Every two to four weeks, you will get a new assignment; a new set of homework that will accelerate your personal development. Over the next 17 weeks, you will not only improve your own life and find more peace, but you will also improve the lives of others.
Follow the the button below to see the full assignment and all the details on how to do it. While you are there, you can translate it too, if you prefer a different language. Be sure to talk with your mentor about each assignment and any questions you may have.
Here is your homework…
- Edit your profile… list your current stage and name your mentor
- Then, Complete Stage One…
- Declutter your attention, time, and spaces
- Choose a form of meditation or prayer and make time for it every day for at least a few minutes
- Understand the emotional roots of your choices
- Learn to trust yourself
- Learn to trust your river / the universe / the divine
Here is how to do it….
Grounding Yourself – Connecting To Your Time, Attention And Spaces
Feeling grounded means feeling like you have a stable place to operate from. This stable place might be a particular physical space like a room or home. It is even more important, however, that you have a sense of being grounded in your time, your attention and in an internal space. Being internally grounded is a feeling of self-reliance, or of being complete unto yourself. It is not dependent on anyone else’s presence or affirmation. It is not dependent on your job, where you live, or what relationship (if any) you are currently in. Being grounded in yourself is a stable foundation even when life, relationships, home, work or other areas seem unstable. The three most important aspects to start with are: time, attention and spaces (both internal and external).
We are lucky to have a lot of resources in this life: food, clothing, shelter, friends, family, money, etc. You can find more food. You can get more clothes. If you have to, you can find new friends. You can even make more money. But you cannot get more time and you cannot expand your attention.
Your time on this earth is finite. You cannot know how many days you have left, but you do know that it is limited. Within each of those days, your capacity to hold things in your attention is also limited. As such, your time and attention are the only fixed, non-renewable resources that you have. You have a certain amount and you cannot get more. Therefore you are wise to guard your time and attention more closely than you guard your possessions and your money. Think about how vehemently we guard our possessions and our money. Entire industries exist around guarding your stuff and your finances. But we will let anyone and anything take our time and attention.
We all know that time is a limited resource. But we seldom act like it. It often takes a major crisis in our lives to truly internalize the fact that our time on this earth is limited and we do not know when it will end. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe decades from now. We find ourselves so willing to let anyone and anything take our time to the point that we do not spend any time on what we ourselves want to be doing. If this sounds familiar, you already know that you need to make time for your own health, pursuits, joys, hobbies, purpose, and self-evolution. If you are not doing that yet, then step one is to clear your schedule. You cannot be everything to everyone but everyone will be happy to make sure you are nothing to anyone.
Think of your time like currency. What do you spend it on? What does that get you? Actively examine each hour of your day and demand return on that investment. It cannot return more time so it will have to return something else – joy, connection, inspiration, creativity, money, opportunities, growth, etc. Some hours are best spent on earning money. Some are best spent on sleep, meditation or prayer, exercise, or other self care. Some hours are best spent forwarding your personal goals, learning new skills, experiencing life, and filling your soul. Demand that things compete for your time.
If you are not yet independently wealthy (don’t laugh, you can get there), and you still need to work to put food on the table and pay the rent, then it goes without saying that you will need to make time to work; perhaps a lot of time to work. Working long hours, however, does not stop you from making some time each day for the reading, thinking, writing, exercising, meditating, praying, creating, taking classes or other activities that will accelerate your development and your connection to every aspect of your life. At least one hour per day is recommended and more is always better.
Recognizing that you need to work, eat, shower, take care of children, and so forth, there are still likely a lot of ways you might be spending your limited time in ways that do not do anything for you. Does watching videos do anything for you? Maybe; if they are the right kind of videos. Other time wasters include reading headlines, watching TV, playing the wrong games, reading the wrong things and so on. That is not to say that down time spent on meaningless activity is all bad. But if you need an hour to work on you, you can find it here among your daily time wasters.
