How did my life turn out like this?
We are in a time where many people are finding themselves asking deeper questions about their lives…
Questions like: What explanation have you had for your life being the way it is?
Pause for a second, take a deep breath, and really consider that question.
I’m not only referring to the difficulties in your life, I’m also referring to where your life is fantastic. Let me clarify. I’m talking about all of it; your life as a package.
…Maybe you feel you are where you are due to fate. Maybe as you ask that question you hear a voice in your head that tells you, you are lucky; or unlucky. Do either of those statements truly serve as satisfactory explanations as to why your life is the way it is?
Maybe the way you see it is that you got to where you are in life through something called Karma; that God is some kind of mega-accountant in the sky who does yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily tallies of all your good and bad deeds (or was that Santa?). Then, this magnificent accounting god dishes out the luck, both good and bad, in accordance with what’s in your good/bad account.
Does this sound ludicrous to you? Great, now we’re on the same page.
If those reasons are not how you get what shows up in your life, then maybe this concept (which I’m sure you’ve heard before) is the correct one: “Let us create mankind in our own image.”
Over the last twenty plus years of teaching workshops, seminars and working with people one-on-one it has become very obvious that…
The outer circumstances of your life are a direct result of the inner state of your being.
One of the most important things you will ever learn about success, whatever that means to you, is that what’s going on inside your thoughts and feeling ends up showing up outside, in your reality.
We are not victims of circumstance…
We are both the one who manufacturers and experiences these circumstances.
No one magically finds themselves in a divorce court, a prison cell or having a bullet removed with it being a result of something that was going on within them.
These events are a direct result of all the beliefs, thoughts, emotions feelings and behaviors you have had up to that point. That doesn’t make you wrong or right, what it makes you is either paying attention or being ignorant of what’s been going on inside you. Either way, it’s your choice, it’s your result.
Few will ever be brave enough to enter, let alone complete the Emotional Healing and Growth that is required to Reclaim the Authentic Self.
“Deep” is a hero’s journey to go back and find what was left behind in a place falsely named ‘history’. It is falsely named because…
History does not only exist in the past. History lives in every cell and every fiber of our being. It is the calcified tears we dared not cry that stiffen not only our bones but the expression of our lives. History is the constriction of our veins and arteries from laughter that dare not be laughed in a childhood where children must be adults because the adults around them never grew up and faced their own
pain."
Who among us is brave enough to stand as a champion, a guide and a warrior for that lost child?
Who among us is bold enough to say; it wasn’t good enough, the child deserved to be fully alive in all it’s feelings including play?
Who is now willing to go back and get that child, hold it in it’s sadness and give it permission to cry all of it’s tears?
Who is now willing to go back and free that child’s spirit to play in the universe of imaginings?
Who will now hold up that child’s spirit as a great light to the world that can laugh deeper, wilder and more authentically than was permitted?
Below I’d like to share a poem with you, yes you, who still hear the distant voice of a lost child that is yourself, not in some distant history, but the child who lives in the moments where you fall in love with yourself again and again.
Who will cry for the little boy
by Antwone Fisher
“Who will cry for the little boy, lost and all alone?
Who will cry for the little boy, abandoned without his own?
Who will cry for the little boy? He cried himself to sleep.
Who will cry for the little boy? He never had for keeps.
Who will cry for the little boy? He walked the burning sand.
Who will cry for the little boy? The boy inside the man.
Who will cry for the little boy? Who knows well hurt and pain.
Who will cry for the little boy? He died and died again.
Who will cry for the little boy? A good boy he tried to be.
Who will cry for the little boy, who cries inside of me?”
Looking for your life’s purpose can be a great way to stay busy enough to never fulfill it!
Sometimes you’ve just got to be willing to go in the direction of. There is any number of ways of finding your purpose, doing what you came here to do etc. It’s important to stay open to the clues, listen to your intuition etcetera. However, a major factor of discovering your purpose is this; be open to everything and attached to nothing.
Many of the most successful and happy people I know are in their 50’s and 60’s and they still don’t know what they want to do when they grow up. This however does not stop them living something that maybe even more important than living your life’s purpose: Living a purposeful life !
