Being Luminous
From Mastering Life's Energies
B Y   M A R I A   N E M E T H,   Ph D,  M C C

From the Introduction:
What Is the Question To Which Your Life Is the Answer?

From Chapter One :
Being Luminous

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed
by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
- Mark Twain

THE ENCARTA DICTIONARY defines luminous as "emitting or reflecting light, startlingly bright, inspiring, radiant, resplendent, stunning, splendid."

Our experience is luminous not when we are thinking about living our lives, but when we are fully engaged physically in reality. The experiences that reflect luminosity are those based on actions taken with clarity, focus, ease, and grace. By clarity, I mean seeing what is truly important and creating a game worth playing and goals worth playing for. By focus, I mean directing our energies and attention toward accomplishing what calls to our hearts. By ease, I mean venturing farther than we normally would in going for our dreams - with a bit of elegance instead of struggle. Finally, grace means being consistently grateful and using spiritual principles so that we are ever aware that all is well.

Luminosity - it's worth emphasizing - is clarity, focus, ease, and grace in action. It can't be invoked by psychological insight or analysis. It's fresh. Luminosity doesn't comb its hair but rather lets the winds of life blow freely through it.

My friend Aimee had a luminosity wake-up call while sitting over cappuccino and croissants with orange marmalade on her fortieth birthday.

Luminosity is about that "something more." It is about taking a deep breath and knowing that all is well. It is about being successful without being exhausted. It is about locating your natural heart of compassion and seeing what you really want to be doing with your life - not what you should do, not even what you ought to do, but what you really want to do.

I know about the "issues" Aimee referred to. As a clinical psychologist, I've been trained in different psychotherapy approaches. I was in psychoanalysis myself as part of my training - three times a week for ten years. Lying on a couch, I talked (and talked) about my issues. To be fair, much of what I discovered helped me become less anxious and more centered. But my problems and dilemmas consumed my attention. They took center stage when I talked with friends about what I wanted to do with my life. It never occurred to me that continually analyzing my problems was not the key.

Then, as I approached my own fortieth birthday, I got restless. I was bored with how I thought and talked about my life. In the early eighties I went to a series of seminars on self-transformation. A light suddenly turned on. I glimpsed a new way of thinking that wasn't based on diagnosing and treating what was wrong. In those seminars we looked not so much at why we thought the way we did but at what we were doing with our lives. I saw that everyone wants to know that his or her life makes a difference - that we all count for something.

Still, I didn't attain luminosity. I took what I learned and single-mindedly pursued my goals and dreams. But it went too far. After a while I saw that I had become, as my friend Ellie put it, a "success object." I was a walking, talking success machine. I was doing a lot - driven to raise the bar, go farther and faster, to prove myself. I compared myself with every other person who was successful and always came out on the bottom. You've probably never done this yourself... or have you?

As a result of all this activity, I achieved goals but was often too exhausted to enjoy what I had done. I looked for what was next, never what was right in front of me. It was no fun.

We really do teach what we need to learn. For example, I wrote The Energy of Money to help people use money in accord with spiritual principles so that they can be prosperous from the inside out. The book came about because of a bad business investment I had made, and so I spent years teaching these principles to others so that they wouldn't make similar mistakes in their own lives.

Now I'm learning about luminosity, even as I write this book. Luminosity is about living the life you were meant to live, without running yourself into the ground and driving those around you crazy. I have been privileged to learn about luminosity in the presence of about fifty thousand others - ministers, millionaires, mentors, students, health-care professionals, grandparents, in short, people of all ages and interests - who have taken seminars from me over the past twenty years. What you will find here is their stories, along with the principles that emerged for living the luminous life.

The luminous life isn't predictable. It isn't tied up in a neat package. In the now-famous series of interviews Bill Moyers conducted with Joseph Campbell about the hero's journey, Campbell talked about how unpredictable life is and how difficult it is to see what may happen in the future. In fact, life is confusing, and things don't always make sense. Campbell told a story about King Arthur's knights searching for the Holy Grail, which was hidden in the middle of a dark forest. Each knight had to enter the forest in the darkest place for him, where there was no path. The reason for this was simple, Campbell said, because if you could actually see a path in front of you, it wasn't your path but that of someone who had gone before you.

