Stuck Again

This feels like a Dear Diary post because I’m stuck again and have been feeling more shit than zen today (Thursday, 25 June is when I started writing it). I was trying to write India Part 3 (click here for Part 1 and Part 2), but I wasn’t feeling it. Earlier this week, between Facebook memories and looking at the calendar, I noticed it’s been a year since I had one of my epiphanies.

23 June 2019 was a weekend of milestones for my brothers. The eldest celebrated his last Mass as a parochial vicar at my family’s home parish and started his new assignment as pastor at another church. The middle child celebrated his 50th birthday and accomplished some professional highlights, like being personally invited by Jason Robert Brown to perform at a gala after Mr. Brown heard him play Bridges of Madison County.

Both of my brothers had professional achievements that weekend and were following their callings/dreams.

And it was exactly six months after our mom died.

Me? I didn’t know what I was being called to do, but I felt certain (for a long time) that I wasn’t doing it. In the six months after my mom died, I had clarity via hindsight that cherishing our families and friends and having gratitude for the relationships while they’re still alive is one of the simplest acts of kindness we can do for ourselves and each other. But I was also beginning to see that I had been missing out on feeling grateful for allowing myself to be me.

“To thine own self be true.” I was 18 years old when I decided I wasn’t going to major in music like my brothers. I just knew it wasn’t for me – not the requirements for practicing or the courses or the future as a starving artist. I didn’t have a dream job that I was working towards, so I looked through the course catalog and determined from the requirements that English was the major that I could start and finish without losing interest. True story.

My senior semester of college (I finished a semester early because I knocked out electives in summer sessions), I took a course on securing a job. We took the Myers Briggs Type Indicator test as well as the Campbell Interest and Skills Survey to get an idea of careers that suited us. Yeah, it turned out majoring in English was the fitting choice among other possibilities, and I would do well in roles as a creator or helper. After college, I fell into editing and technical writing, which was pretty much my entire professional life.

My professional life since college was so traditional or typical – go and find a job instead of creating our own opportunities and merely admire those who created their own business from their passion.

In those six months after my mom died, I started getting a better idea of my calling and started using a Passion Planner to figure it out by writing ideas and having a vision.

After my mom died, a very dear friend recommended The Power of Love: Connecting to the Oneness by James Van Praagh. That led to finding another Hay House author, Rebecca Campbell. Her book, Light is the New Black, felt like an affirmation about things I had thought about but never explored to see if anyone else had similar ideas. Both of these books echoed spiritual ideas that came to mind while I was in India. The authors’ approaches are different, but both come from the same heart of humanity. And both emphasize the importance of being who we are meant to be, authentically and lovingly. “To thine own self be true.”

And truth be told, both books felt a bit crazy-spiritual as I was reading them, but I was open to the new ideas. I felt comforted by my connection to concepts that I felt (intuitively knew) but had never read about until then, so I didn’t even know they existed to the extent that they do. I spent a lot of my adult life as a skeptic/agnostic/atheist and any other labels for someone without religion. I still don’t have religion, but I’ve experienced too many things throughout my life to deny the existence of “the unseen”. And when I started paying closer attention to my intuition and my “soul’s calling”, things started to click and to happen and intentions began to manifest…

And then there’s balance. Prayers and intentions cannot go without an accompanying actions. The spiritual value of thoughts and prayers exists, but we still have to be doing our part. We can use spiritual guidance to do the right thing, but we have to DO the right thing. This is true of making changes in our lives as well as change in the world.

So yeah, to get unstuck, I just had to write and get a flow going. I had to get out of my head and get moving – an action. Honestly, I was getting so caught up in thoughts about everything going on in the world and reflections on the past year and what I’ve been doing since my 23 June 2019 epiphany that my brothers answered their callings and at that point I was merely floating through my life – I was getting lost and weighed down by those thoughts. Some of them were getting a little dark, so I had to deal with them. The shadows.

Shadows are good for getting to the root of things and understanding why we feel upset or uncomfortable or whatever negative emotion they bring out of us. Sometimes it’s not easy to dig out of the dark, but I learned a few things and made peace with them. Things are a little brighter now.

Luceat lux vestra.