If you’re serious about changing yourself and your life, you must change your environment.*
Ben Hardy

your ordinary ego mind isn’t enough for your hero’s journey**
Robert Dilts

You have set out on your hero’s journey,
You are living your story,
And then comes the obstacle, the issue, the problem.

It’s spoilt everything.
Or has it?

What if the interruption is the story,
That you need this to become the person you must be
to realise your calling?

It has always been so.

There is no pre-laid super-highway of destiny or fate,
Only the grafted path
shaped by the feet of the one who must walk this way,
even while it shapes the character of this soul.

*From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**From Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts’ The Hero’s Journey.

Time is where eternity unfolds. The contemplative has always recognised the morning as the time to welcome the new day with a sense of creative expectation and openhandedness.*
John O’Donohue

it is essential to put yourself in the unconditional service of the future possibility that is wanting to emerge. Viewed from this angle, prancing is about a dialogue with the future possibility that wants to emerge**
Otto Scharmer

I have noticed that gratitude creates in me an openness to possibility.

Rather than something we have or do not have,
Gratitude is a life skill developed through paying attention to more.
To the small and ordinary things especially,
So much more to play with than previously imagined
towards generosity.

*From John O’Donohue’s Benedictus;
**Fro Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.

You need an environment that continually calls to mind your future self. If your environment doesn’t continually bring your future self to the forefront, then your environment is activating a different you.*
Ben Hardy

I am constantly being bombarded with influences from my environment. I only wish to throw some of them back. To create energies/influences that will affect others, as theirs affect me.**
Keith Haring

Each day contains many influencing environments,
Noticed and unnoticed,
Unfamiliar or familiar,
Systems, organisations, people.

The prime environment, however,
Is one’s calling,
A space where talents and values and energies
concentre in an indefatigable and imaginative bond,
And which we carry wheresoever we go.

It is not mysterious.
We do not have to go on some globe-scouring odyssey.
Closer than breathing,
It reveals through slow attention
in a loud and busy world.

*From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**From Keith Haring’s Keith Haring Journals.

Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language created by Canadian linguist and translator Sonja Lang.

It comprises 132 characters,
Just begging to be doodled.
And so I offer them here
so you might have some fun,
However you want to lay them down.

So your threshold is the point at which you’re going to go into a new and challenging territory that you’ve never been in before, and there’s no turning back.*
Robert Dilts

You will never regret offering dignity to others.**
Seth Godin

Each carries within a wound and a gift.

The victim only feels the wound,
And desires to be rid of it,
They wait to be rid of it.

The agent feels both their wound and gift,
And in understanding their symbiotic relationship
have moved across a threshold into a new world.

Sometimes other’s have been their guides,
Sometimes they have found their own way,
Sometimes they have become guides to others:

Sponsorship is about holding what’s there in a way that allows other possibilities to emerge … true healing comes from being able to sponsor the wound, sponsor the demon, sponsor the shadow. *

This is dreamwhispering.

*From Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilt’s The Hero’s Journey;
**From Seth Godin’s blog: Justice and dignity, too often in short supply.

The hypnotic spell says “You have no spirit inside of you. You have no hero’s journey. Your main purpose is to buy refrigerators. Your main purpose in this world it to eat cheeseburgers.*
Stephen Gilligan

The cosmos is always both intimate and immense. Its deepest energies are always closer to us than our very breath, and its vastness and interrelatedness are always greater than many of the boundaries we have placed around ourselves as nations, races and religions.**
Philip Newell

The women of the village take the newborn baby into the forest,
Where together they will create a song of calling that is unique,
Not a lullaby but a song of awakening.

When the child does something wrong or becomes ill,
The song will be sung to help them return to their truth.

At the end of their life, the song will be sung one more time,
And then it will never be sung again.

We may not have had a song crafted for us at our birth,
But still, each of us has just such a song of awakening,
Much needed when there are so many hypnotic lullabies
lulling us into sleepfulness:

We don’t come into this world to sleep. We come to awaken, and awaken again, and to grow and evolve. So the calling is always a calling to grow, to contribute, to bring more of that vitality of life energy into the world or back into the world.*

*From Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts’ The Hero’s Journey;
**From Philip Newell’s Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.

In what ways have you yet to accept the fact that you are who you are, not the person you think you ought to be?*
Oliver Burkeman

It’s not that your personality itself becomes stable but rather that your routine environments and social roles lock you into habitual patterns.**
Ben Hardy

To stop short of me being me and you being you would be irresponsible.
Though the likelihood is that this is what will happen to some degree.

In a West African culture, a new born baby’s spirit is asked by elders:

Why have you come? What is the gift you have come to bring?^

It is imperative that that we bring into the world that which only we can,
Towards this we might take Ben Hardy’s implied advice
and shake up our environments:
Reading something different,
Meeting new people,
Attending different events,
Beginning something new.

*From Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks;
**From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
^From Stephen Gilligan and Robert Dilts’ The Hero’s Journey.

Never mind searching for who you are. Search for the person you aspire to be.*
Richard Brault

‘Missing man’ joins search party looking for himself.**
BBC News

You may be waiting a long time to be inspired.
On the other hand, you can aspire to something right now and go to:

It’s true that how we spend our days is how we end up spending our lives. We can deliberately choose to spend them wisely.^

The missing man hadn’t realised the search party he had joined was looking for him,
Until they began calling his name.
Then he replied: “I am here.”

Aspire to follow your heart:

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.^^

*Quoted in Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
**Headline quoted in Austin Kleon’s blog: My year in 101 quotes;
^From Bernadette Jiwa’s The Story of Telling blog: Always, Sometimes, Never;
^^Carlos Castaneda.

As soon as we mechanize, measure and perfect something, it becomes far less interesting. … As we get better at industrialism, the variability of imperfection becomes even more fascinating. Imperfect and proud of it.*
Seth Godin

If I wait whilst seeking perfection, I could be waiting a long time,
But if I begin, in some imperfect way,
There opens the possibility of improvement –
And for quirkiness.
Something sadly lacking in our standardised world.

*From Seth Godin’s blog: Craft and imperfection.

Knowledge of the self is as important as knowledge of the external world.*
Ken Robinson

*From Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds.