Personal Engagement is choosing the same thing again and again whether or not we’re aware of it.

Sometimes we get tired, lonely, feel forgotten, or get frustrated. Getting bored and uninterested in our lives is human, and isn’t bad or wrong, per se. While we disengage in some things, we may become newly engaged in others, or more engaged in what we’re already engaged in. “A door doesn’t close without a window opening” holds true for things we’re engaged in.

There may be places or things where you want to reengage and you’re just not sure how. You may not feel like you have time to sit around and wait to become magically engaged in something. Perhaps the world looks like it needs you to be engaged right now, and you’re not living up to your personal expectations.

12 Ways to Re-Engage in Your Own Life

Without disrupting your life too much, here are some approaches you can take to re-engage throughout any individual part of your life, or the whole enchilada.

1. Have Fun! For all of us there are times when life can get mundane or even heavy. We might find ourselves going through the motions of life while we’re missing out on the living. This is when we might want to take a different direction and re-engage. When we focus on accumulation and survival, living is left behind and engagement doesn’t matter. Adding fun to life is where that routine changes. Add music to your day, draw yourself together with your family through games and miniature vacations to your backyard. Each of us should be an expert on having fun in our lives, and enjoy life as much as we can. There is nothing more engaging. Here’s 50 creative, cheap ways to have fun.
2. Learn Outside the Box: When you when to school, every day you’d enter your classrooms and the teacher would close the door. Today it is that same way at home, at your job, or when you go to your spiritual practice. You may have no windows, a small desk, and few connections to the world beyond your walls. However, all of us possess hearts, minds, and hands that yearn to connect to the world outside ourselves. The world may have given us a skewed vision of what learning should be. Get outside the walls that surround your heart, your mind, and your hands and beyond the windowless rooms of your life and get carried away by the flood of engagement that life offers us. Here’s the cool story of a friend of mine who decided to reschool herself.
3. Be Graciously Disengaged: Every day each one of us has the ability to reach out to millions of people around the world and simply ask, “How are you today?” Yet we don’t. We are not wrong or bad because we aren’t engaged everywhere all the time. We are human. Your process of disengaging is preparing you for new engagement and a new opportunity to form lasting connections within yourself and to the world around you. Be gracious and kind in that process, and trust that wherever you’re headed is the right direction. Here’s 10 ways to be more gracious.
4. Expand Your Community: You wake up ever day. You go to the gym. You clock in at the office. You go home and make dinner. You clean house and watch television. You go to bed. Yawn. While you make think you’re a worthy audience to spend all your time with, you are simply one person. One of your best resources is your ability to connect with others and form community. We can connect like never before and have the opportunity to engage with others from around the world on a daily basis. Community literally knows no boundaries. Here’s a cool poster on how to build community.
5. Look at Your Issues: Sometimes simply loving who you are and what you’ve done doesn’t satisfy you. You’ve tried, and find yourself increasingly disinterested in what’s going on around you. These are the times in our lives when we can deconstruct our lives. Instead of just moving around the pieces and installing new lenses to look at things through, we get to take apart the things we thought were permanent and rebuild them to suit who we really are and what we’re really doing. Seeing truth this way is a deeply engaging process and one that can radically reconstitute who you are.
6. Be wrong and learn to love your mistakes. Having to be right is keeping you from being fully engaged within yourself right now. Life isn’t school, and there’s nobody to mark your mistakes wrong. You can use every engagement in your life as learning steps. Take risks, learn more than you think you need to know, and get past what you think may be right or wrong. Being right is hardly the end goal. Instead, live fully and wholly by your ethics and morals. Among my friends, those include being wrong sometimes. I screw up and make mistakes. But the fun of it might be what John Lennon said: “There’s no problems, only solutions.” Each mistake is an opportunity to get correct, and to learn. So let’s love our mistakes instead of running from them. Here’s a good post on how to be wrong gracefully.
7. Share with others. We don’t have to live our lives in our journals and in our own heads. We shouldn’t close the notebooks in our minds and put them away, just to keep our lives to ourselves. Engaging within ourselves means engaging in the world around us. One way we can do is by sharing with other people, including our struggles, successes, challenges, and methods. This is the way our world can work better! Let’s open ourselves, our minds, hearts, and hands and let others know we’re human beings having human experiences, good, bad and all points in between! By learning to be transparent with others we engage with others, their knowledge and experience, and draw our personal engagement nearer to our own hearts. The Johari Window is a useful tool for knowing what and how we share with others.
8. Build it again and again. One of the benefits of being personally engaged within yourself is the ability to not only get deeper inside your own life, but to get deeper with others too. The community you creating through personal engagement will emerge slowly, surely, and obviously within moments of your journey inwards. It will allow you to engage deeply and meaningfully as you’re capable, and award you with the sustainability of your lifetime if that is what you choose. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. charged us with building this, saying “Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.” This is the soulchange he spoke of. The King Center has shared an essay showing how we can continue to create beloved community.
9. Eat mangos. The very nature of an engaged existence is bound within the skin of an Ataulfo mango. Grown in the Michoacan, Sinaloa, Nayarit, Jalisco, Veracruz and Chiapas states of Mexico, the Ataulfo is silky smooth and wonderfully sweet, and is a dessert all engaged people need to eat. Enjoy it. Mmm mmm!
10. Move on. Engage with new people, new ideas and new culture whenever you can, however you can. Get your people, including family and friends, involved in coming up with ways that you can move on from the Old and into the New. Create a life that is engaging for you, move further within yourself, and you will find more people more engaged all around you in turn. Here’s a useful article on how to move on, what to move on from, and more.
11. Listen to your inner voice. Personal engagement is alive within you right now. Growing quiet and learning to listen to you will lead you further within you, engaging you deeply in the reality that is you right now. The jumbled opinions of the world are interesting fodder if you want to live unconsciously, but within you right now are all the answers to all the questions you have ever had, ever. Do what you know is right, right now. The road you walk is your road, and yours alone. That same voice will teach you to laugh at the way you respond to life too. If you find yourself in a hard place, that voice won’t laugh at the hard place, but at your reaction to that hard place. Learn to smile at it and be kind, and let your inner voice move you to action right now.
12. Let go. We cannot fix what isn’t broken. Your life is working in absolute perfection right now. You are perfectly engaged in a linear, sequential order that makes sense in a universal way. While that might be beyond your comprehension, ultimately the reality is that peronal engagement is beyond everyone’s comprehension to some extent.

If it feels like you’re in a situation where you just cannot be engaged, then stop trying. That is exactly how its supposed to be. If you try to force yourself to get engaged, it might work for a minute.

But ultimately it will not work- or maybe it will. Either way, it is exactly how its supposed to be. Sometimes it’s about letting go and trusting personal engagement to operate in its infinitely harmonious ways, whatever they are.

Other times it’s about taking action and making change. You will become more engaged through your intent and action, surrender and trust. Personal engagement has the infinite ability to persist. Know that by simply letting go. Here’s 40 ways to let go.

You’re on the perfect road to personal engagement right now. Enjoy your walk, run, skip, crawl, or slog- its all waiting for you right now. The challenge is optional, the journey is exceptional, and you are exactly where you’re supposed to be right now. Change, remain, transform, transpire, or expire: Personal engagement is yours.

Life Unfolding

Imagine your life unfolding as you become more consciously engaged within and around yourself. What do you want to take away at the end of your lifetime? How is that different from how you’ve been living? Do you want more? Have you been waiting your whole life without knowing what you’re waiting for?

No matter where you are in your life or what you’re engaged or disengaged in, it’s best to remember that you may not be where you’ve been, and you may not have arrived at where you’re going, but you’re definitely on your way there right now.

Don’t give up on you or what you’re engaged in or disengaged from. Move with intention, on purpose, and you will never move wrong. Engagement always follows.

A fellow traveler from the 13th century once wrote,

“I once had a thousand desires, but in my one desire to know you all else melted away.”

That was the Sufi poet Rumi, and the “You” he was addressing may have been a love, Allah, or himself. Over the last few years, all have become the same for me as I’ve discovered the meaning of my life.

If you are having a hard time re-engaging in your own life, stop running from yourself. There came a point in my own life when I ran into a wall that I wanted to move past. Moving through that desire, I found that the only way to move beyond the life I lived in the past was to consciously engage to the life I live right now, in every instant. That is my journey today.

A year ago I wrote the following questions for myself in my journal. If you find yourself disenchanted, turned off, or pushed away from being consciously engaged, consider these:

1. Do you love being right?
2. Are you playing to keep?
3. Do things fall apart in your life?
4. Are you hungry?
5. Is constant movement most comfortable for you?
6. Do you hear voices?
7. What are you hanging onto?

Today, I’ve learned to answer these questions honestly, at least to myself. That is a route to personal engagement.