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!

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!

I don’t open all my email. I look at the subject line and skim what has come in overnight. One that came in yesterday said this in the subject line: Carol Look on Abudnance, Shirley McLaine and Marianne Williamson WOW. Now, I had already heard the Marianne Williamson call last week, and it was awesome. I was guided to open this one to find out about why Shirley McLaine was in the newsletter.

I found a link to the “Living On Purpose Telesummit”. I did a double-take. Hey, I’m running a living on purpose blog, I thought as I clicked on the link. My email said Shirley McLaine will be a speaker at this telesummit, but she’s not listed on the web page. After glancing over the speakers to appear and realizing I only have heard of three of them, I have concluded that I’m absolutely no expert on living on purpose. So, I’ll give you the link so you can learn from the experts.

http://livingonpurposetelesummit.com/ The tagline says “Wake up inspired, live fearlessly.”

I believe the first step to living on purpose is to NOT live unconsciously. The first step involves catching yourself when you go on autopilot. Sounds simple. Just try to count the times you switch into autopilot during one day. You’ll lose count after a couple of hours unless you’ve cultivated laser focusing ability. I always say to start with small habits, like cleaning your own hair from the bathtub before you get out of the shower, or putting the toothpaste top on before you let go of the tube. (hmmph, can you guess my pet peeves? It’s like my housemates each thinks he has the whole house to himself and he’s not sharing a bathroom…)

Okay, so you’ve started small. You’ve brought a bit of awareness to your day. Expand it a bit, and begin thinking about the things that you normally gloss over. Where does that homeless man I pass each day sleep? How can everybody act like nothing’s wrong when there are natural disasters and wars happening all over the globe? I wish I could teach that mom not to be so harsh with her kids. Who integrates prisoners back into society once they’ve been released? EEK! What are you willing to do about those thoughts? That’s why it’s so much easier to gloss over them and store them away in the back of your mind.

I’m going to switch gears and give a short overview of Marianne Williamson’s presentation that I heard last week:

Those who hate, hate with great conviction. Some of us who love, though, do it when it’s convenient. It’s time to evolve the concept of love. As a mother says to her children, “that misbehavior won’t happen in my house,” so shall the women of America evolve to be able to widen the definition of our house to the community- we won’t have that (starving children) in our house (the city, state, country…). You cannot bomb away hate, but love can transform hate.

Marianne’s newest event in Los Angeles will be February 26 2010, and it’s called Sister Giant: Rousing the Sleeping Giant of American Womanhood. She’s going to force us to think about the things we normally gloss over. She’s going to ask us what we’re willing to do about those feelings that arise.

The two purposeful links I’ve brought you today both talk about waking up.  Let’s wake up on purpose.

Comparing yourself to others gets to be a slippery slope for your own morale. My painting teacher complemented my first painting, though I really didn’t like how it turned out because I was comparing myself to accomplished painters like him. He said once I practice a little and get the right type of paper and brushes, I’d “dazzle” everybody with portraits, to which another student said, “just great, so we can all hang our heads in shame.” I countered, “That’s not what it’s all about!” She insisted, “yes, it is.” She compared her talents to my talents and ended up feeling badly.

She revealed her own self-manufactured world of feelings of inadequacy right there. During my childhood, I learned how to dim my own light because of comments like hers. I got negative feedback on my flexibility, intelligence, creativity, dancing, and I ended up quitting many things I was good at with this rationale: “I don’t want to make others feel bad, so I’ll stop doing what I do naturally.” According to Gay Hendricks, that attitude is adopted by most of us during our childhood, as we test our behavior on others to see their reaction. It seems like my entire childhood and adolescence centered around me reacting to what others thought of me. They provided feedback, I reacted with either withdrawal or defiance. This is a normal pattern.

If we continue to dull our own talents due to fear of negative feedback well into our adulthood, however, our spirit suffers and we may or may not feel regret. Be sure not to blame others when you look at your life after dimming your own light!

And likewise if we continue to compare ourselves to others, creating feelings of inadequacy well into our adulthood, we are setting our own trap and stunting our own progress with the cyclical nature of self criticism.

Beliefs of inadequacy can be eliminated by using Morty Lefkoe’s Who Am I Really Process. I have not gone through his entire program, but go ahead and read the blog in the link above and you’ll find a free trial of his belief eliminating process. After working with his clients, he has found that replacing a negative belief with its corresponding positive belief does not always work. Find out why at his blog.

How a person expresses their ego has a lot to do with what kind of feedback they’re getting from others. Negative feedback could result from someone  showing off too much and being too eager to tell others about how great one is. Whether you’re getting negative feedback because you are gifted and others feel self-conscious around you or because you’re egocentric and you drive others away,  Big Mind process can help isolate and pinpoint your own motivations. From the web site linked above, “Big Mind Big Heart is not someone else’s interpretation of who you should be and how you should live but rather a way you can come to your own deep understandings, and directly experience your life, your relationships and the world at large in a new and rich way.” I have attended a Big Mind event and I can attest that if you work through it with a facilitator, you’ll see benefits.

