From the cradle to the grave, every soul is faced with five tasks that promote living and working with happiness, meaning and enthusiasm.
This is what I share in my upcoming E-book 'Spirited Personal Leadership', which will be published on 1st of December 2022. Here is a hint of what to expect.
The five tasks facing the soul can be derived from the following:
1. Lack of intense feeling and learning from felt experiences
2. Lack of sovereignty.
3. Cultivating soul pain or letting it exist.
4. Lack of soul joy.
5. No development of talent or realisation of dreams.
When people lose contact with their soul this is usually because they live and work from the head and rationality, but without their heart and soul. All kinds of constructed concepts relating to life and work, such as thoughts, convictions and personal ideologies seem to strengthen their grip on their lives. Why?
Because people often subconsciously choose identification with their rational side and only have (illusory) control over the certain and uncertain. They only want comfort and happiness in life and reject the painful, vulnerable or uncertain aspects. And they want to keep control, trying to make this ostensible success formula work. Then certain ego passengers, such as the rational side and the controller take the upper hand. Your ego has taken the reins, often without you being aware that this has happened.
In recent years, a multitude of books have been written on happiness and how to achieve it. However, you don’t actually need to search for a path to it, because it is already there – if your life is based on spirit or awareness. And that path has always been there. Moreover, we see that fortune-hunters set goals and have expectations for the future that are oftentimes unachieved. It is then just a question of time until something goes wrong and they suffer bad luck or accidents.
As the natural cycles of spirit show us, happiness is always followed by unhappiness. Sunshine is followed by rain, followed by sunshine, followed by rain, followed by sunshine, etc. Incessantly. Furthermore, fortune-hunters want to ‘have happiness.’ And that last word, ‘have,’ is the crux of the matter. This when the greedy child of your ego hijacks your subconscious. It temporarily satiates your desire but does not fulfil it in the long term.
For example, bucket list hunters think that they will be happier by ticking their desire boxes. But when the need has been met (which there is nothing wrong with and briefly makes you feel happy and ‘alive’) you simply return to everyday reality.
This is a case of excessive ego because the inner greedy child starts covertly manipulating you. And when your expected happiness fails to materialise, you feel unhappy. You can bet your life that this happiness house of cards will collapse eventually.
“Sooner or later, fortune-hunters become unhappy.”
The question is how do you handle both happiness and unhappiness in a healthy way? If you only embrace and chase happiness, sooner or later unhappiness will return to you like a cosmic boomerang. The cosmos will then automatically involve you in (unforeseen) situations, bad luck or unhappiness that you will have to deal with and will learn from as a soul. Maybe to wake you up from the ‘illusion of happiness’ that you had led yourself and others to believe.
In short, it is precisely clinging to and chasing your rational concepts and goals, such as happiness, which prevent you from accessing that deeper layer of feeling where your soul speaks that gives you a deeper feeling of peace. Because the gateway to your soul is your heart, not your rationality. Finally, heart and soul are mentioned in one breath for good reason.
“The gateway to your soul is your heart.”
When you actually feel your heart skipping a beat, quaking, bleeding, crying, glowing and shining you are in direct contact with your soul. Euphoric successes and ecstatic, painful and vulnerable experiences will then be a greater part of your being. The fact that you permit yourself to feel the felt experiences and don’t skim over the surface will bring you closer to deepening, truthfulness and individuality.
And then you can be happy with everything that comes and goes. Genuinely happy.
And there is so much more that can enrich your work and life. Check publications on: https://martinthoolen.com/en/inspiratie/
If this looks interesting, send me an e-mail at: [email protected]. and I will tell you how to order as soon as the book is published.
And if you want to experience it, develop and contribute even more to a better world in your own way, this might help you: https://martinthoolen.com/en/service/master-module-persoonlijk-inspirerend-leiderschap/
© 2022: Martin Thoolen
Dutch 
English (United States)