How Do I Live From My Heart?
My coach challenged me, “what are you in the business of?” It couldn’t be the 30 second speech, or a diplomatic, textbook, or perfectly crafted, professional answer. It had to come straight from the heart, sending waves of energy through both of us when I said it.
I let it sit. For a few weeks actually. Completely ignored it. Then it arrived like flashes of insight do when you run for pen and paper from wherever you are. “I am in the business of liberating the human spirit into quantum creations.” It’s what I’m here for.
At 5,000 times the magnetic field of the brain, living from the heart is hardly cliché or a “soft” idea. The heart’s extensive neuronal system is sophisticated enough to be called a “heart brain,” a brain of its own with the ability to decide and perceive independent of the central nervous system.
When I came from my head, the answers to what I’m in the business of were as flat as a poorly timed punch line—anti-climactic, cerebral and dull. Literally, I tried different answers on my colleagues and I got blank stares. Scratch that one. From my heart, the answer had visceral impact and meaning, like the surprise of your favorite person walking into the room.
The complex, self-organized system of the heart maintains a continuous two-way dialogue with the brain and the rest of the body. When you put your focus on developing the coherence you have here, you are training your brain according to your heart. And here, you amplify your ability to change your reality, shift the fulcrum point of your life, and experience quantum creations.
To liberate the human spirit is to free it from previous conditioning, emotional memory and identities we carry to create the energetic space for new realities; then to rapidly form new neural networks for living in that reality, bringing it into physical existence.
“How do I live from my heart?” someone asked? “I’ve chased the money, the accomplishment, the relationships, and I know what is important to me now. I’ve worked hard to change my relationship with my dad (or fill in the difficult relationship).
Yet I’ve still been living in a protected state that cuts me off from the fulfillment, the connection, the passion for life that I deeply desire, and the impact I know I can have. How do I live from my heart, from the core of who I am? How can I wake up that passion, to feel connected with others and myself, and love my life?
Living from the heart is more than a positive state of mind. It is a deep integrity of being; a state of coherence you develop between your body and mind by unlearning identities you took on unconsciously.
When the head leads your life, you are making decisions based on what you see, what you “know,” the physical world, pros and cons, logic, what you might lose or gain, and the addictions you live by—the protected states you’ve memorized, people, substances, emotions and ways of thinking.
95% of the mind is analytical, logic, reasoning, subconscious, habit, and ego. Its job is to protect, to remind you of “what happened when.” It is not designed to help you create change, to create new realities, to create a business or relationships aligned with your soul.
Here heart withers; and we wonder what happened to our passion? It exists behind the off-switch of our unconscious feelings. Deciding to live from the heart is the courage to turn the feeling back on and intentionally engage and lead your life—from the heart not the head.
When the heart leads, you are tapping into a magnetic field 5,000 times larger and 60 times the amplitude of the brain. You are tapping into a “heart brain” capable of perception beyond what the brain “knows” or has memorized. From the heart, you are making the unseen primary regardless of how the physical world may appear. You are moving from a focus on solving problems to actually creating a new reality and infinite possibility.
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com. |
How to Increase the Power of Your Choices
“Don’t be embarrassed to be idealistic; it’s your highest vision vibrating through you.”
~ Penney Peirce
The question on the table during a mastermind one evening was, “why do people fear change?”
The goal is to share ideas for discussion rather than come to a conclusion among a diverse group of people. Comments related to the safety and familiarity involved in not changing, no matter how painful; the fear of the unknown appearing as a greater risk than to stay in the same pattern; we warm and sensitize to new ideas as we are exposed to them; the fear of what is at stake—relationships, finances, self identity; and a large percentage of the population does not realize they have a choice to make a different choice.
Choice evolves us, moving our power in any given direction. As Carolyn Myss says, “the greatest power in the world is not love it is choice. It is through choice we choose how to love, when to love, if to love…” By choice, by a never-ending-string of choices, we have the opportunity to awaken and unfold who we are.
The internal reference points we draw from for our choices become very meaningful when we realize they determine whether our choices create real change or merely cycle us through a different version of the same ones. This is true in the macrocosm of humanity and the microcosm of your life.
From the studies of neuroplasticity of the brain to epigenetics, we are realizing just how malleable our experience is, how vast our choices are to deliberately change our experience internally and in the world at large.
Energy transformation changes your reference point. It changes what drives you and the subconscious “files” you access for any given choice. You have probably had the experience of making different choices, changing your thoughts only to have a similar outcome. Until we change the reference points from which we make our choices in any given area, change remains slow and can be more an exercise of musical chairs.
Approximately 95 percent of our actions are driven by the subconscious mind and only 5 percent by the conscious mind. When we make choices, we’re drawing primarily from our subconscious programming, often related to survival, protection, habitual, or instinctive life and how we catalogued our life experience–identities and stories we are used to living within.
Energy transformation can be very specific from simple beliefs to broad patterns. Though a simple conscious mental shift is technically a form of energy movement, deep energy transformation changes the subconscious files of experience you draw from for choices that evolve your business, your relationships, your life, and the world. Freeing up resources and effort for deliberately creating your life, as one client said, “It’s like the glasses have been taken off.”
