A Journey of Self-Creation

The following article is from Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation, published by North Atlantic Books.



No Delay

Everywhere I look I see people who are walking a false path. Their obsession with “security” at the expense of their callings compels them to do jobs they hate. Grin and bear it, until I turn sixty-five, and then my real life will begin. What if our soul-scriptures only give us fifty years to actualize them?

By the time we retire at sixty-five many of us cannot even begin to access our real self. With our God-seeds planted in the wrong fields, we have become too tired and even ill from carrying the weight of the lie to really touch the moment. Forty years encased in stone will do that to you. And that’s if we survive until then -- many of us die from the lie. If we don’t shape up, we may be shipped out.

If we do what we really love, there is no such thing as retirement. The soul beat goes on. If we love our work, we may well make less money before sixty-five, but we are much more likely to live longer and healthier, and to actually want to work well past sixty-five. Is wholeness not the only retirement plan worth saving for?

Somehow it all comes down to truth, or consequences. There is something seemingly safe about living falsely. On one level everything remains unreal, even suffering, because we are walking a false path. Our choices are holdbacks, hiding places, escape hatches. If we don’t get what we want, we don’t really care. It wasn’t our real path anyway.

But the consequences of our falsity are profound. When we live our truth, there is no dissonance along the mind-body-spirit continuum. We flow in the river true. Yet when we lie to ourselves, we corrupt our inner world. It takes an enormous amount of energy to self-distort. The lies get into our cells, and we suffer for it. The convenient fictions we tell ourselves to keep the truth at bay -- “I’ll live my truth later … after I pay off the house” -- become inconvenient factions that congeal and ultimately undermine our very existence. We should be more afraid of avoiding our path than living it.

If thinking of our own death doesn’t motivate us, it may help to think of those who never made it down the birth canal. Think of those little ones who tasted but a few breaths before succumbing. Think of those who died on battlefields so that we would have a chance to be free. Remember how hard they fought for this life, how badly they wanted it.

No matter what others have mistakenly told us, we are all needed here for our gifts, however small or humble they may outwardly appear. If not, the universe would take us back in the blink of an eye. No matter what we may have done in our lifetime, no matter how uncomfortable we are with our past actions, there is always the chance of growing our soul a little bit more.

Dear Reader, please walk your own way while you still can. The truth is that there is no escape from reality. There is only postponement. When it comes down to it -- and make no mistake, it does come down to it -- all you are is your soul’s journey. What else is there? What else is worthy of the time that you have been given?