Four Pillars to Living Your Best Life (Dharma-Style)!
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by whether or not you made the right decisions about your life? Do you have concerns about fulfillment in your professional life? Personal life?
I’ve definitely felt that way many times in my own life and sometimes many times in the same day still!!
Do you want to feel better about knowing you made the right decisions?
Yeah?!
“Well, how do you do that?!” you might be asking.
Ok, well, you first need to start by bringing clarity into your life. And you do that by adding things in that inspire such as reading a good book, listening to a beautiful song, seeing a gorgeous film, taking a long walk, getting rest, meditating, journaling and anything that makes you feel good, grounded and whole.
And it takes more than one film or one meditation or one journaling session to get things going and clear. This is a lifetime effort! But with each time, if you let yourself be quiet and listen, you can hear your own voice tell you you’re on the right or wrong path.
I’ve also experienced things that felt so inspiring that I was ready to take action right after taking said experience in but then fell back to the same position as before that experience. I know you might’ve had that experience, too. However, I do believe that things still get stirred within and that doing those inspiring things is never is a waste of time.
… but sometimes the reason we fall short on action after reading or inspiring our lives is because there was no visualizing and planning around the next steps.
Because if we haven’t fully seen that new future in our minds eye, it’ll be hard to go forward towards it.
You must discipline yourself from being distracted by social media, the news and your monkey mind. This distraction keeps you in avoidance of doing any work, nevermind the work of your life!
So right here and now I feel compelled to share with you a book I recently read that’s having long lasting effects on me called, “The Great Work of Your Life”. This book written by Stephen Cope touches on The Bhagavad Gita which is the great ancient text that introduces and explores dharma.
What is dharma?
Dharma loosely translated means, “an individual’s sacred duty”. You can read this very long explanation here for a more in-depth description.
I’d recommend reading The Bhagavad Gita as it’s one of the most revered (and personally amazing) texts in Vedic literature. It’s the the tale of Arjuna, a great warrior caught up in a great battle of good and evil seeking advice from his charioteer, Krishna, who turns out to be God. The entire (short and original) book is the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna which dives deep into the path of yoga as a means of liberation from suffering. *And the original concept of yoga is simply life.
How amazing that Yoga liberates us from suffering. True from all angles of Yoga!
In The Bhagavad Gita we see Arjuna struggling with the same things we suffer from and the lessons are as relevant today as they were about 2000 years ago. Again, I would highly recommend reading the original but Stephen Cope does an amazing job breaking down some of the main lessons by weaving in people from our history as examples throughout.
Here are some lessons:
Trust in what you offer the world.
Stop doubting yourself.
Living your own dharma will save you.
Be you (be authentic).
Get quiet to hear your calling.
Let go of the rewards.
The hardships of life can be your dharma.
Holy crap!! Am I right? Freakin’ amaze-balls! Learning about Harriet Tubman, Beethoven, Gandhi, Walt Whitman and more had me feeling so good and ready to take action during and after reading! I’ve been carrying around this book even after reading to reference back to some of the pages for my own pleasure!!
Did you know that Beethoven was so despondent about losing his hearing at the earlier part of his career that he nearly committed suicide? What would we have done without his music? I really don’t want to know!
In this amazing book, and in this video if you want to skip reading it, Stephen Cope is getting us fired up by bridging the gap of our cultural heroes and to us right now in this world.
Are we making the right decisions in our lives? We won’t know unless we go fully forward into that abyss of life.
Stephen Cope relying on the Four Pillars of Dharma:
Look to your dharma.
Do it out full!
Let go of the fruits.
Turn it over to God.
It is all about getting clear.Lastly,
“If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you not, it will destroy you.”
- Gospel of Thomas