A primary function of consciousness is to bestow meaning, to decide what things mean for you personally. Examples include deciding how important something is to you regardless of its importance to someone else, how something ranks in priority compared with other things in your life, and whether you will spend time, money, or energy on something. Someone can spend an entire lifetime in search of the meaning of life and never find it, primarily because there is no meaning inherent in life. Instead, each of us, in an act of free will, decides what our lives mean and what is meaningful in our lives. Finding the meaning in your life is primarily a decision and only secondarily a search. Searching leads to a decision more than to a discovery.

It makes sense that the meaning or purpose of your life lies in pursuing something you love to do that is also of service to others and to God. Doing what you love to do, serving others, and earning a living at the same time comprise “following your bliss.”  In this exercise you reflect on what you love most to do, with a view to deciding eventually what your bliss is, and at that time taking action to follow it.

 

 

The soul exists beyond time and space, beyond life and death of the body. For the soul, death is merely a doorway from one place to another, not something to fear and avoid. But while we are in a body we are loath to think about leaving it. This simple exercise is a way for you to bring the subject of death gently into your consciousness without raising fear, so that death becomes a valuable advisor. No one gets out of life alive. As the realization dawns that someday you too will die, you find a powerful motivation to live now. By focusing on what you want, you will feel truly alive.

This very simple exercise helps you quickly identify some things which matter to you but which you might never have previously given yourself permission to strive for.

Time for Exercise: five minutes

Properties Required: none

Steps:

 

Each partner simply completes this sentence at least once or any number of times: “Once before I die…”

It is not required as part of the exercise that you do anything with your statements of desire. But once a desire has been spoken out loud, it has been given life, and you might be surprised at how you begin to mobilize your resources to move toward full realization of your desire. You might also be astonished at how quickly the universe comes to your assistance.

Excerpted from our new book Sensual Love Secrets for Couples: The Four Freedoms of Body, Mind, Heart and Soul, by Al Link and Pala Copeland, Llewellyn, 2007

Available at Amazon.com

Also available as an eBook in pdf for Adobe Reader, prc for MobiPocket, or on CD.




 Check also at Amazon.com, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying (Paperback) by Ram Dass

 

    The meaning of life is forever a mystery. Some mysteries are unsolvable and best left that way. But the meaning in life is entirely different. Life is not a problem needing a solution; it is an experience to be lived fully in the present, moment by moment. Meaning is not built into the actions, events, or outcomes you encounter in your life. On the contrary, you bestow meaning upon them as an act of your Soul Freedom. In this sense, something is only as important as you determine it to be.  Because experience is so subjective, it is primarily your beliefs and emotions that determine how you bestow meaning. Different people attach different meanings to the same thing.