“What you seek is seeking you.”
Rumi

Maybe you don’t need to make six figures a year. Or be married by the time you’re thirty. Or be Team Captain. Or sit in an ashram watching your in breath and out breath. Or have a pension.

Or maybe those are exactly the things that you need to have and do to feel the way you want to feel.

When you get real about the feelings that you crave, you might surprise yourself with some new choices.

You’ll sign up for workshops you never considered. You’ll quit stuff. You could realize that you don’t need to be VP to feel powerful or useful; you just need to volunteer at the youth shelter. Maybe you don’t need that award; you just need to take better care of yourself.

Clarity about your true desires is so liberating because you get to stop proving yourself to everyone (including yourself).

Just think about that for a minute. No. More. Proving. Do you feel giddy about that? Because I do.

I met SARK at a cocktail party. SARK is also known as Susan Rainbow Kennedy, and her posters and books, like Succulent Wild Woman, Living Juicy, and dozens of others, have been read by millions. She dazzles in person. I wanted to sit at her feet and hear any wisdom she wanted to give. We connected immediately. “Tell me anything!” I said. “Like, what’s your thing these days? Anything.”

She didn’t skip a beat. She looked me straight in the eye and, all sparkly but deadly serious, she said, “No striving.”

I whispered it back to her, nodding my head up and down like I’d just heard The Secret Password of All Time. “No striving.” And then, I upped the volume to eureka-level. “No striving! Oh my god, you have no idea how much I needed to hear this right now,” I told her. We chanted it together (chant it with me now): “No striving.” And we giggled like pretty witches.

Then SARK went on to tell me the fabulously unorthodox ways in which she runs her sizable publishing empire. She told me about the flashy offers she’s declined and the financially profitable projects she put an end to so that she could feel more spiritually profitable—which, of course, led to even more profitability. “I stopped pushing years ago. I changed my definition of success. I gotta feel juiced. Juiced is the goal.”

All juice. No push. Feeling good is the goal. Check.

A Note from Eric Handler, Publisher & Co-Founder of Positively Positive

The Desire Map is the soulful, shoot-from-the-hip insight that I’ve come to expect from Danielle LaPorte, but she’s done something really extraordinary with this. Danielle will get you to rethink the way you’ve been going after what you want in life. Like, stop you in your tracks. Each page of this had me nodding with relief. The audio contemplations soothed my soul. Every worksheet gave me at least one personal a-ha.

This is what people are looking for—a new way to plan their lives—an inside-out approach.

Click here to get The Desire Map in hand today.

Danielle LaPorte is the creator of The Desire Map, author of The Fire Starter Sessions (Random House/Crown), and co-creator of Your Big Beautiful Book Plan. An inspirational speaker, former think tank exec, and business strategist, she writes weekly at DanielleLaPorte.com, where over a million visitors have gone for her straight-up advice—a site that’s been deemed “the best place on-line for kick-ass spirituality” and was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Women” by Forbes.

You can also find her on Facebook and Twitter @daniellelaporte.

*Photo by kenteegardin.