Fear and the Path to Fulfillment

What is your vocation, your sense of callings as a human being at this point in your life, both in and beyond job and title?

Krista Tippett

Calling? But I’m an Atheist

As soon as I see this prompt, I dive into theological and metaphysical linquistic nit-picking.

I want to write about how atheists want their lives to feel meaningful just as much as theists but the language of calling and life purpose make most of us cringe. I want to write about how I have come to understand my yearning for a sense of meaning in my life through readings about life purpose, calling, and vocation. I want to talk about Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, James Hillman’s understanding of daimon, the definition of life purpose I learned in CTI’s Fulfillment course, Albert Camus’s understanding of beauty as the salve for life’s absurdity, and Steve Jobs’ commencement speech in which he talks about the dots of a life only being connectable in retrospect.

But I know this desire to talk about language is a defence mechanism, a way of avoiding the harder truth lurker beneath my initial reaction.

I have done my own work with the language around the human need to feel like who they are as a person and what they do in the world matter.

I have learned that a sense that my life is meaningful is a side effect that occurs when I live as my truest self to the best of my ability in connection with others in the spirit of service.

And, the latest articulation of what living as my truest self looks like is new and fresh and deeply motivating to me.

My Life Purpose is to take a stand for and create containers for:

radical acceptance of absolutely everything that is,
being present and alive in the muck, mess, chaos, and complexity of the human condition,
seeing the beauty in the brokenness, and
moving towards what is possible.

So why do I feel a compulsion to revisit old territory in response to Krista Tippett’s question of calling?

Fear.

Fear

Fear and shame are the two biggest barriers to feeling that sense that our lives have meaning.

The antidotes to fear and shame are love, wonder, and curiosity.

We have two branches of our autonomic nervous system. The one our common language has good vocabulary for is the one that show up when we are under bad stress – the flight/fight/freeze response to danger. The other is a little harder to name, but we all know it in our bodies.

For a moment, imagine what the opposite of stress feels like in your body. Note how your heart beats, what happens to your jaw, your hands and feet, your breathing. And then notice what words come to you to describe what you are experiencing. Many people recognize this as the experience they have when they are in flow. InterPlay calls the experience the physicality of grace. I call it living from love or having the Thrive brain in the driver’s seat.

It is not physiologically possible for both systems to be online at the same time.

When we are afraid, the nervous system that comes online has no capacity other than to get us out of danger.

So, when my fear is in play, I cannot hear the voice of my calling, feel the yearning of my heart, or sense the desires of my being.

I have been procrastinating doing something important for my business but couldn’t figure out why. I hadn’t recognized my fear. Until this morning, when awareness smacked me upside the head.

Activating the Thrive System

Last night, I chose to take some quiet, meditative time to reflect on the love I have for my kids and write them all little love notes.

Choosing to look for the good and focus on love are great ways to shift from Survive Mode to Thrive Mode. Other techniques are dancing, sighing, shaking our bodies, getting curious about something, journalling, and meditating. Any system of playfully moving our body or paying attention to the simple facts of what is going on right now in the present moment tends to activate the grace/ease/flow system.

I went to bed last night having moved solidly out of fear and into love.

And in the morning, the answer to Krista Tippett’s prompt was rattling around in my brain so fast it was giving me a headache. The reason I was procrastinating was because that project is a distraction.

I had convinced myself it was a stepping stone toward my calling because it was the fastest way to the financial stability I need to feel safe pursuing my calling. But, the work I do requires me to be in alignment with my values as I serve my clients. I need to be in service of my calling to get and keep clients. Putting aside my calling to make money has never worked before. There is no reason to believe it will work now.

In fact, pursuing work that is out of alignment with my values and my calling invariably drives me towards depression. And one fundamental driving force behind my life purpose is my desire to reduce rates of depression and suicide.

No wonder I have a headache.

So, What’s Next?

I need to go back to the drawing board on this work project. I either need to tweak it so that it is in service of my calling or drop it and work up the courage to really step into the work I am yearning to do.

Because what I yearn to do is to help people create a sense of meaningfulness in their lives and a sense of belonging despite all the imperfections inherent in being human.

My calling is to go straight for the heart of the matter: cultivating self-worth, rewriting our relationships to fear, and overcoming shame while developing the skills required for fiercely intimate relationships: professional, platonic, and sexual.

 

This is part of Quest 2017, a 12-prompt process for annual planning. The prompt was provided by Krista Tippett, host of NPR’s weekly radiocast, On Being.

The full prompt was:

What is your vocation, your sense of callings as a human being at this point in your life, both in and beyond job and title?

Practice internalizing a more spacious, generous sense of what animates you and why you are here (e.g. as a human being, partner, child, neighbor, friend, citizen, maker, yogi, volunteer, as well as a professional). Honor the creative value of “how” you are present as much as in “what” you are doing in the everyday at work and in the world.

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