Setting Your Spirit Free

Let me ask you a question. Describe to me your spirit? Don't confuse spirit with personality. When you describe your spirit tell me all those things you enjoy doing. Basically when you're doing these things you aren't thinking about anything else in the world. You're living in the moment, happy, and content.

If I was to describe my spirit and what it likes to do to you I'd say it loves to go to bookstores, it loves art supplies, it likes to play tricks on people, it loves to ride motorcycles, it loves to run really really fast...

I'm starting to realize more and more how much energy I put towards squelching my spirit. We all do it. The older we get it seems the less our spirit is able to really show it's face.

Today for example I was taking my walk through the park and I hit this small downhill part and I had this intense desire to run...really fast. My first thought was, "What if I fall?" My second thought was, "If someone sees me running like this their going to think a bear or a mountain lion is after me." See the thing with letting your spirit go is that our ego/mind is always eager to jump in and sit on spirit and squelch it. It's really rather sad. But today I didn't let that happen. I ran as fast I could. For as long as I could. And it felt so good. For just a few short moments I was totally in the moment, and as happy as I could be.

When you let spirit out to play, you have to put ego away. And that isn't easy to do. Above you saw a picture of a chalk drawing I made about a week ago. I've had this weird desire to create with sidewalk chalk. I've also had a desire to create mandala's. So I put these two ideas together and went to a park and started to draw. It wasn't easy for me to do this. I don't feel like I'm an artist in any sense of the word and going out where I might be in front of people creating something made me nervous.

So I picked an out of the way park, and went to a section people weren't going to really be walking by and drew. I LOVED what I created. I wanted to sit there for as long as possible and take it all in. The picture doesn't do it justice. The colors were much brighter and you could really see a lot more definition. I had a blast. My spirit was totally fed by doing this.

Below is another example of feeding my spirit. This past summer I did something I've wanted to do for a really long time. I took a surfing lesson. Yes I had my doubts, was scared and felt a little foolish at first...well let me show you instead.