Your attention is even more limited. Within each day we have, according to studies by Nelson Cowan, Jeff Rouder and Richard Morey, a maximum of seven things that we can carry in our conscious attention. But it is really, they report, more like four. There are some things that our brains are always tracking such as physical safety, bodily functions and our immediate environment. Then we laden our conscious and subconscious attention with so much more: work, kids, spouses, home repairs, the dog needs to be walked, don’t forget to do the laundry, worries about politics, social issues, and people we don’t even know but we heard about.
Everything we own, everything we spend our time on, all the expectations that we put on ourselves and others, the roles we play, …. They all take up residence in our attention. Every pair of pants in your closet owns a tiny bit of real estate in your attention. Every vehicle you own, every square foot of house that you live in, and every little tweet, post, article, and headline that you consume. Anything and everything in your reality is taking up bits of your attention.
The thing is… It’s a conscious choice. That’s YOUR attention and YOU decide what lives there. It’s time you took it back.
For most people, the problem is having too many things to do in a day and too many people, places and things clambering for your attention. You might like to make space for self-development, life-optimization, finding peace, finding your purpose and carrying out that purpose, etc.
Freedom of attention creates freedom of intention, and freedom of time lets you make that intention real. In other words, your attention is open to inspiration and your time is open to make it happen.
So how can you declutter your time and attention? First, think of it as a competition. That is, activities must compete for your time, and people, places and things must compete for your attention. “But they already do,” you shout!! Yes, they do. And you need to set the bar a LOT higher. If you currently feel overwhelmed, it is because your time and attention are like a public bathroom – anyone can show up and use them how they please. As a result, it is a real mess, largely created by others but you get to clean it up. You need to elevate your standards of admission, get a velvet rope and a bouncer, and turn your time and attention into the most exclusive, peaceful resort imaginable. Very few people, places, things and activities are allowed in and they must have a really good reason to be there.
Let the competition begin. Start with an 80/20 analysis. Get some paper and write down the 20% of your daily activities that bring you 80% of the joy, or the growth, or the progress towards your goals, etc. Who are the 20% of the people in your life that bring you 80% of the annoyance and grief? Read up on Pareto’s Law in Tim Ferriss’s blog and other places and try applying it to everything. What is the 20% of your stuff that brings you 80% of the use, joy, etc? You get the idea.
Then act on it. Remove the people, places, things, and activities that cause you grief, sadness, more work, annoyance, or just do not contribute. I know, that will include your kids and you can’t get rid of your kids, BUT you CAN reduce how much attention they require once they are of a certain more independent age (old enough to do their own laundry, help with the cooking, and eventually drive themselves to all those events). When removing people from your world, it is often better to avoid drama and just slowly, quietly fade away. Use your best judgement.
Next, say NO. Say no (kindly) to your boss, to your spouse, to your kids (especially your kids), to your neighbor, and to the local organizations that want your time and attention. Stop saying no to yourself. That is, start saying yes to yourself first, and then to others. Martyrdom does not make you important, respected, or at peace. Your suffering does not prevent the suffering of others, it multiplies it. You need to get your own self in order before you can help anyone else. The world does not need your burned out, half-hearted “help”. Fill your soul so that you have something to give. You will be pleasantly shocked and amazed at how little anyone cares that you said no. You will be equally amazed at how much the average person understands, and how people at work, at home and around town will start to respect you, and value your time and attention because you do. See James Altucher’s book, The Power of NO for how to do this kindly and effectively.
Once you stop letting other people control your time and attention, you will have the challenge of your own efforts and desires competing for it. There are so many fascinating things in this world that you could pursue: travel, work or business, language, learning, reading, volunteering, playing with your kids and grandkids, finding and chasing your purpose… It will come down to prioritizing the things that YOU want to use your time and attention for.
Start with anything that maintains your connection to your body – sleep, food, movement, sunlight, self care, etc. These needs are paramount and the foundation of your ability to focus on anything at all. Next, maintain your connection to yourself through experiences, self-development, etc. Third, add in things that connect you to your world and others. That makes the priority: body, self, others, world; in that order.
