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Welcome to the School of Life Design! We are here to learn and create together. This school has manifested in my life and yours to bring us closer to what we desire. As we teach each other and share our creations, the most important thing to remember is that you are doing everything right. We are inspired to make our lives more joyful and fun, not to doubt our choices or worry about what anyone else thinks. All that matters in life is feeling good, so we are coming together to design experiences that feel good.

After you read through this lesson, you can take a listen to the accompanying discussion between me and my partner-in-design Kelly Cree. Kelly is an absolute expert at explaining these concepts verbally, so if you find yourself getting lost, just listen to the MP3 to gain a better understanding of the topics we’re talking about here.

What is Life Design?

Life Design is the practice of shaping your reality into the specific experiences you desire. Let’s compare it to graphic design: a graphic designer shapes art, technology and information to form a specific message. A life designer has not only visual communication elements at her disposal, but her entire world to draw from.

Why practice Life Design?

Because you can. Because once you get a taste of how much control you have over your life experience, it’s impossible to turn around. If you are complacent, content, & hate rocking the boat, then this course is not for you. If you are always reaching for more, never satisfied with where you are, and full of desire to live your life to the fullest, then keep reading.

Contemporary Life Designers

Life Design is nothing new. Any person pursuing personal development, self-improvement, and spiritual growth is a life designer. But most life designers are not very successful at creating their dream realities, because they are missing one simple thing–confidence. You can have anything you want, if you believe that you can.

Try spending one day listening for what people tell themselves they can’t do. “I could never quit my job, because I can’t find a better one.” “I can’t eat that pizza, it’ll just make me fat.” “I can’t take up running, I’m too out of shape.” And on and on and on. Count the times people are making their own realities with negative statements. Do you ever find yourself doing the same?

Why do we think we can’t do the things we desire? One reason is because we believe someone else is controlling our life experience. We believe our boss, our parents, our children, our friends, the government, the weather, or God is what’s holding us back. But you know what? No one controls your life BUT YOU. Your thoughts are the only things that can hold you back from achieving everything you want.

There are many successful life designers creating their realities and sharing them on the Internet. If you ever need inspiration from people who are living the lives they want NOW, look no further! These are a few of the unique souls who have turned my perspective on life inside out:

• Gala Darling: “I believe in making mischief & the triumph of magic over the brute. I believe in short skirts & lip gloss & bringing the radical self-love revolution. I believe life doesn’t have to be serious, that you create your own reality & that beauty is all around us.”
• Esther & Jerry Hicks: “Jerry and Esther Hicks live a fairy-tale life. These two fun-loving adventure-seekers are currently breathing in huge lungfuls of joy as they figure-eight across the United States in their rock star monster bus, following the good weather, meeting friends along the way and enabling as many people as possible to visit with Abraham.”
• Steve Pavlina: “widely recognized as one of the most successful personal development bloggers on the Internet, attracting more than two million monthly readers to his website.”
• Dawn & Drew: “two ex gutter punks who fall in love, buy a retired farm in wisconsin (then move to costa rica) and tell the world their dirty secrets…” When I met Dawn the other day at Rasputina, Kelly asked her what the point of life was and she replied “to have fun!” Dawn & Drew have been my life design heroes since 2005, leading with their example of supporting themselves doing exactly what they love: podcasting.
• Tim Ferriss: a self-proclaimed lifestyle designer who wrote The 4-Hour Workweek. “Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan—there is no need to wait and every reason not to. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, high-end world travel, monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint.”

Basic principles of Life Design

These are the six basic tenets that assist life designers in the creation of great life experiences.