Deliberately changing our internal reference points of choice frees us into more of who we are, a soul reference. We cannot hold a state of creating and protecting at the same time. The more we transform the no-longer-necessary protective response, the more we draw from a new well of creativity, the well of the soul.
Here we begin to see choices we didn’t know we had, options we couldn’t see before, resources that show up unexpectedly, directions that previously seemed impossible, and a way where there was none.
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com. |
Not-so-Secret Secrets to Work that Fulfills You
There’s something powerful about the role work plays in our lives, isn’t there? We want it to have meaning beyond subsistence; to have purpose, creativity, to make an impact, to feed our pocketbooks, to feed our souls. Where is the pure joy of work for the sake of work itself?
Chin Ying Chu talks of work as the highest form of play. I admit I’ve spent my share of time avoiding work from childhood to present. But I’ve also enjoyed work for the pure pleasure or even sheer exhaustion from working on a project, the physical labor of managing a small farm, or a hard workout and the soul-filled feeling at the end when I’m doing something I love.
Work often symbolizes our internal tension with identity. We find a sense of self in our work, our impact, our accomplishments. On the shadow side it can become a security blanket, a religion, an addiction or something we avoid. Either way, it holds potential for the discovery of who you are. Here are a few tips for evolving your present work situation-employed, unemployed, parent, entrepreneur-in the direction you would like to go.
1. See yourself as part of the whole no matter how you feel about your current work or situation. You’ve heard it said that, “all our problems stem from the belief that we are separate from God.” That perceived separation shows up in the different aspects of life, including work. Like a relationship isn’t merely giving to the other person, but to the relationship itself, seeing yourself as part of the whole, no matter what occupies your time, reminds you that your giving and exchange isn’t merely with an employer, or clients, or with yourself. It is with a whole.
Someone flies the planes so you can travel. Someone grows the vegetables you eat. Someone wrote your favorite book sitting on the nightstand. Someone manages the trails in national parks. Someone fixes your car. Someone creates art that inspires. Parents, teachers, caregivers and the community are raising the next generation. Someone manages a mysterious mainframe so money comes out of the ATM. Someone made your clothes. No matter what you do, your work contributes to the whole.
2. Recognize your work not as your purpose, but as a form of its expression. In a way, we could all change careers and still be living our purpose. Purpose moves with you, it is inherent in who you are. Someone who is brilliant at fixing things may enjoy expressing it as a mechanic, a farmer, a computer tech, working on docks, in humanitarian aid. What you do with it is its expression. Aligning that expression with your uniqueness is the bliss of purpose. Like Rumi’s quote, “Lovers do not find each other they are in each other all along.” Martha Graham says we do not even have to believe in ourselves if we are open to following the urgings within. Your intention and commitment to expressing your gifts and sense of purpose through your work will draw to you what you need to develop that expression.
3. Develop a relationship with your own strengths. It’s not enough to know your strengths and gifts or even to know how to use them. If you want the richest experience of work, learn to relate with your strengths and gifts. At the core of life is relationship. Your relationship to anything be it others, money, work, your ideas, your strengths, nature, Source, your self. This relationship eliminates the disconnect or connection you put with your gifts.
If the old ways of exploring your strengths leave you flat, spark new relationships, and put yourself in new situations. Relationships allow us to reflect, discover and choose who we are and who we are not. A popular tool right now is Tim Rath’s Strengthfinder 2.0. Buy the book and you receive access to the questionnaire. I found it spot on and affirming of the path I’ve chosen as well as enlightening.
4. Revel in the fact that you have the freedom to choose. To have the choice of how, where and in what you work is a relatively new phenomenon. Some may think of it as a curse because now they have so many choices. It wasn’t that long ago that you did what the generations before you did-parent, farm, merchant, sailor. Now you have virtually infinite options to participate in moving humanity forward by unfolding who you are.
5. Love what you do and if you cannot, make plans for change, even if you start only with an intention. It seems silly to say, “only” an intention, because this is where the source of the propulsion or power is that sets everything in motion. Loving what you do is for your sake, but it is equally as important to others. No matter what you do you’re actually “selling the love.” Your passion is infectious. No matter what it is you sell, people ultimately want more of you.
“When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music. …And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth…”
~ Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
6. The more you fill what you do now with you, with intention, purpose, and gratitude, the faster it will evolve or change form. This is a powerful secret necessity for manifestation. When you focus this way, you begin to fill the “space” of life that you’re in beyond its capacity and something new must materialize. It can’t not happen. It is an inevitability in the way the Universe works. You can acknowledge what you don’t like about it. That’s healthy and keeps you clear. But if you want to create change, you must hold the paradox of clarity that knowing what you don’t want brings you, while turning your focus to what you know now about what you do want.
