How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life. Barbara Angelis De

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СКАЧАТЬ wise or inspiring, when I didn’t always have to have answers for everyone, including myself? What did it mean for me to be a nothing and a nobody for a while? What would that look like?

      Since I was eighteen years old, I had been on a conscious path of growth. In my twenties, long before I began my career, I spent many years immersed in spiritual studies and meditation retreats that lasted for months at a time. From this platform of inner awakening, I launched myself as a teacher and a writer, and it catapulted me into several decades of success, accomplishment and profound fulfillment. Now I found myself at the summit of that success. It was as if I had been climbing a very challenging mountain, thinking that if I reached the highest peaks, I would have accomplished my goal.

      So here I stood, having finally made it to the top, and as I gazed around in amazement, my new vantage point brought into perspective another alluring horizon I never knew existed, a horizon I instantly knew I had to explore. I would never have seen this new vista if I hadn’t climbed this far and this high. But there it was, glittering in the distance, beckoning to me to come and stand on its majestic peaks, which would offer me yet another enlightening view, and I knew I had to answer its call.

      The only way to get there, however, was to do the opposite of what I’d been doing in my long and arduous climb—I needed to descend, to leave this sunny spot from where I could see everything and go back down the other side of the mountain into the cold gray shadows of the waiting valley. Once again, it was time for me to pull back and journey deep within myself. I had come full circle.

      In order to do this, I needed time—time to question, time to contemplate, time to find myself outside of my successes and the constant attention and demands that came with them. In order to find that time, I decided to pull back—not to abandon my life and my work totally, but to walk a few steps away from it for a while. I had a very successful personal growth center in Los Angeles where thousands of people a month would come to participate in seminars and trainings, and I closed it down. I had a television show in development, and I decided not to go forward with it. I said no to people and opportunities that had been waiting for my energy and attention.

      None of this was easy. It went against all of my deepest instincts, which were to hold on tightly to everything I had and to the promise of more. Instead, I had to let go of my attachment to writing and publishing one new book every year like clockwork, my attachment to never going for more than a few months without being on television, my attachment to giving enough seminars to make a certain amount of money, my attachment to being the biggest something and somebody I could be. Even though I knew I was doing the right thing, I still wasn’t completely sure why. I secretly dreaded that rather than coming together in a new way, I was falling apart. “You’re going through a rebirth,” the courageous part of me whispered reassuringly, but the truth was, I felt as if I were dying.

      Digging Deep for Wisdom

      One night soon after I began the process of making these dramatic changes, I had a very powerful and vivid dream. In this dream, I was using a large, heavy shovel to dig a deep hole in the middle of a beautifully landscaped garden. The garden was filled with lovely, cheerful flowers, perfectly planted in orderly designs, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I just kept vigorously digging away, dirt flying everywhere, ripping up the flowers with each thrust of my shovel, crushing the delicate petals under piles of stones and debris.

      At this point in the dream, a woman came along, and when she saw me digging, she became very upset.

      “What are you doing?” she yelled. “You’re destroying the garden. It was perfect. Now you’ve ruined it. What’s wrong with you? Why are you doing this?”

      I turned to the woman and calmly answered: “I’m digging deep for wisdom.” Then I went back to my digging.

      The next morning when I woke up and remembered the dream, I realized what an important message it contained from my inner self to me. The garden represented the life I’d known that had looked perfect on the outside, orderly and attractive in every way. There I was digging an enormous hole right in the middle of all that beauty, uprooting the plants and flowers, throwing dirt on top of what had once been so carefully designed and cultivated. This was just what I’d been doing in my waking world—questioning every aspect of my life; uprooting old beliefs, goals and ideas I’d never had the courage to challenge; making some radical changes.

      Who was the woman screaming at me? One interpretation was that she represented many people in my life who disapproved of the intense transformational process I was undergoing. To them, I was just making a mess. They preferred the orderly version of Barbara and Barbara’s life, the one they recognized and understood. Many people who worked for me or with me had been watching in thinly veiled horror as I chose to do less and less. Some were frightened about what would happen to them if I made too many changes. Would they lose their jobs? Some were angry as I downsized my life—would they miss out on opportunities or income because I was no longer willing to overextend myself or to do things that weren’t fulfilling to me? Others, including several friends, were threatened by my very act of questioning, afraid that somehow it would rub off on them, and they would suddenly find themselves wildly digging up their own orderly gardens.

      Of course, I knew the deeper meaning of the woman screaming at me: she was a piece of my own self, horribly alarmed at my process of radical questioning that was turning my life upside down. “What are you doing?” that part of Barbara was yelling at me. “You’re destroying everything you worked so hard to build. It was perfect. Now you’re ruining it. Why are you doing this?”

      Why was I doing this? How did I get here with a shovel in my hand, unearthing all the goals and dreams I’d spent so much time planting and protecting? It was a good question with no simple answer. I was reexamining everything because events I couldn’t have predicted were forcing me to travel down roads for which I had no map. I was searching for clarity, for revelation, called by something I could not yet define, something compelling me to reassess everything about myself and my life. I was digging because somehow I knew it was time to dig.

      Did I know where all of this was leading? No, and that was indeed terrifying. I had never liked proceeding without a carefully structured plan, and to do so in my late forties felt foolhardy and even dangerous. But my illuminating dream had reminded me that although I didn’t know where I would end up, I did know what I was doing—I was digging deep for wisdom, allowing the process of questioning and contemplation to penetrate me to my very core, so I could emerge transformed and more in touch with my true self than ever before.

      Living in the Questions

      Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek for the answers that cannot be given For you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, And perhaps without knowing it You will live along, someday into the answers. —Rainer Maria Rilke

      So how do we dig deep for wisdom? Where do we begin? The first step is simply to admit to yourself that you are where you are—in a place of uncertainty or confusion or doubt, in a time of reevaluation and reassessment, in a process of transformation and rebirth.

      Digging deep for wisdom means:

       Being honest about the fact that at least for the moment, your reality is comprised more of questions than answers.

       Allowing these questions to exist, acknowledging that they are piled up around you like mysterious boxes waiting to be opened.

       Not fleeing from the СКАЧАТЬ