7 Proven Ways to Bring Yourself into Aliveness and Balance,
Under Any Circumstances
Why do executives take exceptional care of everyone else except themselves? They’re like lifeguards saving clients, staff, and others, while they lose sleep, sanity, and wellness. These demands aren’t equitable, or sustainable, and it’s why endurance wears down until the business ends. The #1 crisis for business owners today is one of personal energy. Physically, emotionally, spiritually, an intellectually we erode ourselves into no margin.
However, we have choices to make independent of a world bargaining with our energy. We can control the capacity despite the demand. We can renew our life energy, spirit, and aliveness by the choices we independently make from our past. Here are 7 Key ways to do this:
1. Get the right amount of sleep you need per night. Before coaching, most clients were operating drastically under-slept. They can go 5 days without eating and be hungry, but they can’t go 5 days without sleep; they’d go nuts. Sleeping enough hours is vital to clear the mind for the next day.
Three things to choose toward restful sleeping:
– Decide what time that you’re going to sleep at night.
– Choose the number of hours you plan to stay asleep
– Select the exact time you’ll wake up
Sleep is the greatest form of renewal we have. During sleep our brain is evacuating all the unnecessary data collected from observations and experiences. The brain is making space by storing partial information for future use. When your brain isn’t rested, you haven’t the room available to presence new realities that disconfirm what we knew before. We close the pipe for new energy and information to flow into better combination patterns of order.
Someone mentioned to me once when you’ve lost sleep, everyone else gets stupid. Your tolerance runs short for life’s variations and sudden turns. Rather than operating in a higher gear, you operate from a lower one that brings less wisdom to the present moment, more reactionary and mechanical instead of creative and open.
2. Create a sacred space to tap into intentional silence to ground your inner voice and operate from it daily.
– Spend 15 minutes first thing in the morning to be silent, and ground your intentions.
If you like meditation, do that, but it’s not required. First thing in the morning it’s your chance to be still, and listen to your inner voice. You might consider what you’re truly in service to, or revisit what matters most to you at this point in life. I like to ask what I’m creating. And it’s even better before bedtime, do the same process.
Asking me what I want to create resets my bearings on the subject matter, not myself. It brings me from self-improvement fixation to that of what I choose to bring into being. If you get stuck on the purpose of your life, make it simple: to live. Live each moment with involvement and engagement by taking what matters to you into it and being aware from its presence.
3. See with an open heart. Gratitude is a form of enchantment with what’s in your life. Say a sincere heartfelt “thank you” 5 times per day to someone or toward some situation that has moved you, inspired you, challenged you, or amazed you. This practice brings you into more aliveness immediately, especially when you forgive or learn from someone’s betrayal. Let the world change you by seeing what’s working in your current life story, and act as if you invited it just the way it is. You can’t argue with mother nature, and you can’t argue with the truth of this moment. It’s an acquired taste to become present to what’s going on without interpretation or meanings added on.
– Open your eyes to see with heart and meaning, letting yourself be touched and moved by life’s gifts. The “present” is a gift of truth.
Even when something challenges you beyond the familiar, trust that it’s what the future ordered up, perfectly. Gratitude is a way of opening up yourself to tasting the quality of life that’s here. It’s the sensation of looking deeper into current reality to see what there is to see. It’s like an artist stepping back to see from a wider vantage point, as she makes connections between parts of the scene, and then moving back into it closely like a magnifier.
Magnifying your seeing you begin to occupy yourself intimately with your own nature, and the nature of what is there. You fall in love with the life that’s here, and the persons that are in it by being separate from it as an observer. This distance allows you to have a relationship with it. And seeing more deeply brings you into love, kindness, compassion, and fullness. You know others and become known in the true presence of your soul, nothing is more freeing than this.
4. Be mindful. Practice being aware of your thoughts as they give rise to feelings and then your actions (behavior). Awareness is the regulator of the flow of energy and information in the present moment. When you’re making assumptions that falsely represent reality, you’re relating with your own concepts rather than the immediate experience.
– Choose to live concept-free by taking away the prism of generalizations, outsmart them, and land yourself into the present moment.
Getting to the present is just as key to getting anywhere else, like a goal or vision. When you compare what you have this moment to what you want to create, it brings you into a new and better pattern of order whereby new combinations of energy and information can flow inward and outward. When you’re suspending your judgment it’s like opening the pipeline to flow new information in, and when you’re still, and aware like allowing thoughts to come and go like the wind blowing through, you can see what’s going on, independent of your concepts. The truth will always make you resourceful, especially when it’s made of generative force when compared to a desired state you seek to create. As you wipe your inner window of concepts, you sense the pull from an emerging future possibilities calling you, to come into being. This voice calls to evokes action and fascination from the deepest part of you, the one who knows it must submit and follow like a chef follows his ingredients to the unfinished recipe. He is heart-tugged by the faith in taking a meaningful leap into uncertainty, where mystery becomes understanding, and ambiguity becomes agility.
