation events in the past ten years, so the researchers have used the data from the machines to see if they could tell when the meditation occurred just from looking at the numbers.

The researchers have been able to label  the odds against chance at these events to be 20:1, 50:1, and even 100:1 or more.

Here is the Global Consciousness Project web site. Since it’s a Flash-based site, the address bar never changes, so you’ll have to use the search bar. The search bar is at the bottom of the page, and you will have to type in “organized meditation” to get to this page:
Interpretations of results for organized meditations (Princeton)

It is the Global Consciousness Project which led me to BrainPaint, featured in my previous post. Use the link above, then find the search bar and type in “Global brain”. You will find a link to the images created by Global Brain.
Bill Scott, founder of BrainPaint speaking about the Global Consciousness Project:

We’re ready to begin global consciousness feedback. The data coming from your servers is very complex and lifelike. I have a server up and running taking a minute of your data and updating an image every minute.

Being that complex systems are infinitely sensitive they ideally lend themselves to feedback of this nature. These images from your data are quite profound!

Teams of scientists from major universities around the world are spending time analyzing data about consciousness and extrapolating that data to something meaningful on a global level! To me, this indicates the time is ripe for each individual who feels ready to start his/her own journey towards self discovery. Start meditating, or praying, and even if you don’t feel results, they will be so incremental that you won’t notice you’re changing. The steps an individual makes towards living a life more at peace with oneself and the world will help propel the world into a more peaceful state. And that’s living on purpose!