Later in that interview series Campbell talked about what happens when we look back on our life. That's where we begin to see how everything fits, and we make sense of the decisions we made. We say to ourselves, "Oh, that's why it was important to move to Seattle," or, "Now I see how lucky I was to meet Tom just when I did." Looking back, we get a sense of continuity.

Imagine you're stopping for a moment and turning around to look back on your own hero's path. You see that all along it are strung beautiful round paper lanterns, the kind that people hang on trees during the summer. Each one casts a golden glow that illuminates a part of your trail. As you continue to look back, you see that whether the sky was a royal blue or gray and overcast, these lanterns shone nevertheless. Sometimes fog settled in, but you could still see the warm light from each globe. Now consider that each lantern represents a luminous moment that you designed and put in place. Wouldn't that be great to look back on? You could see without a doubt that indeed yours was a good life.

The Call to Luminosity
You deserve to live the life you were meant to live, and you have the energy to do it. It's time to focus that energy instead of wasting it. And by energy I mean your money, time, physical vitality, creativity, enjoyment, and relationships. All these are forms of energy that you and I can learn to focus toward what we truly want in life. We can master this energy or remain frustrated and in a perpetual bad mood.

Luminosity summons images of light and radiance. All of us want moments in which there's enough light that we can see clearly all the possibilities open before us. We want our eyes to see and our ears to hear what has always been there.

Luminosity is also about going toward the light, being in love with the light and not even worrying about getting away from the darkness. I've learned that whatever I try to get away from only follows me, nipping at my heels. Going toward the light gives more hope. It takes less energy than trying to get away from something - and it's much more fun.

There, I've said it. Fun: the f-word. A friend once told me something like this: "I want to get enlightenment, but I don't want to be so heavy about it. This enlightenment stuff sounds so serious. Can't I just have a little fun?" (The answer is yes.)

It takes guts to turn your attention away from what you think is wrong with you, others, or your work environment - to turn from complaints to contribution. It takes daring to become focused on dreams instead of dilemmas. You could get worried that if you don't look at your shortcomings - or those of others - something bad will happen. You may be so used to looking at your problems and concerns that the thought of leaving them behind sends chills through you. Later on we'll see why this is so and give you a way to go beyond your worries as you travel on the road to luminosity.

But right now, just to begin, ask yourself, "Would it be all right with me if life got easier? More fun?" We might get suspicious of a question like that, wondering, "What's the catch?" or "How does this apply to my work?" Get used to it. I'm going to ask you that same question a few times in this book.

The Difference between Happy Moments and Luminous Moments
Luminous moments are different from happy moments. Yes, luminosity includes happiness. But as we define them here, luminous moments involve focused action.

Happy times look like this: I was eight, and my mom owned a bakery. On this particular day the bakers had made a three-foot tub full of dark bittersweet chocolate icing. They used about ten pounds of pure sweet butter and real vanilla. You could smell it all through the bakery. The trouble was, this batch was overcooked and too dark to use. There it sat on the kitchen floor, a tub of lukewarm dark chocolate icing with just the slightest pool of melted butter on top. It called to me as I stood over it. I looked up. Mom was watching, a smile twinkling in her eyes. As though she had read my mind, she said four words: "Go ahead, do it!" And I did. I plunged my arm down into the warm, dark, sweet chocolate. The icing oozed between my fingers. I drew my arm out of the soft icing and started to lick it off. My arm smelled like butter for two days.

But a luminous moment looks more like this: I was twelve. I had worked at the bakery and saved up $20. I caught the bus and went to a department store to buy my mom a Mother's Day gift. I saw a gold-plated pin in the shape of a sheaf of wheat. It was $19.95. I plunked the money down, bought it, and gave it to my mom the next day. I was nervous because it was the first time I had ever gone out on my own to buy her something. What if she didn't like it? She opened the package, looked at the pin, and burst into a big smile. She told me it was perfect and how creative it was of me to give her something that reminded her of baking. My heart soared! I felt so proud.

