The Road Less Traveled is filled with obstacles, challenges, twists and turns. It begins with confronting ourselves, a willingness to take that hard look within, understand what happened, heal your past, while learning how to create healthy beliefs that will drive our behaviors to more positive consequences in our life. This by definition puts on a different path. It was easier to blame others for our life and therefore take no responsibility. It was easier to have others tell us who we are, what we should be, how we should be, than it is to question and ultimately challenge these definitions, and then form our own definitions of happiness, success, lifestyle, etc.

For all the years I have spent with my own personal growth, self-discovery and spiritual awakening, and all of the techniques & methods I have used, books I have read, counselors I worked with, and more…, I can boil it down to five items that are the most important ingredients to taking charge of your life.

What can appear as a doom and gloom regarding the future of humanity, is actually a story about hope, resilience, and the evolution of humanity. This article focuses on what is likely to be our future, how to assess this, along with a slant that we can do this!

The motivation for those on the path of personal growth, self-discovery and enlightenment comes from within, intrinsic motivation. What does this motivation look like and what is its source?

Building on Part 1, this post utilizes my own story to demonstrate the development of purpose. Purpose is a culmination of our life experience to-date, along with a conscious choice to become our full potential.

It has been my own experience to realize that most people are unhappy and feel that they have wasted a lot of their life. Having a sense of real purpose and living your life “on purpose” is the antidote for this.

For years I have heard others suggest meditation as a tool for personal growth, self-discovery, enlightenment. For years I have ignored this topic. I felt that I was doing an adequate job managing my life, my challenges, along with my personal growth. So what changed? What prompted me to look into meditation and what I have learned and applied so far? Is there value to meditation? If so, what and how? This is the focus of this post, a sort of, “meditation for those who have ignored this topic.”

What if we were able to change the way we see others? What impact would this have on our relationships, colleagues, connections? Consider the following framework from Ram Dass.

One of the challenges I often hear from our elders relates to the feeling of loneliness. Loneliness is not only a condition of the elderly, but of anyone at any age. Although there are many steps we can take to help deal with loneliness, this post focuses on understanding the root cause so that we can increase our happiness quotient which is the antidote for feeling all alone.

There are multiple levels or layers to self. The outermost layer is what we are most aware of. This is what we know about ourselves, or typically this is limited to what we see. Similar to the analogy of an iceberg (see image), we are conscious (portion of iceberg above the water), of only about 10% of who and what we really are. What lies beneath the surface represents our subconscious, or largely unaware of, which represents our beliefs, values, biases, prejudices, etc. This accounts for 90% of self, which is largely hidden from us, and requires a conscious effort to learn about our hidden self. It is what lies beneath the surface, our subconscious, that plays a major role in our behaviors and consequences. Hence the value of self-discovery is to undertand this connection so that we can change our unhealthy patterns, negative consequences, into more healthy beliefs and positive consequences. We are the cause of our own unhappiness which is so difficult to initially grasp!