Do you have a new project coming along? or a major life shift? Often these are exciting to contemplate in the abstract, as if they are already accomplished, but the matter of figuring out and walking through the details can be overwhelming. This is especially true if you are creating something really new, with a substantial learning curve.

So let me ask, what is the real energy sink? If you’re like me there’s a mix of mental and emotional factors. The mind wants to have all the answers and plans, now, before you even start. This gets coupled to all the emotional fear and heaviness that comes with doing something new or complicated. If it’s a heart desire you’ve been wanting to do for a long time, there are old “why not to” tapes as well.

The trick is to break up this negative loop between the mind and the emotions, to keep the mind from looping through figuring out things it can’t handle yet, which triggers the fears and emotional heaviness, and buries the joy of your heart.

Let me suggest a possible way to do this. Start by putting off mentally committing to the whole thing. Whether you ought to do something new, particularly a big something, is often a question with way too many variables and unknowns. Letting your mind chew on something it can’t solve yet, is asking for all sorts of anxious trouble. So tell the mind to let that go. Give it to your heart and your intuitive knowingness. These can feel into the overall pattern and handle the general guidance, the go/nogo decision, and the timing of launch.

What the mind is good at is detailed planning. Let it do that, but set it up as a game. Pretend you are going to do whatever your heart is opening to. Then ask the mind, what do I need to have or do in order to allow this to happen? If there are pieces that are not clear yet, toss them back to Spirit. You can pick them up again later as they come into better focus, resources show up, or an offhand comment by a friend gives you an aha. The others you can start walking forward.

This cuts the mind free to be creative and imaginative, to make lists and check them off, but without all the emotional pressure; doing what it’s good at, without having to wade through old emotional baggage, invalidation programs, or any of the other things that slow it down and create effort.

Meanwhile you are tracking your heart’s desrire, noticing the hints and contributions from Spirit and deciding the big things in a holistic way that avoids over thinking things. This is what the heart is good at, especially when there are unknowns that have to be filled in over time.

By letting the your heart and mind each do what they do best, you can cut out much of the stress. If the mind freaks, tune into your heart and feel the desire there, release the negative stories, calming the mind and let it go back to making up solutions. If your heart quails, sit with it, breathing out the fear, until your soul certainty surfaces again.

This way you can play with your dreams, infusing them with your heart’s desire and joy, until they are already manifested, or at least launched, with planning and resources, and you can say to your mind, see it wasn’t nearly as bad as you might have thought.

(© 10/2012)

Have you ever known someone who had an inspiration? who brought it into the world with power to inspire others as well? It might have been an invention like the light bulb, or an idea for a movie, or a theory of how the sun works. It might have been a grand vision of a better world or a way to experience the divine. Large or small inspiration is a part of life. If you are listening Spirit is always present.

What happens when the ego gets hold of this inspiration? It knows something great has happened but may think it rare as well as precious, something unlikely to happen again. Becoming attached to this inspiration, the specific form and detail.

It is very human to do this; we think we have learned, we think we know, and if it comes from Spirit, even more so, it is certainly The Truth. But here in this world of flux and change, truth is always relative, even when something comes from Spirit. We receive a gift or vision, which we breath life into, but then insist on preserving it in that moment of the realization or inspiration, rather than letting it grow and evolve.

All things have to grow and change to stay alive. We are so protective of the communication, that we close it down. Fearing that we won’t receive any more, rather than accepting today’s communication for today, while allowing that tomorrow there can be something new, we cling what we have received today. Which becomes yesterday.

If you can’t allow for today to be different, there is no life in it. The Sun comes up today as it has for billions of years, but the experience of that sunrise is always different, if only a little bit, from all the other sunrises. The season is shifting, the sky is different, there are more leaves on the trees, or fewer, and mostly you are not the same as yesterday, and so you experience it differently.

When the experience of your favorite meditation is allowed to unfold in the moment, it will be unique and you will be truly alive. You are alive in the dance of yourself and the universe, the giving and receiving of attention that gives rise to inspiration, creativity, joy and the magic that makes today uniquely different and engaging.

Try checking inside each morning to see what’s true today. Mostly its the same, but not exactly. Open to what’s new or different. This means being comfortable with change and uncertainty, with learning curves and new directions, with releasing our ego attachment to what has gone before. As humans this is hard, often it seems impossible, but it is when we come truly alive, being in the moment and open to magic and ongoing inspiration.

There is a balance between old forms and new life, between stability and change. We do learn and grow, and we can put yesterday’s lessons to use today. But they will only really fit today if we pay attention to how they flow today, and how they are uniquely different. This breath, right now, pay attention, perhaps its the same, perhaps its different, it really doesn’t matter. What does matter is how intimately you give yourself to the experience of it, the allowing of the air to flow into you and release out of you. How does this breath want to be breathed? Listen and live, allow the inspiration of this moment to be new and fresh.

Let each breath bring life, joy, love, and perhaps new guidance.

(© 9/2012)