It's now almost half a century later, and my mom has long since passed away. Burglars broke into my home many years ago and took almost everything my mother left me, all the great rings and jewelry she had bought over the years. All, that is, except for that gold-plated pin shaped like a sheaf of wheat. It's been with me through ups and downs over the years, and it always reminds me how I made my mom happy that day.

The difference between a happy moment and a luminous moment is this: in luminous moments you have taken action on something important to you. In the happy moment, I enjoyed that luscious warm fudge icing all over my arm. I was in the right place at the right time and knew from my mom's look and encouragement that she loved me. But in the luminous moment, I knew that my mom knew that I loved her. I had taken focused action to show my mom how precious she was to me. Luminous moments occur when you generate something important from inside yourself and make it real in the physical world. Bringing it to pass takes energy that you have to focus. It might even involve risk because you might fail.

Think about times in your past that were great, that you'd characterize as "the best." Where were you? What were you doing? And that is the key question: What were you doing?

Were you writing a book, mentoring a colleague, composing a song, taking your kids on a white-water-rafting adventure, planting a garden, talking with a patient or client, cooking dinner for friends, or comforting a family member? Was it a moment when you finally picked up the phone and called a friend just to say you love and appreciate them?

As a result of taking that action, you may have experienced a quality that people associate with a luminous moment. Whatever you were doing, look at the quality of that instant. Perhaps you experienced elements of quality that look like this:

I was elated when I saw my mom's smile as I gave her that gold-plated pin. I felt so proud that I had met the challenge of getting her that piece of jewelry. I had saved up the money and, for the first time, taken a bus alone. This was big.

Now I wear that pin whenever I have a challenging meeting to attend or a talk to give for which I lack a bit of confidence. It reminds me of the time when I chose a goal, worked for it, took a risk - and it worked.

It's Not How Much You Do but What You Do
I was once driven to do many things in life. People who love me have told me that sometimes all the activity made them dizzy. I'm naturally active, but the driven quality came about because I failed to make an important distinction: the busy life isn't the same as the successful life. Lots of activity does not equal accomplishment. It is possible to do "big" things but be so exhausted, cranky, and depleted afterward that you feel emptier than when you started.

I ask you to entertain a different definition of success: Success is consistently doing what you said you would do with clarity, focus, ease, and grace. Success, seen this way, is an inside job. You don't compare yourself to anyone else. You don't even look at whether what you're doing is big or small. You look instead at the quality of your action and of your experience. Success is not about dragging yourself across the finish line or up the mountain.

Speaking of mountains, let me illustrate what I mean. About two years ago I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with seven girlfriends. It was June and hot - 118 degrees at Phantom Ranch, at the bottom of the canyon. As you hike down the canyon, you're literally going back in time, reading Mother Earth's autobiography. You pass pink layers of rock, then red, then heavy, dark, old, old, old rock that's been there for a billion years and looks like it's been burned in a million fires. The bottom is like a convection oven; you feel the heat radiating off the rocks long after the sun sinks behind the canyon walls. The coolest it gets at night during the summer is around 90 degrees.

My goal was to hike down the Grand Canyon, and back up, with dignity. I wasn't going to crawl or claw my way to the surface as I'd done three years before when I'd pushed myself to climb up as quickly as possible.

This time, halfway down the Kaibab Trail, I realized that my hiking boots were too old and weren't supporting my feet. Hence my toes banged against the boot casings with every step. Any hiker will tell you that one mile like that is painful. Eight miles downhill were excruciating! At the bottom, when I took off my boots, I saw through the blisters that I would lose four toenails.

So how did I snatch clarity, focus, ease, and grace from that situation?

The hike back up took me fourteen hours. Normal hiking, pushing myself a little, would have allowed me to finish in eight. Two of my friends bounded up the trail to finish in five. The rest of us decided not to push ourselves and stopped frequently. We carried water pistols, and when people passed us, we squirted them. Then we'd talk with them and laugh. This was a good thing because the heat in the canyon soon rose to over 100, and everyone needed to be cooled down. This also took my mind off my feet! And every time we stopped, it gave us a chance to really look at the rocks.

