"There is not just one world available to you. There is another world, and you have the power to choose where you wish to reside." Gregge Tiffen
As the new calendar year 2014 begins and the light returns, I’m filled with awe at the possibilities that present themselves not just daily, but moment to moment to deepen my knowledge by using what I know to live more fully into being the creative force in my own life that I am designed to be.
The Solstice marks the beginning of a new cycle for the planet and the turning of the calendar to another January 1 signals the beginning of new cycles in business and other aspects of life. Each are convenient times to create our own personal new beginnings. These are times, especially the start of a new calendar year, when our culture and our systems support us to make changes, to begin again. We evaluate where we are in our health, our wealth, our well-being. Then, we set goals to give us focus and guide the choices that we make about what action to take next. For the most part these goals are of the world we have come to accept as ‘real’, the one in which we have placed our quest for happiness, for health, wealth and well-being.
While these goals may bring us achievement, they don’t measure our personal progress in consciousness, the knowledge that becomes wisdom that goes with us when we leave this body behind. While they may bring satisfaction for a period of time, soon after we celebrate the accomplishment, we hop back on the hamster wheel of life, challenged by this world to go for ‘more’. The world we’ve come to call the ‘real’ world has no concrete, stable standards. Its rules change. Thus, one day we ‘win’; the next we ‘loose’, regardless of what we’ve done.
I’m not suggesting that we are victims of this world that we’ve made real, but rather that we look beyond AND within for a different world. A world where the way things operate never changes, although how we use the operating manual is a laboratory for growth. I’m suggesting that we discover additional measures to anchor us in a world with ever changing expectations. To create these measures for myself, here are the questions that I’m considering:
- What am I here to learn?
- What qualities in my life do I choose to more fully develop?
- How well do I see everything in life as opportunity?
- How strong is my belief in the personal power that I have been given?
- How well am I using my capacity to live in the world without becoming of it?
As I launched my part in this new year, I trekked to the top of the Ziggurat … to give thanks for life and the natural beauty that abounds and to choose which world I will inhabit and depend on in the coming year.
As you launch yourself into this new year … whether diving off the high dive into the deep or gentle entering one step at a time, I invite you to join me in creating new measurements as a part of your new beginnings.
Experiment for the Week: As you kick off the new year, review your goals and look deeply into each one. What deeper measures of success do you see?