10 Tips to be radically responsible

Get back on track-

Commit to our 21 Days of Radical Responsibility Program

Start with 10 tips to be radically responsible (for your life):

1. Make choices based on what’s actually true, rather than what you think should be true.

• Listen to how you feel in this moment-be aware of signs, signals, sensations as pointers.

• Tune into the heart vibration and rhythm of the breath. To feel calm or rattled is a reliable guide.

2. Assert and reinforce your feelings, needs, boundaries, requests.

• Be aware of when someone attempts to talk you out of your feelings

• See everything as an opportunity to trust yourself more

3. Own your choices and visions. Don't blame others or the external.

• Know you are who you are because of all your experiences

• See the lesson or blessing in all situations whihc you create for yourself to grow

4. Honor personal power of others. 

• Treat them as whole, creative and resourceful rather than needy

• See your role is to allow others to make their own choices rather than control them

5. Filter for present-moment thinking

• Be aware of tense of language spoken
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• Let go of thoughts of past or future

6. Focus on what's in your control

• Focus on yourself and your responses to the external

• Accept what is within your power and reach

7. Be radically honest with yourself and your values

• Be aware that every choice has consequences

•  Do not go along with others simply its easier (recall Dumbledore: "The time comes Harry, when w must choose between what is right and what is easy.")

8. Practice your ability to respond to your emotions, sensations, and thoughts in useful ways 

• Validate your truth, intuition, signs and signals from within you

• Meditate to sharpen subtle senses

9. Practice self-compassion: treat yourself with kindness and grace

• Set realistic standards
• Love yourself, your choices & inclinations

10. Take action. Action is reciprocal with confidence. Don't stay stuck because you're unsure or the path is unclear. Take a step forward.

• Notice feacing fear is the reliable choice (so long as it doesn't put you in harm's way)

• Recall your thoughts and feelings direct every moment of your life – no one is coming to save you=

Dream Analysis of the Week-superconscious dog

Dream: I was working in a labcoat and required references to take the project next level.  So, I visited a former university lab I had worked in to obtain a copy of published research paper I had co-authored. Try as I might to submit it to my tech lab supervisor, the work was not taken as legitimate or as a valid credential.  In fact, my former research was peer-reviewed as irrelevant, obsolete, cause to let me go. I left lab, went to visit a hip female biochemist. Rather than ask to work with her, I interfaced with her dog. It barked the vibration of complex organic chemistry molecules and they appeared in the air as if on a holgraphic screen. Then, the dog shared silent vibrations. I created right here and now in the great outdoors with no need for a lab. Meanwhile, my son was playing with a family of wild monkeys, swinging from trees overhead.

Interpretation: Whatever we touch, see, hear, sense, is speaking to us through and being filtered in dreams. This shares views of reality.

You are clearly exerting effort to stay in a situation that is not aligned with your true passions, abilities or soul.  Regardless of the efforts you exert, if you are not a good fit, the universe will shake things up beyond your control. Even if you do well keeping up appearances for a while, your vibration will shift your conditions.

Labs are typically artificial environments where substances and clones are unnaturally synthesized. This draws attention to falsity, facades you may be upholding which will crumble if you do not dismantle them yourself.  You are not a copy, but an original, and must validate this inside before others see your true value.  This is not about how other people see you or attempting to appease them, it is being aware of how you see and present yourself, and any incongruence with your thoughts, feelings and behaviours. 

The dog echoes you are your own best friend and support. In unexpected ways and places, you can raise self- awareness of and unleash innate gifts, activate dormant capacities, be uninhibited, do the unexpected.  The monkey echoes a playful side bursting to express itself.  You are closer than ever to embracing what makes you feel most alive.  Notice the possible inner tug of war concerning obedience (duty) and complete freedom. Seems you contemplate where you stand on 'norms,' taboos, and priorities.  Signs urge you do what feels natural.  Let go of all that feels unnatural.

Contact us with dreams for analysis. Dream Consultations include exploring events and energies on many levels. We can examine a series of dreams to help identify patterns, energies, perceptions, consciousness, metaphors and more.

5 Ways to begin taking radical responsibility

To draw on the theme of a new online radical responsibility course I am offering, consider 5 ways to begin taking radical responsibility:

1. Recognize that you create all of your life experiences. 

This may be a shocker: No one and nothing is doing anything to you. Stop looking outside of yourself to people and conditions and thinking they are happening to you. Unconscious individuals look at lack of peer feedback and believe peers are the issue. Conscious individuals shift attention off the external and focus on themselves. This is a choice. Where are you placing your attention? 

2. Accept your deepest intentions (unconscious commitment) are not in your words, but in results showing up. 

If the world is not giving you abundance, useful feedback, opportunities, clients, you feel unappreciated, these are results. Regardless of what you say you want (e.g. opportunity, clients, praise), you’re unconsciously committed to getting results you get.

3. Allow curiousity to guide you. 

Your unconscious commitment/ will (the actual result) is perfect for your next developmental step in becoming a conscious co-creator. No one is doing anything wrong. Right and wrong do not exist. This is a feeling based journey you are making conscious to reclaim inner power. Everything exists for your deep learning and growth.  

4. Answer two powerful questions from a place of curiosity and wonder. #1: “How do I create and perpetuate this situation? ” #2: “What do I get from creating and perpetuating this situation?”