Pain is pain, no matter how you look at it, but this time my experience wasn't one big complaint. I forgot about comparing myself to the hikers who'd made it to the top faster. I took the trail literally one step at a time. I got to the top of the canyon with dignity and smiling - despite the fact I was minus four toenails.

In the busy and driven life, there's no clarity, focus, ease, or grace because there's no room for them in the flurry of activity. Moments of elation are followed by longer periods of exhaustion. I call it busyholism, and we look at it here because the minute we talk about taking action in life, some of us start to hyperventilate, thinking it means we need to get even busier. We worry that our daily to-do list will only get longer. But the truth is this: clarity, focus, ease, and grace are principles that decrease the amount of our activity because what we're doing becomes purposeful and focused.

So, if you are going for luminosity, you may have to lower the bar. That's right, I said lower the bar, not raise it. We've learned to raise the bar on our hopes and dreams to a sometimes impossible level. This keeps us either driven and revved up, on the one hand, or lethargic and resigned, on the other.

Instead, you're going to look at what sings to your heart. You will create something we'll call a game worth playing, and you'll choose the goals worth playing for. You'll learn how to gather and focus your energy - your time, money, physical vitality, creativity, enjoyment, and relationships - so that you get what you really want. You'll also learn how to go past that point where you've given up on yourself. You will go from busyholism to accomplishing what is dear to you. But the price you may have to pay for all of this is lowering the bar - going for less, not more.

Let me tell you a success story about someone we'll call Sally. She was twenty-eight when she first came to a seminar I led on how to become financially successful. Tall, with a big smile, she had just gotten off welfare and had a job cleaning homes.

Sally wanted to be financially successful. The definition of financial success is doing what you said you would do with money - with clarity, focus, ease, and grace. The amount of money is not important. I know millionaires who are not financially successful by this criterion; instead, they are worried about money, afraid that they'll lose what they have, convinced that people like them only because they are rich.

Being financially successful was a big challenge for Sally. As she put it, "No one in my family has ever even talked about being financially successful. I want to know that I'm doing something with my money instead of just having a one-night stand with it."

Sally set a goal: an investment portfolio with $600 in it by the end of one year. This would demonstrate her intention to be financially successful.

Every month Sally would work extra hours to put $50 in an investment portfolio savings account. That may not be a huge amount of money, and for Sally it was a bit of a stretch but by no means impossible. By our definition of success, each time she regularly deposited a $50 check, she was demonstrating financial success.

At the end of one year she had $600. She put it in that investment portfolio. "I'm going to put $100 a month away now!" she said.

And so she did. I happened to see her a few months after she put that $1200 into her investment portfolio. She looked like a different woman. Her clothes were more professional, and she was putting herself through school, but what I remember most is what she said about the process: "I thought you had to have confidence and feel better about yourself before you could be financially successful. I waited a long time for that to happen. Now I see I had it backwards. When I got that first $600 and did what I said I'd do, I automatically felt better about myself - like I could take on the world!"

How much - quantity - is not what's most important here. Conventional wisdom tells us that you have to save up larger amounts of money in order for your investments to count. But is that really true? In a spiritual or metaphysical sense, amounts are simply inconsequential. It's the quality of the action - in this case action taken with clarity, focus, ease, and grace - that determines your experience of luminosity. And luminous experiences encourage us to persevere, to keep going. It's the consistency that pays off in the long run.

Success and Luminosity: Just a Matter of Skills
You have everything you need to function perfectly on your hero's journey. Nothing has been left out. There is nothing wrong with you, and there never has been. I say this no matter what you have experienced in your life.

Please let that sink in for a minute. Getting just this from the book might allow your heart to relax and your stomach to calm. Do you realize how much energy we spend with our heart tense and our stomach all tied up in knots? That's because we are worried that at the center of everything, something is wrong with us.

Whatever you have gone through in life or are yet to go through, your experiences are the natural consequences of being a human being. You are already on the hero's journey. It always looks like this. And on this journey, you already have several things going for you: a good heart, the capacity to dream, and the desire to make a difference. How do I know? It's true about everyone, whether they know it or not.

What also may be true about you, as for many of us, is that you have not yet developed the skills you need to attain the goals and dreams most important to you. That's all that's necessary - learning a few skills.

