The First Step: Taking Responsibility for Your Life
Happiness starts with your willingness to be 100% responsible for your life.
This means if you are being abused, it’s up to you to leave. If you are being abusive, it’s up to you to stop. If you are poor, it’s up to you to learn how to make money and do what is necessary to get there. If you’re depressed, it’s up to you to investigate and understand why. Nobody else in the Universe can create the life you want for yourself except yourself.
This step means cleaning up your act. If you want people to trust you, you have to be trustworthy. If you want loving relationships, you have to learn how to be loving. If you want peace, you have to decide to stop fighting. If you want results, you have to go for them.
The good news is that the life you want is entirely possible for you to create. The “reality” news you have to create it yourself. We all like to imagine that our lives will someday magically improve, but that’s not really how life works. We take responsibility, and commit to moving in the direction we want to move. Then the magic happens, and Providence helps us out (sometimes). But you have to be willing to do the work first, by yourself, for yourself, because you know it is yours to do.
Areas of responsibility include:
- Owning our emotions. Emotions exist within us, they are ours. Blaming others or in any way negating our responsibility and ownership of them prevents us from just sitting with them compassionately until they tell us what they need and then clear.
- Owning our history. When we stop blaming the past for our current actions or the state of our life, we are free to change.
- Owning our attitude. We are the only ones in charge of our lives. We are always at choice about what our attitude and response will be in any given situation.
- Owning our boundaries. We no longer allow ourselves to be abused and we choose who we spend our energy and time with. We choose to take on the responsibility of self-care and self-parenting.
- Owning our money situation. We can create abundance in our lives if we choose, if we work toward something and earnestly learn about money, business, and prosperity.
The Second Step: Discovering the Unconscious
Once you start on this journey and are committed to it, you eventually reach a point where you realize that while you are choosing as best as you can to grow and move forward, you still have unconscious stuff to contend with. Stuff you don’t know you don’t know.
This is the stuff that keeps you in patterns, reacting out of habit and old scripts and beliefs about yourself. How do you stay conscious and unwrite these scripts?
This short answer is you practice mindfulness every day, every moment that you can remember. You just make a practice out of becoming conscious. You notice how reactions feel in your body, and learn to intercept them before they get out of hand. You find models of healthy relating and living that were absent from your childhood, so you know what healthy looks like. You create a big container inside yourself where you allow any feeling and thought to emerge and be heard with love.
The long answer is that you trust the process of your life, and give yourself over to it. Use what speaks to you. You know what you need, better than anyone else ever will. Learn to listen to that voice that tells you where to go next, and you will be led to what you need to learn next. You decide to love yourself and heal, and you walk forward from that place. One step at a time, your soul will unfold.
The Third Step: Understanding the Context of Your Life
Our soul evolves over many lifetimes, and in each lifetime we choose the circumstances which will help our soul learn its next lesson. We draw to us the exact experiences we need to learn and grow on our spiritual path. It is always up to us what we do with them. We will not learn everything there is to learn in this lifetime. We don’t have to. We just have to do what is in front of us to do, and do it well.
Tips
Release Judgment and Nourish Yourself
Judgment serves no helpful purpose. Spirit is not contained only in “good” things–Divinity is everything, all of this. There is nothing in this world, nothing in your past, nothing in you that is not good, that is not forgivable, if you do the work of correcting yourself. Let go of your judgments and do the work of cleaning up your life.
Love yourself as you are, while you do the work, for you are already sacred and good. By providing yourself that love and acceptance, you are inviting your secret brilliance to shine forth. The spark inside us is shy and fragile, and it needs to be nurtured to grow and thrive. If it helps, think of that little girl or boy you once were, and start to love her or him first. Love that child with fierce tenderness–give her room to grow, and beauty, and magic, and watch her blossom.
When learning true responsibility, we often end up with a lot of guilt and self-blame. To navigate this we must learn to forgive and accept ourselves as fallible. Humility is the beginning of change. We allow that we have made mistakes. This doesn’t mean we are “bad”–just human. Admitting them lets us grow from them.