Oneness	We are all one. We all come from the same source energy. We are just different windows into the same soul. This concept is the reason for living transparently, for sharing what we learn along the way, and for letting go of a little privacy.
Alignment	When we are aligned with who we want to be, we feel joy. That alignment comes from feeling good, and from following our inspiration before acting.
Contrast	Every time we experience something we don’t want, we know more of what we DO want. This delicious contrast is what creates the desires we strive to quench. Without contrast, we would have no desire.
Patterns	Your daily habits, behaviors and experiences come from thought patterns. Your beliefs come from repeatedly going down the same sled-tracks of thought buried deep in your brain. We can learn to recognize when we’re taking the easy way out, and following our thoughts down old, undesirable pathways. Once we recognize our thought patterns, we can allow the creation of new patterns.
Balance	Energetic balance means that what you put out into the world comes back to you. By listening to your intuition and bodily cues, balance can be easy to achieve.
Whitespace	In graphic design, whitespace is the absence of design elements. It is the place where your eye goes to breathe. In life design, white space occurs where we experience relief, where we let go of resistance. White space is inspiration from our higher selves, after our resisting old thought patterns get out of the way. Meditation and exercise are two ways of creating whitespace in your life.

Life Design Toolbox

Below are some concepts you can use to start improving your life right now. This is not an exhaustive list, but a starting point for shifting your reality. These concepts will help you recognize the power you have over your own life experience, and every one of them is easy to practice. All you need is an open mind.

Gratitude	As Steve Pavlina says, “Persistent gratitude will manifest financial abundance much, much, much faster than worry, frustration, or apathy.” Wake up each day and count the things you are grateful for. Keep a list in your sketchbook and add to it every chance you can get. Have an hour long conversation with your best friend about all the things you are grateful for in each other. The point is that once you feel grateful for what you have, more good things will start pouring into your life.
Visualization	Penelope Trunk interviewed Jim Fannin about visualizing success. Fannin suggests doing one thing: “play a movie in your head of you achieving your big goal.” By knowing exactly what you want and what it will feel like, you are creating the conditions for your dream to become a reality. Think about it in terms of sex. Before you had sex with someone, did you fantasize about it? Did you try to picture exactly what it would be like? Then, almost like magick, the opportunity arises. Visualization helps focus your intentions, helping your mind bring you what you desire.
Creativity	Whenever I feel uninspired, I do some sort of thoughtless creative activity to get my inspiration flowing again. Sometimes I doodle in my sketchbook with pretty colored pencils, sometimes I sit down in photoshop and make fractals over and over. Invariably, the exercise stops my negativity and allows me to move forward with fresh energy.
Positive thinking	Taking control of your thoughts is key. Whenever you catch yourself thinking negatively, about ANY subject, pivot into a different thought or different perspective. If you’re thinking “I look so fat” just start thinking “I feel beautiful today!” Turn “I don’t have enough money this month” to “I have more money than I need right now!” It can be hard at first, but only because you’re creating a new thought pattern. It’s easy to keep thinking in your old pathways, but making new thought habits pays off big time.
Affirmations	It can be hard to remember to keep thoughts positive, so it helps to write down what you want yourself to believe. Kelly and I made a list we wanted to remember, printed it out and hung it up in our bathroom. Some of the phrases were “I am healthy and prosperous,” “I create my own future by envisioning it clearly,” “I deserve the best, and I accept it now,” and “I choose courage over fear in every decision that I make.”
Mindfulness	Mindfulness is about living in the moment. It’s about feeling the breeze on your skin, the air in your lungs, the grass between your fingertips. It’s about looking for things that feel good in every single moment. I’m appreciating the warmth of my keyboard as I type this. I’m enjoying my hair staining my periphery bright pink. I’m loving the sound of raindrops outside my window. By looking for good feelings in every moment, you raise your emotional vibration and attract more good feelings into your experience.
Intuition	According to Abraham, you are born with an emotional guidance system that leads you towards what you want. It’s like the “warmer and colder” game you played as a child. When you are getting closer to what you want, you feel better. Warmer… Warmer… Hot! When you are moving away from what you want, you feel bad. Colder… colder… colder… Learning to trust your intuition is not really complicated, just think about how you are feeling. Do you feel good? Then keep doing whatever you’re doing! Personally, when my intuition is really strong, I get a funny taste in my mouth, like a dentist’s drill. It’s not unpleasant–and it lets me know that I’m on the right track!

Life Design methodologies

A methodology is a system of methods you use to find a solution. A life design methodology is a process of allowing a desired experience to unfold.

The methodology for using the Law of Attraction is: Ask, Believe, Receive. First, ask for the experience you desire by creating it in your mind. Figure out exactly how it will feel. Next, release it into the universe and trust you will get what you want. Then allow yourself to receive what you have asked for. It’s that simple.

