Taking Things Personally (That Aren’t)

I have noticed that a particular shift in perspective can save much needless suffering (as I am holding the Life Fulfillment Calls with individuals.) For short, let me call this shift “ending the notion that how we are put together, and our quirks and less-than-our-standards behavior is our personal failing.” From a larger perspective, this is ridiculous.

Taking personal blame for evolution is likely an act of either short-sightedness regarding time, an act of enormous hubris, or both. That we have a “reptilian brain” that tracks sex, aggression, protection, etc. isn’t something we put together. Please give the nearly 14 billion years that went into the “kluge-job” of a brain we have some credit here. And we weren’t around for very much of the 14 billion years either. Let’s concentrate on the part we are around for, and on the part where we have a say. And that say surely isn’t regarding everything.

Taking blame for our “monkey brains” that track status, belonging, being part of the group, is also likely unlikely to make us any more free, or to have us make better choices. Quite the opposite. If we let evolution have had its way so far, and start where we are starting with the “monkey plus” brains that also have a prefrontal cortex we are just learning to use, we can let the signaling that fit another time and place alone. We can let it roll through. We can take it as a radio station playing Paleolithic tunes in modern times. And we can concentrate our best discernment and belonging to the one developmental theme in front of us that we can do something about. (We can bring a greater humanity and workability to something that is in front of us.)

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Taking on Life Fulfillment

As we are about to begin Life Fulfillment Consulting with a new cohort, what is timely to say right now? Here are some “first thoughts” in preparation for Life Fulfillment Consulting:

  • While people often think that they are more than willing to be wholeheartedly happy, there are reasons that it remains more rare than common. Certain things get in the way of being wholeheartedly happy. Being a regular person will do it. So will entertaining all of what you aren’t doing that at some level (possibly even unconsciously) you think you could be doing. And much more worth rooting out.
  • Wholeheartedly belonging to life, as if “you” are an expression of what it is all doing for the last 14 billion years up to now, as well as part of the unfolding of where it is going, makes room to have the whole mess — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and be privileged to unfold it from here by development.
  • There is a deep feeling of fit when you bring that which you are deeply grounded in as a strength to your own and others life situations. It is indeed sufficient for building a whole life (whole as in beginning to end, and whole as in all domains of living).
  • Never underestimate the value of mastering all of the dimensions of time as central to fulfillment. Adopting a common-sense notion of time will cost fulfillment and substitute busyness and a desperation for cramming “substitute satisfactions” into a life. Bet on fulfilling your life in all dimensions of time/timing, and real satisfaction will take care of itself.
  • The key orientation to a satisfying relationship with time is that of “unfolding”. It is inclusive of past, present, future, and what underlies and gives them. There is an integrity to this relation to time, and it avoids most of the major fantasy relationships to time (wishing and hoping and wanting), as well as the more presumptuous relations to time (big promises and goal-setting as a fixation as if you are in charge of life).

Please consider these notions. And prepare the way for being wholeheartedly happy while unfolding your life.

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