25 Update Post From The Life Is A Fork In The Road Facebook Page

How Do I Create The Weekly Facebook Status Updates?

At least once a week and sometimes more, I’ve posted a status update on the Life Is A Fork In The Road Facebook Page since January. These updates were initially intended to encourage discussion about listening to and following our inner wisdom. As I read more stories and insights, I began to learn things that shaped these weekly reflections. Sometimes it was a deeper insight about what was really going on in people’s lives. Other times I found several people commenting about the same issue and turned that into a post so others could comment on it.

Writing Life Is A Fork In The Road

This book I’m writing is not going to be a collection of stories though it will include many stories to illustrate its ideas.  It will be a conceptual book about what I’ve learned and the conclusions I’ve drawn. The stories and insights everyone shares all have become a part of a collective body of knowledge. From that I look for patterns that pinpoint what we have in common and what is unique to each of us. This pattern analysis will ultimately allow me to discover deeper truths about our inner wisdom, what it is, how we hear it, what keeps us from hearing it, and how we learn to trust it. It is my hope that the final conclusions of my book will help people to find their own inner wisdom and trust it enough to follow it more often.

What follows are 25 of those weekly Facebook status updates in sequential order. If you read them in that order, you will notice an evolution in my thoughts. That evolution reflects what I’ve learned by reading all your stories and insights during this last nine months. This book is literally being written one post and comment at a time. While the status updates are short and therefore not representative of all I need to say on a particular point, the longer comments I have made in answer to many people’s questions all reflect the conclusions I’m drawing and will become a part of the final book as well.

If you feel like copying and sharing any of these, please remember to give Don Shapiro credit as the author along with a link to either this website or the Facebook page for the book. Gratitude and blessings to all of you.

http://www.lifeisaforkintheroad.com

http//www.facebook.com/lifeisaforkintheroad

25 Facebook Status Updates from the Life Is A Fork In The Road Page

Our inner voice can be as unique as we are. For some it is a soft whisper, others a shout, and many some type of inner feeling. To some it might be an illness or someone shouting at them or an event that happened to them. While many of you have talked about who or what you feel the inner voice is, what we need to explore more is the different ways it manifest itself & why it shows up differently in different people.

How can we make our lives better? How can we make better choices? How can we find peace, happiness and a good life? There are 6.8 billion people on this planet so there are 6.8 billion answers to these questions. We can’t live someone else’s life or by someone’s else’s advice. We each have our own unique journey. That’s why listening to our inner voice is so important. It’s the only advice that really matters.

We’re a miracle born without an instruction manual. It appears we actually have a built in guidance system some of us learn how to use through experience. Even then, we’re still novices in how it all works. By collecting enough stories about real life experiences that involve our inner voice, it’s my hope we might actually learn something new so we can better use this miracle we’ve been given.

Life is a test of faith. No matter how many facts or analysis exist about the fork we face, there always remains something unknown. Ultimately, we have to make a leap of faith concerning many of our choices. At that moment, do we hear & follow the guidance from our inner voice of wisdom whether it comes from within us or a symbolic event around us?

Our choices & experiences may be great teachers, but do we always learn the lesson that was meant for us? What role does our attitude & perspective play in whether we learn anything from experiences placed there to help us grow? Do we sometimes fail to learn the lesson? Have any of you failed to learn a lesson from a choice only to have one fork after another thrust upon you to get you to wake up to that lesson?

What is our true inner voice? Some say it is God. Some say it is the universe. Some say it is the accumulated wisdom from our life experiences. Some say it is all of this. How does it differ from our wants, desires, likes, dislikes, emotions and ego? Do we have a destiny guided by our inner voice that we either follow or fight which shapes our life? How do we explain when bad things happen to us beyond our control?

Life IS a fork in the road…actually over 1,000,000 forks during our lifetime. Add up your choices & that’s your life. Change your choices & change your life. Some are big, many are small & more involve daily routines we put on auto pilot. Our inner voice may tell us to change any of these choices, even the order of our morning routine or daily drive. Following our inner voice is about all these choices big & small.

Awareness unlocks our potential. As our awareness grows so we grow. If we’re looking for guidance to move beyond where we are at, maybe we need to expand our awareness about ourselves, our situation and more. As our awareness expands, it changes what we see and how we see it. It opens up windows and doors that didn’t exist before. That may help us unlock new inner guidance & discover new forks we hadn’t considered.

We are not alone. No matter what we have experienced or what paths we followed, through all that has been shared on this page we have learned that we are not the only ones. No matter what life throws at us others have been there before us. We are all connected to each other and connected to something bigger than ourselves. Together, as a community, we have become a giant hope generating factory.

How do we deal with the fear that holds us back from making a choice at a major fork in the road? Is it fear of making the wrong choice? Is it fear of the unknown? Is it fear of leaving one’s comfort zone? Is it fear of things being less than perfect? Sometimes, it might be any or all of these. Sometimes we don’t trust ourselves. Sometimes we don’t trust our inner voice even when we know it speaks the truth.

