Discover Your Self ~ Walk Your Path

Have you ever woken up on a Monday morning just as, if not more, exhausted as you were on Friday afternoon? I know that you’ve woken up wondering where the hell your weekend went and with your work week stretching out in front of you like an unending treck across a desert, with no water, or food.

I have a theory, I think it is because we have absolutely no idea (as a culture, or individuals) how to rest.

I can, and I’m sure that you can empathize with me, spend whole days – weeks even – doing nothing (that is, getting little to nothing accomplished) and get to the end of the day feeling just as worn out and overwhelmed as I would if I had worked all day. I do this on days when I am supposed to be working and on days when I am not supposed to be working.

I know that my problem is not in what I do or don’t do, but in what I think about. It may be my day off, but here I am making a priority list of what needs to be done this week in my head, or worrying about the books I think I should be reading – instead of enjoying my indulgent one. My head, with out an act of force on my part, is constantly in my work. It doesn’t matter if I write, or read, or administrate one single thing I’m still “working” 90% of the time (and I assure you that the fact that there’s nothing to show for it makes it all that more exhausting and frustrating).

I’ve noticed that my husband doesn’t have the same problem I do, but he still comes out of his weekends feeling exhausted and unrested. Watching him, I’ve worked out that there is a whole other end of the scale; from too much work to too much nothing.

Like I said, we don’t know how to rest any more and for some reason we seem to think that doing nothing activities (like watching TV, or literally doing nothing) is the same thing as relaxing. My observation is that mindless television watching is anything but renewing or relaxing. It doesn’t feel stressful in the moment, and it keeps us from falling into my trap of working in your mind, but you never feel any better when you come out of it. Just a little frustrated that the whole day is gone with nothing to show for it.

Learning to Relax

There it is, that’s the word that everything really hangs on: renew. Our time off is supposed to renew us, make us feel whole again. And what we are currently doing with our evenings and weekends just isn’t cutting it.

Did you know that the Jews, in all their complicated and multidimensional laws, have a law (in the Old Testament) that says you can only plant a particular field for six years, on the seventh year you have to leave it fallow? The logic and wisdom of this law has always impressed me enough that it’s stuck with me for years – and I don’t even have fields!

Agriculture drains the nutrients out of the soil and the seventh year was meant to give it time to renew those nutrients and keep the soil fresh and alive so the next six years would be as thriving as the ones before. It’s a Sabbath for the earth. Of course, it follows the exact pattern of their real Sabbath. You can work for six days, but on the seventh day you need to rest.

I’m mentioning this because I think the best commentary I’ve ever heard about rest came from a Rabbi speaking about the Sabbath, in his book Living a Joyous Life, Rabbi David Aaron says:

Some people can’t stop, they don’t know how to take a rest. They don’t know how to put aside what they are doing. They’re compulsive. These are not creative people engaged in malacha [creative work]; these are people who labor. They are slaves to their jobs and slaves to their instincts… They are no longer people with careers, they are careers…
When I stop on Shabbat, I demonstrate that I am not a compulsive, laborious, mindless bundle of nerves and tissue, but rather I am a human being created in the image of God, and I make my own choices.

Life drains the nutrients right out of our souls, and all of us need the opportunity to step back and renew them so that we can live rich, refreshed and joyous lives.

The Challenge

Which is exactly why yesterday (my first weekend day this week) I did nothing that I normally do. I didn’t watch random television because it was there, and I didn’t let my mind wallow in it’s “work” mode. Instead, I put on a random (and enjoyable) audio book. I sat in my office all day and sorted, piled, and organized books (something that brings me immeasurable pleasure, actually) colored, and played games. Basically, I immersed myself in my own private space and did whatever felt good at the time (while listening to my audio book – which was my ultimate goal). Today I think I might do some cross stitching (while listening to a new audio book) and play some video games…

See, real rest comes when we do things, when we play and dabble, when we choose something. The kind of rest that gives nothing and comes from nothing happens when we fail to choose what we are going to do. It’s what happens when I let the day coast by and never once ask myself what I’d like to do, or what would bring me joy.

