7 Ways to Revitalize Your Passion for Life in Turbulent Times

IN BRIEF: The difference between maintaining your zeal for life and heartbreaking disillusionment during turbulent times ultimately begins with you and where you are placing your focus. Here are seven proactive life responses for the most common reasons why you might feel your passion for life slipping away.

Thanks to social media, you’ve survived the “me” generation. “Me” exploded into “we” and a socially conscious generation was born. What was once considered personal fulfillment has changed for the better.

Undoubtedly, your hopes and dreams are different than they once were. Change is occurring at such speeds, you might not be sure of what to wish for except for a global group hug.

“Despite what the evening news would have you believe, your prospects for a higher quality of life are opening wide as we consciously merge mind, body, and spirit — including science.”

A new science is emerging linking happiness to our well-being. According to the “World Happiness Report 2017,” published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the United States ranks 14th in the world.

The difference between maintaining your zeal for life and heartbreaking disillusionment during turbulent times ultimately begins with you and where you are placing your focus.

What is the common thread of personal well-being, or even the ever-elusive personal fulfillment?

Here are seven proactive life responses for the most common reasons why you might feel your passion for life slipping away.

Celebrate failure. Feeling cynical or defeated, or that your hard work is not paying off? When there is a disappointment in life, seeing everything as an opportunity will keep you invigorated and challenged in a good way. The ability to adapt and learn is vital to living the good life. The path to success is shared with the path of failure. Celebrate every step of the journey.

Make a living or live brilliantly? Making a living becomes complicated when you wish to live like someone else. Materialism and title are fake substitutes for real affluence — the ability to inspire people. Make a list of what you admire and begin to make changes in your life to reflect your values.

Simplify, minimize, and let go of clutter. The economy provides us with the sustenance of life, but when it becomes the goal, you work like a machine mortgaging your life, losing your passion for living. Investigate new markets that allow you greater life flexibility through stewardship rather than ownership.

Rediscover your inner child through exploration of your inner world. Innovation and automation have provided us with more free time than we’ve ever had. Instead of TV, smartphones, information, and shopping, regain a sense of wonder by looking at every day as another opportunity to explore and learn about your inner world. Focus and your natural state of happiness are cultivated through meditation, prayer, and contemplation.

Be a beacon of light despite a chaotic world. Living the good life is being peaceful even when those around you are stirring the pot. When others engage in negativity, don’t get sucked in. Consider ending support of violent media content. Become response-able for you and your corner of the world. Seek common ground with those you come into contact with by supporting needed change.

Reconnect with nature. Do you ever walk your neighbourhood and ask where all the people are? When was the last time you roamed a nature trail? Technology is nice, but it’s not nicer than a sense of community and all the wisdom and health benefits hidden in nature’s vastness. If you’ve forgotten this, stop what you’re doing right now. Come back in 30 minutes and report your findings.

Include service to others in your weekly schedule. Self-love and self-care are certainly important, but keeping a healthy balance between ego and selflessness is the heart of personal fulfillment. In a synergetic world, personal fulfillment and social responsibility are intimately connected. Try volunteering just eight hours a month to discover what you would grumble about at minimum wage. It is a gift — the most exciting, rewarding, and fulfilling gift you could ever give — the gift of you!

Your passion for life can never be taken away from you — unless you take away your focus. Focus is the key to the mastery of life as an ongoing practice.

“Finding balance between economic, social, and environmental objectives is key to personal and community well-being and happiness.”

Let go of the non-essentials.

Keep your focus on your internal compass help you maintain external balance.

Merging mind, body, and spirit, you become joyful, the gratitude flowing just for being alive.

Embrace life from every angle and finally begin to thrive!

Putting your heart into everything you do, your passion for life becoming voracious — this is your brilliant future here, now.

You were made for this. You can do it!

Author: Christine Horner – Collective Evolution

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Breaking Through Limitation: “I Can, I Will, I Must”

Do you ever get the sense that it’s not “SC” (spiritually correct) to express passionate will? In the ‘New Age Movement’, where ‘acceptance’ and ‘surrender’ are the big buzz words, is there still a place for passionate courage, commitment and determination? Certainly to me there is.