As you progress, don’t forget to defend your time and attention. This requires ongoing maintenance. People in stage three will always try to make you think it is your responsibility to give them what they want, help them, solve their problems, or take their work load. People in other stages are sometimes just lazy. It’s not that helping people is off the menu, it’s that helping others should be from the perspective of your purpose or passion (because that is where you are most effective), and only after you maintain yourself.
As a simple rule, if someone else can do it better, faster or cheaper, maybe they should, and you should not. If someone else would take more joy in it, let them. If it would be a point of growth for someone else, give it to them.
How will you clear out your time and attention? What tasks can you take off your plate?
Next, consider a major clean-out of everything you own. If you have things you don’t use or don’t want, give them away or sell them to someone who could use them. Good books along these lines include: The Life Changing Magic Of Tidying Up, Essentialism, and You Have Too Much Shit. Get inspired and get going. For your work spaces, where you have less influence, you can remove distracting elements and bring in items that give you a sense of peace, joy, focus, or any other feeling you would like to have at work. If you work in a factory, restaurant or other setting where changing things is not an option, focus on your inner space and carry it with you.
Lastly, let’s talk about that internal space. This is where you want to anchor yourself. Creating a place of peace inside you means you always have somewhere to go regardless of how chaotic the outside world becomes or where you find yourself. You can be your own place of certainty and peace.
Take a few minutes to try this: close your eyes, breathe deeply and let it out slowly. Consider what your body feels like. How does your head feel? What can you hear? Can you feel your heart beating? Can you feel your lungs breathing? Feel gratitude for that. What does it feel like in your belly? Take some time to mentally explore every space inside yourself as you ask yourself what it feels like. Somewhere in there is your place of peace. It might be your heart, or a particular spot in your belly, or your lungs. Somewhere in there feels like peace; like a secret place you can retreat to anytime you like. For most people it is deep in the belly in a place called the lower dantian, but it could be any space that feels like home for you. To carry a place of certainty within yourself is the ultimate defense against a chaotic world. Find your internal space and return there daily, or whenever you need it.
Forms Of Meditation And Prayer
Prayer is often thought of as a form of ingratiating the divine or asking the divine for what you want and perhaps for guidance. Meditation can include that, and also includes a very important extra ingredient – listening for the answer. There are many forms of meditation and prayer to try. You may have grown up reciting particular prayers. There is no need to abandon that. Consider, instead, adding some new forms in just to try them. Be experimental and see what works for you. The following list is just a start. Add your own variations as you find them.
Forms of Prayer…
- Specific Prayers For Specific Occasions – these are recited the same way every time such as blessing a meal. Use the ones you know or make your own, specific to your situation.
- Sending Gratitude – connect with the divine and give thanks for everything wonderful in your life. You might speak it out loud or just in your mind. Feel the gratitude in your heart and send it to the divine.
- Asking – connect with the divine to make a request. Ask for what you want and then give over your desire for it to the divine, trusting that the divine will deliver it, if it is in your best interests.
- Contemplation – quietly contemplate a thought, question or quote from your favorite religious or other text as if you are contemplating it together with the divine. Insight and guidance often comes during this type of prayer.
Forms of Meditation…
There are so many forms of meditation that are worth exploring. Search on types of meditation, research each for more detail, and make your own based on these categories or others. Feel free to combine methods into each session. For example, you might begin by focusing on the breath, then focus on the silence and ask for guidance, and then end with manifestation. Use whatever combination works for you.
- Clearing The Mind By Focusing On Something Else…
- Focus on a word or sound.
- Focus on your breathing.
- Focus on specific places within the body and how they feel.
- Focus on what is happening in and around you in this moment.
- Focus on the silence – this is the ultimate goal of most forms of meditation. It can be challenging to achieve so it helps to warm up by focusing on something else first such as the breath, and then, when the mind is more calm, rest in the silence. This is usually when answers and guidance come. Feel free to ask the universe / divine what you want to know such as how to solve a challenge or the answer to a particular question.
- Manifesting (Asking For What You Want)
- Samyama – Think of what you want, then take your desire for it and drop it into the infinite silence inside you, knowing that if it forwards your purpose, it will of course be granted. Imagine dropping a penny into a wishing well inside you.
