Holiday Hiatus

I'm taking a blogging break for the rest of the year to enjoy holiday time with friends and family. Look forward to getting more disruptive behavior going in 2011!! Happy Holidays!

Links That Rocked My Week

Alright Disruptors, more passion-finding-rut-disrupting links for your weekend! 

How Does Your Garden Grow? A Gentle Guide to Nourishing the Best in You by Gail Brenner: A lovely post about being gentle with yourself as you whether the passion discovering storm.

Why We're Bored (and how to fix it) by Mike Donghia. A treasure of a post offering up some scrumptious ideas for disrupting your rut.

Reclaim Your Creativity: 3 Steps to Bust Through Inaction by Tara Gentile. You somehow find yourself locked in the room of status quo. I can sure identify with this article, can you?

Links That Rocked My Week

Changing things up here a bit on the blog. For Saturdays, I'm scrapping the Happiness Is section and instead adding something that might be more useful to you all. Going forth the Saturday post will be links to other articles or videos that I discovered during the week that spoke to my heart. So here we go.

I've been writing a lot about passion lately and what it means to "find your passion". I'm stellarly excited to find some great posts out there in blogland this week pertaining to this topic.

How To Find Your Passion by Christine Kane. I love some of the ideas Christine presents here. She removes the pressure of finding this thing called PASSION and makes it simple and within reach for those of us who think passion has to be some grandiose thing that makes us want to shout from the mountain tops.

Finding Your Passion by Tyan. Tyan ads to something I've been touting about here- the idea that the passion thing is more about BEING rather than DOING. Check it out.

You Don't Need a Job, You Need Guts by Ashley Ambirge. Ash's blog is one of my faves. She is definitely a Rut Disruptor. This is her new book and I'm digging it. There is a fabulous section in the book about passion finding. Her theory is to combine what you love doing with who you want to BE. She explains it in a way that will captivate you as all her writing does so well.

Alright passion hunters! That's it for now. I expect some serious passion discovering to occur in the next few days. Got it?  I think even I might be figuring some things out. Dang!

Disruption Mission: No Identity Day

All the world's a stage

and all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many  parts.

-Shakespeare

photo credit: Ivan Bliznetsov

For centuries philosophers have stated that the ego is an illusion. Shakespeare's quote suggests that we are like actors and our very identity is just a "role" that we play for 80 or so years. The ego illusion concept is a core belief in Eastern thought as well.

Before we delve into our next mission, let us define what we mean by "ego". Simply put we mean our "self", our identity. One definition reads, "The self, especially as distinct from the world and other selves." For me anything that defines who TORRIE is- that is part of ego. When I say I am an introvert, an artist, a mother, a person who hates beets- those are all just roles that "I" am currently playing. So if I am not really Torrie, I'm just playing the role of a woman named Torrie, then who am I really? I refer to that part as the AUTHENTIC SELF.

So herein lies the problem...
when I constantly forget that I am not really my ego. We get so sucked in to our story about ourselves that we believe it is concrete. In fact, we go out of our way to force things to fit into our little story about who we are because we don't want our story (our identity) to be DISRUPTED because that makes us feel very uncomfortable. We do this all the time when we say things like, "Oh, I can't meet new people because I am shy." So we go around playing the role of a shy person, and totally forget that we are just playing a role that is totally based on an illusion. Are you with me still?

I've been messing around with this ego stuff and having a grand ol' time with it. And I'm going to state a bold and super fun challenge for all of us: Pick one day and truly believe that your ego is a total fabrication of your own mind. If you find this hard to swallow, then just PRETEND, act as if your ego is an illusion... just for a single day. Are you willing to play along with me?

Now, what you will do during this assignment is to notice how you respond to things. Ask yourself, "How would I respond if I knew the ego wasn't real?" or another question I love from Byron Katie goes: Who would I be without my story?

For me I notice that I don't take anything personally because...well, it makes no sense to do so. When that dumb driver cuts me off (or flips me off) I wonder why they are having a bad day. I imagine that person laughing with joy, or crying with sorrow. I don't go, "You lousy #@#$%!!! What the F**** is your problem? Why are YOU taking your crap out on ME?" In other words I don't try to defend my SELF.

When the kids are behaving badly, I don't try to defend and justify my super-mom role. When something doesn't go according to plan I don't try to defend it. This allows me to see any situation with a crazy amount of detached clarity.

This is also a very powerful technique to use when facing a fear.
If we believe (or pretend to believe) that we have no real "self" to defend, then suddenly the idea of fearing failure seems absurd. And the absolute BEST part of all this is that when you begin to pull away from your ego the AUTHENTIC SELF begins to emerge. And all I can say about that is WOW. 

So won't you join me for one fine day of egoless living? Warning: if you try this you may want to keep trying it. Proceed with CAUTION.