Purpose

I just read "Heroic Leadership: Best Practices From A 450 Year Old Company That Changed The World" by Chris Lowney.

He is a former Jesuit priest turned corporate investment banker. He describes Jesuit practices of how to become a better leader and one of the practices is to meditate for 5 minutes three times a day.

I wish to record the meat of my meditations...to keep me focused and moving forward.

The first focus is that divine love pours out into the world without end. It is not a limited quantity. This means knowing I and everyone around me is a "loved person of unique dignity and potential...". I don't have to respect the person but I do need to respect their divine spirit.

The next focus is to meditate on my key personal goals. Career, Relationships, Financial, Home.

The next focus is to take stock of my actions thus far in the day to see if they helped me reach my long term goals or moved me in the opposite direction. In the words of Al-Anon or AA, take a "fearless moral inventory" twice a day based on my actions. And if they were in the opposite direction to ask for divine help in moving me in the right direction.

The final focus is a "restless drive to imagine a greater project, or a better way of accomplishing the current problems". It also touches on motivation. What goals motivate you that you would go beyond 100% effort to achieve them. That idea of athletes going beyond what they thought possible to achieve the impossible.

So the meditations are:

-Key goals
-Divine Love
-Fearless moral inventory
-Motivation

Thursday, April 21, 2011

21 April 2011

LOVE:

I am in need of the reminder to meditate on divine love today. I got bitched out by my boyfriend's landlord about my cats. He said some pretty hateful things, so of which were true and some of which were not. Me and my cats didn't single-handedly cost him a tenant. Yes the litter box stinks and yes this is almost the end of the month and showing the place with the cats isn't the premium solution but I didn't plan spring break just to fuck him over as he so eloquently put it. So remembering that the divine loves me no matter what is helping to keep some kind of equilibrium in my head about this.

GOAL:

I am employed full time based out of New Orleans working in the oil and gas sector helping to save lives by engineering safer systems, through reliability engineering! With a supportive boss and an environment which promotes continual learning. Some little tweaking here and there. But I am thinking this is what would be perfect. Hopefully I am being specific enough and yet general enough as well. Setting goals is always dicey, you can meet your goal and still fall far short of what was in your head to begin with!

INVENTORY:

I think I actually did a pretty good job of sticking up for myself with the landlord yesterday even in the face of a pretty brutal attack. Today I took steps to rectify the situation as best I can with my cats still down here for another day. I truly feel like I have handled the situation as well as I could have. Other than coming up with something witty and appropriate to say in the face of that hatred and rage. It does bring up the topic of needing to work with handling other people's anger better. That is something I need to give up to the divine to work on. I don't know how I am supposed to deal with it, or what someone who handles it well looks like. Maybe that is what I should pray for. A good model of how to deal with the anger of people who can hurt me if they so choose. Or maybe it is simply understanding that anger doesn't necessarily mean violence toward me. That is all I can focus on when people are angry around me, is that they are going to lose control and hurt me, and I won't see it coming until it is too late. Ah...very much a result of what happened to me as a kid. This is a kids fear. Something to think about and meditate on today in my quiet times.

MOTIVATION:

My motivation today came at 1:30am. I woke up out of a sound sleep with a better model for reservoir flow and spent a good hour puttering around with math on a couple of blank pages. Now that is the motivation I want to continue to have. I would like to have someone to discuss these challenges with, who could help me over the rough patches and tell me if I am way off base. Something else to turn over to the divine and see what happens.

This is my first post as a 40 year old. WOW!!
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