Sunday, January 1, 2012

New Year's Resolutions: Fulfilling Your Heart's Desires - Part 1: What Motivates Your Choices?

Happy New Year!  May you experience the fulfilment of your deepest joys and true, heart's desires. For many, meeting our heart's desires may seem like trying to realize a fairy tale illusion, or trying to touch a mirage that always feels out of reach. Yet we often come to New Year's with hope that this year we will finally get the love we want, get that perfect job, make millions or experience glowing health. Whatever it is that you seek to bring fulfilment to your life, may you find it now and live it always. But how do you do that?

 

About nine years ago, I came across a hot-off-the-press book that greatly helped me get my life on track. It helped me stop trying to fulfill other people's dreams and helped me find the courage and get-up-and-go to start fulfilling my own. It is New York Times best selling author Debbie Ford's book The Right Questions. If you have not read it, I recommend you do. It is short, to the point and very useful.

 

In it, Debbie reminds us that where we are today is not the result of a single decision, but the result of repeated choices we have made over time, usually at an unconscious level. When we consider this, we may conclude that this could be a reason why many New Year's resolutions don't succeed. Perhaps, despite our best resolve, we find it hard to live the life we want because we have not been asking "the right questions" to help us understand the thoughts and choices that brought us to where we are today.

 

If we are to understand what drives our choices, we must look within. We must understand our fears, shame and doubts that thwart our ability to fulfill our dreams. Everyone will have different interference patterns that block their joy. We usually can see these patterns taking shape in our early childhood in relation to our primary caregivers. I do not believe it is wise to blame our parents for our current life. But exploring how we interacted with them will shine light on our unconscious tendencies that created our life today.

 

We all come to this planet with a predisposition towards certain tendencies. These tendencies will unconsciously drive all our choices until we wake up to the story of our life. When we explore our early relationships, we can see our tendencies. Any child would react differently in any given situation because we are all unique. Where one child would have fought back, another would have run to hide, and another would have not noticed any issue at all. How did you react to your early environment?

 

(Continued tomorrow with "What are the unconscious tendencies that affect your choices?")

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