You were born into this physical reality with certain passions and desires — predilections, if you will — designed to effortlessly indicate directions and interests for this lifetime. . . Naturally followed, these inclinations would lead you into subjects, interests and realms of discovery designed to unleash and expand your personal power, creativity and consciousness.

If you didn't already have a sense of what you need to do to feel creative and purposeful, you wouldn't feel uneasy or incomplete for lacking it. Perhaps your path for this lifetime isn't the solid, static thing you thought it was. . . Perhaps your path is more like a river: a river of consciousness, flowing effortlessly through time and space, bounded on one side by issues of honor and on the other by issues of integrity, energized by passion, limited only by your beliefs of what is possible.

Honor is a condition of your relationships with others. Integrity is a condition of your relationship with yourself. With these boundaries, your personal path is what gives direction and purpose to your life. It's that built-in psychological compass that produces those vague feelings of uneasiness and discontent when you drift off your path and purpose.

To anyone who comes to the realization that we do indeed co-create our reality, or at least create our experience of reality, ‘reasons' are the booby prize. In simplest terms, you either succeed or fail concerning a particular goal. Success never needs to be explained, it is just what happened, failure seems to need an explanation.

So when you fall short of your goal, the ego (that monotonous voice in your head, that internal dialogue) manufactures reasons for why you failed. These reasons are used to rationalize, justify and generally avoid responsibility in any given situation.

Accept the fact that you are the source of your own experience, once you've accepted that issue — without the attendant self-inflicted wounds of guilt, shame, embarrassment, or other egotistical value judgements — you can begin to create the relationships, and experiences you believe you deserve. Your experience can never exceed your images and truest expectations, — you always get, not necessarily what you want, but what you believe you deserve.

What keeps most people from following their path, from wholeheartedly creating the life they want, from fully participating in the wonders of the world, is their unwillingness to accept responsibility for what they've already created, attached to an equal resistance to resolving and releasing their past. So they continually try to row backward against the flow of their own river. They drag their old sad stories with them, often due to vague notions of disloyalty or fear of loss of identity. This results in the past being incomplete. Once something is completed, it disappears. And what is left is space. Space to create the life you want. Continually dragging your past with you not only wears you out, but also prevents you from expanding your future possibilities as well as boring everyone who knows you.

Exerpts from an article by Lawrence Banghart