When I set up my business originally, I called it Total Fitness because I knew that I had to grow, both as a person and as a practitioner. I expected that by the time I would be 50, I would be doing mostly healing work. I wanted to set up a framework that would allow me to continue to evolve.
My favorite author, Dr. David Hawkins, M.D., author of Power Vs. Force, has developed a scale of consciousness from 0 to 1,000. Everyone and everything has a level of consciousness. The maximum level of consciousness that a human being can reach is 1,000, and this is reserved for the great avatars like Jesus. He says the average person only raises their level of consciousness about 5 points in an entire lifetime.
And then there’s the 80/20 rule. Pareto’s Law. This law says that for most events, 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In business, 80 percent of your sales may come from 20 percent of your clients. And in personal growth, 80 percent of the people may want to change but actually stay the same, and 20 percent of the people may actually grow, spiritually speaking. These 20 percent of the people are the ones who lead the changes in everything.
When I ran my radio show on VoiceAmerica.com, my favorite guest was the visionary movement therapist Emily Conrad, founder of Continuum. Emily has developed a system of movement that allows people who are totally paralyzed to be able to move again.
One of the premises of Emily’s work is that there is a continuum between structure and evolution.
The more structure we have in our lives, the less able we are to evolve.
So if you have a wife, a business, four kids and a mortgage, you may end up feeling pretty locked in with few choices.
If you set yourself up so you have more free time and less financial obligations, you may be able to explore your life and get into all kinds of things.
We establish structure in our life in order to secure ourselves. A roof over our head, a 401K, a marriage, a job where everyone appreciates us. These structures can support us, but when they become too patterned, as Emily would say, which is another way to stay they become too mechanical and repetitious without following our actual life energy, they begin to stifle us on all levels and paralysis sets in.
Emily’s favorite animal is the octopus because it can morph itself so easily.
She herself was a successful dancer who become an even more successful choreographer and who kept evolving to the point where she lost all her dance students and eventually developed her work into this system of movement that allows people who were once officially paralyzed to be able to move again.
She knows all about the risks of leaving behind money, a constant stream of students and what the world thinks of as security but also the soul’s longing to evolve. Because she had the courage to evolve, she now has a worldwide following, is easily 30 years ahead of her time, and has been able to help people who had otherwise given up all hope.
I have allowed myself to evolve, professionally speaking, by following my joy.
I have written in my blog about how, when something no longer fascinated me, I gave myself permission to move on. I do my best to stay in a state of joy when I work, as this is how I know I will do my best work.
I study and study some more and by the mere act of studying and reconsidering what I am doing, I shift and grow and hopefully do better and better work for my clients.
I remember right before I started my radio show, I was considering whether or not to accept the offer of having my own show. I was talking over the prospect with my mentor in healing, Sue Maes.
I said to Sue, “I am happy with my life the way it is.”
And she said, “That’s just what you think.”
As usual, Sue was right. Even though I thought I was happy, it was my soul’s longing to evolve.
There are simple ways we can build the prospect of evolution into our every day lives, I think.
We can daydream.
We can spend quiet time alone in order to listen to our guidance.
We can pay attention to our feelings of envy or jealousy, which really just point out what other people have that we really want for ourselves. If you see a woman in the mall with a really fab pink purse, and you think, “I wonder where she got that,” what you are really noticing is that you want one too. When you see or hear about a person who has an incredible life, what you are noticing is that you want one also. When you are looking about and finding things that really excite you and make you stay up all night reading and researching, that’s telling you what your soul really wants to do.
And it can all come right back to healing.
Sometimes if you find yourself sick and tired, the solution may not be that you need a better exercise program or a new juicer.
Maybe you are just sick and tired of your life. Maybe the solution is even bigger than you thought. It may be that your soul is longing to evolve, to give yourself the life you have been longing for with less structure and more opportunities to discover yourself.
