I have been in a very quiet, contemplative place lately, watching as some new energy percolates and rises to the surface, and I am now in a place where I am ready to declare independence for myself. I am declaring independence from the belief that I have to make my life match up to anyone else’s definitions of success for my life, as well as from all the places in my mind telling me that my life should somehow be in any way different from the way it is right now.

About six years ago I decided to leave the work-a-day world and go into business for myself. I’ve spent a large portion of those years with different classes, workshops, books, seminars, and programs designed for entrepreneurs. It’s all great information, especially since I was on a pretty steep learning curve. But I’ve reached the point now where those products are actually keeping me out of my life.

I realized that what I genuinely desire, and what the people who produce those products desire, are not the same thing. And I’ve been making myself wrong and feeling guilty for wanting what I truly want, and not wanting what they say I should want. Let me explain.

After six years of trying out a lot of different possibilities, I realized that my goal in life is not to be a worker/earner. If I had to give a name to my “reason for being”, I would say that I am a spiritual contemplative/mystic/writer/professional dreamer. So I like working about 10-12 hours a week, with lots of time left to create a nurturing home, take care of the errands of daily life, maintain my connections with other people, think, observe, process life, and create.

I like that the way I contribute to and help change the world is through working on myself, and transforming my connections to the people around me, one encounter at a time.

Unfortunately, even in the personal growth/New Thought community, that business model is never really presented as a viable option. It seems to me that whenever people are talking about things like The Secret, and The Law Of Attraction, and other principles of Deliberate Creation, the emphasis is always on BIGGER, and MORE. If the concept of “enough” is ever addressed, it only seems to be in the manner of finding a way to temporarily let what you have be “enough”, only so it can move you to a different place where you can finally get MORE. There doesn’t seem to be much work addressing the question of genuinely being satisfied and feeling like you have enough.

And that is where I started to feel disconnected from the popular concept of personal growth, because I could no longer ignore the fact that I am really satisfied with my life right now.

[Read more…] about My Declaration Of Independence (Which Turned Out To Be Quite Long)