When I was nearing the end of high school, I was deeply frustrated to the point of the occasional suicidal thought. I was blessed with a mother, and a general culture, that taught me that I could be anything I wanted to be. I was privileged to say the least, but that privilege also carries with it a grave burden for someone like me. For a person who needs to get it right, to make the right choice and do the right thing, infinite possibilities is an unbearable weight to shoulder. I used to pray that God or someone would just tell me what to do. My mother would say that when the time was right, I would know, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me. Honestly, I still don’t know the way that many people seem to know, however, over time, I have gotten used to uncertainty and learned to enjoy a life path full of switchbacks and cul-de-sacs. I sometimes envision my life path as one horseshoe turn after another. I also discovered that, though I can’t say what I want to do specifically, I have a general vision of what I want to be, do, and have. I want to teach people and facilitate their learning how to live an intentional life; a life that is full of love, joy, wellbeing, and clarity. I want to live on the ocean in an apartment that has floor to ceiling windows with an unobstructed view of the ocean. I want to continue growing spiritually in a loving and passionate relationship. I don’t know how I will get there specifically, but I’m learning to be happy moving in the direction of that grand vision. How does that sound to you? Does it sound like a lovely but unfocused dream? I’m sure it does to some. Sometimes it seems that way to me as well. Does it sound like a good direction to be moving in? Well, did I mention switchbacks and cul-de-sacs? With both general desires like mine and goals that are much more specific, there are many times when we feel like we have either gotten off course or we have stopped altogether. There are three (I like the number three) types of disruptive incidences that I’d like to focus on here, and one of them may surprise you.
The most common disruption is a block that can manifest itself in many forms from the creative block of a writer, or writer’s block, to the block in our problem solving ability we experience when we feel like we’ve run out of ideas to solve a problem such as finding a job or dealing with a family issue. There are many times in life when we feel stuck or frozen in place. I know that to be a very frustrating situation, and I’ve also found that another thought follows upon the heels of a block in my progress. Just as I wished someone would just tell me what I should do when I was getting ready to move on from high school, I wish I had that special collaborator. I begin wishing that I had someone to turn to to help me through the stymied situation. But, I have realized the cause of these blocks are not the lack of help from the outside or the lack of solutions from within. The cause of the blockages are our own thoughts and emotions. We block ourselves so that we are unable to move forward. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are the source of our own blocks, and we already have the answers and information we want. We only need to access it.
Some people recommend that we power through these blocks. Writing coaches tell writers to just keep on writing, for example. And there are times when that can be helpful for some. However, my suggestion is to first find a way to clear your mental space as best you can. Most teachers of living life intentionally recommend meditation, and I do too. Meditation is an important daily practice whether there is a block or not. It’s a way of redirecting our focus from the block to something else, even if it is an empty void of no-thought. The release of the block is the cure to it. This is not the blank state of mind like writers feel when staring at a blank page. That experience is not an open state of emptiness, but is actually a tension or resistance so strong that nothing can get through. The emptiness of no-thought is relaxed, free, and allows everything. It isn’t struggling and striving for ideas, but is open to the inflow of inspiration and the song of the muses floating to the surface of consciousness. However, we can get stuck in a free flowing void from time to time as well. We can succumb to inertia. So, once we’ve gotten beyond the negative to the neutral, and we notice we are getting a little to settled into the non-action, but we don’t want to return to the stress induced block by forcing ourselves to focus, we can turn our redirect our minds more lightly, more playfully to possibilities of what to do or be. We can reach for a developed practice of gratitude for who we are and what we are doing now, and ultimately loving our way back on our paths. I’ve found that moving toward more active emotional states such as gratitude, love, and joy, in turn gets the creative engine’s gears turning and ideas flowing. The block seems to have melted like a wall of ice in the sun.
Though we fear the obstacles and blocks perhaps the most, we also need to feel connected to our full Selves and the Divine Source of Creation to feel the stream of inspiration and intuition lead us to the even more delightful blossoming of imagination and experiences of synchronicity that can make travelling our paths awe inspiring. And sometimes, even though there is no block and we are meditating and doing everything we think we need to do, we can feel a sense of dryness to our lives. We can feel as though the wellspring of inspiration has either dried up or at the least, the tap has been temporarily turned off. Have you ever found this to be true for you? Have you felt spiritually numb, or that meditation had turned into a chore that had as much meaning as cleaning the bathroom? St. John of the Cross called it, in the extreme case, the dark night of the soul. We see this term improperly used in the media these days. It doesn’t mean depression or sadness, it means an angst caused by a sense of loss of connection with the Divine. It feels as though our souls, which had been enjoying the love of the Universal Creator, suddenly got shut up alone in a dark room and all light and love had been deprived. One needs to have ascended to a spiritual height to have fallen to such a spiritual low, but have you felt that or something similar? We all have times when we feel disconnected from Spirit or even our full Selves. The full Self is the combination of that eternal soul or spirit, the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind. Meditation alone may not get us reconnected very quickly. I’ve found that when I’ve had that feeling of separation, it was mostly due to insufficient love for myself, and beating myself up for getting disconnected only made it worse. So stepping up your self-love game is the best tactic.