The answers that arise are pivotal for raising your awareness of what you can do, how you can live differently

Question #1: Imagine you’ve been asked to teach a class called, “How to get feedback & appreciation.” Note results you get now. Be the expert. Have fun with this: create a slide presentation on how to create a boss who doesn't treat you well. Typical points might include: Don’t ask your boss for feedback. Think that all feedback must be verbal and labeled as “feedback.” Get defensive when your boss gives you feedback. As you answer question #2, it dawns you’re not crazy. You’re creating this situation and you benefit from having it be this way. Discover what they are. Own what you’re getting. 

5. If you’re willing to shift your unconscious commitment (intention), examine your presentation and apply what you learn to your life. Discover the power of conscious intenation. Follow your own prescription. Results are pointers to inner voice or vibration. SHift inside and the outside can only mirror that. Its universal law.

This is an example of how many mystery writers create their scenarios. They tend to begin with the solution to the mystery and write their story backwards. So, there is more than psychology to this.  The formula works! Go with it. See what happens.

Notice so often, many assume spiritual growth means achieving some extraordinary, other-worldly, blissed-out state where we are somehow transported out of where we are. This view leads us to constantly reach for the next spiritual high, focus on futures. Or we feel that with all our commitments, responsibilities we have few ways for developing our inner nature. Both of these views reflect an error in perception. Let's step back, take another look. 

In fact, our day-to-day experiences offer raw material for spiritual development. Conflicts that arise in our families and among colleagues, the pain of losing loved ones, or our resistance to paradigms, stories, events, do not prevent inner development. Rather, they point to our ignorance and all else that hinders us from knowing and embodying true nature. We must simply be willing to surrender to the process. We are each invited to meet situations that present with compassion. This is true nature. 

Many of us do not distinguish between true nature and our personality traits, particularly our less desirable traits. Thing is, we are not the body, mind, emotions, but spirit-soul. It is the nature of the untrained mind to want what it perceives as advantageous and resist what seems painful. Discovering how the heart and mind can work together allows us to move beyond resistance and start to know inner freedom. Every situation we create has potential to reveal our true nature.

At different stages, we can feel overwhelmed by life conditions or feel bound by past traumatic events. If and when this happens, we do not see things as they really are. They are just mind-states which can be known, seen as impermanent, do not belong to us. They do not define true nature. A spiritual practice can provide insight and discipline to explore our perceptions. We each must discover what is true for ourselves. Heresay does not cut it. We can each do this right where we are. There is no need to go to a monastery or get our life more together. The intensity of our will and fears is a catalyst that propels us to go down the rabbit hole.  We can choose how to see, reframe, respond to events that will lead us to a deeper relationship with true nature.

For many years, words by Viktor Frankl have inspired me. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

It is crucial to understand, from a spiritual perspective, that the pain and suffering with which we work is no less substantial, or less real or difficult than those others face. The constrictions of the heart and mind cannot be measured like so many pounds of pressure; they are energies we learn to feel, harness and guide us back to true nature. Funny, the quest to reconnect with true nature is often lost in ordinary life. To be wrapped up in the mundane causes us to forget the big picture.

Buddha teaches that true nature is obscured by veils of wanting, fear, and delusion (or ignorance). He urges us to look at nature of our mind systematically and observe how these three mind-states condition what we think and value, and how we behave. He teaches that to identify with these mind-states causes suffering.
If we are not our thoughts, then what is our true nature, how do we find it, and how do we live so that it may flourish?

Well, the true nature of love is not based on ego strategy, but on the sheer openness of one heart to another. This is the kind of heart-opening that provides us with courage to face what arises.

Buddha also echoes our true nature is emptiness- a lack of a permanent Self- and when this true nature is realized, the divine states of the Brahma-viharas – loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity- emerge. There is also a state of mind and heart known as bodhichitta that leads one to completely dedicate oneself to the liberation of all beings from suffering. In the teachings of the great yoga masters, our true nature is Brahman, the universal soul, of which the individual soul is simply a part. When this is realized there is satchidananda, the awareness of bliss, from the knowing that pure awareness is our ultimate nature.

At some stage, it dawns, feelings of true nature are real. What Buddha describes are actual states of mind- body that can be physically and emotionally felt as profound consciousness shifts. For some people, these changes in consciousness have a strong physical component or a marked shift in perception. Some of us experience dramatically altered states of being. Others know subtle shifts in clarity, emotional centeredness, spontaneous acts of kindness. Every moment the body and mind experience true nature may feel transcendent, and manifestation simply occurs without effort. To know a “soft heart” is to act with selfless compassion. This is dwelling in the divine aspect of true nature. The new normal can feel like a transcendent moment.

Allow rose of clarity to blossom

Notice fear-based conditioning teaches us to cling to suffering perhaps because in some way, we think it makes life worthwhile. The mind thinks joy must be earned. Irony is, the more miseable we are, the more we cling to what does not serve us, the harder it sems to let go. In truth, one who is truly happy does not cling to life,or form unhealthy attachments. Deeper reflection brings new insight.

People who are suffering maintain their version of "hope." They always hope something different or better, will occur tomorrow or down the track. Those who live in adversity create an image of heaven or paradise that helps them endure discomfort. Yet, this distant idea of relief is like a carrot on a stick guiding the rabbit in us forward. Its a mind game to keep us frozen where we are. This tricky mind would like our attention to be hijacked away from the present moment. Still, that future never comes as it does not exist as mind would have us believe.

One big lesson here is only as we begin to feel hopeless about our perception of life or situation, does real hope and falling into surrender become possible. Only in a moment of real crisis or tragedy does transformation happen. So, when we think we have no real or acceptable options, maybe feel stuck in a hard place, this is when the heart cracks open and light finally reveals itself unexpectedly. The rose of clarity within blossoms in this perfect moment and not a moment before.