- Feeling-Based Manifestation – Imagine how it feels to already have what you want. Visualize it lightly in the back of your mind.
- Loving Kindness – send love to yourself, those your care about, friends, neighbors, … work your way outward to sending love and good wishes to people you do not like, those who have wronged you, and even further out to the world and the universe.
- Guided Meditation – there are many wonderful meditations led by trained teachers who guide you through what to do. If you are not yet ready to meditate on your own, try seeking a guided meditation on a meditation app, on your favorite streaming service or on various podcasts.
Making It Your Own…
If you are religious, you can combine prayer and meditation techniques to feel more connected to the divine and to nurture that relationship. If you are spiritual, but not religious, you can combine these techniques for that same connection outside of institutionalized religion. And if you are neither spiritual nor religious, you can still learn to quiet the mind and connect to the universe and all the answers it has to offer.
You can read about many interesting meditation techniques (and I recommend it), but do not think that you must follow each to infinite detail. That is why I have presented them in such generality here. Play with techniques, combine techniques, and experiment to find the right combination of prayer and/or meditation for you. They key in all of these is to quiet the mind. That is, to simply sit down, shut up and listen. How you get to that state of a quiet, listening mind is not important. The practice of getting there is what matters and is what will bring you the most benefit. This is liberating. Developing your own ceremony, ritual or routine that is optimized for your own benefit will play a major role in accelerating your evolution through the stages towards complete connection with every aspect of your life.
Connecting to yourself is a great place to start. Here you are. Inhabiting this body on this planet, in this amazing life. But your SELF is something else. Your SELF is something deeper inside. Connecting to yourself will include connecting to many facets. Take them one at a time and find joy in the exploration and connection as you get to know the real you.
Connecting To The Emotional Roots Of Your Choices
Major decisions in your life come in many forms… marriage, starting a business, ending a business, changing jobs, changing careers, going back to school, etc. Often we can get our decision down to two options and then we struggle. Not wanting to make a mistake, we are paralyzed in the last step of deciding. What follows is a method for making these decisions that is so revealing that the decision makes itself.
First, list each option across the top of a page so it will have a dedicated column and you can compare them when you are done. Your options might be as simple as yes and no, or something more complicated.
For each option, ask yourself WHY you should pick that option. List your reasons out, as many as come to you. Try to be really honest with yourself here about why you are drawn to that option. Make your best possible argument for each option. Really sell it to yourself.
Then, for each reason why, boil it down to the one word emotional trigger that is at the root of that reason: greed, fear, ego, purpose, service, joy, love, hate, etc. Be brutally honest.
When you get down to two options and just cannot decide, it is because your human mind (greed, ego, fear, hate, etc) is arguing with your soul (purpose, service, joy, love) and the answer will be shockingly clear. If you choose the option based on negative emotions, you will have a negative outcome. If you choose the option based on positive emotions, you will have a positive outcome. Why? Because your actions will ultimately multiply the emotion that drives them.
Think back on big decisions you have made in your life. What were the true emotional triggers for those decisions? How did it turn out for you? When did it go well? When did it go poorly? Are there patterns you can see?
It is really that simple. What big decision have your been trying to make? What are the emotional roots of each side? Which side should you choose?
Trusting Yourself
Trusting yourself is a phrase that is thrown around often. Here, we mean trusting the silent observer inside, your intuition, and your ability to understand yourself at a level that lets your truth come out. This is a self you can trust and rely on. Understanding the emotional roots of your choices was step one. Now that you can analyze your thoughts and emotions, it is time to trust yourself in terms of trusting that the questions you have, have answers, even if you cannot know them right now. Trust in your need to explore these questions and others as they arise. Trust in what draws you to want to know more. And trust that your journey will take you to a beautiful place. Trust that your destination is unique but your journey is ancient and well tested. Trust in you inner guide to get you there.
