Fighting For Our Lives

I had the recent good fortune to attend a speed coaching event. Much like speed dating, coaches were seated at intimate tables and we rotated through their stations. At each stop, we had 12 minutes to ask a pressing question and determine whether they might be the right mentor for us. My question: “I want financial security, but I also want to spend as much time as I can doing my soul work. I’m not sure it’s possible to do both, but I’ve sacrificed a lot in service of that vision. How can you help me get there?”

Coach #1, a self-proclaimed Awesomeness Coach, invited me to look at a nature-based mural on the wall and describe my vision for my future. I was one sentence into it before I felt as though my energy withdrew into my core like a snail that’s been poked. She sprang to her feet and challenged me to rip it out. I stood and froze, my fist clenched around that snail’s soft body, but not budging. She gave me a count-down – now or never. Something in me recognized the fear – the unwillingness to release the familiar even when it’s holding me back – but also a deeper rebellion against being pushed and a sense that there was something special in that snail I didn’t want to damage. “I’m not going to,” I said, partly ashamed and partly victorious. I wanted to be free, but not in the way she told me be. She asked me what I was most afraid of, and challenged me to do something that scares me every day until I can work up to facing it.

I moved to the next station, shaken and tearful. I told Coach #2 about my experience and my refusal to take such a bold and aggressive step. She was more grounded and empathetic, and I settled back into myself. As I continued to explore my reaction with other coaches, what surfaced was a strength in my voice and straightness to my back when I spoke of my way of being – of leading from behind, of modeling vulnerability, of facilitating deep conversations and valuing shared power. This is at odds with much of what we are told about what it means to be strong, but in owning this truth with my voice, I felt a sense of strength. A daily practice of facing fears just for the sake of believing I will one day be free of them left me feeling totally depleted and overwhelmed.

We are fixated in our culture with the idea of being special. We want to be winners. We want to be the best at something, to develop mastery, to overcome and heal and transform. And while there is a lot of healing and transformation needed in our world, what do we risk losing if attaining an outcome is our only goal? If we are always looking outward to the next achievement, what of our lives are we missing in this moment, what offerings of serendipity escape our notice, and what in our essence do we fail to become because we are so dead set on what we think we should become? Or worse yet, what are we told we should become, even by those who have our best interests at heart?

This is all intricately connected in my mind with my experience of the Predator – that unseen but viscerally felt sense of danger looming somewhere, ready to take us down. I believe that if I am quiet and still it will pass me by. Others adopt bravado or a defensive stance to scare it away. Some become charming and ingratiating to attract others to their defense. But behind it all is the motivation to avoid or conquer something that cannot be destroyed. Death is an archetype. Its role is to make us fight for our lives and remind us we aren’t gods. But without a right relationship to it, it keeps us small, trapped in a constant state of bargaining for what we think is comfort, safety, and security when what we are really doing is denying our true essence. The only way to take out its teeth, one by one, is to embrace ourselves fully, to create in the way our soul was born to create. We overcome death by living an artful life, and that is all about process, not product.

This journey requires us to fight for our lives, but not with the same strategies we have used to try and defeat or outwit the Predator. A part of me feels calm when I imagine committing to a clinical counseling program. I am facing the fear of debt and constant busyness, lack of sleep and intellectual challenge, to develop a natural gift I have for insight and connection that offers socially recognized status and financial rewards, if I am persistent. This commitment and sacrifice will bring me years of a comforting sense of direction and purpose that will make my sacrifices pay off.

“If you take away the financial security at the end of it, what value is left in it for you?” a savvy coach asks me. “Nothing,” I reply without hesitation. What seems like facing fear to live a soulful life is really just another bargain with the Predator, another way to abandon my essence to follow someone else’s path which doesn’t require as much risk or ingenuity. Do I feel alive when I imagine shutting myself in with clinical books, doing academic research, and losing time for art, day-dreaming, and casual socializing? No. Do I regret not having committed to it in the past? No. I can’t imagine my life now without all the ideas, people, and places I have been free to explore without the obligations that life would have required.

The Predator shifts inside me whenever I look at anyone sacrificing their presence, playfulness, art, curiosity, and exploration in service of a career. It whispers, “Just follow that path and you can have it all: you can have your soul work and your security, self-esteem and the respect of others. You’ll pay off your debt and I won’t make you feel vulnerable anymore. All you have to do is hunker down for a few years. Your soul will be there when you are done.” When I start scribbling poetry it hisses that it’s a meaningless waste of time. When I support a patient at work, it whispers that this is beneath me. When I research mentors, it echoes I can’t afford it. You have to have a plan and take your life into your own hands, it lies, nothing will happen unless you make it happen. Serendipity is for the naïve and lazy.

This whole process makes me feel sick to my stomach, because I am still learning to discern the voice of the Predator from the voice of my Self. It’s cunning is in the flavor of the language it uses, and fear abounds on whatever path I choose. This is because like most of us, I was never initiated into adulthood. I was never taught to recognize the Predator or how to deal with it. I have followed my heart and bargained myself into love and out of it, into jobs and out of them, into towns and right through them to the next one down the road. All I know is that this has to stop. I am beginning to really believe I have the strength and courage to do what needs to be done if I can only see clearly.

Despite the comforting structure of an academic program or a traditional career path, these have never stuck because they aren’t mine. Despite the alluring comfort of a spiritual teaching or the shelter of a man’s adoration, none of these ground me in my own constantly regenerating wisdom and love. The truth is and always has been that while I would like vocational security and accomplishment, if I am faced with a choice, I will choose the life that enables me to focus on developing my capacity for giving and receiving intimacy, connection, and love. Right now that looks like being willing to risk all of those things to be intimately known, connected to, and loved by my Self.

I am called to fight for my life every time something causes me to doubt what I know. What I know is frustratingly scarce these days, but enough to guide these next steps. I will do whatever it takes complete my apprenticeship. I will seek elders who can initiate me into adulthood and peers who can witness and share my journey. I will be tempted by many surrogate parents: bosses, spiritual teachers, lovers, landlords, even confident peers who have chosen different paths. Every type of authority I have abandoned myself for in the past has arisen to divert me in recent weeks and each one I have deflected with tremendous fear, vulnerability, and sadness. In their wake is only the depth of my own emptiness, once again, reminding me that I have not yet arrived. But in that blackness I can feel my skin, and there is space to breathe. I feel that menace looming in the distance, and I whisper to it, “I see you. And this is my life. You will not take it from me.”

Nancy