Module Four
Amy:Hello, and welcome. It’s Amy Ahlers, the Wake-up Call Coach. And oh my goodness, I can hardly believe it – we were just talking about that we can hardly believe it, but welcome to Module 4, the official final call for Find Your Calling. Martha and Lissa and I are so excited to be here with all of you, and to just walk you through this last step in our process of helping you remember your calling. And so with that, Martha, would you like to lead us in, my dear, with a meditation?
Martha:Absolutely. This meditation is something that my coaches use a lot, and we do it many many times for each person, because it’s so much fun. It not only helps you sort of guide your life and sort of plumb your intuition to see what’s coming up for you, but it also results in much faster realization of the things you really want. So we’re going to do this meditation, it’s called The Ideal Day.
And the important thing, there are a few things you need to know before we start this. First of all, don’t think through your answers. I’m going to give you prompts for your senses, like smell, touch, taste, and so on. And if you think about it and put everything through a filter, you’ll ruin the way your intuition offers you images. So stay grounded in the senses. And the other rule is, everything is possible in this ideal day that we’re going to create. If you want your house to magically clean itself, that’s what you get. If you want to go skiing at night and swimming in the morning, that’s what you get. So there are no impossibles here; it’s a fantasy, and it comes through the senses, and nothing is impossible.
Okay, get a mat. Everyone get comfy. And it helps to close your eyes. And you obviously aren’t going to say out loud what you see, but you might want to write it down after the call. Right now you’re just going to let it come into your field of imagination. So, we’re going to project forward in time, five years from today. So, it is November 13, 2018. Imagine how old you will be five years from now – don’t freak out, just imagine it. Imagine how old your children, or a spouse, or siblings will be. Just ground yourself in the future by thinking, “Oh, my 5-year-old daughter’s now 10. My 80-year-old father is 85.” Whatever.
Now, this day happens to be a typical day in your ideal life. That means it’s not the day you win the lottery, it’s not the day you get married or all your dreams come true. It’s just an ordinary day, but the life that you’re living is your perfect life. So what you’re going to do is just watch yourself go through an average day in a perfect life. That’s what it happens to be today.
So you wake up feeling incredibly refreshed, beautifully rested. In your mind’s eye just lie there, wherever you happened to have woken up, and listen to what’s happening around you. So it’s a perfect life, typical day. What do you hear? Do you hear the ocean? Do you hear children laughing? Do you hear a cat purring? Do you hear traffic noises outside, or the wind in the trees? Birdsong? Just notice.
And then, also in your mind, nose I guess, smell the air. What does it smell like? Is somebody cooking breakfast? Are there pine trees outside? Do you smell the ocean or the countryside, grass? Just smell the air in your ideal life. Notice its temperature and the feeling of it, the humidity, the softness, the movement of the air. Really just notice what’s happening in your perfect life.
And then – you can do this with your eyes shut, but in your mind’s eye look around – so you open your eyes in this perfect space, and you look around. What is the space like? Sometimes I’ve had people wake up outside, so if that’s what happens to you, great, but it’s most likely the room. Look at the room, look at the surroundings, and just see where are the windows – I’ve never once had someone wake up in a room without windows, but maybe you’re the first. So look around at the walls, there are pictures on the walls. What does the room look like? Is it a Manhattan apartment? Is it a cabin in the woods? Check it out.
See if there are photographs on the walls, of you and other people. What are you doing in those photographs? What are the big moments that you’ve commemorated over the last five years? Look to see what kind of sheets you have, and what the covers look like. And then see if someone’s next to you in the bed. It’s fine – no matter how many people are with you in the bed, you get to have it all. Or maybe you’re alone; maybe you get some free time. Maybe your loving family lives next door. We don’t know, there are no rules.
Then you’re going to get up and put your feet on the floor, and go into your bathroom, which is your perfect bathroom. Just look at it. See what it looks like, if it’s marble, if it’s cute tiles, there’s a mosaic. Is it a Donald Trump bathroom with a golden toilet seat? Who knows?
So anyway, you do your morning ablutions – you take a shower, go to the bathroom, whatever – and then you get out of the shower and you look at yourself in a full-length mirror. And your body is your ideal body. What does it look like? Just take that in. It’s perfectly fit, it’s the perfect weight, it’s the perfect size, and strength, and fitness. And enjoy how good you look – and how good you feel on this ideal day, on this average day in your ideal life.
