Daily Osho Card Reading: 'THE DREAM' - Day 9 of 21

Today the intention I held within me as I pulled an Osho card for self-support was to help me identify what is the problem I face when I sit in front of my computer to work, and I become tense, easily distracted and participate in shifty focus, where I am drawn away from the task I set out to do, and do many other cool, yet un-planned things instead or additionally. This draws out the task at hand, and causes inefficiency in my work, as well as reactions towards not getting the things done as I had planned.

Card pulled: THE DREAM

Description:

"Some enchanted evening you're going to meet your soulmate, the perfect person who will meet all your needs and fulfill all your dreams. Right? Wrong! This fantasy that songwriters and poets are so fond of perpetuating has its roots in memories of the womb, where we were so secure and "at one" with our mothers; it's no wonder we have hankered to return to that place all our lives. But, to put it quite brutally, it is a childish dream. And it's amazing we hang on to it so stubbornly in the face of reality. Nobody, whether it's your current mate or some dreamed-of partner in the future, has any obligation to deliver your happiness on a platter--nor could they even if they wanted to. Real love comes not from trying to solve our neediness by depending on another, but by developing our own inner richness and maturity. Then we have so much love to give that we naturally draw lovers towards us."

This card's description reminds me of a quote from Bernard Poolman, that "work is love made visible".

I pulled this card in relation to 'work'. And surprisingly, the card is quite appropriate in what it mentions and neglects to mention.

I think what the card neglects to mention is the work it takes to "develop our own inner richness and maturity". It takes experience, meaning, actually walking through challenges, falling and getting up again, pushing self through resistances to get to the other side of them in order to develop these things, and seeing through commitments to actually know from living experience what that entails.

It is challenging, but I personally have mostly experienced fulfillment after having overcome a challenge.

 But in reading the description, I am also led to wonder: have I developed a romantic relationship with some potential work out there that I am waiting for to fulfill and complete me?  Where I will love the work so much that it will easily flow, never posing a challenge, never a resistance, never bringing forth a part of me that I will have to face and overcome?

This is the point that comes up when I apply this card in my life in relation to the support I had asked regarding my difficulty while working.

I have set myself up and walked a process where i am in the exact position I have always wanted to be. I absolutely love it and am so incredibly grateful to be here. But yes, I am still facing the same challenges that I was facing back at all the jobs I had labelled as 'meaningless to me', jobs that were not what I was passionate about, or were not what I wanted to be doing with my time. So, obviously it was never the job, it has always been me that is/was the 'problem'. Which is cool, because it means I am also the solution, and if I am the solution, then I can apply myself in any and all work that I do, as this too shall pass, and there is no saying what will come next or where I may end up at this point in my life.

What I can see when I bring the point up in me, is that there are certain parts of the work that I am doing that i have labelled as 'work' in terms of it not being exciting or fun or 'positive'. I will have a project with a final goal, and a lot of the work involved in getting there IS fun and enjoyable to me. But then there is 'the other stuff'. The research, the learning, the coursework, the 'serious stuff' that I have to go through to get to my final goal. And sometimes I don't know how to go about a certain step, in which case I go into a helplessness that I identified in my last blog, and that helplessness creates frustration and in this case avoidance and distraction.

This is cool to see as it is another dimension opening up about a point that I had just opened up yesterday. The thing about facing such points is that they are multi-dimensional in this way, and too often we will open up only one, maybe two dimensions of a point, never really getting the full picture of how it is playing out in our lives.

So, here I can see I have a romantic expectation of the job I am doing, an expectation that is unrealistic and thus, the starting point of the work is already problematic in that it will create consequences in my work when that expectation is not met. The correction here is to drop that starting point - to let go of any and all conscious or subconscious beliefs that such  perfect, easy and flowing work will come naturally, and end up making me feel fulfilled and complete automatically.

This does not mean I will accept and allow working to be a laborious struggle. It simply means I still need to re-define what work is to me, and look at who I am within it.

This brings up the point of the way I handle the more difficult or challenging, yet necessary steps towards my goals. I have come to program myself to see this scenario as a laborious struggle. These include the obstacles I face that I must figure out as I go, not already knowing how to handle them. These are unlike the obstacles I have faced many times and are now easier to see my way through, as I had already paved the way for myself.

Paving the way for oneself does not mean creating a life of paved roads, one that you can easily coast through till the end. That would mean only always sticking to what you know, what you have already done, and that is limiting. Paving the way means making space for oneself to expand - meaning, once you have one road paved, it becomes easier, so the time and effort you had put into paving it is now freed up to start another, new road. This way, there is no coasting, there is only constant expansion.

