I have been pondering this thought all day today. Well in between tweeting about my daughter being in New Zealand and the Tsunami warnings I am scared to say the least.

Moving right along… I have to keep my mind off of the bad things. Remember the Law of Attraction???

So how does one go about growing and developing in their thoughts and the way they see things and react to things? You see some people who are always happy and you wonder what are you missing…

Well for me it all boils down to the way I start my day. If I don’t start my day off right then it completely affects how I react to every situation the entire rest of my day. So I will give you my daily morning routine and you can follow that or adjust it to what fits better for you.

1) My morning prayer before I get out of bed. I follow the A.C.T.S formula to help me pray powerfully. I   learned this in my new Christian 101 class with Pastor Mark and Sally.

A - Adoration - which is defined as “an emotion composed of profound admiration, utmost love, and devotion - to love an honor with intense devotion.” Few Christians spend much time in their prayer life adoring God, yet it is in adoration that God pours His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Rom 5.5). Adoration is a muscle which needs to be exercised. Psalms provide a good model of men who adored God. Also, in Luke 1:46-55, Mary adores God with Elizabeth for the great things He has done. Adoration, therefore, is reverent and loving conversation with God, reflecting on His nature and works.

C - Confession - is agreeing with God that you have broken His standards and His heart — acknowledging your faults to God, both attitudes and actions inconsistent with the person of Christ

T - Thanksgiving - is telling God how grateful you are for everything He has given, even those unpleasant things you cannot understand. Thanking God will help you understand His purpose.

S - Supplication - is making specific requests of God on behalf of yourself and others. Often when we have adored God, confessed, and thanked Him, He helps us pray accordingly.

2) My gratitiude walk. I walk every single morning with Robert and our 4 legged kids;) I always walk in silent while I focus on all the things that I am grateful for. I even talk to God silently and thank him for whatever comes to my mind.

3) 1 hour of mental training with a motivator or mentor. Each week I try to do someone different. Tony Robbins is one of my favorite. This week however I am doing a course (actually 10 days) called The New Psycho-Cybernetics: A Mind Technology for living your life without limits by Dr. Maxwell Maltz and Dan Kennedy.

Well that about wraps up my morning. I know it seems like a lot of time but it really isn’t if you think about it. It is SO worth it to me and I get so much more done through out the day then when I don’t do it. I am able to stay focused and relaxed.

I hope this helps some of you and if you need any help don’t hesitate to let me know.

Cheers

Hey guys sorry I haven’t written in a couple days but I have been swamped.

I had a wonderful weekend on Sunday. I am loving my Christian 101 class with Sally, Pastor Mark and the rest of the gang:) At church we had an awesome Missionary that has been in Madagaskar since 2000. They are doing a fabulous job over there with the street kids. They have opened the Street Kid Center and is growing at an astounding rate. They are teaching the kids that would not get any education at all if it wasn’t for them. They also feed then and etc. I wish I could go over there.

Brittani is feeling much better these days but boy oh boy do I miss her. I can’t believe still that she is going to be a Mama soon. She will be an awesome one though.

I also miss Bri very much and can’t wait for her to get here on the 8th. We are going to have an awesome Oktoberfest and family reunion.

Well have to run for my coaching class.

Live Strong and Live With Passion!

Well Brittani got her ultrasound done today but there was a big misunderstanding. We can’t find out the gender until the 20th of next month

However I do have a couple pictures of my new Grandbaby!

Brittani said it was amazing seeing her baby for the first time. I am so happy for her and Ben. I can’t wait to get over to New Zealand and visit them.

Can you believe the detail in these pictures? It is amazing.

Even though I was bummed that I didn’t get to find out rather I am having a Granddaughter or a Grandson, it sure was awesome seeing my little Grandbaby for the first time

Today is a BIG day in the Oleary households, well at least in mine

Brittani goes in for her Ultrasound today. She doesn’t want to know the gender so the Mid Wife is going to tell Ben and he will let Me, Jolene, Peggi and Ian know, well that’s if they want to know as well. However no one else will know because Brittani does not want to find out and neither does Jeff until the birth.

I can hardly contain myself today, I am so freaking excited!! I don’t care if it is a boy or a girl. If it is a girl her name will be Coraline and if it is a boy it will be Ian, to carry on Ben’s family tradition.

Brit really wanted a book called Spritual Midwifery and I ordered it so hopefully it will be here soon. I have a care package that I want to get sent off to her. She is craving Moon Pies so I am sending some of those, a new bible, the baby outfit and toy that I bought and the book.

Yesterday my cousin sent me a message that she bought the baby a tee shirt that says, “Who Needs Santa When I Have Grandma”  I LOVE it!

Cheers

I told you yesterday about the documentary that my daughter sent me to watch called The Business Of Being Born by Ricki Lake and OMG what an eye opener that was. My goodness I had no idea that in the United States over 40% of babies are being born via C-section. It is unreal!!