And then go to your closet, and it could be a walk-in closet or it could be a lovely armoire or whatever. But you open up the closet doors and you look at your clothing. What kind of clothes do you own in your ideal life? If you’re a guy, are there ties? I once had a guy who said he didn’t know anything about what he wanted, but when he opened that closet, I said, “How many ties do you have? Do you have any?” he said, “There isn’t a tie in the same zip code,” and it was a huge breakthrough for him.
So if you’re a woman, do you have gowns? Do you have overalls? Do you have mud boots? In fact, for everybody, look especially at your shoes. What shoes do you need in your ideal life? What shoes do you like to wear? Are there boots, or are there ballet slippers? Are there running shoes? How many heels, how many flats, how many wingtips? You can really get a good idea what your life is like by looking at your shoes, because each different activity requires different shoes.
So check out how many business suits you have, how many fancy dresses do you have? Put on an outfit that will be perfectly comfortable and perfectly beautiful for you in this perfect lifestyle. Do you put on flip-flops and linen trousers? Do you put on high heels? Just check it out.
You’re going to go do something that makes you really happy, very motivated, very incentivized, as they say in business. And you just can’t wait to get to it. First you go and you have breakfast, so you can walk through your residence, see the kitchen, eat a delicious breakfast with your favorite people. And then you go to the place where you work in the morning time – or maybe you just go out running every morning. At this point the ideal days can get very different from one another, so it’s a little harder to give consistent cues. But whatever you do in the morning, whether it’s exercise, or watching TV, or playing with your children, or going to a job – just notice how many people are there? Are you working together, or alone? Are you working with objects, with ideas, with machines, with people and organizations? What really floats your boat? And how many people are you working with, and what are they like? They’re awesome – or they’re not. What are their distinctive features?
And then maybe you break for lunch, and then you go to doing whatever it is you do in the afternoon. It could be the same work, it could be different work, it could be play, it could be socializing, it could be caregiving, it could be adventuring – just notice what you do in the afternoon in your perfect life.
And then go to the evening. Notice what you do for dinner, who comes. There may be famous people, there may be all your best beloved, there may badgers – but that’s just me. Whoever it is, you have a wonderful dinner conversation, and then you spend some time in the evening really connecting with the people you love, or the things you love to just enjoy in your free time. Actually all your time is free, but this is fun time. And then you go to bed, feeling pleasantly and perfectly tired.
So just having run through that, I must say that you’re much closer to having it than before you imagined it. Because if we dream it, we can’t necessarily do it – but if we never dream it, we never do it. So just by focusing on these images, you’ve already put yourself in a much better position to have what you imagined. And this is also a good place to start building vision boards, so cut out pictures of things you saw in your ideal day. Stick them on a piece of paper and put it up where you can see it – and then let it go, because attachment keeps it from materializing. So just relax. That’s the whole meditation.
So Amy, you want to set us an intention?
Amy:I do, I do indeed. That was so beautiful I love this. I love acting ‘as if’. An exercise like that, there’s just nothing more powerful; it’s just incredible to see how the seen and unseen forces just rise to meet you in that.
So our intention for this final module, our final class today, is about you really claiming that your purpose is unfolding perfectly, right here, right now in this moment, even if you’re in bug-soup land. Because that is part of the process of really declaring that it’s happening right here and right now, in this moment. So we’re going to say the words “My purpose is unfolding perfectly,” together. My purpose is unfolding perfectly. My purpose is unfolding perfectly. So say it out loud, scream it out loud, declare it and hold it as the truth. Okay, on the count of three. One, two... My purpose is unfolding perfectly...and three. My purpose is unfolding perfectly. All right, okay, thank you all so much for doing that with me.
Since it’s unfolding perfectly, Martha, let’s talk about actions, shall we?
Martha:Absolutely. It’s an interesting thing these days – it used to be that you could sort of tap into a career path, whether that was a homemaker or a guy who goes to the office every day, and you’ve kind of had your life pattern set forever. These days that is no longer true. There’s so much change in our environment that basically you have infinite options at any given moment in your life. You could make infinite choices – which makes it exciting in terms of opportunity, but it’s also very unnerving in terms of knowing what to do next. With infinite choices it can be quite overwhelming.
So what I like to do is teach people something I call Compass over Culture, because the culture that you live in has many many different paths, and probably none of them are right for you. I’m just sayin’. Because your individual path, your destiny is as unique as your thumbprint, and you have the ability to realize that, but it won’t be exactly what anybody else is doing. That’s the joy of this new part of human history; it’s much more sort of impressionistic than it is rigid.
