The pointer of “follow your joy” is a temporary bridge to take you out of a fear-based mindset, or a struggle-based mindset. However, there is a drive far stronger than just joy, I like to call this drive as an wholeness based movement; this movement is not just dependent on enjoyment, rather it seems to come from the perspective of the right thing to do in the moment. You can only truly align with this drive when you’ve moved beyond clinging to light natured emotions/feelings (like joy), and are willing to integrate the dark natured component in your being. That’s the reason why I call it a “wholeness based” inspiration, it’s not just a joy based inspiration, it seems to incorporate a certain wisdom, a certain requirement of the hour, which can just be termed as the deal of the Now – it’s not a fear-based, or lack-based, thinking that motivates this movement, neither is there a drive coming from a place of “needing” joy, it’s just a causeless drive which can only be termed as the requirement/responsibility of the moment; and it doesn’t feel like a struggle, it just feels like a drive.

The path to coming towards living a life aligned with this “balanced” inspiration (coming from a place of wholeness) is to first let go of the struggle-based mindset which is driven by the force of lack-based and fear-based thinking. That’s the reason why the pointer of staying true to your joy is given as the initial step. However, the state of being driven by joy is just a temporary phase, and if you stay in a space of allowing you will soon see yourself moving beyond it into a more balanced state of being driven by wholeness (what I also called being driven by love in this post – What are you driven by?, of course, wholeness would be a better term, than love, because it creates less deluded imaginations in the mind, the term love can obviously create some misinterpretations, which I’ve clarified in part 2 of that post). You cannot reach wholeness if you stay stuck in being driven by joy alone, it would just keep you in a light-natured imbalance. There is something deeper in life than just “enjoyment”, something much richer in experience and balanced in its movement.

Letting go of resistance to wholeness-based inspiration

The problem is that a lot of spirituality, and positive-thinking based “self-improvement” teachings, seem to focus purely on the state of joy, or rather, that’s the misinterpretation the mind comes to. When you get oriented with this “belief”, that being joy-based is the highest possible expression, you are bound to become imbalanced towards the light nature component in you and start fearing/avoiding the dark nature component (as being negative). However, if you can simply stay in a state of allowing what arises within, you will notice that you naturally balance out of being driven by joy alone, and come to a place of wholeness. This state of wholeness is your natural state of being, the stable state of life-energy, the state that allows a balanced perspective on everything, a state that incorporates a wholeness based wisdom rather than just a highly “individualistically selfish” (or purely egoic) perspective.

Being driven by joy is of course a much higher vibration that being driven by struggle-based thinking, and is usually a pre-requisite before one can come to wholeness – it takes a conscious choice/courage to let go of a struggle-based mindset and align with one’s joy, and this growth in consciousness is a needed pre-requisite before one can move to the next level of finding wholeness. It’s just that you can get stuck in an misguided understanding that being driven by joy is your highest expression, in which case you start resisting the natural growth towards wholeness as it entails letting go of being driven by joy alone; it requires the integration of dark and light component in your being to create a balanced movement. You may already have an inner knowing that being driven by joy is not your highest expression, while also knowing that being driven by fear/hatred is also not aligned with your being, in which case you are already mature enough to directly allow the state of wholeness – you don’t have to move into a temporary phase of being driven by joy to find wholeness.

The deal with a wholeness based inspiration is that it can sometimes feel quite “impersonal” in terms of just doing the right thing without actually coming from a perspective of personal gain. The mind (or ego structure) being highly survival based, is usually resistant to the very idea of an impersonal movement, or a wholeness based movement, and would usually argue for a purely egoic perspective – this is when you know that your mind is still rooted in fear-based or joy-based movement alone, those are the two extremes in which the ego usually swings. Basically, the deal is to not fight the mind, and just allow it to be; you can’t force the mind into wholeness, you have to allow it to mature into wholeness. If you simply stay in a space of allowing, the maturity will come in automatically as your mind gets touched by the intelligence of your life-stream. The deal is that the wholeness based movement will take care of your personal requirements as well as bring forth expression, in you, that meets the requirements of the totality – an analogy is that a healthy cell is the one that is well nourished (personal requirement) while also staying true to its function towards the body (totality-based requirement); without the body’s health the cell can’t be healthy, and without the cell’s health the body can’t be healthy, it’s a symbiotic relationship.

Wholeness driven desires

Your desires may seem to evolve as your mind’s maturity evolves from a struggle-based living towards a wholeness-based living. I am not saying that your desires become more “spiritual” (as per conventional, or conservative imagination of spirituality) or something limiting like that, rather it’s just an evolution in terms of growth. The desires that you have in the state of wholeness are all wholeness-based in the sense that they all have a wholeness-driven purpose – you may have desires that seem totally personal and desires that are oriented towards a creative expression, but eventually they all serve a wholeness based purpose. After all, your personal well-being, and satisfaction, is important for you to live the full potential of your expression.

Also, if you have the desire to own a luxury car, even in the state of inner wholeness, that means it has a wholeness-driven purpose. To be driven by wholeness does not make you into a monk who sells his Ferrari, it could well make you an entrepreneur who owns one – after all, technicians who work for Ferrari are dependent on people who buy them for their well-being, and the designers of the car are living their creative expression, there is nothing “less spiritual” about owing a Ferrari if that’s your inherent desire. Just don’t have some deluded idea that you have to own a Ferrari to feel successful – the feeling of success is just a feeling of alignment with who you truly are in your growth and evolution. Of course, if your expression is to be a hermit then that’s what you will move towards, but in many cases people just have some spiritual imaginations about how they should live instead of following their natural expression.

Also, in the state of wholeness, desires lose their sense of extra-ordinariness because you are no longer driven by their joy element alone. You also lose this sense that you have to “make it happen” and realize that the presence of a desire in you is simply indicative of a “requirement” in the scheme of things from the perspective of totality and you simply are a channel through which its manifestation/creation seeks expression. You become allowing of the desires, while not having any deluded sense of over-excitement about it. The element of enjoyment wanes away in its motivation, and what really motivates you is something that can only be termed as the “deal of the moment” – in fact it’s not even a state of motivation, rather a state of flow. It’s a very different experience of life altogether, something that your mind can’t quite imagine if its looking purely from a light natured or dark natured perspective. You can’t know how this wholeness based inspiration will move through you, and what type of expression it will create, but you can be sure that it will feel like you are living your truth, like a sense of “unforced” responsibility along with a sense of “this feels right”; there is joy also, but it’s much deeper than joy.