A couple of minutes ago I took out a piece of paper and wrote down every goal I have ever wanted for my life which I haven’t yet accomplished. Anything I could possibly remember ever wanting.

And then I crumpled up the piece of paper and burned it.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in previous posts, I’ve had a lot of alone time since my wife went on her trip across Atlantic Canada last month and I’ve been doing a lot of meditating and inner work.

In my last post I wrote about going through what I called a psychic flu, and I now believe it was a releasing process of letting go of an old version of me that isn’t me anymore. I believe I’ve gone through some kind of expansion process and I’m still trying to wrap my brain around what’s happening.

It’s like my energy has shifted, but my mind still needs to catch up.

Even though I have felt most of the changes in the last few days, I think this actually started a few months ago when I attended the PSYCH-K® course with Sandra Wallin.

Letting Go of an Old Personal Development Paradigm

I’ve been a student of personal development for over 15 years now and I’ve got a library of well over 1,000 books on different personal development topics. Once you read that many books on any topic a set of predictable patterns emerges as there is only one truth and only so many ways to describe it.

One common theme amongst most of the books I’ve read, especially some of the more recent ones related to building wealth and spirituality / Law of Attraction is that a lot of personal development gurus teach that anything a person can believe, they can achieve.

The whole premise behind the Law of Attraction is that you can attract anything in your life if you can align your energy with the belief of having that thing.

Lack of belief is the missing element in most personal development formulas for achieving anything. All the formulas vary slightly in method, but they all revolve around the central concept of belief.

Belief is an extension of faith, which Napoleon Hill states is the “starting point of accumulation of all riches”. Napoleon Hill also states that affirmations and visualizations are the keys to creating that state we call “faith”.

Different personal development guru’s have different formulas for building belief, and many of them use some form of affirmations to accomplish this task. The bottom line is that any inspired action you take towards a goal without belief/faith isn’t going to produce the desired outcome, however by having belief and faith, even the smallest amounts of inspired action (and sometimes even no action) produces results.

Ask any guru of any system why a person isn’t getting results even if they are seemingly taking the same action steps as someone else who is getting results, and it will always boil down to one thing – lack of belief.

In the past one of the main tools I have experimented with and used myself to build belief was affirmations and visualization. This is because until I learned PSYCH-K®, I had no better tool.

Even though affirmations have worked for me in my life, in our PSYCH-K® training we were taught that they have been tested to work only 20% of the time. After reflecting on that teaching it rang true for me from direct personal experience. In some instances affirmations worked, while in others – not so much.

The promise behind PSYCH-K® is that it is a technology / process where you are able to eliminate disempowering beliefs and replace them with empowering ones using a method that is not only much more effective than affirmations, but also testable to determine if the belief has been balanced or not.

Meaning, with affirmations you simply say your affirmations and then hope that they have shifted your beliefs, whereas with PSYCH-K® you actually test to see if the process is complete. If not, you can go back and re-run the process until it is complete if it is safe and appropriate to do so at that time.

I’m not going to dive too much into PSYCH-K®, as I covered some of it in a previous post, but I now live in a totally different paradigm, where lack of belief is no longer the ultimate problem – since I now have a tool at my disposal to change any belief I want.

It took me over a month to even process that mentally, but once I realized the implications of this ability, I understood that life will never be the same again – kind of like the day when proved to myself that the Law of Attraction isn’t just some crazy hocus pocus.

With “lack of belief” no longer the central problem, I had to let go of that paradigm.

With Belief, Anything is Possible

Realizing that I couldn’t blame my lack of belief as the problem to any area of my life anymore was horrifying at first.

If you truly believed that you can have anything you want in your life, what would you want?

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a scanner, but that is such a hard question for me to answer. I get the feeling I’m not the only one with this challenge.

Enter the Planning Problem

Once I realized I could do anything and have anything I ever wanted, I started looking through my old goal lists and trying to figure out which of these goals I wanted to attack first.

This is where I ran into a lot of challenges.

When I looked at my old goal list I no longer saw a list of cool things I wanted to accomplish, I saw a list of misunderstood desires.

For example, one of the things that I have always wanted to have is a personal basketball court on my property. I wanted to be able to invite my friends over to hang out and shoot hoops on a nice sunny day. For some people it’s a swimming pool, for me it was a basketball court.

Now, I started to think about that goal and I realized a few things. First of all, on my 5 acre property I have plenty enough room to build a basketball court right now. I could level a piece of the property, and lay down an asphalt court. It probably wouldn’t even be that expensive, so why haven’t I done it yet?

