Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The journey of intentional living is a great deal like peeling back the layers of an onion. You peel back a layer and think that you have found everything you need to find only to discover that there is another layer underneath with more to learn.

The exciting part, though, is that a pattern seems to be emerging. You have the major things to face in your life. Once you face these, the other things seem to get smaller and smaller.

Another pattern is that in the early days you are exhilarated by facing your fears and conquering them. At some point, though, there comes the desire to begin moving forward to a new future. Here might be the right picture.

You start by realizing that you want more than what you have now in your life. It is either a proactive or a reactive movement. You either see something about life that you want more of, or you realize that you don’t want to stay where you are. When that happens you lose energy to continue doing what you are doing now. If you don’t do anything at this point you begin slipping into compression (the precursor to mild depression). If you begin exploring what is going on within you, though, you move in a different path. You begin the journey to understand why you are where you are now. This is the opening of the door in to fearless living.

What you go down that path you find obstacles in your path. You find things that you must face. Depending upon your emotionally hooks to the present you either face them or run from them. What many people desire is the knowledge of what they emotional hook is. They don’t really want to remove the hook and live free of that emotional hook. They simply want to now what it is. There are others, though, who want to be free from the emotional hook. These individuals who want to be free of the emotional hook move one step further down the path of fearless living.

When you decide to face them you take the next step on the journey of fearless living. Somewhere in the process of facing the fear and refusing to run from it, you find the power to confront it. When you do, your inner world is altered. By confronting the fear and finding the power to change things you free yourself from being controlled by the fear.

This is another place where people choose to stop on the journey to fearless living. They are so relieved to confront the first fear that they want to bask in the glow of having faced it and not died emotionally.

Those who continue down the path of fearless living recognize that power to live fearlessly is found in the relentless pursuit of uncovering things that inhibit our real living.

Somewhere along the way the energy turns from inward to outward. The focus moves toward living out of my power rather than simply using it for insight and awareness.