Having trouble throwing away those un-used condiments in the refrigerator? Still circulating the uncomfortable conversation you had with so-and-so two weeks ago? Turning your eye from that pile of unfiled papers? You may be avoiding the important phase of “endings”. It’s time that you snuggle up to endings, to make room for beginnings in 2011.

I have my own ending-avoiding tendencies (as evidenced by a pile of unfiled papers and my messy kitchen). Even so, I’m placing my focus on endings, especially as the New Year approaches.

There is dignity in recognizing that something has reached it’s ending. The ending is simply a completion, the moment of arriving at a state of fullness.

“Complete” has two meanings. First, that something has run it’s course, and come to the end of a process. Second, that it has all the appropriate parts. That it is whole.

Completion is both the process and the end result of the process. A sentence runs it’s course, including all the necessary words and comes to an end, appropriately punctuated with a period. To complete is an act of respect and dignity.

Completion also creates space for the new to emerge. Without the ending phase, life becomes cluttered, overwhelming and draining. When you don’t complete, your creativity and forward momentum suffers.

The ending phase of the life cycle is crucial to forward momentum and success. It allows time and space for the new and frees up energy that is trapped in old creations. Anything left incomplete leaves un-whole circuits of energy in our minds. Whether or not we are aware, these incomplete circuits sap our success by occupying our unconscious minds.

This is as true in the case of emotional matters as it is in financial and practical matters. The un-mourned loved one keeps us from fully participating emotionally in the present. The debt left unpaid hinders the flow of giving and receiving money in our now.

In what areas of your life are you feeling stagnant, overwhelmed or cluttered? For this holiday season, give yourself the gift of completion, and start now to unleash the energy that wants to sky-rocket your success in 2011.

Start now: Tool for Completion.

Step 1: Inventory of incompletions:

Make an inventory of everything that you have left undone in your life. Leave no stone unturned!

• What significant communications have you left unsaid? (Hint: if you think of it 3 times or more, it is a significant communication)
• What debts/or money owed are lingering?
• Are there any feelings that you are avoiding?
• Do you feel a sense of ease when you think of your past and current relationships?
• What home projects/errands have been left undone?

Step 2: Choose a Completion style

For each item, decide a fun and easy way to create completion. There are many different ways to end:
Is it a slow steady decay…a gentle letting go…a violent bashing of the baseball bat, a shedding tear or a consuming flame.

Step 3: By when

Give yourself a realistic “by when” date for completing each task and mark it in your calendar. Eg. I will sort through my receipts and file them by Monday afternoon.

This weekend I was driving back from a camping trip with my friend and fellow coach who moved here from Germany over a decade ago. I asked her what is the principal cultural difference between Canadians and Germans. She explained how in Germany, unreasonable displays of joy were vocally opposed.

Growing up she was asked “What’s wrong with you?” when she smiled at passersby. In the German language the word for “things are going too well” also means “you’re crazy.” Surely, if you’re feeling good in a world that is meant for struggle and suffering, something’s wrong!

As a naturally buoyant and expressive person, she felt tremendous relief when she arrived in Vancouver to happy and healthy yoga-goers. Her description of German culture confirmed for me an aspect of human existence that I’ve become acutely aware of recently: The upper limit problem.

The upper limit problem suggests that there is a cap to our capacity to tolerate positive energy, joy, love etc. When we surpass our engrained “upper limit” we do something, or create circumstances that will bring us back to more normal and comfortable levels of expansion.

What she was describing was what I would consider a “national” upper limit. While in Canada we may have a higher tolerance for joy, happiness and health than Germans, the upper limit problem is ever present in each of our lives.

Here are a few examples of the upper limit problem at work:

- You’re having a great day and feeling joyful. Out of nowhere your mind kicks in with critical thoughts, self-doubt and worry. Pretty soon, you’re feeling down.
- You get hired for a gig that is so exciting, you didn’t think it was within your reach. You spend the evening soaring and delighted. You wake up in the morning with a sore throat and feeling dopey and tired.
-You go on beautiful date with your partner and enjoy an intimate and loving connection. The bill comes for your meal and you end up in a tense argument about money.

It makes sense that this happens. It’s only very recently that we’re evolving as a species to increase the amount that we let ourselves feel good and have our lives run well for any significant amount of time.

Humans are accustomed to pain and adversity through a millennia of struggle. We know how to feel bad. In our bodies we have millions of nerve connections devoted to registering pain and an expanse of territory in the centre of our bodies dedicated to feeling fear.

Does it have to be this way? Do we have to continually cap our success, prosperity and happiness?

No.

The first step is to Get Willing.

Once you get willing to continually expand your capacity for love, abundance and success, you’ll find that YOU CAN continually increase them. You’ll find that your life CAN continually get better and better and that you CAN enjoy your power, passion and pleasure more than you imagined possible.

