Preview sample of Bliss: Writing to Find Your True Self, also an e-book

INTRODUCTION

I met Diane at a conference on the spiritual nature of vocation. She was struggling over a decision that would radically change her life. She had worked in a bank for nearly twenty years, happy with the safety and security of the daily structure. However, now that her children were grown, she felt restless. Through the years, she had grown increasingly aware that she wanted to change her job and do something that felt more like a calling and not just a means to earn money—although she still needed to support herself. She wanted to feel that her work would make a contribution, as well as be satisfying to her. In other words, she wanted to be fed by her work.

There was one major block. She wasn’t sure what she actually wanted to do, and even if she could figure it out, she wasn’t sure she could make the leap from a secure job to something more entrepreneurial and uncertain. She felt paralyzed by the lack of clarity and the feeling that it would just be easier to stay right where she was. Yet something nagged at her to at least explore the possibilities.

At the time, I offered workshops in what I called Bliss Coaching, and she decided to sign up. We had to begin with the basics so Diane could formulate a sense of direction. After that, we worked on courage and commitment, and then on opportunity. Ultimately, she decided that what she wanted was to become a freelance photographer, which was not an easy switch. She had background in photography and remembered the energizing feeling that it gave her to pursue this artistic endeavor, but it had been a long time since she’d used those skills. She also needed to research the latest equipment and take a course to bring herself up to speed. Each of these steps required that she work on her confidence and inner guidance system. It would be all too easy to just tell herself she was being foolish and walk away.

Yet once she found direction, other things seemed to fall into place. She acquired customers, first through friends and then through word-of-mouth and advertising, and she used the apparent synchronicity to build motivation and momentum. For her, the initial feeling that she needed to find herself in a new vocation paid off in a satisfying new direction. She learned what it meant to follow her bliss, and she’s doing very well with it.

* THE CONCEPT *

It was during the late 1980s that folklorist Joseph Campbell urged people to find and follow their bliss. He had done it in his own life, to great advantage, and he believed that anyone could and everyone should. Alot of people agreed.

Briefly, by “bliss” he meant that each person has skills and talents that serve as homing devices for moving us toward what we are meant to do in life. Bliss is the natural direction we should take, the perfect work for us because it inspires maximum creativity and performance. For example, some people know the first time they put pen to page that they were born to write. It just seems inevitable. “Working with words,” said a poet, “is the only thing into which I can fall and feel totally cushioned.” Others feel at home with law or plants or raising children.

To discover your bliss means to wake up. Not everyone wants to do that. Sweet dreams can seem more pleasant than waking reality. It may take those sweet dreams to get started, but no fantasy can compare to the reality of finding and following your bliss. That’s why it’s called bliss. While our primary understanding of bliss is as a life process, it also encompasses feelings such as joy and contentment.

Keep in mind throughout this book that bliss is a metaphysical experience that begins inside. The feeling is that of a larger being calling to one of its parts to expand into it, to become whole and fully harmonious. It generates energy and optimism, and it does not necessarily arise from exclusively positive experiences. There are those who find their bliss by first entering a dark period. Whatever is within us is the material with which we have to work.

Bliss is for those of you who are interested in discovering what you are meant to do. This book came about after speaking at numerous events, including writers conferences, when I realized that many people are under the impression that creating a life direction is simply a matter of knowing what you want to do. Well, that’s no simple matter and neither is acting on an inspiring idea. As I developed my teaching on the subject from seminars to workshops to a series of sessions, I realized that many people either have not recognized the correct progression or cannot stay the course. Finding your bliss means being clear, becoming motivated, staying committed and listening to your inner sense of direction.

Before going any further, it’s important that you understand right away that this is a workbook. You will need to approach it with the idea that you are going to think about and do the exercises. In that case, you will need a pen and a notebook in which to keep your writings. You might as well get those items now because in a moment I’m going to ask you to do an introductory exercise.

Any of the exercises in this book can be done individually or in a group, but often a group experience can be more productive. For one thing, you’re accountable to others, and for another, someone else might say something that will spark new thoughts and ideas for you. It’s also fun to share personal ideas and to see how bliss begins to operate as you master the various steps. You might consider forming a bliss support group.

