8 Cues for Developing Passion

While penning down my thoughts last week on what passion is, there was the realization that passion though freely available in our true authentic self, isn’t truly tapped by each and every one of us.
We go about living lives full of goals, balance sheets and to-do lists, without batting an eye towards our hidden passions. That passion which made you experiment, that passion that made you Unique, that passion that made you YOU!

Here are some cues for cultivating, developing and reigniting that hidden passion that lies within each and every one of us-

1. Review your dreams: There are only two emotions: pain and pleasure. And passion is an offspring stream that flows between the two. It feeds-forward into pleasure the lessons it learns from the pain. When we fail in either of these two constituent abilities—receiving and rightly interpreting the lessons from the pain, and persistently feeding them forward as an investment in intended pleasures—we fail to strike the fire of passion within. So being ceaselessly awake to the gap between one’s potential and intentions (the idea of a dream life complete in all its facets) and one’s performance and pains (the reality of one’s present life circumstances) is the key to strike passion. And striking passion is akin to striking gold. The only fundamental wealth we have is that of passion. You can create anything with it and also lose anything without it. However, an insecure man feels too secure with his present to allow himself to try any experiments with it.
2. Learn from sorrows: The real sorrow in life is not getting sick, old or having to die, for we often come across sick, old and dying people who are happy. The real sorrow of life is to lose the ability to feel the sorrows—and hence that of doing the needful. Pain is a message from Nature that you should pay attention to and address.  Most humans  get roasted in their suffering, having lost their sensitivity to the pain they are going through. You need to develop awareness of the pain, track it down to the learning hidden in its roots and persevere to take appropriate action to leap out of it towards your passions.
   “Whenever you lose, at least do not lose the lesson involved,” ~ Dalai Lama. Sorrow and pain must be accepted with grace but not as a punishment meted out to us for our past deeds that we cannot even remember. It should be seen as a signal towards the necessity of looking within to discover and correct where we are continuing to flaunt any of the laws of nature.
3. Examine your subconscious vision: There is no one among us without a vision; though consciously we may not be aware of it. You arrive in life where your vision takes you. And where you are now can help you discover the subconscious vision that you had been carrying all this while. And if this is true, you can easily determine where you would find yourself tomorrow, if you ruthlessly examine your hidden vision.
4. Identify genuine passion: A sure sign of genuine passion is the fact that it takes you out of the confines of your narrow personal achievements and inspires you to contribute more to the larger self. This kind of passion fills you with a feeling that you are a humble servant but with a heroic mission. Your goals are in terms of ‘giving’, not ‘getting’, ‘grasping’ or ‘achieving’. Desires indeed have no end—more so when we do not dare to acknowledge them honestly and do not seek their fulfillment.
5. Let inner peace prevail: There are three kinds of people. One, who are so deeply satisfied with themselves and sing glories of the virtue of contentment that they stop growing; two, who are so discontented that they see no point doing anything; and three, who are so obsessed with speedy results that their impatience consumes them. All these three kinds of people immobilize themselves and instead of growing, begin to decay. Contentment or frustration of the kind that makes us stagnate in life can hardly be spiritual.
   You cannot focus on your work whole-heartedly unless there is peace in your mind and contentment in your heart. You cannot look at frustration and draw the necessary passion to dream and do what is possible if you allow yourself to become it, i.e., allow it to consume you or get consumed by it. Keep distance from it—the way you keep distance from fire—so that you use it without getting burnt.
6. Be here and now: The solution of life does not lie in finding a permanent end to it, imaginary or real. It lies in learning to live it correctly, joyously and ceaselessly with passion. In order to be happy, you need to feel happiness. If you are living in a sea of happiness but don’t know how to feel what you are in touch with, I am sure there will be no happiness for you. The road to Happiness, therefore, is an inward journey of progressively deeper awareness of what you already are. It is strewn with carrots of intentions planted within you by Nature, as milestones, in order to inspire and guide you further on the path.
7. Flow with life mindfully: One of the greatest spiritual qualities is that of being aware of what and why one is doing what one is doing at any moment. Lack of goals or passion in achieving them is certainly what would not necessitate or help one develop this quality. Most of the time people don’t realize that flowing with life is not the same as living irresponsibly, absentmindedly, passively and purposelessly. Life is an exciting journey if it traverses through the progressively meaningful goals that you set for yourself.
   The realization that what we were going through so far was ‘life’ and what all we could have done with it dawns on us just a few minutes before death. How pathetic, painful, and regretful! I wonder, if only we could get to live those last five minutes of realization somewhere towards the early or even the middle part of life, how much life it could inject in our lives. I also wonder what possibly would happen, if once introduced to them, you could live every five minutes of life like those last five minutes.
8. Aim high: The answer-sheets of the toppers when compared to those of the average or not so good students are not necessary long with extra pages attached. However, a typical topper’s answer sheets have more marks per inch of the page. It has almost no paragraph that is without compliments or rich marks. We can make our life like a topper’s answer-sheet. Each month, week, day and hour of our life is akin to the page, para and line of our answer-sheet. And each small or big piece of job or project that we undertake is like each answer on our answer-sheet. Our attempt should be to undertake only those jobs/projects that are high-scoring and highly meaningful from Nature’s point of view and attempt them in a way that each month, week or day spent carrying them out secures us rich compliments and marks from God and the universe.

CONCLUSION-

Conserve your passion:

Some people are passionate while planning their life, if at all they ever do it, but the passion gets dissipated on its own very soon. It fails to percolate down from their filofax into their daily living. To have moment-to-moment passion in our lives we not only need to ignite passion but conserve it too. A great day does not begin in the morning; it begins the night before with the chalking out of a plan for it. It is pursued the next day as planned while maintaining the tempo by allowing yourself to contemplate on the desired ‘means’ and ‘ends’ pertaining to every new activity before starting it with your best of attention and intention.

What do you think…Are these cues for developing a life of passion enough? Do you have any more suggestions? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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