Watch this little clip here:

“Birth: it’s a miracle. A rite of passage. A natural part of life. But more than anything, birth is a business. Compelled to find answers after a disappointing birth experience with her first child, actress Ricki Lake recruits filmmaker Abby Epstein to examine and question the way American women have babies. The film interlaces intimate birth stories with surprising historical, political and scientific insights and shocking statistics about the current maternity care system. When director Epstein discovers she is pregnant during the making of the film, the journey becomes even more personal. Should most births be viewed as a natural life process, or should every delivery be treated as a potentially catastrophic medical emergency?”

It is an outcry, it is a disgrace to woman and the children we bring in to this world. To think that we are being taken the very priveledge that God gave us as woman is a total shame. It is disgusting this “Designer Births” that are being scheduled by woman, I mean seriously!! Scheduling cesarean deliveries around your social events and etc, it just unreal to me.

I did not deliver my 3 children at home, However I did deliver them all 3 by totally natural vaginal delivery. I would have delivered them at home if I had known that is was an option but that was never given to me as an option. I can not explain the pure joy of delivering naturally. Did it hurt? Hell yes!! BUT the feeling you get when that little one comes out and you lay them on your chest is completely undescribable. Still to this day I get teary eyed thinking about it. And the fact that Brit is going to bring my grandbaby into this world by a natual birth at home just fills me with joy and excitement!

As most of you know, my daughter lives in New Zealand and she is a little over 3 months pregnant now. After much thought and research her and Ben have decided to deliver the baby at home in a birthing pool. Of course the Mid Wife will be there as well as myself.

I will be heading over to New Zealand at the beginning of March for hopefully around 3 months to be with Brit and to help her if she needs it. She is one strong cookie so she probably won’t need old Moms help but maybe she will just pretend to make me feel needed

This is the birthing pool she has decided to go with and it looks really comfy and also like she said. She will be able to use it before in the summer to cool off and then of course after the baby is born as well.

It sure looks WAY more comfortable then I felt giving birth. I am SO happy Brittani decided to go this route. It just seem so much more natural to be and it seems to me at least that it would be way less stressful on the baby.

I recieved a DVD today from Brittani called The Business of Being Born which is a documentary by Ricki Lake about working with Mid Wifes and such. I am going to watch it this evening and will chat about it tomorrow.

I am just so excited about this and feel totally blessed to have such an awesome daughter. I only wish she was closer.

Until tomorrow, cheers

So yesterday I was at walmart shopping for a few odd and ends and ventured off into the baby section. I wasn’t going to buy anything until I found out rather the baby is a boy or girl, however I just couldn’t help myself. Hehe!!

I can’t believe all the adorable stuff they have these days! It is amazing. Especially the Seahawks outfits OMG they were precious. I am heading back over there as soon as I find out the sex of the baby and buy lots more.

Here is the outfit and wrist rattles that I purchased today, aren’t they cute??

Some cooks can take the worst collection of ingredients and with a little stirring, a little simmering and apparently a little magic make it taste good. Conversely there are other cooks that can take the best foods, and with a lot of spilling and even more swearing serve up food that should not be given to the family dog. So, is it the food or the method that either makes or breaks a meal?

Actually, it could be both. Or it could be the spices that are added or not added to the meal. Certain foods react poorly to certain cooking methods or spices, and because healthier foods have less chemicals to hide their flavor, any imperfection will stand out more. Take tofu for instance. It is an excellent source of protein and is basically flavorless on its own. It picks up flavors from the foods that it is cooked with and in some cases the pan that it is cooked in. If you cook in cast iron for instance, you may notice a faint metallic taste to your tofu dish.

Lemon infused broccoli is a delicious dish, but if you add the lemon too soon it will turn the broccoli a wretched brown color. I steam the broccoli and add the lemon to the water that I am using to steam with, when it is finished cooking, I toss in a little bit of lemon zest for additional flavor and color.

Other vegetables can benefit from a little burst of flavor as well. Take peas for instance. They are perfectly fine on their own, but every now and then you can add pearl onions for variety or a splash of light Italian dressing.

Careful and gentle cooking methods is imperative especially with the more delicate food selections. Dainty strips of chicken breast will not stand up to rough treatment, you must saute them gently and slowly in really good olive oil, turning them only as often as needed to prevent sticking or burning. If you are adding garlic to the dish, lightly cook it with the oil first and then remove it before adding the chicken. Garlic burns very quickly and will give your dish a bitter taste. The olive oil will pick up the flavor of the garlic and so will your chicken.