What this means is that you don't need to change who you are and even what you think. There's no need for a makeover. The only thing you need to do is learn to bring forth what is already within you so that you dance with life in the way you were meant to dance.

To illustrate, let's imagine that you buy a new car. It's fully loaded with extras. There's only one catch: you've never learned to drive. Now let's say that you get into this car as soon as you buy it, start it up, and drive away with it. Would that be a logical thing to do? No, you'd quickly get into some sort of trouble, maybe even an accident.

Now let's suppose that after your accident you begin questioning what's wrong with you that you didn't know how to drive. You start to analyze your faults and shortcomings. Maybe you get the "insight" that you have driving "issues" or that your lack of ability is related to an urge to "self-sabotage." You might wonder if you have a fear of successful driving and your fear led to your accident. Given all those other folks driving merrily along, something must be terribly wrong with you.

The truth is that nothing is wrong with you. You simply haven't learned the skill of driving. Once you do learn it, you're off and running, visiting places you've always dreamed of. And amazingly, at the very moment you do this, all your self-analysis drops by the wayside. Your attention is no longer focused on the internal "stuff" because you are having too much fun.

The first skill we're going to learn is how to separate your doubts and worries about what you can or can't do from something much more powerful inside you: your capacity for being willing.

Nevertheless, I Am Willing
People who are successful are willing to do what they don't want to do. They are willing to do what they are afraid of doing. They are also willing to do what they don't know how to do. They have learned to say yes to their lives. Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld captured this well. He said, "For everything that has been, I say thank you, and to all that will be, I say yes."

Say yes to all that will be, and you're taking a step every bit as courageous as those knights who entered the dark forest in search of the Holy Grail. Think about it. You put one foot in front of you. You don't know what your path will look like, but you are going ahead anyway. No more standing at the outskirts, waiting for the trail to show up. You have begun. Even if those customary, limiting inner thoughts are yelling at you to stop, you're on your way.

Say yes to all that will be, and you're giving life permission to serve up your experiences fresh from the oven. No cooling necessary, no added ingredients. You will take what you are given and will appreciate what is offered. You will take it in, digest it, and use it to wake yourself up to everything around you.

But how do you say yes? One way is to say, "I am willing."

By simply being willing, you automatically energize yourself to take action. This is true no matter how long you've put that action on hold. You get in touch with the power that resides in your hero's heart.

Before we go any further, let's look at the difference between being willing and willingness. Some words are more powerful than others. Powerful words light up our hearts while other words bring little or no energy with them. The words you use in everyday life will direct your attention. Ultimately, they affect how capable you experience yourself to be. I have worked with thousands of people who liberated themselves from old doubts and worries simply by seeing the difference between willingness and being willing.

Willingness is a noun, along with words like eagerness, readiness, oneness, and openness. A noun refers to a thing, an object, and because it is a noun we experience it as outside ourselves. For example, when we say, "I have willingness," we're treating it like something we possess - like a car, a glass of water, or a cute cat. "I have willingness" says nothing about who we are, and that's why it isn't as powerful as "I am willing."

Try this out: say "I have willingness" out loud. Next, say "I am willing." Which statement gives you more of a sense of possibility and promise? Which has more energy attached to it?

"I am willing" is the most potent statement you can ever make. It signifies that right here and right now you are ready to go ahead with your life without being forced. You are voluntarily participating, no longer being dragged onto your life's path leaving heel marks in the dirt.

Here's where the nevertheless comes in. Nevertheless means "despite a situation or circumstance," "all the same," "even so." To put nevertheless in front of I am willing means that even with my doubts, fears, judgments, evaluations, attitudes, states of mind, and points of view - even with the usual, limiting internal chatter going on in my head that tells me to turn back, to wait a while, to retreat - I am saying yes to my life's adventure. I am willing.

Right now, please take a piece of paper or a three-by-five card and write "Nevertheless, I am willing" on it. Carry this with you for the next three days. When you hear the usual chatter that comes up every time you contemplate moving forward on an idea, dream, or vision, hold up those four words and read them out loud. Note what happens to your energy.

And that's only the beginning...

© 2007, Maria Nemeth, All Rights Reserved