Well, when I really thought about this goal, I remember initially having this desire back in high-school when I used to play basketball with my friends on a daily basis. I dreamed about one day being able to play on my own court, but that was over 15 years ago!

In reality though, I don’t even play basketball anymore. And neither do my friends. It was a period of time in my high-school days that I really enjoyed and this goal of having my own basketball court just kind of stuck on my goal list all these years amongst many others.

Maybe one day I’ll start playing basketball again, but at this point in time in my life I’m not drawn to it at all, and if I was there wouldn’t be anything to stop me from playing. There is an elementary school with a basketball court 5 minutes away from my house so I could go and play there today if I wanted to.

As I went through my goal list from all these years I looked at each goal and I realized that behind each goal lay a secondary benefit or ulterior motive that wasn’t important to me anymore. Using the basketball goal as an example again, it wasn’t really the game of basketball that I enjoyed so much – but rather the fun of competing with my friends at something.

Years after graduating from high-school, I remember having X-Box parties where we would compete in playing Halo on a LAN. Sometimes there would be six or eight of us playing in teams and having a blast. Halo became the new “basketball” for me. Same energy, same competition, same fun, just a different “sport”.

Years later Halo got boring and then it became World of Warcraft. I remember playing for hours with a dozen of my friends. See the similarity?

Here’s my point. It’s not the basketball court I wanted, it was the energy/emotions/fun I had while playing basketball with my friends. The cool thing is that this type of energy is available to me right now, as soon as I realize it’s not wrapped up in a package called “basketball” or even “Halo” or “World of Warcraft”.

I used this basketball example because it’s so easy to understand for most people. In fact you might be thinking “Duh Paul!” to yourself right now. Meaning, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t see this before.

Well, the thing is that it’s not just this basketball goal that I’m talking about here. It’s EVERY goal that I had on my list.

Long term goals from 15 years ago, and even short term goals I set a few months ago. I just don’t see them the same way anymore. I see through them now and realize that they are quite meaningless in themselves. The real thing I seek is the experiences, feelings, emotions, and energy behind the goals and not the goals themselves.

Coming to this realization screwed everything up, as I had to go back and try to set new goals, ones that hopefully have more meaning and aren’t simply a means to an end.

However, this turned out to be an impossible task. I’m seeing through things so much more now that it is becoming almost impossible to plan anything. I keep trying to make some kind of long term plans – even just for this week or this month, but I can’t stick to anything. The fluidity of life changes so quickly for me now that my mind can’t plan through all the possibilities.

It feels like I’m trying to play five thousand games of chess at once when I try to plan anything, because everything is interdependent on everything else.

If Not Planning, Then What?

After my Psychic Flu on Saturday, I woke up on Sunday inspired and excited. I had zero plans for that Sunday and I woke up and just started working on whatever I felt inspired to work on. I had this urge to work on a new design for my wives Blog, so I worked on that for a while. Things just flowed for me, one after another and by the end of the day I had accomplished more that I had in weeks – all without planning to do a single thing.

You’d think that I would learn something from this, but for the past couple of days I’ve regressed back to trying to plan things again – especially long term, trying to decide what I want to do with my life and what I want to work on first. This has left me frustrated, annoyed and totally unproductive.

This is when I got the intuitive idea to burn all my goals. To let them go. To release myself from my past. To allow my spirit to dictate my future, instead of trying to cling on to old misguided desires.

I had a similar vision come to me in the past with one of my coaching students, where I saw a vision of her writing down her old identity and burning it in a cleansing ceremony to let go of her old self. In my instance it was about my goals.

Burning My Goals

Deciding to follow my intuition, I wrote down all my previous goals on a piece of paper. I wrote a lot of them in shorthand, or using acronyms which I knew the meaning of so as to fit everything on one piece of paper.

I also had the intuitive feeling that I should burn the list along with some Sage. Burning Sage is an ancient purification ritual used by the Celts, Druids and Native Americans. I felt drawn to burn sage.

I also felt drawn to make a video of the ceremony and to take some pictures for my Blog as a way to remember this day when I let go of all my past goals and plans, to instead embrace a new way of following my intuition to see where it takes me.

I honestly don’t know how long I will stick to this, and if I’ll go back to setting new goals and plans as I’ve always done, but in this moment I feel so much lighter and more free that I don’t really care about what happens in the future.  For the first time since I was a little kid, I don’t have any goals.  It feels really weird and cool at the same time.

Here’s a video clip of my goal-burning ceremony:

Now, what am I going to have for dinner now…