USING THE GOAL SETTING SHEETS
There are two sets of sheets. One for making a record of where you are up to in your holistic practice and the other for goal setting.
On the “Current Practice” sheet there are columns for you to note down what you are already doing that works well and a second column to note down what is missing or needs changing in each of the six holistic areas of your life – physical, emotional, mental, social, service and spiritual. The entries in the second column may provide the start point for your goal-setting sheet. That sheet has columns for the first place to start in any goal setting endeavour and a second column to list what might stop you doing anything towards this goal – to give you an idea of how to develop a strategy to deal with your normal blocks. For instance you may set yourself some physical exercise for early in the morning and then realize that you are not good at getting out of bed on cold mornings. Two strategies to deal with this might be: plan your exercise for later in the day or work with a partner to come round and get you up and out.
These sheets are just a start point to give you ideas. You may want to design your own goal sheets with more columns or bigger spaces for writing goals down. Also goal setting doesn’t suit everybody. Some people may find that goal-setting sheets are just too linear or too mental for them and doesn’t suit the way they work. We are all different; the plan is to find out strategies that we all can use for holistic living even though the style may be different from person to person.
One area that is very interesting to all of us in the Findhorn community is how do you connect with your spiritual or higher self and how do you use this part of you in your everyday life. (Or maybe that should read “how does it use you”). I’d love to swap notes about effective spiritual practice beyond meditation and devotional singing etc.. And maybe even more interestingly: how do you make decisions in life using your spiritual self. Do you sit quietly and ‘attune’ to things. Do you have a method to let your spirit guide you rather than mentally plan out the future? What is that method you use? (One of mine: when I go inside to make an important decision I wait for the slow, gentle understanding rather than a harsh “do this, do that and do-it-now” voice that I associate more with my mind rather than my spirit. That mental voice often uses the word ‘should’).
And here are some interesting facts about the attunement process that I learned from Eileen Caddy (one of the founders of the Findhorn Community) when I went to visit her once at her house, Cornerstone, in the 1990’s. I told her that I didn’t really understand how to use the attunement process with groups. Was it a decision-making process I asked her? “No” she replied, “you use it to inform decisions” (and she went on to explain that you make your decision by your preferred or usual method after you have attuned). She then told me that the exception to this was if everyone in the group got exactly the same answer or vision in their attunement. And that was the way you knew if the attunement process was really working and everyone was aligned. Attunements where people get lots of different answers and messages are just part of our learning process and show that the process is not perfect (or more likely – that the people in the group are not perfect and are not in full alignment). Eileen didn’t seem too bothered by this outcome and knew that people were on a path and had to learn how to attune and align themselves. This knowledge doesn’t just come automatically. Eileen’s husband Peter Caddy really needed to work with Eileen’s guidance because he didn’t like sitting still and going inside at all – he preferred action. His own guidance came in the form of intuitive action – fast and immediate – but more often he would act on Eileen’s guidance because he trusted it.
Dave Till