Challenge: Change

     Oh Tama Kieves, I love you, why did you come into my life?  All these years I have been jockeying myself into my dream job, thinking I loved the content of my work but not the job itself.  All these years I have been filling out my "red" and "green" cards a la Marcus Buckingham, filing my "strengths" and "weaknesses" into little red and green piles.  All these years I have been working and re-working the framework of my life: my job responsibilities, my clients, my colleagues, my continuing education, my location.  Rearranging all the components in the expectation that one day, I will wake up, leap out of bed with fiery passion for my work.  Guess what?! In October, I scored my dream job.  Guess what else? I still hit the snooze button with all the fiery passion I should be using to leap out of bed.

                                                                        Fail.

     I remember that fiery passion feeling. I've had it before - when teaching kids in a 1:1 setting. Just me, a kid, and potential for change and growth.  I've had it when introducing women to the mystery and bliss of pole dancing for the first time.  I've had it when giving a workshop and seeing the entire paradigm of people's ideas about teaching and children drop out from under them.  You know it too, I bet.  The rush. Time sliding by, unnoticed.  The tingling aliveness under your skin and through your body.  The seamless transition from moment to moment.  Powerful.  Alive.

     Thanks to This Time I Dance, I'm itchy.  That itch that keeps you awake at night, scratching until you bleed.  No amount of packages of frozen peas or other temporary salves can make this itch go away.  I see a future filled with outer purpose that fuels my soul, and I want it.   I don't even have the skill set for it - I haven't danced in years, I'm a lousy photographer, and my writing is less than organized and inspirational.  I want it anyway.  How do I get there? I need skills, I need marketability, I need a life coach (MOM!)

   Until I can secure my mom's services, I open my favorite guidebook, A New Earth.   I hit this page right away.  It is a long passage, but can it help us bridge the gap between what our outer actions look like now, and the blissful future vision?

"Here is a spiritual practice that will bring empowerment and creative expansion into your life. 

 Make a list of a number of everyday routine activities that you perform frequently.

 Include activities that you may consider uninteresting, boring, tedious, irritating, or stressful. 

But don't include anything that you hate or detest doing.  That's a case either for acceptance or for stopping what you do.... 

Then, whenever you are engaged in those activities, let them be a vehicle for alertness.  

Be absolutely present in what you do and sense the alert, alive stillness within you in the background of the activity.  

You wills soon find that what you in such a state of heightened awareness, instead of being stressful, tedious, or irritating, is actually becoming enjoyable.  

To be more precise, what you are enjoying is not really the outward action but the inner dimension of consciousness that flows into the action.  This is the finding the joy of Being in what you are doing." (Tolle, p. 300)

     The challenge this week is to bring alertness, aliveness, to the tedious moments that bog me down, to help me act from a place of inner purpose and aliveness, to myelinate the pathway to aligning my inner and outer purposes.  Let's make our lists of daily activities!  Ready, set, go!

     (Hey, did anyone notice that sneaky little sentence about stopping what you hate?)