THE PASSION CODE
-for aSatisfyingRich and SustainableRewardingLife[DF1]
Eva Sanner
Contents[DF2]
Before we begin
1. Enjoy Being Human
Playing Nightmare Roulette • The Senses and the Brain •
More Isn´t Always Better • Enjoyment and Self-Esteem •
Presence • Everyday Luxury
2. Live Your Body Joyful
Listen to Your Body • Signals of Your Body • Sleep and Love Yourself Happy • Go Wild Again
3. Don’t Believe Your Thoughts
Dealing With Thoughts • Taking Time for Yourself •
A Place to Pause • Avoiding Negativity • Leave Your Thoughts Alone • The Dream Got Real
4. Befriend Your Feelings
Where Do All The Feelings Come From? • Follow the Thread Back •
Show Self-CompassionCare[DF3] • Stormy Weather • Allowing and Communicating • Shutting Down
5. Dare to be You
Your Example Matters • Don´t Be Realistic • Role Models Who Are Themselves • Moving to Africa • Challenging Conformism • A World of Unique Beings
6. Find Your Flock
The Impact of Experience • Knowing Your Connection •
Belonging on Various Levels • A Flock That Works
7. Live in the Now
The Symphony of the Senses • Do You Really Want to Be Seen? • Loving or Having Sex • Presence In Practice • Conscious Conversations [DF4]• The Power of Now • A Pro at Being Present • Christmas Shopping Contact
8. Be Curious
Searching, Playing and the Brain • Beyond the Autopilot • Love and Surprise • Beginner’s Luck and Beginner’s Mind • Variety the Spice of Life • ”It Was an Experiment” •Attraction andDistance
9. If it Scares You, Do It!
This is Fear • Fear of Being Rejected • Dare to Open - or Close - the Door • Our Inner Voices • Fear of the Unknown • The Challenge of Passion • The Innate Fragility of Life • If You Only Dared
10. Let Go of Control
Another Way of Taking a Decision • Can I Trust my Gut Feeling?
• External or Internal Blocks • Daring to Make New Choices
11. Do What Makes You Happy
What Makes Your Heart Sing? • The Joy of Work • The Joy of Reunion • Flow • ”I have longed for the music” • Finding Joy Despite Difficulties • Sharing Joy
12. Give to Others
We are Not Selfish • Empathy is Good for You • Give to Your Loved Ones • Give at Work • Another Kind of Leadership • Supporting Yourself • Give Where Your Are
13. Show Gratitude for Everything
Here and Now • Gratitude in Relationships • Grateful at Work • When Times are Rough • Don´t Be Blind • Love What Is
14. Use Your Time
Your 42 Million Minutes • Use Your Time • What Time is Really Worth • Letting Time Stand Still • The Meaning of Prioritizing • Time to Love • What Remains
15. Breaking Your Dependence
When It Has Gone too Far • Recognizing the Signs • Easing Loneliness -and Creating More • An Addictive Society •Living With Accepting Your Vulnerability[DF5] • Relating to Something Greater
16. You are Many
A Common Flock • You Affect The Totality •
The Loneliness of the Individual • The Need for Miracles • The Lost Connection
What Passion Type Are You?
The Manifester • The Engine • The Relationist •
The Explorer • The Mystic • The Creator • The Organizer
Exercises
Epilogue and Thanks
Reading More
‘Figure out your passion. For your passion will lead you right into your purpose.'.
T D Jakes
Before We Begin
You can read this book in a thousand ways and for as many reasons. You might be in the prime of life and have everything in place, outwardly speaking - in terms of your job, relationships, financial situation and social contacts. But inside, you sense a strange yearning for more - not things or money, but rather other experiences or maybe a different way of life. You ask yourself if your relationship has become routine. Or maybe your job could be more exciting? You feel tired of yourself and your boring limitations and do not really know where to start. Because you doubt whether it is possible to actually get what you long for. Could there be more to life than there is right now?
Or are you a creative, passionate person who has lived in a creative flow for a long time, with one project following the other - but now seem to be up against a brick wall? You no longer desire the things that used to be such fun. You may find the flow of ideas is not what it has been, or you have less energy to make them happen. You could rely on your expertise and experience and no one would notice the difference - except you. But you do not want to continue on routine but instead become really passionate again.
You may be a young person, someone who is just about to take on life, but who has begun doubting what you want to do, create or contribute to, or what is possible. Wherever you turn, you see closed doors, the struggle for achievement and competition.
You may wonder if you will have the courage and the energy to do what it takes to reach your goals. You may wonder if your goals are really your own, or perhaps those of your parents or simply what society collectively expects of you. You want to find out what you are really passionate about. Because somehow you know that this is the most important thing of all.
