Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

by Martha N. Beck

Trying to replace someone special to you, or something you once were, is as useless as trying to replace the sun with a Lava lamp. If you’ve suffered this kind of a loss, the road to your North Star lies through grieving. There’s nothing to do but mourn, and the pain will disappear a lot faster if you lean into it.

The way our culture has things set up at the moment, the most powerful and important decision-making positions go to people who are numb to grief and empathy. Psychologists have a name for these folks: They’re called sociopaths. In case you don’t know already, this is another word for completely, alarmingly, dangerously crazy people.

EXERCISES (For those facing a serious, irreplaceable loss) 1. Find or Make a Safe Place to Grieve It’s a real bummer that workplaces aren’t safe places to mourn, but it’s true. You really will damage your career by floundering around in your sorrow when you’re dealing with a colleague, customer, or client. Many people also lack a personal support system that lets them grieve;

To get into—or, more accurately, through—your grief, you have to make a safe place for mourning. At a bare minimum, you need privacy and quiet. Ideally, you’ll have a warm, comfortable place where you can lie down and wrap yourself in a blanket or two (this creates the sensation of being cuddled, which is very conducive to effective grieving). You’ll also need paper and a pen; expressing your feelings by writing about them can keep them from becoming unendurable. A stereo of some kind and some good sad songs are also very useful. Any song that helps you cry will access your grief, move it through you, and help you release it. Both listening to sad music and writing down your feelings are ways of connecting with other people. By writing, even if no one ever reads what you write, you communicate your sorrow. Music can make you feel that the

2. Reserve Time to Grieve First of all, sadness slows you down. Give yourself more time than you think you need to finish projects, from cleaning your bedroom to writing a computer program. You will not be able to speed up by pushing yourself. However, the more love and support you give yourself—and get from others—the more energy you’ll

At the end of each grieving session, picture yourself placing your sadness in a secure container, closing the lid, putting it on a shelf in a cupboard, and shutting the cupboard door. It will still be there tomorrow when your time to grieve rolls around again. 3. Maximize Comforting Activities A lot of people try to push their grief aside by “having fun,” even if that means drinking enough tequila to float the Disney cruise fleet. These same people may also try to cheer you up by forcing you to go dancing, sleigh riding, clubbing baby seals, or whatever else they do for entertainment. Listen: Doing “fun” things instead of grieving is very different from adding comforting activities to your grieving process.

EXERCISE Make your own Hate ‘n’ Rage Journal. In this notebook, you can write all your most bitter, virulent, unworthy thoughts and feelings. Once you’re clear about your anger and its source, make sure the journal is put away where it can’t burn anyone. Then proceed to the next step. OPTIONS FOR DEALING WITH ANGER When your emotional compass reads “anger,” you once again have two viable options. You can change yourself (as I did after I identified my anger at my own spinelessness) or you can change the situation that’s making you angry.

EXERCISE For the next twenty-four hours, do not use the phrases on the left unless they are literally true. Substitute the most accurate statement from the list on the right. You’ll be amazed how much this will clarify the real source of your anger.

EXERCISE Think of something that really enrages you. Then, while holding this in your mind, duplicate the actions of fighting in some way that helps the world instead of hurting it. House or yard work does it for some of my clients. You might also try going to a gym or a kickboxing class. Notice how much physical energy you can get from your anger, and how much less upsetting anger is when you’re moving.

instant gratification, were called Sybarites, and you’d better remember that, because there will be a quiz in twenty minutes.) Hedonists believed in living for happiness, but they also believed that, due to our basically good inner nature, we can be truly happy only if we live moral lives, complete with integrity, compassion, and sometimes self-sacrifice.

real joy is based on real effort. A high flight followed by a crash landing is characteristic of Joy Lite.

you felt real joy, just remembering that experience will light a small, warm flame inside you. The memory of joy, all by itself, is joyful—something that can’t be said of imitations.

EXERCISE List four or five of your happiest memories: Choose the memory that appeals to you most right now. Close your eyes and recapture this experience in as much detail as you can. Then answer the questions below.

EXERCISE (For those with a history of happiness.) 1. Take a minute right now to mentally run through everything you’ve done today. Does thinking about these activities bring on any surges of joy? Which activities are most joyful? 2. Now think about the past month. Have you done anything in the last four weeks that left you with a joyful memory? What was it? List as many joyful moments as you can; then see what they have in common.

any truly joyful memories. If you can’t cast your mind back to experiences that make you thrill with joy, you’re due for some remedial work. Sadistic as this may sound, one of the main purposes of remedial joy work is to make you cry. Tears show up as a signal from the essential self that you have fixed your sights on something that would bring you joy, if only you could experience it.

Sometimes my joyless clients tear up at the oddest times: when I’m talking about my car, or they’re describing a restaurant meal, or a hummingbird pays a visit to the flowers just outside my office window. These tears are indications that some source of joy is nearby, even if the client has not yet learned to feel it.

REMEDIAL JOY EXERCISES 1. Search your brain for any memories that makes you smile spontaneously. These might seem to be “inappropriate” occasions, like the time your brother accidentally ate a wasp or an especially bizarre episode of the Jerry Springer show. No matter what they are, write them down.

to remember the last time you cried because you were happy, not sad. Births, weddings, sports victories, inspirational stories, movies, books, or television shows may all strum your heartstrings. The ones that can bring tears to your eyes are usually telling you that you need the type of experience you’re observing. 3. If neither of the exercises above yields any clear memories, search for incidents where you have felt intense yearning, and perhaps jealousy, about something you have never experienced:

Once you’ve figured out what brings you genuine joy, it goes without saying that you should immediately begin filling your life with as much of it as possible.