Lifestreaming is the life design methodology we’ll be using in this course, and it is very similar to the Law of Attraction methodology. But first–what the hell is lifestreaming?? Lifestreaming is simply sharing your life experiences, usually online. You can lifestream by blogging, podcasting, or publishing an e-book. I lifestream by podcasting, posting lots of photos and creating articles for this site.

As a life design methodology, lifestreaming is the practice of documenting things that feel good. First, by posting about what makes you feel good, you are automatically asking for more things that feel good. You can share about a visualization exercise, what you are grateful for, or any other topic that makes you feel good.

By posting about something that makes you feel good, you’re asking for more good feelings.

Next, you release your desire to the universe. In lifestreaming, you are releasing your desire into the Internet. Publicly sharing your posts is a way for you to believe in them, and also a way to let them go and let the universe take over.

Picture asking for a recipe on Facebook. If your network of friends is large enough, you can trust that someone will answer you with what you want. You wouldn’t freak out, wondering if your question will ever be answered. You just believe someone will step in to help.

So then you receive what you want, and you can document your gratitude, sharing with others how easy it is to get what you want. Posting about the good things in your life just keeps them coming to you faster and faster!

I used to believe that lifestreaming was about portraying reality as it really was. A classmate critiqued my work, saying “what about documenting all the bad things that happen in your life?” I took her advice and started looking to document the shitty parts of my life. Guess what happened–I invited more shit into my life! Before that point, I didn’t have much shit to document! Lifestreaming is about creating experiences that make you feel good, releasing them into the Internet with trust that more good things will come from it, and then receiving more good things!

Posting about gratitude and visualization, or about anything you’re interested in, are just ways of feeling good. By sharing them online, you’re publicly asking for more good things! And when you share your experiences, more people get to see the positive outcomes you are creating, and might be inspired to do the same!

In this course we will be using this lifestreaming methodology, since it would be pretty hard to work together online if we weren’t sharing! If you’d like to try a different methodology, please do! We’d all love to hear about your process.

Activity: Who do you want to be?

When you decide to begin consciously creating the reality around you, it’s a good idea to know what you want. Today’s exercise is to write the “About” page of your dreams. When you have completed this course, what do you want your life to look like? Picture someone asking for your bio. What would you send them? Now is the time to craft your biography to say exactly what you want it to, then get to work designing that very life! I’ve written mine, and it now lives on my own About page. You are in control of where your life is going, so start making some decisions! And don’t worry, you don’t have to keep it forever–you can modify it any time you like!

I am a teacher & student of life design living joyfully with my partner Kelly & my two feline familiars in Austin, Texas. Independently wealthy, super-fit, and covered in mystical tattoos, I have woven my life into a magickal, dream-like trip full of loving friends, delicious vegan food & mind-blowing adventures around the world! My purpose in physical reality is to pursue JOY & share it with others.

This website, jessicamullen.com, inspires thousands of individuals daily to consciously create the lives of their dreams.

Kelly and I also produce The Popular Podcast, a hugely successful video podcast which documents our lives and entertains our international community of friends.

I received my BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005, and my MFA in Design from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. My thesis report is titled “Lifestreaming as a Life Design Methodology” and you can read it here.

To turn in your assignment, leave a comment on this page with your new bio. Or if you already have a website, post it on your “About” page and leave us a link to click! (If you want me to take a look before you post it, just send it to me in an email.) Also, feel free to do something other than writing! Maybe your bio is in the form of an image, or a video–it’s up to you!

Once you’ve turned in your assignment, I will offer any suggestions I might have!

Don’t forget, you can download the accompanying discussion MP3 to help clarify the concepts covered in this lesson.

See you next time!

Lesson 2 is Designing the Digital You. In this lesson we’ll get you all set up with a website that makes you feel good. We’ll cover privacy concerns, graphic design and whole lot more about lifestreaming to get what you want. And the best part–your “About” page is already written!

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Thank you!

I am so happy and grateful that we are on this journey together! It is so exciting to find joy and share it with others. If you enjoyed this lesson, please consider a donation to keep the School of Life Design thriving!

Thank you for co-creating with me!

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