This week on the podcast, I answered a question about deciding what organizations and movements to support with your time, money and psychic efforts. It’s a question I am thrilled to receive frequently, and I was so happy to externalize my process a little bit. It even helped me gain clarity on aspects of the process I hadn’t yet verbalized yet.
After I finished recording and editing the show, I felt there was more to say. Although the episode focuses specifically on deciding on where and how to give, the process I shared isn’t limited to that application at all. In fact, this process is a part of most of my decision-making and overall strategy for aligning my actions with my inner life. In a sense, it’s a process for synching up who I am with what I do, or it’s a way of practicing right relationship with my community and our planet.
So what am I talking about and how does it work?
I’m talking about being truly intentional about decision-making. I’m talking about having a broad vision and leaning on that vision to make real-time, present-moment choices that reflect respectful, stable relationships with ourselves and our fellow galactic citizens.
What’s the process?
In this post, I’m riffing on the biggest, broadest aspects of this work. We’ll refine and focus in coming posts.
- your deepest values/ HEART-CODES
- how do you want to feel/ Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map
On the most essential level, the process I personally use to guide what I’m doing with my life AND what kind of orange juice to buy at the grocery store is a marriage of values and feelings. Finding out what those are can be as deep of a dive as you’re up for. The deeper you go, the more clarity you will have.
- Heart-Codes
The Heart-Codes emerged out of my study of the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras: they are the SOUL of the philosophical study applied to real life. At their core, yogic philosophies center around doing the work without getting caught up in the outcome. The “getting caught up in the outcome” is where we humans tend to spiral and veer off our paths and even end up manipulating what “the work” is. Finding the Heart-Codes requires mega-TRUST. Trust in yourself. Trust in your community. Trust in the unknown. It sounds simple. It is simple, but it’s also some of the hardest work we’ll do.
- SIMPLE VERSION: What values are the most important to me?
- DEEPER DIVE: Here’s a podcast episode all about working with your heart-codes, AND here’s a guided video practice I created about them as part of my Self-Care Challenge on Yoga Anytime.
2. How do I want to feel?
Starting (or continuing) to feel sensations in the body is a radical act. It is a path toward self-sufficiency and toward community-care. Noticing how you feel when you behave certain ways or do certain things is very useful. Centering your decisions around feeling the way/s you want to feel has expansive, positive impacts to you and your fellow Earthlings.
- SIMPLE VERSION: Asking “how do I want to feel?” and “What do I need to do to feel that way?”
- DEEPER DIVE: Read Danielle LaPorte’s book Desire Map (or take the course). LaPorte calls the list your “core desired feelings.”
Now what?
Use this information. When buying your next pair of jeans, when deciding what to do with your day off, when deciding where to spend your time…ask how this fits in with your heart-codes and your “core desired feelings”? How does it feel when you *do* align your decision with these frameworks? How does it feel when you don’t align? Just notice. There’s no judgment. We’re just noticing.
Why does this matter?
If you have ever felt like you have been living two different lives, like there’s the real you, and then there’s the “you” that exists in the world, then you might notice how over time this disparity or lack of coherence can affect you in many ways: physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I have certainly felt like that during chunks of my life (and there are certain relationships and moments where I still feel it now, but it’s rarer and rarer), and I have had many opportunities to observe fellow humans who are living in true pain because of this lack of coherence. The more skillful you become doing this for little decisions, the easier it becomes to integrate this into your big decisions.
Acknowledgments + caveats
Here’s the thing: living this way depends on privilege. If you’re living with modest means, with limited abilities that are not supported, if your basic needs are not being met, if you are (and have been historically) without representative models within your communities of people living intentionally and with the future in mind, this is much harder. I feel you. I am working to bring in low-cost, fully representational examples and resources where-ever I can in this process. There will be updates.
How does this feel?
Please share YOUR experiences. How do you make bigger decisions? How do you make smaller decisions? What is the work that goes behind/ beneath/ within all of that?
I’ll share a few more layers of this kind of work in coming weeks using other aspects of yoga philosophy.
Remain in wonder, kelly.
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