“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” – Joseph Campbell
In the first half of life we look for security, personal identity and satisfaction in traditional ways. We find a partner who provides us with emotional security, we have a family, and we build a life and community together.
As we move through our lives, our hopes for our current life may become depleted and our energy may fall back into our unconscious, where can begin to feel bored and depressed. We may wonder why and how this happened for us because we feel we have done all the ‘right’ things.
What inspires our energy in the first half of life is the belief that there is somewhere to go, something to do, and somewhere where all will be well in the end.
If you look at life as a journey, then, where are you going?
What is your goal? The end place, the reason for all of your effort?
You may feel nostalgic for a time when you felt more energy for your life, and you believed that your life was moving toward what you believed was a good place. Somewhere along the way, we may no longer know where that good place is.
We believed that if we found the right person, the right home, or the right beliefs, then we will have found what we are looking for. Maybe for a while, but in time, we may lose interest in these things too.
Carl Jung says that over time, we can begin to withdraw our psychic energy from old projects and situations. We may wish to stay safe with the old, but our psyche demands continuous growth and will sacrifice our comfort to achieve it.
If we feel depressed, we can lean into those feelings in order to find the gift for us that exists within them.
We can ask ourselves: What will provide us with a new life direction? And, what is next for us?
During these difficult times, we need to ask ourselves, what matters in the end? To ask ourselves this question is to create the possibility for a differentiated choice. If we limit our options to making money and having good health, we may miss out on a lot of other aspects that life has to offer.
There’s a lot going on inside each of us. New possibilities for a flexible future can come forward when we allow space for new understanding and awareness to occur.
Let’s make sense of it together.
[email protected] or 647 222-3086