Use fresh herbs whenever possible- in fact you could grow a small variety of common cooking herbs right in your window sill, snip off some leaves as you need to and have the satisfaction of not only cooking your own meal, but growing part of it as well. Some very easy and tasty herbs to try are basil, rosemary, sage and thyme. The more leaves that you snip off your basil plant, the more it will grow. Trim the leaves and keep them stored in a zippered bag or use them to make a homemade pesto.

Healthy foods are not any harder to cook than the unhealthier fare, so treat yourself and your family well, and feed them great tasting, healthy foods.

I can not get over the amount of chipmunks that are out and about lately. They are so incredibly cute!

Ashton and Fiona are having a hay day chasing them around. Obviously they would never catch them. The funny thing is though that as soon as the chipmunks get up the trees, they look down at them and it seems like they are yelling at them in their little tiny squeaky voices. It is truly hilarious!!

I get such enjoyment looking out of my window while I am working and just watch them. They just seem to love to play around on the ground by the flowers until my little ones come over then they just zip up the trees.

On another note we have a VERY pregnant squirrel here, Robin was trying to give her some bread yesterday but she didn’t want any part of it.

I came across one of my beloved bloggers that I love to follow and his post today just hit me BIG time. You see my biggest question to God lately and all my prayers have been surrounding the fact that I can’t seem to figure out my LIfe’s Purpose!

If you begin with the assumption that you have a pre-encoded purpose and attempt to discover it merely by sitting down and writing a mission statement, I think you’ll end up building a house of straw for yourself. You won’t have a rational foundation for trusting your purpose. In most cases you’ll feel like you’re just guessing, and you might look back on your mission statement a week later and find that it’s not so interesting as you thought it was when you wrote it. You’ll always have doubts about what you’ve written.

When people try to sit down and write out a purpose or mission statement, they usually lack sufficient clarity to do so intelligently. How exactly are you supposed to define your purpose? Are you simply supposed to know it and squeeze it out of your brain like a sponge? What if you can imagine several different missions that might fit you, but you have no idea which is better? What if you can’t think of anything at all that seems meaningful to you? What then?

Just because you may not have a pre-encoded purpose doesn’t mean you don’t have a purpose though. It simply means that it will take more work to define your purpose. Your purpose isn’t really something you discover. It would be more accurate to say that your purpose is something you co-create based on your relationship to reality. I wouldn’t exactly call it a free choice though. There may be multiple choices for you, but all choices are not equally valid.

What is needed is an intelligent method for developing your purpose, a process that makes sense, such that when you arrive at your final answer, you have high trust that it’s correct.

If you’re wondering why defining a purpose for your life matters at all, read this:
Why Does Purpose Matter?

How to Intelligently Define Your Purpose

I’m going to suggest two different methods for defining your purpose. Ideally you should use both of them, since each will help you understand different aspects of your purpose. This is going to be a lot of work, but the end result will be worth it because you’ll reach a point of tremendous clarity. In the end it will be far easier to make decisions and take action, and you’ll find that your life just seems to work once you know your purpose.

Method 1: Emotional Intelligence

The first method is to consult your emotional intelligence. Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about. Emotionally you will feel that it is correct.

I’ve already written up this method here: How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes.

The answer you get from this process, however, depends heavily on your ability to generate good input. Essentially what you are doing is exploring the search space of possible purposes, and you’re using the heuristic of your emotional reaction to gauge how close you are. But one thing I failed to mention in the original explanation of this process is that it requires you’re clear about your overall context for life first. If you don’t have that level of clarity yet, then you’ll have a hard time making this approach work successfully — you’ll be approaching the problem from the wrong context, so the potential answers you generate will all be in the wrong neighborhood. Garbage in, garbage out.

To use an analogy, imagine you’re looking at a map of the United States, trying to locate Las Vegas. If you have a good map, it shouldn’t take you long at all. Your eyes might shoot towards the left (west) side of the map, slide right (east) from California to Nevada, and you’ll soon spot Las Vegas in Southern Nevada. But what if you try this same exercise using a map of the U.S. from 1870. Now that’s a problem because Las Vegas didn’t officially become a city until 1911, so you won’t find it on a map from 1870. You won’t be able to locate the city until you realize you’re looking at an inaccurate map and get yourself a more recent map. Similarly, if your context is an inaccurate fit for reality, corrupted by too many false beliefs and incorrect assumptions, then you’re unlikely to be able to define a meaningful purpose for your life no matter what method you use — it’s simply not to be found anywhere on your map. Most likely you’ll settle for something that’s close to your purpose, but not quite right. You may target Reno instead of Las Vegas (Reno became a city in 1868, so it might be seen on your 1870 map).

My output from this method was:
to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace.

