What do you really want out of life?

Every time we send our mailing list a survey asking what you want from the Lefkoe Institute, what you want out of life, or what you would like to change in your life, the most frequent answer we get is overcoming fear in order to take action. Other answers include: Eliminating other negative feelings and wanting to be more successful. On a recent questionnaire many of you mentioned wanting to make some type of contribution to others.

Is that all there is to life?

These are certainly worthwhile goals. I suspect that they are representative of what most people in developed countries would say. (In some parts of the world the answers would be: shelter, sufficient food and water, physical safety, etc.) Your answers were the same ones I would have given for most of my life. I’m happy to say that using The Lefkoe Method (TLM) has helped me and many others achieve the goals listed in our surveys.

But at some point I asked myself: I certainly would like to remove my obstacles to success, but is that all there is to life? Life has to be about more than getting rid of my problems and “having things.”

In an attempt to discover what else there might be to life, I unlearned hundreds of beliefs, de-conditioned a lot of conditionings, and dissolved all the meanings I could distinguish every day. I also listened to hundreds of podcasts, read innumerable books, and constantly practiced the techniques in the Lefkoe Freedom Course and the Advanced Lefkoe Freedom Course (ALFC) after those courses were created.

Eventually, by consistently using all the processes in TLM I was able to go way beyond my initial goals.

Here’s where I am today

I sat down recently and made an inventory of my life. Here is my description of what my life looks like today. Every item on the list is not true for me every minute of every day, but this list is a pretty accurate description of me and my life most of the time. And when I don’t think, feel or act like I describe below, I don’t give that fact any meaning. I just ask myself what I can learn from the experience and move on.

• I have created a personal vision beyond anything I had ever thought I could accomplish earlier in my life,
• I have identified the contribution I want to make to others and removed many of the barriers in the way of making that contribution,
• I am regularly starting projects I would have been afraid to start years ago,
• I am rarely upset or angry by what my loved ones do or say; when I am I usually am able to dissolve the meaning that caused the upset.
• I experience unconditional love with most people, including those I used to dislike (this is one I still have to improve on, but I am able to do this frequently),
• I am excited and passionate about my work without the upsets that used to come when I didn’t achieve what I intended or when I got negative feedback from others,
• I am no longer being concerned about what others think of me and no longer need to do and say things to impress others, as I had been earlier in my life,
• I no longer fear rejection,
• I feel confident about my ability to do almost anything I choose to do; in fact I especially like committing to do things I don’t know how to do and then figuring out how to do it,
• I see multiple possibilities for most situations and realize that the viewpoints of others make as much sense to them given their life experiences and beliefs as my viewpoints do to me given my experiences and beliefs,
• I have virtually eliminated stress and emotional suffering from my life; I didn’t feel a moment’s stress or emotional suffering when I recently received a diagnosis of fourth stage metastatic colon cancer,
• I have eliminated most of the barriers—the beliefs, conditionings, and meanings—that stand in the way of living my ideal life and becoming my ideal me,
• In fact, I have raised my consciousness so that much of the time I experience nothing missing in my life, anything is possible, and there are no limitations,
• I have made virtually all the changes in my life I had always wanted to make and had never been able to make,
• I have eliminated the “shoulds” and negative self-talk that used to sabotage my enjoyment of life,
• I recognize that the most of the remaining problems I face are not because of my inability to deal effectively with the world; they are the result of the world I created for myself with my beliefs about myself, people, and life—which enables me to dissolve most problems merely by changing my beliefs about my world,
• I create breakthroughs in every area of my life regularly, which enables me to take actions I had not taken before, so I can produce results I had not produced before,
• I get tremendous enjoyment and satisfaction from my journey, while remaining unattached to the destination.
• I am truly happy almost all of the time and when I’m not, that’s okay.

I’m confused

When I compare the goals most frequently mentioned in our surveys with what I now know is possible for a human being, I’m left with a question: Why are most of these qualities/characteristics/ways of dealing with life not listed when I ask my readers what they want from life and from the Lefkoe Institute?

I’ve thought of two possible answers:

1. You don’t think they are possible, so it never occurs to you to say you want them.

2. You are so focused on overcoming the day-to-day obstacles in your life—the things that are in the way of you getting what you want—that you don’t really think about what would come next. (This would be like asking people in third world countries why they don’t think about having a better job when they have none at all; better food when they have none at all; a nicer and bigger home when they sleep on the ground under a leaking tent.) Maybe we’ve just got to handle our more basic needs before we think about wanting more subtle “higher level” satisfactions.

(See Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for more details on this point. On the other hand, one study seems to indicate that although fulfilling our basic needs was “strongly correlated” with happiness, people all over the world reported that self-actualization needs “were important even when even when many of the most basic needs were