From time to time, just about everyone catches themselves feeling as though they are somehow veering off track, or as though there are deep truths and insights into life that they are missing out on in the hustle and bustle of the daily grind.
These moments of reflection can be a bit concerning, since they can seriously draw into question what it is we’re doing with our lives, without necessarily giving us the sense of perspective we need in order to ensure that we are living life on our terms, in alignment with our highest values and aspirations.
Here are just a handful of tips for getting a bit more life changing perspective on a regular basis, so that you can ensure you are living to the fullest.
Spend some time away from home, separated from your usual routine and context
To a pretty substantial degree, perspective and insight can often only really be obtained when we separate ourselves from our usual routines and everyday contexts, and put ourselves in situations where we have the space to view our lives from a somewhat more detached perspective.
One of the best things you could do in order to facilitate this, would be to spend some time away from home – preferably in a very different kind of location – on a fairly regular basis. That might mean traveling around the world and staying in The Face Suites, or it might just mean doing regular weekend getaways.
One way or the other, you can often understand and unravel particular problems that have been on your mind a lot more rapidly and effectively, when you are away from home.
In all likelihood, you will find this happens pretty automatically, without you having to sit down with a pen and paper in order to plan things out. In fact, trying to directly plan things out in this way may even be counter-productive.
Get back in touch with your intuitions and imaginative side
Today, it’s very commonly the case that all perspective and understanding is presented solely as a matter of logical and rationalistic thinking.
In reality, however, true perspective is often a much more holistic and difficult to pin down thing, that has a lot to do with our intuitions and our imaginative side.
Also, in the book, “The Master and His Emissary,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist makes a compelling case that, far from being “unrealistic,” our intuitions and imaginations may well put us in touch with the world of experience and insight in a much more direct way than our attempts to rationalistically dissect everything.
If you are trying to get a deeper sense of perspective on the direction your life is heading in, and where you should perhaps make some changes, begin by getting in touch with your own basic feelings, intuitions, and instincts about things.
Then, engage with different stories and art forms that help to reinvigorate your imagination and sense of connection to the unseen and magical dimensions of life.
Put yourself in unfamiliar and challenging situations
If you are constantly engaging in the same perpetual behaviors time and time again, and are basing your attitudes towards things on a few well-entrenched assumptions and theories of yours, it quickly becomes just about impossible to actually develop a broader sense of perspective.
Easily one of the most powerful things you can do in order to achieve a high degree of perspective if you find yourself in the situation, is to break out of that framework and to begin regularly putting yourself in unfamiliar and challenging situations, that get you directly confronting the external world head-on, and learning via experience.
Perhaps you feel like you would be too scared, shy, and embarrassed to do a martial art, for example. That you “wouldn’t be any good at it anyway, so what’s the point?” In reality, though, you may well have a completely different experience in practice by confronting your fears and actually signing up for class. You can never know in the abstract.
You simply need to have hands-on experiences to broaden your perspectives as effectively as possible.
Expose yourself to the stories of other people who are leading very different lives to your own
There are a huge number of different ways to live and act in the world, with some of those ways being outright negative and destructive, and other ones resulting in a variety of positive outcomes.
In reality, one of the most powerful ways of developing a heightened sense of perspective on life is to expose yourself to the stories of other people who are leading very different lives to your own.
Are there particular outlooks that you feel you could really benefit from adopting? Particular mistakes you would like to be really careful to avoid?
Pay attention to the lives and stories of others.
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