Topics : Discovering Your Human Potential

Stephen Covey's "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" are a clear cut, step by step guide on how to bring about the changes you need to create a happier, more effective and successful life. Gabrielle Roth's "The 5 Rhythms of Dance" are a joyous and enjoyable way of getting in touch with the cravings of your soul. Not a compendium of "how-to's", or yet another list of things that you have to do to be "holy, pure or enlightened", but simple techniques to break through our resistances to serious spiritual practice.

The meaning of true courage, and how it takes all the great "hearted-ness" in the world to live a life of real worth. Living a life of spiritual discipline, with honor and integrity, is based upon the moral and ethical precepts of doing our best because we care, of giving for the sake of giving and not in search of rewards, it is then that we find abundance. Abundance is a product of humility. It flows from a sense of service. It is an ever-growing commodity. If you truly enter into this abundance mentality - like the rule of the farm, seed, water, weed and wait - it will always produce a harvest.

Challenge and adversity can be the greatest catalysts to success. Our "best-worst" experience - bankruptcy, loss of job, marital break up - can be a condition that our soul has secretly been arranging for years, in order for us to choose the only life we can genuinely live. As David Whyte points out, in a very true sense, our soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's life. Perhaps, if we are not happy with our life, it is time to step back and see if we are not living our mother's life or our school's life or our spouse's life, instead of our own. The spirit of success begins with having the courage to take the smallest step, and if it's your very own then all there is.

Relinquishing Fear

Fear of failure, fear of success, being self-destructive, are ways of expressing to the world that we are not worthy, that we are not entitled to success. In order to move on we must give up our boring myth that we are victims. It is much easier to live a life of lightness, to not go after our dreams, to settle for something,but it is in bringing to expression our creative urges to be or do what we are passionate about that success lies. The poet, David Whyte, says that when this creativity is suppressed it actually corrodes away our insides, a debilitating process that saps our energies from doing anything else. Always it smoulders inside. The trick is to relinquish our fear and let it out. It is our life and no one else can live it.

The Spiritual Path

Never cease from exploring. Ultimately you begin to see life for what it really is. All the great teachers have said not "did you follow my teaching?", but "did you go your own way, and if not, why not?" No one but no one has the magic formula, or can tell you with any definitive assurance what exactly you must do in life. Whyte, continues to say, "slowly you must determine to save the only life you can save, to live the only life you can live, and if that is a mystery to you, then you are surely lost."