So how do these qualities relate to acceptance and surrender? Are they meant to be blended together in some way? How do you commit to something with your whole heart, but without becoming attached to the struggle?

The Commitment and Passion to Get Things Done

Understandably the warrior characteristic has received pretty bad press in the spiritual mainstream over the years. That’s because this  inherent quality of the soul, has been horribly distorted to control and suppress others. But is that a reason to ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’: to meditate out the will, passion and commitment to get things done? Certainly not to me – these characteristics are invaluable essences of the soul – the masculine warrior energy of commitment.

I work with spiritual people all around the world, and generally I notice a common theme running throughout the evolving movement:  a general suppression of the authentic arising of committed passion.
I sense it happens for these reasons:

  • Society has conditioned and suppressed people to limited lifestyles, with controlled expressive beingness.
  • Even when people break free, there’s a lot of advice about ‘letting go’ and ‘acceptance’ which gets misconstrued as giving up the individuality of committed self expression.
  • Spiritual practices frequently seem to dissolve out individuality as they work to unravel the ego.

But true surrender is not ‘acceptance of anything goes’. What do I mean by that?

Commit to the Directive of the Universe

There is a natural flow to the universe. As we know, everything is interconnected – that flow courses through us, when we open up and make space for it to flood in. Where does the flow then take a truly surrendered person? My observation is that the soul is yearning to be liberated, and so this is what it does…

Manifests all the situations that would limit and constrain,
in order that we can confront those barriers and break through.

How do you break through? You do it by accepting the path that unfolds before you, then intuiting what you’re being invited to do – either by the heart-felt pull, or the landing of higher knowing. When you make internal space to pick up on these internal impulses, the soul will guide you into your own repressed tightness – fear for example, that identifies you with the illusion, rendering you less than who you truly are.

For instance: we might live in fear of leaving a relationship because we’re afraid of living alone; or leaving a job we don’t feel satisfied with because we’re afraid of not being supported; or not committing to that heart-felt dream, because of fear we’ll fail.

All of these experiences will generate internal tightness – literally your energy field contracts down; your consciousness then becomes flooded with the energy of failure – the previous limiting pattern. The mind goes into negative overdrive; the body and breathing stiffen; and we close off to higher guidance – the creative soul can no longer flow in.

It is exactly these moments that we need to embrace and confront – because here is where the maximum soul growth is possible.

Feel the Fear,  Do It Anyway, Then Soften Into the Tightness

The fear is there for a reason – it tells you something important for your spiritual development is about to happen: that there’s a priceless opportunity to expand beyond a previous limitation.

So here’s what I invite you to do:

  • Feel the fear of the choice presenting itself (breaking up a limiting relationship for example)
  • Commit to what you know in your heart to be correct, irrespective of the fear
  • Then crucially, explore and feel the contractions within your body – the negative thinking, the heavy emotions, the tightness of the physical, the worrying mind
  • Know that all of these reactions are simply transient energetic experiences, they are not meant to define you
  • Let go of the need for any kind of physical outcome – winning is the growth of soul
  • Soften into the contractions by feeling through them and find the  Void of Silence  inside, of calm stillness – it is that sense of infinite potential
  • Allow for the spontaneous arising of a new sense of beingness
  • Give yourself completely to outward expression of that beingness
  • Finally, watch for the  Synchronistic Feedback Loop  that shows the universe is supporting your growth.

I Can, I Will, I Must

This is what surrender is all about. It’s not the acceptance of ‘anything goes’. You’re surrendering to the universe, and its directive that you’re become increasingly unbounded by the external drama by infusing your soul through it.

It’s the constant confrontation of the internal limitation of the moment – this is true surrender to the universal flow.

For this level of confrontation, it takes enormous levels of commitment and will. There aren’t many out there at the moment who’re embracing this, but if you’re drawn to what I’ve written, and you’re still reading, you’re almost certainly one of those warriors: the kind of person who feels – “I can, I will, I must”.

This is not a classically spiritual video,  you might not consider it ‘spiritually correct’, but it certainly sends shivers up the warrior’s spine. I can feel the soul in it. The guy calls himself “ET” – go for it dude…

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Author: Openhand – Wake Up World

 

Have You Found Your Calling Yet?

