Navigating Our Wild Future with Love and Trust, Not Fear

In early January, I committed to an intention that was well beyond a typical do-over for the new year.

I wrote in this essay What If We’re the Lucky Ones? that for every action and decision that I face this next year, I would ask myself these questions:

• Does this move me closer to loving myself, and therefore others and the world?
• Will this create a lifestyle and way of being that realizes this alternate and paradoxical future (where we become the humans that can make the most of our uncertain future,) or move me/ us further away?

And recently, one more question to reflect my all-inclusive trust in the perfection of all things- the universe, God (e.g., the ineffable, unknowable, all-pervasive power that exists beyond me), and even in my own life experiences:

• How do I choose to act and make decisions if I deeply-pervasively trust that all things are aligned with the highest good- for me and all others, including the planet?

How Can Love Be an Intention?

My friends and colleagues were perplexed at my intention. How could I possibly accomplish this?

They asked me, when I pronounced this intention, “why love? I thought you helped people find purpose.”

True. I do help people clarify their purpose.

But in the last few years, I’ve personally uncovered that when I’m so aligned with purpose that my Beingness and the world around me are coherent with who truly am, then I seldom feel anything other than love.

Who knew that the ultimate outcome of deep soul alignment is love. For self. For others. For the more than human world.

And how else can we find our way into this wildly uncertain future if we don’t feel love, at all cost?

And Trust? How Can You Trust More?

And then friends asked about my more recently added intention about Trust.

Somehow, in the last decade of my life, I’ve gained a now-encompassing trust that all things happen in perfection.

That each and every life event brings me closer to an awareness of who I am, what is mine to do- my sacred World Work- and how to move closer to that alignment with my soul than ever.

And that if I falter in action or decision, I can bring myself back to the awareness that I trust that the universe has my back. That it/ God is always conspiring on my behalf.

I think I had this faith as a child, but it faltered in my move toward an outward orientation- the status quo of our sociocultural orientation to achievement.

And when I allow this small shift in awareness, that all things will work out as needed, I can let go of the need to control, to be utterly responsible for the whole, and that I no longer hold any anxiety, fear, resentment, or sadness about how things are or how they turn out.

I relent to the perfection of the Universal will.

That doesn’t mean I’m passive or lazy.

It means that I balance Allowing and Agency. Being and Doing. Silence and Aligned Action.

And the stillness, silence, connection and insight that emerges from that way of being has been remarkable. Magical.

Back to The Intention

I knew these questions would be the forcing function to help me become the type of human who can walk into the future, knowing I did everything I could.

I truly didn’t underestimate how challenging this would be nor how deeply it would affect my decisions.

And I’ve been forced to confront some deep hard truths about how I’m living this “one precious life” in a world facing collapse, disruption and the loss of everything we’ve known.

Or The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI), according to Michael Dowd’s legacy.

After 1.5 months into the intention, I’m not gonna tell you that I’ve done this perfectly. I’ve had some major screw-ups, lost opportunities and am cognizant of my shortcomings.

I’m living into the truth of where I’m falling short.

What I didn’t expect is just how forgiving I’d be of myself and my frailties in my efforts to become this human Being and Doing that I want to be.

What Constitutes Authentic Truth?

I’m not a stranger to challenge, nor to living a life far afield of my authentic truth.

After social conditioning finally kicked in about age 3, I lived my next 25 years allegiant to the cultural religions of progress, productivity and profit.

At least the first three-quarters of my adulthood was spent in careers aimed at becoming better using the traditional benchmarks- becoming more skilled, effective and productive, and gaining influence, credibility and authority- even if I was aiming at making the world a better place for all of us.

My life has never been just about me, but even in this service orientation, there are ways I fell far short of living in alignment.

It took near death experiences, immunocompromised health, financial instability and (more) serious heartbreak for me to realize that I still wasn’t aligned with my true self. I was only fooling myself by pushing myself in fields that felt more honorable than pimping widgets.

I was a fool to think that I was any closer to living in alignment than a shoe salesman, just because I spoke the lexicon of personal development or spiritual salvation.

And now I know it’s a continuous journey. A Sacred Human Expedition to find ourselves, over and over.

Life is Just a Constant Recalibration to the Seat of the Soul

Maybe I’ve learned to be more forgiving, compassionate and loving to myself because I do see it as a continuous expedition to become ourselves.

To be free of the constraints of our childhood wounding, the karmic knots and the ancestral twine that binds us.

Perhaps I’m willing to make this out-loud commitment to myself, to you, to God and to the planet, because I do actually believe that we’re blessed to be here now.

What more did we expect, as we bargained with the devil in our zealous use of the earth’s bounty, than to come face-to-face with the grim reaper of our collective fate?

So I’m ready to face my own devil-in-the-details intention of how I choose to use this remaining time even as I witness the cascading effects of the collapse.