For example, Geraldine feels soothed and happy when she visits bookstores, so she started going to one during her lunchtime,

You can learn to hold your own happiness lightly by remembering that you are its source, and that there is an infinite supply.

my life I’d lived with a sense of insecurity, a feeling that everything I trusted could collapse, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was right—that’s exactly what happened when the company let me go. But once I began to trust that thing inside, that black cat, I began to take my whole life in a different direction.

INTUTITION TRAINING EXERCISES

I advised him to “do without doing” and follow this new interest wherever it led.

EXERCISE Go to a bookstore or library when you have at least fifteen minutes to spare. Wander through the shelves without any particular intention. Try to feel if some books or sections seem to “tug” at you. This “tug” is a wisp of the same kind of curiosity you used to feel when you were a little kid, whenever something really interesting passed your way. It’s quite subtle, and you may be tempted to ignore it. Don’t. Pick five books that give you the strongest “tug,” take them to a table, and page through them, focusing on anything that seems to draw your attention.

She knew that I collect anything shaped like a turtle (I’d given her a tiny turtle shortly after we met) because turtles have everything I think a writer needs. They have tough shells to deal with criticism; soft, sensitive insides; the need to stick their necks out if they want to move forward; and the slow-and-steady patience to keep slogging away, day after day.

Stay in your present life as long as you possibly can!

Catalytic changes literally transform your identity in your own eyes, and usually the eyes of others, so that you are identified by a new label. Catalytic events fall into three types: shock, opportunity, and transition.

A shock is a sudden change that comes from outside you, not from changes you’ve made in your own thinking.

An opportunity always looks like a lucky break. It happens when you encounter the possibility of making a huge jump toward the life your essential self wants to live.

Transition events develop much more slowly than shocks or opportunities, and they come from inside you, rather than from the environment.

EXERCISE See if you can remember three major catalytic events in your life so far. Were they shocks, opportunities, or transitions?

Though they could’ve sworn that they were moving forward, they feel as though everything they’ve ever learned or experienced has suddenly evaporated. They grieve desperately over the loss of familiar roles and situations, all the time bumbling around in their new lives like scared, clumsy infants.

Square One is a time of fundamental death and rebirth,

that it gives you a chance to choose a new identity. Freed from your old life patterns, you can seek, find, and embrace your essential self much more easily than you could before

Square One allows you to plot a new life course based on your internal compasses rather than social pressures.

This doesn’t mean that your dreams are misguided, or that they won’t come true. It just means you’ll have to modify the scheme you created in Square Two—possibly several times. That’s the nature of any hero’s saga,

a pit bull and the resilience of Flubber. But if you continue to manage your own change process, a gritty little miracle is going to happen. Your plan, whether it’s plan A, B, C, K, or T, is going to work. You’ll move into Square Four.

ignominy

Knowing how to speak one language is a skill. Knowing how to learn language, any language, is called a “metaskill.”

So? What are you? You may have identified yourself by a job description: “I am a tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, corporate strategist, Thighmaster salesman.” Or maybe your identity is based on relationships: “I am a devoted lover, caring parent, loyal friend, and a trusted confidante of the pope.” You may identify yourself by membership in some group or cause: “I am a homosexual, a Republican, a Jew, a Poultry Rights crusader”; or an avocation: “I am a deep thinker, a ski bum, an alcoholic, a fitness fanatic.” I want you to notice that you could be everything I just listed, all at once. You’d be really weird and mighty damn busy, but yes, it’s theoretically possible to be all those things, and many more as well, simultaneously. Each of us has infinite roles and identities. But we typically think of just a few, maybe only one, when we say, “This is what I am.” This “primary identity” shapes our place in the world, dictates many of our actions,

Transition events are even more likely to cause social disruption—and intense self-doubt—than opportunities.

This is what you’ll experience if and when a transition pushes you out of one life and into the next. You’ll be more fraught with indecision than people

On the other hand, they’re also said to have special powers, like the ability to change shape, become invisible, or travel effortlessly in any direction. Being nobody nowhere, they can become anything and go anywhere. On the threshold, your essential self has more freedom than at any other time or place.

Consider just letting yourself relax into the “not-thinking” and “not-doing” Taoist masters worked so hard to achieve. It really is in the still and curious world of the threshold that the true self emerges, that we find ourselves and the purposes of our lives.

Your essential self always tells you what it wants by making you feel absolutely entranced. You get to have that “falling in love” feeling

The magnetism of your own North Star, the life you were meant to live, is close enough to sexual desire to confuse people who haven’t learned the difference.

The people and things that thrill your essential self will be exactly what you need to achieve your highest potential.

you wander around the nothingness of the threshold, follow your internal compasses no matter where they take you. If you feel an irresistible urge to cook lentils, or buy an aquarium, or watch a twenty-four-hour Mary Tyler Moore–athon, I truly believe that’s the quickest route to the life you were meant to live. For a while, you might not see how this is going to work. That’s okay. Just keep doing what feels most joyful,

go on a vision quest. As the world spins crazily around you, pay attention to what I call the “three N’s”: noticing what you love, narrowing your focus, and, finally, naming the thing you most desire, the identity that fits as though it’s custom-tailored.