Personal Growth Plan

Project Yourself- Part 2

Thank you for your patience in waiting for this blog post. I know that I asked you guys awhile ago to think about how to undo the parts of your conditioning that you either don’t like or find useful. A lifetime task indeed!

Assuming you have done some exploration of this issue, I’d like to add a little more to the mix now, just to make things interesting. I want to talk about what you can do when you have some handle on who you really are and what you really want to do with the moments of your life. Because let’s face it: if we are not doing what we really want with the precious moments of our life, what have we really got?

In talking about “projecting yourself” into your life, I want to say a few things about “free will.” Those of you who have read various books on “free will” know that there is an age old battle on exactly how extensive our free will really is. Is it absolute, as some claim, or is everything we do predestined, especially when seen in ‘retrospect? I think it’s fair to say that everything that has happened should have happened, but that doesn’t mean that our free will could not have been used to alter events. It could have, it’s just that we didn’t choose to exercise it in that moment. That said, I believe that we have free will, but most of us are unfamiliar with this energy and/or sometimes reluctant to use it. I think that our free will exists within the framework of who we are, where we were born, what our life experiences were, where we went to school, or work, our talents, likes/dislikes etc. In the my book “Monergy,” I have a name for all these different factors: I call it the “energy sphere of influence.”

When we use our free will efficiently, we act in furtherance of our energy sphere, and we help fulfill what might be construed as our destiny. I believe that free will is very powerful, but it is not absolute; it operates best in certain contexts, you could also say it is situational.

To experiment with free will, here’s a little exercise you can do every morning as part of your mediations (assuming you meditate): spend a few moments infusing your entire being with health, vitality, love, peace of mind and whatever goal you want to achieve for that day; then extend those same wishes to the people you care about. This is an excellent use of your free will. Try this for a few days and see if you feel differently.

Free will is an energy you must become comfortable with and use wisely. I think it was Stevie Wonder who said in one of his songs: “You can get everything you want, but not want everything you get.”