Today feels like the first day of the rest of my life. Of course, every day is that, but today I really feel it.
It's been three weeks since I left CBS, freedom I had been longing for. It was great that first week to go hiking in the mountains instead of working in an office, but there were a lot of little tasks that needed to be taken care of and then my mom showed up and everything went to hell. Instead of reveling in my freedom, I was suffocating.
Now finally both have been lifted from my life. Now I have the time, the space, and the freedom to find out what it is I could be doing with my life. I've known for some time that I needed a new way to earn my living. It's been almost 5 months since I took a trip to New York (when I was considering getting into publishing), and then to Washington DC just after the presidential election (when I was thinking about getting into politics).
Then on New Year's Day 2009, I made a resolution that this would be the Year of No Regrets. My plan was to quit CBS and head to Europe with Sarina in June. My last day turned out to be February 27th and we will leave for Dublin in early June. We'll spend 10 weeks in the UK.
There is a method to my madness and I want to lay it out very clearly here. Too many of our decisions in life are based on fear, not love. I'm not willing to live that way any longer. Too much of my life has already passed me by because I was too afraid to take action in the moment. I cowered in fear instead of stepping out on the edge -- the razor's edge, as I call it.
I'm ready for transformation in my life and it appears to be ordained in the stars. I want to let go of the past, let it fall away like a snake shedding its skin. Every decision from this point on will be based on love, not fear.
There are many things that have led me to this point, but I will name only a few. A major influence in my thinking has been Rick Jarow, especially through his audio program, The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide. Since I first discovered it in early 2003, I'm sure I have listened to it at least 100 times. I just listen to it over and over again. It is so deep and rich and profound that I learn something new every time. When I reach saturation, I stop listening for a while and then I do my best to put the principles into practice and live them. After a few months, a year, or more, I start listening to the program again and I can see the progress I've made, though I haven't yet fully mastered it.
One of the techniques he suggests is creating a 6-month trajectory for your life. "Choose one thing that if you did it for 6 months you would feel good about your life." It should be what is most pressing, what is most important in your life.
So my experiment is this: for 6 months (from today, March 21st to September 21st, 2009), all of my decisions will be based on love, not fear, and I'll see what happens.
What's most important today is to get my life organized so I have a serene and organized foundation from which to work. After that, I have 4 primary goals:
1) Finish the novel I'm currently writing, The Magical Diaries of Lilith Fyerider. My deadline for completion is April 22nd, 2009, the day before the Pikes Peak Writers Conference.
2) Spend as much time in nature as I possibly can -- hiking, walking, running, biking. That's part of my warrior training.
3) Fall in love.
So, we'll see how it goes...
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The Fool's Journey
This is an experiment.
I made a decision that the choices I make this year will come from love, not fear. I've tried it the so-called "rational, practical" way and I don't think it got me what I really wanted. In fact, it was not rational at all. My decisions have often been based on fear rather than love, but we call that "being practical" and therefore "rational."
Give me a break. Basing your decisions on fear is just as irrational as basing your decisions on love. In fact, when you look at it that way, it's even more irrational.
I made a decision this year to try something different. And because I can't sort it out rationally, I thought, "Well then, just try it out as an experiment and see what happens." I already tried it the way society says it's supposed to be done and I wasn't deeply happy. Not that I think a person should be happy all the time, but one ought to at least feel a general satisfaction with one's life.
So I'm going to go further out on the razor's edge and see what happens. The razor's edge is the difference between what you know and what you don't know. That's why most people won't go there. They'd rather stay imprisoned by the devil they know than risk moving toward the unknown.
This sums up the story in Revolutionary Road, a film that had a powerful effect on me when I saw it in a local indie theater. Both the characters, Frank and April, knew they were unhappy. On some level they knew they were imprisoned in the "hopeless emptiness." But when the devil offers Frank a slightly better lifestyle in the hopeless emptiness (a promotion and a raise), he decides he'll take a more comfortable prison rather than risk the unknown. But April doesn't want a more comfortable prison. She wants freedom and she's willing to pay any price to get it.