Nothing is the course of least resistance,which seems more relaxing, but is also the one of least reward. So for this week, on my evenings and days off, I’m going to be really and truly practicing the Art of Relaxation because I desperately need some rest and renewal in my life right now. And I’m guessing that I’m not alone in that!

I figure that there’s probably a really good chance you have no idea how to tell the difference between doing the nothing things and the restful things, so here’s a few tips to help you join me in my challenge this week.

1. Pick one joy thing to do every day. We all have off time each day, and picking a joy thing at the beginning of the day is a good way to be sure you use it to your advantage. A Joy Thing is an idea I got from The Joy of Appreciative Living (by Kelm), it’s one thing, no matter how small, that you can do today that will bring you joy. It could be calling a friend, sitting in the sun, reading a fiction book, working on a painting, going for a run, etc… No matter how small they are, joy things always renew us.

2. Make conscious choices. TV can sometimes be renewing, if it’s a good show or movie that you’ve been waiting for, if it’s something you do to bond with your family – if you rule it rather than it ruling you. The problem is, most of us just leave the tv on because it’s there, not because we want it. Activities renew us when we choose them. If you were doing yoga because you “should” it won’t be as restorative as the times you do it because you really want to. Plan one thing for each weekend day that you’d really like to do, then do it. Choice can make all the difference.

3. Get a hobby, preferably a totally fruitless but enjoyable activity. Maybe something you’ve wanted to try for a while or haven’t done in long time. Playing is good for the soul, not everything has to have an end result that is “valuable”. The worth of a hobby isn’t in what you end up with, or what you do with it, but entirely in what you get out of it!

4. Go outside! It’s summer for goodness sake, if you haven’t been outside at least once each day (for more than car to door runs) then you are doing it wrong!

There you go, now we are all well equipped to live it up this week. I expect my self-indulgent behavior is going to make all the difference in my home, my work, and my self this week so I challenge you to join me in learning to rest and report back the results next Monday. See you, our new PS3 is calling my name!

What are your warning signals? How do you know when you are pushing the boundaries of your physical/spiritual/mental health? Do you know them? Did you even realize you have them? I’ve met some people so far beyond internal exhaustion, and so disconnected from themselves (not as unusual as you might think) that they have no idea how to tell when something is starting to go wrong within themselves. I’m not one of those people.

If I want to stay on top of depression, if I want to be the one who chooses my life, then I need to know what to watch for.

All About Me

I find that I’m a strange person. I love people and being out and about, but I absolutely need my own space and privacy – I need to feel absolutely alone every now and then. I hate having nothing to do and get a high off having a project and work, but working too hard pushes me to a brink of exhaustion. The lines between these internal yins and yangs in my personality are fine and sometimes hazy. It’s often super simple for me to step from excited and fabulous to Way Too Much without even noticing it.

Take June for example. I was so excited to be teaching my tarot class for the first time. My class was full (with a waiting list even), all the students were engaged and engaging and it was great to feel useful again. But it took its toll.

I had to break my own rules just to keep up (this is the price of procrastination) I worked weekends and evenings just to get the stuff ready for each class. Not to mention all the other things I had signed up for that were now floundering on back burners. In my excitement I didn’t realize just how tiring the month had been. Then, of course, I went and had my tooth extracted the same week as the final class.

Talk About No Time to Breath

Following the flow and my internal guidance I got my About and Hire me page up, and I officially started doing tarot readings and parties. I just kind of catapulted from one place to another, which, don’t get me wrong, is really good and I love it but…

Even good, and exactly on your path, change can be scary and overwhelming. Especially if you were feeling drained and sick before it all started. But that is something you don’t always remember to look at in the moment, and after all, isn’t this what you asked for? Aren’t these all good things?

Wakizashi even said to me this weekend, “I don’t know what your problem is, your life is great. Life is good. What is there to be upset about?”

And my life is good. And I am so excited about the things I’m doing and the people I’m meeting. I finish a tarot appointment and I feel high, almost Ike work just shouldn’t be so joyful.

