Vocation, Passion & Integrity

Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later?  For me, over the last while, the theme has been passionate living. As a teacher and coach, I have more and more people asking me about how to live a life that is fully alive and creative.

“ I want to contribute, to participate, to find something that I’m really passionate about,” they say. “How do I do that?”

“I feel something calling me, but I’m not sure what it is. How do I find out? I don’t even know where to start.”

When I allow my heart to open to these questions, I sense a deep longing that seems to be part of our collective consciousness right now. I realize that each one of us was born to discover this way of being, of fully participating in life.  I have helped many people open to this passionate way of living through a process of exploration and free expression. If we really allow ourselves to engage in this process of deep inquiry, we begin to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is changing, flowing, and dynamic. We discover how to live from a place I call our ‘creative edge.’

I think a great deal of confusion, doubt and despair happen when we equate this creative edge, this place of passion and aliveness, with skill or knowledge. They are not the same. Learning a skill and gathering information are the kinds of things we learn in school.  Passion and creativity do not work like this. To connect with this part of our being requires another kind of learning and practice. This is more like unlearning than learning:  how to open, to let go, to allow ourselves not to know, to be a complete beginner. The mystic poet Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”

“You know Rumi is right,” one of my clients said recently, “There are things I really love to do, that I feel called to do, that I’m not very good at. But that doesn’t matter. I can learn, bit by bit, and if the passion is here, then I really have something to sustain me, to keep me going.”

“Yes, “ I replied, “When we find out what we really care about, it’s a very powerful resource. We can move through the obstacles in our way, fall down and get back up again. Failure is just part of the process. It doesn’t defeat us. We just keep going. No-one else told us that we should be doing this. It’s a genuine impulse, connected to our authentic being.”

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About how you’re not following your dharma, your dharma is following you.
( or why your damn dharma won’t leave you alone)

I’m looking back now at what’s happened in my life over the last six months.

On one level I feel like I went to sleep and then woke up in a new world. Things in this new world seem to be operating in miraculous ways, on a daily basis. It’s not that I didn’t know about all this before, but it felt like there was a glass wall, separating me from stepping into and embracing this other universe. Now I’ve stepped through, and I’m really not quite sure how it happened. I could shrug my shoulders and say it’s all part of the great mystery. But I don’t really want to do that. I’d like to understand a bit more of what happened as I worked with you, so that I can pass some of this on to my friends, students and clients. That’s one reason I’m writing all this down-I’m tracking back, following the thread that joins the moments that seemed to really make the difference.

The first moment I remember was quite early on in our coaching relationship. You asked me about writing a newsletter, and I told you I didn’t have time for that kind of regular, committed writing. You said, “There’s no such thing as not having time for something. We find the time for what we really want to do, every single day of our lives.”

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment. It’s not that what you said was new to me. I’ve said it many times to my students and clients. But in that moment, your statement was an arrow that hit its mark, dead center. I felt it going in, deeper and deeper. It was literally a physical feeling of being pierced by the truth of it. And I had no resistance. I felt the presence of all my habitual excuses and evasions about writing, and I saw what they had cost me. And I let them go. Something in me was ready. That’s a very interesting thing to me. It reminds me of Hamlet: “Ripeness is all.” In that moment, I was ripe. The apple was ready to fall, and it did.

When I look back now, I realize that all my life I have not only wanted to write, but I’ve known that it was my ‘dharma,’ something I should be doing. That’s how I understand dharma right now-it’s the union of passion and necessity. And there has never been a time in my life when some teacher, friend or colleague was not urging me to write. What held me back for so long? What holds us all back from doing the things we long to do, need to do, are born to do? I think it’s because we have not been able to clear the field of our intention. We are blocked, covered by our desires and aversions. The very thing we most want is the thing we are afraid of. So that attraction/aversion process you took me through at the beginning, which is so much a part of the Radiant Mind Course and my own work, cleared the field for me. That was the hardest part of our work together. I couldn’t believe how much resistance I had to really engaging in those exercises. It was like looking deep into my subconscious mind, shining the light of my awareness down into these subterranean regions of my own being.  As I was doing them, I didn’t realize how much was being clarified, freed up and released. That only revealed itself later on.

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“In times of change, the learners will inhabit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” (Fred Kofman)

Do you feel overwhelmed sometimes, by the ever increasing rate of change and complexity in today’s highly unstable world? There’s a joke about how ordering a cup of coffee today (de-café soy vanilla late) involves more choices that our grandparents made in a month!

The answer to our collective dilemma does not lie in the mind, which is already overloaded with vast amounts of information. It lies in the heart, the spiritual heart, the radiant core of our being. When last year’s tsunami moved across the Indian Ocean, there were scuba divers in the depths of the sea who emerged at the surface 30 min. later, totally unhurt. What a perfect metaphor for the difference between living in the silent depths of the heart, and being tossed about by the waves of the mind.

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