About a year ago, I came across Danielle LaPorte’s work, which revolves around core desired feelings. The thinking here being that we are not chasing the goals themselves, but the feeling that achievement of those goals will give us.
But that got me recently thinking … can you go one step deeper? Is it possible that while for each of us the source of THE FEELING is different … THE FEELING itself is the same for everyone?
The two that come to my mind are peace and love. Right now I’m partial to peace, so I’ll start with love.
By love, I don’t mean the romantic kind only. I wrote about my definition of love in an earlier post, but on a broader scale, it’s a sense of connection with everyone and everything. It’s looking at the world as one big organism and treating each component as a valuable part … just like we would each of our own organs. And so to keep going with an organ analogy, if all of our organs are healthy, we feel healthy. When one is sick, everyone suffers.
I’m really loving the organ analogy now because it’s kind of like when you get really sick and then you heal. Remember how shortly after you recover, the simple feeling of being healthy again feels divine? That’s the feeling that comes to my mind when I think of love in this context.
Ok, onto peace then. I think that the simplest way to describe this feeling is being centered. The image that comes to my mind is that of flow, which as per Wikipedia means the following: the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does and loses a sense of space and time.
Wow! Isn’t it beautiful? I think that the key nugget for me here is losing a sense of time because that means I am fully immersed in the moment. To put it more simply, I feel most alive.
Just to be practical here I am not advocating to be in a constant state of Nirvana. No. What I am advocating here is to continually make adjustments, however small, so that you get there more often.
At this point, I think that I am stuck with a chicken or the egg problem here. Do we get peace because we love or we need to be at peace in order to love?
There definitely seems to be a symbiotic relationship at play. How about this then:
When it comes to my actions, whatever they might be, I know the optimal ones, will come from a place of love.
When it comes to the state of being, I want to continually gravitate towards a sense of peace.
Those are the root feelings that I’m really after.
So what are your core desired feelings? How can you get there more often?
