Living An Inspired Life

Are you living the life you want to be living—an inspired life? What’s it take to live an inspired life? We learned so much about this in the past year since we were inspired to sell our house in Santa Fe and move to Hawaii. It was pure inspiration. And we acted on it. But it didn’t go exactly the way we expected.

Life in paradise

We had vacationed in Hawaii many times, and we often dreamed about living here. But a two week vacation didn’t seem like a fair trial, so last year we took five weeks off and rented a home on Hawaii. Day by day we felt younger and became more adventuresome than we’d been in twenty years. We fell in love with the place, the people, and more deeply in love with each other. We were inspired to make Hawaii our home.

It took us a year to sell our home in Santa Fe, thin out all the stuff we had accumulated over the previous decades, wrap up certain aspects of our lives, pack, move to temporary housing, unpack, pack again, and move to Hawaii to unpack one more time. It was exhausting. We had no idea. Well, Hannah had some idea, she said, “This isn’t going to be easy,” but I ignored her comment.

Where is paradise?

We arrived in Hawaii in May, 2017, looked up and saw an empty canvas. Although we were still inspired, mostly we were tired. We contracted, pulled inward, starting wondering and worrying about how we would make a living. We started questioning what we had done. We over-examined ourselves and that added to our fatigue. That’s about the time the embarrassment set in. We didn’t even want to tell people how we were feeling so we kept it to ourselves, which made us feel more isolated.

That was the first couple of months of our new lives in Hawaii. We couldn’t find paradise even though we were living in paradise. And even though it was very difficult, we were both highly motivated to reconnect with our inspiration. Some of our self-management tools—Perception Language and various mindfulness practices—were helpful, but not enough. That’s when we started delving deeply into the process of inspiration. Where does it come from? Why does it get squelched? How can we foster it?

We’ve found answers to those questions—at least for ourselves, incredibly valuable answers. We’ll be sharing them with anyone who would like to join our upcoming webinar—Sunday, July 30th.

Inspiration is hampered by memory

To lead an inspired life requires living in the present moment and letting go of all those old tapes, justifications, limiting beliefs and personal narratives that we use to define ourselves. All that stuff comes from memory. It is all from the past. When we live from memory we inhibit ourselves from seeing what’s possible in this moment.

Each of us contains great wisdom and deep knowing—this is where inspiration comes from. If we listen and then act from a place of inspiration, we feel expansive and energized, alive. There is no guarantee that each thing we pursue will work out the way we want, but we’re engaged, living fully, learning and growing. And generally when we act from inspiration we increase the likelihood of getting positive results because other people want to be around us and join us in whatever we’re doing.

Many of us have a hard time living inspired lives, partially because of the pressures of day-to-day life, but mostly because we don’t have a clear understanding of how to do so. Even when we have glimpses of inspiration, very quickly we cover up our inspired selves with layers and layers of distractions, hurt feelings from the past that caution us to be careful, the need to be right, the need to fix other people, old fears and self-doubt. And when we listen to all this crap we can no longer hear our own inspired voices.

Listen to your inspired voice

Inspiration is not always grandiose. It may not be about changing THE world, it may be about changing the way you treat your partner or child. Or it may be about speaking the truth when it is unpopular, or committing an act of kindness when it is inconvenient. Or it may be about writing that article or song you’ve been waiting to write, discovering the artist within, or about something you’ve not yet imagined.

We moved away from our life in Santa Fe not because it was bad, but because after we tapped into our inspiration during those five weeks in Hawaii, we said, “This is how we want to live all the time.” Now we’re here and we’re not on vacation any more, but we are doing very specific daily practices to reconnect with our inspiration. We believe this is part of why we came here, to learn how to live inspired lives and share what we learn with other people.

Our work at liveconscious.com offers ways to find and speak with your inspired voice. We hope you will join us for a free webinar, this coming Sunday.

If you're considering attending one of our retreats, click the link below to fill out the Personal Information Form. After we review it we'll get back to you with any additional questions or comments we may have.

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