I just [finally] finished reading Carolyn Myss’s Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential.

In her previous works, Myss, a self-described medical intuitive, has posted that failure to understand your life’s purpose can manifest as mental or physical illness (depression, anxiety, disease). She wrote this book with the intent of helping others discover their own Sacred Contract, by which she means the theory that our souls enter into a “contract” before birth wherein we agree to have various experiences and encounter certain people in order to learn lessons. Discovering your Sacred Contract would presumably answer the age-old question: What is my life’s purpose?
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My last experiment with intention-manifestation was a smashing success, and I’d like to try another community experiment if anyone’s interested in playing along. This round of the experiment will run from August 1 to August 31. (Any interest in doing a longer time frame next time around, maybe September 1 to December 31?)

Here’s a refresher on how to participate:

• Find a place to be alone. (You’ll need a pencil and a piece of paper.)
• Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and relax.
• Look inward and ask yourself you’d like to achieve/manifest by August 31.
• Open your eyes and start writing ideas as they come to you.
• Once you have a few possibilities, select the one that you feel most passionately about. It also needs to be something you can truly believe in.
• Write a specific goal statement, which ends with “Make it so!”
• Read your statement out loud with as much feeling and conviction as possible. Feel that mental “click” as you DECIDE to achieve your goal.
• Leave a comment or send me an email to let me know that you’re participating (you don’t have to disclose your goal).
• Be on the watch throughout the month of August for the manifestation of your goal. It may not appear in the form you’re expecting…
• Report back and let us know how you did!

My goal is to receive $500 from sources other than my salaried income by August 31, 2008. Make it so!

I wanted to try a money goal not because I need $500, but because needing money in order to feel “secure” is something that holds me back from pursuing writing full-time. It’s hard for me to contemplate leaving a regular paycheck for the uncharted (and potentially unpaid) waters of the writing profession. Knowing that I can “manifest” money would be a huge confidence boost when it comes to taking the plunge and quitting the old day job!

What goal did you choose and why?

Tags: intention manifestation, law of attraction

Image from http://www.ardecfunding.com/images/plaintiff.jpg.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been offered and have accepted a paid writing position. (By the way, today is the final day of the Community Experiment. Any results to report? Email or comment to let me know!) I’m extremely excited about this opportunity, and I absolutely cannot wait until the administrative boxes have all been checked and I can get started with the actual writing. It feels so good to know that I’ll be getting paid to do something I love!

Even though getting paid to write has been a goal of mine for YEARS, I might not have been as excited about this opportunity if it had arisen a year ago. As a matter of fact, I might have walked away from it. Why on earth, you may rightly ask, would I have been anything less than thrilled about a paid writing opportunity? What possible reason would I have had for ignoring it or turning it down?
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Tags: Career, Passion, Purpose, Writing

Welcome back to my new Wednesday feature, the Question of the Week. Please feel free to use this question as the topic of a blog post, for personal journaling, or simply for self-discovery.

This week’s question is Right now, in this moment, what is the biggest obstacle standing in the way of your dreams?

My dream is to be able to write full-time. I still haven’t worked out whether that means writing novels or blogs or articles or nonfiction, but I know without a doubt that I want to be able to write. And I am writing. I’m even getting paid for it. But I can’t bring myself to quit my day job. The reason (a/k/a the giant effing obstacle)? Fear.

I’m afraid that I won’t have enough money, which is absolutely ridiculous. My husband does well enough that he’d be comfortable with me quitting work to stay home with kids, so we clearly have enough money for me to quit and make a real go at a writing career. But I grew up in a home where there was never enough money, where crushing debt was a fact of life, where lay-offs turned my family upside-down. The thought of quitting a really well-paid job for a possible non-paid job is absolutely terrifying.

I’m also afraid that I’ll fail. What if no one wants to publish my book (or read my articles)? What if I’m a terrible writer and no one has the heart to tell me? What if I don’t have the self-disciple to keep at it? What if I just give up and quit? What if I let everyone down?

I’m working on overcoming these fears, but it’s no easy task.

What about you? What’s your biggest obstacle?

Image from http://www.eteamz.com/fcrogue/images/goals.jpg.

There’s a ton of great literature out there on how to set goals. The SMART technique tells us that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Other sources advise that goals should be phrased as positive statements (”I will eat healthy foods” vs. “I will quit eating junk food”), and pretty much everyone suggests that we write down our goals to formalize them. This is all great advice, but you could develop and write out the SMARTest goal imaginable and still be missing a very important step: choosing a goal that inspires passion.
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Tags: desire, Goals, Passion, Purpose