Inspiration in Action – Chapter 1

Chapter 1


Life As We Know It

Someone once said “Life isn’t meant to be easy.” So many people have chosen to believe this, that they would rather life a hard life than enjoy ease and grace. If you believe that life is hard and you have the chance for ease and grace, then you will in one way or another ensure that life is hard. From here, life will be difficult, but perhaps it really isn’t.

Life is not difficult, life is easy. Life is bliss and joy and endless celebration. What is difficult is resisting life. Not going with the flow sees the flow of the universe turned against you, or rather it sees you turning against the flow of the universe. Imagine having all of creation against you. Some of us don’t have to imagine, for some of us this has happened. For some of this is happening. Many of us even believe that life isn’t meant to be easy when in truth it is saying no to life that is difficult.

This book is about saying yes. It is about saying yes to who you really are. It is about reclaiming your own integrity and deep natural sense of empowerment. This is an ambitious book, but it is not as ambitious as the secret desires of your own precious heart.

There is a massive lie being told worldwide. This lie says that we are here to suffer, that we are somehow guilty of something, sometime, somewhere, somehow and that as a result we deserve to be punished. Some religions even try to convince us of this. If only we act normal enough and have normal enough desires and don’t rock the boat we might be ok. The world is full of weird people who act normal. After working with hundreds, thousands of people and having them pour out their deepest, darkest secrets and most embarrassing fears it is clear that we all have some things in common.

For the most part we fear that we are not subscribing to a pattern or mould that we are supposed to fit into and are being punished for not fitting into it. What’s more we are supposed to know what the pattern or mould actually is and the fact that we don’t is a reason for self condemnation and evidence that we do not fit the mould. We try to trust sources outside of ourselves and ignore the only authority that truly counts, our own deep truth.

Journeying into your own deep truth will be an adventure. It is the ultimate life experience, to choose to more fully live life in each and every moment. To delve into the darkest depths of our own soul and face the demon guardians of our own creation that block the way and then to finally emerge victorious. Then to heroically take it one step further and share the treasures we have found there with the world, enriching all about us who wonder what it is that we have that they haven’t. All the while we stand as a shining example of the bounty to be found within.

This book is a guide, a set of clues as to what you will find. It is not a poetic story that will reveal it’s secrets once you have discovered them for yourself. It is not designed to make the author seem wonderfully clever after you have completed parts of your own journey because the author knew what was in store all along and gave unfathomable clues all the way through. It is not a pretense at helping you. This book is an actual guide. It is a manual. It is the result of years of painstaking effort at refining methods for explaining the mystical realms of a truly adventurous ‘heart wide open’ life. It is the product of working with the most experienced and qualified mystics and the most uneducated and otherwise misguided of our society and everyone in between.
I have written this book so that it can be understood, again and again and again.

Scott Peck said that once the fact that life is difficult is understood and accepted, it no longer matters. This is because understanding this requires that we surrender to life, and then life is easy. Logically this does not make a whole lot of sense but if life is ruled by logic, it is often a logic well beyond our understanding.

Acceptable Conditions

Remember Lester Burnham? He is the main character of that wonderful movie, “American Beauty.” At the beginning of the movie it is obvious that Lester is not a happy man. He does all the right things, he has a stable job, he doesn’t challenge his wife or confront his teenage daughter too much. He is nice. He is also desperately unhappy. Early in the movie in an internal monologue he says, “I have lost something, I‘m not exactly sure what it is, but I know I didn’t always feel this… sedated, but you know what, it’s never too late to get it back.”

There are so many people out there who believe that life is about achieving what could be called, “Acceptable Conditions,” as though getting to the point where you want for little is the entire point of your life. It is as though we actually think that there will be an end to our wanting. Perhaps at some future time we will have happy hearts because we have the things that our head decided would make us happy.

