In a world where one can find an endless supply of guru’s who offer answers to all of life’s questions and challenges, who have attempted to distill the great mystery down to a “7 step path” to “enlightenment” or “healing” or “salvation” — it is worth remembering that at the end of the day, you are the one that has to live your life.
Your experience of the world is unique to you. The struggles you encounter are yours and yours alone. No one can live your life for you.
Carl Jung said, “Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come is created in and from you.”
To live a lifetime is to play in the great game, to engage with the mystery of life. Who are we? Why are we here? What is the purpose? Why are these things happening to me? These are the great questions human-kind have been asking for all time.
Some among us have found evocative answers for ourselves, and some of those answers have broad application to many others; it’s always helpful to hear about these stories, these paths, these suggestions at living. It can be profound and healing to stop and find fellowship with others on the same path of self-exploration. But nobody has the one truth, or the one way.
There are as many ways as there are people. To adopt someone else’s path is to abdicate your own, and in the end, one will always come to be resentful and regretful of such a choice.
Of course one can and should accept help, support, and take advice on efficiency in living, but that doesn’t change the fact that each lifetime experience is a unique, unrepeatable journey that one alone must engage in from where they are. One can invite and allow someone or something outside of you to carry them through life, but the price one pays for this favor is deep knowledge of self.
Nietzsche says “There is only one way, on which nobody can go except you; where does it lead? Don’t ask, just go.”
The true path is one of being oneself, embodying one’s own unique energy. I have often had clients and students ask me, “I want to live a life full of meaning, what should I do?” — my answer is always the same. You bring the meaning to whatever you choose to do. There is no difference in being a waiter or a project manager or a yoga teacher or a coach aside from the person doing it.
No vocation or act is any less or more meaningful than another. Any life, any choice, any small or large act in the world can be imbued with meaning — if you bring yourself to it. You will find fulfillment when you connect, deeply and without hesitation, to yourself.
Once you find yourself, and find the contentment that comes from feeling at one with your path in body and spirit, it becomes easy to be in fellowship with others, when desired and called upon. It becomes easy to give of oneself in ways that are healing, validating, and true. The path is not to rid one of the self, or give it away, but instead to own it, to be-friend it, to stop resisting oneself and the uniqueness of the journey. Once you are at one with yourself, it becomes easy and fulfilling to have communion with all manner of “otherness”.
Here at Art of the Seer Academy, our purpose is to create and hold evocative spaces and create stimulating experience that direct your attention inward to find your own path. Everything we create is in support of this task. And we’re excited and passionate about sharing what we do with our students, and among ourselves.
William Pacholski