“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell ~
Once you know yourself at deeper and deeper levels and take the need to make time for self exploration and growth apply this simple 3-step formula that summarizes how to do life.
Applying these three steps can spur continuous growth, whether we start from a point of pain or distress, boredom or even high motivation and empowerment. Here are the 3 steps for doing life:
1. Experience
2. Expand
3. Express
Experience – How are you experiencing life right now? From a positive or negative perspective? With acceptance or judgment? From your point of view or others’? With an intention to get love or to give love?
Tune into your experience in this moment. What are you feeling? What thoughts are giving rise to these feelings? Is your experience heavy or light, contracted or expansive? Don’t judge yourself here – just get an objective reading of your experience. This is the research step.
Expand – Once we consciously perceive and experience something, we hold the power to improve our experience by expanding our outlook. How can I expand my perspective to feel better, to gain more clarity or inspiration or appreciation …?
Sense life with open, new eyes. We want to see beyond what we believe to be ‘the facts’ and perceptions arising from the bias and distortion of our unconscious filters. Be willing to meet each event, thing, person, idea … with a fresh, unbiased mind.
Tune into your hunches, callings, intuition, insights and ideals. What qualities, values and feelings do you aspire to bring to your experience?
Try exploring, elevating, embracing, enhancing, exaggerating, evolving or empowering the essence of your experience. Go to a new level where the little stuff in life starts to make more sense.
Express – After doing our inner work of expanding our perspective, it is time to take action. Do something different or do the same thing but in a different way to live from this new, expanded viewpoint. Action grounds our new realization or goal and places us on a new path forward.
Remember ‘RAP’ to anchor your new insights: Repetition, Authority and Peace of mind. In a peaceful, meditative state, with emotion and will power, repeat your new goal, affirmation, visualization or choice.
Play with other ways to help the new concepts, images and ideas move into action. Risk breaking out of your comfort zone. Write them down. Draw them. Sing them. Discuss them.
To create significant change, we must integrate our new expansive viewpoint into our being. When we focus on it, internalize it and own it, we make it part of our subconscious. We overlay old engrained programs that are not serving us with new and empowering habits and thinking patterns.
Remember the 3 word formula for doing life now!
Experience, Expand, Express!
“Your life is the manifestation of your dream; it is an art. And you can change your life anytime you aren’t enjoying the dream.” ~ don Miguel Ruiz ~
Visit Higher Awareness for multiple ways to apply all 3 steps.