If you have never had great riches, great sex, a hot body, the latest sports car, are you really qualified to decide on whether or not these things will make you happy? You would be the least qualified person to ask. There is no intention to disparage these things, for some people this will bring happiness, for most though, they will bring emptiness and with good reason. But more on that later, there is a deep value in that feeling of emptiness that should not be dismissed.

Let’s not neglect Lester Burnham. He had all the right things, all the right ingredients for happiness except perhaps for joy. We have all had experiences of joy in our life, if not I implore you to read on. Joy is something that is hard to get a hold of. There is no guarantee of joy, you can have all the right things like Lester Burnham, you can behave how you are told you are supposed to and still, no joy. If this was your life you could easily be accused of not having gratitude, not having an appreciation for the riches of what is laid out before you. If all the riches of the world do not stir your heart, do not implore you to expand and take a chance at really opening yourself up and feeling life pulsing through your veins then perhaps you are an ungrateful wretch. However gratitude cannot be forced, it must be chosen and it can only come from something that feels as though it is within you. When felt deeply enough it grows and soon you will feel it all around you and in time all things will give you joy, but you do not get to decide how you will get to this joy.

Wasted Wisdom

Words of wisdom are often wasted. Take this statement that is so often bandied around, “The answers you seek lie within.” To whoever said that, thanks so much, it’s useless. If the answers are within, why am I listening to you? Honestly to those who know this to be true, it is redundant, completely unnecessary, not required and self-evident. If you don’t know this to be the truth then looking within is not something you will understand nor see the benefit of, so what is the point of telling you to look within? Just say thanks for wasting 3 seconds of my life reading this useless advice, then move on.

What’s more, if you know how valuable it is to look within there will come a time when you forget, and even if someone tells you to look within you are unlikely to hear it. Chances are you will assume you already know this little tidbit and will ignore the reminder. At this point you should probably get your tarot cards read, your I-Ching thrown, coffee cup read, runes analyzed and they will all say the same thing. Wait for it, they will all say in one form or another… look within.
What is the way out of this predicament? Well, it seems life has a magic formula to help you understand. If you don’t look within it will take everything away from you so that you have no choice. Sounds promising huh? Well guess what, there is another way but unfortunately if I tell you right now, you will either not understand or assume you know it. So I am going to use the rest of this book to take everything away from you that stops you from understanding. You have permission to dislike, perhaps even hate, me, I am used to it.

Let’s get started.

Moods and Mistakes

What constitutes life for most people is really nothing more than a waiting game. We wait for circumstances to be right so that we can start living and then on our death bed we lament lost opportunities and wish we had taken more chances. Elderly people have an unexpected perspective on mistakes, they generally wish they had made more. They wish they had really lived. To live is to risk, to live is to breathe fully and deeply and experience all the emotions that arise. To live is to cry and let it feel as if your body is being pulled apart by the gut wrenching sobs and go through it until you come to the still quiet place inside, look around, wonder what you were crying about and then go and party.

“Our moods do not know themselves.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

When we are sad we often think we will not ever know happiness and when we are deeply connected with someone we feel we will not ever feel alone. It is as though our moods make us ignorant of the broader experience of life, it’s ebb and flow and sudden turns, reversals of fortune and strokes of good luck.

The solution is not to try and stop this flow, it is inevitable. This may sound incredible but it is possible to experience joy in any moment and under any circumstance. All sorts of horrors may spring to mind and you may, this moment, doubt what I have said. It is all about perspective. In my consulting practice it is very common, in fact commonplace that after a few sessions my clients, many of whom have extraordinary turmoil in their outer lives, report not knowing quite how they are feeling and only stating that they like it and want more. They have described it as an inner peace, as energy spilling over, as love, as good humour, as sweet sadness, as deep certainty, as being in the flow of life and many others things all of which are talking about one indescribable state.
This is the sort of state that is generally only attainable with years of meditation or stoic focus on one’s spiritual path. The process that I will describe in the coming pages is one that makes use of all the things in your life. Good and bad, wanted and unwanted. Everything that is happening in your life is already attempting to wake you up to a greater life. There is a destiny within you that is calling you to expand yourself and those around you.

