With the Developmental Mindset, Learning to Serve Noble Purpose Never Ends
We will not often know when and where the call of development toward our noble purpose will come. Sometimes it takes form as a quiet but persistent inner voice pulling us toward something we don’t fully understand. Sometimes it takes the form of a vivid dream, at night or in the daytime, that brings intense feelings of joy, passion, peace, or aliveness. Or a call may come from an unexpected moment or event. Usually, it is not fully apparent to us when the calling arrives. How do we know when it is a call and when it is a distraction from our path of purpose?
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Listening to the Call of Development: Flowing into Noble Purpose
If we begin with the end in mind, what are we focused on going toward if achievement and accumulation is not the peak? Enter a definitive shift in focus on the target destination in moving to well-being. When we say well-being, this does not mean going only for what feels good to you alone. That is the slippery slope to narcissism and self-indulgence. Rather, the shift to well-being we are suggesting requires a very different energy and focus. It is obtained primarily by allowing a connection to something larger than yourself. Our life experience begins to open to the collective whole and away from the isolated individual. This shift is a critically important one, and is definitively an internal one.
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Swimming in the Waters of Busyness
Being busy is a badge of honor in our modern day culture. We “work hard” and are deeply proud of this fact. We enter into the arena each day battling out the contest of who will prevail with the busiest life. We swim in the waters of hyper-busyness, often blindly accepting that “this is life” - or some other unconscious story that we have come to believe as absolute truth. We take action after action to fill our days to ensure we are busy… and not really sure why. Days, weeks, months, and years go by this way… and we wonder why we are always so tired, why our mental and physical health is taxed, why our relationships are strained, or why happiness seems to elude us. It’s the rare person who dares to pause and ask the simple by very important question of “why do I work so hard?”
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Never Eat Alone
As I returned from the resource center, there was a noticeable shift in my own outlook and mood. I was surprised as to how I had lost sight of the mutual benefit associated with serving others. In a culture that encourages us daily to hyper-focus on ourselves and our own comfort, a simple act of service like my food donation can remind us that we are all have a part in the greater whole. By stepping out of my own head, which was filled with my own so-called "problems”, and instead listening to my sense of interconnectedness, I was able to contribute to the well-being of my community. And, as an unanticipated outcome of that, my own well-being benefitted, helping me to realize just how interconnected we truly are. The Chewong seem to have figured this out long ago: the spirit of fairness and sharing is truly the key to collective well-being.
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Free to Choose Your True Nature
We spend the majority of our lives navigating the needs of human systems. There will always be someone or something that requires you to direct your energy in a specific way, at a specific time, for a specific reason. We will never be devoid of the need to play a role in one or more systems. What we do have, however, is choice in every moment. All too often, we believe that we do not have choice, which can lead us to unceremoniously give away our true nature for purposes of adapting to someone else’s needs.
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The Assembly of Peace
In each of us, peace can be seen through two lenses. One lens is outer peace, which can mean ceasing hostile behaviors with others much like the Celts were able to do for the Festival Assembly of Tara. With outer peace, we may extend ourselves with a calm, accepting embrace of our fellow human beings - regardless of personal histories, old stories, and differences. Of course, extending outer peace with any level of authenticity requires courageous introspective work within ourselves. This is the other lens: inner peace.
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The Universal Medicine
All of us, to some degree, are longing for something different these days. Make no bones about it: it is a highly stressful time that is testing all of our resilience. But, what our family experience reminded us is how much we create our own stress - and frequently where it is not needed. Indeed, it is a truth that each of us lives in our own body as an individual being, and therefore each of us is responsible for the creation of our own thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors. In a very real way, we create our own suffering. This can be a perspective that is both disturbing and empowering.
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We Weave the Web Together
Life co-exists as interconnected parts of a collective whole. Translated into human terms, that means all of the energy we create as a single human being - our thoughts, emotions, impulses, and actions - has an impact on the whole. Contrary to many of our beliefs that we are isolated beings on an island, quite the opposite is true. Each of us, you and I included, are part in a larger system of systems that we both shape and are shaped by.
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Be Here… Now
Cultivating our being in the midst of an environment fueled by crisis feels very unnatural, counterintuitive, and even dangerous. When things heat up, we are supposed to slow down?? What?! The short answer to this is “yes”. But it is just a moment that is needed to get you somewhere different… and this is the thing that our hyper-doing addiction keeps from us.
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Let Love Rule
Love is a complicated thing. There probably is not a subject that has been more idolized, scrutinized, and demonized than love. It’s no wonder we tend to steer clear of the topic at best and bash it at worst. Yet, as we all face into more crises in our world, it seems to be there is a crisis of love that is most at hand.
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Your Inner Sound – A Force for Change
I invite you amidst the chaos of your day, right now, to take a very brief moment to do something we almost never do – pause. Take a deep breath in and let out a long exhale. Now tune into yourself. Shift your focus from what you are seeing in front of you, to what you are experiencing inside of you. As you tune in deeper, you may start to notice the noisiness inside.
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