Following your intuition isn’t all sunshine and roses. Diving into your own spiritual awakening is extremely hard work.
I’m writing this on what has been a particularly rough Sunday at the end of a strenuous two weeks.
Since January 1st (it’s now February 16th) I’ve been in a bit of a cocoon. I’ve been doing a lot of introspective work, leaning into the beginnings of a spiritual awakening, sitting quietly with myself to get out of my head and into my body. It has helped me identify more closely with my spirit and my path (which I’ve recently learned may be referred to as my dharma).
The unfortunate side effect of all this spiritual and emotional work is of course that I’ve grown acutely aware of how wrong my current path is for me. So much so that’s it’s almost unbearable.
What path are you on?
I remember several years ago seeing a commercial about antidepressants. This was before they were relatively common; I’d never heard of them at the time and didn’t know anyone who was taking them. The woman in the commercial described herself as needing to “wind herself up” just to get out of bed every morning. There were animated people depicted like wind-up toys with keys in their backs that made them put one foot in front of the other. That’s what it’s felt like lately to make myself continue down the path I’m on.
This is not to suggest that depression isn’t a legitimate diagnosis or that those medications aren’t helpful to those who need them. But I do raise the question, how many of us would be freed from regular feelings of depression if we tuned into our intuition and followed our calling? (A note here that I distinguish between experiencing feelings of depression and being clinically depressed. I’m referring to the former experience in the context of this post.)
And the trouble is, I think when we force ourselves to continue down a path that isn’t right for us, not only do we feel sad, fatigued, and lost, we start to lose touch with our spirit.
Most of the actions I take nowadays are taken for the purpose of living up to someone’s expectations of me. I get nervous and uncomfortable if I feel like someone wants something from me or expects a certain behavior, especially if it’s something I’m not certain I can deliver. But I have continued to do it, ignoring my intuition, to be pleasing to people. And I’m so very tired of continuing down a path that isn’t right for me just for the sake of meeting others’ expectations.
So they don’t reject me, stop loving me, and stop respecting me. My family. Friends. Work colleagues.
We set our own traps.
Everyone around me now has an established image of me they’ve come to expect and rely upon. Which of course is the one I chose to project, so in many ways it’s my own doing. I could have stood up for myself when I was 18, and again when I was 23, and 26, to do what was right for myself. But the isolation, the sensation of letting people down, was too much to bear at the time.
Now at 33, looking back, I think it would have been a small price to pay if it meant I would be living my life in alignment now.
Waking Up
This overall spiritual awakening is what discovering my feminine energy has led me to. I have been driving, forcing, pushing, and ambitious for the past decade or more. I barreled my way through challenge after challenge, earning accolades and adoration from people who were supposed to be the most important to me. But I never stopped to ask myself if I really cared about the achievements I was racking up.
That’s not entirely true. I do remember moments when my intuition was slapping me in the face to get my attention. One such occasion was when I was studying for my licensing exam in the summer of 2011. I had colored poster boards full of notes taped up all over the bedroom walls of my apartment. A friend had come over and we were lying on the bed, looking around at all of them, and I told him that if I didn’t make a hard left turn soon, I was going to be stuck going straight on a path I didn’t want to be on.
I was right. But I didn’t know how to fix it then. Maybe I don’t know how to fix it now, either. But I do know now what I was missing then, and knowledge is power.
New Discoveries
Part of embracing the feminine energy is forgiving yourself, acknowledging the choices you’ve made without judgment, and creating space for yourself to heal and choose again. I’ve been running from my choices, avoiding a spiritual awakening, for a long time. It’s a difficult balancing act to slow everything down and start to heal, while continuing to do all of the things that wounded you in the first place because they keep the roof over your head. That is what I’m struggling with now. I feel every day like I want to walk away from my day job and never look back. It wasn’t always that way. I enjoy taking pride in my work, whatever that work may be. But I’ve run out of fight for the work that I do.
Is it just stress?
You might be reading this and thinking, she’s just stressed. This sounds like classic burnout. And you’d be correct on both counts. I’ve known for a long time that I have chronic stress, but it wasn’t until I really started paying attention to it as a disease I carry around in my body that it started to sink in how much trouble I’m in. You can ignore something for a really long time until your mind and your body force you to do something about it. Once I started allowing myself to slow down, breathe, and think about what I really want, I started to realize how much pain I’m in. And once I noticed, I couldn’t un-notice.
Again, it would be a lie to say I’ve been completely oblivious. I went to massage therapy regularly about a year-and-a-half ago after I’d been in a minor car accident. The therapist was also a reiki practitioner. I remember one of the first times she laid hands on me, she made a pained sound and said, “Oh my gosh, you hurt so much.” I don’t know if she said that because of how tight my muscles were or because of something else she was picking up on, but it made me want to cry.
Now I’m very aware of my pain, and it still makes me want to cry.
Spiritual Awakening
We’ve got to get back in alignment with our souls, people. This isn’t a woe-is-me diary entry. This is me being vulnerable, sharing what I’m learning, because this spiritual awakening isn’t just about discovering my femininity. It’s much deeper than that. It’s a consuming awareness that I’ve been chasing all the wrong things, and time is passing me by.
We’re living in a time where we have got to put a stop to this. Our culture demands certain behaviors of us, and if we don’t fall in line there is always the threat of ostracization. Living on the fringes. And humans need each other. We need each other’s love and support now more than ever. So we do what we feel we must in order to continue receiving that love and support.
What if we’ve got it wrong?
But what if we have it wrong? What if we’re running around, seeking the respect and approval of the wrong people? What if we’re busy trying to prove that we’re someone we are not, for the sake of being accepted by a group of people we wouldn’t want to be accepted by if we were confident enough to be our true selves and state our true desires? And what if in the meantime there’s another whole group of people who would happily accept us and love us just for being exactly who we are, on our true paths, being our truest selves?
I look around me at people my age and older (and yes, some younger, too), who are so lost, shrunken, withered away, slowly killing themselves in pursuit of what isn’t important to them while they ignore the things that are. It’s rampant. We as a society fail to nourish our bodies, souls, and relationships, instead surviving on pretenses, highlight reels, and the pursuit of adoration and material wealth.
Get Quiet with Your Soul
If you put down your phone, step away from television, set yourself apart from your biggest sources of influence, and let your mind get quiet; what does it say? What does your soul desire? When was the last time you asked it? How long have you been ignoring it out of a sense of duty, obligation, or fear? What’s there that you’ve tried to bury or run away from?
What if instead of trying to escape it, you took responsibility for it and took steps in your life to nurture it and let it grow? I’m learning that every answer I’ve ever needed has been inside me all along. That doesn’t mean I feel strong enough or brave enough yet to sit still and sort through them all. But the call of my soul, for the first time, is growing louder than the siren song of the non-threatening, socially acceptable life I’ve built for myself.
But that’s what your soul, your intuition, is there for, right? To keep you from crashing on the rocks?