This expansion can take any form at all. It could mean better health or more attractiveness or acceptance of your body. It could mean handling your money better or stepping up into serving the world in a way that means you will earn more. It could mean meeting new people or reacquainting yourself with otherwise forgotten friends. It could mean deeper connection with your family, starting a family or perhaps forming a family like bond with some of your friends. It could mean taking on employment that is more meaningful to you regardless of what the salary is.

It could mean doing a job that was once tortuous and feeling joy in the humble service you provide. It could mean learning something that you’ve always wanted to. It could mean attaining a truer connection with yourself or something bigger than yourself such as the Universe, Mother Earth, your community, city or country or whatever you might call God.

Ultimately when you discover what it is that you secretly desire, your whole perspective is likely to change. Sometimes there is some pain, at this point but it is a welcome pain a little like stretching in the morning. If you think about it, stretching after you wake up has some pain attached to it but it is so expected and accepted that it hardly registers as pain at all. This is the part where things begin to become strange and unusual. This is an exciting stage because it means that the status quo of your life is about to evolve and either be cast aside or so elegantly built upon that your life simply cannot stay the same.

At this time all things can change. Many will stay the same and some may not change much and simply be enhanced. The level of drama that will occur here is determined by how much you have been ignoring your own truth until now. If you have been compressing and strangling your heartfelt desires then you can expect some upheaval and if you know why it is happening you will not have much issue with it. In fact you are likely to love it. If you have been relatively true to yourself you will know that adventure is afoot and you may find yourself smiling at these words. If on the other hand you feel fear, I ask you if obeying that fear means shutting down on yourself.

“Contrasting Urges”

Life is full of paradoxes. It is true that ‘fortune favours the bold’ but on the other hand fools rush in where angels fear to tread. These contradictions, when put simply, serve as advice to use discernment. Sometimes one form of behavior is suitable and sometimes another.

You have two basic contrasting urges in your life. The first urge is the urge for comfort. You want life to be safe and to work for you and not bruise you or upset you. The second urge is the desire to grow. You want life to be adventurous and fulfilling, you want to get somewhere, you don’t want things to be the same all the time.

Your purpose is not comfort. Comfort is a reward for following your purpose and comfort comes in many forms. Sometimes what was once a comfort is a prison. For instance you may want to buy a motorized massage chair and upon having it you love and enjoy it. It is a wonderful thing, yet as time passes so does your enjoyment of it. It becomes old, perhaps you want the new model but you are stuck with this one and after all it doesn’t make your life exciting does it? Perhaps you have spent too much time in that chair and instead you dream of sitting precariously on a ski lift instead. The call of adventure beckons. When you answer it and take your chances and grow well beyond your limits in one way or another, suddenly the comfort of the massage chair is sweet once again.

“A boat is safe in the harbor. But this is not the purpose of a boat.” – Paulo Coelho

There is no one answer, both comfort and challenge are part of life. In fact many people say that life has no meaning. It is empty and meaningless and it has only the meaning that we ourselves give it. We can theorize and philosophize forever and a day and no one will be any the wiser. After all is said and done there will be a desire stirring in your heart and there will be resistance in your head when it comes to fulfilling it. This resistance will usually represent itself in your thoughts and your feelings and if you pay too much attention to them, the desire in your heart will be drowned out by ‘respectable logic.’

Usually the mundane obscures the magical. Most people’s lives are truly examples that life is perhaps empty and meaningless. They have lost something and they don’t know how to get it back. Something is missing and they don’t know what it is. They try to figure it out and find reasons why they should do this or that but nothing quenches that thirst or satisfies that hunger… because it is a hunger to be irrational, to be ludicrous and break the bonds of what is expected or safe and go for something that the heart wants. Why does the heart want it? Simply because it wants it. The heart is not all that interested in logic, it is interested in growth. The mind may scream it is meaningless and pointless but the heart wants what it wants and beckons you to go where it will lead you.