But…

I also need to admit that something is wrong. I’ve been eating terribly (hardly eating at all till night time). The boys have both complained about unwarranted anger and grumpiness two days running. I’m staying up till all hours of the night, sleeping in, and still feeling exhausted. My right eye keeps twitching. I feel like my life is slightly out of control, I can’t decide what I should be doing with my time, and if I start to think about it too much I get a strange internal frantic feeling. Most telling of all, I can feel myself trying to escape; blocking out the real world with books, and movies, and daydreams.

All these things tell me I’m suffering from a little bit more than overwork. If I don’t take this sudden gift of clear vision and do something about it now I will very soon find myself looking up from a deep, dark, internal pit. Hidden in the description above are about a half dozen of my warning signs.

Stepping Back

Life changes. That (not taxes and death – though technically it’s intimately related to death) is the one constant you can expect from life: change.

Life is a river that constantly rushes and pushes us through time and experience, and like any other river this one is never the same twice. Sometimes you can spend years waiting, fighting and pushing for something, anything, to change. Other times it can feel like life is rushing past so fast you can hardly get your feet under you or even catch your breath. We move from lazy river to rushing rapids and back again.

That’s why it’s so important, when you feel like you might be losing your grip on your very self, that we have a habit of stepping back, of taking time to reassess. Am I doing everything I can to keep myself healthy? Am I listening to my body? To my soul? Is the problem that I’ve gone off course somewhere? Or is it simply that I’m not taking enough care of myself?

As a big picture thinker I have a hard time both remembering to reassess my life, and to keep my eye on the details that help me keep my feet under me at all times. This is why I create routines and systems; they are the guidelines and boundaries that help keep me healthy and prevent me from diving in over my head – most of the time.

June was so overwhelming that I abandoned those systems; a decision that landed me right here on the brink of “not healthy”. So, this week I desperately needed to take the time to reassess them. It’s time, now that my work is evolving and growing, for me to change my daily schedule and to reframe my work week.

For example, tarot parties naturally happen on weekends, and I have something booked the next three to four weekends. Which means what I define as a “weekend” (ie two days where I don’t do work) needs to be reassessed. (I’ve decided to only book appointments on one day of each weekend and then to take Mondays off. Daring Monday will still post on Monday, but I’m going to write it on Fridays.).

I’m trying to firm up how I use my time each day and use tools, like my iPhone calendar, to help me follow the schedule. I’m reassessing my priorities and current projects, and am asking how I can help myself get the things that matter most to me done without pushing too hard.

I’ve negotiated a personal retreat with Wakizashi (I normally need one once a year to hold my sanity) and I’m thinking I need to plan lots of space throughout the summer.

It’s often very difficult to step back and look at all of this objectively. It sucks to have to admit that I’ve gotten myself into this position myself. But there’s nothing as empowering as being able to sift through all of this and make new decisions, to set new boundaries for myself. It feels like I’m getting some control back; the water may not be smoothing out, but I’ve definitely got a bit of my footing back. The rest of the challenge is going to be in following through on my decisions to make sure I don’t get swept away again.

Over To You
Of course, your issues and best solutions and my issues and best solutions won’t be the same thing. And maybe you don’t particularly need a reassessment in the same way I do, but hey, it’s summer – half-way through the year – it definitely can’t hurt. If you are a big picture person (like me) then you need to move in and look at the details of your life (like I did above) and if you are a detail person then maybe you need to step back and make sure you haven’t veered too far off course.

Now’s as good a time as any to assess how things are going and to make some course corrections (as needed), why not join me this week?

In yesterday’s post, I talked about daring to find your own Way, and I can frequently be heard talking about finding you own path (it is in fact in the site tag line). It occurred to me yesterday afternoon that those two ideas are very similar in our modern day usage and that you might appreciate if I took a few minutes to clarify how I understand each of the words.

I’m not big on the idea of “religion” (as in a pre-set system of belief and guidelines for behavior), although much of my time and energy is invested in the spiritual. When I started out on my own Hero’s Journey (an adventure to find and recapture your own soul) some five or so years ago I decided that I needed a new word. Religion just wasn’t going to cut it.