The ultimate price is death. Though that certainly wasn't her goal, it shows her commitment to escaping the hopeless emptiness.
As Patrick Henry said when he made the idea famous, "Give me liberty or give me death." In order to truly be free, you have to give up the fear of death. I'm not afraid to die. I don't want to die, but I'm not afraid of it. In fact, I'm not afraid of much of anything anymore. Fear has little hold on me.
My desire for love in every area of my life is too strong for fear to get its vice-like grip on me. The anger I feel at not seeing my desires fulfilled is also stronger than the fear. Together these two energies -- the energy of love that pulls me toward my future -- and the powerful energy of anger that burns through the bindings of fear -- has lead me inexorably toward the unknown.
The reason I have to write about it is because the path is as unknown as the destination. So it's almost as if I create the path as I write.
For example, when I ask myself "What should I do with my life?" I'm not even thinking in terms of career or money. Instead, I ask myself, "What is it that I truly want to do? What is it that my heart is calling me to do?"
In order to do this, it is absolutely necessary that I trust in abundance. I have to trust that I can meet whatever comes my way. I have to trust in my own innate resourcefulness. I have to trust in my ability to draw the resources to me when I need them. That's why so many people make their life choices based on fear because they don't trust their own resourcefulness.
I'm going to do an experiment this year. I'm going to trust myself. I'm going to trust my resourcefulness. I'm going to trust my inner guide, my daemon, whom I call Artemis. I do trust myself and I trust my daemon.
This is not about, "How can I make money?" It's about, "How can I express my True Self? How can I fully express the person I am meant to be? If I do that, will the rest take care of itself?"
That is the basis of the experiment.
It's about following my heart, trusting that if I do so, things will work out okay, maybe even better than okay. It's about love, letting love guide me. I want to bring love into every area of my life.
This is what people think of as a "spiritual journey." You start from your core, your deepest inner being, rather than what's on the outside. As I said, I'm not looking for a job or a paycheck. My desire is for true self-expression. This is not a fashion statement. It's a statement about who I am at the core of my being. It's about the meaning of my life.
When you weigh a pile of money against the meaning of your life, there's no contest. How can a person ever sell out the meaning of their life for a pile of money? That's not to say you can't have meaning and money, but I'm talking about trading the meaning of your life for money, so there's no more meaning, just the money. Even if it were a billion dollars, without meaning in your life... it's... well... meaningless. It's empty. It's pointless. It's the "hopeless emptiness."
Yet people make that trade-off all the time. They don't want to face their fears of the unknown. They don't want to face failure. They don't want to face the death of their ego, but a part of you dies anyway.
The image and symbolic meaning of the Wheel of Fortune in the tarot is helping me a lot this month to keep things in perspective. The key word to remember is "Surrender." There are some things that aren't worth fighting. You have to find another way to deal with them.
But it's also about feeling fragmented and whipped around by the circumstances of one's life when you're out on the edge of the wheel. When that's happening, the solution is to surrender, let go, stop fighting it, get centered, get grounded. The hub of the wheel is the place where one gets centered, aligned, and grounded. There are different ways to do that. One of the best ways is through meditation.
I often use writing. Some other ways are walking, hiking, or biking. Like today...
I made a decision that the choices I make this year will come from love, not fear. I've tried it the so-called "rational, practical" way and I don't think it got me what I really wanted. In fact, it was not rational at all. My decisions have often been based on fear rather than love, but we call that "being practical" and therefore "rational."
Give me a break. Basing your decisions on fear is just as irrational as basing your decisions on love. In fact, when you look at it that way, it's even more irrational.
I made a decision this year to try something different. And because I can't sort it out rationally, I thought, "Well then, just try it out as an experiment and see what happens." I already tried it the way society says it's supposed to be done and I wasn't deeply happy. Not that I think a person should be happy all the time, but one ought to at least feel a general satisfaction with one's life.
