What Is Life Organizing?

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What if there was a way to organize and guide your life that more closely resembled lying back on an inner tube as the current carried you along (with you occasionally adjusting your course because you want to smell a wild rose onshore or because you hit a bumpy stretch) rather than a furious, exhausting upstream paddle? What if self-mercy and listening to your authentic desires were your truest guides, far more trustworthy than gauging how much you accomplish in a day or what you earn? What if feeling confusion and uncertainty was actually a sign that you were on the right path? What if you could erase your sense of never having enough time or energy by cultivating a constant loving connection to yourself?

I have been focusing on just these questions, both personally and professionally, for more than twenty years. In general I noticed that most people seem to approach the process of organizing (whether a day, a project, or a life) by setting a goal, breaking it down into doable steps, and then staying the course until reaching the bull's-eye. This method can be very effective in certain situations — I'm not suggesting that you abandon it — but it's only half the story, and we're starving for the rest, for a heart-based, spiritually informed, trusting story. We want to make room for, must make room for, chaos and interruption and accept that most of the time we don't know the big picture and we can only discern what to do one step at a time. This way of improvising our lives is built on our knowledge that we are creating our lives through how we think, how we react, and where we put our attention. We find that the most direct means to create a life that fits us is to embrace each moment as it arises.

I wrote this book because I want to develop this alternative way to shape a life and because it is one way to bring down the Berlin Wall of busyness, the ever-growing belief that to be successful, we must do more and do it faster, a story that is literally killing us. Be warned: this is a subversive way of looking at time. Once you embrace it, you can't go back. The old models will never wholly fit or satisfy you again; they will always be too much about willpower and force, about your private agendas and the mind's endlessly inventive stories.

The way I'm proposing in this book is frightening at first. It asks you, over and over, to trust, to loosen your grip on life, to soften with compassion and love toward yourself and others. It asks you to stop and feel, to tune in to what you really want and what you already know. To act with more boldness on your hunches and your values and to track with more clarity the outcomes of those bold actions. To serve all of life. This process is infinitely rich and it requires trust in your own experiences, in your own lived knowledge. "Test everything; hold fast to what is good" (1 Thess. 5:21) may become one of your mottoes, as might "But all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things will be well," as Dame Julian of Norwich said.

Why is this approach toward creating our lives emerging now? I think it is because of the generation of women who were children in the 1970s and 1980s and watched their parents wear themselves out for a paycheck and are realizing they don't want to live the same way; because we're making spirituality part of our daily lives rather than something we do only on Sunday or on the meditation cushion; because we are honoring intuition and other ways of knowing; and because we've reached the boiling point. We can't live in perpetual exhaustion any longer. We realize that our modern lives aren't totally working, personally or for the planet, so we ask ourselves, What can we create to help us survive and thrive?

Whatever the reasons, more and more women (and some men) are rejecting the overstriving, forcing, rushing, making-life-happen mode and developing a more intuitive yet grounded way to discern and sort the choices available to us. On the surface, it doesn't always look that different, but inside, it feels like the difference between a business suit and organic cotton pj's. I believe, with my whole body, that it is part of the change so many of us are already making or are yearning to make, and yet we have little idea how to talk about it, how to build on it, and how to make it practical. Here's how three women who have been using some of these principles and ideas have described it:

Poppy: "It's about living with greater awareness, cherishing yourself, and finding balance so as to be the most 'you' version of yourself that you can be. It's about becoming."

Wendy: "It's about honor, in several senses of the word: 1) Honor (as in respect) for ourselves, our needs, our bodies, our desires, our wishes. 2) Honor (as in truthfulness and integrity) about ourselves, our needs, our desires and wishes — whether they are 'good' or 'bad' — and in our behavior with others. 3) Honor (as in recognition and reverence) for the goodness and power within us, for the world's goodness and power, and for the Great Divine Entity (whatever you want to call him/her/it/them)."

Helga: "For me, it is about my search for sustained happiness. Aspects include feeling pleased, content, glad, satisfied, and comfortable. It's being happy with myself and what I have in my life. I'm on a journey toward resting comfortably within myself, in the sense of being my own safe place or refuge while staying interconnected with all living things. It takes me to the basics I need for the journey. To be consistently happy I need to know who I am (all parts of me, with no judgment); what I want (body, mind/spirit, heart); how I can be who I am (peacefully); and how I can have what I want (without doing harm).

"Life organizing is also about supplying the questions that get me there a bit faster. And, since the journey does not have an end, life organizing accompanies my twists and turns to always get me back to the source and to what really counts."

"Trust the Life Process"

There is a caveat: this new way of creating our lives can get derailed if we connect it to balance, as in, "If I could just figure out how to balance all these parts of my life, all these demands on my time, and all these interests, I'd be okay." When we're in this frame of mind, we'll always be searching, often more and more desperately, for the holy grail of balance; but we're never going to find it with the eyes or the tools we're using. Balance becomes a girdle, a rigid form into which we try to squeeze ourselves so that our lives will (finally!) be the perfect shape and we will (finally!) be right, safe, and on top of things. Yet this notion of balance is a false ideal that moves us further away from wholeness and ourselves. Real balance comes only when we are in loving touch with ourselves.

The new framework that we are hungering for is what I call "life organizing." I've spent the past thirteen years observing and articulating tools we...