Rouse your spirit, get energised, fired up!

As I was developing this set of daily instructions in a natural way over time, it became apparent to me the vital role of inspiration and motivation in our lives as already explored in the introductory articles. I realised the importance, even urgency of staying engaged and energised with every single moment of the day.

 

I wanted to stimulate my energies so I wouldn't even need to worry about things like apathy or disinterest, as I’d be fully inspired by tussling with whatever life dished up and loving every moment! To help with this I started to come up with new tricks, building up little daily habits to focus and remind me to stay engaged, right from the moment of waking up.

 

As the first practice point of the Inspiration focus element, we want to challenge the status quo, our tendency to be on auto pilot and submit to the gravitational pull of unconscious living. If we don’t have some energy and spirit, it’s hard to shake ourselves out of our habitual modes of being.

 

One aspect of this practice point is to therefore bring awareness to how engaged we are at any moment in time, and do something about it. We take our ‘pulse’ and investigate exactly what state we’re in. Are we tired, disengaged, angry, hungry, irritable and so forth. Can we bring some energy to what we’re doing, firing up some motivation?

 

Not only is it important to practice this on the fly, and learn what most inspires us and fires us up, but we can start creating habits and activities in our daily routine that can keep us focused and reminded of our purpose. I started doing this not long after I came out of my long period of complete inactivity.

 

I noticed that when waking up first thing in the morning, I was mired in a sense of apathy. It seemed like such a struggle to get going. It brought to mind contrasting earlier periods in my life where I used to literally jump out of bed. I’d go from unconsciousness to fully awake mode in the blink of an eye. Where did that all go?!

 

So I started this practice of immediately sitting up on the edge of my bed as soon as I woke up, as soon as I was conscious, and I would completely disregard all urges to the contrary. I know that this may seem like an impossibility to many people, but it can be trained, which is what I had to do.

 

This intention to challenge my apparent immovability seemed to generate immediate positive feedback. Every morning it became easier, I started to become acutely aware of my state of mind as soon as I was conscious. Over months, I built this single little challenging practice into a brief set of mental training exercises in a natural, intuitive way that I still do today.

 

After sitting up on the edge of my bed, I check in with the quality of my mental state, how I’m feeling in general. Do I feel open and positive, or are there faint left over traces of angst or worry from a difficulty I experienced yesterday (this sometimes happens). I then bring to mind the day ahead and rouse a sense of excitement about engaging with it, excelling, doing my best, challenging any fears that might arise, overcoming any obstacles.

 

Then I invite the memory of yesterday in and see if anything stands out, any issues or difficult interactions, bright points, things that went well and so on. Based on that general momentary overview I then feel out something appropriate to focus my practice on today, something that needs a bit of attention. All this takes barely a minute or two.

 

Since then I’ve also added some brief basic stretching that only takes a minute and helps my body wake up and get my circulation going. But it’s more than that, it’s another life affirming activity that says, ‘Here I am! I’m ready to engage with this awesome day, no matter what it brings.’ This is instead of the usual mindless stumbling around the house until the first coffee of the day.

 

Yes, there are aches and pains, especially this early in the morning, but the stretching feels good, my whole mind and body loosen up and get going and I’m reminded that I’m very much alive. After this mental and physical energisation and focusing of my being, I restate three other brief personal practice principles that underpin my whole focus…now, I’m ready to face the day!

 

This simple 3 minute practice sets up my whole day with a firm intention to engage positively and wholeheartedly with whatever it brings. This has given rise to many other habits and practices that I do to keep me energised and focused. For example, before meditating every morning, I light some incense and say a prayer, that's more of a calling forth of my warrior energy, summoning conscious intentions and once again reminding myself of the most important thing in my life, and therefore keeping that in the forefront of my mind.

 

I’ve also set up a few automated messages on my phone that pop up throughout the day, reminding me to ‘check in’ and refocus. I change these messages regularly for whatever practice is relevant for me and to keep things fresh.

 

Work out what’s important

 

This practice point and the following one asks us to be more conscious and identify what we actually want in life, what is most important to us. What are our immediate goals, what are our values and life principles? Are we actually seeking happiness and meaning, and if so, are those things actually going to bring it? We might find that we don’t even know, that’s a great discovery! Now we can start finding out, instead of drifting through life as virtually unconscious habit.

 

Once we have clarity about our life purpose and direction we can start making some changes, or do something differently. Hopefully we feel inspired and motivated, and we now have a sense that things are going to be different from now on, we’re really feeling it! Far too often however, that initial burst of enthusiasm doesn’t last long. A week, a day, a few hours!? What happened, where did the strength of that conviction go?

