Last night I heard Elizabeth Lesser (author of Broken Open, and co-founder of the Omega Institute) in a television interview. She said at least a hundred beautiful things, but what stays with me most this morning is this: Being our true selves, living the lives we were meant to lead, is the greatest adventure there is in life. It’s the most thrilling, heart-racing, always-fascinating thing we can experience. Its all the adventure we need.

This is the big secret. The potential for a totally exciting moment-to-moment experience is resting within you. It takes courage and facing the truth to access it.

Lesser argued that when we are not living the thrilling ride of authenticity, we begin to look for thrills in other places – maybe gambling, jumping out of planes in the sky, stealing, substance abuse. On a more mundane level, I think, we are a nation of individuals seeking the thrill of the next new item, food, experience, video clip, etc. There is nothing wrong with sensory experiences when they take their proper place as minor events of life that come and go. But often we are compelled to seek them in an attempt to replace the fulfillment that comes from living our personal truth and staying connected to our true nature: love.

So, a question for you: is living your life a thrilling adventure? It doesn’t have to look like a big adventure to anyone else (and if you are living authentically, it probably won’t. There won’t be fireworks or roller-coasters or drama visible from the outside. What matters is that day to day feels like a thrilling, joyous, complete adventure to you.

If not, don’t panic. Above all don’t judge yourself. Just take in this information as an indication that there are truths in you waiting to be explored and discovered.

One easy and powerful way to begin to uncover them is by doing those things that enthrall you and engage your passion. These are your personal gratifications, which compose what I like to call your thrillprint.

Discovering Your Thrillprint: Gratifications

A thrillprint is as unique to you as your thumbprint. Its the group of activities and subjects that engage and thrill you. My thrillprint is made of up writing, experiencing art and beauty, undertaking a creative process, and pursuing a spiritual path. For one of my friends, it’s dancing and literature and cooking and having vibrant intellectual conversations. For another it’s acting, hiking, and being with her kids. For my mother it’s gardening, pottery, and caring for the sick. Gratifications are extremely personal, and yours are your unique thrillprint, as individual to you as your thumbprint.

Psychologist Martin Seligman describes the activities that make up our thrillprint as “gratifications." Gratifications, he writes, are those activities that totally absorb us in a kind of suspension of consciousness. They create a sense of flow. When doing our gratifications we become extremely present, focused. We are lighter, freed from the burdens of our ego-identity, its narrative, its baggage.

Gratifications are very different from sensory pleasures, which tend to be rooted in physical sensations, and which are fleeting. When experiencing them, we’re still very much our little selves. When we are practicing a gratification, we have a sense of immersion and and sometimes oneness with the activity or the world around us. Unlike when we are experiencing sensory pleasures, when we are doing a gratification , we are always in some way living personal strengths, passions, gifts and values.

Here are some of Seligman’s components of a gratification, as described in Authentic Happiness: The task is challenging and requires skill, we concentrate, the task has clear goals, we have deep, effortless involvement and time stops.

Here’s what’s amazing about gratifications. If you are engaging with a true gratification, you only need one. You might choose to have two or three or even four, but you don’t need them. You don’t need ten hobbies. You don’t need to be doing a different fun thing every night of the week. Doing one gratification deeply, fully, whole-heartedly--as long as its part of your thrillprint--is more than enough. In fact, one way to see if you are accessing your gratifications is if you feel a need for more, many, different recreational activities, or if you practice one or two deeply and find them deeply satisfying. It’s the different between a few close, rich friendships that truly provide you companionship and support, and fifty acquaintances who do not.

So just do the one thing. In reading this, you might be getting whispers of what makes up your thrillprint. Or maybe you clearly know already.

Don’t know what composes your thrillprint? Ask the universe, ask your intuition, ask your soul. Use the questions under "identify" below. Sit quietly. The answer might come like a faint murmuring, a quiet signal over the wires. Your mind will likely say, “I don’t know why this is popping up, but ….” Listen.

Your mind might think this is the year of growth through marathon training but something inside you is saying: “Cook. Cooking is where its at.” Go cook. Don’t make a long term plan, go play instead. Have the experience.Disvoer your thrillprint.

