2013 August | With an Open Heart

Aug 20

Creating Your Bucket List

This post is part of The Awakened Heart Project

Week 34: Creating a Bucket List

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”

– Zig Ziglar

Life Lesson: The Bucket List

Have you seen the movie Bucket List? The one with Jack Nicholson, and Morgan Freeman? It’s a great little movie. The kind that’s rather cliché, but makes you smile, makes you cry, and leaves you feeling warm inside. It’s the story of two men, who are both dying. As they realize they’re running out of time, they decide to complete everything on their bucket list…together. The movie captures incredible moments -some on a grander scale than others. Nonetheless, it leaves you thinking, “Yes! I can do that! I need to do that!”

Creating life goals that aren’t always career focused or family focused is an important part of building a meaningful life. It seems many of us have constructed bucket lists that are centered on excelling in our careers (e.g. to be the vice president by the time I’m 40). Or, centered on money and material objects (e.g. to make a six figure income, and build my million dollar home). Or, the lists are more about others or hopes, but things that are totally out of ones control (e.g. to have three boys that all play soccer).

Don’t get me wrong; ALL of these goals, dreams, and aspirations are important and relevant. There is nothing more important than family, and having career aspirations is admirable to say the least. On the other hand, we are made up of far more than just our careers and Read more

Aug 13

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Maybe Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Are All Wrong

This post is part of The Awakened Heart Project

Week 33: What Are Your Basic Needs?

“We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death.”

– Leo F. Buscaglia

Life Lesson: What Are Your Basic Needs?

Last week we talked about define who we are from our internal world rather than external world. We tried to rid our identity of labels with “assumed roles” to define who we feel we are at our deepest levels, -our souls. This week, we expand on the theme of internal and external influences, but more specifically needs.

More than often, we put the external world in which we live in before anything else. We put our jobs first, the carpool first, the expenses, etc., well before we put our internal needs and desires. We are raised to believe that “This is how you live”, -this is what is means to be a “productive member of society”.

In 1943, humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow proposed his theory of The Hierarchy of Needs. This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs. He displayed this hierarchy as a period. At the foundation level, humans much fulfill basic physical needs like food and shelter before moving onto other needs, such as self-esteem and relationships needs.

This theory does makes sense. However, I recently came across a somewhat opposing viewpoint by Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakenings that I found just as true. Nepo writes:

While this is in part true, I believe there is a dimension of the inner life that is as imperative and equivalent as food and shelter. Without the fulfillment of these basic inner needs, we are just fed and sheltered bodies void of life. Without love, truth, and compassion, all the comforts of modern life don’t matter, because we are simply reduced to biological machines, not even as present as animals.

Nepo argues that when we begin to live our life from the perspective that basic needs must be met first, the result is that we often defer the risk to love in the process. We make comments like, Read more

Aug 5

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Who Are You? Forget Labels and Redefine Yourself.

This post is part of The Awakened Heart Project

Week 32: Who Are You? Forget Labels and Redefine Yourself.

“Sincerity is the fulfillment
of our own nature,
and to arrive at it we need
only follow our own true Self.
Sincerity is the beginning
and end of existence;
without it, nothing can endure.
Therefore the mature person
values sincerity above all things.”
― Tzu-ssu

Life Lesson: Who Are You?

Who are you? Have you ever really thought about this question? Who are you as a person? I’m not talking about how others define you. I mean, how do you define you? What makes you who you are internally? Sadly, the definition of ourselves’ tends to be defined by external circumstances. For example, you fail a test in school, the definition of yourself becomes, “I’m a failure”. You get married, the definition of yourself becomes, “I’m a wife” or “I’m a husband”. In contrast, if/when you get divorced, you come, “The divorcee”. But it’s not like in the time you were a wife, to the time you were divorced, you suddenly transformed into a new self, right? Or what if you were employed in the morning as a bank teller, but by the end of the day you were laid off. You’re no longer a bank teller, but are you a different person? No, you’re not. These external labels do not define you. Inside your soul, you are so much more than these labels.

How many times have you been introduced to someone and they ask, “So, what do you do?” immediately implying that they want to know what you do for a job. How often do you respond with something other than your job? I’m guessing hardly ever, yet I’m sure most of us do much more than what’s in our job description.

What if, instead of asking, “What do you do?” when you met someone knew, you asked, “So, who are you?” What do you think their response would be? Would they take a minute baffled by your question to reflect on it? Would they simply ignore it and describe their job as if on autopilot, unsure of how to answer such a question? Think about it for a minute; if someone Read more