Start each day knowing that there will be fear and say ‘so what’, there will also be love. Each day could contain tears, ‘so what’, that same day can also contain laughter, so choose to live a life of purpose.
The fact is that living your life on purpose means you wake up each morning with a commitment to feel grateful that you are doing just that; living your life on purpose. We can move forward with clear focus toward what we want to achieve and that could be money, possessions or status, but always remember what you, we all of us are actually want is a “feeling” and you can start by deciding what feeling you want to start each day with and then deciding to create it. Take a deep breath and as you breath out step off the cliff and you’ll discover you can fly. Be willing to be surprised at how often something wonderful and wondrous shows up…
Leave me your comments and feedback about finding your life’s purpose and living purposfully below, I look forward to hearing from you.
With deep gratitude and sincere purpose.
Do you have the stones to give with it?
You could avoid it heck, that’s what most people will do, and if you want to be just like everyone else you can tell yourself..’it’s okay’. But if you know there is something within you that’s been fighting to get out, (your real self, your authentic self), It’s time to take action…
The path of least resistance is lined with the corpses of the mediocre.
Just think about that statement for a sec.
To become free we must be able to overcome the obstacles that appear before us. Telling yourself and anyone else who will listen, how tough it is, does nothing but validate that it’s okay to quit on yourself.
Those who don’t have the courage to stand up for who they really are and what they really want, die having lived lives that are, at best, half lived and all too often sadly forgotten.
These are the forgotten lives of the mediocre, whose fear of offending others has ruled them like a cruel master.
Now, it’s important that you understand something here.
All courage is subjective; so, what’s easy for one person is not necessarily easy for another. It could be the most difficult thing in the world for them.
Stop and take a moment now to acknowledge the courage you’ve already displayed in your life, and at the same time turn your back on complacency.
Because celebrating your success is an excellent thing to do; however, staying in celebration mode when it’s time to move on is like wearing your Christmas hat in February; it gets a little stale
You know what you’ve got to do, and you know that no excuse will ever really do. So stop with the excuses because I’m sorry to say, no one is really listening to the excuses anyway.
The quality of your life is not measured by the quality of your excuses…
The quality of your life is measured by your commitment in spite of all the great excuses you could come up with.
Listen, It’s never quite the right time, there is always going to be another place that needs the money, and there will always be someone who thinks your crazy for even considering ‘it.’
I don’t know what ‘it’ is that you need to do to fulfill your purpose, heal your soul or make a difference. What I do know is this; we rarely know the value of something until we’ve been through it! And when you look back on your life, no excuse will have been good enough for you to feel good about not doing what your soul cried out for.
I care about you, not your excuses.
It’s easy to tell yourself that the emotional upheavals in your life are “all in the past”, yet the question remains: Are they really?
When you stop and think about it much of our daily experiences are nothing than the same past experiences playing out in a new senerio.
What we don’t look at actually controls us; Because it becomes the undercurrent of our personality. Just because “it” is in your past on a time line doesn’t mean that you have actually let “it” go. Here’s a quick exercise.
Think about the last time someone cut you off in traffic, or some other equally frustrating behaviour.
If you remember that you got way beyond mad … and into the range of pure outrage, that’s called a ‘disproportionate response.’
Simply put, it means that from an onlookers standpoint the incident might have rated a ‘3’ on an anger response scale; however, your reaction was more like a 6 or more.
And if you can’t remember a traffic incident, think of another time where you’ve become incredibly angry at the drop of a hat. (Even if, because you have become masterfull at stuffing it no one else would know?
Anytime that happens, it’s a reliable indicator that there’s other ‘stuff’ that you’re upset about. Being outraged at this driver is just a safe place to express what you don’t feel safe expressing in another situation.
Bottom line: If you are having disproportionate responses, your past is not in the past at all and until you deal with “it”, it’s running your life!
What we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves becomes the driving force for a destiny we may not desire.
Try this: Watch for disproportionate responses and ask yourself: “What might I be angry about that actually has nothing to do with this situation?”