 

What happened is that the triggers and consequent mental changes that brought on this momentary state of clarity and motivation ceased to be, and then your habitual self that has been running the show for most of your life re-emerged, as it always does. Sound familiar? The solution is very simple, we have to consciously bring into being those very same mental conditions that motivated change.

 

This is all about mental training as is everything about personal change and growth, even exercise. To continue to fire that inspiration and motivation we must constantly remind ourselves of what we are striving for and why! We keep our goals and priorities in the forefront of our minds. It.s very hard to forget what's most important when you’re putting your mind upon it all the time, it is very hard to get waylaid. Keeping it close to mind, we keep those energies roused and stirred.

 

If you haven’t already noticed, life has a very strong tendency to want to misdirect us. We may have been wandering around aimlessly our entire life, just bouncing from one momentary and ever changing preference or desire to another. These focus practices are the cure, it’s all part of a positive, directed mental training and conditioning regime that finally puts you in the driver’s seat. Here, we become our own master instead of a slave to mostly unconscious, impulsive directionlessness.

 

There’s no argument that this is hard work, all worthwhile things are. The world out there is always looking for shortcuts, but they don’t really exist. Hard won changes to one’s core being are powerfully positive actions in themselves and set us up for continued success in life, and all the richness that comes with it. Get excited by the process, commit to it with confidence.

 

This is just training, it’s cause and effect, changes will occur. It’s like you're turning around an ocean liner. There's some lag in terms of the effects we want to see versus the significant energy we have to invest to change course. As with any training, the initial difficulty is replaced by more confidence, and as it gets easier, things start to flow, we start to get into the vibe of it, the positive feedback loop increases.

 

It’s like learning to surf, once you’ve gotten through the awkwardness of learning to paddle and stand up and harness the energy of the wave, you're off and flying! These practices are about keeping energised and positively engaging with the process. A life lived positively and fully consciously generates constant vivifying positive feedback.

 

Part of this process is about forming new habits, positive habits, to replace all the unconscious ones we currently have that most likely don’t serve us very well. Human beings are, as previously suggested, mostly a conglomeration of habits, we are habit machines and are constantly forming new ones, mostly without any knowledge of it. I will address this topic more fully in a future article on forming positive habits. 

 

Waking up to one’s life is about making that process fully conscious, and deciding what habits we are going to bring into being, and which ones need to go. One thing we can do to help this process is to change our attitude to what seems like an overwhelmingly difficult task. We need to cultivate a sense of patience and become more process oriented than goal orientated in this particular practice.

 

Goals still need to be kept close to our hearts, but we can encourage excitement and enjoyment of the long game we’ve undertaken. We can begin to savor the sense of patient and dedicated commitment to change, and those hard won gradual results as they come.

 

The secret to habit forming is that once you learn to enjoy the process, you’re not in a hurry to change everything, which would be doomed to failure anyway. We are rewriting our own code which takes time and patience. All we need to do is focus on changing one small habit at a time.

 

This is something I learnt a long time ago, and it absolutely works. Once again, it’s just about training. You bring one new habit into being, giving yourself a realistic goal and commit to it 100%. It may only be a few weeks and the new habit is happening of its own accord, now with very little effort. Time to add a new one. In the space of a few months, you can be well on the way to rejigging your entire paradigm!

 

If we think of the ocean liner metaphor again, it’s like we are changing course by only half a degree of azimuth with every habit. This doesn't take a lot of energy input to shift the direction of such a large vessel. That course change may not even be perceptible, but if you keep adding those half degree direction changes, in a relatively short space of time, you will notice that you are pointing in a completely new direction, a new horizon! Happy days! 

 

Priorities, excuses, rationalisations. We do what we want!

 

Everything we do as human beings is about our motivations, what we prioritise, even if it’s things we have to do, that we might not want to. It’s a choice we make in every moment of every day, so inspiration and motivation is very important, it’s who we are. We express ourselves through our actions, they are our thoughts and desires made real.

 

The fact is most of human behavior can be quantified by two very simple propositions, the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, there’s not much more to it than that. That pleasure can be the more obvious things like enjoyable experiences, but it includes subtler aspects like our sense of material or financial security, our ideas and beliefs, our relationships to other people and so on.

 

All these experiences give us a sensual feedback, a feeling that attracts us to them when they are going well, and cause fear, worry, anger and other unpleasant feelings and emotions when they are not.

 

The complexity of how this all manifests is not in question, and it can look very civilised and sophisticated, but it’s still a basic behavioral dichotomy that defines our whole existence. Very few people are truly motivated by entirely altruistic reasons, there’s nearly always some agenda with our ‘caring’ actions for others. Helping others does make us feel good, it can also give our ego a boost. How many good deeds do you do where you never tell someone about it?!

