You’re born into the world with little time to think about why you’re here and little time to plan out what you want to do.
You’re told you have to obey your parents, finish school, find a job, work from nine to five, pay your taxes, go to church, and save up for retirement.
Nowhere in that script is how you’ll:
- Find your purpose in life
- Pursue your dreams
- Identify your passions
- Live your life with meaning
That’s because the matrix distracts you from the truth.
The truth is that you, and you alone, need to find your purpose, pursue your dreams, identify your passions, and live your life with meaning — in order to be happy.
What is the matrix?
Morpheus says the matrix is control.
From the Mindful Construct perspective, the matrix is culture gone dysfunctional.
Culture shapes your beliefs and thoughts. Your beliefs and thoughts shape your emotions and behaviors.
If those beliefs and thoughts are unstable, dangerous, or dysfunctional, you suffer the price. By being buffeted by your emotions, trapped in unhealthy relationships, and ineffective in life.
The matrix cannot tell you who you are
The matrix will have you believe that life happens to you.
That you’re a victim of fate.
So when something goes wrong, the matrix tells you blame outside forces.
Blame gets you nowhere. (Unless you work that blame into something constructive.)
You cannot control or change what happens to you. But you can choose how you will respond to your life.
How to break free from the matrix
If you dig the philosophy of response ability and the path of creating your life as a mindful construct, you’re not interested in “get happy now” schemes.
You’re not trying to obtain success at your life-long goals with no work, no time, no pain, no heartache, and no discernment. You’re not chasing after that red pill that will solve all your problems so you won’t ever have to face them.
You know that happiness is an inside job. That the only red pill for personal development is: working with all of your emotions.
Which means, working with your Ego too.
So instead of looking for the latest fad for how to get rid of your Ego, toss your negative emotions to the gutter, or dissociate from other valuable parts of your multidimensional self, you’d just like some solid perspective on how you can take your emotional health and well-being into your own hands.
Mindful Construct delivers this perspective through weekly blog articles, and I’d like to extend the journey further.
Introducing the Your Life is Your Construct e-class
I’ve created a free e-class called Your Life is Your Construct. It’s the first thing you get when you sign up for the Mindful Construct newsletter.
Here are the ten lessons the e-class delivers:
- The Truth About Reality
- The One Simple Story That Changes Your Life
- Why the Universe Within You Is So Important
- 11 Powerful Ways to Take Care of Yourself
- Why It’s a Good Thing You’re Just Like an Iceberg
- Your Emotions are Logical
- How to Start Trusting the Logic of Your Emotions
- The 4 Major Emotion Revolutions
- How to Be Mindful of the Advice You Take
- How You’re Constantly Growing Wiser
After going through the lessons, you’ll have more confidence and a clearer perspective on how happiness is your inside job. You’ll also have some fun, creative, and practical exercises to work with.
What you need to do next
Enter your email address to get the Your Life is Your Construct free e-class & the “5 Reasons Why Science Won’t Give You All the Answers to Life” special report:
You’ll get an email asking you to confirm that you want to receive the newsletter. Click on that link to get started with the lessons. (And to make sure the lessons get through, you can put me on your whitelist.)
I will not rent, sell, or otherwise share the information collected. And you can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Melissa, your posts are awesome! I am looking forward to reading your special report.
Thanks Sara, you’re welcome to share your thoughts on it once you’re finished!
Melissa –
“Happiness is an inside job.” I love that! So many of us look for fulfillment in all the wrong places when it’s in us all the time. Great post.
Hey Melissa,
Stumbled upon your blog again after almost a year (have been working on a project and took some time off the blogosphere). Amazing content and really well-thought-out articles. Happy to find plenty of information to catch up on.
Regarding “the Matrix” it would be interesting (well, for me at least) to see an article that goes into the cultural and social programming in more depth. It’s really shocking when we realize how almost all of ‘our’ beliefs, ‘our’ ideas, ‘our’ conclusions are not our at all. How we mostly scan around for different ideas and selectively pick the ones that suit us and convince ourselves they’re our own. How our life and the decisions we make about the way we live it is shaped by the cultural programming, by the ideas of the people around us, the media etc. And how we never stop to question these ideas at all but just let them influence us and our decisions. Our minds in order to survive need to make sense of the world around us. And the way we do it is by tapping into the ‘explanations’ and ‘narratives’ that we find around us – the parents, figures of authority, codes of behaviour, moral values, religion etc. There is really nothing else we can use, especially in younger age. And since the ‘narratives’ of our parents and other people are just taken from the narratives of their parents and the older generation we effectively re-cycle the same patterns of thinking, the same ways of behaviour, the same concepts about life etc. (would love to see something about the Jungian ‘collective unconscious’ and archetypes) .
So much or what we proudly call ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’ is just a product of social and cultural conditioning, our minds are full or recycled ideas and concepts that are probably largely inaccurate, biased and dysfunctional… And we live ‘our’ lives completely oblivious to this, not aware of ‘the Matrix’ and the extent to which we’re in it. Not only on a personal level but at ‘tribal’ level – our families, our societies, our countries and globally as humanity…
Ok, got carried away a bit :)
Now, time to sign up to the ecourse :)
Keep it going Melissa, you’ve got a really unique style!
Goodness Greg, these are all things I’d like to tackle! You’re talking about a huge chunk of topic. :D
Some articles tread more obviously in this direction, especially ones about the cultural myth that emotions are the “opposite” (aka enemy) of reason. In the class you’ll also learn more about why this isn’t true.
But yes, I’ll think about how to carve out this topic. Thanks for getting carried away!