Living From Love

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Living from Love

by 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 R. Yoder.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Alight Publications. ©2004. www.alightpublications.com

About the Author

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,

Hatncr, Gail Straub and Gershon, Wallace Black Elk,

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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