Archive for the ‘Motivation’ Category

By Steve Mills

You can learn a lot about life from reading and listening to the life stories of others. I love biographies, to see how my personal hero’s have structured their lives. The struggles they have faced, strategies they have used and the way that they have structured their lives in order to do what they love every day. The insight gained from looking at the place where people have started their life journey, and the steps they have taken to get to their goals is extremely valuable, like the condensed experience of every year of their life, put into the few hours it takes to read the book.

While it is important to use biographies and stories of success to learn and motivate us, there is one thing to be wary of. That is using the circumstances of others as excuses for not taking action ourselves. In the past I have caught myself, after reading about another self made billionaire, thinking things like “If only I got that big break then my life would be different” OR “if I didn’t have all of these responsibilities then I would have time to plan for success.”

By Seamus Anthony Ennis

When I despair of and don’t know what to do about this crazy world we live in then I just try to do something positive. Help someone, give a little money to a cause, or if I feel the urge, just have fun making something cool. I believe it all counts.

It counts because every time you follow your creative urge, you are contributing to the great mission we have been charged with: to create a better world.

Creating cool stuff – be it a work of art, a healing practice, a cake, a blog, or just a nice vibe in a room – helps to add a little pebble of goodness to the slow growing tower of joy that (I believe) is the destiny of life on Earth.

Yes, that’s something I believe. I also believe that we all need to believe in something in order to function successfully – we need a purpose. So although I don’t know if it’s true, I choose to believe that our purpose is to make positive contributions to the evolution of Life and to eventually triumph over the unenlightened condition and become a spiritually advanced, peaceful, happy race living in harmony with all of nature.

By Steve Mills

Too often in spiritual and  personal development circles, the unique part of you as an individual is overlooked in the pursuit of grander visions. The special part that makes you “you” is not seen as important, and sometimes it is seen as something to be suppressed.

It is however my belief that you don’t have to become anything more than YOU to become enlightened. The Rebel part of you is as important in your pursuit of enlightenment and happiness as the disciplined, restrained and conformed aspects.

The Rebel part is that spark inside everyone that makes them unique. The part that doesn’t play by the rules , that laughs in the face of danger. It is the essential part that continues to fight when things look grim, the eternal part that knows life is there to be lived.

Some might even call it their spirit,  if they are that way inclined.

People who lose this free part of themselves quickly fall into despair, hopelessness, and that too common modern affliction, depression. It is the free rebel inside of us that allows us to break thought the constraints in our lives, and take action instead of passive wishing and thinking.

You Are Already Enlightened!

That’s right, and no – I’m not joking.

Zen Masters have publicly said that we are all enlightened, the trick is knowing it (or getting in touch with it). And if you haven’t any idea what it feels like to connect to this state of being then all I can say is it is very difficult for anybody to express in words. To briefly try (not the main point of this post) let me paraphrase Rachel Pollack’s words about the Hanged Man tarot card (from her book Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom): It’s feeling free to be who you are, even if everybody else thinks you have everything backwards; it’s the feeling of being deeply connected to life.

But here’s the rub: “perfect enlightenment” is probably a myth. A beat up. It’s a bit like saying ‘perfect musicianship’ or ‘perfect scientific methodology’.

These things most likely can’t exist and in fact, certainly in the case of artistic endeavour, absolute perfection ruins things. It stifles the life out of things and therefore makes them inherently imperfect again in some kind of weird feedback loop to nowhere.

By Steve Mills

When I was a younger man I was fascinated with ancient history. I would spend entire days reading about past discoveries, ancient civilizations, the rise and fall of empires. I was thinking about this today and the image of a medieval nautical map came to mind. People of centuries ago had some pretty detailed maps of the areas that they frequently travelled, especially when you take into consideration the tools and mathematics that they used to draw them.

The one feature that really stood out for me on those maps however were the areas that weren’t quite as well mapped, or were completely unexplored. In these areas, they had pictures of huge grotesque creatures, and dire warnings of what would happen to people if they crossed those waters. Large, foreboding font labelled these areas with such titles as “Here there be monsters” or “Death for those who enter”.

The bravery and skill of people of bygone ages to push on and explore the unknown is often underestimated by people in modern times.