Living from Love
by William R. Yoder Ph.D., D.C.
Our contemporary culture places a strong emphasis on achieving
goals. There are numerous books and workshops on goal-setting and "going
for your dreams." They teach you tools that can help you to more
effectively achieve the outcomes you desire, including techniques of
visualization and affirmation, influencing others to do what you want,
managing action steps and daily planners, dressing for success, etc. in
short, how to become the empowered, unstoppable you, who can "make"
your dreams happen. But despite the passion and excitement of these
workshops, they often fail to address the very critical question of the
true nature and meaning of goals in our lives.
Most goal-setting books and workshops start from the assumption
that in order for you to be able to experience happiness, success, and
satisfaction in your life, something has to change in your world —
something has to change in your external situation and circumstances.
They claim that the answer to your unhappy and unfulfilled life is to
clarify your dreams, make an action plan, do daily visualizations and
affirmations, and act with power and focus and self-confidence, so that
you finally achieve the outcome you desire and then you can feel happy,
fulfilled and complete.
These workshops promote their techniques of
goal-setting and goal-achievement as the way to "attain" happiness. But
any approach that makes peace and happiness dependent on a particular
outcome or particular circumstances is implicitly saying that you are
not enough just as you are — that to experience a truly happy and
successful life, you must "achieve" and "earn" and "attain" and
"acquire" (fame, power, wealth, accomplishments, etc.). This
not-enoughness is the foundation of a fear-based life, since every
attempt to change your life will be essentially motivated by the threat
of failure if you don't succeed in attaining your outcome, you will
continue to feel not-enough.
A pathology orientation is always a fear-based approach to life,
because it is explicitly focused on battling or running away from what
you do not want. A vision orientation, however, may be either
fear-based or love-based, depending on how you define your vision or
dream for yourself. If you believe that you will be truly happy only if
and when you attain your goal, then you are implicitly affirming for
yourself both that you are not truly happy now, and that if you fail to
attain your goal you will continue to be unhappy (In fact, you would be
even unhappier, since then you would feel that you had tried and
"failed." Not only would your life in general be not-enough, but you
would have shown yourself to be incapable and/or unworthy of having it
any better — thus piling even more not-enough-ness onto your
self-concept.)
Thus, even though you are living in the lighted clearing
of a vision orientation, and are seeing everything in the light of
moving-toward-a-goal, you are still living an essentially fear-based
life. In a sense, this kind of vision orientation can be seen as merely
a pathology orientation in disguise although you may seem to be moving
toward a goal, what you are really doing is desperately trying to move
away from your supposed not-enough-ness.
Any time you see your happiness as dependent on circumstances,
you are living an essentially fear-based life. On the one hand, the
journey toward your goal will tend to be desperate, since you believe
that your happiness is riding on the outcome. For some people, this
underlying fear may be covered over with an ambitious, driven, go-go-go
attitude. The real issue, here, however, is not the energy level or
ambition of one's personality and lifestyle, but whether it is fueled
by love or fear. On the other hand, since circumstances are always
changing, any circumstance-dependent happiness will be temporary and
tentative at best. That means that even if you succeed at achieving
your fear-based goal, you will still live under the threat that things
could change.
In the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the first Truth is, "Life
is suffering," and the second is, "The cause of suffering is attachment
to desire." "Attachment to desire" implies a fear-based desire — the
belief that things have to be a certain way in order for you to be
happy. When that is your starting point -- when that belief
fundamentally defines the lighted clearing of your life -- then your
life will be suffering. You suffer because you don't have what you
want; because you have it and lose it; because you had it and lost it;
because you have it and fear losing it; because you have what you don't
want; because you had what you didn't want (regret, guilt, wounds); or
because you fear getting what you don't want. According to Buddhism,
your unhappiness is never really caused by circumstances — the real
cause of unhappiness is your belief that your happiness is caused by
circumstances.
The Separative-Technological view tends to be intrinsically
fear-based, since it believes that nothing has any intrinsic value
besides what you give it. This means that you have to "make" the
quality of your life — it is up to you and your on-going "doing." This
puts a continual pressure on you, because without your on-going effort,
your life is simply nothing, has no quality, is merely empty. And in
the dog-eat-dog world of this view, you will end up being used by
someone else.
The alternative to a fear-based approach is a love-based
approach. The Spiritual view provides a good theoretical foundation for
understanding and experiencing a love-based life. According to the
Spiritual view, you are an expression or manifestation of Spirit.
Spirit is the very being of Peace, Love, and Joy Spirit is the very
peace-ing of Peace, the loving of Love, and the joy-ing of Joy. Thus you
are, in your very being, an expression of peace, love, and joy. You do
not have to accomplish or acquire or earn anything to experience peace,
love, and joy now. You do not have to "make" your own happiness all you
have to do is to stop making yourself unhappy and to remember your own
deepest truth as a being of Spirit.
You can believe at a conscious level
that you are choosing and living a love-based approach to life, when in
truth you are subconsciously motivated by fear. Again, the key to
recognizing that you are living a fear-based approach to life is its
negative emotional tone. For the Spiritual-Holistic view, negative
emotions are always a reflection of fear and ignorance, and serve as a
reminder to shift your focus back to your Spiritual truth. From the
perspective of your awareness of your Spiritual truth, there is nothing
to fear, and nothing you "need" to strive for — there is only the truth
and wholeness of Spirit in all of its many forms and manifestations.
Whereas the Separative-Technological view often tends to be expressed
as a fear-based approach to life, the Spiritual-Holistic view is
intrinsically and necessarily a love-based approach to life, which is
emotionally reflected as the experience of perfect peace, love, and joy.
Does this mean that we simply give up all of our desires and
dreams? No, because it's not the goals and dreams that are the problem,
but rather how we understand and live toward them. Going for your
dreams can be an intrinsic part of the joy and passion of your life and can
be how you concretely express the love and joy that are your truth. But
as soon as you (choose to) believe that your happiness is dependent on
a certain outcome, or that "things" have to change for you to be happy,
then you are living in fear. You are no longer expressing your joy, but
are desperately trying to achieve or earn it.
The Bhagavad Gita defines
the path of "karma yoga" (the way we can live Spiritually in our
day-to-day world) in terms of "doing what you will, without attachment
to the fruits of your labor." In other words, you live toward your
dreams with passion and joy, but without any emotional attachment to
the outcome of your efforts.
It's fun and exciting to have a dream to
live toward whether your dream is skydiving, building a new house, or
establishing a soup kitchen for the homeless. What is important is
whether your dream grows out of and expresses your deepest truth, and
whether you live toward it in love or in fear. But from within the
Spiritual-Holistic perspective, the actual outcome of your efforts is
ultimately irrelevant to the quality and worth of your life. The
quality of your life is simply "given" as your truth -- this is one
meaning of the term, "grace." And everything that you "do" in your life
is simply your joyful expression of that truth.
This article was excerpted from:
 Lighted Clearings for the Soul: Reclaiming the Joy of Living
by William R. Yoder.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Alight Publications. ©2004. www.alightpublications.com
Info/Order this book.
About the Author
William Yoder has doctorates in both philosophy and chiropractic.
He has
taught Eastern and Western philosophy and religion at major
universities. His studies personal study
with the Option Institute, and with such teachers as Ram Dass, Michael
Hatncr, Gail Straub and David Gershon, Wallace Black Elk, David
Spangler, Brant Secunda, and Thich Nhat Hanh. He and his wife have taught
workshops in both the private and the corporate sectors on the topics
of health and healing, human potential, self-actualization, and
spirituality.
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