Most people are not even aware that there is a whispering heart patiently guiding you through the noise of your mind and the din from the outside world. They go to work to make money to feed and clothe themselves so that they can go to work. It is empty and meaningless and they do what’s right and produce offspring to be trained into walking that treadmill because that’s what you do and that’s who we are.

Common Everyday Drudgery

If you are lucky, you will have a passion. If you are like most you will have only duty and obligation and the empty solace taken from the belief that you will be rewarded one day. Meanwhile there are others who go about an otherwise ordinary existence with joy in their heart. They are few and far between these days.

Many people out there have acquired material things thinking they would make them happy only to discover it is a never ending treadmill that ultimately gets you nowhere. Others having taken the spiritual path find themselves isolated from the world and unable to effect it in any way that makes a difference, that holds meaning for them. Their wise words are heeded in churches, mosques, temple and ashrams but don’t make it into common every day practice.

Common everyday people listen to words of wisdom and may even share them with their neighbours, family and friends but when it comes to acting upon it in their own lives it usually takes a crisis to bring out the best in them. The courageous ones are the ones who decide to act it out in their lives on a daily basis. The heroic ones act it out from one second to the next.

The materialistic types commonly have effectiveness in the world but an absence of meaning. The spiritual types commonly have an abundance of meaning and little effectiveness. These are broad generalizations and are true only to an extent but it’s a great extent because being deeply in touch with oneself and using it to effect the world in a deeply meaningful way is an incredibly rare thing.

Wake Up Calls

A wake up call is a message from your outer world that is trying to get you to notice something. It can be anything from a sense of déjà vu to an overdue notice from the phone company or at worst it could be something tragic. The outside world challenges you so that you can refine your life and live more purposefully.

We are getting wake up calls all the time. They can be either soft and quiet words of advice coming from within or they can be dramatic and perhaps even fatal. A client of mine was having a wonderful time creating plans for her business and was obsessed with the possibilities of this and that and spent enormous amounts of time ruminating about what could be. Luckily she received a wake up call that told her that it was time to get her feet on the ground and take some action. There had been hints such as some money issues and some minor conflicts and these were not heeded. So she drew a wake up call to her in the form of a bus, and it nearly killed her.

She was attending a coaching programme with me the next day and I sensed something was up the moment I saw her. I asked her if she had a rude shock and being used to receiving pertinent but otherwise unexpected questions from me she confessed her general state of obliviousness by sharing it with the group and told us about the bus. It truly had nearly been the end of the line for her.

The way it works it this, life wants you to be conscious and grow. It wants you to be looked after and grow. It wants you to be challenged and grow. So if you push yourself too hard it will serve you and make you sick and force you to stay in bed and admit your humanity. If you stay in bed too long it will bring bills to motivate you to get your behind into gear and do something for other people so they will pay you and enable you to pay others who do things for you, such as provide electricity.

These wake up calls are there to keep us going toward our goal, even if we don’t know what it is. This idea is so intricate and mysterious that examining it properly involves looking at all of life and it’s myriad patterns but there is one simple key to unraveling it all. It is so simple that were I to mention it now it would seem silly and inconsequential, so I am going to employ my flare for the dramatic and say ‘stay tuned.’ For the moment suffice it to say, life wants you awake and pay attention. It wants you enjoying the comforts that life has to offer and exploring the opportunities it lays before you.

“Pay attention or pay with pain.”
- Unknown

The Living Dream

What if you were an actor in a play? What if you were only pretending to be here and had chosen to forget that it wasn’t all there was? When we go to a movie we choose to believe for a little while that what is on the screen is the reality we are experiencing or witnessing. Isn’t it fun to get completely caught up in a movie and forget yourself? This ability helps life to be exciting. Getting lost in the reality of life is what makes it interesting. However staying lost can make it painful and then it is as though life uses increasingly serious methods to wake you up.

