Tag Archives: inspiration

Answering Your Soul’s Calling

Three white pebbles against the background of the sea and sky

by Gregory Toole

I often receive the comment, “how brave,” when I share with people the story of leaving my corporate career. My response is always the same: bravery played very little part. June 30 of this year marks 20 years since I left my corporate career. One day, I just walked away and I knew I would never return. I hadn’t much of a clue what lay ahead, but I knew my corporate-ladder-climbing days were over.

To give a little background, I had come into the computer industry out of college when it was the hot field to be in, when jobs were thought to be somewhat scarce in other industries. I quickly advanced and after five years I earned an MBA and moved into the business side of the industry. One of the gifts I received while there was that I worked with people who were really passionate about what they did. They were really passionate about creating the best computer and software products they could. Try as I may, I did not find myself excited or passionate about that.

What I did find is that I wanted to be involved with something I was just as passionate about as my colleagues in the computer industry. Going back to my college days, what excited me was serving more in the social sector to make a difference in people’s lives. While I wanted to leave my corporate career, I had prepared so much for this work I had no idea what else I would do.

Then I entered a Center for Spiritual Living. I found people on a spiritual journey much like my own. Within just over six months of finding spiritual community I found the support and the clarity to leave my corporate career. The people in my spiritual community understood what it meant to follow one’s heart and to answer the call of the soul.

While the only clarity I had was that I wanted to serve humanity in some greater way, it was enough because the call was so strong. Everything in me pointed to moving in this new direction, while the thought of staying in my corporate career felt like severe contraction and the extinguishing of the fire in me. In fact, it didn’t seem like much of a choice at all: one option took me toward fulfillment, soul-alignment, and felt like full expansion of my energy field, while the other option felt like contraction of my energy field and ultimately death. Not much of a choice, which brings me back to why I have always said it really wasn’t about being courageous.

When the choices are that stark, there really is only one choice. I feel thankful that the call within me is so strong, although there were times I wished it weren’t, that I could have just stayed in what was comfortable, even if it weren’t all that fulfilling. But my soul would not allow it. I believe it literally would have killed me, staying in something that was going so against the grain of my soul’s calling.

Having made the choice to follow my soul’s calling, within a year I became Executive Director of a non-profit youth development organization, within four years a licensed spiritual practitioner, and within 10 years a minister in Centers for Spiritual Living. I did not foresee any of this when I took that first step to leave my corporate career, but I did feel a strong calling in the direction of something important. I have never regretted the choice and never looked back.

What is the deeper calling in you that is seeking expression? Are you fully aligned with your soul’s calling, with what expands you and has a deep resonance in your heart? My vision is of a planet where everyone is following the call of their soul. In this vision, I see a more vibrant, peaceful, loving, and creative world, free of fear, greed, and addictions.

Will you join me in that vision? If so, just check in with your heart and see what you are called to in this moment, and the next, and then the next. What a world we are creating together!

Enjoy the journey.

Getting Unstuck: Start That New Project

golden key for success business

by Gregory Toole

There are so many reasons why we might procrastinate starting a new project, despite the fact that it excites us and inspires us. Here are a few:

  • We’re afraid we’re not quite up to the task.
  • The perfectionist in us wants the conditions and timing to be just perfect.
  • We might succeed, and then we’d have to step into a larger sense of ourselves.
  • We’re spinning our wheels on something else (i.e., we’re in a rut).

Being stuck is a state of mind. We’re usually not really stuck, unless we’ve stepped into some industrial-strength glue. The mind, however, is powerful enough that it can work us into a sense of being stuck that can feel as real as any physical bind. Conversely, the mind is also powerful enough to free us.

For many years I wanted to study Spanish. However, every time I thought of studying Spanish, the thought that immediately followed was, “But I still haven’t mastered French. I ought to master French first.” It was a good rational argument, so I would put off my study of Spanish once again. On a positive note, it would usually get me inspired to practice my French language studies more persistently.

