Quick survey about your happiness. 3 yes or no's. Totally anonymous.

I'm curious about how people are doing out there, so I thought I'd ask.

3 yes or no questions. Totally anonymous.

Click here.

Thanks!

Ever forward. 

Posted via email from Ever Forward

The key to living a satisfying life is how you respond to the life you're living.

You come back from the coffee station with a new stain on your shirt to find your coworker crying because she's just been laid off. So, you take her to lunch at Chili's to cheer her up and everyone has margaritas and when you get back to the office your e-mail account has been deactivated. Is that an echo of the Mexican Hat Dance you're hearing? No. It's the sound of the ax dropping and it's not what you had in mind when you left the house this morning. 

In the teaching of the Tao, the 10,000 Things is everything that happens in your life, good or bad. You win the Super Bowl pool. You get a speeding ticket. You have a ridiculous blind date. Your alarm clock goes off. The 10,000 Things is how the Tao shows itself to you, and losing your job is one of them. 

By itself the 10,000 Things is just a bunch of stuff that happens. How you interact with it is the key. Your responses to the details of your life have an effect on what happens next. Consider that speeding ticket. What happens if you give the cop static for pulling you over? What happens if you just accept it as the consequences of your actions? Very different potential outcomes. 

Your present situation combined with your response to it gives birth to new circumstances to which you must respond. From the moment you lose your job, everything that happens in your life, for the rest of your life, will be the spawn of unemployment. 

The key to living a satisfying life is how you respond to the life you're living. Not only does responding creatively improve how you experience your circumstances, it helps you change them for the better. With each choice you make you alter your landscape just a little. By responding creatively you take some control over the direction of your life. 

It's not complete control, of course. Life is risk and there is always uncertainty. It's like a rudder on a boat. It helps you deal effectively with a current you can't control. At some point you have to trust the current but this is much easier when you know how to handle the rudder. 

Interacting with the 10,000 Things is a skill you can develop. Over time you learn to recognize and respond to opportunity you could not see before. You can even learn to create opportunity out of circumstances where it may not be obvious. It takes time, but it's really just a matter of beginning, of making mistakes and persevering, and it begins where ever you are right now.

Just lost your job? 

Start there.

Ever forward.

Posted via email from Ever Forward

The Te of Unemployment

Te (which sounds like day with a really hard d) is the virtue of following the Tao. It's an active effort to cooperate with what life hands you instead of resisting it. The result is a more fluid experience of life with less conflict and greater responsiveness to opportunity. In fact, practicing Te enables you to evoke opportunities from circumstance, as if they were hidden there waiting to be found. Like Easter eggs. 

It's the power by which the Tao creates transformation. When an acorn becomes an oak tree, that's Te. So, to practice Te is to participate in the process of transformation, instead of just being a passenger. You make the most of a situation by bringing out all the potential it contains. 

The Te of Unemployment sounds something like this: "Being out of work brings opportunity you should try not to miss." 

Sure, there are lots of unemployed people, but there's only one unemployed you. In the Tao of Unemployment, you lost your job because it's part of your path. You are the only one walking your path, so the situation is full of opportunity and potential intended just for you. Unemployment and you make a unique combination not repeated anywhere. 

How you deal with it is totally up to you. That's why Te is a virtue—it's something you really should do, no matter how other people react to the same situation. It is uniquely yours no matter how many other instances of it occur. And that's why it's a gift. Something about the experience of unemployment is exactly what it takes to reveal the next phase of your life, which, if you let it, could be incredible. 

So, Te is your part of the equation. You can dive in and learn, or you can resist. Te is diving in. It's how you find and activate the opportunity and potential in your situation. Resistance is anything you do that prevents you from finding those things. Fear, anger, laziness, desperation—feeling these things is normal. To give in to them is to resist the Tao. To explore and learn from them is to practice Te.

What do you want your life to look like over time? Will a new job give that to you? What do you want to be true of you when a new job finally comes along? What thing of value can you get from unemployment that no other experience could give you?

What are the gifts? 

The treasures?

Eventually you will find a new job. But what happens then? The opportunities contained in unemployment will no longer be available to you, and you could miss out on something you really need in order to be happy, job or no job.

Ever forward.