While I’m a little Pagan in my spiritual thinking, Wakizashi (aka my husband) is not; he’s all Asian all the time (though he is the least Asian looking man I know) and leans towards Taoist thinking. (Taoism – say the “T” as a “D” – is an ancient Chinese system of thought which is both religious and not religious at the same time.). Taoism is, in fact, more about a way of life than it is a belief system and the word even literally translates into The Way (or some version of that).

I decided that even though Taoism itself isn’t my way (though I agree with, and assimilate, a lot of its teachings) I do love the concept of its name. Taoism is The Way because it guided the way you believed and the way you lived. It taught you the way to treat others and the way to treat yourself. It isn’t just a religion, but an actual system for living (which I suppose most religions seem to be aiming for, but not really getting for the most part). That was exactly what I wanted my spirituality to become within my life: My Way of Living.

Your Way reflects your spiritual (religious) belief system – it encompasses it actually – it defines how you understand life (why are we here, how are we supposed to behave while here, what’s our purpose), the Universe (who is Divinity, do we have connection to the Divine and if so how, why), and everything (whatever isn’t already covered, or that you might not be sure of). But it is not just a belief system, your Way is also what you do about what you believe, your Way also involves the degree to which you walk your talk. My Way is my Life; if you want to see my Way look at my life.

The best thing about having a Way is that it has no title, no parameters (and therefore no boundaries), a Way can be all encompassing. I can absorbed and live out the teachings of the Tao, of the Earth, of Paul and Christ, of my own spirit and even of my wise friends. Your Way is your own and it doesn’t have to exclude or include anything or anyone you don’t want it to. A Way is not about either/or thinking, or about duality and the only thing that matters to your Way is what matters to you and your life.

What If You Are Wrong

One sidebar I feel that I should address is the issue of right and wrong; the problem with religion today – with all religion – in my less than humble opinion, is this fear of being wrong. Oh, you wouldn’t think, by their behavior that they worried about being wrong, they spend so much time declaring themselves as right – and the only one who is right at that. But the truth is that all of that covers up an innate fear that they might not be right; after all, the louder you yell the less you can hear the doubts.

When I walked away from the only religious and spiritual box I had ever known I came face to face with this fear. It took my breath away (and as I read the stories of others who are walking this path I see the same fear stealing their breath too). I felt like I had been called out of my box by God himself and so I threw myself on that calling with total abandon and forced myself through the fear, though I think many get caught in it’s web and pulled back from their own journey because of it.

This has led me to a very clear conclusion about being Right or Wrong. It doesn’t really matter.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in truth, and even in Truth, but I’m also pretty clear that we aren’t going to really know it until we move beyond the physical world. And so far, there are very few hills of Truth that I’ve been willing to stake my soul on. So my conclusion has been simple, the only thing that matters is how I live my life.

What if I pour my life into the belief that there is a Divine with personality who interacts in our lives and cares about us. That when we leave this world our souls don’t die and so evereything we do here matters and has value. And when I die it turns out I was wrong, that everything is done, or that we are the only divinity out there. The question is, who cares? What really matters is that what I believed made my life better and that it guided me to make your life better (in whatever way I can). If the life I lived here was full of joy and hope and I offered the same to you because of it then that is all that really matters – that is real Truth.

Which is exactly why I think right and wrong only applies if your truth, your way, is hurting you or someone else in the process. If it’s making lives better then, whatever.

Way, Path Aren’t They The Same Thing?

They sound like the same thing, but your Way and your Path aren’t the same thing at all (at least not in my worldview anyway). Your Way is the spiritual path you walk, or what your belief system (and it’s living out) look like when you claim ownership and responsibility for it, while your Path is the purpose or calling you fulfill.

Your Path might describe the service you offer to the world, the work you do, the beauty you offer, or the legacy you leave. Your Path defines the roles you play and the way in which you choose to fulfill them. Walking your own Path is all about living out your life according to your personal blueprint and offering your gifts to the world in a way that brings joy to you, those you share them with, and those you live with.

