I had the pleasure today of visiting the Conscious Life Expo with my daughter. It's a three-day event with over 120 exhibitors, lectures, and workshops with the philosophy that The primary intention of the Conscious Life Conference and Exposition is simple: to participate in the conscious co-creation of a new world, a world based on new paradigms in science, in spirituality, in longevity, in local and global community, in relationship, in health and well-being. And while we co-create this new wholistic model through our authentic self expression, we also participate in a powerful and passionate celebration of life and love. The purpose of the Conscious Life Conference and Exposition is to bring us all together. It is a three-day gathering of the tribes, a three-day celebration of evolution and consciousness and a three-day brainstorming session on who we are, where we are and where we are going.
In reality, it was a hotel full of women dressed like goddesses and men with long flowing robes and long hair sharing their unique secrets in life, each with a particular niche of their view of truth. We could have our tongue or future read, lie on a lavender mat on a moving circular board, see a picture of our aura, or eat assorted wheat-gluten-meat-and dairy-free treats. The workshops included "The Inside Scoop from Outside this Dimension" and "UFO Crash Retrievals" and "Acutonics and Soul Sonics" and "Animal Communication for Everyone." I admit to being a bit out-of-the-box myself, but I sure don't know what these things are all about. But it was a peaceful group of people quite serious about their views and I respect that passion.
We really went to see Dan Millman, the writer of "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior," one of the books I've read recently and wanted to go out and buy for everyone I care about. It's a somewhat fictionalized story of the author's journey to enlightenment and, as far out as his path has taken him, it gives a down-to-earth message of how to live life more fully and more consciously and it truly did change my life.
We didn't know what to expect meeting Dan. You never know if a great writer is a good speaker, but we found him to be amazing. It's like he was talking with each of us, delivering his message with stories and humor in a way that we really understood and that spoke to our hearts. He talked about "what is the way of the peaceful warrior" and what is the "real secret." And I'd like to share it with all of you.
In the midst of this hotel full of what we thought to be really quite far-out people, each touting their particular passion at the ultimate truth, Dan said that there is "one light and many lamps." That often messages are not what is right or what is wrong, but what we should remember and not forget. We should seek what helps us to live better, to rise above ourselves, and keep pursuing it as long as it works, that the path to enlightenment is really a way to learn about ourselves. That we can read every self-help and spiritual book written and attend every lecture, but the best way to learn is to just fully participate in life, to just "do it." He called relationships "voluntary adversity" because of the challenges they bring us and said that daily life will teach us everything we need to know to evolve into better human beings.
He's a humorous guy. He talked about how some of us think we'll find happiness in the western path of accumulating possessions and status and material things and fail and then go to the eastern path of nonattachment and meditation but that the real goal is balance. Like the really opposite words "peaceful" and "warrior," the most success in achieving fulfilment in life comes from a balance of both or "keeping our head in the clouds and our feet on the ground." Dan says it does take courage to live this life but that having a peaceful heart and a warrior's spirit is the balance needed - and that it's not about success or failure but finding one's individual limits.
And then he talked about The Secret, that hugely successful book and movie that came out recently that purported to be the Law of Attraction. Like positive thinking from the 1950s, it said that we need only know what we seek, like money or our soul mate, and that the universe would bring it to us. But he said that a spiritual law is something that always works and never fails, like the law of gravity, and that something that is only successful sometimes is really a theory. He did like that the Secret suggested that we focus on what we want, a path to knowing our authentic self, and that we should learn to dream bigger. But he said that the real secret is that changes take time and effort to reach our goals and that our lives are shaped by what we do more than what we think. Sure, it's good to have positive thoughts, but who can do that 24/7? Our thoughts are like a road map, but it's up to us to take the journey. And, like the serenity prayer I learned decades ago, we must learn what it is that we can change, what we can influence, and what we have no control over at all.
We can't change reality, but we can change how we perceive it, he says. Our emotions are the weather patterns of the body, and obviously we have no control over the weather. Feel frightened, he asked, and we realized that it's not possible to do that on command, but stand up or more around are things we can do. We can only control our actions and behavior so it's up to us to choose our actions - the challenge becomes turning what we learn and what we know into what we do. Dream big and start small, like planning to get fit and healthy but start by just putting on our walking shoes. The real secret of the Peaceful Warrior is to just get up and do it, just do it. He ended with a story about running up a mountain, that it was so hard and everyone wanted to stop and the leader said that they could decide to stop with every step, as long as they kept running to the top. I'll see you there!
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