The Compass of Joy — Finding Your True North

Bashar provides detailed practical guidance on using joy and excitement as a navigational compass — how to distinguish genuine excitement from ego-driven desire, and how to follow excitement with full commitment.

I speak often about following your highest excitement, and I want to give you more precision about how to actually work with this principle, because it is sometimes misunderstood in ways that can create confusion rather than clarity.

First, let me be specific about what 'excitement' means in this context. I am not talking about the surface-level desire of the ego — the thrill of getting validation, the pleasure of acquisition, the temporary high of novelty. These can masquerade as excitement but they have a different quality. Genuine excitement — the kind I am pointing toward — has a particular felt sense: it is expansive rather than contracting; it feels like an opening rather than a grasping; it has a quality of rightness and of your whole being participating, not just your wanting mechanism.

How do you find it? Sit quietly and imagine yourself doing various possible activities, taking various possible directions in your life. Notice what happens in your body. Some things produce a sense of lightening, of opening, of energy moving upward and outward. That is the excitement signal. Some things produce a sense of contraction, of flatness, of energy decreasing. That is the signal that this particular direction is not aligned with your authentic nature at this time.

Now, here are the critical elements of working with excitement that many miss:

First: follow it at the level where it exists, not at the level where you wish it existed. If your excitement is for cooking, follow cooking — do not insist it must be for starting a restaurant empire before it is worthwhile. The excitement at the current level, fully followed, leads naturally to the next level.

Second: follow it without attachment to outcome. Your job is to act on the excitement, not to control what the universe does with your action. Many people stop following excitement when they cannot see how it leads to their desired destination. But the path revealed by excitement is not always the path you imagined. It is always more elegant.

Third: follow it fully, without holding back. Not with reckless disregard for practical considerations, but with wholehearted commitment. Half-hearted excitement-following produces half-hearted results. Full commitment generates full momentum.