Now What?

Now What?

For some reason people forget to ask this question. You get married. Is that it? Now you can get on with “your” life, now that you got what you wanted? No way! No that you are married, you have a whole new “practice” to master called having a great marriage, keeping that great marriage alive. When people come to Life Path Healings for private work, they always leave with “homework”. If they do not do the homework no harm, no foul, or so they think. However few realize that if you don’t jump into your lessons, the classes you and Source designed for you for this life, life circumstances will create those lessons for you.  Should you participate in the homework, which is only one step in building a new you, living life differently it is up to you to continue to “take the classes”. Because you are not “enrolled” in a class, most people forget to monitor and track their work and they forget to keep going. When you are in university you understand that the education you are going after is only a stepping stone to building a new life for yourself, a career, a way to work, a new and long term if not permanent focus.  You have a structure, a quarter or semester that you know you need to show up for and keep learning. You have weekly classes and a professor to help keep you on track and you learn to monitor your own work, your progress, with feedback from the professor. You have a curriculum that you need to follow, and follow it  for years, not a weekend workshop. Taking on the work of living an awakened, authentic, Spiritual Life means learning, creating, and maintaining a “curriculum” for yourself. For some people this means creating a structure, others can do this more intuitively but most people become “dropouts” perhaps not having the skills to set up and maintain the self-learning and self-healing needed to live life differently.

If you are working by yourself ask yourself how you will monitor the work you are doing? Typically in the beginning of any kind of learning it is near to impossible to monitor yourself learning something new especially in the area of psychology or spirituality.  Self-directed learning is usually most successful when tackling short term problem solving projects. Working this way, over a period of time, typically years, you will be able to put together a body of knowledge. If you are learning technical subjects such as software or car mechanics, gathering a body of knowledge is much more manageable because it is technical and measureable. Self-learning abstract subjects such as spirituality is much more difficult and self-learning about the Self is near impossible unless you have the discipline and focus to work with Source via a strong and consistent meditation practice.

People begin to study with a Teacher for three reasons: they are in exquisite pain (for some who are privileged this might mean not having the newest car, because pain is subjective), because they are losing their mind due to an overabundance of strange spiritual occurrences and last but not least they have decided or been told they are “gifted” and have a “purpose” and now want to make a career of what they were told in another workshop or new age encounter. So typically in the beginning people who approach spirituality are not on a Path. They come to solve a problem and then “get back to” having a great life.  Then there are the few that wake up enough to see there is such a thing as a Path. It is a bit like when one realizes you cannot just diet (and keep gaining the weight back), you have to make a lifestyle change, forever. Or for the few people who go to therapy that wake up to realize that they need to continue therapy because if you go to therapy only when there is a problem and leave  when the problem is solved  you never make any real progress. You are just putting out fires. The true success of therapy is when your original problems are solved, you continue with therapy using that calm and stable time to do deep work that will ultimately make the old problems disappear forever.

If you have truly committed to waking up, to a Spiritual Path, you will have “homework”. You need to do your homework, or tell your Teacher you are not doing, or cannot do the current homework. If you don’t know how to monitor yourself (and most people don’t, especially if they have not participated in the structure of a four year university degree), you need to meet on a regular basis with your Teacher and set up a structure for check in and evaluation.  In between meetings you need to track, write down, exactly what is happening, what you are or are not doing, what is working and what is not working so you can report accurately to your Teacher. You also need to be aware of your follow up.  With most Teachers you will need to take the initiative after you feel you have mastered or begun to master your most recent “homework” assignment to ask “Now what”?  It is probably best that you set up calendar dates to remind yourself it is time to attend your “next” class. 

Most people I work with, especially those who do not have a job or a career as a supervisor of some kind, or those who have never gone through the discipline and ups and downs of earning a four year degree have no idea how to “study”, practice and track what they are learning.  They work with me a bit like going to a restaurant for take-out. I give homework and the next time I see them they either have not done the homework (and have no insight as to why they did not do the homework, or they quit doing it), or have no idea what exactly they did do or didn’t do which means no feedback can be given as to whether or not what they did was what was asked, and because of this lack of information there is  no way to evaluate if the work done was effective or simply done poorly.  Now students want to “do the next step to advance their work (or new age career). But you simply cannot do the “next step” without first completing, learning and mastering the first step given.

When you do not work consistently with a Teacher, and you are not a self-directed learner you will be setting yourself up for failure and you will also end up either blaming “the Path” (and quitting) or the Teacher (and blasting him/her via gossip on and off the internet) for your “failure” which is not a failure at all, it is a lack of a skill, knowing how to learn.  Our current K-12 education only teaches you how to “get by”, handle the teachers, memorize information and feed it back to the teacher, and handle the system.  If you have been any kind of supervisor (or graduated from a university),  you have developed the discipline ,strength and perseverance it takes to truly learn. Learning means doing things that are uncomfortable because learning means doing “new” things and doing new things outside of your comfort zone is always uncomfortable. The new age tells you to follow your bliss and only do things that “flow”. But learning is not that way so new age people learn via life circumstances, accidents, illness, finances, betrayal etc.  If you choose to walk a Spiritual Path and to study with a Teacher that means learning the skills that it takes to actually learn.  Learning means doing things that at first make no sense to you, because you are being asked to do something you currently don’t know, comprehend or even understand. That means getting off your power trip and needing to “be right” and being humble enough to make mistakes and accept corrections. Learning means you keep going, even when you don’t see the end in sight. Part of learning is developing the skills of delayed gratification, handling frustration and low self-esteem issues that surface when you make mistakes and can’t seem to “get” something. The art, the skill of learning is in itself a complex and beautiful thing to master for life in general but especially for self-healing and Soul Evolution.

Most people are so afraid of failure and have such a giant ego about making mistakes that they sabotage their work rather than commit 100% and then have to face the potential humiliation of failing.  If you don’t commit, you believe and feel you don’t have to face your fear of failure because after all, you never gave it your all.  That is the story of ego dominated thinking. If you give your all, and fail, your fragile ego based life would blow up.  

Stop bouncing around like a pinball machine and try committing yourself to your Path for a few years. Yes, years.  Become teachable, and learn how to learn. Ask questions, monitor all of your work and take notes. Bring those notes and your questions to each session. Before you quit anything or change up how you are doing what you were asked to do, check in with your Teacher. And if you are lucky enough to learn how to learn, you will go on for decades instead of quitting every time you feel threatened, challenged, or your low self-esteem kicks in every time you have to work hard at something. Living as a learner, an awakened human being is a lifestyle and a gift you can pass on to your family. Everything you learn will be carried over to the Other Side.  When you are awakened, and learning, life is filled with miracles and magic and Source can rain down upon you because you are now an open book, ready to receive. A Yin Warrior.

Journey On