How I Discovered My Divine Zone

What's makes the best life?

I've often tried to answer this question for myself. In my twenties and thirties, I thought the answer was achievement and fame. I made a career in art and my work got into top New York galleries and a museum show with favorable reviews in The New York Times, Art News and New York Magazine. And after all this, I still didn't feel great about my life.

In my forties I thought the answer lay in dispelling unhappiness. So I studied psychology and learned about the therapeutic process. I became a psychotherapist, founded the CREATIVE QUEST CENTER FOR PERSONAL GROWTH in NYC, trained psychotherapists and helped many people understand their problems and handle life better. I had many wonderful experiences and felt my life was very constructive and good, but still felt something was lacking.

During my mid-fifties and into my early sixties, I turned toward focusing more fully on my creative and spiritual development. In addition to my usual activities, I spent a lot of time doing yoga, meditating, painting, drawing and contemplating nature. These activities developed my ability to connect deeply within myself and led me to a great discovery -- the better I connected deeply within, the better my external life got.

Eventually I realized why this happens; there's a cause and effect relationship between the inner and outer of our lives. Early in the first of Neal Donald Walsch's 'Conversations with God' book series, the voice of God says simply and poignantly - "If you don't go within, you go without." Years before I found these books and read these words, I had experienced their profound meaning. And then, soon after, I had another breakthrough.

During one formal meditation (sitting in lotus posture), I felt a mysterious energy slowly curl its way up my spine. At its conclusion, I felt highly charged and had a vivid sense that I was a divine being; that a pure spiritual essence quietly resided in me.

From here on I knew myself in a very different way ... not just as Joseph Russo, the ordinary guy with frailties and limitations who worried and struggled like everybody else, or as a creative artist or professional psychotherapist, but also as a divine being of much greater dimension ... and I could now more readily shift to this divine level of Self. It was as if a barrier within had weakened and I could easily slip cross to another level of my consciousness. The moment I remembered my deeper True Self, I could make an inner shift and be one with it. And the more I did this, the more wonderful life was.

Behold! I now had the most satisfying answer to my original question -- what makes the best life? And it had little to do with what I chose to do, and everything to do with what level of Self I was focused at.

From here on it was clear that the key to having a great life was a matter of continually remembering one's True Self and making an inner shift to be focused at that level. In 'Conversations With God,' book three, much is said about the importance of remembering. By remembering our True Self we function at a different level and experience a higher life. This level of living is what I came to call Living In Your Divine Zone.

The more I remembered my True Self and made the shift, the better life got. And eventually it got so good I couldn't keep it to myself anymore. I had to share it. That's when I began writing and publishing the e-mail essays I called "THOUGHTS TO LIVE BY" and my book -- "LIVING IN YOUR DIVINE ZONE."

I know that this may sound like pie-in-the-sky to some, but I have to tell it as I know it. Each of us develops a certain vision of life based on what we know. If we've never experienced life on a really high level, it may seem impossible. But I think most of us have had a taste of it ... when falling in love or our baby is born or escaping a disaster or getting totally wrapped up in a good cause or creative project. At such times we may know life in a new way ... we may experience a great-to-be-alive feeling over days, weeks or even months.

And life can actually feel great like this on a more extended and regular basis. When we shift to and remain at the level of our True Self, we leave our ordinary experience of life behind and begin LIVING IN OUR DIVINE ZONE. At least this is what I have discovered for myself. I did not expect to discover it, but many years ago my own Gurdjieff master laid the groundwork and started the process that led me here.