This article I wrote, published in Natural Awakenings in November, 2003, is still relevant for my life today, and for the lives of all of my friends, including Patricia Hairrell, Sharon Haydon, Hazel Fritz, Darcy, and Gail, who every day inspire me by the choices they make to create their lives.
I thank my sister Margo and her friend, Norma Kelsey, for leading me to master mentor of creators, Robert Fritz. Find a list of his books at the end of this article.
Darcy, my friend and life coach, helps me stay on track. Find her blog and link to her web site here:
May you discover what you love and create your life around it!
Creating Your Life: Nailing the Big "IT"
Your search for your purpose, the reason for your existence, the BIG IT that will give your life meaning, will be over when you choose to become a conscious creator and begin developing the skill of creating. Maybe you secretly believe that acquiring money will open up opportunities to find happiness in your life, but plenty of rich people aren’t happy. You may believe that the route to happiness comes from within, through spiritual growth, meditation, affirmations, and positive beliefs, but nothing inside or outside of us, is capable of keeping the everyday swing of emotions and life’s events in balance.
We need to take another approach. We're creators. We’ve already made choices that allowed us to create the lives we’re living. With more knowledge and practice, we can create on a higher level and bring something into existence that doesn't already exist, for one reason: we want it to exist, from the center of our being, from our purest love, without asking for anything in return.
Robert Fritz, a pianist, composer, screenwriter, and corporate consultant, has written a number of books on this kind of creating. In his workshops in Vermont, he teaches people from all over the world, from CEO’s to classroom teachers, how to create within their lives. In his book Creating he writes, “Creating is not designed to heal you, fix you, or satisfy you, but a way in which you can bring your talents, energies, actions, imagination, reason, intuition, and yes, even love to the creation you desire.” The involvement, the act of creating, gives our lives meaning and purpose. Nothing outside us is IT; we are IT—for our deepest desires. Life isn’t about what our creations can give to us, but what we can give to them.
Prioritize Values. Each of us is born with a different set of values. What are yours? What do you truly care about? Who do you love? What do you want? The problem is, we don’t live long enough to delve into everything that matters to us, so it’s a good idea to list your values and organize your life around those that you are the most passionate about. We’re also born with the raw materials for developing our gifts that will allow us to organize our lives around those values. Creators spend their lives mastering their gifts.
Think Results. At least once in your life, you have probably wanted something so badly that you went to great lengths to get it, and what you got was the result of your efforts. Creators go through a process, beginning with visualizing the result they want, then assessing their current reality, and finally, deciding the actions they need to take to get them to the result. It’s important to correctly define each of these steps. For more information about this process, see “Suggested Reading.”
Are your Concepts Bothering You? If knowing what you want and taking the steps to achieve the result were as easy as they sound, why haven’t we been able to always get what we want? We may have developed life structures that keep us flailing in the undertow, unable to reach our highest aspirations, or barely grasping them, only to lose them in disappointing failures. Part of the problem can be our concepts—theories and ideals about the world. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes that art is based on reality, not imagination. In Your Life as Art, Fritz describes concepts as the “enemy of observation. Concepts blind the artist, dull the writer, reduce the composer and filmmaker to cliches, deaden the actor, and make the poet trite.” Fritz discusses concepts in detail in Your Life As Art. Here are a few of his examples of concepts, with suggestions for negating their influence:
Personal Ideals. Most of us have unwanted beliefs about ourselves, not based on truth, that we may not be aware of. They can cause trouble if you have established an ideal of yourself to hide your belief. For example, if you believe you’re stupid, and you’ve spent your life trying to prove you’re smart, you might not want to risk learning a new skill. It’s best to become aware of your hidden belief and the ways it has impacted your life. And then realize that it’s sometimes true (we all do stupid things) and often not true. And it wouldn’t matter if you were stupid; it won’t keep you from getting the result you want.
Social Ideals. What are your expectations of how other people should behave? It’s difficult to discover your true aspirations and values if you’re making up rules for other people to live by. To get back in touch with your own values, ask yourself if you hold the value that people are free to live the lives they want to live.
Justifying Your Existence. If you think you need to justify your existence by doing good deeds and contributing to mankind, ask yourself if this is actually possible. To create from our love for our creation is not the same as creating because we feel obligated.
Explaining Mysteries. You may be on a search to find the right worldview and explain the true mysteries, such as questions about God, creation, and life after death. The belief is that if you discover the concepts of Truth, your life will become easier to manage. It’s okay to let go of the need for concepts and accept that, while we can speculate, a lot about our universe is unknowable. Fritz writes, “If anything, faith is the suspension of having to have an answer to the mysteries, rather than insisting upon a concept of Truth.” We all have spiritual experiences, but when frozen into concepts, they can keep us from achieving our true values and desires.
To Search or Not to Search
We have choices. We can spend our time haphazardly searching for meaning, happiness, and satisfaction—inner states that cannot remain constant. We can unconsciously create lives in which we spend our days putting out fires, living in details unrelated to what truly matters to us, or just going with the flow. Or we can discover what we love and learn how to create our lives around it.
Suggested reading
Julia Cameron
The Artist’s Way
Robert Fritz
The Path of Least Resistance
Creating
Your Life as Art
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