You might say that your Way describes the Forest or Mountain through which we all journey in our lives and your Path is the way that you take (or sometimes carve out) through that landscape. Your Path is how you express your Self in the world, and I find that you, more often than not, stumble across your Self while you are busy clarifying your Way.

For me, my Way, my Self, and my Path – while being intimately connected – are still all distinctly seperate ideas. And it’s these ideas, or actually, helping you to discover and connect to these ideas for yourself, that Limitless Living and my work is all about! I guess you can say, they define my own Path!

I have to thank Heather Plett from Fumbling for Words for leading me to this project… I love the fact that the United Church invited four, what I would have called “Graffiti” Artists (I think the video called them “Aerosol Artists”) to create an expression of their personal faith on their property. I just didn’t know the United Church was that progressive (goes to show how little I know then).

I particularly like that the four artists seem to all come from individual paths; that the Church was more interested in inviting four of the top artists than in inviting four of the top “Christian” artists. (Although, I really liked what the one guy who called himself Christian used to describe himself, “Christ Follower.”) I like this so much because I’ve spent so many years on my own personal spiritual journey.

During this journey I’ve discovered that there are some things that all spiritual paths have in common: there is something bigger than us out there, this something has some form of relationship with us (the personal and/or universal “us”), compassion is essential, do unto others, etc… I believe that we should be adding one more thing to the list of commonalities: You are the creator of your own Way.

Creating Your Way

Creating your way is a scary process, it takes real daring. Creating your way means that you need to be willing to risk that the way you’ve been taking up until now has been wrong (maybe just slightly wrong, or maybe just wrong for you, or maybe WAY wrong). It also means risking that you will no longer fit in; your worldview may be unique among your circle – you might become “the freak,” the one that others look askance at when you talk about Life, the Universe, and Everything. But it’s a risk that is well worth it, because when you push through and find your Way, you also find your Self.

I’ve spent the last five years asking myself, every time I discovered an imbedded belief, “Why?” My head tells me: There is only one way to God!” And I ask: Why? Why do I believe that? Who said so? Does that line up with my actual experience of God? My head tells me: God loves us! And I ask: Why? Who said so? How do I know?

Sometimes I come to my truth quite quickly, sometimes it takes days, months, even years to decide what I really believe. Now, after so many years of this seeking and de-cluttering I find I’m actually beginning to recognize markers, identifiers that resound with me, who I am and who God is, along my path. I can say, without a doubt, that I believe This. I don’t have a whole doctrine written up, and I expect that this will be a forever, ongoing process (or it should be), but I do finally feel like I have my feet under me. I have made – or maybe it is more accurate to say, found – my own way.

The more sure I become of how I understand Life, the Universe, and Everything to work the more I see my own path – my calling – opening up in front of me. I may not fully know where I’m going, but I’m starting to see how I’m going to get there. Sometimes I come face to face with someone else’s worldview and I feel my own Way being pushed on – like it did this weekend, when that happens I need to return to the Beginner’s Mind. Why do I believe that? Why does this bother me? Am I ok with being wrong?

It’s a daring way of life, but one that I just can’t seem to give up. I know that I can’t ask you to walk my way, because it is MY way. But, I’m no more willing to walk someone else’s way, even if it is less risky, or if I’d fit in more. I’ve discovered myself and the Divine walking this path and so I just need to keep plugging on – no matter the risk.

Which is exactly why I have become convinced that we all need to figure out how to walk our own Way. I think that it is in our own Way that the artistry of the soul comes to life and we discover the depths of our joy and connection to that greater, deeper, Limitless that we often sum up as God. I believe the answers to the world’s problems: to war, and hunger; to slavery, and the suppression of women; to emptiness and depression; to the slow slaughter of our planet, all lie in the power of each individual discovering and walking their own Way.

What’s Your Way?

If you were to paint your faith, what would it look like? What colours would you use? What symbols (animals, people, designs) would you include? Do you know your way, or are you still seeking it? Are you blindly walking on in the way you’ve always had, or are you stumbling along in the dark placing one foot in front of the other? Find the colours of your beliefs, paint YOUR faith…