Day 5: Open the Door

At the start of this second section I asked you to center your living in love. Our main purpose on earth is to grow in love; our world needs more love. With more love, we could do away with war- we would have no prejudice, oppression, or violence of any kind. Everyone would have enough food because we would feed each other. We would care for the environment because we love our planet, and the animals, and our children too much to harm it.

How, then, do we create more love in the world? We simply need to open our hearts wide as often as we can, wider and wider, calmly throw open the door to love. 

If you have a leading to act in love, and you have gone through all the stages of discernment, you might be clear on your next steps. That's where we are often stuck, though - we might hear the Truth, but still have doubts about its absoluteness; we might hear the Truth and see our path forward but struggle against apathy, or mind-numbing fear.

Ed Bacon says, “But however Truth comes, it bears with it just enough of its own sense of rightness to overcome the fear of risk taking. While genuine risk plays a crucial role in all of the Habits of Love, it is perhaps most keen in the Habit of Truth. At too many forks in the road, anxiety stops us from following Truth's suggested direction. What will happen if I say yes to Truth as I recognize it? That question can arrest us in our tracks."

Whatever your biggest mission is now - personal growth, healing, service, relationship revival, activism, or something else - you need to find the strength to open the door. This is your growing edge: To accept that you will be carried beyond yourself; to accept that you will find the strength and creativity to take the risk, walk your path, and speak your message out loud. 

Today you will draw on your organizational skills from the first part of this book to open the door to transformational love. 

• Map out your mission: On a plain piece of paper, start a Mini-Map with this priority mission in the center. Looking at your Base Map, follow the connecting lines to all the values (and other priorities) that relate to this one priority, and add them to the Mini-Map. Have a little chat with yourself in your journal, or just make a list of the values (and other priorities) that lead you to action for your mission.

• Set an intention for your mission using the action + deepest reason model.

• Make a backwards calendar: Brainstorm a list of all the supplies, information, people, skills, and steps you need to take to complete your mission. Group all the tasks into chunks. Organize chunks into the order they need to happen. Plug your chunks of action into the weeks of this month on your priorities grid.

• Make a full effort plan for how you will lean in and spark full and energetic effort day-by-day, for your mission: Brainstorm a list of the things that have worked to motivate you in the past and form your Full Effort Practices into simple steps.