There is magnificence within you… Who you are is so much greater than your history. However, until you look at your history you are destined to repeat it in one form or another.
“Most people’s lives are nothing more than the realization of a promise they made to themselves”
Let’s take this a little deeper…
These promises that we made to ourselves were in all likelihood ‘unconsciously’ chosen and chances are you made them when you were very young. (Although as you read this you may have had a ‘light bulb moment’ and realized exactly when you made your promise and why you did it).
I spend a lot of my time teaching people how to create thier reality. However, what I also say is that most people are creating their realty at a very unconscious level. In fact many of them only get conscious of ‘creating reality’ when something different shows up and they quickly scramble to get things back to “normal”.
Now there’s that fascinating word: “Normal”. For most people reading this you are bright enough to realize that normal is at least somewhat subjective. I n that what’s normal for you may not be normal at all for someone living on a different continent in a completely different culture.
However, ‘normal’ goes much “Deeper” than that. Most people without even knowing it, for the most part are unconsciously busy doing their best to keep things normal. But again please note; the normal I’m speaking about is your own version of normal.
For some people when I say normal they think of the suburban family with two point five kids, a white picket fence and an minivan. But that’s not the kind of normal I am discussing here.
What I’m referring to is your own particular brand of normal. Have you ever heard the saying: “Situation Normal All F*%ked Up?” Well for some people that kind of situation is as indicated, their own brand of ‘normal’. Normal is relative to the individual, as normal as church on Sunday is to one person, smoking crack is to another.
So here’s my challenge to you to bathe in these questions for a while…
What have you made normal that might not be healthy? And…
What promise might you have made to yourself that without you realizing it, is in fact keeping your life pretty much the same as it was?
CHANGE WITHOUT CHANGING?
“people want to change as long as they don’t have to change”.
But here’s the news: You do know what’s going on underneath! You can fool some of the people some of the time, heck you can even fool yourself some of the time.
But the truth is in your quiet moments you know when the time has come and you are either going to box yourself into a deeper and deeper level of numb, where not only your sadness and pain get buried in your body but, so does any chance of true joy, fulfillment and happiness…
Or you’re on a steady slope into your own personal version of hell, where it will eventually get so painful that you will move mountains in order to change. (I know that I’ve done both and you don’t have to do either)
I challenge you to decide because, today you stand at the crossroads. You can let your ego tell you that I’m an ass for saying this, that I’m only in it for the money or some other crap about how it’s not that bad.
THE PROMISES YOU KEEP TO YOURSELF
Is your future going to be your past with a paint job?
Let me explain what I mean… If you were to take a look into the future of most peoples lives you would see that for the largest majority of them, their future will be pretty consistent with their past – except there’s possibly a slight and fairly uninspiring level of improvement. It’s like they took the old jalopy and gave it a paint job in order to convince themselves it was new.
Seriously, put some thought into it, most people are “waiting” for something or someone to bring about the change they say they want. Maybe “the secret” or some other magical thing will come along and solve their problems, but in all likelihood it won’t and in a moment I’ll tell you why.
Why is it that most people lives pretty much the same from year to year? Why are so many people ‘stuck’ when we live in the wealthiest time in history, a time when there is more knowledge and more availability to that knowledge than ever before?
Are we on automatic and if we are, can we get off it?
Let yourself marinade in this thought:
“Most people’s lives are nothing more than the realization of a promise. A promise to who, you ask. A promise or a series of promises they make to themselves”.
We either (consciously or unconsciously) promise to live ‘better’ than we have, and than those around us have, which means we are willing to butt up against the people, situations and what’s ‘normal’ in our lives. We are not talking about being a rebel without a cause here, we are talking about going “Deep” within to discover what’s authentic.
Or the other option is: We promise to not be a ‘problem’, which means we take a look around, decide what’s ‘normal’, be quiet, accept our circumstances and how we get treated as a result of being with the people we’re with in those circumstances.
The question worth asking yourself is which set of promises are you living by?
Labels: happiness, inspirational, self-development, wellbeing
