is it scarcity complex, or a call to adventure?
If you tell someone with a bent toward the spiritual and/or self-help that you feel a sense of lack in your life, she might look at you with a faint hint of disapproval. She might tell you that what you put your attention on, grows, and we become what we think about most.
So don’t focus on the lack, she might tell you. Focus on abundance. Focus on enough. You have everything you need. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. This moment is perfect. You are perfect.
What if that lack isn’t the symptom of a scarcity complex, but something else?
What if it’s your call to adventure? The beginning of your hero’s journey?
What if it’s your way into a richer, deeper, more meaningful life?
According to mythologist Joseph Campbell and depth psychologist Jean Houston, inside all of us is a longing for more. This isn’t the voice of the void but the cry of your soul, driving you to wholeness. click to tweet
Houston explains in this interview that The Call might start off as bland and generic: I want to get married, or, I want a new career. The “usual things”. But at some point there’s what Houston terms a second genesis, when another level of possibility begins to crest and you realize there’s so much more to you than you ever suspected.
That’s when your life’s adventure begins.
And by the way, you are perfect. You are exactly where you are supposed to be – until life keeps whacking you with hints and reminders that it’s time to be on your way to somewhere else. (In storyteller’s parlance, this is known as ‘resisting the call’, and the hero will continue to stagnate, and life will keep poking and frustrating and disrupting her, until she’s willing to leave her ordinary world and strike out for the territories.)
Moving into your yearning is different from trying to fill the void through a hard or soft addiction. The latter leaves you worse off than before, wanting more but requiring ever more to achieve the same effect. What is addiction, in the end, but a spiritual quest pulled inside out?
To move into your yearning is to recognize and honor your needs. It is to move to the other side of lack, where you can start to remember who you are.
