Finding Your Passion

Posted by on May 4, 2012 in Belief systems, Get Off the Sidelines, Ken's Blogs, Speak your authentic truth

Finding Your Passion

Is there something in your life that you are truly passionate about?

Maybe it’s singing, dancing, being a life or a business coach, travelling. Maybe it’s being the best mother, or father, or grandparent that you can be. Maybe you want to make a real difference and aspire to change the world. Whatever it is, you find that whenever you’re talking about or doing this thing or things, you literally feel your energy rising. When you talk about it, your voice may rise or speed up, you might even start talking with your hands, the excitement is obvious. You can’t help the smile from coming to your face, and the overall “feel good” feeling goes right to your bones. Aaaahhhh, you start to smile just thinking about the next time you’ll experience it.

There are a few things that I’m passionate about and I like to keep visions of these things in the back of my mind, ready for quick recall, especially for cases when I’m doing something I’m a bit less passionate about. Like paying the bills, or raking the lawn. For some of you, gardening and raking the lawn might be something you’re passionate about as you love your garden. For me, I love my garden but raking the lawn is a chore that simply has to be done and while I love the end result, I might bring up visions of my next golf game while I’m moving from the front yard to the back to complete the raking. Yup, as soon as I’m done the back yard, I’m outta here and off to the golf course. And a smile crosses my face. See ya in a few hours honey.

Passion is one of the most pleasant emotions we experience. Dr. Bruce Lipton writes about the Honeymoon Effect and that experience of complete joy that we walk around with while we’re in a honeymoon period, and it’s a period full of passion. Whether it was the honeymoon period associated with a new relationship or marriage, or a new car or a new job, we remember those periods as the best days of our lives. And they were probably the healthiest times of our life as well.

So what if we lived every day doing something we’re passionate about, even if only for a few minutes? What if we made that commitment to ourselves to do something every day that we were passionate about, or to take steps to living a childhood dream? My belief is that if we were to do this, many of our problems or perceived problems would simply fall away. Every chore, every difficulty that we encounter would become seemingly less difficult as we pulled forth the memory of the last event or the anticipation of the next time we would engage in the particular activity. A quick pause and a couple of deep breaths in the middle of that unwanted but necessary task might be just what the doctor ordered.

You might even find that paying attention to this passion takes you to heights you never thought you could have achieved. I’m sure many authors and sports stars began with a passion and a dream, but no real understanding of what they could become. They worked through whatever obstacles presented themselves and just kept moving forward in the direction of their dreams. As they look back, I think it would be safe to say that they’re glad they followed their passion.

A few years back a video was making its way around the internet. Dr Randy Pausch was a very well-liked and respected university professor at Carnegie-Mellon who was dying of cancer and knew he had only a few weeks to live. He wrote and videotaped his “Last Lecture” about “Really Living Your Childhood Dreams”. This was the message that he wanted to stand at the top of the mountaintops and scream to everyone that would listen. The passion in his lecture was amazing, and the message he left for his kids and the rest of us was truly inspirational. If you missed it, view it here. The video was viewed around the world by millions of people and really made the world stop and pay attention. As I think back on my life journey, this may well have been one of the moments that changed my life.

On a personal note, I have written in a few blogs about my personal journey with an autoimmune condition, and how it was a huge wake-up call for me. Over the last couple years I have really started living my life with a passion, a passion to help people wake up before they get a wake-up call that they don’t want to receive. I have learned so much about what causes disease and other conditions and some of the things that we can do to truly live our best lives and keep our minds, bodies and souls in a condition where disease can not exist. I want to scream from every rooftop and mountain top about my beliefs – how we can understand and shed our limiting beliefs and live our childhood dreams, how we can face fear and stare uncertainty in the face and ask them to move out of the way as we are able to move past them, how living our lives from our authentic truth is so important to our health and well being, how we are all here to STEP into our greatness, and how we can eradicate disease from society. That’s what my last lecture would be, and what the heck, why not start giving it now.

One of my favorite quotes came from “The Last Lecture”:

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

What would your last lecture be? Or what will your legacy be? If you know what it is and you’re living it to the fullest, don’t change a thing. If you know what you’d like it to be and haven’t quite stepped into it, there’s no time like the present to start.

Will you live your life with passion?

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Namaste, Ken

Written by Ken

Ken Jaques describes himself as a Health Care Evolutionary, Community Builder, and Speaker. True healing begins when we treat root causes instead of just masking symptoms. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in 2008, Ken has experienced many facets of the health care system. As “the only patient who ever lost their hair on this low of a dosage of chemotherapy” – as spoken by his rheumatologist – Ken has been on an amazing journal of self-discovery, a journey of true healing. In his blog, Ken shares stories of how his beliefs have changed over the past few years, and how they are still changing. Is it possible that our bodies can heal themselves? Do we really have to live without hope after we receive a chronic illness diagnosis? These are the types of questions that Ken encourages people to ask themselves as they embark on their own physical or emotional healing journey.

Ken is creating a platform to connect People, Patients, Practitioners, Partners and Promoters, enabling a collaborative effort to help shift the focus on health from I-llness to We-llness. Check out the pilot at www.myHealthyCommunity.ca.

“When ‘I’ is replaced with ‘we’, even I-llness becomes WE-llness” ~ Malcolm X

14 Comments

  1. Great message and reminder for us all to wake up and find our true calling in this life time! thanks Ken, have a fab day! Andrea

  2. Thanks very much, Ken! Great reminder! We need such reminders every single day to keep us above whatever is around us that makes us sink, but only if we let it!

  3. Great article. We all need to follow our passions in life and hence make our lives more magical.

    • Agreed Dot, following our passion keeps us healthy and alive. Thanks for commenting.

      Cheers,
      Ken

  4. Ken, yes passion is what we need to give fuel to our desires. I have enjoyed the “Last Lecture” also.

    • Very true Mark. Thanks for commenting, sounds like you’ve found yours.

      Cheers,
      Ken

  5. Yes! I love your message, Ken! It took a lot of soul searching for me to step out of blick and yick and into passion and I can’t imagine anyone living like that 🙂

    • Thank you Laura, I know what you mean. I’m just coming out of the last of my blick and yick myself – I’ve never heard it called that before but I just might use it again 🙂 . Thanks for commenting, love your puppy 🙂

  6. Oh, yes, passion! yay! That is vital life force energy…keeps us alive and kicking! Thanks for this reminder. 🙂 I keep meaning to listen to or read The Last Lecture…thanks for that reminder too.

    • Hi Lisa, Nice to hear from you. Thanks for taking the time to comment. You really will love “The Last Lecture”.
      Cheers,
      Ken

  7. Ken,

    I am so delighted that I found your blog through the blogboost challenge.

    The desire of my heart is to help others discover that ‘they were created with greatness in mind and greatness is meant to be shared.” I have lived 36 years of my life chasing other people’s dreams. Thankfully I am waking up and and working hard to forge my own path.

    I hope we can encourage each other on the journey.

    • Hi Jeremy,

      Sounds like you’re waking up to something amazing. Have fun with your own path. Do some forging but don’t be afraid to just let it go sometimes, some of our best steps are ones we never knew we were going to take. All senses wide open, messages come from the strangest places. Have fun on your journey and I hope we can encourage each other along the way.

      Cheers,
      Ken

  8. Hi, really enjoyed your article! Just wanted to pass along a tip that was shared with me by another blogbooster, that if you bump up your font size to 16 it’s much easier to read on screen and people tend to stay longer. Loved what you had to say and will definitely be back!

    • Hi Alexandria, thanks very much for the comment and for the tip. Now I just have to figure out how to do that within my site :-).

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