Design Your Own Life

You can design your own life. You already know how to do it. Now all you need to do is design it the way YOU want it.

In a way, the title of this post is a redundancy. What do I mean by that? I mean that to tell someone to design their own life is pointless, because they are ALREADY doing that. You are designing every detail of your own life. It's just that most of us, most of the time, don't realize it. And most of us, most of the time, are getting stuff that we don't want, so how can we be designing that?

Not so long ago, I was listening to a CD of a QA seminar given by Bill Harris of Centerpointe, and he said something during that seminar that resonated for me. The people had gathered to listen to Bill talking about designing the perfect life, and at one point he said to them something along the lines of, "You, all of you, are already powerful creators. You are already doing this." It's just that, at the moment, it's running on a kind of automatic pilot. We are all of us powerful creators. What we need to learn is the art of CHOOSING what we create.

I've been doing a lot of experimenting with reaction in the past few months, and I've learned some things, which I would love to share with you. Newton's Third Law of Mechanics States that "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." That's true for billiard balls, and mountains and rivers, and stars and galaxies. They bounce around, they react, they don't have any choice. They have to follow those mechanical rules. And of course, our physical bodies are subject to the same rules. But I think that, too often, we tend to follow those rigidly mechanical rules in our mental and spiritual lives as well.

But to do so is a CHOICE that we make. How often have you heard people say, or have even said yourself, when something happens that you don't want, "Oh well, isn't that just exactly what you would expect, these things always happen to me," and similar phrases? Frequently, people don't even bother to start anything, because they are already convinced the outcome will be negative.

This kind of behavior is what we might call reactive. Now those people who talk about karma will tell you that the more you react against some thing, or some event, the more you are setting yourself up to get more of the same.

In a designed life, you accept that such negative things will happen, you deal with them as best you can, but you do not allow yourself to become involved with them, or entangled is probably a better way to describe it. Instead you focus on asking yourself a question like, "Is there any way I can use this situation to get where I want to be?" If nothing obvious presents itself, then the best course is just to ride out whatever storm is around you, until you can reach calm water again. The answers will probably be waiting for you there.

It's very helpful if you are a person who practises meditation on a regular basis. If you have tried this in the past, but found it too difficult, or it required too much of your time, there are a number of helpful products on the market to make it easier. Two examples among many are The Meditation Program or Holosync.

So then, in trying situations, practise acceptance, non-involvement, and the art of designing the life you wish to live.