Comparing a short person to a tall person or an accountant to an artist is hardly fruitful. Compare yourself to you at an earlier time to celebrate your progress. See how far you’ve come?

I hope everyone’s holidays have been merry and bright. And may all my readers enjoy an abundant new year. Abundance is a wonderful word, because it refers not only to finances and the material world, but also to the spiritual and emotional planes as well. Wouldn’t it be awesome to always have an abundance of the holy spirit?…an abundance of joy, of  gratitude, of love?

If you need a story to inspire you, go hear Marcia Wieder’s personal story of life transformation at her Dream University. She looked around at her own life and realized it was opposite of what her dream life would be like. The two questions that caused her transformation were: How do I want my life to be? and What am I willing to do about it?

So many people get caught up in these two questions. The first requires clarity of vision. You have to know what your dream life would look like in the first place! Lots of us have lost that laser focus on our dreams. The second question forces you to look your fears in the face and battle it out. Who will win; you or your fear? We’re afraid of commitment, of risks, of insecurity. If you need your life to change, there is going to be some risk, insecurity, and commitment to your vision in order to jump start the process. Or maybe not!

So take ten minutes to watch Marcia’s video on the link above. She tells how she went from overweight and broke to living her dream. She emphasizes that a lack of money in your life right now does not need to stop you from making some steps towards your dreams right now.

While you are there, click on the link for her free ebook 100 Ways to Make Life Easier. She offered me this ebook in her newsletter and I was blown away. I’ve read more than a handful of self-help titles. Marcia has delivered such a powerful group of tips and advice that I can’t believe she’s giving it away for free. I’m not an affiliate for her, I just think that if you want to change your life and manifest more abundance, then you need to follow the tips she’s laid out in this ebook.

To an abundant new year!

By Michelle Casto, guest blogger. Originally posted on ArticleSnatch; keywords Soul Care and Self-Care

In today’s challenging times, there seems to be less and less time to do soul-nourishing activities. However, every ultra successful person knows a secret ingredient to success which is often over-looked, that of being “balanced” and taking plenty of down-time to rest, refresh and rejuvenate.

For many, the holidays can create added stress and pressure to an already full plate. Many suffer seasonal affective disorder, and just feel “blue.”

What follows are 5 simple ways to Care For Your Soul that if you start now will quantum leap you into the New Year feeling refreshed, focused, and fulfilled.

1. Honor Your Core Values
People, circumstances, and things that are not good for you cause you to constrict and withdraw your love, power, and passion. If you keep living a default life, you become more and more disconnected from your True Self and Source/God/Goddess. The more disconnected you are from Source, the more disappointing results you attract over and again.

Your nurturing soul stuff (like enjoying healthy positive relationships, doing work that has meaning for you, staying in balance, attracting financial abundance, having a spiritual practice) allows you to expand into your divine essence. You will always be adjusting to see what fits you now.

2. Nurture Your Soul With a Positive Environment
Identify the state of being that creates an environment of success for you. Now create supportive environments that honor your values (people, opportunities, places that inspire you and move you forward). Too many times we are fighting against-ourselves, other people, or circumstances that are contrary to our inner nature and then we wonder why it is so hard to make changes and become the human beings we are meant to become. Environments and associations (who we hang out with) are 100x more important than you realize—can pull you forward or drag you down.

3. Discover Your Life Purpose
You cannot talk about caring for your soul and not mention living with purpose. A native American saying is, “Everything on earth has a purpose. Every person a mission.” Just like a bird who has its own unique song, you, too have a song to sing. It may only be a little song but there are people who will like it. You were born to do something great and to help someone or perhaps a group of people. Your purpose often seems much bigger than you and affects others in a positive way. When you are on purpose, you help greater humanity.

4. Write Your Own Fairytale (complete with happy ending and all!)
Who remembers the fable Goldilocks and the Three Bears? What was the story—-three beds, certain bed, certain porridge. Not too hard, too soft, hot or cold, but just right. She had to try out various options before choosing one that suited her tastes. What I call a lot of research! You are the author of your own success story and can edit anytime you feel like it.

5. Receiving Support from a Trusted Mentor
When it comes to nurturing your soul, there is nothing more impactful than receiving emotional support from a coach or trusted mentor. If you need help with any of these ways to care for your soul, a professional life coach can help you look inside and identify what your soul is longing for. That is the purpose of a Life Coach, to support you in making the changes that help you to feel good and be happier.

These simple ways will help you to nurture yourself and care for your soul when you just take the time to practice them. Let me know if there is any way I can support you in taking better care of your SOUL.

Michelle Casto empowers you to accelerate your success on your path of purpose.
Visit www.brightlightcoach.com

I have come across an extremely interesting web site:  “Molly Burke on Purpose”

If you are looking for a particular method to find your life purpose, the short overview on the link above is for you.  Think of it as your own personal experiment. You invest some time, follow Molly’s instructions, and perhaps you’ll bring your life into better focus! If you feel lost or unfocused, I’d really recommend this experiment to you.

