ENGAGING

Engage and Play!

You have just spent a week aligning to a principle—the principle of aliveness. By focusing on aliveness, you have taken a step toward living a principled life. The principle of aliveness can open possibilities in every experience. Remember, without aliveness, you are in deadness. Aliveness is the principle of life in action and is the foundation for all other principles—it activates and powers all the other principles.

As you go through this, you live meaningfully, fulfilling your potential as a critical element of humanity. You consciously take your place as a key partner on the human journey as you discover how to create yourself in the moment. You challenge limiting beliefs and develop new ones, learning to live purposefully, and guiding your life by transformational principles. You work to experience each moment fully. Starting with the weekend training, you opened your heart and created space to explore more about who you are and what beliefs you have and the beliefs you would like to have.

You delve into what truly matters in your life and consciously choose the life you live. You find ways to be closer to yourself, others, higher principles, your higher self, and what holds the highest value for you. Knowing yourself and exploring your beliefs—both personal and professional—provides a greater sense of purpose and meaning and leaves you feeling more satisfied, willing to be curious, to seek, and to engage in creating your own destiny and life path—your Life Quest.

Your Life Quest — Living with the Purpose and Principles

Your Life Quest means leaving behind familiar comforts and to going into the unknown—Evolating, the process of living a great life. Evolating means tapping your yearning, engaging in activities and ways of being that address your yearning, revelating on your limiting beliefs and assumptions, and liberating into new possibilities. You must be willing to leave behind mistaken and limiting beliefs and explore and adopt new ones. This is a time to surrender, risk, have faith, challenge, question, discover, and be willing to go into the unknown. It is time to create who you are and what you believe—not just what you were taught from your family, communities, schools, religious upbringing, and/or other organizations, but to decide for yourself what resonates in your heart.

Engaging is aliveness in relationship. It is a here-and-now interaction with yourself, someone else, or an activity. It is completely engaging in the here-and-now with whatever you are doing or being with. It is about being alive, engaging, spontaneous, and creative.

Tools of the Quest

Your assignments help you discover purposeful, intentional living. You reflect upon and meet your deeper yearnings—true needs that provide the pathway toward purposeful living.

The Four Loving Truths, transformational principles, and One Decision, like other tools you will learn, are designed to support you in living life purposefully. Purposeful living is using principles to live life as a meaningful quest. Purposeful living gives breath to everything you do. Each person’s journey is unique, and it is yours to discover. The assignments are your jousting tools to use to practice the skills of your life quest. They are like mini-quests each week to take you into new territory and to develop new skills to guide and direct you. As you keep your heart and mind open, you discover that you are the essence of the principles—you are love; you yearn to tell the truth; you yearn to be the most loving human being you can be—and your quest is about you emerging by unblocking what is in your way.

All of us yearn to make a difference in the world, to matter, and to take a stand for what we are passionate about in our life. Yet many of us are unsure of what to do or what that looks like. You choose how you want to live throughout this quarter and ultimately your life. Most people think that it means you need to be a Mother Theresa or a Gandhi and don’t realize the daily ways you can make an impact. We get lost in admiring these icons rather than admiring how they have lived and applying that to our own lives to make a difference. You experiment this quarter with daily ways to see all moments as opportunities for principled living and development. This time is about being the most you—emerging to live more life in every moment!

The Science of Play and Engaging

These unerring principles serve as a compass for satisfaction and meaning in your life. You can align with them every moment of every single day.

Principles can orient you to the greater MORE of life in any circumstance, no matter where you are, no matter what’s going on. You can always access a principle and bring a principle to bear. If you are feeling lost, dissatisfied, upset, or unfulfilled, you can reorient according to principles. And when you are satisfied and things seem to be going well, using your principles helps you to get even more out of your life. When you reorient to your principles, you regain power, experience a sense of control over the experience of your life, and exercise your freedom.

When in doubt, live a principle—when things are great, live a principle—every moment, live a principle! Principles are the source of everything. Without aliveness, there is no life. Play is the principle of interactions that causes us to be nourished and to grow. Truth is the principle that allows us to live our quest in everything we do. It’s only when we live the transformational principles that we can fully experience the transcendental principles of love and compassion.

Your assignments this month are designed to help you practice principled living.

Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive

Aliveness is the ultimate principle on which all other principles are founded. It is the animating principle, the principle without which there would be no life. Aliveness is our life flow—when it operates fully, we experience our emotions fluidly and fully.

This facilitates our contact with the world and allows us to touch and be touched. Aliveness powers the other principles and is the dynamic behind them all. Think of words that you could use as synonyms for aliveness: lively, thriving, animated, full of life, aware, conscious, dynamic, growing, alert, energetic, spirited, vigorous, vital, vivacious, zestful, invigorated, as opposed to the antonyms of aliveness such as dispirited, dull, lifeless, and spiritless.

Deadness is the polarity to aliveness. In deadness, we choose to withhold rather than express. We let unfounded fears determine our choices. With aliveness, we can turn anxiety into anticipation and turn fear into enthusiasm and excitement. To live life fully, we must learn to recognize our fears and face them. We learn to distinguish real fears that should be heeded from unreal or imagined fears that should be overcome. By learning to follow our aliveness, we automatically take the appropriate steps on the journey towards becoming full, conscious, and responsible human beings.

