When we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
-Wendell Berry
Different questions arise at this point.
Different quality of questions.
Different focus of questions.
Different relationship with the Universe, Source, Consciousness, Awareness, God’s Infinite Being.
This can be the time that we no longer rely on the thinking and knowing of our thinking mind (another name for ego or seeming separate self). There is nothing wrong with the ego. It is useful for helping us do what our true self wants to do. It is not so useful for answering life’s most important questions. The answers don’t lie there. Our thinking mind doesn’t know. Our true self does.
However, many of us rely on our thinking minds to direct our lives until we reach the point that Berry references … and we pause.
It can be a frightening time … for a while.
I walked away from my coaching business as I knew it in 2007 because I had reached this point. I wasn’t experiencing fulfillment or peace or love and I longed for all of those. I was “done” working hard yet not experiencing meaning and purpose.
What’s our real journey? At the time I didn’t know. I had no idea. I stepped into the world in a new way. I allowed my heart to guide me. I knew life didn’t have to be the way I was living it and that it didn’t have to be so hard. I knew it in an intuitive sense, not an intellectual one. I had no proof. It was like these knowings were invitations and I had to let them guide me.
I was fairly unprepared. I had worked with many coaches and taken many courses over the years – and read hundreds of books. But those didn’t have the “answers” I was looking for.
It took another eleven years before that part of the journey ended and the next “leg” of it began. I discovered nondual* teachings and decided to live my life aligned with those teachings. Here I found the “way” to live what I had intuited many years ago: life doesn’t have to be the way I/we have been living it and it doesn’t have to be so hard.
Most of us long for meaning and purpose and peace and love and happiness (fulfillment, contentment).
As the story of the Prodigal Son tells us, we can come home to that for which we long. The father in the story represents the peace, love, meaning, purpose and fulfillment that we seek. What we seek is within us already. We can turn our attention around, away from the content of our experience, and allow ourselves to believe, to reveal to ourselves and to experience that truth of who we are and what our life can be.
We are much more powerful than we (probably) believe we are.
We are not limited in the ways we believe we are.
We are inherently loving, peaceful, fulfilled, abundant.
Our lives are pregnant with meaning. (Love this word ‘pregnant’ used by Bernardo Kastrup in a recent webinar.)
That is our true nature.
The journey that begins with “I no longer know” is a fabulous one in my experience … filled with miracles, aches, pains, delights, upsets, twists, turns, fear, delight, mystery, love, peace, fulfillment and meaning.
Not for the faint of heart.
Yet one for all who are called. (And by the way IMHO we all are actually called. And these times are using a megaphone to shout the invitation.)
If you are in the place Berry refers to, you can begin by:
- Believing in yourself. If you sense that you are ready for the journey, trust it.
- Paying close attention to what your thinking mind is telling you, choosing whether you want to go in that direction or whether you want to ask those thoughts – politely and lovingly – to take a vacation as you listen to and know your true self and the direction it is nudging you to go in. (In my experience, you don’t have a full picture all at once. It could be that some people do.)
- Taking some step that informs your thinking mind as well as your true self that you are ready. It doesn’t have to be as drastic as what I did, but something so that your true self knows you are sincere and ready.
* Nonduality is the realization that although we seem to experience a separation between ourselves and other people, animals, nature and objects, that there is a single reality, a relatedness, infinite and indivisible, the nature of which is pure Awareness, or Consciousness, Divine Spirit, Infinite Intelligence, the Universe or Source, and that the existence of all people, animals, nature and objects originates from this Source.
If you are ready to begin the real journey and want to explore where to start and how working with me might be useful, please send me an email at peggy@peggy-oneal.com and offer a few days and times for a free, no-pressure conversation.
