Finding Your Purpose in Life

Pen-Award winning historian and author Mitch Horowitz says experience has taught him this: “No single factor under human control is of great consequence in your life than one passionately felt and clearly formed aim.”

He suggests engaging with a powerful, simple exercise that “may make all the difference in finding your true and practical purpose in life.

 “I want you to watch for special moments when you witness someone doing something remarkable — at the peak of his or her abilities — and from a place deep inside yourself, you think: I can do that.”

In April, Horowitz will release his latest book, “The Miracle of a Definite Chief Aim,” inspired by the teachings of Napoleon Hill.

In it, he explores how each of us can take the journey that begins “with that one spark of inner realization, in which you say to yourself: I can do that.”

Read more about Horowitz’s approach in “How to Find Your Definite Purpose in Life” in the April issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine.

Filmmakers Focus on Consciousness

The Illuminate Film Festival, May 31 - June 4 in Sedona, Arizona, each year brings together filmmakers, scriptwriters and distributors interested in using their medium to explore mind-body-spirit connections. Moviegoers have seen a dramatic increase in these types of films, as will be explored in the May issue of Guide for Spiritual Living: Science of Mind magazine.

This year’s festival again features a Conscious Film Convergence, bringing together industry leaders from around the world to present workshops and presentations for aspiring and established filmmakers. Participants will meet funders, distributors, directors, writers, and other movers and shakers in the industry in an up close and personal venue.

This is the world's premier event dedicated to elevating the world's collective mind, body, spirit and environmental consciousness through cinema. The event is comprised of master classes, panel discussions, a mentorship program, nightly parties where you can mingle with presenters, and the most compelling conscious cinema of the year as curated by the ILLUMINATE Film Festival. The keynote speaker will be Louis Schwartzberg, award-winning cinematographer, director and producer.

To learn more about the festival, visit www.illuminatefilmfestival.com. (Early Bird registration ends April 10, so make your plans to attend today.)

The Necessity of Compassion

“Love and compassion are necessities. They are not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” — The Dalai Lama

Joan Halifax explores the necessity of compassion in her Ted Talk, “Compassion and the true meaning of empathy.” She addresses the central question of what compassion is comprised of.

“There are various facets,” she explains. “And there’s referential and non-referential compassion.

 “But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I’m not separate from this suffering.”

She cautions, though, that this is not enough. Compassion, she says, activates the motor cortex, which means “that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering. And if we’re so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering.” But compassion, she says, has another essential component — that we cannot be attached to the outcome.

Halifax explains it this way. “I realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience, from working with dying people and training caregivers, that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe.”

Halifax is an activist, anthropologist, author, caregiver and Zen Buddhism priest. She runs the Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico, a Zen peacemaker community she opened in 1990. She focuses on socially engaged Buddhism, which aims to alleviate suffering through meditation, interfaith cooperation and social service.

View her Ted Talk here: www.ted.com/talks/joan_halifax?language=en

Life Is What You Make Of It
—Ernest Holmes

The two fundamental propositions which we must remember are that we are creative centers in Mind, and that our thought is creative through the action of a Power greater than we are. If these propositions are true, it follows that everything in our personal experience depends upon our mental and emotional reactions to life and our deep realization of the intimate relationships we have with the Infinite.

In this way, we see that life is what we make it and there are tremendous possibilities implied; but at the same time, this seems to place a great responsibility on our shoulders that we do not always desire to recognize or accept, regardless of the potentials involved. For the most part, we seem to want to shun responsibility, we want to do things the easy way, we would like to just coast along and have everything taken care of for us.

However, we have outgrown our crib and we have spread our wings and are on our own, both in our physical lives and in the life of the race of man on earth. We are maturing and in doing so, we cannot evade or ignore the nature of things as they are. We do think, our thought is creative, and as a result our life is what we make it. …

Where previously we may have frantically splashed around getting nowhere, barely keeping our heads above water, we now know that swim we can, and swim we will, carrying ourselves along the stream of life with direction and confidence.

This is an excerpt from “A New Design for Living,” written by spiritual visionary Dr. Ernest Holmes and Willis H. Kinnear.