 

Apart from all the sense experiences that we seek and avoid through our 5 major sense organs there’s also the mind sense. What we think, what we believe, our sense of self, our intellectual stimulation is all a type of subtle sense desire. We experience pleasurable and painful mental feelings in relation to this rich and complex mental life.

 

Human consciousness is one of the least understood phenomena on the planet, and its complicated and convoluted nature means that we are prone to continual self-delusion to justify our desires, to propagate the mental reality that we want.

 

From the moment we are conscious after birth we attempt to bend the world to our will. We want food or we need our nappy changed! As our consciousness becomes more advanced, we learn how to manipulate our care givers more effectively, mostly without their knowledge.

 

We progress through childhood, our teenage years and into adulthood picking up ever more sophisticated ways of getting what we want, ultimately though, it’s not far removed from that early infant’s wail. Not only that, we become masters of rationalising our position to justify our pleasure seeking and pain avoidance behavior, convincing ourselves that what we want is the best thing for us, what we deserve and so on, and therefore maintaining the delusion.

 

It is this delusion and drive to maintain it that causes us all our problems. We don’t want to see reality, we don’t want to get real with ourselves, we are simply not across the fundamental axiom that the truth will set us free. And it’s not surprising as that message isn’t one we’re hearing much. Our society for the most part is predicated on accepting and running with the status quo and not questioning its validity. At the heart of this is control and keeping those that have it in power.

 

The point of all this is to set the stage, to understand what we are dealing with, what is the core condition that drives our painful experience of life. Once we become enlightened about these fundamental human behavioral aspects, once we’ve seen and understood what we are working with, what the starting point is, we can start to use it to our benefit.

 

If you don’t agree with it, start being more mindful of your own experience, see if you can prove it is otherwise. However, be sure that you are genuinely open to what you might find, otherwise it’ll just be more of the same, self selecting your current paradigm because it feels good and less challenging. 

 

Who are you?

 

To state that we are just seeking pleasure and avoiding pain doesn’t minimise the fact that some of the things we seek and avoid aren't valuable or reasonable. Desire can be both positive and negative, it depends on what the intention is. The problem is that most of us have probably been cruising through life without much discernment about that value or intention.

 

How many of us ever stop to take stock and ask whether or not our actions and goals are leading to a truly meaningful and happy life. Life can be busy and often overwhelming with all our competing responsibilities and desires. It can be very challenging and confronting to address these questions.

 

Who wants to admit that their life up to this point might have had very little meaning or significance, that you haven’t really been present in it, that your lack of engagement might have even caused harm to loved ones. Many of us have experienced tragedy or trauma due to our own actions or those of others, how do we reconcile these adversities with our overall sense of direction?

 

This practice step is at the beginning because it’s addressing that fundamental question of what is the sum total of our life as represented by our desires and consequent actions. Before we fire our rockets, ‘rouse our spirit’, we need to know where we are. What has our life up to this point told us about who we are, what we believe, what we stand for and what we want? We need to

 

come into contact with our whole self so we know what the starting point is. And do we even know what would truly bring happiness and meaning? The answers don’t have to come immediately, as long as they simmer inside us and keep the questions alive. The main issue is that we are not really switched on and asking these bigger questions, to even do that let alone consider actual action can be overwhelming. To live a genuine, authentic, vitalised life we just need to commit to finding out with rigorous honesty.

 

This process of coming to know oneself is a long one, it’s an ongoing journey that never ends. Don’t expect that this initial summation is the full picture, our understanding and idea of ourselves is subject to change as we evolve, as we get to know ourselves better, as more revealing information comes to light. We don’t have to put pressure on ourselves to have it all figured out at the starting line.

 

To start engaging with the process of growth and change we just need to get a basic understanding of where we’re at, what we want and why. Once we have a direction we can assess how we’re going to get there. Are our objectives ultimately beneficial, realistic and sustainable? Are they concordant with the overall direction of our lives? What are our immediate goals and how do they relate to our overall values? 

 

When we bring as much clarity and understanding as possible to this process, we can then leave all our doubts and uncertainties behind, those little voices that undermine us and eat away at our resolve. We can crack on with our whole being behind us, engage 100% with a sense of confidence that we’ve cleared the way as best we can, but at the same time remaining open and receptive to making navigational adjustments along the way.

 

In a way, it doesn’t matter too much what the goal is, as long as it is positive in nature and serves our best self. With the genuine intention to grow and evolve in our heart and mind, we just need to start engaging with practice, applying as much awareness as possible. This is guaranteed to bring results, insights and greater understanding creating a strong positive feedback loop.