Experiment With Your Life!

 Seventeen years ago I was given the best advice of my life.  I received this radical wisdom on the very first day I attended the Unity Church of Boulder (Colorado) and listened to Minister Jack Groverland.  Over the next twelve years of Sundays Jack repeated his sage advice often: “Experiment with your life.”

I was intrigued by his message that first day, and scared at the same time.  At age 41 I was pretty much run by routine.  I had a good life and I didn’t think messing with it was such a wise idea.  Thankfully Jack is relentless and brilliantly insightful about human beings.  My life changed dramatically over the 12 years I listened to Jack and practiced what he preached – changed from the inside out.  And the biggest change?  I came ALIVE!!!

Do you ever feel bored?  Uninspired?  Chronically Tired?  Disinterested?  Short tempered? Distracted?  Lethargic?  Complacent? Unable to sleep?

It turns out that human beings NEED change.  Yes, I know we all fear it, but that is a discussion for another day.  Human beings require mental, emotional, physical and spiritual stimulation.  Without change we stagnate.  Our hearts, minds, bodies and soul must be refreshed by connection, ideas, movement and inspiration that is not ‘same old, same old.’

One of the reasons that kids are so joyful and energetic is that they are continuously involved in experimentation.  It is what they do all day, every day.  For them it is all new, new, new – and intriguing and fascinating.  When was the last time you felt that way about your life?  Well guess what, if you want things to be different (interesting, dynamic, engaging, exciting) – you need to think and act differently.  If you are not changing, you are stagnating. 

Everything about life is based on change and renewal.  Think of the seasons.  Thing of the life cycle.  Think about your body!  It is actually a new body every year because all its cells are replaced with new cells!

As we move into adulthood we relegate more and more of our living to routines.  This obviously saves time and energy.  But the downside is that life becomes more and more lifeless.  And all those symptoms listed a few paragraphs earlier are a direct result of the deadening of our lives.

YOU are meant to be a dynamic organism: growing, changing, expanding, creating, refreshing yourself continuously throughout your life!  PLEASE: Experiment with your life!  Take a fresh look at everything you think, do, say, and feel.  Experiment with small changes and move on to more meaningful ones.  For the biggest rewards of all consider rethinking WHO you think you are – on all levels.  You just might surprise yourself!

Living in the Present

The best remedy for a painful, troubling, or disappointing past is living in the present.  Today's experience of life will be determined by the lens with which you view the world, your life, and your circumstances.  Every single moment each of us is writing the story of her/his life.  What story will you create today?

Today you get to decide if you will experience the world thru the lens of your past, or thru the lens of the story you wish to create for yourself.  Who is the person you want to be?  What is the life you want to live?  Today you can begin a new story simply by being that person you envision and making choices congruent with the life you want.

The past no longer exists.  There is only now.  And now creates the nature of tomorrow.  IF you allow the past to be the past, it does not matter what mistakes you believe you made, what hurt you experienced, what you failed to do.  All you need to salvage from the past is a clear vision of what worked, what did not, and who, where, and what you want to be now.

'Living in the present' is more than being in the present.  You are in the present because that is all that exists.  Living in the present means bringing all you are and all you want to be to this moment, and leaving all the stories of the past in the past.  It means being, in this moment, the truth of who you are at your deepest level today.  

Today, begin your new story.  Forget all that has been.  Express all that your soul envisions.  Use each and every moment to write the life you truly want into creation. You and only you are the author of your life.

Happiness - The Choice That Never Gets Old

Did you choose happiness today? Sages, poets and studies agree: happiness is what everyone wants.  Yet so few of us live happily as an ongoing experience.  And this is a direct result of the fact that almost none of us were taught that happiness is a choice.

Human beings are choice makers.  We choose moment after moment, again and again throughout every day of our lives. We are choosing even when we are not aware of choosing.  Sometimes we choose consciously, more often we choose on auto-pilot. 

We choose our beliefs, our friends, our goals, our activities, and our actions. We also choose our clothes, our cars, our food, our toys and our pastimes.  And the prevailing hope/assumption is that the sum of our choices will create happiness.  When we fail to achieve happiness, we believe that we must choose new/different people, activities, work, recreation, cars, toys, etc., until we hit on the right combination that will create happiness.  This is good for the economy, but it is never going to produce happiness.

We get fooled into thinking these choices can produce happiness, because some of our choices do result in pleasure, and we are so unfamiliar with true happiness that we mistake pleasure (which is always conditional and transitory) as happiness.

Pleasure and happiness are not the same, but they are connected – just not in the way we have been conditioned to believe.  Most of us live our lives as if the more pleasure we can experience, the happier we will be.  This belief is backwards.  The way it actually works is this: the happier you are, the more pleasure you will experience in life, no matter what you are doing or what is going on around you.

Happiness is not conditional.  It is the natural state of all human beings.  Most of us don’t experience it as our natural state because nearly everything we have been taught about how to live our lives creates barriers to our moment to moment experience of happiness.

This blog is dedicated to helping you understand what is creating those barriers, and assisting you in making new life choices that will dissolve the barriers and allow you to experience happy day in and day out.  And, believe me, happiness never gets old.