The End of Achievement

If I had a prayer it would be: “God spare me from the desire for love, approval, and appreciation. Amen” – Byron Katie

In my last writing, The End of Effort, I spoke about letting go of the need to prove your worthiness to be loved through achievement. As these writings come through me as opposed to my own mental wisdom, I really had to digest that lesson for myself. As often happens, more came up for me. 

I’ve always had a goal or direction to follow. If the goal had no time frame, then I’d call it an aim or intention to create something. Even if I had understood the Universe’s timetable for creating and that I needed to let go of when I believed things should show up, I never let go of achieving- not fully. Even now, I’m having trouble with it. 

After writing The End of Effort, my heart started to communicate with me while in meditation. It asked me, “What if my sense of self-worth never came from anything I ever do, what if it never came again from accomplishment?” It made me cry as an intense sensation of love and shame came over me.

When I settled back into The Now and the feelings I was experiencing, I said to my heart, “I’m scared. I’ve been achieving my entire life; I don’t know who I would be if I wasn’t being that way.” It replied, “Be no one, just be here with me.” Then shame came over me and I said, “So I have been doing this wrong my whole life? I didn’t need to do all those things?” With gentle love, it said, “All of it has led you here to me; it was not a waste.”

Then the question came to me: Which one was I, the one asking the questions or the one answering them? Or both, or neither? Or the space that held the conversation?

“I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I’ve been knocking from the inside!” -Rumi

Letting Go of Outcome 

What if you never looked outside of yourself for approval ever again? What then would be the reason for performing an action? When it comes to feeding yourself, bathing yourself, or going for a walk in nature, these are acts of self-love that have no intention or outcome; they are simply life in motion.  

When it comes to being with a friend, laughing at a joke, or playing with a child, these acts nourish in a different but similar way. You cannot do them wrong and there is no physical reward.

When it comes to work, career, creation, and expression, however, we very much get tied up in the outcome of executing the action. The reward will make us suffer through things we hate. If you suffer to achieve, the prize will always be tainted, and worse, you will believe that suffering is the only way to create anything of value. What if we never looked to the completion of a thing but the act of completing it as our only reward? 

What if we did something only for the joy of doing it? It is difficult to separate the outcome from the act. I always find food analogies to be helpful. So the question becomes, “Do I eat only to get full?” If having my hunger satisfied was the only goal of eating, it would be a boring act indeed. If I were solely focused on the outcome, it wouldn’t matter what I ate because I only cared about being full. I could eat vitamin paste or raw onion just for the nutrients and to fuel the body. In this analogy, we can see that creating the meal, serving the dish, and eating the food are by far more important than satisfying the hunger.  

The hunger simply inspires this symphony of loving creation to take place. So then could “paying the bills” also inspire a similar loving creation to take place? What if you let go of the money as the outcome for any work or task you ever did again? What if the pure joy of being a part of creation and having the Universe work through you was enough, and paying bills was just a byproduct like feeling full from the meal? 

Letting go of outcome also means letting go of your dream of the future. Every time I go through an intense breakup in a love relationship, I notice that I’m not only breaking up with the person but also the dream I had built in my mind of us being together. The future of us walking down the aisle, buying a home, going on long trips, creating a life together. For me, it’s as if the hardest part of ending the relationship was ending that future dream. 

Well now it is time I do that with my own future dream and lead by example for you. This dream I had of being rich and famous. Of the world knowing who I am and being one of its favorite sons. No matter how hard I tried to erase it, that vision was always in the back of my mind, subconsciously running as if to give all my “hard work” a purpose. Even now, I feel it struggling to stay inside. When I uproot this belief, I find that same scared boy who just wants love from his family.  

Now it is time to dive off the cliff and divorce this dream. The cliff comes in the form of life-changing questions. What if my heart gave me everything I ever needed? What if it gave me all the love, all the appreciation, all the approval, and all the validation that the world couldn’t even come close to giving me? What if I never looked outside myself again for any of those things?

What if I never worried again about accomplishing anything?

Abundance Mentality vs. Accumulation Theory

As always, I must circle back to money. In the financial world of which I am steeped in day to day, I find that most people believe that living a life with money in vast quantities is better than living a life without money. I’m not going to argue that here because it is far too vast a subject.  

Let me just say that I think living a life without alignment, purpose, or connection with my inner self is far worse than living without money. I’ve done both, and alignment with soul is the only power we truly need to create anything we want. Money is a poor substitute. 

However, what I want to talk about is that in the financial world of planet Earth there is a prevailing belief that if you have a big pile of money, all your worries will be dissolved and you can rest easy. Most people call it retirement. This is the outcome that your life’s work is thought to be for. To amass the big pile so you can finally cruise into death on a cloud of feathered pillows.

However, what only a few have pointed out is this is still scarcity thinking. It upholds the idea that the elderly are useless as if we need them to be hunters and kill buffalo for the whole tribe. It also reinforces the fact that not only will your body become useless one day, but so will your mind. And because of that, you need money to sustain you when this inevitability comes. Or that toward the end of your life when the kids are grown, you’ve worked long enough, you will finally stop working and do what you love—the golden years. 

The question is though, why would you ever spend your life doing something you didn’t want to do for the outcome of being able to stop, and then finally doing what you dreamt of? You might call it the ultimate delayed gratification, but I call it scarcity mentality. Because to buy into this bullshit, you would have to believe that The Universe will stop providing for you when you make the shift and start heading in the direction of inspired action. It means you have to have a bank account full of money to realize your dream because you will be cut off, and no more will come.

This is possibly the most ridiculous lie the mind keeps alive because it ignores the fact that you have been provided for every day of your entire life. And that the Universe is the thing inspiring you to follow your heart and head toward your dreams. Why would it create the inspiration in you and then cut your funding the minute you finally listened? It doesn’t make any sense, but you have to see it to see through it. 

Accumulation Theory (the ‘I need a big pile of money’) only makes sense for those people who don’t know their purpose in life. Because people believe that money is the only way to manifest things, and no one is going to pay you for sitting on your ass watching TV all day. So because the average person has never really asked themselves what they truly want and has never cultivated communication with their heart space to ask it what excites it; they just want a big old pile of money so they can do “whatever they want” when the golden years come…even though they have no clue what that is.  

Utilization Theory says that all or at least most of the resources I have are going to be put to the use of me living my purpose on earth. This is an abundance mentality. The best definition of abundance is doing what you want to do when you want to do it. That definition is so good because it eliminates the need for a pile of money; all you need is just enough. A small meal that fills you up is as good as a feast. Yes, another food analogy. 

If true abundance is money showing up right when you need it to, that means the only thing stopping you from living your heart-inspired dream is your doubt that it won’t. So, you have to ask yourself why is it so easy to believe in my doubts but not in myself? Why do I believe money won’t show up when I’m living from a heart-centered purpose? Why do I believe there is no value in living my dream? 

You are reading this for a reason. Something drew you to it. You can ignore it if you wish and go on wondering why all your accomplishments are empty and short-lived. Always wondering why all glory is fleeting and why money never sticks around or doesn’t have the fulfillment you thought it would. Or you can listen to your heart. 

What if all the money you ever needed was always there when you needed it, but only if you were living your soul’s purpose for entering this life? And what if all achievements that were not in alignment with that purpose along with the money, love, and glory that came with them always crumbled like a house of cards? As if life was showing you over and over again that this isn’t the way for you.

“You can always measure what you’ll lose, but you can’t see what you’ll gain.” -Kyle Cease

Written With Purpose, From My Heart To Yours. Good Journey My Friends