Or you might just be one of those people who has begun wondering if there might be ways to live well that do not affect either your wallet, your health or the environment. Ways to enjoy life that do not have side effects for someone else, that just make you feel more alive the more you do them. Ways to enjoy that feeling, other than just buying and buying to feel alive.
This book is written for all of you. It is for you who wants to live life to the fullest, no matter who how[DF6] you are and where you are. Because it will help you get the courage and the get-up-and-go to make the right changes, to find or rediscover the joy of doing what you really love and to follow a path that you know is your very own.
But all this is actually not just for your sake. The world needs more people who are themselves, more who are fearless enough to stand up for what they believe in and more people to shape their own lives and circumstances, instead of letting circumstances control them. The world cannot handle any more success, as we have learned to define it. It can not handle more things, more transportation and consumption. The planet simply cannot take it any more. We need to actualise our lives in ways that are sustainable in the long term, for us as individuals and for the entire planet. Ways that really make us as alive as we can be and as happy as we are meant to be. We need more wholehearted, passionate people, and so this book is all about passion, what passion is made of and how you and I can get more passion in life.
It is early May 2016 as I write this. It is almost to the day three years ago that I got the idea for ’The Passion Code’ at a lunch meeting with, yes… passion as the actual theme. I was invited to speak because I have written and taught on relationships, sex and love. Everyone at the meeting turned out to have different associations to the word passion - love, glow, heat, motivation, creativity, desire and love, pleasure and desire. It became obvious to me during this conversation that the same principles that make sexual intimacy in a relationship vibrant and interesting, also make life more passionate. And I realized: this is what I wantto write about!
In the next chapter, therefore, I will consider sixteen factors that I associate with passion. The fact that it turned out to be precisely sixteen may be a coincidence, but the other day I discovered a Tibetan saying according to which it is only when we have examined sixteen aspects of a phenomenon,that we have understood it completely. So I think I have succeeded! One chapter is about pleasure, another about the body, one about daring, anotherdealing with emotions, one about being curious, and so on.
Together, these passion factors make up what I call the Ppassion Ccode[DF7]. They represent various components of an approach that may help us find or recreate our own passion in life. What makes one person feel elated, will elicit no more than a raised eyebrow from someone else. And what seems like passion and dedication to this person, seems like a rather lukewarm commitment to that one.
We are quite simply passionate, dedicated and committed in different ways, depending on our personality. You might say we are different passion types. So at the end of the book you will find a section on how different personality types mayfeel passionate about things in different ways –but be just as committed and feel just as strongly anyway.
We all have this ability to live wholeheartedly with dedication and energy. Not just because it's more fun and more exciting, but because when we do so, we are more ourselves. When we live in this way, we help and inspire others to do the same thing – and contribute to a happier environment. All our decisions affect not only ourselves, but also our immediate surroundings and everyone who is there. When you become fully yourself, you give others the same opportunity and influence them in that direction as well. That is why, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, when[DF8] you follow your deepest passion, you contribute the most to the world. Perhaps it is precisely when we forget our thoughts and ideas about ourselves, that we become the most authentic versions ofwho we are?
Passion is about choosing to enjoy, having the courage to take a chance and to allow oneself to just be. Typically, in this process, the internal obstacles are the most challenging ones, although we often tend to see the external ones so much clearer, especially those relating to economic conditions or social barriers. But change starts from within. When we can overcome or at least handle our inner obstacles, we can also solve external problems with greater ease and joy. In a creative life, whether in terms of being creative as part of your profession or simply expressing the creativity that is a part of life, there are moments that some people have described to me as being even better than sex. It is when your hair stands on end because you have come up with a particularly apt turn of phrase, when you feel the satisfaction of having realized a vision or when you simply feel you are enjoying your full potential, at least for a moment. I am deeply grateful for all my three professions –as writer, therapist and educator - all of which allowme to experience such moments of joy again and again. And every time it happens, I feel that I am living my passion.
There are many definitions of what passion is. If you ask a young person, she or he might speak of love, sex and romance. If you ask someone older, they mightmention interests, motivation or simply whatever gives them the energy to get out of bed in the mornings. In considering passion, certain people think of something dangerous - something that consumes, burns and destroys that which is established. If you ask a priest in the offical Church of Sweden, perhaps she or he will talk about St Matthew Passion - the story of Jesus' final days of life, set to music and performed in a church. In that sense, passion means devotion or even suffering. Some think of something essential, something they yearn for and need, a joy of life they cannot do without. In the Swedish town of Borås, there is a restaurant called Passion, so a person from there might think of that first.