Self-care and self-love can be thought of as interchangeable in this case. Or perhaps self-care is the set of tools we use to foster our sense of self-love. And since thinking of ways to care for ourselves can be particularly challenging when we aren’t really feeling it,iIf you don’t have one yet, make a list of things that will make you smile and laugh even when you are feeling absolutely numb. Nature can be a great help for me; going out to the ocean, smelling and feeling the moist salty air, and seeing that gentle joining of sky and sea at the horizon makes me feel happier, and more loving of myself in all of my darkness. Interacting with animals can do it too. When I see and feel the gaze of another creature upon me full of acceptance, I can start feeling it for myself more easily. Sometimes music can get me singing, then moving, and then loving myself a little more. What are your ways of getting a smile on your own face? Think of them as your tool kit and have them ready when you can. Once you’ve got your love of self flowing, you will start feeling the flow of love from Spirit again, a flow that was always there but inaccessible because, ultimately, we were the ones who had turned the tap off when we weren’t looking. Now that the stream is flowing again, we will be able to move forward and take action again with the power of our intention and expansion. And always remember that action that flows with intention from our Source of Love is so much more powerful than action that is performed from necessity because it was the next action step on our list. Those lists are fine, but if we can get emotionally in line,not fictitiously pumped up but honestly feeling the flow of emotional energy moving us so strongly that we can’t resist taking action, the more powerful that action will be. The stronger we feel our connection to our full Selves and Spirit, the more certain we are that we are on the path to creating the lives that we really want.
Moving in the direction of our grand visions feels wonderful, and those inspiring moments of synchronicity we feel when we are really moving smoothly in alignment with our full Selves are phenomenal. The surprising opportunities that seem to appear from nowhere are amazing as well. And sometimes the successes we feel can become traps as well. Sometimes we start to hear the nagging voice behind our facade of pleasure whispering that we are getting away with something, that we don’t deserve to have this luck or that adventure or the delightful little surprise that seemed to appear from nowhere. Have you ever heard that voice? What did you do? Did you start worrying to yourself that you should return or refuse whatever had come your way? I have. Have you accepted the gift but felt guilty for having taken it? If you haven’t, you are lucky, but many of us have experienced that guilt or have consciously or unconsciously avoided an opportunity that had presented itself. And, yes, we are talking about the voice that is always ready to tell us that we aren’t worthy.
I’ve struggled with that demon of unworthiness before. I’ve felt it when presenting this information to you on YouTube or in essay form. I’ve felt it in my job as well. It is amazing isn’t it? Just as we are feeling successful and blessed, we throw another huge obstacle in our own path. The best way I know to disengage this self sabotage is to learn how to turn towards satisfaction. If you can’t find the feeling of worthiness that will allow you to delight in a new opportunity or surprise windfall, then learn the technique of turning to a neutral, if slightly positive, stance of satisfaction. If you can learn to be satisfied that the windfall appeared whether you deserved it or not, you can much more easily accept it and actually benefit from it. Receiving something with attached guilt is perhaps worse than refusing it. Slathering even the smallest opportunity with such negative emotion corrupts not only the gift but also the giver and the receiver. However, moving to gratitude is sometimes too difficult, so training yourself to move to satisfaction may make it easier to release the negative and prepare yourself for the positive. If you can hover around the feeling of satisfaction most of the time, imagine how much smoother and easier your journey would be, and how much easier would it be to find love, joy, and wellbeing from satisfaction than from feelings of unworthiness.
They say that if you do the thing you love, you will love the thing you do and be successful at it. That is true, but we also misunderstand it. We think that if we don’t love the thing we are doing at the moment, then we need to quit and do something else. There are times when that is true, especially when the thing we are doing is putting us at risk of harm in some way. However, that is usually not the case. Usually we don’t love the thing we are doing because we find it irritating or unimportant, or we dislike the people we work with, or we are simply bored. The work we are doing now may not be the work that we would be best off doing. We may be absolutely correct about that. However, if we walk off to another job or situation without doing any work on ourselves, we will most likely recreate similar circumstances of dissatisfaction wherever we go. If we can learn to be satisfied with what we are doing and who we are doing it with right now, then we will be open to the new and brighter opportunities that will present themselves. Once we can retrain the inner critic that teaches self-doubt to take a seat and relax, we can help that critic become a teacher of learning to be satisfied with who and where we are and happy about where we are going. That is the door to creating long-term success with our grand visions.
