Peace, Passion, Purpose

Let Go of Control

To have more peace in our lives requires authenticity and self-mastery.  More passion is kindled through relationships and growth.  For a sense of purpose, we need to clarify what is meaningful to us.  That all sounds like the work of a lifetime, and it is.  But don’t forget it’s a journey, not a destination.  If we are seeking more peace, we may work on living authentically and developing self mastery for the rest of our lives, and day by day, as we get better at it, we will experience more and more peace.  Through improving our relationships, and living on a growing edge we create a life that becomes more passionate as we get older.  The more we understand what is meaningful to us and why, the greater our sense of purpose.

   Do you know how many people have worked all their lives just so they could have a good retirement, then they die just a few years after retiring because they feel useless and have no purpose?  Or the opposite example; those who retire and begin a second career, maybe even a volunteer career, and find more meaning and satisfaction than ever before.  My parents belonged to an Airstream club that built its own retirement motor home park in the mountains of Arizona.  It was easy to tell which people had a sense of purpose and which ones were just waiting to die.  I don’t want to tell your story for you, but I would bet you are not one of the people who is going to be willing to spend your last years just waiting to die.  I’m certainly not going there!

   Oddly enough, in order to find the song in our own soul and live in a state of peace, passion and purpose, we need to let go of control.  Control is nothing more than the ought to’s and shoulds that made us forget our soul’s song in the first place.  This doesn’t mean we go unconscious and say ok, God, you’re in charge.  We become very conscious and discover Spirit leading us exactly where our hearts yearn to be.  Our letting go is only into the presence and power and love that gave us life in the first place, and it is done with a willingness to become the full grown potential carried in the seed that has been planted in us with the breath of the divine.

   A life of peace, passion and purpose is our heritage as sons and daughters of life’s longing.  Anything less is waiting to die, no matter our age.  What we are born to, our heritage, is to live in a state of peace, nurtured by the power of divine love no matter what outer circumstances we face.    To spend our days passionately, with relationships that challenge us and keep us on our growing edge makes our later years outshine our youth by megawatts.  To discover our deepest values and live according to their calling give us a sense of purpose that is not dependant on anything but the joy and satisfaction in our own hearts.  In the words of my faith tradition, “Life is an upward, progressive movement of Spirit.”  All things are possible, including a life of peace, passion and purpose.

Peace, Passion, Purpose

The Song In Your Soul

I have often said that for the first time in recorded history, humanity is living long enough to grow up.  It’s even better than that.  Mid life is no longer somewhere between thirty-five and fifty.  It is possible now to have a thirty year career, retire, and still have an entire adult life ahead of us before we get really old.  We can start looking at midlife as between fifty five and sixty-five, or older.  That means we have lots of time for lots of changing!  Isn’t that wonderful?  I would like to share a passage with you on midlife from the book “Create a Life that Tickles Your Soul,” by Suzanne Willis Zoglio.   “In midlife the need to accumulate material things becomes less significant than the need for time to enjoy what we have.  The need for the approval of others becomes far less compelling than the need to follow dreams of our own.  …… As we assume positions of leadership in our careers and communities, we want to exercise that same level of influence in our personal lives as well.  We become more insistent on living deliberately and according to our own rules.  As we begin to lose parents, older siblings and even peers, we become keenly aware of our own mortality.  Just as we hit our stride, time starts to really fly.  Suddenly we have an urge to do what we’ve always wanted to do, before it’s too late.  We want to taste life more fully, connect with others more honestly, and somehow have a hand in making the world a better place.  So we set out to reinvent our lives, seeking peace, passion and purpose.”

   Peace, passion and purpose.  We are seeking to regain what we were born with, then had trained out of us or forgot as we were growing up.  Let me give you a little reminder lesson on the 1960’s in middle class America.  Not the part about the hippie generation, rather the part about conventional social expectations.  Education for girls was still not necessary, but most of society had recognized by then that girls who went to college were more likely to marry the really successful guys, the doctors and lawyers and such.  If you find a college town movie from the ‘60’s, many of the girls would be wearing suits that Jacquie Kennedy or Barbara Bush would have considered socially appropriate for the upper class.

   I grew up being told that whatever my life was like, that was God’s will for me, and my job was to live that life in humble service, hoping to die free of sin so I could then spend eternity in paradise. 

   Do you know how far away eternity feels to a 10 year old in Sunday School?  And just how much weight will that teaching carry with a 16 year old, in love, or maybe it was in lust, for the first time.  Of course it didn’t help that the young man was three years older, drop dead gorgeous, and a natural born smooth talker.  Motherhood, here I come.  Funny, a hundred years earlier I would have been the success of the community, bagging a husband with a job at such a young age.  In 1960-something, it was a shameful stigma that locked the door to church that I had already slammed shut.

   I can remember hitting my first round of mid-life crises.  I was directed to a psychic – the first time I’d ever met one – and the first words she said to me were; “You’ve spent years trying so hard to fit into all the little boxes other people built for you, and you almost succeeded.  If you had, you would have killed yourself in the process.”  That was the beginning of me reinventing my life, and I began a long search for the peace, passion and purpose that had for so many years been buried under obligation, duty and, yes, resentment.

   When you give up the song in your own soul in exchange for pleasing others, or for what looks like the easy road to success, resentment becomes a growing cloud that darkens your days and separates you from joy.  The only cure is to find your own song again and start singing it.  Stay tuned.

Paths of the Gods

Changing our actions

   You know, every time we come to the beginning of a new century, we humans expect great or terrible things to happen.  All sorts of prophets arise with all sorts of predictions.  The world is going to end, there will be cataclysms, the rapture is coming when some will be lifted to heaven with Jesus and the rest of us will suffer eternal damnation, a new wave of consciousness will transform us all, and on and on and on.  And those expectations come true, although not always as we imagined.  Just looking at the last few hundred years, we find a new wave of spirituality sweeping the world at the beginning of the last century, not the least of which was introduction of the Hindu tradition of meditation to the western world.  The one before it was the industrial revolution and the beginning of modern science.  The one before that was political revolution, carrying a wave of democracy.  The one before that was a wave of exploration and settling the earth.

   Now here we are approaching December 21, 2012 and those expectations are wilder than ever.  And I like what I’m hearing.  Some of it is incredibly exciting, and it is you and I, ordinary people living ordinary lives, that are going to bring it about.  We are going to do it by changing our minds about our beliefs, and once our minds are changed, our actions and our lives will change.

   The following is from futurist John L Peterson.  It is from a presentation made to the Unity Worldwide Ministries board of trustees in 2009.  “I believe we are entering one of those punctuation points in the evolution of our species that will rapidly propel us into an unimaginable new era.  This new world won’t work at all like what we currently find familiar.  Because this shift is so fundamental and acute, the most positive option will not make sense at all from this vantage so early in the transition.  In the face of almost certain uncertainty, our job is to rise to the occasion, to evolve – in our thinking, our perspectives and in our commitment to make this transition as positive as possible.  We will probably become some new kind of human at the end of it all – it is that big and important.”

   This was followed by a list of possible breakdowns and breakthroughs over the next 20 years, and the breakthroughs are so astounding and positive it almost makes the breakdowns seem piddly.  Of course, each of us has a hand in this.  It does depend on us.  The critical question we have to ask ourselves is have we each attained enough ethical and spiritual evolution to handle these startling new changes in a way that is moral and just?  They are going to effect our lives.  Can we deal with it?