In the psychoanalytical literature,passion is often described as a force that makes us abandon our ego for something else - a person, a process or an idea. In everyday language we call this being obsessed with something, and the word alludes to the old idea that people could be possessed by demons or evil spirits. We might desire someone so much that it feels like a need, "I cannot live without you" and other similar expressions will come in handy here. Sigmund Freud himself wrote a lot about passion. However, he usually associated it with infatuation, which for him found its most extreme expression in the form of passion. What fascinates me and what is common to all these definitions is what Freud's followers called "abandoning the ego." Suddenly, our existence opens up, and we are given the opportunity to surrender –to a beloved person, an idea, a belief, a project or an ideology. We can also choose to say no and stay with what we know. But if we say yes to this wind that pulls us toward the unknown, which attracts, challenges, or perhaps even threatens us - it can make our livesmore passionate. This book is about how.
Passion is about exploring the unknown, like walking into a new room, where you do not know what will happen, where the boundaries of what is possible have been pushed ahead, and where you can discover new sides of yourself. To do what you really feel is right, even when everyone else just shakes their head. Not to back off because someone says it's impossible, if it is really what you want or what you feel givesyour life meaning.
Within positive psychology influenced by the likes of i.a. Martin Seligman, peopletalk of the concept of zest as one of the 24 human character strengths. According to Seligman, zest is part of ’courage, a virtue, and defined as the ability to live life with dedication, positive expectations and energy. For a person with zest as a prominent character trait, life is an adventure, an attitude that helps him or her handle challenges and maintain their motivation in difficult situations, as well as completing what they have started,even if it is hard. If we have zest, we tackle life wholeheartedly and do not shy away from adversity. On the contrary, we see life as an exciting challenge and ourselves as fully alive people with energy. Tome, zest is more or less the same thing as passion. It is to live fully, and to not hold yourself, your ideas, your desire or your creativity back. Having a dialogue with life, where we say yes more often than no, and feel safe enough to live in the unknown, at least sometimes. That's when we stay awake and open, and that's when we have the possibility of taking the chances and opportunities that suddenly arise. The passion keeps us alive and soft, so we do not become rigid and limit ourselves. Passion helps us stay young – and might be one of the reasons why we sometimes choose to fall in love when we perceive life as being limited.
I would not work with people if I did not believe that change was possible. And I would not think that my own life was very interesting unless I felt that I was going somewhere. We have a personality, but it is not completelyconstant.When we practice finishing things, we practice our patience. When we decide to do what we have decided to do, although things get in the way, we practice our ability to stand by our decisions. When we try to understand another person and imagine how she or he feels, we practice our compassion. At the end of the book, you will find a chapter of exercises you can do to explore, experience and reinforce the principles I describe. We are quite simply greater than we think. We can expand our perception of who we are and how we operate, by deliberately stretchingourselves beyond our comfort zones. We are not here just to be comfortable. Just as we are all not destined to find a life-long love and have a quiet, comfortable and uncomplicated life, we are not meant to live without questions and without problems. We are here to grow. When we struggle with challenges or even crises, life may be wanting us and our personality to expand a bit more. Just so we can include more of what we are, more of what we did not know about ourselves, more of what has been relegated to the unconscious.
In a way, we associate passion with youth. It is the phase of life we think of when we talk about being "hot-blooded" and feeling rapture, not only in the areas of love and sexuality, but also when it comes to questioning established norms and truths in various ways, not least politically. But young people are not the only ones who stand on the barricades, and who go out demonstrating for causes, and they are not the only ones who neckon the bus (they really aren´t). A passionate man, a man with zest, is lively, alert and open even after the age of thirty. Or fifty. Or eighty. So, letting our passion out or even cultivating it is a good idea. That way we can combine our hopefully growing wisdom with vitality and energy. It makes us beautiful and vibrant people, even when we eventually do get old. This book is also a "passion insurance" - a manual on how to live life fully from now on, and as long as our cognitive faculties are intact.
Passion is a fruit, someone wrote on Facebook when I asked my friends there how they view passion. I wonder if he was trying to simplify my question for his own sake, or if he was trying to be ambiguous or funny. But perhaps passion really can be seen as a fruit, in the sense that it is a result of choices that we have made and steps we have taken,that allow us to make what we want and desire come true. After all, we wll never experience passion if we never take any risks. Only those who are daring get to experience passion. The others are onlookers, whether we are talking about close relationships, or experiencing the adventure of moving to another continent. No matter what our background is or what our situation looks like, we always have a choice, within certain limits. We may not need to emigrate to experience variety, but we can choose to move to a different city. Or - if that is not feasible - we can choose tochange our workplace or our profession altogether. Or - and this is perhaps the most difficult thing - we can choose to behave differently in the situation we find ourselves in, and thus create change from within.