If you’ve read yesterday’s post, you may notice certain patterns in this purpose statement that link up with my overall concept of reality:
to live consciously = awareness, required for conscious personal growth
and courageously = courage, a virtue required to pursue conscious growth
to resonate with love = unconditional love, which isn’t an emotion but rather a sense of connectedness with everything that exists, implying that working on my own growth and helping others to grow are compatible
and compassion = another virtue, one which helps temper courage
to awaken the great spirits within others = to help others lock in at a higher level of consciousness/awareness, which will give them the means to pursue personal growth consciously
and to leave this world in peace = a double meaning here: 1) world in peace = to do no harm, to work to improve life instead of destroy it, to leave a legacy; 2) leave … in peace = no regrets, knowing I did my best and could have expected no more of myself, refusing to die with my music still in me, inner peace

If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read these two posts to help you identify your overall context, within which you’ll be defining your purpose:
The Meaning of Life: Intro
The Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live?

Method 2: Rational Intelligence

The second method is to use your reason and logic to work down from your context. The clearer and more accurate your context is, the easier this will be.

To identify your purpose, you basically project your entire context of reality onto yourself. Given your current understanding of reality, where do you fit in? If you buy into the social context that most people seem to use, this will be virtually impossible for the reasons stated in yesterday’s post. Social contexts don’t provide sufficient clarity. At best you may end up with a wishy-washy purpose statement that addresses the basics like making money, having a family, having friends, and being nice, but there won’t be any real substance to it. If you gave it to someone else to read it, they wouldn’t come away knowing you any better.

Fuzzy context, fuzzy projection, fuzzy purpose.
Clear context, clear projection, clear purpose.

Since my context of reality is based on seeing life as a process of ongoing evolution (and I use the term evolution merely in the sense of growth and change, not in the strictly biological sense via natural selection), then when I project this context onto myself, the result is very simple — I’m a participant in the process of growth and change.

This is such a simple approach that it’s easy to miss. All you’re really doing is looking at your overall context of life and projecting those same qualities onto yourself. This projection becomes your purpose, your role in reality.

Imagine a hologram. When you cut off a piece of a hologram, the entire original image is still contained within the smaller piece. Reality is the big hologram, and you’re a piece of it. You inherit all the properties of reality. Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself. If your beliefs are accurate, you’ll end up with a sensible, achievable purpose.

This method will also help you identify problems in your context because you’ll notice that something is wrong when you project a false belief onto yourself.

Suppose your context of reality is whatever the Catholic Church teaches. Then when you project this context on yourself, you get that your purpose is to serve God, obey the Church in religious matters, and to strive to be like Jesus.

If you have a null context of reality (nihilism), you get a null purpose. When you project nothing onto X, you get nothing.

If you don’t like the purpose you end up with when applying this method, then what you’re really saying is that you don’t like the context you’re using. This is a conflict you’ll need to resolve. You must either accept the context and the purpose that accompanies it, or you must change the context.

Blending the Two Methods

I think it’s helpful to use both methods for defining your purpose to see where they lead you. If your context is sound, you should get congruent answers from both approaches. Your emotional and rational intelligences will each phrase your purpose differently, but you should see that it’s essentially the same. But most of the time that won’t be the case, and the answers will be different, which means your context is incongruent. You rationally think about reality in one way but you feel it in another way. Perhaps you hold religious beliefs but only follow them sporadically — they aren’t integrated across your entire life. You may feel in your heart that your beliefs are true, but you don’t think them in your head. In this case you have to identify the disparity, figure out where it comes from, and work it through until you can get both sides to agree or you can get clear on which one is correct. Use your consciousness to listen to the emotional side and the rational side, and be like a negotiator between them.

For example, if emotionally you feel that your purpose is to be some kind of artist or musician, but rationally you work out that you should be serving people in need, then you have to work through this disconnect by taking a look at what your context says about it. Remember that your context is your collection of beliefs about reality. When you experience a conflict like this, it will typically lead you to a hole in your context, a fuzzy area that you haven’t yet clarified. In this case you might see that you have mixed feelings as to the overall value of art and music. You partly see them as serving people, and you partly see them as a relative waste of time compared to other pursuits. You’ll have to decide which is the most accurate, empowering viewpoint. You have to fill the hole in your context. Yesterday’s post explains how to do that.

This can be a lengthy process if you have a very fuzzy concept of reality or if you’re very conflicted internally. For many people this will require rooting out incongruencies and consciously filling contextual holes, and it will take a long time before enough of those are eliminated to wield sufficient clarity to define a clear purpose.

At this point your purpose is likely to be very abstract and high-level, so tomorrow we’ll explore how to break it down into goals, projects, and actions.

This post is part three of a six-part series on the meaning of life:
Part 1: Intro
Part 2: How Shall We Live?
Part 3: Discover Your Purpose
Part 4: From Purpose to Action
Part 5: Transitioning
Part 6: Conscious Evolution

ShareThis

Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum.

Use the 7 universal growth principles to achieve major breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Get the book Personal D