Last year, I really became in touch with this pattern and asked myself if it was serving me in the highest way. I realized that it was not serving me. I still hadn’t mastered the French language and yet I hadn’t even started on Spanish.

This is one way that the mind can keep us stuck, by putting up false barriers. In accepting that perhaps I’ll never “master” French and letting go of that as a reason to not study Spanish, last year I was able to begin studying Spanish. It has not interfered in the least with my intention to keep improving my French proficiency.

It’s so easy to get stuck, yet there are some simple ways to get unstuck. Here are 10 simple steps you can take to get unstuck:

  1. Get quiet and still. Take a couple deep breaths. Tune into what you’re feeling. Allow what you’re feeling to be okay. Accept it. Embrace it. Be gentle with yourself and see what you can learn from your feelings about what you’re needing right now.
  2. Realize that, whatever you’re feeling, the feeling itself can’t keep you from taking action.
  3. Write down, in a journal or on a piece of paper, everything that is rattling around in your mind. This gives you a chance to look at it objectively and perhaps to organize it so that it’s not just mental clutter.
  4. Take what you’ve written in the last step and see what things need your attention and what things can be discarded. This is likely to provide greater peace of mind and to dispel confusion, now that the thoughts are sitting finitely before you on paper and no longer rattling around in your mind.
  5. Write down some positive affirmations or empowering statements about why you want to take on the project, how you’ll feel when it’s complete, and what impact it will have on others and the world around you.
  6. Allow yourself to feel excitement about taking on the project.
  7. Let go of worry about how the project will turn out and instead see it as a creative endeavor and enjoy the process of creation.
  8. Take a step, any step, in the direction of what you want to do. This starts to break through the mental and emotional clutter that might be blocking us. It gets the energy flowing in the direction we want it.
  9. Praise yourself and celebrate each step forward. Avoid self-criticism.
  10. Each day, continue to take steps, remembering that no step is too small. Anything that moves you forward is positive. Eventually the momentum of taking these steps will move you forward, and before you know it you’ll find that you are no longer stuck.

Congratulations! Your creativity is freed and you are once again able to be of full service to yourself and the world.

Surrender: Where The Real Power Is

by Gregory Toole

In our upbringing, most of us have probably known “surrender” to be a negative action, something we surely only do as a last resort. The common definition equates surrender to giving up.

In spiritual terms, the only thing we give up with surrender is our need to be in control of everything. And since we don’t actually control nearly as much as we sometimes think, ultimately we are not giving up much at all when we surrender.

However, we gain much–greater ease, peace of mind, and expanded possibilities for our life that are beyond anything we could ever imagine when we needed to be fully in control.

A big question is, “What are we surrendering to?” What we surrender to is our divine nature, our higher nature. In short, we surrender to God, or whatever we call our higher power.

Another question is, “How do I do it?” The answer to this question is a bit more involved, but the simplest response is that we begin to let go, little by little, of our attachment to specific outcomes and how and when those outcomes come to pass.

In letting go, we get out of the way of our higher nature, making room for grace to come into our lives. Grace can only occur when we get our human ego-centered selves out of the way.

As brilliant as the human brain is, it really is finite in terms of its ability to coordinate the infinite range of activities that need to take place for our lives to be full and, at the same time, for us to be at peace and at ease with life. Our divine, or higher, self is infinite, capable of coordinating an infinite array of simultaneous synchronistic activities on our behalf, all at once.

“How is this possible?” you may say. It is possible due to the infinite intelligence embedded in our divine nature, combined with the reality of oneness, that all of life is one and connected. Surrender aligns us with the flow of this one life and infinite intelligence. In that flow, synchronicities become commonplace and we find that our effort is only a small part of what takes place to get our needs met.

