The Purpose of Life

What is your life's purpose? If you are a spiritual traveler like us, it might just be to unravel the secrets of your being. Try that perspective and see how relaxed you suddenly become. You will no longer dread certain situations but will be curious instead how you might be reacting to them. Suddenly you will pay as much attention to your own feelings as to those you interact with.

When you are really in tune with everything that bubbles below the surface it will be easy for you to spot pain-bodies; little pockets of painful memories that rise to the surface when someone pushes your button. Sometimes we throw a tantrum; sometimes we experience fear. It feels like a psychological band-aid that someone accidentally rips off. How easy it is to understand these links once you start digging. Unfortunately we rarely go back to understand what injury we may have experienced in the past, or what belief-set we still carry around. Instead, we blame others for our pain or fear. 

All it takes it is just to step outside of our pain, our panic, for but a moment. Instead of starting a new movie with new accumulated psychological baggage we just rewind our archives and mentally disconnect today's conversation from yesterday's pain. This self-inspection doesn't prevent us from experiencing pain, but it does prevent us from breaking even more China. 

Try to observe how you react to a situation and how your interpretation sets you on fire. When you blow up according to your past understanding of today's conversation, you really lose a chance to interact with what is. You do not interact with your conversation partner but with a ghost of the past.

Don’t worry if the theory is crystal-clear to you but you still often mess up in practice. It is hard to break with patterns of the past. We have a lifetime to figure this out, and opportunities are plenty. We are here to learn. If you are a spiritual traveler like us, let life constantly remind you about your mission. As a matter of fact, that's what the Tao does for us. She is a life-coach who can be accessed in every daily interaction. Make the Way your life's purpose and insight will follow you no matter what.

Let's be present at this precious moment and the past will slowly dissolve. We want to experience our life with intensity here and now. Let's be totally present at this holy moment whether it is full of darkness or light. Never mind a little pain if it propels us into Her arms. And who needs a thrilling pleasure if it keeps Her at a distance. Our life's purpose is to merge with this special, precious moment. That alone we want from life.

By Christian and Su Zhen 

The Story of You

You change for two reasons. Either you learn enough that you want to, or you have been hurt enough that you have to.
(Unknown)

I read Steve Chandler's book, "The Story of You: And How to Create One", and I quite liked it. Yes, you are that powerful. Everything about you is your implicit belief system and who says it can't be changed! "Success" is always yours to choose; your so-called failure is just there to help you discover what true success is all about. You choose the story of your life - don't let some subconscious programs tell you what this story is all about.

"The Story of You" is a self-help book, so if you think there are areas in your life that need to be reinvigorated, you might get a tip or two from it and learn how to re-tell 'the story of you'. This learning process is all about dropping a few limitations in the process. It is quite subtle though; while limitations are always self-imposed, living your dream is always a joint creative process with a higher Force.  A Tao traveler would tell you that 'the story of you' is read out to you along the Way. Actually, I was intrigued by the ending of the book; a Tao traveler could have written it:

As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.
(Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea)

Stairways to Heaven and Hell

I caught up with an old friend yesterday who also works on self-empowerment themes and she introduced me to a fascinating psychological framework. When I listened to her, it sounded a bit like a stairways to either heaven and hell. Imagine a triangle which has fear on the top, blame and escape on the right and pain on the left. The way one would descend into deeper and deeper problems and struggle if one is afraid of life, that one projects all problems onto others (blame) or tries with the help of medication, alcohol or other addictive measures to avoid life. In life's negative feed-back loops one would experience increased pain and the fear of life would go up even more and down one goes until one day one needs help from others to be lifted out of the hole again.

The polar opposite is a triangle that has love as its top, has learning on the right of the triangle and thrill on the left. You start out with the assumption that you are loved by life, you experience life as a thrilling experience but every little mishap along the way you use as a learning experience to adjust and will thus be able to cooperate with life with an ever increased level of intensity. Life and you become friends, you realize that everything that comes your way is in fact nothing to be afraid of, but instead another opportunity to choose love and to say yes to life.

I liked that way of thinking very much because it describes the Tao. Along the Tao, life hollers at you day in, day out, 'hey, don't be afraid, the monsters that you see are not real. We are your friends and we are here to help you and love you.' You can experience the Tao for yourself and it doesn't really matter whether you face fear in many areas of your life or not. When you move upwards on this stairways you will experience a tremendous gain in energy and happiness for the removal of fear is the gain of love. As the Course in Miracle states, there are only two emotions, love or fear. And yes, love is always yours to choose.