It’s All about the Compass We Prioritize

The Outer Compass

Have you ever noticed that most of the world is orienting to the external guidance systems of developed cultures?

The extrinsic indicators of success- money, power, fame, appearance, and other status symbols created by culture- are aimed at the external world.

We choose these hallmarks of success because our world created a handy reference guide called capitalism.

This external material world orientation was prioritized for us so we wouldn’t need to create our own map of our future. So that we would become cogs in the wheels of progress, profit and procurement of the world’s resources, including human capital.

And in so doing, we became stuck in the quagmire of disconnection and disembodiment.

Separate from ourselves, each other and the planet.

The Inner Compass

And what is the other compass we could choose to use, to find our way in the world demonstrating to us that we chose the wrong benchmarks?

The benefits of using your Inner Guidance system are several-fold.

When you are rooted in Purpose, the GPS of your Soul, you gain:

• Direction and guidance to help you move forward
• You figure out “what’s yours to do,” the next expression in this long human life that will provide both meaning and fulfillment but also be your greatest contribution, which we so sorely need from EACH of us at this complex and challenging time,
• You resolve you karmic knots, ancestral twine and golden thread of lifetime wounds (involution)
• You become an ever-greater and continuous expression of you gifts and contributions, the expansion of you unique expression- the I Am of the I Am Not (your evolution)

How Can You Act with Love and Trust, Not Fear?

And lastly, when rooted in Purpose, you navigate from Love and Trust, not Fear.

Love is the product of the inward journey and navigational system.

Trust is the belief that when you’re rooted in your soul’s truth, all things will emerge in synchrony with that. It’s the result of living in alignment and letting the now conjoined quantum physics-spirituality take care of the rest.

Fear is the product of an outward focus and orientation.

When we allow ourselves to participate in the organic unfolding of our true nature, we participate in an involutionary-evolutionary journey.

The involutionary journey is the inward excavation and deconstruction of that which we cannot yet see about ourselves, the shadow.

The evolutionary journey is the upward and outward expression of ourselves in our continually expanding awareness of self.

Yet it must start from an inward orientation if we are to be our most evolved Creators to create the greatest expressions that the world needs of us now.

Alignment is like a sail at full tilt aiming into the wind, no slack- everything oriented and moving in the essential direction of purpose, creating direction and focus, that ultimately leads to internal, then external coherence, resonance, superposition, then synchronicity.

Magic.

For more detail about the quantum physics of it all, see some of my earlier writing (What Happens Beyond Purpose Alignment? Magic) about how purpose leads us to synchronicity, or magic.

The only thing I’d add to this prior writing is that I have a new awareness of how the continuous journey of finding ourselves, the Sacred Human Expedition that we must now take, creates the constant calibration and recalibration to the changing dynamic of our world.

As we learn to use emergence as a tool, this process unfolds for each disturbance against which we must recalibrate:

• Each iterative cycle of alignment- the phases of deconstruction- release- emergence- lead to realignment. This is an upward and outward (or evolutionary) spiral leading to more and more precise downward and inward (involutionary) spiraling in the Purpose Flywheel.
• So that each turn of the flywheel yields a tighter spiral to create a more precise and aligned purposeful vision and pattern of manifestation and synchronicity.
• Each iterative spiral releases the ways of being that are disharmonic and disruptive to being the limitless potentiated beings that we are.

Our Inner Compass: Love & Trust

So while most of the world is still playing the outer game aiming toward fame and fortune, sustaining a worldview and lifestyle that will continue to destroy all that we know…

…for those of us who want to navigate toward a new beginning, a new world of living on this bounteous planet we’ve begun to decimate….

….we must find a new way.

We must navigate with a new type of compass. A new orientation.

We must navigate this wild unruly world with our sails full of the wind of the future, not the past.

We must begin the navigation with an inner mastery, not the fear-based approach that orients only to what we see on the outside.

Will You Join Me in Navigating from Love and Trust, Not Fear?

This spring, I am launching a new immersive leadership initiative called Sacred Human Expedition. We’ll be gaining tools for the trek to an alternative future. A new dawn of humanity.

About the Author

I’m the Author of the bestseller, The Golden Thread: Where to Find Purpose in the Stages of Your Life. Download this free audio course to learn about your own Golden Thread of purpose.

I’ve spent my life imagining a world where we could all become who we’re meant to be, awake and alive in a way that allows us to express our most innate, natural and purposeful gifts.

I believe the bridge to our future exists in becoming rooted in our purpose, and more prepared for the unknown. Download the Navigate Our Wild Future Playbook to gain tools to help you prepare.

And very soon we’re unleashing an immersive leadership initiative called Sacred Human Expedition, designed to help us all learn to navigate from love and trust, not fear, and become the audacious and inspired Creators the world needs now.

Stay tuned or contact me to learn more.

Explore at Emergence Institute.