Fear and anxiety easily give way to anger and violence. The opposite of fear is trust, whiuch, related to warm-hartedness, boosts our self-confidence. Compassion also reduces fear, reflecting as it does a concern for others’ well-being. This is what really attracts friends.

Dalai Lama

I’ve been reading about the Japanese concept of Ikigai and how it relates to long life. Ikigai is found at the intersection of discovering what you love, what you’re good at, what the world sees and what you can be rewarded for. Notice I wrote what you can be “rewarded for”, not “paid for.” I think it’s an important distinction. If you don’t know enough about Ikigai, Google it, everybody is writing about it.

I’m not looking to live forever, I just want to be fucking happy! My own personal happiess is a promise I made to myself in my twenties after a suicide attempt. But I’m enlightened enough to know trhat personal happiness is the foudation from which I am able to reach out and serve others, help them feel supported in theior own quest for happiness. And I am not willing to do harm to others for the sake of myself!

Seems to me the more I learn, the more I KNOW love is the answer in all things. Maybe this is just me ahead of the curve but it just seems obvious! Most people make decisions based on fear. That may have served us as a young developing species but clearly now fear is unnecessary and extremely harmful. We live in a world of abundance! Yet you see how a comparative few have so much while there are so many who struggle and scrape by the best they can, often barely surviving! So unnecessary, yet it happens because of fear!

Follow your bliss!

Joeseph Campbell said it when he coined the phrase, “Follow your bliss!” The danger here of course is that you follow your bliss to the detriment of others. You folloe your bliss and are so completely self absorbed you can’t even see how you are hurtig people. That is what makes Ikigai so attractive to me, it includes a huge selfless component: You must answer the question of what the WORLD needs! I would rephrase Joseph Campbell’s “Follow your bliss!” to read, “Follow your Ikigai!”

Love is powerful, and I would venture to say, Love is the answer. You literally can do no harm when Love is your driving force! I believe that! Eve if the journey is wrought with sadness, the reward at the end of the road is so great, because you had that journey. Anyone who has experienced this knows what I mean. But you can not give in to fear and take the easy way out for doing so will shortchange you and you will miss out on the opportunity for deeper learning and self development.

And if you haven’t found your Ikigai you are living a small life that will kill you sooner due to your own limiting beliefs! And you are probably sharing that shit with everyone around you, including your children. The concept of Ikigai also means that every single one of us has one! I would absolutely love to experience a world in which every single human was living their Ikigai! I can not imagine what that would be like!

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Until next time…