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The Living Fully Challenge
12 Months to a Fully-Lived Life
Month #3
Welcome to month #3 of the Living Fully Challenge. I hope you found some way to energize, enliven or give yourself pleasure in the area of your romantic relationships and that you successfully changed lots of negative thoughts to positive ones in all areas of your life last month as you continued your 12-month journey to a fully-lived life. I also hope you feel more connected to someone in your life or as if you are giving or receiving more love.
While some people feel they can live their whole lives alone, life just isn’t quite as full without a loving partner with whom to share. So, be sure to keep working on this area if you don’t yet have a romantic relationship or if yours needs a boost of some sort. Also, changing negative thoughts is a process – a continual process. It takes 30-40 days to change any habit, and negative thinking represents a habit like any other. If your negative thoughts are hanging on, keep working on turning them into positive ones, and you’ll surely succeed.
While you may feel the need to keep working on earlier assignments – and you can if you desire and should if you haven’t completed them, I hope you are feeling more and more alive and finding yourself with more and more to appreciate each evening. And now it’s time to move on!
The Two Basic Monthly Assignments
As in the past, continue this month by, first, completing daily the two basic assignments. They form the foundation of your living-fully practice.
Basic Assignment #1:
Take some deep breaths several times every day. The breath is the source of life. God breathed life into us. As we breathe in, we continue breathing in God’s exhale, and as we exhale God inhales. It’s a continuous circular breath from Creator to the created. Plus, without the breath, we die. Each breath gives our body what it needs to continue living. And the fact that we breathe without even thinking about it represents a miracle. So, breathe deeply and consciously as often as possibly, because the breath enlivens you! If you have a watch that beeps on the hour, I suggest you set it to do so, and each hour take a minimum of 10 deep, slow, conscious breaths.
Basic Assignment #2:
Each night before you fall asleep try to acknowledge at least one thing about your life and the way you lived it that day that you really appreciated or enjoyed. If you can't find at least one thing you appreciated or enjoyed, than commit to doing something different the next day - to doing one thing you can acknowledge the next night - something that puts a smile on your face - before you fall asleep. The reason for this exercise seems self-explanatory: If you aren’t doing anything that you can acknowledge as being enjoyable or that you sincerely appreciate, you aren’t living fully.
Assignment for Month #3
As you know, each month’s assignment is comprised of two exercises you will use for 30 days to help you live more fully. The first one will involve one area of your life. The second one will be applied to 12 general areas of your daily life – finance, romantic relationship, free time/fun, health/exercise, work/career, spiritual practice/relationship with God, friendship, relationship with self, relationship with family, continuing education, charity and care of the Earth, and commitments/responsibilities.
Exercise A
Moving on to the area of free time and fun, find one way this month to use your free time to really do something enjoyable. By this I don’t mean just watching your favorite television show or renting a movie and making some pop corn. I mean doing something out of the ordinary. If you normally go out to dinner and to a movie for fun, that’s okay for a start, but try to do something extraordinarily enjoyable. Brainstorm and come up with a few ideas – maybe one big activity per week and a few small ones to spatter throughout each week – that are things you always wish you could go do or that you love to do and that you rarely make time to do. Ride a horse. Go surfing. Take a trip to the top of the Empire State Building. Go to the beach. Go mountain climbing or sky diving. Go out to eat at a different restaurant. Go to a play (instead of a movie). Paint a picture. Write that novel you’ve been dreaming about. (Small activities might involve a swim in the ocean, a day curled up with a good book, shopping with a friend, a bike ride, or a trip to the zoo.) You get the idea. If the activity you choose makes you feel energized, enlivened, happy, enthusiastic, or passionate, do it!
Just like last month’s Exercise A, myriads of ways exist to complete this exercise. If you aren’t sure what to do, close your eyes and visualize yourself with all the time in the world. Then ask yourself, “What is the one thing I would want to do that would make me feel really alive and joyous?” See what enters your mind, and then go do it.
Exercise B
Just like last month, apply this part of the month’s assignment to the following 12 general areas of your daily life – finance, romantic relationship, free time/fun, health/exercise, work/career, spiritual practice/relationship with God, friendship, relationship with self, relationship with family, continuing education, charity and care of the Earth, and commitments/responsibilities.
This month, in each category make conscious choices about what you want or don’t want in your life. Life constantly presents us with contrast, with duality. We are faced with things we like or dislike, want or don’t want. However, much of the time we don’t make conscious choices that state our preferences. Often, instead, we make unconscious choices instead. Therefore, we end up with a lot of things in our lives that aren’t exactly what we want. In fact, often we find ourselves surrounded by things we flat out don’t want in our lives. As a result, we end up disliking our lives. That doesn’t usually make us feel enlivened. It doesn’t make us want to get up every morning and jump up and down and shout, “I’m so happy to be alive!” or to feel as if we even want to try and live our lives fully. It usually makes us feel the opposite. And when we have enough things in our lives we don’t like or want, we may even want to stop living altogether.
So, we must learn to make conscious choices about what we prefer in all areas of our lives. To begin doing so, we must first know what we have already chosen. Then we can make new choices. To complete Exercise B, therefore, take these three steps:
Step 1: Take stock of what you have in each category. This means looking clearly and realistically at what you have chosen in the past – debt, loneliness, 60-hour work weeks, 20 extra pounds, a stressful job, etc.
Step 2: Making a clear choice about what you want now. This entails stating, or, better yet, writing down what you prefer to have – disposable income, a partner with whom to share your life, a 30-hour work week, a lean and in-shape body, a fulfilling job about which you feel passionate, etc.
Step 3: Visualize what it would be like to have a life consisting of the choices you made in Step 2. Imagine this life as if it already exists. For example, see yourself looking backwards in time at the wonderful life you have created with your conscious choices, and don’t just see it but also feel how wonderful it is to live that life you have chosen. In other words, make sure you combine the thought of having this life with the feeling of having it right NOW.
For right now, that’s all you have to do. Just assess honestly in all 12 areas what you have chosen in the past – consciously or unconsciously, make some very conscious choices about what you want in your life from now on, and then imagine having it. Easy, shmeasy, right?
Once you’ve done this, you can begin approaching the choices presented to you each day more consciously. You can look at them and choose what you want in your life and what you don’t. And when something shows up in your life that isn’t what you prefer, hopefully you will be conscious enough to notice and make a new choice right away.
And now, go out and have fun!
A fully-lived life consists of being conscious at all times, if possible, of being aware of our preferences and of making choices about what we want in our lives. In this way, we can create a life that is what we really want – one that makes us feel enlivened, joyous, passionate, and energetic. A life that makes us happy and grateful to be alive, that makes us want to get out of bed each morning and thank God for another day of living, that makes us force ourselves to go to bed at night because we are just having too much fun to close our eyes and sleep. That’s living fully.
Please feel free to send me an e-mail with your comments or concerns or simply to tell me how things are going. Feedback is appreciated as well.