So by compass I mean that inner sense of knowing what you want, knowing what feels right, knowing what to do. And again, y'know we’ve talked about this through the whole telecourse – it relies on tuning in especially to your body, and then your emotions. And it’s like the game, You’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder. You’ll come to a place in your life where you’re not sure what to do. And if you then stop and become very attentive to your inner guidance, you will feel pulled in one direction more than another. And sometimes the culture will say, “Oh, that’s good. You want to go back to school? Yay for you, that’s awesome.” But sometimes the culture will not approve. “What? You want to drop out of school? Bill Gates, you won’t succeed if you don’t stay in Harvard.” Bill Gates dropped out because his compass said to. And everyone said he was an idiot, and look at him now. By the way, if Bill Gates walks into a bar, then statistically everyone in the bar is a millionaire, because if you add all the incomes together and divide by the number of people, his money provides millions and millions of dollars for everyone in the bar. Just thought you might like to know that.
Anyway, let that be a lesson to you to follow your compass. And if you listen to that compass, I guarantee there will come a time when you will do some of the things that the culture says are not advisable. In fact, you will always find part of the culture to tell you that whatever you’re doing is wrong. If you think that’s not true, watch the TV news channels for a while. Anything you do will be decried by some sector of the population. Everyone is against something. I should say, there is nothing that someone is not against. Take that one out later.
So what that means is that you will have to at some point follow your compass in a place where people are shouting at you, No nono, that’s not the way to go. And to do that is a hugely leap of faith. You also don’t know if you’re going to succeed at anything when you first start out. If you plant a flower, you don’t know for sure that it will grow. If you are depending on growing flowers to start a business, that can be very very scary. But you still have to plant the seeds if you want anything to work out.
And what I’ve found over the years – I really believe this, I don’t even pretend I don’t any more – is that that compass, somehow the compass in your body and in your emotions is pulling you towards some part of the future that is meant to happen. So if the feeling of fear is scary but seductive, like you really want it even though you’re scared of it, like falling in love, that’s the time to take the leap. That’s the time when you’re going to get a good outcome. I can’t tell you exactly what the outcome will be; I definitely can’t tell you how the outcome will emerge. But I can tell you that if you’re taking a leap of faith based on the inner compass rather than a cultural norm, that’s when it’s most likely to work out.
So, people often ask me, “I’m scared. How do I know if I’m following my compass? I’m scared of everything. I’m just afraid all the time.” That actually has nothing to do with whether or not it’s a good idea. What it does have to do with is our tendency to attach to stories of fear – we’ve talked a lot about that in our last session. Lissa was giving us all kinds of great information about how to move into a relaxation response. So fear is not necessarily a signal that you’re doing the wrong thing. Disgust is a signal that you’re doing the wrong thing. So the way I always put it is, y'know we’ve talked about the swimming pool. If you’re up there on a hot day on the high dive ready to dive into a sparkling blue pool, that’s probably a good thing to do. If you’re up there on the high dive on a hot day and below you is a pool full of toxic waste, and you not only are afraid of the fall but it’s disgusting – that’s the feeling of the compass saying, “Don’t go that way.”
So try and get a little bit beyond the fear. I’ll read a list of things that characterize a leap of faith, and then a list that characterizes just plain bad ideas. So, leaps of faith feel scary but seductive; stupid ideas feel scary and aversive – like yuk. Leaps of faith feel liberating; stupid ideas feel contracted and pressured, and un-free. Leaps of faith feel like you’re shaking open – and it’s terrifying, but you can tell there’s more light, there’s more space, there’s more air, there’s an exhilaration; stupid ideas make you feel like you’re shutting down – shutting down options, shutting down the people you love, shutting down your body, shutting down your own intuition. Leaps of faith feel empowering, although in the process they may be terrifying; stupid ideas make you weaker. They actually physically make you weaker. You can have somebody hold your arm out horizontal to the floor and have someone press down gently on your hand to see how strong you are, and then phrase a statement about a leap of faith, like, “I’m going to start my own business,” and see if your arm stays strong. If it’s a stupid idea, your arm will get very weak. This is true of everything, from eating the right foods to choosing a romantic partner – the body weakens when it lies, or does something that’s against the compass, and it strengthens when it’s setting you free and telling the truth, and moving you into the destiny you’re meant to have. So it’s literally, physically empowering to take a leap of faith, and literally, physically, disempowering to do an act of stupid idea.