When you find that thing, it may take you a few weeks to settle in to it. There might be a learning or re-learning curve. Your inner critic will try and stop you along the way. It will stream words at you: "I need the materials and they are too expensive. I need a room for art and don’t have one. I’m no good at this. I’m no good at this anymore. Its too late. Its silly. I’m worried I will fail. I’m worried this won’t be fun and I’ll be disappointed. I don’t want to be a beginner at it". Notice the voice, recognize it, and work with your inner critic to diffuse its strength.

Stay with it. As you move into the gratification, you will fall into absorption in the activity itself. These voices will subside. The power of the gratification will overcome them.

And then, in a few hours or days or weeks, if you find that soon you are having outlandish fun, smiling more in general and feeling a new sense of flow and lightness and rightness in your life, you’ve found your gratification.

The Four Steps to Big Joy

There are four things you need to do to get huge joy, love and flow in your life via your thrillprint:

Identify: sometimes we don’t know what our gratifications are. They got squashed or lost long ago. So ask, ask your heart. As described above, don’t judge the answer, just listen. Here are some other ways you can ask:

Think back on experiences when you felt a sense of flow, competence, energy, when you didn’t care what others thought. What created that feeling? What was present?

Make a list of those activities that give you the most satisfaction in life. Brainstorm a long list of the juiciest experiences you can think of. See what comes from that. For this exercise, stay away from sensory pleasures like getting a massage. Look at the list of components of gratifications above and brainstorm around that.

Accept: accept the truth of what your thrillprint is. Your ego-identity might have preferred if it was pilates because then you’d have those abs, or knitting because knitting is in (is it still in?), or hiking because you live in the hiking-revering bay area. Instead, the truth may be it’s hanging out with three year olds, or playing the flute, or learning about history. Your job is to come home to what’s true for you.

Chase: its up to you to chase your gratifications. Pursue them. Show up for them. Find resources to help you do them. Stick with them.

Protect: Protect your time and energy for your gratifications. Create time and space in your life and calendar. Give them your best hours of the day if you can. Do them with a spirit of self-care; be smart about what you need.If you need to rearrange your schedule, do it. If you don’t want to invite your friends to join you, don’t. You many need to let this work gestate and keep this love to yourself for a while. You are the parent and guardian and protector of the magic that is created when you practice your gratifications.

Spillover Effects

That’s pretty much all you have to do, and the reward is overflowing joy. Oh, and also a re-ordered and transformed life. Yes, that’s right. Its  mysterious and fascinating but true that doing these often “recreational activities” sets in motion a whole cascade of health and change in one’s entire life.

I have a friend who had long been struggling with family and career issues in her life. She was working on all of these areas – trying to find a way out – but the process had a quality of burdened-ness and limitation. But she collected the clarity and courage and energy to show up to a pottery class, embracing what for her had been a huge but neglected passion.

From the first class, she had a blast. She was home. A spark was lit within her. Her passion for pottery carried her through the awkward moments of integrating with a group of more experienced potters that had been meeting for a long time. Her passion carried her through the challenge of building up her skills. The love she felt for the art overcame the fears she would have felt in any other similar situation. She kept going back, intoxicated by the joy and the utter excitment: she was living her thrillprint.

Then, over the next several months, family issues that had persisted for decades began to change. They seemed to kind of resolve themselves in some moments, in others she found new tools and ways to deal with them. At other times, the issues themselves seemed to shrink down to lesser importance. Then, in her newfound joy, the suffering and conflicts that had characterized her work situation began to seem absurd to her. She had a whole series of new ideas for how to get out of it. She also had a new sense of volition and possibility about doing so.

I believe all of this was accelerated, amplified by the pottery class, if not caused entirely by it. Of course its not the pottery class, or even the act of working with clay. It’s the joy. It’s the river of life that was opened up in her. It’s the love that was called forth. The clay is the portal. But as humans here on earth in this physical existence, we need the portal.

The love we find through the portal of living our thrillprint spills over into other areas of our lives. It causes us to see things differently. We ask new questions. It offers a healing balm that can sooth our open wounds. It changes the size of things: when we’re operating with big love, big joy, big spirit in our lives, the size of the whole canvas of our lives gets larger. As a result, the problems, annoyances and limitations that loomed large before now shrink small.

So, its more than worth it.

Identify your gratifications.

Accept them.

Chase them.

Protect them.

If you do so, you'll experience the blissful adventure of living your thrillprint, one of the greatest adventures there is.

And let me know what your thrillprint is, and how it goes.

Tara

For more writings on practical ways to live with more freedom and fulfillment, visit http://sophiashouse.wordpress.com/