This is the 3rd in a 4-Part Series which offer a practical path to loving your life every day. Click here to read Part 1.
Click here to read Part 2.
 
You probably fall into a dark mood once in a while, convinced that life sucks. Moods make you irrational, so that you might even burn some bridges. The question is, after the mood fades away, do you love your life again? Are you enthusiastic about dealing with whatever messes you made? The last blog invited you to consider disowning all your irrational feelings as not you. You are free to declare what is or is not the real you, and you can transform your experience of life by discounting all your foolishness as trances that you cannot always control.

Your animal brain is conditioned to produce victim feelings that, all too often, interfere with your good sense. These victim feelings contribute to the survival of children and less intelligent animals, but they also temporarily distort your priorities by making whatever has your attention far more important than it is. Unless you take pains to disown any judgments you made during a trance, you will always have a mistaken view of what you want in life and how to be happy. Victim feelings fool you into believing that you would be happy if you could get enough pleasure, success, and comfort. It does make sense to pursue those things, but you will only be consistently happy once you value the pursuit as much as the results.

Fear, anger, and foolish urges energize you, but undermine your good sense. Need and duty motivate you to keep working, but they steal your energy, so that you drag yourself to stay on track. Life seems heavy, filled with boring or unpleasant effort. It is a sad way to live. You only love the pursuit when your actions are motivated by your natural enthusiasm for life. That enthusiasm is lighthearted and consistent with your good sense, expressing as a Welcoming Perspective. You love the game of life, ready to play with whatever is thrown at you. You might be fairly out of touch with your natural enthusiasm for engaging with life. But it arises whenever you are free of need and duty for a while. You will find yourself looking around for something to do, like venturing beyond your comfort zone, taking on a challenge, or being creative.

A first step toward rehabilitating your natural enthusiasm is just to pay more attention to all the energy you have for social occasions, games, and hobbies. Better, recall when you were enthusiastic about taking on a project, not driven by need or duty. Once you are open to being lighthearted and enthusiastic in other parts of your life, consider creative ways to restructure some of your activities so that you look forward to them. Maybe you can find a way to make a game of cleaning out your garage.

But be careful, because you can be sure that, sooner or later, boredom or an obstacle will arise. You will probably try to force yourself to finish the project. But that means you are now driven by a sense of need or duty. That is fine, but be sure to draw that big fat line between the enthusiastic you and the victim feelings that have you dragging your feet while you finish the project.

A fundamental difference between your enthusiasm for the game of life and your victim feelings is how emotionally invested you get in your pictures of success. A victim needs the particular result you were aiming for (such as a clean garage), on an implied deadline. Unfortunately, emotional investment is often the only available motivation for being productive. If you only showed up for work on time when you were enthusiastic about doing so, you might soon lose your job. Emotional investment has a function, but also a big cost. It keeps you stuck in the illusion that final results are all that matter, so that effort seems like a necessary evil.

But there is no practical problem here if you are actively cultivating your Welcoming Perspective. You can have the best of both worlds. You are motivated by your enthusiasm for as long as it lasts. And then you can fall back into need and duty to keep you moving forward. The important thing is to keep noticing whether you are welcoming or a victim. If you do so, you will notice how much better your life is when you are enthusiastic.

Victim feelings are so deeply conditioned that they will never disappear for good. Tiny victim feelings such as silent griping arise and fade all day long. That need not be a problem. You simply want to be alert enough to fill the space in between with welcoming. You can be deeply engaged in whatever has your attention right now until a victim feeling is triggered, and then pick up where you left off as that feeling fades away. It is surprisingly easy to jump back and forth between the two tracks: gripe, engaged, gripe, engaged. The challenge is to keep distinguishing the gripes as trances, and later disowning them.

This blog has been about your enthusiasm for pursuing a life that works. That enthusiasm is natural, and your life goes well whenever it is present. But the path to awakening your Welcoming Perspective takes persistence. You might get busy or discouraged, so that you give up on it. In the next (and final) blog we will talk about where to find the power to own your life, rather than continue to be run by victim feelings.
 
Click here to read Part 4
 
Visit Chuck Turner’s website here: WelcomingPerspective