To get willing start with these simple questions:

Are you willing to increase the amount of time every day that you enjoy power, pleasure, play and passion?
If you answered Yes, consider the next question…
Are you willing to increase the amount of time that your whole life goes well?
If you answered Yes, consider the next question…
Are you willing to feel good and have your life go well all the time?
And if you still answered Yes, consider this final question:
Are you willing to expand everyday in prosperity, power and love?

Your willingness to have your life continually get better and better is the first step to dissolving your upper limits. Next time something happens to bring you down, remind yourself of your new willingness and get curious about how you can expand and open yourself up to life getting better and better….and better.

Welcome to your Life. There are no Instructions.
How to Live your Life’s Purpose.

by Karen McMullen

To live your best life there is no road-map. There is no guidebook. There are no instructions. You can’t paint by numbers and those who try to tell you where to go can’t possibly know which destination is best for you.

There are instructions, guides and maps on how to follow someone else’s path but that’s not what you want anyway. Once you decide to step into your unique life purpose, the only one who can guide you there is you.
Your challenge as an adult is that you’ve experienced years of conditioning that suggests that you don’t know what is best for you.

Instead of learning how to masterfully listen to your own inner guidance, in school you learned through a “paint by numbers” approach: “If you simply graduate, get a degree, specialize in a profession, then you will get result B: a house, car, career and a family.” According to this model, your only job is to follow the steps laid out for you, to paint in the numbered blank spaces and you will achieve the desired outcome.

For some this approach works. However, if you are reading these words, you have arrived here because there is something MORE nagging within you, a calling to express your deepest purpose. And there is no Masters program that can teach you that. There is no “How to be (insert your name)” course that will tell you what is the highest and best use of your specific talents.

Since there are no directions, maps or guidebooks, it’s no wonder that you may feel lost at sea in your life. With no one to tell us where to go, and no mastery in guiding ourselves, it makes sense that less than half of North Americans have chosen work that they enjoy or that expresses their purpose for living.

Fortunately for you, you already have all the navigational equipment that you need to guide yourself to a fulfilling, abundant and successful life path.

Your Navigation Tool #4 Follow your Bliss

Because your end goal is to enjoy your life, you can’t get there through hard-work and suffering. The old paradigm says, you need to slog your way through a, b, c, and d before you get to sit back and enjoy your life.

This is simply not the way the world works. You don’t achieve freedom and happiness, through hard-work and suffering. Suffering begets suffering. When you are caught in the feeling-place of slogging, you don’t have access to the solutions and circumstances that will align you with your best life and highest potential.

Think of it like a radio station. When you are tuned to 98.5 FM, you don’t expect to pick up the tunes on 101.3 FM. Radio frequencies don’t work that way! In the same way, if you want to live a purposeful and passionate life, you have to attune your own radio dial to the energy of purpose and passion. From the radio station of “slogging-through-another-day-at-work”, it is literally impossible for you to access the inspired ideas and circumstances that will guide you to purpose and passion.

When you decide to follow your bliss, you are well on your way to living your life’s calling. Do whatever it takes to tune your radio channel to feeling good. When you feel crappy, “following your bliss” might mean hunkering down for a night of TV and chocolate. It doesn’t matter what you do. Make one of your guiding principles, a commitment to feel good now. When you reach that good-feeling place, your calling is ready and waiting for you.

Are you a day-in day-out routine and reliable kind of person?
If so, you are likely quite comfortable with “sustaining”. The ability to sustain means that you can continue with a project, career or goal for an extended period of time without interruption.

What is the point of keeping on keeping on? When you stay the course of any project or path you create the possibility for mastery. Without the capacity to sustain something, your world would become a spring garden of sprouts with no fruit or flowers.

The question is: Are the projects/career that you sustain on a daily basis leading you to mastery in an area that sustains you? Whether or not you like it, you are becoming a master in the areas where you devote your attention over time. Are those areas rich and fulfilling to you?

Sustaining becomes a slog when you lack vision, forget to enjoy yourself and are doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. So here are three tips to enhance your sustain-ability.

#3 Create a compelling vision.

A vision is a clear view of where you are and where you are going. A compelling vision is one that inspires you towards it! Shackleton and his crew were able to sustain themselves while stranded for a year and a half in the antarctic because Shackleton provided an unwavering vision of rescue and home. Without an enticing vision of where you are going, the mind says “what’s the point in all this effort? Bah!”

To create a compelling vision, ask yourself: “what would an exceptional scenario look like for my career?” Get a sense of the big picture. How many people would you work with? Where would you work? How would you be contributing? Draw it, write it or tell your friend about it.

#2 Include JOY.

