Getting What You Want

GETTING WHAT YOU WANT

By Bill Cottringer

We all start out our journey in life with a tiny piece of the treasure map. It is coded in the DNA of our souls. Life then gives us many opportunities to learn and share our map pieces with each other to get a bigger map, so we can all get closer to the treasure. The treasure is what you want and the treasure hunt is getting what you want. But this is hardly as simple as this seems and yet it is never quite as complex as we make it.

Success and failure in getting what you want is easy to know, but hard to accept. When you have it you know it in your bones and when you don't, you still want it. So what is the big secret in being more successful in the treasure hunt? I would say in understanding what we all need at any given point in time (and the priority of these needs change quickly and frequently) and then discovering how we can be more successful in getting what we don't have, in the right order and the right priority, by cooperating with one another rather than competing. If we must compete, let it be against our own self.

We are all on a journey to learn, grow and improve. We do this by opening up to and experiencing important spiritual truths and insights that our souls are challenged to remember and understand, and  then applying these guiding principles in our daily lives to grow and improve our humanness in the quest to be successful in getting what we want and helping others do that too. This is frequently called living a good life.

Much of life is searching through this and that to find the most useful 5%stuff from all the rest of the 95% useless nonsense. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There is a lot of hay that has to be gone through and sometimes it gets like snakes on a plane.The chaos distracts us from finding the needle and sometimes even from remembering what we were doing.

One of the biggest sorting processes occurs in our relationships with other people?trying to get past the visible, annoying differences to get to the more enjoyable, invisible commonalities and have a magical meeting of being. The important commonalities we all share are the needs we all have and the common successes and failures we have in meeting those needs. An important realization is that these needs all come from different parts of us--our minds, hearts and bodies--but actually have to be centrally filtered through our souls. These needs constantly interact with each other like a pretzel and that can get very confusing. Sometimes, where one stops and the other starts, is not clear. Neither are causes and effects. And of course they never happen in any predictable way, just to keep things interesting.

 Here is a useful way to understand what is actually going on inside with these four sources:

WHAT OUR MINDS NEED:

• To know what time it is.
• To comprehend the meaning and utility of important experiences we have.
• To distinguish between moments of opportunity vs. moments of danger.
• To continually grow the size of our treasure map piece by mixing both concrete and abstract meanings from many sources.
• To form a more accurate and complete viewpoint that gets positive results in helping ourselves and others progress in reaping an abundant harvest.
• To understand our private purpose and how to best live it.
• To remember all the wisdom that was planted in our unconscious minds.
• To understand these other three cornerstones.
• To be as certain as we can about the realities we see and act on, in sorting the 5% sense from the 95% nonsense.

WHAT OUR HEARTS NEED:

• To love and be loved and be safe and protected from fear and rejection.
• To understand and accept others and be understood and accepted.
• To be fully free in both our unique individuality and common equality.
• To experience the relief of loosening our control grip and letting go and giving in (taking the Nestea plunge).
• To feel empathy with others and give generously and unselfishly.
• To express the level of creativity that solves life's most difficult problems.
• To sense the grand satisfaction of replacing our pride and ego's achievements with gracious humility and anonymous selfless service.
• To feel comfortable in taking leaps of faith in growing our hearts.
• To have breathless moments of romance.
• To dream and imagine no boundaries.

WHAT OUR BODIES NEED:

• To live and die and breathe much in between.
• To be treated like a holy temple rather than an amusement park.
• To make passionate love with life with our whole being?mind, heart, soul, body and spirit.
• To be healthy, fit and appealing with our physical uniqueness.
• To be fully alive with a driving positive zest for life.
• To eat well, work hard, play enthusiastically and sleep peacefully.

WHAT OUR SOULS NEED:

• To experience and understand our whole self, including our dark shadows, so we can become who we think we already are.
• To know wisdom and apply it for good purposes.
• To be surprised.
• To experience God directly in nature, relationships and dark times.
• To join and be re-connected with other souls in the oneness of God.
• To reconcile opposites for the peace of understanding and more perfect completion of the creative process.
• To go from thinking and feeling and doing, to being.
• To expand awareness of everything by unfolding our potential.
• To experience life without judgment or expectations.

The bottom line is that life is the process of satisfying all these needs. Of course they are all different for each of us and even different at different times for all of us. The first step to getting what you want is to learn to want what you have. This safe oasis is a good place to rest and take an honest inventory of what you do and don't have, so that you can begin to learn why. This is where you stop doing and start being in giving to get. And each time you become better equipped to deal with greater adversities and obstacles in the climb up the stairs.

 Once you are clear on what you do or don't have from all these basic mind, heart, body and soul needs, then you can begin to set your priorities--to actively pursue what you are closest to from where you are right now or are otherwise able to get to, adding other people's treasure map pieces to your own in gradually getting a bigger map and closer to the treasure. And fortunately you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time because lots of people have useful treasure map pieces to help you enlarge the one you have to close the gap between what you have and what you want and help others do that too. And there are plenty of treasure hunt success clues available for the asking.

The real challenge is getting what you want in a relationship. This is always a big test because a person's own needs frequently conflcit within him or herself and then again, two people's needs are often in conflict with each other too. The question that puts us to the test is-- Whose needs are more important and urgent at the time? That's why the singing group Chicago asked, "Does anybody really know what time it is?"

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, The Bow-Wow Secrets, and Threading Your Needle With Life's Rope. He can be reached at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net