However you choose to approach them, keep in mind that the writing exercises are key to helping you find your bliss. A study was done that demonstrates how beneficial the act of writing is to your health—not just mentally, but physically. As reported in a recent Journal of the American Medical Association, 47 percent of the people with arthritis and asthma who wrote for twenty minutes on three consecutive days about something they were struggling with, showed a marked improvement in their ailments. They wrote freely, without analysis or grammatical concerns. When you write about something that matters to you, there are changes in your emotions, blood pressure and heartbeat that apparently improve your circulation. So writing is good for you. If you skip the exercises and just try to think through them, you’ll miss these benefits and neglect to improve your written communication skills. In addition, you’ll want a written record of your journey. Think of it as your Bliss Diary.

Having said that, let’s get started with your notebooks. This first exercise is quite important to get your ideas flowing on the subject. You’ll also want to refer back to it along the way to check your progress.

Exercise

Finish this thought: “Finding my bliss means. …”

Write as much as you want, but write at least a paragraph that includes what you think this concept means and how it applies to you personally. You will add to this as we go along, so don’t worry about getting down everything you can possibly think of. Even if it’s vague, just provide yourself with a written statement of how you plan to approach the work involved in this book. This is your initial statement. Give it some thought because it will form the basis of what direction you will take. Your ideas may go through changes along the way, but this first piece ought to reflect some effort in coming up with what bliss really means to you.

* THE LAYOUT OF THE BOOK *

Bliss presents the stages of psychological development involved in finding bliss and offers tools for getting through each stage. First, I will clarify what the concept of bliss means, and in successive chapters, I will point out the many factors that can complicate the process. Perhaps the most difficult is the exploration of your shadow side. I will then offer strategies for discovering those traits and skills that facilitate bliss and indicate how writing can be used to enhance this. Each significant step includes written exercises so you can create a personal map along the way. Sometimes you will write before you learn about a concept in order to get your thoughts down initially and perhaps add to them afterward. At other times, you will write your thoughts or describe your experiences at the end of a lesson. All of the exercises work together to give you clarity and motivation, as well as to help you gradually process the steps involved in finding your life direction. Writing makes your thoughts concrete. Even when you are not specifically writing, such as during a visualization exercise, you will always be asked to write something about your experience during an exercise. The point is to use writing to find your bliss.

Writing is an instrument, a tool that gets you to some goal: expression, clarification, vision and creation. This book is about using writing to explore where you want to go and who you want to be. My mission is to show you how writing can help you know just what feels most “right” to you, what will make you cry out, “This is it!”

Whatever the “it” is for you, it helps to discover if it will be something stable throughout your life, such as an endeavor like poetry that you have worked at since childhood, or if it may shift as you evolve. You may find out that what you thought you wanted is not as desirable to you as something else is. In any case, writing that keeps you in touch with your feelings and thoughts can keep you focused. You will not be able to forget what you thought about because you will have it right there on paper.

I’ll give you an example from my own life. It’s somewhat involved, but it shows many of the steps that accompany the process. After describing what happened, I’ll briefly show you how those steps apply.

When I was in high school, I was urged to go to college because it was the thing to do. If I didn’t go on, I was warned, I’d never go back and I’d be stuck with too little education to do much of anything with my life. Yet I saw my friends signing up for college without having a clue what they wanted to do. The sentiment seemed to be, Hey, what else am I going to do?

I wasn’t keen on mindlessly living my life, so instead of following suit, I hitchhiked across the country to “find” myself. After three years of doing odd jobs like acting in summer stock theater and working as a counselor in a shelter home for delinquents, I visited some friends in Arizona and looked through their college catalog.

Some of the courses looked interesting, so I signed up. I ended up loving school so much that I kept signing up every semester and summer until I ended up with some forty credits more than I needed to graduate—all because of an intense joy I had experienced from learning. I was sorry to leave, so I went on to graduate school, getting two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. During that time, I became a philosophy professor.

And in high school, I had resisted ever going to college!

At any rate, since I loved the experience of learning, I thought I would really love being a teacher. While in school, I’d hung onto every word in the classrooms. My professors had opened up new worlds to me and inspired me to see how wonderfully creative the profession of teaching could be. I learned to read and write, and even to watch movies in ways I never would have if I hadn’t had these enthusiastic mentors. Now I had the chance to pass along that magic to fresh young minds that I knew were as eager as I was for all this knowledge.