“You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
- Edgar Allen Poe

There will be more on this later in the book. It is important to consider that a lot of your life is made up, it is pretend. I want to make the point though that while many philosophers and some spiritual teachers will tell you that ‘all is Illusion’ and that ‘things are not real’ they are missing an important point. If we are in a dream, if it is all pretend, if it is only illusion, then what is the purpose of this living dream? Simply because it is a dream within a dream does not mean it has no value. This dream that we are all having is important and valid. How do you know this to be true? If it weren’t valid you would not be doing it.

“Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.” – Richard Bach

Death and Dying

Is it enough for you to watch Dead Poet’s Society once in a while, shout “Seize the Day!” or it’s Latin equivalent, “Carpe Diem!” getting all excited about your grand plans and then going to bed that night and forgetting your firm but momentary resolve to do something significant? Have you ever had a grand intention and then let yourself forget about it, because it is just too hard to get out of bed or make that tough phone call or ask that wonderful person who makes your heart stir to go on a date? Each time you do this you are dying a little, your life force gets sapped away every time you make a promise to your own heart and don’t fulfill it.

There is something about life that we all try to deny. Life ends. One day you will curl up and die. If you die well you will die doing something you love or being around people you love or both. Personally I would prefer to go out while teaching people about how to experience true joy and share it with each other and see my kids and preferably grand children in the audience. You know what, I would rather my kids and their kids were out there doing something deeply meaningful and completely in the moment. It brings tears to my eyes to imagine that they might be providing service to someone with joy in their heart at simply being of service. This may not be your purpose though. Yours could be making billions of dollars and appreciating all the comforts the world has to offer. Yours might be to be humble and sweep the streets, it could be to enable women to experience their true beauty or accept their inner doubts. It could be anything.

“What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.” – The Dalai Lama

If you live your life as though you are afraid to die, you are already dead. This does not mean you should go and do such crazy things that ensure you will end up dead anyway. Sometimes making the most of life is about facing death, sometimes it is about protecting yourself, sometimes it is about caring for people and sometimes it is about telling people to get out of your life.

If you think you know what life is about you are probably just about to be proven wrong.

Life is contradiction. The flow of life is pure joy. When you are in the flow you wonder if you could ever be outside of it, when you are out of it you wonder if that flow and that joy every really existed. To those who like to theorize about the joy of life, everything is merely an illusion to be dismissed, a temptation not to be indulged. When you are truly in the flow of life, every moment is worth an eternity. If you have enough of those moments you get to recognize the thin path back to that state. Then when you are in that state you can be productive, more than ever before. You can bring that joy inside into a form that can be shared with others.

Questions

This first chapter is coming to an end. I have talked about how life is for many people and I have alluded to the fact that it doesn’t have to be that way. To get there from here you have to take some steps and ask yourself some tough questions, questions that the mind has enough trouble with so that it needs to turn to your heart. Yes, that’s right, ask your mind hard questions so that it has trouble answering them and has no choice but to tune into your heart.

“My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?” – Charles Schulz

Ask yourself this. Are you really happy? Are you so happy that the question seems silly? Do you only think you are happy? Did you come up with lots of reasons why you are happy or do you just simply know it? Do you find yourself bubbling over with joy or calm yet feel composed and powerful? Do you feel bliss at every breath? Do these questions irritate you? Do you cry and laugh because it is beautiful?

Is life drudgery? Do you avoid enormous parts of your life? Do you waste a lot of energy convincing yourself that everything is ok? Do you live in never ending hope that is never fulfilled? Is there a part of you that can’t wait until it is all over?

Are you prepared to sacrifice some of your comforts in order to really live life? Do you want to break out of a self imposed prison but don’t know how? If your life did not change would you begin to die inside?

Are you relatively happy but know that there is always more joy to be had? Are you determined to live your life to the fullest with courage in your heart and presence of mind?

“The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life.” -Dr. John F. Demartini

What is the one question that you would be willing to spend your entire life trying to answer even if you knew you could never answer it? What exploration of life are you here to undertake? What way of being or doing or having is it your mission to discover?