 I will continue in my next blog!

Day 219- Setting Money to Purpose: Creating a Work/Life Balance

This blog is continued from: In Money but not OF Money - Howto Find Your Passion Without Chasing Money

Listen to this recording here

          This blog is focused on living the principle of honouring self, and creating the best life possible, while not allowing the pursuit of money flatten one's passion or ambition. In my last blog, I discussed about how I changed my experience at work and my starting point of working, in order to bring more of ME into my job, and re-ignite my passion and fire despite the fact that I was only originally there for money. The process was very difficult for me, and filled my life with challenge.

          During pushing myself to change the way I work and Who I Am within the work I do, from making it all about money, to making it more about me, my passion and my spark of life, I noticed an unfortunate problem: My life had become all about challenging myself, my habits and my comfort zone, and nothing else. It was ALL difficult and challenging, and there was nothing else. In this blog, I will talk about how I created my life outside of work, to support the balance that is ever so necessary in life. It must not only ever be about challenge and letting go, but also about creation, and building the new way of being and doing.

          What I did to address this problem, was to now look at what I could create and develop outside of work, in my home life. I asked myself: what do I want to create and develop for me that would create more of a balance in my life so that it wasn’t all about money and making money. So I made a list.

          The first thing I looked at was my living space. I was living with my parents in a spare bedroom to save money and pay off debt. This means that my living space had also come from a starting point of money only, I had not really considered myself. The room was small, so I had items and belongings scattered into several rooms. The room was also right next to my parents bedroom, so if I came home late, I risked waking them up. Due to this, I found myself feeling like I had no personal space to call my own.

          I asked if it would be alright if I created a space for myself in the basement so that I would rather create my living space from a starting point of what would best support me, my living, my life.

          I accumulated furniture through friends and acquaintances, estate sales and second-hand stores. I bought some plants and some lights, and created quite a nice space, with a fireplace, a workout zone, office and bedroom area. After several months, I had my space set up to reflect me, my life, and what I wanted to do.

           The next thing I noticed was that I had very little activity outside of work. I had deemed it too expensive to go out into the city while I was trying to save money and pay off debt. I decided here that it was more important to create balance in my life, than to stay at home only in order to save money. I freed up some of my funds and looked into discount classes or courses I might be interested in. What I found was that many yoga classes offer a trial month at a very reduced price, so I signed up!

          Hot yoga was very nice to attend during the cold winter months, and I really felt like I was doing something nice for my mind, being and body. It was an incredibly supportive activity for me to do after a day in the office and before going home for the night. It got me out of the house on weekends, because I had become somewhat of a hermit, and it motivated me to consider my body in terms of treating it well and giving it what it needs.

           What followed from here was relationships. Now that I had several important areas of my life covered and directed, I began to notice myself become interested and motivated to have more people in my life. There were a few ladies I worked with that I really got along well with, and began to test out spending some time together outside of work. We managed to develop a deeper connection than simply ‘colleagues’, and supported each other through tough times at work, as well as had fun times outside of work. Again, here I had to make the decision to free up some funds for this, but often times we were able to keep it cheap by making our own food and watching free documentaries at home, staying up late into the night to discuss what we had learned, or having a cookout in the yard and chatting over a meal.

          All of these things required me to challenge who I was and what my priorities were, among many other things, without compromising my goals. Due to what I had been experiencing at work, i would fall into more depressed states, and have difficulty getting myself up and out, I don’t know if I would have had the ability to contemplate my life and needs, or the tools to use my creativity and actually practically make and implement such decisions for myself if I didn’t have the skills and understandings that I learned through walking a dedicated process of self-change. This is but one example of how I walked my process for ME. I supported myself and my unique life and situation in ways that created balance within and as creating a life that is beneficial for me. Why? Because I matter. And until I make this a living realization in every moment, I will only be waiting forever for myself to change and become a better human being.

Dare to change your own life? The following links are not for the faint of heart:

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Thanks for reading my story!

Day 218 - In Money but not OF Money - How to Find Your Passion Without Chasing Money

I was able to sit in on this interview recording which discusses the problems money can create in our lives, and how it can flatten our passions and work when it becomes the starting point of whatever it is we become involved with.
 

I will first share the questions addressed in the interview, questions which I am sure almost every working person has asked themselves at some point in their career. Next, I will share my own case study example of how I lived this issue in my own life.

The Questions:

Is the quality of your work and your expression within it diminishing over time?

Do the things that you once loved doing feel more like work and less like something in which you are expanding and exploring yourself?

What happened to that spark that was once there?

