Sunday, May 30, 2010

Journey to the real you

I have no choice but to start with something more personal on this special entry. For amongst the things that I have learned lately there is within a desire to help, though how can I help without sharing first.

It's been a year now since I have been having this deep nudging feeling that something is not quite right in my life. Some call it a mid life crisis, I would like to call it a journey into your inner true self.
When we re-evaluate our life we can see the things we have accomplished and those we have dismissed but are still part of our passions and desires calling out to us to accomplish them. I would rather that time be at mid life than at the end of life.

Back then, I blamed it on the job, a job I did not like but paid the bills. I dismissed the idea within and tried to move on but a few months later the same feeling came back stronger.
I cannot describe the feeling but it was obvious my life was taking a different direction than the one it was supposed to take. There was a void inside that I cannot explain although I was not alone nor was I lonely. I knew strongly there was something else I was supposed to be doing but I did not know what it was. And with every passing day the void stretched and my misery increased.

In this journey of self discovery, I adopted many paths that I would like to share. I will only touch upon these issues now as a mere introduction and write some more on them later on.

The first thing that occurred to me and perhaps because I was trying so hard to find my own purpose is that everyone has a purpose. It was impossible and insane to believe that we were born to simply have fun, suffer and reproduce. To what purpose, I asked myself?
As a Christian I had to refer to stories from the Bible, although I also believe in other religions the same applies.

It was a matter of time before I realized that in order to begin the journey of self discovery I had to love myself first in order to find myself second. It was the result of a one minute scene in a movie I was randomly watching which brought tears to my eyes and had me think later on, on this body we call temple.

Then I started taking some meditation and breathing classes and found that although the effect is not immediate and there is no change at the beginning, slowly I was able to see the difference between my old self and my new self. I have learned to stop for a while instead of always being in a rush and as I learned to stop I learned to savor the moments a little more. Of course I did rush at times but then I became conscious of it.

My next step was to let go of fear. Fear is the one thing that paralyzes us rendering us incapable of moving forward and thus stuck forever in a vicious circle expecting a different result if only by wishing for it to be true. I stopped wishing and began acting. I stopped fearing and began to trust the process.

And although nothing was happening, I have learned that to reach step 4, I had to go through a stage of death. In other words, I had to let go of everything. I had to stop living to begin to live. When I spent many sleepless nights trying all the tests available on the internet to finding your true life purpose and destiny to no avail, it was devastating. The answers I found were already there before I had even started. I knew what I liked to do and what my passions were but I never took them seriously and at times I was simply afraid; afraid to fail, afraid to try.

After taking all these tests and finding myself back to square one, I tried to imagine how to use these passions in every day life.

Most people like me focus more on the money than on the gift and so get stuck in a job they don't like, living a life that is not full because they do not know how to use their gift and make money. At times the gifts bring no financial value and that is the mistake we make, the mistake that I made when looking at my passions and gifts. I wanted to combine passions with a job and money thus fulfilling my purpose. But by focusing on the financial side of it I had missed the entire point of the search.

As it seems purpose and gifts are two different things and though gifts are there to help in the process, the purpose is something greater. To get to that purpose one must have the means to get there and that is where the gifts come in handy. My other mistake was to combine purpose with gifts.

Finally after many days of researching online on how to use these gifts to get a job, I broke down. I was unable to think clearly anymore nor get an answer. I was going in circles and it was driving me mad. I took the day off from work and cried all night and all day. All I wished for was to either go on a deep slumber and awaken with a sense of purpose or never to wake up again.

In this process I was dying, as though my old self was dying, for I had remembered the time wasted and the fears and the excuses and all that I had stopped doing to become what I have become today.
I decided to attend my meditation class and I was offered a healing which was nothing really than a simple massage, but it was therapeutic because it gave me time to speak.
It was then that I heard myself speak, and it was later in the week that I actually listened to what I heard myself say.
I took these things to heart because they were a clue as to what my purpose was. They might not have told me what my purpose was straight out but they gave me the steps to move forward.
These steps were there all along, I just never wanted to act on them. I was always procrastinating.
I knew that in order to reach the mountain called higher purpose, I had to take a step and climb it first.

And so my advice is listen to yourself because not many of us can hear our thoughts because they are on automatic and most of the time we don't even realize we are having this monologue with ourselves. But once the words are spoken it seems it is easier to remember them, perhaps because they have been released out of our system and mind.
So above all, no matter what you are going through to find who you are or your purpose, listen to yourself. You are the person who has the most clues to tell you who you are.
Most of us speak just to hear the sound of our own voice, but we rarely listen to what we are saying. Listening, I have found, not only makes us aware of the way we treat others but also brings awareness to our deeper self.
Many people say the answers are within. For many months I have tried to find the source of that voice within but I don't even know where I was looking, because I was always looking outside for something that came from within. In short, looking happens to mean listening.

If you hear yourself say you wish you can dance then perhaps you should take a dancing class. That is not to say you will soon become a dancer and have a show on national television but it could be a step forward to something better.
Truth is, we don't know what the future holds, and we don't know what is coming ahead.
A little fire of the soul can sometimes achieve much, but if the soul is dead then there is no point to carry on.
Hope is not the only thing that keeps us alive, our spirits cry out to us as well. When I felt that deep sense of wrongness in my life within me, I knew it was not me but something from within that was calling me to act upon it. I was fine, I got accustomed to my job, my family was around me, I trained regularly, I watched my diet and all was great. The outside me was doing fine, the inside me on the other hand knew better.

In my search which is still ongoing, I have written down some thoughts which I will share on the next logs.

1 comment:

  1. just remember to pack right for the journey,a little adventure ,a lot of laughter and a wonder for nature.
    Great as always Gypsy

    ReplyDelete

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