I found Molly’s site through my Self Growth newsletter! She’s got her own expert page here- Queen of Confidence:

“Author of the information series, “Your Life on Purpose”. Her boldness, personal energy, motivational gifts and uncanny knack for getting right to the heart of a matter combine powerfully to act as a catalyst for change in the lives of her audiences and clients.”

The phrase “catalyst for change” is music to my ears. Another life coach I’ve encountered prefers to associate with the label catalyst rather than coach. He’s Michael Neill, the Genius Catalyst.

A catalyst is an agent of change; defined “One that precipitates a process or event, especially without being involved in or changed by the consequences.” A person who is a positive catalyst can lead others to ask the necessary questions of themselves that, when answered, will create lasting behavior changes. I can really appreciate what Molly Burke has done in creating her On Purpose list…she leads you to ask yourself questions you may not have thought to ask.

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.

My friend Siona from Gaia informed me that today is Blog Action Day. She gave the acronym BAD on the subject line and that piqued my interest enough to open the email! So to break form from my regular posts about developmental levels, meditation, healthy eating, the mood food connection, and purpose, I’ll take today to post about the BAD topic of the day: Climate Change.

Every THING is interconnected with everything else. In fact, when I saw Bernie Glassman speak, he stated that his definition of enlightenment is to realize the interconnectedness of all things. So, here is a blog post about my take on climate change:  intimately interconnected with personal growth, purposeful living, and everything else!

I truly believe that intentional communities of earthships are the way to go when it comes to saving resources, reducing toxic emissions, reducing dependence on foreign oil/drilling. A couple of earthship communities may not solve some of the widespread infrastructure problems that large cities come across in the event of natural disasters, but as for me, my dream purposeful life consists of building my own earthship, and heck, not just one, but a whole village of ‘em, and teaching/learning about sustainable living, as well as our own bodies’ ability to turn the nutrients we eat into energy (thus my interest in the mood food connection.)

As temperatures on the planet change, weather patterns change, and even our own coastlines change. Look at a Mandelbrot fractal to see the never ending variation one coastline brings. Sudden landscape changes either destroy or damage structures not built with this in mind. The infrastructure built up by the modern world is dependent on oil. If there is no access to gas, oil, and plastics, then the everyday routine we depend on comes to a grinding halt.

I admire the earthship design because it is its own mini biosphere. If climate change ends up knocking out power to entire cities, people with the earthship’s solar and wind energy collection systems will not even feel the loss of power. If climate change ends up driving the price of crude oil, then even the food you buy in the grocery store may become an expensive luxury because nearly all of it has been DRIVEN there in gas powered trucks.  The earthship’s internal greenhouse design enables owners to grow their own vegetables all year long.

The earthship design has several self contained systems: water collection and treatment, electricity production, food production, and stable interior climate without the use of heaters/ac.

I love the idea of being sustainable, independent, and off the grid. Climate change is forcing current consumeristic society to redesign itself. Visionaries like Gunter Pauli of Zeri are on the leading edge of testing new designs. He says he’s built an entirely biodegradable factory! If society can follow his example of redesigning business structure around sustainability, then not only could humans slow down current rate of climate change a bit, we could empower even more humans to be able to lead a sustainable way of life.

Purposeful thinking brings about purposeful change. Let’s lead this frothy wave of evolution with integrity to mother nature.

What would the world be like if everyone participated in their joy? During a recent worldwide meditation called Fire the Grid, the moderator asked everyone to do something that brings us joy. I got to thinking about how many people go several weeks or more without seeing joy in their lives. What if we switched priorities? What if we scheduled in time for doing things (or finding activities) that make us happy? The more people that do this, the more people would find careers or jobs that they actually like.

Those who enjoy organizing; become professional organizers. (I say this because I can hardly believe there are people who actually LIKE it! I’m the sloppy artist type.) Those who enjoy accounting, banking, dancing, art, creating, inventing, healing, serving, exercising, teaching, and presenting: Do those things. If we become unbalanced in our lives while pursuing the things we enjoy, there would be people available who enjoy bringing balance to others (life coaches!).

I can see this world forming already when I look through my friends list at Twitter. The people who have found me there are enthusiastic life coaches, therapists, doctors, authors, marketers, and artists. They are the ones who love what they do and want to spread the word that everybody else deserves to love what they do, too.

Another question: how do I integrate doing the things that bring ME joy with wanting to further the planet on its spiritual evolution? It just integrates naturally. Once a person starts generating happiness, it quickens the evolution of themselves and those around them.

I am vastly slowing down my blog entries this summer as I work on these and other issues. I will continue to design monthly wallpapers (because I love doing it so much!), so go ahead and sign up for my newsletter.

I have put the ebook Sad For No Reason on hiatus as I work with various technical difficulties.