As we do the work of self-love, we become more able to receive others in their humanity, and release our judgments. We see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, and we rejoin the human race.
Feel Your Feelings and Listen to Them
Emotions work like this:
- Something meaningful happens
- Our body releases emotions to let us know how it affected us
- We either feel them (and get the message) or we suppress them (ignore the message).
If we feel our emotions, fully, for as long as they are there to be felt–they dissipate. Emotions are messages from you to yourself, that something is right or wrong in your world. If you feel the emotion, it has done its job and it goes away.
Suppression happens if we don’t want to feel that emotion (pain), think we shouldn’t have the emotion (anger), or are just in the habit of suppressing all our emotions (including joy). So we ignore the feeling, or we think about it instead of feeling it, or we label and diagnose it. This leads to all sorts of problems: anger turns to resentment and blame, sadness turns to hopelessness and despair, confusion turns to frustration. Eventually, if you suppress your emotions long enough you will get depressed and want to die.
Luckily, the answer is simple: feel your feelings. It can be difficult to start, since we’re so used to denying, suppressing, and avoiding them. But it gets easier with time and regular practice. Book: Emotional Clearing by John Ruskin.
Use Everything as an Opportunity to Grow
Every single upset, problem, issue, painful memory, symptom, and trauma, is an opportunity to learn more about yourself. You created each situation for a purpose, and you will keep creating them until you pay attention. Use each event in your life as a tool to further your growth, and life itself becomes your first and best teacher.
Each of us has within us the wisdom and the intelligence to walk our path in this lifetime. We are always equal to the challenge of our life. As spiritual beings, we are more than any of the material circumstances of our lives. Nothing in your life is too big for you to learn, to hard for you to grow through, or too ugly for you to face.
Find the Inherent Wisdom in Your Body
Our bodies–our physical body, our emotional body, our energetic body–know what they need. If we learn to listen, to slow down and notice what is going on inside us, we will hear a true and sure voice that leads us toward our highest good. This is the still small voice of Spirit. Listen, and remember who you are.
Learn Non-violence
Everyone has basic human needs, and feelings that come up when they are met or not met. We are tempted (and trained) to try to get our needs met through violence, either subtle (manipulation) or overt (domination). This isn’t inevitable: we can learn other means. We can learn to release our scarcity beliefs and strategies and start creating and believing in strategies that meet everyone’s needs, at no-one’s expense.
We can also learn to release self-violence, and to look at ourselves with compassion, forgiveness, and understanding. We can stop fighting and hating ourselves, and start loving and caring for the fragile beauty of our souls.
Listening carefully to your feelings will lead you to the needs underneath them, and understanding your needs is the foundation of creating a happy life, as well as enabling you to understand every human you’ll ever meet. Book: Non-violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.
Embrace Your Inner Artist
We are inherently creative beings. The literal word for artist is creator – like God, “the Creator”, we are all artists. We need to create, and we need to nurture the creative soul inside ourselves. Everyone’s creative voice is different, and everyone creates in a different way and creates different things. Chefs, lawyers, architects, and painters–they are all creating. Find and feed the artist inside yourself, and you will find a direct line to God.
For some of us, creativity is the answer: it’s what we need to do to be sane. We need to write, we need to paint, we need to make things. Give up ideas of “good” and “bad” art–art doesn’t come from you, it comes from God. Get out of your way and let the beauty and mystery flow through you. Book: The Artist’s Way.
Reclaim Your Intrinsic Motivation
When we grow up in the reward/punish framework, we start performing instead of living. We forget what our true desires are, and start living for the approval of others–this is extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is that desire that comes from within, that is connected to our needs and our life-force. The tricky thing about it is that intrinsic motivation is much stronger fuel, but it’s fragile–it is easily replaced in our brain with extrinsic motivation, especially if our needs for acceptance and belonging are not being met. We need to take care around our dreams and give them safe and nurturing space to grow without judgment, praise, reward, or other extrinsic factors.
