Everyone needs a blueprint for their life. Just as you need a blueprint to build a house, so you need a blueprint if you want to build your life. Otherwise, you will build according to someone else’s blueprints. Your life will be built to be someone else’s dream house. In fact, what you will do, if you are like most of humanity, is build your “house” according to the architectural plans of several builders, some of whom have vastly different plans from one another. In fact, it is as if some want to build of stone, others of wood. Some want traditional while others want green construction. Some know what they are doing while others only think they know how to build houses. You were born with a physiological blueprint that is extraordinarily reliable at providing instructions for your foundation and basement. This is a source of extremely reliable architectural plans for your house. The only problem is that it says nothing about the construction of the upper stories or the roof.
You were also born with an emotional blueprint which created predispositions in your mood and personality that largely determine whether your house is built by the sea, in the mountains, in the woods or in extreme conditions of desert heat or arctic cold. This blueprint also influences whether your house has many windows or is closed in or changes with the seasons, its colors and lighting. However, it says very little about how your house should adapt to present environmental conditions. Consequently, if you only follow its blueprint you will find your house lacking adaptability and flexibility, which means you will soon outgrow it.
You were also born with an inborn blueprint for learning language, concepts and communicating them, that is, with an ability to learn to read blueprints of all sorts in order to become an architect yourself. In addition, you come in with the ability to access additional blueprints that only come available as certain doors are unlocked and possibilities present themselves. These blueprints are generally first vaguely sensed in dreams and, like dreams, most are never recognized as blueprints or used to remodel your house to accommodate your current conditions.. One reason is that you have not been taught to look for them or read them. This is a major function of Integral Deep Listening and this statement of intent. However, there is another, vitally important reason why you do not make use of the best blueprints available to you, and that is you have been taught to discard blueprints that are not approved by social and cultural architects.
Your inborn blueprints largely support and complement one another in the building of a solid foundation, basement and first floor to your house, but the forms that your house takes is largely dependent on creative serendipity. Like snowflakes and trees, you had no say in the form you took, male or female, black, brown, white or yellow or where you landed, Minnesota, Shanghai or Swaziland. Just like a tree, you had to make do with your “soil conditions,” whether dry or moist, the “minerals” available in your soil, the ease or difficulty of your environment to support its growth, the weather and its relationship to other life forms. Is there too much wind? Are there violent storms? Are there tree-trampling elephants?
The family and culture you are born into are also capricious architects that build your house. They firmly place their blueprints over those you came in with. Their customs, beliefs, religious, national and health preferences bind your limbs and clip your roots until you assume the shape, form and behavior that they insist will insure your success and happiness. The results may indeed be in harmony with what wants to be born within you. For instance, if you have strong physical aptitudes and are born into a family of athletes who channel you toward sports in which you excel, then the result can be largely in harmony with at least parts of your innate architectural blueprint. However, in important ways, the architectural blueprints used by your parents and teachers for the construction of your life probably are not very compatible. Imagine had strong physical aptitudes and were born into a family of musicians or intellectuals. Imagine you had strong musical aptitudes and were born to a family whose life was built around sports. Imagine you are a thinker and are born in the country, far from schools or books, and who is raised to tend cattle. Under such conditions, your house takes on the shape and living conditions of others, whether you like it or not. You will think your house is an expression of who you are and its design is “right,” good, or predestined by God, karma or a divine plan. You were taught to think this so you would swallow your social engineering by well-intentioned others who did not have a clue about what your architectural plan might best be or how to construct your house in a way that would maximize your unique gifts to the world. You were taught that the “house” they turned you into is who you are, but is it? You have largely been designed to the specifications of family, cultural and social architects who think they know who you are and who you need to become, but who have no idea who you are or what shape your house would take if it were constructed under ideal conditions. How could they know? Have they consulted your unique architectural blueprint? If not, are they simply claiming they know what is best for you when in fact they are merely imposing their own priorities on you?
IDL first wakes you up to this reality, because without awareness of it you cannot become a conscious co-creator in the construction and reconstruction of your house. This is the work of the IDL Statement of Intent. It focuses your awareness and attention in directions that are most likely to generate wakefulness, clarity, lucidity and enlightenment. IDL then helps you to access and follow your unique blueprint for your dream house. This dream house is not, however your dream house because it is bigger and better than you are or than you can even conceive. If it were created to your specifications you would soon outgrow it because you are constantly outgrowing who you are and who you think you need to become. Instead, who you are will continuously be remodeled to the specifications of your life compass according to the construction plans provided to you by your own emerging potentials. You access these through interviewing characters in your dreams and the personifications of those life issues of greatest importance to you today.
When you combine a clear focus on intention with regular IDL interviewing and application of those recommendations that make sense to you, you will construct your dream house based on a blueprint that uniquely reflects both your needs and your unique gifts to the world.
For the IDL Statement of Intent, go here.
To learn about IDL interviewing, go here.
For information about the IDL Coaching Certification program, go here.
