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Briana and I are getting excited about the upcoming release of our book, The Well Life: How to Use Structure, Sweetness, and Space to Create Peace, Balance, and Happiness. It comes out December 2nd but you can pre-order it now. Today, I’d like to share an excerpt from Chapter 9: Choose Your Prizes:
What “prizes” would you like for taking a life as a human being? These are the goals that will make your dream life a reality. A loving and supportive relationship? Enjoyable work that provides a great income? You get to stand at a vast counter, look over an endless array of exhilarating choices, and make your selections. This chapter is all about identifying the particular expressions of sweetness you want in your life.
You can be happy regardless of your external circumstances, regardless of your possessions and accomplishments. This is especially true if you follow your light, as we explained in the previous chapter.
But we recognize that while this ideal is possible, most people aren’t entirely there.
Early in our training, we encountered a provocative idea: “Nobody can make you feel a certain way. You’re responsible your own feelings.” The hope was that, once you realized this, nothing anyone said or did would bother you. Yet it just didn’t have the instant-enlightenment effect we hoped for. People affect each other; it’s almost unavoidable. As clearheaded and peaceful as we might get, very few humans are immune to the influence of their planet-mates.
So, rather than trying to convince you that you should be happy and peaceful, even if you can’t afford groceries and your dog just died, we need to strike a balance. You’re going to continue to want things and to pursue success in your own way. The best we can do is to teach you ways to be most effective at this, remind you that lightness and peace are always available, urge you not to get attached to the material stuff, point you to the deeper, intangible outcomes that your soul really wants, and guide you to heal and grow in the process.
All Prizes Are Fair Game
We feel it’s important to stress that we don’t have any problem with someone wanting to be phenomenally wealthy, or to have a gorgeous house, a fancy car, beautiful clothes, hot sex, lots of fun, plenty of free time for travel, and pretty much any other non-exploitative desire. We want you to revel in these prizes of life as a human! The key, for us, is to encourage you to have and pursue these goals consciously:
- In alignment with your Core Values and Purpose, and through the expression of your Gifts.
- Seeing the big picture of how you relate to the world and yourself.
- Admiring the material stuff without confusing it as the source of true happiness.
- Making lifestyle choices with minimal negative impact (if any) on the planet and its inhabitants.
- Recognizing your unbelievably good fortune.
Everyone, even the most enlightened being, has preferences. There’s nothing unevolved about wanting your life to look a certain way—only in the inability to make the most of it when it doesn’t look that way.
After saying to the universe, “I am thoroughly grateful to be alive, to be healthy (to whatever extent you are), to have my needs met (to whatever extent they are),” it’s completely reasonable to say, “And also, my preference would be (to have more money, to be healthier, to be in a happy and loving relationship, to have a peaceful mind, to have a job that allows me to use my gifts and earn a good income, to have more time for play and sheer enjoyment, etc.).”
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed that snippet. We’re so happy with how the book turned out, and eager to see it transform lives.
Be well,
Peter
Thank you. I try to live every day with these thoughts. Physical pain is what I strive to try and conquer and that’s a tough one when you have no choices in front of you. So, I work on my mind instead.
Hi there – thank you for this. What does ‘What “prizes” would you like for taking a life as a human being?’ mean? Does ‘taking’ a life mean something specific to your thoughts?
By “taking” I mean “choosing.” In my version of how life works, we have two main forms of existence – (1) in unmanifest form, unified with The Divine (the Totality, God, or whatever word you like), and (2) manifesting as one of the infinite, seemingly separate expressions of The Divine – such as a human (still unified, in actuality, with The Divine). Or, in other terms, I think that in the space between lifetimes, we exist in a state of oneness with the One that we are. By “taking a life as a human being,” I mean the choice to manifest as a human and to forget the wholeness of which we’re a part, and to face the challenge of remembering what we really are. So, as I see it, part of jumping into a human body is the forgetting of the Oneness that we are, which carries a risk of feeling separate and lost and fearful, but one of the unique benefits is that we get to revel in all the beauty and the tremendous breadth of feeling and experience that is available to us.
Choosing to be human is at least a two part responsibility for your own spiritual development and also the skills you will bring to the current world stage so you have responsibilities you have chosen for both yourself and your/our world. You may believe you are insignificant to the world but this is because you have forgotten the dual purpose. That burning unexplained ambition has a basis in something far deeper that most will accept. It can be possible that your value to the world is the gift of your children or your grandchildren so unique they are crafted as skilfully as an Italian statue, timed to arrive in the world and to work in unison with many others to progress civilisation (as opposed to humankind).