|
Living A Life By Design (Rational Spirituality) We are fond of saying: "Live your live by choice, not chance. Life By Design." But what does it mean to live a Life By Design? To live a Life By Design is to increasingly discover BOTH the nature of the objective reality we find ourselves in (including our Self/natural values/mind) AND to consciously build structures consistent with that world such that our Self can dance/express itself in/through that reality with increasing power/beauty/WholeSumNess/FunJoyment. -- Designing Your Life - Mindsets/Trances Notice how it feels when I ask you "what's true?" This particular question, when we approach it from a factual/practical place, when we remember that our essence is so beautiful that our only job is to enjoy ourselves...allows us to allow the pre-rational to be exactly what it is, WHICH allows our rational mind to notice its patterns and nature, giving us the capacity to tap into its energy in a way that serves our deepest values. When I first realized the power of NLP/mind, I spent the first decade of my practice making "everything" beautiful. However, my definition of "beautiful" was "positive/smiling/empowerment/happy." "Negative" emotions such as pain/grief/sadness were "bad" in my world, so I used NLP to "transform" them. In practice, I allowed my fears and "unwillingness to feel" define beauty, then ended up using my newfound powers to override my own boundaries/self to fit my preconceived notions/ideals. I denied my true Self, to try to create my "ideal self." End result: on the inside, I was internally conflicted and emotionally spent most of the time; on the outside, I was positive, upbeat, and "master of my emotions!" I would reframe everything to be happy, even Fantastic! AND, at the same time, I would be overtaken by despair and depression every week or so, when I would get tired of the "work" involved and break down. Then, New Years Eve, 1996-97, I asked myself the following question, and the foundation for Life By Design/Rational Spirituality was laid: "When you can choose how to feel about anything, how do you choose WHAT to feel? When you can pre-frame everything, how do you decide what frames to use? How do you know what to want?" I realized that the rules that my conscious mind was using to evaluate the world were built on top of a set of unconscious/unquestioned fears - that weren't serving me! After a very long night dealing with the ramifications of this, the refined version question at the heart of Life By Design formed itself: "By what criteria do you choose your criteria?" This led to a simple but profound piece of advice, which, the more I follow it, the more depth and fulfillment I experience in life: "Before you consciously design a trance, get conscious of your own pre/trans." This is why the question "what's true?" is so valuable. The foundation for self-creation is built on exploring what's true for you AS YOU ARE. It is to discover/distinguish what your natural values are. The more you are in touch with your natural values/rhythms, the more elegantly you can learn to express them in the world you find yourself in (through imagination/planning and experimentation/trial-and-error). The first/foundational step is to simply check out the Self/emotional world you find yourself in - BEFORE you start designing any particular trances. Of course, this “investigation” IS a trance. AND, it is a meta-trance, one that consciously encourages discovery, that has space for pain/negativity/fear as well as pleasure/positivity/power. It is one that encourages depth, reality, self-acceptance. It both makes space for the "pre-rational" to be exactly what it is, AND, gives freedom to the rational to distinguish its patterns and differentiate it from trans-rational, AND gives you the attention/awareness to ride the ecstatic unfolding of the trans-rational back to the source that you ARE. It uses exactly what you currently are, and exactly what you currently are not as the gateway into an ever deeper discovery of who you are meant to FunJoyously become... In more prosaic terms, it makes sense to explore the experiential/objective world you find yourself in before you decide where/how you want to live during the different seasons of the year. To choose where you want to build your houses/etc. before you have a good sense of the lay of the land and the nature of the seasons is, in my opinion, a bit premature. To continue the metaphor, it would be better to create an observation deck/home-base with everything you need to explore your world, but with the understanding that this is a temporary shelter (as luxurious as you want to make it, of course) so you can LEARN what it is that would make you most happy. Your job is to explore the beauty that you are in wide-eyed wonder for a while, rather than carve a statue of the YOU you think you want to be. Later, once you have had a chance to place lots of attention/awareness on the natural expressions of beauty that you are, distinguishing the pre-trans, and learning to recognize your natural rythyms - THEN you can build more specific trances for the various aspects of life, all variations and expressions of that central theme, asymptotically...but only forever! A Life By Design is built from the bottom up, as an expression of our nature, not top-down, trying to fit our Self into some ideal (no matter WHO offers that ideal, be they priest, politician, professor, shaman, channeled being, psychic guides, or realized guru). At each point, we use what we have learned/experienced to gain greater insight into our nature. Problems Are The Solution, but Success is as well. The more we take on this mindset, the more we refine our foundation, our understanding of our nature, and the more powerfully/beautifully/WholeSumly we can build. BECAUSE, the essence of Life By Design is that the question "by what criteria do you choose your criteria?" has an answer, and that answer is the process of self-discovery described above. You have a nature. As you increasingly discover what that nature is, you can build a life that is consistent with you nature, that creates structures with which that nature can creatively and exponentially express itself through beauty, which also happens to be our best contribution to the world... :-) Mark Michael Lewis |
Listen To My Podcast or Books and Audio Programs
|
