CONSCIOUS CHOICE: RIGHT LIVELIHOOD

A RAGE TO CONTRIBUTE:
Peace & Prosperity
Through Living Your Gift Out Loud

By Lee Glickstein

Lee Glickstein, founder of Speaking Circles® and longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister, teaches how to speak to groups with presence.

Every person who becomes a true teacher, leader, speaker or advocate heeded the call to live out loud by conditions and events in their lives that demanded their participation from a deeply emotional place within.

One of many stories in which such connection is obvious is Candy Lightner going on to found Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) after her daughter was killed by a drunk driver.

But most of our emotional storylines are much more subtle. Many of us were born into adverse conditions—physical or emotional—while others were dealt severe handicaps or obstacles in the course of life.

Every human entered the world with certain strengths, as well as inherent genius for creative problem solving. Those who are able to use these capacities to survive, cope, and eventually prevail are often moved to help others who still struggle. Decades of experience in solving your most extreme challenge, often by painful trial and error, has given you an evolving mastery that may or may not have a name, but it is a potent and precise force within you that cries out for a voice.

Packed into that hurricane force is your contribution to humankind, whether for you that means your gift to the masses, or simply to the people in your life.

When we can access, clarify, and express our precise gift so that others can gain the benefit of our true life work—those decades of experience in solving our most extreme challenge—we gain the relief of serving them. Until then we may sense that something big is missing in our life. What is missing is that we are not contributing anywhere close to capacity.

I have come to realize that I have a rage to contribute. The primary emotional storyline of my life is that as a child I was not seen nor heard and my natural expression as divine light was squelched and remained underground for 45 years. I found a way out that allowed me to become a transformational agent for others whose self-consciousness and performance anxiety were stifling their voice, their spirit, and their contribution.

Thus my rage to contribute alchemically morphed into my life work, and the fire rages on.

I believe that full contribution is fueled by powerful emotion of some kind, whether rage, grief, or love, or outrage at conditions, and that accessing and expressing the emotional life storylines that transmuted into your specific gift to humankind is crucial in attracting prosperity and peace.

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