Without the ‘good stuff’ of joy, fun and love, sustaining becomes a slog. This is not to say that their won’t be times of hard-work and perseverance. Even so, the overall balance must be tipped in the direction of enjoyment for your path to truly sustain your mind, body and spirit.

To include enjoyment in your projects make a list of instant-joy-makers. What brings you joy instantly and reliably? Now, how can you bring that into your work-day?

#1 Do the right things for the right reasons.

The most valuable asset that you have is your time. All the money in the world won’t serve you if you have no time to enjoy it. Anything that you do that takes up hours of your day needs to be important enough to you to warrant regular participation.

As a serial creator, I find it very helpful to consider two questions prior to initiating a project:

“Is this creation worthy of my time and attention over an extended period?”
“Is this creation something that I am willing to tend to and care for until it’s full fruition?”

When you choose projects/a career that compels you in the direction you want your life to go, is pleasurable and important to you, sustaining becomes natural and easy. The energy that you spend becomes sustainable because you are fueling your own fire.

To initiate is to “cause a process or action to begin.” When we initiate, we become the cause of something that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

To me, initiating and creativity are intimate partners. The best part is that initiating is a practice that can be learned! Here are a few easy steps to get you going:

1) Notice areas of your life where you tend to “go with the tides” or become passive. Example: “I keep spending my evenings in a default way. Eating dinner and then ending up exhausted on the couch.”

2) Wonder “hmmm…what do I want to create in this area of my life?” Example: “I want to feel energized and creative after work! I’d like to do some painting like I used to enjoy.”

3) Notice the next step. What is the impulse that arises naturally? What is the next logical step? Example: “I’ve been picturing a painting I want to do for weeks now. I already have a canvas and paints…so the next step is to commit to spend half an hour painting this evening.”

4) Do it!! Take the plunge. Go for it and see what happens. Remember the more you exercise your “initiate” muscle, the more your creativity will flow.

Did you try this activity?? I want to hear about it! Tell me your story and I’ll include it in the next newsletter!

Picture this: 10 people. Each kneels before a large blank paper. In everyones hand is a mop-sized paint brush oozing black ink and poised to mark the page. Creative tension presses heavily. It is the moment between the nothingness of the blank page and the somethingness of the mark.

We are at a calligraphy workshop with Master calligrapher Barbara Bash. In her instruction she quotes Shambhala teacher, Chogyam Trungpa. “There is only one thing to feel when approaching the empty canvas. Terror.”

That just about sums it up. There is something totally terrifying about the nothingness of the blank canvas. It is the unknown. Our thinking mind doesn’t know how to cope with it! “What if no ideas come? What if I screw up? I’m not creative! I have nothing to share.”

These are some ways that our mind attempts to talk us down from the ledge and keep us from taking the creative plunge! And yet, if we stay there, in the uncomfortable moment of facing the unknown, something inevitable happens.

Out of nothing, comes something that didn’t exist before. The paintbrush hits the paper. An impulse emerges. We have an idea. And that, is creativity in a nut-shell.

At best, creativity is experienced as a feeling of flow and a connection to something greater than ourselves. In creativity, there is always magic! At worst, we get stuck in the pre-creation moment of terror and never initiate for fear of screwing up.

How can we position ourselves in relation to this magic? How can we become friendly with nothing?

Many people strongly desire to express their creativity in some way. They may even envision their creations but struggle to get beyond that moment of hesitation.

The key to befriending creativity is to practice initiating. As you develop your ‘initiate’ muscle, the blank canvas becomes a more enjoyable place to linger. The inner critic and fear of messing up is replaced with a gentle curiousity. “Hmmm…I wonder what wants to happen?”

We begin to dance with the something that is latent in the nothing. We introduce ourselves to the nothingness and say, “Hello, my name is ______. And who are you?” We wait and listen.

And with every answer, with every creation, our world expands to include more than was there before. Oh, how I love creation! To the Gods of creation, I offer this prayer: “May I go forth today and initiate an expression where before, I hesitated.”

Step 1: Inventory of incompletions:

Make an inventory of everything that you have left undone in your life. Leave no stone unturned!

What significant communications have you left unsaid? (Hint: if you think of it three times or more, it is a significant communication)
What debts/or money owed are lingering?
Are there any feelings that you are avoiding?
Do you feel a sense of ease when you think of your past and current relationships? If not, what is left unsaid/undone?
What home projects/errands have been left undone?
Have you made any agreements that you haven’t kept?

Step 2: Choose a destruction style.

For each item, decide a fun and easy way to create completion. There are many different ways to destroy:
Is it a slow steady decay, a gentle letting go, a violent bashing of the baseball bat, a shedding tear or a consuming flame?

Step 3: By when?

Give yourself a realistic “by when” date for completing each task and mark it in your calendar. Eg. I will sort through my receipts and file them by Monday afternoon.

Go forth and complete!