If the only thing you know is the feeling you want to have, or you take the “don’t wants” and flip them into their opposites of what you do want and focus there, that is enough. Trust me. You are on your way to a new creation. Filling to capacity where you are now takes you out of “wait” or “shrink” or “doubt” mode. It is working in tandem with the change you desire.
“Live the questions and Life will bring you the answers.”
~ Deepak Chopra
Living in the sometimes uncomfortable, but potential of the power your questions and intentions hold, Life will certainly move you forward in the discovery or evolution of your work, especially its pure joy and playfulness.
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com. |
The Year of the Heart: Making Friends with Uncertainty
The soul-driven life is an internally driven life.
It leaves space where the ego demands decision and it makes decisions and takes risks where the ego says drag your feet or be responsible. It is intuitive. It is powerful. It is playful and spontaneous, without being impulsive. It is creative, with a drive to press the edges of growth. It is organic yet ordered. It is trailblazing. And it is uncertain.
The uncertainty of the soul-driven life is its animation because it lives in a constant state of potential. That is, what is capable of being and becoming, what is possible rather than what is. Though the soul is never static, its natural state is peace and present. To make friends with uncertainty is not to be in a constant state of frenetic activity or ignorance. It’s more of living in the paradox of motion and stillness inside and out at the same time.
So what’s the point of making friends with uncertainty?
For those dedicated to the intentional creation of their life, their business, and the evolution of themselves it is the eye of the storm, the power center of creating.
Our first impulse when we learn about our ability to create our lives is to want to control it. You mean I can have “this?” Great, here’s what, where, when, and how. And take this thing over here away. Now show it to me so I know I can have it. But the greatest possibilities cannot happen from there. It’s stifling to the soul.
Within uncertainty is the power of real change, the highest possibility. Coupled with intention, they are the building blocks of the Universe. Like an artist who doesn’t know the outcome, but starts chiseling, painting, dancing, writing, mortaring, dreaming, and imagining with an idea in mind, shifting with the idea as the art emerges from their hands, so too, you create your soul-driven life.
It’s uncomfortable. We’ve all been in conversations with someone who is uncomfortable with space, or been the one who is uncomfortable leaving space. But have you also enjoyed conversations where the space just added to the flow of conversation? Every moment wasn’t filled with words. You could just be and experience the person all the more. The space only added to the connection.
Likewise, to make friends with uncertainty stokes the connection with yourself and the Universe at large for creating all that you intend. Enjoy the uncertainty of the space in the “conversation.”
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.
Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com. |
The Year of the Heart: Your Play Ethic™
What if we had a play ethic instead of or in addition to a work ethic?
Dr. Leila Denmark retired at the age of 103 as America’s oldest practicing physician, and here’s what she had to say…
“Anything on earth you want to do is play. Anything you have to do is work. Play will never kill you but work will. I have never worked a day in my life.”
There is a decision we make about what we call work and what we call play. I have found the most difficult physical labor or recreation to feel like play, while the simplest office project could feel miserable. I have felt wonderful doing something completely for myself and felt miserable serving.
We grow up with a lot of supposed to’s and ideas about service, “real” work, laziness, paying our dues, doing our part, responsibility, obligation, purpose, and success. All of which can have their place, yet unfortunately have little to no relationship to who we are as individuals and teach us little of our inner world and how to listen to our own voice, the soul that guides us.
Functioning becomes priority to listening. But when we reverse that order, restoring our connection with ourselves, everything changes. Many people are waking up to this simultaneously as humanity moves through this great shift.
The answer to your personal play ethic™ is not simply to blur the lines between work and play in what already exists in your life, a more linear approach. Rather, to connect with your individual ability to create and see what unfolds before you, riding the adventurous wave of uncertainty.
If you know you want—need—to restore play to your life or business, begin with an intention. Intention is more than a goal. Intention is the power of creation set in motion. It is a declaration to invite the forces of the Universe to work with you and you to surrender with them—step one to more play because it is not simply up to your efforting. Whew!
Start with a simple power statement to affirm your intention such as:
- I live and work playfully
- I intend to live and work playfully
- I choose to live and work playfully
Then pay attention to the subtleties. For example, are you receiving more fun tasks at work? Are your clientele shifting? Are the more arduous parts of your life shifting? Do things feel like they get worse? Are you drawn to get the help you need to make changes? Are new opportunities arriving? Are you finishing your projects faster? Do you feel more creative? Are you inspired to recreate more? And always take action. The action you take builds your intuition and connection with soul.
Play gives life meaning and focus. Einstein said, “Play is the highest form of research.” So remind yourself as your play ethic™ unfolds that you are opening your mind to ideas, increasing creativity, amplifying your focus, and invigorating your mind, body and spirit for more life adventure—including work and livelihood.
“The soul has no other wish than to have an unlimited number of fearless, joyful, playmates on the journey home.”
~ Penney Peirce
| © 2012 Shelley Hawkins, The Self Connection™. All Rights Reserved.
Your requests for reproducing this material in part or in whole are welcomed. Please note that without written permission from the author, this article may not be reproduced in part or in whole. Your requests receive prompt response at info@theselfconnection.com. |
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