These are often symptoms of when money begins to take over our lives and our expressions to such a degree that we suffocate our passion, our drive, and our sense of self-value.

Discover how we can begin to change our relationship to money so that we can bring back the spark and the inner passion of who we are within what we do, and not allow money to override our work, our living, and our expression.

The recording can be found here:

In Money But Not of Money - The Soul of Money

My living example, and how I lived it for ME:

For me, personally, I found myself in a corporate job in the back offices of a bank. I got this job because I had just moved back to Canada after a divorce, and I had bills to pay. I was working because of a need for money, I was working for money. The job itself was robotic and repetitive, reading and correcting SWIFT and other payment messages all day long… basically reading money codes and finding where they are broken, why they stopped for repair instead of going straight through into the recipient's account. I also did high volume settlement transfers for large US corporations, monitoring for insufficient funds and verifying that audit requirements are met for approval limits on transactions. It sounds about as fun as it was, meaning, not at all! I felt like a real robot, a cog in the machine, working inside the mysterious black box where your money passes through when you send it anywhere.

This was NOT my idea of living my passion or changing the world to any degree, and the potential was there for me to become depressed, unmotivated, discouraged and complain… in fact, before and even during my process of change, I did all of these things! But the difference between living according to the automated patterns and programs of the mind, and living in self-awareness with the tools of self-correction, is that by using the tools of support I have been practicing for some years now, I managed to change myself within the work I do, find my fire, my passion and my spark of life, even within these conditions. I will explain how I did this, which is also looked at from various angles in the interview recording I sat in on.

The first thing I did was to change my perception of my job and why I was there. Instead of processing transactions and verifying payment messages, I made it about self-development and acquiring new skills. At work, I pushed myself to practice discipline, focus, and the ability to learn new things – all are qualities which needed some attention and development within myself anyways. I viewed my job to be more like a game, where there are moving pieces and every day, throughout the day, I needed to put the puzzle together and solve the problems.
 

This is how I changed my perception and starting point of my job, and here are some of the results:

In pushing myself, I ended up leading campaigns, doing training and making presentations to develop leadership skills and the ability to work within and direct groups. I ended up finding and implementing process improvements to improve the running of my department, and even changed the way our cross-departmental quarterly townhalls were presented. I pushed for and achieved a change in terminology within how the corporate announcements referred to employees, to a way that is more aligned with my principle of respecting and honouring my peers as my equals, and to not support the corporate hierarchy where employees low on the ladder are seen as replaceable resources. In pushing myself to develop myself, I also managed to leave changes in my workplace that will remain there after I have left.

I also developed qualities within myself the serve me to this day, leadership skills, the ability to work with all types of personalities in a group, the ability to be more direct and expressive, bringing myself as Who I Am into what I do. Also, the ability to focus on tasks that may be perceived as mundane and repetitive, discipline to push myself to do things that I might have otherwise judged as overwhelmingly boring or unpleasant. All of these things are present in daily life no matter what we do. The reality is that it is not always fun and stimulating, there’s always paperwork, administrative tasks, bills, budgeting, and things that repeat every day, so these skills I viewed as essential to my future, no matter what my future brings.

It is easy to list things here, years later, but the truth and reality is that at many points, this process was difficult, challenging and I had many hard times. 

Realistically, some skills can take years to develop. I spent the first year or so feeling a bit shell-shocked and getting back on my feet after my move and divorce. What I was able to accomplish there was planting the seeds within myself, and nurturing them into seedlings that will require continued maintenance, nurturing and support in my life. “If you don’t use it, you lose it”, as they say.

The process is far from over or complete. This is a living process of self-creation that can and must be lived in all moments throughout life. Does this sound like a burden or a lot of work? Maybe. But I don’t think so, because before I made the push to change, as I mentioned, I was living as depressed, unmotivated, discouraged and complaining. To me, THAT sounds more like a burden and a lot of hard work! Both ways are using mental and physical energy, but one way leads to growth and development, while the other leads to self-diminishment and misery.

If you got this far, thanks for reading! I will continue in my next blog.

For now, check out these links to learn how to change yourself to live your utmost potential:

 

See life coaching

Join the forum

Destonian Social Network

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 To read about how I got here, check out my journey:

Leaving the Rat Race - Going to Africa
Turning a Self-Defeating Moment Into A Moment of Self-Empowerment
The Greatest Gift
The Cure to Self-Sabotage: Unprejudiced Objectivity
Conquering the Rat Race
Defining My Own Life
Re-Defining my Moment
Change Who You Are Within the Work You Do
A Small Change in Environment, A big Change in Perspective