INSPIRATION

"The easiest way to get inspiration is by being happy and grateful."

How often does this happen to you? You have been trying to figure out what to say in a speech or wondering where to find a missing file. You are sitting on the toilet – you are not even trying to solve the problem – when out of the blue, you know the answer.

Or maybe you’ve spent weeks wondering what to buy your Mum for her birthday. You are soaping yourself in the shower, and bingo! You get the perfect solution! 

Such solutions pop out of your subconscious mind. We touched on this earlier.

The subconscious mind only engages when we are relaxed – and for many of us, one of the few times we relax is on the toilet. In fact, you have to relax to get the job done!

It is the job of the conscious mind to pose the problem, to set the goal. Beyond that, the conscious mind is of limited value.

All of us are open to inner guidance and inspiration. We can each access help from a source higher than our physical selves. Whether you are comfortable with words like God, Source or infinite wisdom is not an issue. But you need to be seriously asking and seriously listening. Inner communication is like regular communication between people. To get help, you need to be open to it.

The Problem with Ego

Imagine that I wanted to get to the train station and I stopped you in the street to say, “Can you tell me which way to the train station? Actually, I do know the way and I have found my own way there before very successfully, and I have some good reasons why I’m here and not there yet, and I don’t really need anyone’s help, but I’m curious to see if you know as much as me. I’m doing fine, actually, and I can find it by myself.”

Would you help me get to the station? Not likely.

I’m justifying all my actions. I already have all the answers and I’m not listening, anyway. My ego is in the way.

But what if I had been wandering the streets for three days and I staggered toward you, thirsty and exhausted, and said, “How do I get to the station?”

Now I’m hungry for information. I’m making no excuses. I’m beyond worrying about what you think of me. My ego is out of the way. I’m in a state of complete non-resistance. Now I’m listening. Now you can help me.

In everyday life, we can receive help only when we are open to it. So it is with inner guidance, inspiration and intuition.

So do you have to be on your knees before you get inspiration? Not at all. The easiest way to get inspiration is by being happy and grateful. That’s when life flows, that’s when you get ideas when you need them, and that’s when you keep finding yourself in the right place at the right time.

The way to choke everything off is to be upset, angry and depressed. While we are arguing with everything and insisting that the world is wrong, while we are full of excuses, our mind is too distracted to even notice any help.

Will I Hear a Voice from the Sky?

When you are overwhelmed and distressed, your best strategy is to say, “Please show me the next step.” If you are humble enough and open enough to say, “Just show me what I need to do today,” and ask for the same help tomorrow, you can find your way out of the hole.

Let’s say that you are flat-broke. You’ve lost your job, you’re hungry, your car has been repossessed and you are facing eviction. You see no way out and so you decide to ask for divine guidance.

Now, to you, the ideal solution may be first prize in a $50 million lottery – but solutions may come in other ways. Very likely, help will be more of an unfolding process. Help doesn’t mean that everything is fixed for us. Help means assistance and direction.

Ask and you will be shown, but usually, it won’t be a voice from the sky. It could be that a friend calls with a helpful suggestion. It could be that you are led to a book or a magazine article. It could be that for no known reason, you turn to a TV channel you never watch and see an advertisement you never saw before.

Often we receive help and never recognise it. So we say, “It wasn’t divine inspiration. It was actually my old friend Ted who showed up unexpectedly.” In fact, Ted was a part of a miraculous process.

Finding Your Wallet, Finding Answers

How often do you lose something – your keys, your wallet, your phone – and search desperately, without luck. Eventually, you give up. You say to yourself, “If I quit looking, I will find it.”

You abandon your desperate search and get on with your day. And then, within minutes, and for absolutely no reason, you decide to shift a cushion on the sofa and there, wedged into the armrest, is your wallet.

The secret to finding solutions in your life is a lot like finding your wallet. You say to yourself, “I want to find it. I will find it,” and then you quit banging your head against a wall. You let go.

Needing Doesn’t Help

Wanting is an important part of the process. But it is a relaxed kind of wanting – not a desperate “this is ruining my life” kind of need.

Here is an important distinction: the feeling of need is totally different from the feeling of wanting. Needing is more like hopeless desperation. When you need something, your attention is on what you don’t have. And when you focus on what you don’t have, you will continue not to have it.

Wanting is more often happy anticipation. When you want something, you are focused on what you will have. That is why you get it.

Songwriters and inventors will often say, “The idea just came to me.” Perhaps you have thought, “How come brilliant ideas don’t come to me? I would like to invent something! I would like to write a hit song.” When you really, really want ideas and inspiration, they do come.

Singer and songwriter, Carole King, has written over 100 hit songs. Says Carole, “When I’m truly present, I get out of the way and all this stuff comes through.” Sir Paul McCartney, ex-Beatle and writer of the most recorded pop tune ever, said that the melody for “Yesterday” came to him in a dream. You say, “What a lucky guy! He takes a nap and wakes up having written the most popular tune in history. I’d like to do that!”

But there is more to it. Here is a man whose every waking moment was dedicated to writing beautiful music. He spent his life putting phrases and melodies together and pulling them apart. When you love your work that much – and when you ask your subconscious for help – you get answers.

The other half of the story is that Paul spent months writing the lyrics. So sometimes you get flashes of inspiration and sometimes you need to roll up your sleeves.

So How Does All This “Feelings” Information Fit with Spirituality?

It fits perfectly. It explains spirituality perfectly.

It explains why all the great spiritual teachings have love (feeling) as their foundation. Whether you are Hindu, Sikh, Taoist, Christian, Muslim or Jewish, you simply EMBRACE YOUR SPIRITUAL BELIEFS SO THAT YOU FEEL AS GOOD AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN, ALWAYS.

You might say, “But I’m not spiritual.”

If you can delight in watching a baby sleep, if you can be transfixed by a mountain view, if you have ever been entranced by an elephant or a hummingbird, if you find joy in paddling a canoe or wonder in the eyes of a German Shepherd or a whale, you are spiritual.

The life force that holds together a diamond, the life force that runs through an oak tree or a kitten, is the same life force that runs through you and me.

You can’t help being spiritual. The Universe is coursing through you; the spirit is in you.

• The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realise their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realise at the centre of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this centre is really everywhere, it is within each of us. ~Black Elk, Sioux Medicine Man

In his classic book, The Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda tells the story of his search for a guru. His quest begins at the age of twelve. He travels thousands of miles around India and eventually finds his master living almost next door.

Yogananda’s story is every man’s story.

We long to connect with the power of the Universe. We join groups, do seminars and scale mountains in Tibet. We visit cathedrals and make pilgrimages. But we don’t really need to go anywhere:

• You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.  ~Franz Kafka

You are not separate from anything. You don’t have to go anywhere to find the power of the Universe. You find it by feeling different.