You are a hero. I am a hero. We are all, every single one of us, on what Joseph Campbell calls “a hero’s journey”. We all have within us a Nelson Mandela or Joan of Arc or Luke Skywalker or Mother Teresa or Harry Potter. Like all of these classic heroes, we are all little sparks of divinity on a mission to step into our true nature and fulfill the Divine assignment our souls were sent here to earth in order to fulfill.

Who Will Save the World?

But if you’re like most of us, you may not realize yet what a hero you really are. Most of us feel a sense of mission involving a major transformation in human experience, a strong sense that (whatever that mission is) it’s getting closer in time, a compulsion to master certain skills in preparation for this half-understood personal mission, high levels of empathy, an urgent desire to lessen the suffering for humans, animals and plants, and a loneliness stemming from a sense of difference, despite being generally social.

The Dysfunction of the “Ordinary World”

We only discover we are heroes when we get disillusioned enough with the dysfunction of our present circumstances. When we feel sad enough and lost enough and hopeless enough, something deep within us has the opportunity to emerge, something stronger and wiser than we may ever have known existed within us. We all have this heroic spark that never dies, even when we’re in our darkest moments. I call this part of you your “Inner Pilot Light,” which is your inner superhero. This spark within you is fueled by a pressing sense that there is adventure out there, that your life has purpose, that you’re on a quest you may not understand yet, that your small little existence on this very big planet could mean something, that there is more to life than the ordinary, dysfunctional world, and that perhaps all it takes is a cape and a mask and some really cool boots in order to save the world.

The Phone Rings

Right when you might start to question your inner superhero and feel tempted to lose hope that your little blip of existence in this great, big world could really make a world-changing difference, you’re likely to hear the phone ring. It usually rings very softly at first, perhaps so softly that, like your cell phone with the ringer off, you miss it altogether. But when you fail to pick up, the phone is likely to ring louder. Some Divine force turns the ringer on.

When this happens, this is your calling ringing you, just like that, with a loud RING that you can’t help noticing. It’s your life’s purpose calling, complete with instructions not just for how you can change the world in your own precious way, but with the Prescription for how you can lead a wholly healthy life that will prepare you to fulfill this calling.

The Refusal of the Call

Because heroes are inherently curious, you won’t be able to resist picking up the jangling phone, yet when you hear what you’re meant to do on your hero’s journey, if you’re like the rest of us, you’re likely to respond with a rousing, “HELL NO.” What you are being called to do is too scary. The dangers are too risky. Your comfort zone is too secure. Fear wracks you. There are so many really, really good reasons to hang up the phone and refuse the call. Nobody would blame you. You’re only human. It would be natural to turn your back on something so terrifying. Yet no matter how much you pretend you’re not available for that last minute Friday night date with destiny, I guarantee you that, when it’s your true calling, the call will keep pestering you.

The Universe will conspire to encourage you to heed the call, even if it means thwacking you upside the head with the proverbial two by four. When you ignore the call, you may get sick. Your relationships may fall apart. You might find yourself in financial ruin. You may experience a loss so painful you’ll think you won’t be able to keep living. But you will. Because you’re on a hero’s journey. And the hero must prevail.

You Finally Say Yes

However your calling shows up, you are likely to be humbled into submission until you finally, reluctantly, answer the call. The call simply won’t go away. You will finally surrender because The Universe won’t give up on you. Never. Not when the stakes are this high. Not when there’s a world to make better because you are here on a mission.

Finally, you either muster up the moxy to rally to the task, picking up the phone with a smile, or you get so worn down by the incessant ringing that you pick up with a sigh and a roll of the eyes. Nobody’s going to give you an A for a cheerful attitude. The mission you’re on is pass/fail. Will you answer the call? Or will you not?

Because you are a hero, you will finally agree to your task. Because you must. And when The Universe says, “I have a Divine assignment for you,” you will finally say, with a humble, trembling voice, “Okay Universe. I’m in.”

The world is in crisis. Our health care system, education system, and political systems are dismantling. We are at war with ourselves as a species, not just externally, but internally. The time to save the world is now.

We need you. Are you ready to answer your call?

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Author: Lissa Ranking MD / Wake up World