Awakened Doing: Part 1
Hands down, the most profound spiritual discovery of my life is this: There are two very different pathways to enlightenment and our greatest human potential lies in combining them.
Before I get started with this share, some definitions, or guidelines if you will. One, what do I mean by enlightenment? This is just a fancy pants word for describing the incredible trifecta of joy, self-love and peace. Two, when I use the word spiritual, I am not referring to any religion, nor am I discounting any religious beliefs whatsoever. When I use the word spiritual, I am talking about personal growth and contribution.
I spent the first fifty years of my life believing that there was just one pathway to enlightenment. Despite my naïveté, I am grateful that I discovered the first pathway at a very early age. I knew it by different names over the years. For instance, ‘live my dreams’ was one name I gave it. This was my true north for decades. Today, I prefer the name and description the great intellectual Joseph Campbell gave it:
“If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living."
Follow Your Bliss. Three simple words. This is one of the proven pathways to peace, joy and self-love. Don’t take my word for it. Explore it for yourself.
In case you’ve been watching my personal journey and not really understanding my career or life moves the last five years, allow me this indulgence. After discovering the nuance if of bliss vs. dreams six years ago:
My business partner Patrick Combs and I created and named a coaching business called ‘Bliss Champions’. We then created our first big stage performance together and named it ‘Bliss Talks’. We then created an investment fund for our bliss seeking clients and called it ‘Bliss Investments’. We even bought a resort in Hawaii so we could host retreats. We renamed the property ‘Bliss Island’. We even bothered to trademark all of our invented bliss brands. We take bliss very seriously! 😎
Our goals were simple. Teach people how to discover and follow their bliss. And, only in ways that honor our own joy, self-love and peace.
It was the most joyful journey of my life.
However, along the way, I became self-aware of some pain and suffering in between all the joyful moments I was co-creating with him and my wife. I was lacking peace in the ‘in-between’ times.
Nobody seemed to notice this outside of my wife and Patrick, but I did, and I wasn’t ok with the lack of growth in this area. After two years (needless suffering is a thing! 🙈), I finally decided to take massive action.
I knew that Patrick had been practicing presence for over a decade. I saw first-hand how beneficially it played out in his daily life. He was undoubtedly experiencing the aforementioned trifecta of joy, self-love and peace through presence, without doing anything at all. Unless you count being present as doing something! 👀
I convinced myself that if I could get him to teach me what he learned over a decade, it would help me deal with the pain and suffering I was looking to overcome. So, I braved it, and asked my business partner and best friend outside marriage to be my mentor in presence. He enthusiastically accepted and built a year long curriculum just for me!
I have shared much of what I learned from Patrick in various posts, except what I’m merely introducing today. In summary, he taught me the second path to enlightenment.
Now that you and I have a shared understanding of the two pathways to enlightenment (I’m not assuming that you agree by the way), I can now get on with IT!
My most profound spiritual discovery to date is something called Awakened Doing.
What is Awakened Doing? Tune in to my next post to find out what IT is.