So I'm going to go further out on the razor's edge and see what happens. The razor's edge is the difference between what you know and what you don't know. That's why most people won't go there. They'd rather stay imprisoned by the devil they know than risk moving toward the unknown.
This sums up the story in Revolutionary Road, a film that had a powerful effect on me when I saw it in a local indie theater. Both the characters, Frank and April, knew they were unhappy. On some level they knew they were imprisoned in the "hopeless emptiness." But when the devil offers Frank a slightly better lifestyle in the hopeless emptiness (a promotion and a raise), he decides he'll take a more comfortable prison rather than risk the unknown. But April doesn't want a more comfortable prison. She wants freedom and she's willing to pay any price to get it.
The ultimate price is death. Though that certainly wasn't her goal, it shows her commitment to escaping the hopeless emptiness.
As Patrick Henry said when he made the idea famous, "Give me liberty or give me death." In order to truly be free, you have to give up the fear of death. I'm not afraid to die. I don't want to die, but I'm not afraid of it. In fact, I'm not afraid of much of anything anymore. Fear has little hold on me.
My desire for love in every area of my life is too strong for fear to get its vice-like grip on me. The anger I feel at not seeing my desires fulfilled is also stronger than the fear. Together these two energies -- the energy of love that pulls me toward my future -- and the powerful energy of anger that burns through the bindings of fear -- has lead me inexorably toward the unknown.
The reason I have to write about it is because the path is as unknown as the destination. So it's almost as if I create the path as I write.
For example, when I ask myself "What should I do with my life?" I'm not even thinking in terms of career or money. Instead, I ask myself, "What is it that I truly want to do? What is it that my heart is calling me to do?"
In order to do this, it is absolutely necessary that I trust in abundance. I have to trust that I can meet whatever comes my way. I have to trust in my own innate resourcefulness. I have to trust in my ability to draw the resources to me when I need them. That's why so many people make their life choices based on fear because they don't trust their own resourcefulness.
I'm going to do an experiment this year. I'm going to trust myself. I'm going to trust my resourcefulness. I'm going to trust my inner guide, my daemon, whom I call Artemis. I do trust myself and I trust my daemon.
This is not about, "How can I make money?" It's about, "How can I express my True Self? How can I fully express the person I am meant to be? If I do that, will the rest take care of itself?"
That is the basis of the experiment.
It's about following my heart, trusting that if I do so, things will work out okay, maybe even better than okay. It's about love, letting love guide me. I want to bring love into every area of my life.
This is what people think of as a "spiritual journey." You start from your core, your deepest inner being, rather than what's on the outside. As I said, I'm not looking for a job or a paycheck. My desire is for true self-expression. This is not a fashion statement. It's a statement about who I am at the core of my being. It's about the meaning of my life.
When you weigh a pile of money against the meaning of your life, there's no contest. How can a person ever sell out the meaning of their life for a pile of money? That's not to say you can't have meaning and money, but I'm talking about trading the meaning of your life for money, so there's no more meaning, just the money. Even if it were a billion dollars, without meaning in your life... it's... well... meaningless. It's empty. It's pointless. It's the "hopeless emptiness."
Yet people make that trade-off all the time. They don't want to face their fears of the unknown. They don't want to face failure. They don't want to face the death of their ego, but a part of you dies anyway.
The image and symbolic meaning of the Wheel of Fortune in the tarot is helping me a lot this month to keep things in perspective. The key word to remember is "Surrender." There are some things that aren't worth fighting. You have to find another way to deal with them.
But it's also about feeling fragmented and whipped around by the circumstances of one's life when you're out on the edge of the wheel. When that's happening, the solution is to surrender, let go, stop fighting it, get centered, get grounded. The hub of the wheel is the place where one gets centered, aligned, and grounded. There are different ways to do that. One of the best ways is through meditation.
I often use writing. Some other ways are walking, hiking, or biking. Like today...
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