Purposeful Growth

This is the time of year when many of us will make resolutions to change. We’ll resolve to lose weight, eat healthy, get more exercise, spend more time with family, be more generous, and work on personal development and growth.

Most of these well-intentioned resolutions will fail within a few weeks, because they’re lifestyle changes we don’t really want to make, but think we should make.

As long as you’re inclined to evaluate your life and where you’re heading, I suggest you take a big step, but one with infinite potential for personal happiness.

With permission from Anita Pathik Law, I’m reprinting an entry she made in her blog, and suggesting that you consider her request and reformulate it as a goal, your goal for 2008. To be yourself.

From Anita….

And, so, this next year, I ask of you one favor; a favor that will serve all of humanity. Make a commitment this year. Be yourself. If you don’t know what that means, find out. Follow your heart, honor your resonance and your faith and have a conversation with your fears every time they come into the room. Be kind to one another. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to your parents and your children even when you don’t want to. Make love like you mean it and stop taking things so damned personally. Grow up and show up, even when it’s hard. Be present. Be present to the people in your life and the every day miracles that are gifted to you as whispers and kisses from the Divine. Take a long hard look at how you have adopted the beliefs you carry and release the ones that don’t serve a consciousness of healing and peace. Be conscious as you form and pass along new opinions, especially as they relate to the upcoming political elections and internationally impactful issues. Don’t make everything a crisis. Instead, see everything as an opportunity and grab the proverbial bull by both horns and enjoy the ride of your life!

Forgive everyone and everything from your past. Holding onto resentments is only weighing you down and holding you in a past that doesn’t actually exist. Be authentic. Be alive. Breathe. Smile. Laugh. Choose love over everything. And above all, be grateful. Be grateful for your ability to feel, to connect and to experience compassion. Be grateful for the entirety of your life, even those experiences that brought pain, for they are the ones that offered you the greatest opportunity to grow and become a better human being. Be aware that anger is compassion misdirected and fear is usually a temporary loss of faith. And, last but not least, please, please see yourself as the powerful person you are. You are a healer, a creator and a facilitator of incredible change. We need you. We need you to be strong. We need you to claim your power and to remember and serve your unique purpose in the world. In the end, this moment is yet a beginning of a new world, one that we will co-create together and I am honored to be on this path with you walking alongside me. It brings me great comfort to know I am not alone in the quest for a united humanity and that as each of us awakens to the healer within, uniting first our own internal divisions, we unite all. Anita Pathik Law is the the author of The Power of Our Way; A Path to a Collective Consciousness. Her purpose is “to raise consciousness and build bridges of higher understanding.” She serves this purpose through her coaching, writing, hypnotherapy, healing work, music and her facilitation of numerous groups, programs and retreats. To learn more about her work visit http://www.divinitymovie.com/,  http://www.powerofmyway.com/ and http://www.powerofourway.com/ Visit Power of Our Way for more on Anita’s life transforming programs.

Our memories of past experiences are part illusion. The brain isn’t large enough to record everything we experience so it fills in the gaps with imagination.

Daniel Gilbert’s entertaining and enlightening book, Stumbling on Happiness, describes how memory works; a description that should humble anyone harboring the illusion of a

great memory. Our brain’s capacity is huge, but not nearly large enough to store every sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, and emotion we experience. It turns out we make up much of what we think we remember. 

Have you ever argued passionately with someone about your recollection of a past situation that you both experienced? If you’re like most of us the answer is yes, and the resulting argument might never have been settled because you both may have been simultaneously right and wrong.

Because the brain can’t store every detail, it makes up for this limitation by storing just enough to recall a past experience. This generally is sufficient for our needs, but does lead to eye-witness fallibility and lots of personal arguments over past experiences.

Gilbert explains it this way. We compress the huge amount of data that we perceive in a given experience into a few critical components: the sensory highlights and associated emotions. Later, as we recall the event, our mind brings up the highlights and emotions and fills in the rest. That’s right, we imagine what would have occurred to smooth out the few pieces of fact and form a complete story.

This is all very interesting, but what value is this information beyond water-cooler talk? How about fewer arguments? Wouldn’t that contribute to a more tranquil life? How about better decisions? Isn’t that important to your personal growth?

In the future, if recollection of a past event is important to you because of a disagreement, to make a decision, or to learn from it, consider the emotion that accompanied the past event. The emotion at the time will provide clues about the role that imagination played in recalling the past event. And remember that the past is past, our memories are fallible, and part of what we each remember is illusion.

This article first appeared in the Personal Development Topic at Suite101.com.

For related articles, see the Mind & Attitude topic here.