Life Force

My first thought of Life Force is Pranayama breath. But that’s only a portion of the understanding behind what Pranayama and Life Force is. You see, Pranayama is a Sanskrit word meaning “extension of the life force”. The word is comprised of two Sanskrit words, prana or life force (breath) and ayama meaning to extend or draw out.

Recently, my husband and I watched STUTZ on Netflix (HERE is the link). We both loved it! Phil Stutz is a psychiatrist, author and a 20 year Parkinsons survivor. Recently Jonah Hill filmed a documentary with Phil called STUTZ. Together they discussed Phil’s tools that he used to achieve results-driven practices that help clients reach their fullest potential. 

One of these tools is called 

Life Force

These simple steps can help you turn everyday problems from big to small into chances to make big changes in your daily life.

In Stutz's Life Force model, there are three levels to what make you, you: The bottom, most primal level, is your relationship with your physical body. The second level is your relationship with other people and at the top of the pyramid, is your relationship with yourself.

The Life Force speaks constantly—­not in words, but through events. You can feel it as an undeniable presence guiding you. More commonly, you’ll feel its presence for brief moments, usually in reaction to a deeply moving event: the birth of a child, the act of falling in love, or a trip to a faraway place that awakens something deep within you.

Or it can emerge without explanation as a sudden insight into another person, as the solution to a problem that’s defeated you for months or as a burst of creative expression that comes from somewhere beyond you. These moments of inspiration can seem random, but they’re reminders that the Life Force is always there.

But knowing the Life Force is there isn’t enough if you don’t know how to connect to it. 

Look around. The people you see living inspired, expansive lives are the exceptions. The vast majority of human beings are caught in limited, joyless lives—­every attempt to change seems thwarted.

Maybe you’re a songwriter with an idea for a film script. Rather than becoming excited about writing in a new medium, it feels beyond you and you give up. Or maybe you’ve developed strong feelings for a person you’ve always thought of as a friend, but when you’re around that person, you automatically close yourself off. Or perhaps you’ve run a lot of 5Ks and you’d like to run a marathon, but you’re not willing to commit to the time it takes to train for one.

This fixation on things outside of us makes change impossible. If you want to open the door to a future with real potential, you’ll need to access the inner power of the Life Force. You won’t be able to see it, you can’t hold it in your hand, but when it’s flowing through you it will inspire you to do things you didn’t think were possible.

The Life Force in History, Nature, and People

The belief that an invisible animating energy underlies our existence is thousands of years old. Unlike our modern, mechanical notion of energy, which we understand via mathematics, this is a living energy that we feel inside us. In Eastern religions, this energy, or Life Force, is known variously as prana (in Indian philosophy and medicine), lung (in Tibetan Buddhism), and chi (in Chinese philosophy and medicine). In the Old Testament, it was called ruach, the breath of God, which gave mankind not only life, but the spirit to evolve.

The Life Force itself may be invisible, 

but evidence of its power is everywhere. 

It created life on earth and, over untold eons, drove evolution from single-­cell organisms to the unimaginable complexity of the human brain. Every seed that sprouts into a full-­grown plant, every salmon that fights its way against the current to spawn, every sun-­seeking weed growing through cracks in the sidewalk, is an expression of life’s unstoppable energy.

It’s natural to think of the Life Force as sustaining growth in nature—­the grass growing, fish swimming, birds flying, etc. But the Life Force is capable of something more: it can fuel the inner growth of each of us. When you learn how to use its energy it becomes the antidote to the personal problems that fill us with a sense of powerlessness.

Every human being is blessed with the ability to use the Life Force in this way, but unlike its workings in nature, harnessing its power for inner growth requires a conscious choice.

You Must Choose to Inspire Yourself!

PS
Think of your kids! Your teens are surfing the wave of life force, so much of which gets sapped with the stresses of being a kid today. Register them for my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Teens course starting January 7th. This course is designed to help your teen (ages 10–18) manage stress through simple and approachable mindfulness techniques.