But I was wrong. Teaching was not my bliss. My excitement was more about the context of enjoyment in self-growth than about ultimate life direction. It was something I had enjoyed, but I soon learned it was not my calling. I felt stressed when preparing lesson plans. I came into overpacked classes full of people who were just like my high school friends had been: mindlessly becoming college students because Hey, what else am I going to do? This was not at all of interest to me. I wanted to work with minds as hungry as mine had been, but there were few like me and they were often overrun by the grinding gears of university demands. It seemed that I could not generate in others what I had felt in the classroom.

At the end of each semester, I was often depressed. After a few years, I was demoralized, and eventually I burned out. Was it me or them? I didn’t know. I only knew that I wasn’t offering anything to anyone—especially myself. I was being drained and was not the least bit happy.

So I quit and did other things. I wrote a few books, opened up a psychotherapy practice and dabbled in short-term

ventures. As long as I had a project, I didn’t think that much about whether I was deeply, spiritually satisfied. But sometimes it would get to me. Sometimes I felt lost. It seemed absurd that I was teaching workshops and counseling others on finding their bliss while neglecting that path for myself. I definitely could feel something lacking in my life, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was.

So I made a date with myself to go out to the desert. Literally. I spent several days in the barren but breathtaking landscapes of central Arizona, reading philosophy and writing a journal to help clear my mind and get a better understanding of what I really wanted to do. I did many of the exercises in this book to remind myself of my values and to see how I had cluttered my life with distractions. What seemed important was that I develop a mindful approach, a proactive initiative, rather than just allow things to come into my life in a random manner. I needed to know what I really wanted and that required getting grounded.

What became very clear to me were the following insights:

1. I love writing, but mostly for my own satisfaction. It gives me the feeling of being enclosed in a self-centered world, and since I don’t want my whole existence to feel that way, I need to make a change.

2. I know I can teach and that students respond, but I do not like teaching at a university, and I do not like teaching the subjects I have been asked to teach.

3. I don’t trust corporate values and the way people seem to lose themselves to a corporate vision, so I would not be happy teaching in a corporate environment.

4. I want to find a way to give to others, but have little time for volunteer work. If I could help educate others in a way that enhances their lives, I would like to do that kind of work, especially if it involves writing. I want to be some sort of mentor in the educational process without necessarily having to submit to the expectations of a university administration.

I didn’t know quite where this left me, except that I was clear about my values: Parts of our lives should be devoted to bettering the lives of others, and I valued education, which had made my own life better. Yet I did not want to go back to being a college professor, just a small part of some educational machine that offered little to nurture the soul as an essential part of the process.

I didn’t know if my retreat to the desert would make a difference in my life, but within one month of my return, I received a phone call. I was being considered for a rare and unique opportunity to direct a program that brought the humanities to the inner city, a program which included the chance for potential students to earn college credits. Known as the Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities, it had been started in New York City two years before by a man who felt as I did about education. People who could not afford to go to school were offered a free course that exposed them to such subjects as art, literature, poetry, philosophy and American history. I was offered the position at a new site.

It was as if the writing I had done in the desert had been a letter to the universe, or God, or my Larger Self, to make it known what I wanted to do and what I could do to achieve that. Once the letter was received, it was like a cosmic computer program had checked a set of fingerprints against a data bank and come up with a match.

I accepted the job, with all of its challenges, and at once felt that I had finally found a way to teach people who had the same hunger I once had and who understood that knowledge was not just an accessory, but a lifeline. Knowledge could make a major difference in the way they see the world, raise their children and create opportunities for themselves. More importantly it could stretch them and give them a way to reflect on what they hoped to do, not just what they had to do to survive. I felt satisfied and challenged all the way through my stint as director. The students understood that education could open up their lives in ways they had never imagined, and they discovered a sense of purpose and self-esteem as they achieved something important.

So that’s an example of how opportunity coincides with the hard work that it takes to know what you want and to prepare yourself for it. That’s the idea behind bliss, but finding your bliss involves work. You may have to do some tough self-examination. It may also involve putting together a support system. It most definitely means getting to know yourself better—both the good and the bad—and will probably mean making difficult changes. But in the end, it means coming into a track that has been there all along for you and feeling as if you have finally found the way to make the most of your potential.

The following chapters must be worked through in order for you to get the most out of this manual. You will be asked to write about experiences, make lists, speculate about situations, visualize and resolve problems. When you’re finished, you will have laid some excellent groundwork for making decisions about what you want your life to accomplish.