When we learn to live according to the principle of aliveness, we get in tune with the world. Aliveness can be expressive or receptive, active or passive: Riotous laughter, full-blown rage, heated passion…or watching your child while they sleep, meditating in blissful peace, and holding hands watching a sunset. These can all be expressions of aliveness. Aliveness is being present, being in the here and now, sensing what is happening around you—really seeing, feeling, touching, and hearing—and participating fully in whatever is going on. Follow the principle of aliveness and you will never be bored! Being fully alive means that you move from fearfully frozen to tentatively engaging, from feeling stuck to speeding forward, from opposition to an open consideration of possibility. You take risks and become aware of possibilities you never imagined, constantly learning and growing. Game on!

“Aliveness is energy. It's the juice, the vitality, and the passion that wakes up our cells every morning. It's what makes us want to dance. It's the energy that moves a relationship from the status quo to something grander and much more expansive, something that makes our hearts beat faster, our minds, and our eyes open wider than ever before. Everything is of interest to a person who is truly alive, whether it's a challenge, a loving moment, a bucket of grief, or a glimpse of beauty.”

- Daphne Rose Kingman

Live a Week of Aliveness

Main Assignment

This week, your assignment is to apply the principle of aliveness in your life. Use it to change the quality of interactions, the quality of your day, at work, and with others.

See how aliveness affects different aspects of your life:

Be alive with yourself

Orient to aliveness in everything you do this week—wherever you are, whether you are alone or with others.
How do you feel about yourself and your life when you are engaged in being alive?
Be aware of how orienting to aliveness affects your quality of experience, your quality of life, your energy, your satisfaction, your sense of yourself, etc.

Be alive at work

How effective are you at work when you align to aliveness?
How good a team member are you?
What are your interactions like?
How does it affect your productivity, energy, your attitude toward your job?

Be alive with family

How does your aliveness influence your family life?

Be alive with friends

How are your friendships influenced by your aliveness?

Very-Able Assignments

Enroll Others to Use the Principle of Aliveness with You

Enroll others to share in a situation, team project, at dinner, on a date…Let them know that you want to experience more aliveness in everything you do. Plan with others how to engage more fully and get more out of what you are doing. Invite others to challenge you when you are dead or checked out. Stop and rate yourselves and each other every once in a while on your quality of aliveness from 1 to 10.

Very-Able Assignments are designed to support you with your main assignment and/or to deepen the assignment. You can focus on one a day, or experiment with each or any or many of them to experience different aspects of your assignment.

Dead or Alive?

Remember, we are always orienting to a principle—whether to its positive pole or its negative pole. We are either orienting to aliveness or deadness in any given moment or situation. Rate your aliveness every hour throughout the day. Give yourself a number score from 1 to 10 (where 10 is being fully alive) and record it on your worksheet titled “Wanted Dead or Alive?! Daily Tracking Form.” (as shown below). Assess what it would take for you to be more alive and do that the next hour. Then rate yourself again. Use this as a consciousness tool to increase your aliveness throughout the day.

Blocks to Aliveness: Beware of Ruts, Routines, & Soft Addictions!

Be aware of what you do to orient toward deadness rather than aliveness. What activities, ways of being, thinking, or situations seem to “kill” your aliveness, or make you less present? Note your soft addictions, zoning out, and stinking thinking that deaden you. Be aware of when you are numb, buzzed, foggy, out of it, in a trance. It is hard to “be aware” of when you are “numb, foggy, or in a trance” that’s the whole point! Well, catch it after the fact and track it back. See how easy it is for you to go “dead” as a default rather than “alive”. See how often you can switch back to aliveness when you have started to go toward deadness.

**Go to the Movies! See the movie Zorba the Greek (or The Last Holiday with Queen Latifah, or Kick It, or . . .)**

Identify the reactive and creative principles the main character chooses to align with. Explore the impact on the story of other characters and the principles to which they align. If you see other movies that illustrate aliveness, let me know! Email me to share your finds.

Stomp Clap Stomp Clap…“When you’re super alive and you’re startin’ to thrive…. Then You Gotta Share It!”

Share your aliveness with others and help them catch fire, too! Start a movement of aliveness and invite people to join you on the journey of transforming and unleashing their next most radiant selves.

Energize Your Life, Ignite Your World, Unleash Your Purpose!

Continue watching for opportunities to establish new relationships and exchange contact information, deepen existing relationships, and introduce people in your network to one another.

Experience as much aliveness in as many ways, situations, and with as many people as you can this week. Infuse everything you do with aliveness. Be alive when you wake up in the morning. (Try rinsing off with cold water in your morning shower to remind you to wake up and be alive!) Be alive as you get ready in the morning, eat your breakfast, attend a meeting, share lunch with friends, check your email, do work projects, workout, make dinner, call a friend… Be aware of all your senses: touch, hearing, sight, taste, smell. Be aware of the sensations in your body, the emotions you are having: fear, hurt, anger, sadness, or joy. Think about all the ways you can be more alive in all that you do—and do it!

Be present in the moment, in the here and now, and experience aliveness!