Just finished Stephen Copes book, “The Great Work of Your Life.” Amazing. 🙌🏽Inspiring. ✨Life changing. 🙏🏽 A tremendous book that supports clearing out life clutter (stuff, activities, people, even household decor minimalism) so that your focus and purpose becomes more and more clear and central to your daily activities.
This book tickled my desire for a really clear Dharma Path! I have a sense of my purpose and my dreams, but reading this made me want to really clarify my goal/pursuit/purpose, and to change my life to be more in support of that clarified vision...and then do the shit out of it!
Cope’s book is so good that I was eager to consume it, but even before I reached the end I started wondering how I was going to live after it was done! I considered just starting the book over as soon as I reached the end. But I had another book waiting, Osho’s “Trust”, and friends who are waiting to read Trust after I finish it. (Borrowed it from our yoga center’s free library.) So I began Trust this morning a little reluctantly still wondering if maybe I should be rereading Cope instead.
But of course Trust came along. The opening pages are EXACTLY the message for me - right now. Copes book stirred up a longing in me for refined clarity of purpose, for a clear end in mind of how I want my life to be and what larger life purpose I want to serve. But it in there also was a sense that I needed to figure something out. Like to pick a specific thing or destination that I should be shooting for. Trust resolved that longing on the very 1st page of the prologue.
It begins, “A destination is a very clear cut thing; a direction is very intuitive. A destination is something outside of you, more like a thing. A direction is an inner feeling; not an object, but your very subjectivity.... destination is in the future. Once decided, you start manipulating your life towards it, steering your life toward it.
How can you decide the future? Who are you to decide the unknown?
...the past decides when you decide a destination. Your experience of the past, your knowledge of the past decides. You kill the future. Then you go on repeating your own past — maybe a little modified ...but it still comes out of the past.
Direction is something alive, in the moment. It knows nothing of the future, it knows nothing of the past, but it throbs, it pulsates, but here and now. And out of this pulsating moment, the next moment is created. Not by any decision on your part - but just because you live in this moment and you live in it so totally, and you love this moment so wholly, out of this wholeness the next moment is born. ✨ (sparkles added by me for emphasis 😉) It is going to have direction. That direction is not given by you, it is not imposed by you; it is spontaneous.” ✨ (more inner sparkles there for me)
Of course!! I don’t need to have a precise and exact image of my future with the chosen destination all set to know that I’m on my dharma path. I just need to get “myself” and my will out of the way! To flow with life. To allow myself to be guided and drawn to the ineffable that resonates with the deepest parts of my belly.
Thanks universe for this beautiful message dropped in my lap at the moment I was pondering this question.