Five Steps

Here are five initial steps to support you in your desire to practice surrender:

  1. Let go of the notion that you’re fully in control.
  2. Spend some time in meditation daily, even if it’s just one minute a day. Use this time to listen for divine wisdom and inspiration, but don’t be attached to getting a result.
  3. When you feel stressed, pause for a moment and get in touch with your breath. Your breath is your connection to life, and thus the flow of life.
  4. Don’t schedule yourself so tightly. Leave at least a little room for divine opportunities (those that match what you want, but not your human timing).
  5. Develop strategies in advance for how you will capture your divine inspirations and insights (e.g., keep a recording device handy). These insights are a gift to you and often provide clarity and solutions that would have required far more human effort to develop if you had waited until you felt you had time to think about them.

The practice of surrender is possible for you. It starts with willingness, and being open to divine guidance. Little by little, you can loosen your grip, and as you do, the ease and peace you’ve been wanting start to become real, and yet your life is even fuller.

Enjoy the journey!

Letting Go Into Your Greater Possibility

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by Gregory Toole

So often it seems as human beings we are waiting for the right moment or the right opportunity in order to step into something greater. Yet, metaphysically we know that we co-create our own experience.

Creating that great new opportunity is as much about letting go as it is about accepting the new. In order to create the new, we must let go of the old. The Christian scripture guides us not to pour new wine into old wine skins.

Right now, for the third time in my career, I am releasing a position without a clearly defined next position in sight. Many people look very surprised when I tell them that. Some even look like they are about to administer me a sanity test.

In my experience, however, I find that sometimes I need to let go of what is, before I can discover the new, that it’s a challenge to hold on to the old, while at the same time bringing forth the new. As I write this, I am imagining an interesting visual of someone carrying around a big sack called “the past” on his back, laboring under its weight, while at the same time attempting to be nimble in navigating the newness that is calling him. It’s not a very graceful picture.

In holding onto what is, we get to feel safer and more comfortable, but perhaps that is a false sense of comfort since nothing in the outer world represents our security and all temporal experiences can change. What if we put our sense of security and comfort in our inner power and creativity, our ability to co-create our experience?

Then we’d be able to move as Spirit moves us, rather than as human comfort dictates. Then we wouldn’t be holding so tightly to things and experiences of the world. Grace would be our experience. Change would not concern us very much at all because we’d be in the flow of change, welcoming it, trusting it, knowing it is always a movement toward greater good in our lives.

I would suggest this way of being is what we are being called to. It is a more natural way for us to live in alignment with our spiritual nature.

The World is Ready for All of You

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by Gregory Toole

I gave a talk this past Sunday in Oakland, California that was about the power and freedom of fully being who we are. Often we are so busy trying to conform, fit in, or not stand out too much that we forget the gift of our uniqueness.

We know intuitively that we are each a completely unique manifestation of Spirit, and yet sometimes we still find ourselves comparing what we do or who we are to what we see in others.

When I traveled to Ukraine in 2009 to be a keynote speaker at a spiritual conference, despite the fact that I had literally given several hundred similar talks in the past, I found myself wondering if I needed to somehow be different, or more, in Ukraine. I began to ask myself whether my style of delivering a talk would go over well in another culture. I finally remembered that all I have is me, who I am. So I decided to just go for it and be myself.

I had fretted so much over whether I would be acceptable that I forgot there would be an interpreter, since most people at the conference only spoke Russian. I got two sentences into my talk and I was stopped by the interpreter so that she could speak my words into Russian. It was a funny moment and I let go of all my angst. Then I told a joke and there was complete silence…until 30 seconds later when everyone broke into laughter. Ah yes, even the joke had to be interpreted into Russian first.

Even though my words needed to be translated into Russian, who I am needed no translation. Much to my delight, the crowd loved me. It was a reminder to me that who we are is the gift. When we don’t give all of who we are, we are literally cheating the universe, our fellow beings, and most importantly, ourselves.

Here are three affirmations I shared in my talk on Sunday:
The world is ready for all of me.
The world needs all of me.
The world’s going to get all of me.

And so it is.

Namaste,
Gregory

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