Ten Ways to Find Your Inspiration
The word inspire comes from the Latin word for inspirare, which means to breath upon or into. When we inspire others, we’re living from our higher selves. When we’re being inspired, we expand beyond what we previously were, or know our selves to be. Our lives have new breath. Our soul and our actions are one.
1. Know what inspires you.
Go back to your memories and recall when you felt most inspired. What was the common thread amongst the different times when you’ve been inspired? Was there a theme to the times when you’ve been inspired, or have been inspiring? Was it an action that a person took - or that you took? Think about what’s inspired you in the past. Look to see what’s missing now.
2. Learn to live with ambivalence while striving for perfection.
Inspiration lives between the two spaces of ambivalence and perfection. Inspiration speaks to the best within our selves - ambivalence is the messiness of our lives, the life process. Perfection is the ideal, while ambivalence is its application. Inspiration is what moves us forward in life - through the ambivalence and towards the ideal.
3. Take a break from your life.
Go to a movie or hike a mountain to its highest vista. Surround yourself with the sound of the rhythm of water, while the warmth of the sun energizes your body. Move your body so you feel its life. Keep your focus on nothing other than your experience. Live in the present.
4. Inspiration isn’t only what’s done TO you.
Being inspired requires an openness of heart and spirit. Create an environment that supports an open heart, so that inspiration blossoms in your life. Inspiration can’t exist without this.
5. Sometimes we fall before we stand.
Don’t beat yourself up when you fall from grace. Life is a process and isn’t static. When you fall, don’t beat yourself up for falling. Acknowledge the fall and it’s impact on your life. At some point, you’ll take action and stand up. Trust the process.
6. Divert your attention.
Forget about the joys that inspiration brings, and live from another domain. An inspired life isn’t only about inspiration. It’s also about exhilaration, about passion and living life fully. Do something completely different than you normally would. Strike up a conversation with someone you typically wouldn’t, and approach the conversation with naivete, openness and depth. There’s a good chance that inspiration will come to you when you’re least looking for it.
7. Surround yourself with what inspires you.
If a certain type of person inspires you, follow and nurture the attraction. Trust what inspires you, and let it guide your actions. If a Wagner opera inspires you, surround yourself with it’s music so you feel completely at one with the music, and with what inspires you. Lose yourself in what you love and be inspired.
8. Get outside of yourself.
Though you think you know what inspires you based on past experiences - this doesn’t mean that you can’t be inspired by something new that previously didn’t effect you. Live in the present and pay attention to what tugs at your heart. This will give you a hint to newer sources of inspiration.
9. Grace + openness + life + soul = inspiration.
Create a formula consisting of the ingredients that define inspiration for you. We all have different perceptions and experiences of inspiration. Define what it is for you.
10. Inspiration is a quality and a state of being.
To be inspiring to others is to be self-generative and inspiring to our selves. How can you be more self-generative? One must live in a state of being that allows for inspiration to take root. How can you cause and create your own source of inspiration? Where are you self-generative in your life, and how can you be more self-generative?
Let Me
I am not too small
for the ocean of your past.
see how we fit,
how I can kiss your dreams
with just the curve
of my smile.
that you would know I love you still.
honestly. regardless. always. recklessly.
your herstory ill bury between
sworn eyelids,
to stay afloat.
to forget. to breathe. to fly. onward. into us.
that you would feel loyalty. newness. hope.
my allegiance, i’ll balm
on the scratches,
polish the shelves on your
backbone,
with tears.
understanding knows.
and you must let me,
help you become.
the narratives of pain.
the sting of shame, loss, regret.
the chords of your song.
dusty, croaky, frightening.
hidden in your heart.
the melody of you, young boy.
caged and longing to love.
the one you chose
not to sing.
until I came along
that you would know
that you would see,
someone can love you still.
I am not too small.
See how we fit.
I make love to your dreams.
With just the curve of my smile.
“Too much forward thinking - concentrating solely on how something will turn out - disengages us from the process necessary to complete a task. If you are waiting for perfect conditions to exist before beginning a process, you may never get started at all. Let go of the idea of success or failure, and revel in the act of doing. ”
—Mary Carlomagno“In the fall of 2004, my freshman students and I analyzed a speech of John Kerry’s and found it confused, contradictory, inchoate, and weak. Six weeks later I went out and voted for John Kerry. What I was doing in class was subjecting Kerry’s arguments to an academic interrogation. Do they hang together? Are they coherent? Do they respond to the issues? Are they likely to be persuasive? He flunked. But when I stepped into the ballot box, I was asking another set of questions: Does Kerry represent or speak for interests close to mine? Whom would he bring into his administration? What are likely to be his foreign policy initiatives? How does he stand on the environment? The answers I gave to the first set of academic questions had no relationship whatsoever to the answers I gave to the second set of political questions. Whether it is a person or a policy, it makes perfect sense to approve it in one venue and disapprove it in another, and vice versa. You could decide that despite the lack of skill with which a policy was defended (an academic conclusion), it was nevertheless the right policy for the country (a political decision). In the classroom, you can probe the policy’s history; you can explore its philosophical lineage; you can examine its implications and likely consequences, but you can’t urge it on your students. Everything depends on keeping these two judgments, and the activities that generate them, separate.”
—Stanley Fish
Cong | Open-mindedness: The Cure to all your relationship problems
Has that idea ever occurred to you, that your people problems are really just caused by the lack of open-minded effort? Key words are Open-Minded and Effort.
Maybe if you let go of what you thought was right, you’d be less frustrated about it. That’s the down-side of self-justification. When you try to push your opinion of what’s right, and others don’t simply agree, you can choose to either lose your mind or lose your heat.
Path One. You think you’re right, and strongly feel so right that you think they’re wrong. In effect, you see yourself as better than them. Just because they seem wrong, you are not better than them.
Path Two. You break loose from the situation, take a step back in silence, scream at the top of your lungs if you have to. (chug 1-2 mugs of RLY cold water.) Vent. Understand that this can be avoided if you didn’t push your opinion on other people. Work things out by seeing things your way, their way, and from a third-person’s perspective.
Two people with totally different tastes can be together. You know—“opposites attract”? You really just have to take the effort in solving problems, the effort in having a more open mind. Maybe they are wrong, but you need to understand that they don’t know any better. Don’t be a fire-feeder.