Life is learning to trust the soft whisper deep inside us that hides between our breaths. It might not always be soft & sometimes it can come in unusual ways such as an illness, the passing of a loved one, a movie a friend ask you to watch, a dream, a poem or something someone says to you. However it appears, it hides between all the other voices and feelings inside of us such as our wants, desires, likes & ego.

Does our community offer a glimpse of how the world can get along peacefully? We now have members from over 155 countries. They represent every religion, spiritual belief & philosophy on earth. We are living proof it can be done. When we build from a foundation of what we have in common, it’s so much easier to work through our differences with respect. Our community has made the world a much smaller & more personal place.

Don’t let the experiences of the past limit your vision for the future. We have to learn how to find our true inner voice of wisdom from all the other voices inside of us. A voice from the past may keep telling us we can’t be more than we have been. Sometimes, our well meaning family & friends say the same thing. Let your true inner voice give you the courage to pursue your purpose and be all you can be.

One of our greatest challenges is learning to trust ourselves. When our true inner voice of wisdom sends us a message, are we listening for it & do we trust it enough to act on it? How do we know for sure which voice or feeling is the real one especially when other voices are competing with it? What if we don’t like what it’s advising us to do? How can we learn to trust it at that crucial fork in the road?

Life is a journey, not a destination. Everything we experience offers kernels of wisdom to guide us along that journey. It’s not where we arrive that counts but how we live every moment along the way. Following our true inner voice of wisdom can lead us to experiences we otherwise wouldn’t have encountered & enrich our life in surprising ways.

A “den of chatter” buzzes inside us battling against our true inner voice of wisdom. We can get used to a certain way of being such as our feelings pulling, pushing & disturbing us until that becomes our “normal” accepted way of life. It can be hard to leave the familiar, even a dysfunctional familiar, for a new way of making choices. How do we move from following our head & emotions to following our heart?

Everything we experience offers kernels of wisdom to guide our journey through life. From one fork to another, life offers a never ending stream of lessons. Even choices that turned out poorly serve a purpose. There are no bad choices. Our challenge is learning the lessons from those choices that will help us make better choices in the future & recognize our true inner voice of wisdom when it beckons.

Love is unconditional. It is a spiritual state, not an emotion. It’s not a choice you pick at a fork in the road. Once love enters you, it exists forever. Your choice is whether you want someone you love to be in your life. If someone you love does something you absolutely hate, you may not want them around you but you still love them. If you place any conditions on your love, what you are feeling is not love at all.

We are the light at the end of the tunnel. For some, the tunnel is longer than for others. We may look all around & ask advice from others to help us out of that tunnel. The real answers that can help guide our journey come from within us, deep within. The light shines from the core of our existence, a place beyond our emotions, personality and ego. That light is our true inner voice of wisdom.

The rhythm of the universe flows through us & connects us all. If you listen closely, you can hear its beat. That beat of wisdom from within & beyond is unique to each of us. One person’s quiet is another’s shout. One person needs the absence of stress while another needs the pressure. Beyond our uniqueness, there lies a common pattern that unites us all. This is what your stories have taught me so far.

No one knows better than you what’s best for you. You are the expert on you. Of course we receive advice from family, friends and even an occasional stranger. Some of it might open our eyes to a new perspective but ultimately we have to make the choice that’s right for us. Other people’s choices may be perfect for them but not so much for us. You can’t live someone else’s life or by someone else’s advice.

Is following our inner voice of wisdom a selfish act? Is it just “doing our thing”? How do we reconcile guidance from within & beyond us (be it the Creator or other force depending on your beliefs) versus putting our loved ones first? The inner voice of wisdom is not our ego, desires or emotions that may lead us to selfish choices. It’s a message of wisdom that considers the best interest of both us & our loved ones.

Every choice contains seeds of a lesson that can improve our choices in the future. There are no bad choices. Even choices that turned out awful can teach us to listen to the inner voice of wisdom we ignored. If that’s the only lesson we learned, then the experience was worthwhile. It’s not whether a choice turns out good or bad that matters. It’s whether we learned something from it that helped us to keep growing.

Our true inner wisdom guides us toward what we need, not what we want. It reflects knowledge, logic & understanding about us & our journey that goes beyond our conscious awareness. It knows what we need to learn & experience to prepare us for the next part of our journey. Trusting & following this guidance may mean doing something that initially is unpleasant but essential for us to arrive at a better place.

Our inner wisdom broadcast deep inside us just like a radio station. You have to tune into its frequency to hear the message. Your radio has dozens of stations all broadcasting messages that sound like a “den of chatter”. Too often we keep our dial tuned to just a few stations instead of using the scan button to hear a sample from all the stations. The more you scan, the more likely you are to find your inner voice.

Copyright 2010 Don Shapiro     All rights reserved.  These statements were all written by Don Shapiro and  posted on the Life Is A Fork In The Road Facebook Page between January and September, 2010.

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License