To learn to trust yourself in this way, start by recalling times when your intuition was right. Maybe you ignored it, or maybe you followed it, but it was right. Recall times when you were drawn by something deep inside you to take a certain action, and it was right. Can you recognize the difference between being compelled from a deep place of intuition versus impulse from the animal brain? The animal brain can often steer you wrong but your intuition never will. Practice recognizing the difference by thinking back on your past choices. Take your time and find as many examples from your past as you can. Write them down and categorize them as intuition versus animal brain, or true self versus monkey mind. Analyze as many examples as you can find and then look at your list. How often was your true self wrong? Not often, I bet. See the proof that you can trust your true self. Now that you can discern between compelling from the true self and impulse from the monkey mind, you can trust your human mind to see the difference and follow the path of the true self. This is not a blind trust, but a trust built on a track record of leading you on the right path.
From now on, when you feel drawn to do something, take a moment to note how it feels. Does this feel like a compelling from your soul? Or does this feel like impulse from the monkey mind? What is the emotional root of this? Take your time and train yourself further. As time goes on, your ability to discern between impulse and compelling will grow stronger and only increase the trust that you have in your true inner self.
Trusting Your River / Universe / The Divine
The river of your life is a metaphor for how we seem to have a combination of fate and free will guiding our lives. Have you noticed that sometimes life seems like a struggle? And sometimes things just seem to work out easily? Your river wants to take you towards your purpose (whatever that may be, and however that may change over time). When you are on track towards your purpose, you will find that life flows easily. But if you struggle against your river, that is, away from your purpose, life seems hard.
Learning to trust your river is not easy. We cannot see around the next corner and the journey towards our purpose usually includes several leaps of faith. It can be so very hard to just close your eyes and go with it. Once you recognize the nature of your river, however, it becomes not just easy, but a relief to let your river take you where you need to be.
Consider the experiences, good and bad, that have influenced you, shaped you or been significant in your life in some way. You know what they are. Write them down. Consider how they influenced you. What did they teach you? What gifts did they have for you? (skills, perspective, joy, love, fear, … ). Appreciate all of these experiences for what they taught you (especially the hard lessons), and for any joy or love that they brought you. Appreciate them for the gifts they gave you.
Now let them go. They are in the past. You HAVE experiences and you LEARN from experiences but you are NOT your experiences. You might keep your list that you wrote out above or you might ceremonially burn it, tear it up, throw it out or delete it. Ceremonies and rituals are powerful psychological devices. So if you are having trouble letting go of any particular experience, write it on a piece of paper, thank it for teaching you and giving you skills you can use later, then burn it (safely!) in a bowl or fireplace. Thank your river for that experience and for experiences to come. Reaffirm that you are not this experience or any other. Feel the distance between you and that experience.
New experiences will come along and continue to shape you. Thank them for what they teach you, and let them go, too.
When you can detach from your experiences, and view them as an outside observer, recognizing that they are not you, but they shape you and that is a good thing, then you will find more trust in your river/universe/divine.
Can you see the river of your life shaping you? Can you see how it guides your choices and teaches you lessons and skills and gives you the gifts of joy, love and occasionally fear, perspective or compassion. Can you see how it is leading you to something? Can you let go and trust in this river/universe/divine?
Trusting your river can be hard because we know from past experience that it may bring you to a place of sadness, loss or fear. But trusting your river has an interesting effect. The more you trust your river, the easier life becomes because you stop struggling. When you flow with your river, it takes you more directly where you need to be. There are fewer places of sadness and fear and when those times come, you have the perspective that this too is being human. Such compassion for yourself and your shared humanity is the key to making sadness and fear dissipate. So by trusting your river, you ultimately minimize the time you spend with these emotions.
When you trust your river, you tend to not act out of fear, jealously, sadness or other negative emotions. When you trust your river, you act out of love, purpose, joy and other positive emotions. The result will multiply those positive emotions. So the irony is: to have fewer bad times in your life, you have to stop fearing having bad times in your life. This is an important glimpse into the true nature of life. You get what you think about and feel. If you think about bad situations and you feel those negative emotions, you will get more of them. If you think about good situations and feel those positive emotions, you will get more of those instead.
Trust your river/universe/divine. Trust that your river is taking your where you need to be and that your river has a system to ensure that you can have any life that you want. If you want beautiful and amazing, your river is ready to take you there.