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The Tao of Unemployment

If the Tao is the Way (and it is, I looked it up at Wikipedia) then it must lead somewhere, into something. That something is this: the constantly expanding awareness of what reality is capable of, and how to deal with it. Following the Tao makes us ever more available to the lessons of experience, which makes us better at life.

So, what's the Way of Unemployment? 

I haven't had a full-time job for eighteen months. It's been a long painful grind. Interviews and opportunities come and go like mirages and in between are these long stretches of hot sand. Sometimes just staying positive is rigorous work. But you have to become at home in the shadow of unemployment. No matter what your situation, you have to get creative, because job or no job your life is happening.

Much of the popular advice about unemployment relates to finding a job or reinventing your career. That's logical and smart. More personal is the advice to enjoy the time, go to a cafe, pick up those water colors, or spend time with the family. Also, very good advice. Less is said about all the information you can gather about yourself.

The stress of unemployment brings out the truth. It's filled with indicators about how you live your life. An honest look will reveal all the repair work you need to do on your personal foundations, and all the potential for growth, healing, and positive inner change. Unemployment is an opportunity to explore your fear, to understand your expectations of life, to get a feel for your relationship to success, to your dreams, to the people you love. It's a chance to evaluate and strengthen the your connection to yourself—the connection that exists completely independent of your career goals. 

If you don't have a connection to yourself independent of your career goals, that may be the greatest thing the Tao of Unemployment can show you. 

Of course losing your job is a chance to take a new direction. Of course it's a chance to evaluate the path you've taken to this point. But it's not just about reinventing yourself. It's about "who the heck are you to begin with?" You can't reinvent something until you understand what it is already. If you look, you'll find out who you are right now. If you're honest you'll see the opportunity. You'll see where you are strong, where you are weak, where you are fearful, where you are brave. 

There's an old saying: "When the disciple is ready, the master will appear." That's the Tao of Unemployment: unemployment is the master and it appears because you are ready to learn what it has to teach. 

Ever forward.

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You need to trust who you are.

Ten years ago I went through a family systems therapy intensive. It was eight days long and a lot happened, but here's what I remember most: I blew my own mind. My mind was blown—by me. I experienced my own beauty in a completely detached, objective way and it was awesome. There was no denying it and no getting all puffed up about it. It was a simple experience of the truth.  

Conditions were such that the past and future where nowhere to be found and I was fully awake in the now. The result was the blazing, white-hot beauty we all have, but which seldom shows fully on the surface. The experience carried with it complete certainty that this was the most basic me—the fearless me, the incredibly happy me that results from just being me. 

I've never felt it quite so fully since, but that's okay, because I know it's there and the experience can't be taken away. I have seen the me that lives in the now—not in the future or the past. I don't see it as often as I'd like to because I spend too much time in those other places. 

The struggle of the day to day is far more important than the big deals of life. In the big deals, we mobilize, activate, and use our inner resources. But in the day to day, shadows creep in slowly and dim our view gradually. Stress, fear, insecurity, mindlessness, or just plain laziness—these things grow unnoticed until we're lost in the surface static, disconnected from ourselves in the now. I have wandered in that static for long stretches, but I've also seen the gold beneath the tarnish. 

We all want to be awesome. We worship the awesomeness in others, too often at the expense of our own. Well, you can't change the fact that you are awesome any more than you can change the color of your eyes. But you might not have access to it. Maybe you've never felt it. You can tell yourself "I'm awesome," but you might not really believe it. Maybe the thing that keeps you from habitually exhibiting your awesomeness is the fact that you don't really believe it's there. Do you? Answer honestly. Nobody has to hear it but you. If you pretend to believe in your own awesomeness when you really don't, you're lost. But if you can admit to not believing in it, you can turn things around. 

To fully penetrate the now there must be no residue of the past or future on your thinking—whether a specific memory or an attitude that influences your behavior. Each moment must be given the chance to shine, to be perfect and fully new. You need to constantly relax in this way, without expectations or demands, without fear or fantasy. Even if you have waited long for something and grow weary of the waiting, fear and desire must not be allowed to tarnish the pristine quality of this next emerging moment. When you can achieve that, whether through therapy or meditation or just by accident, you allow your own awesomeness to emerge.

You need to trust who you are. You need to trust your inclinations and talents—even the way you look has something to do with your particular brand of awesomeness. Nobody can be you better than you can, and the world needs you as you, or you would not be here.

Ever forward.

 

Posted via email from Ever Forward