5. Trust your personal gifts with your life. Be a blessing to someone or the community by operating from what you enjoy most and do best. This isn’t an option, it’s what you owe the world, in fact it’s your DNA talking to you. You don’t have a choice, it’s an obligation to the world that you engage in what you love to do in some way, even if it’s not monetary.
– Choose to organize your life around your personal gift and let others relate with you because of it.
When you don’t choose to do this, you sell out for a social role, approval, security, fear; whatever the opposition might be that drafts you into selling out. And then external sources are on the hook to fill this deep hole inside. Instead, choose to move toward what you’re best at doing; these are your roots that lead to your wings. Anything else is out of bounds; a life fowl.
If you can create a business that espouses it, relationships that gain value from it, activities that bring you into it, environments that evoke it, you create the means to this sacred expression which flows inward and outward like an open vessel. You must help the world see the opportunity of you to enjoy the miracles. When you see the divinity in you, you see it in others, and put faith in their capacity.
There’s only one of each of us, one fingerprint, one voice, your gift is inextricably linked to the whole like a little spec, a seed, a seat in the universal theatre, that only you are coded to occupy. The sooner you GET THIS, the better for you and all of us. We’ll then be able to have what belongs to us—your personal gift, and give you the miracles awaiting you in this lifetime. If you want this miracle to happen in your own life, be a miracle for someone else; take us into your personal gift. It is the only way home. You know more than could ever say, and must remember what you already know, and have forgotten. Like the lion, tinman, and scarecrow, you have the gift already, the door is there, just step in with your whole being.
6. Move from the center. Joseph Campbell called it “follow your bliss.” I take that to mean “follow your deepest desires and aspirations.” Organizing your life and business around what you care about is a fundamental choice around your orientation to life. Most of us have learned by conditioning to react and respond to circumstances, which brings us into choosing better responses. But there’s another orientation which is that of the creative one.
– Live your life building process creating what matters to you by bringing what you care most about into being, and living with it.
In the creative orientation you organize your choices around what matters to you, rather than removing unwanted circumstances. You don’t live up to ideals, change beliefs, use positive thinking, manipulate yourself, seek answers, model someone successful to get ahead, pretend you’re this or that through affirmations, and assume your wishes are life’s catalog ordering system. All of this is too much work and full of tricks, why do it, especially when it makes you a lousy creator?? Just focus on the creations you seek to bring into being. This makes life simple. This makes life exciting, new, and engaging.
Something is desired, some things aren’t but quit focusing on yourself, stop trying to change you, make that a hobby. Know yourself, your patterns and quirks, assets and liabilities, likes and don’t likes but don’t change you. As Billy Joel sang, “I love you just the way you are.”
Instead bring desired creations into world that you love; this is your best place to invest the life spirit you were given. That way you’re using the precious gift of life you have by creating out of the love that made you. And you’re operating from the continuous expression of the finest quality of being that you can express to the world: Love. Not the receptive love, but the generative part of love; the love that creates. And you’re connecting with that which you came for…to do something for the whole. When you operate from this broader context, all the information you derive from life’s lessons become knowledge stock from what you bring into being, separate from what you knew before. The future is shaped by your creative process, as the future desires it of you. Your will and willingness intertwine in the alchemy of creating life creations, as you’re lived by them.
7. Come to Terms with Impermanence. Learn to let go, to let come. Nothing stays the same. To bring new combinations into our life, we must learn to let go what is ready to end. The universe is a wild card in terms of what could show up in your life. When you come to terms with your own power, in other words, that you don’t create what shows up in your life, you’re removed from blame. You put power in the right place. Power doesn’t flow from you, it flows from what you seek to create; you might call them “guiding ideas” that govern your actions. Like Picasso said, “the power comes from the painting, not me.”
Suddenly you’re not looking at your deficiencies. Life brings good and bad situations at any time. This makes you resourceful, ready for anything, and expecting nothing. Yet your brain wants things to be the same. It’s seeking to confirm data drawn from the past; in fact it’ll trade relative truth with actual truth. It’ll lie to you about what’s going on for survival purposes. Your mind is different than your brain. Your mind is in touch with life’s random nature and inclined to live independent of your brains interpretations.
– Learning to live more often in the present moment is the greatest form of letting go.
Letting go is about opening the inflow for divine guidance, opening up all organs of perception within you to relate with life, in a sacred balance. This opening to the present is also a pathway to an outflow of creative expression that seeks you to come into being. When you live in the present moment you find the future there. For you lay the path down as you walk on it. The future connects to the present moment via the unfolding process of future possibilities showing up in the now. The now is where futures are always beginning. Something is ready to take-off, and it’s what the future cooked up, are you listening generatively? Or missing your cue?
