Episode 90. When you obey your heart’s and soul’s guidance you become fulfilled. Brought to you today by the universal law of nature number five. The law of the one in the many.

I think it goes without saying that every human being searching for and would love to have a level of fulfilment. We all must acknowledge at some point that we are either achieving it or not. During the early years of our life it is easy to achieve fulfilment because there is much low hanging fruit that we can grab onto. But there are side-effects to many of those low hanging fruit. Eventually I guess we come to the conclusion that it must be something to do with family because we all gravitate towards relationships and ultimately having babies and bringing up families in houses we cannot afford. So I guess, it would seem, that the hunt for fulfilment is in the area of family dynamics.

What complicates this search is work. We must go to work because we must earn the money to pay for the things that we can’t afford so that we can have a family. It would seem counter cultural to deliberately starve your family of resources while saying that family dynamics is the source of your fulfilment. And so the story begins that we go to work to earn the money to bring it home to buy the house we can’t afford to have the kids that will drive us crazy so that we can become fulfilled. And then there are other variables.

Firstly we come to realise that the person we have nested with is not so much interested in our fulfilment but their own. Now it becomes a little bit of a tug-of-war to see who in the family dynamic that we have aspire to rules the roost and therefore gets fulfilled at the cost of the other person. We may say I will feel fulfilled if my family lives in a nice big house near the beach but the partner might say I want to live in the middle of the city and will feel fulfilled if I go on a lot of holidays to the Maldives. And so begins the challenge of fulfilment.

One person I met meditated for five hours a day. He had a wife and a family of three children and took the kids to school he had a job and earned enough money to pay for their small house in the mountains and he was totally in bliss because this house in the mountains was his dream and it didn’t cost too much because it was a long way from the city and a long way from the people that gave him the shits. I his wife, spent most of her days travelling up and down from the Mountain house to the city so that she could do her work, she started a business in the local area so that she could have friends, and, she grew vegetables in the garden with the kids so she felt at home. It would seem that they had found Nirvana. But if ever you’ve watched the TV show alone, on the SBS network, nearly everybody who taps out does so because of loneliness. And both the husband and the wife in this example were tapping out living in paradise as far as he was concerned, and suffering from ill-health as a result of loneliness. It would seem strange that what look like on the surface, a very fulfilling environment for them and the kids was the opposite. They were spending most of their time trying to fill up the time.

So the quest for fulfilment takes us to all ends of the planet. One day, I decided to climb a mountain in Nepal to seek fulfilment. It was a long and arduous process to even arrive at the base of the mountain with permission to climb. And I did climb and I did reach the top. And I stood on the top and wave the flag and planted prayer flags to celebrate my achievement and 30 seconds later I was just as unfulfilled as I was at the bottom. But it was on this trip that I saw posters in every cafe and accommodation all the way up to the base camp of Mount Everest. The posters read “touching my father’s soul”. And it was a Sherpa who was going to climb Mount Everest. His father, one of the most famous Mountaineers in the world was Tenzing Norgay. And this was his son. Tenzing Norgay was the man who climbed with Sir Edmund Hillary to summit Mount Everest for the very first time and nobody knows to this day who touch the top first. And this son of Tenzing Norgay was going to touch the top of Mount Everest and called it touching my fathers soul. It got me thinking as I walked dejected back toward my base camp, maybe this quest for fulfilment can be found by touching our soul. And maybe, just maybe when we touch our soul, we touch the souls of our parents.

At this time I still had a lot of unfinished business with my father and my stepmother. And although my stepmother does not feature in this idea of touching your parents so it was a person who was instrumental in my childhood and therefore because nothing is missing just changes in form, in someways took the place of the mother of my birth. I decided at this point in time to stop chasing fulfilment. Instead, like a man running around the house looking for the car keys when they’re already in my pocket, I decided it was time to find what I already had. So while still in the mountains, 4 1/2 thousand metres above sea level, I sat down with scraps of borrowed paper and did what I call the discard process. I call it the discard process because it discards the rubbish that keeps us from fulfilment. I processed every molecule I could think of around my relationship with my father and eventually after such a small period of time, 5 to 6 hours, I really felt his presence and unconditional love for him. As I did a deep calm came over me. I then processed my stepmother which took a lot longer. I have tried to forget her and pretend that I was passed all that. But as I dug deep into the perceived victimhood and violence of her approach to me I realise there was deep hurt. After a day and a half I finally broke through. This breakthrough, a breakthrough through my own ego, gave me something so vital to my future it was unbelievable. I finally stopped feeling sorry for myself in my childhood. And with these two simple process I came to this amazing state of fulfilment. I touched my soul and therefore the souls of others.

It is all too easy to theorise what is a soul. It is all too easy to say I have a soul. Such an intellectual proposition I carried through many years of personal development and training but I didn’t understand that it was something we needed to reach out for but instead own. I also didn’t realise that once I found it I would never lose it, however, I needed to be disciplined around the buildup of noise that may cloud that voice. The closest I can get to explaining what I meant was when I say listen to your heart. But this is such dangerous advice because there is no such thing as a human heart except for the physical one. And so it is so easy to mistake the heart with emotions and it is these emotions that make the noise that blocks the soul. It is also a paramount mistake to spend, like that family I spoke about earlier, five hours a day in meditation in order to be in touch with your soul. Yes, hiding away in a meditation hut will keep you connected to your soul much more than if you get out and go to work. But this soul, and its connection to us, is never static. And if we suddenly stop exploring and going deeper and deeper into that connection, we become our own worst enemy, we become narcissistic.

During my 50 odd tricks to the Himalayas I have been blessed to spend a lot of time with very wise people. One of them, a Bhutanese shaman, a highly educated and professionally qualified doctor, was also a practitioner of the ancient arts of Tibetan healing and acupuncture. The hours we spent together walking through the mountains to visit his patience was spent exploring this topic of the soul. I still remember one of the messages he gave me that was quite clear. It goes something like this and please forgive me for the paraphrasing, “never do anything for yourself.” A simple example of what he was saying was the process of meditation. If you come to Bondi on any particular day you will see groups meditating. On the weekend sometimes they use microphones and speakers to make the experience transcendental. And if you listen to the teacher you will hear the teacher talking to people about finding themselves, finding their bliss, finding happiness. But as my Bhutanese friend advised, meditate for the world, never for yourself.

So in the process of finding our father’s soul if we are doing it for self gratification or to find personal fulfilment within ourselves we are heading in the wrong direction. The reason we would seek our father’s soul is to become a better servant to the world around us. To lead better, to love deeper not for our own benefit but for the benefit of those we affect. There is nothing so true as these words of my Bhutanese shaman friend, “never do anything for yourself.” And so, whether you seek fulfilment in a family or whether you seek fulfilment in a job it’s not important, what is important is that you serve others and you don’t do it for yourself. This is the source of fulfilment and it is the source of happiness ironically. And finally, if you take this message to Hart you will recognise that the seeking of fulfilment is the problem in itself because you are doing something for yourself. Instead, try to cause it.

With spirit, Chris