It’s not that goals are bad.  They’re not, but I’ve learned that aspirations and intentions flow more with Spirit than goals sometimes do.  Think about a new year’s resolution – it’s like saying “I resolve to change!”

It’s not a bad thing to do, but I like a kindler, gentler approach.

Sometimes goals and resolutions are the ego’s way of trying to magically change a life.

The ego makes a resolution at a New Year’s party, and somewhere underneath it believes the resolution itself will do the work. I’ll just declare it, and poof, my life will be different.  Within a few weeks, we’ve often already failed.

I don’t know about you, but that approach only ever made things harder for me. I’d resolve to do it differently without having the skill set to actually allow miraculous healing into my life.

Here’s what I’ve learned instead.

Rather than trying to make things happen, we allow them to happen.

We do that by holding an aspiration in our mind. An intention. We cultivate a felt sense of how we’d like to live and be.

This is one of my favorite parts of leading Masterful Living. I invite everyone to set an aspiration, not a rigid goal to force, but a heartfelt vision of how they’d like to feel and be.  It’s so valuable to work this way.

My own aspiration sounds like this: to be holy, loving, kind, and respectful to myself and others. To feel at peace and in the flow of love and prosperity. To awaken to my true identity.

When we’re identified with the ego, we look at an aspiration like that and think, “That’ll never happen.”

But when we’re identified with Spirit, something shifts. We think, “I’m so interested to see how this unfolds.” Because, as it says in A Course in Miracles, “all thought produces form at some level.”

So we hold the aspiration in front of us all year long. We set the intention each morning. And we make one more loving choice than the day before.

And when we feel irritated that things aren’t how we’d have them?  That’s worth noticing.

We can’t be irritated unless we’re identified with the ego in that moment.

Spirit knows everything is in perfect Divine Order all the time, regardless of how it looks.

So the irritation isn’t really us. It’s the ego thought system ready to be released.

We don’t force our life into being. We allow it.  We’re spiritual beings having a human experience.  Let’s appreciate our humanity, have compassion for it and remember our divinity is more powerful than anything else in our life.

This allowing, this aspiration-setting and daily gentle practice, is the very heart of what we do together in my Masterful Living Program. If you’d like a full year of holding your aspiration in community, I’d love to have you with us next year!

IN-PERSON EVENT – Quantum Counseling Training Intensive in July – This is my most powerful healing event – and I only do it in person every other year. If you have an interest in training to be a spiritual counselor or simply doing some dealing work to open up your intuition and improve your relationships, I’ve been offering a professional training intensive for the last 15 years. This year we’re doing the training intensive – open to anyone whether or not you have any interest in becoming a counselor – the Quantum Counseling Training Intensive in Asheville NC Sunday, July 12th to Saturday, July 18th with Jennifer Hadley and Mark Anthony Lord, as well as Guest Teachers Alan Cohen, Jon Mundy and Lisa Natoli, Michael Mirdad joining us online – register soon so you can qualify for early-bird bonuses please click here now for more info.

Did you miss it? Q&A for the Quantum Counseling Training Intensive is available on replay now. Have you felt the nudge to go deeper in your healing journey—but you’re not sure where to begin?  The replay is available now!

LATEST PODCAST EPISODE: Mark Anthony Lord: The Work That Heals Us Mark Anthony Lord and I met as practitioners in training in 1999, and we’ve walked the same path ever since: prayer practitioner training, becoming ministers, starting our own ministries, learning to counsel and to train counselors. We each came up through a dark night first. What we keep marveling at is that the work itself is what healed us, and that A Course in Miracles met us at every turn. We go all the way back to the beginning here, and we don’t tidy it up.