Following Your Bliss

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

— Joseph Campbell

One of the inspirations for my own career path has been Joseph Campbell’s incredible work The Hero’s Journey, and specifically the idea of “following your bliss”: connecting to your own authentic path in life, listening to your heart, your truth and trusting the deep impulse within us to live a life that truly makes us most alive.

From a transpersonal psychology perspective, this is described as ‘hearing our note’ and as we listen the tune gets louder and clearer. It is often during the most challenging times in our life that we start to listen to our tune.

We are living and coaching in a time of profound disruption, rapid technological shifts, social polarisation, environmental and global uncertainty —and the rapid pace of change is leaving our clients feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and often unmoored.

As a result of the current polycrisis and the falling away of the stories and delusions they carry about how work and life should be, they are opening up to a potential life they truly wish to engage with.

“I just can’t tolerate this behaviour anymore, it all feels pointless” or “it just does not feel like what I am supposed to be doing, I don’t want to waste my life any further” have been calling cards for clients to re-evaluate and connect to a deeper sense of energy and purpose in their life.

As a former colleague of mine, Diana Whitmore, used to say, ‘there’s a diamond in the rough’: this is an underlying hypothesis in transpersonal coaching that means in times of crises we often connect to an emergent purpose, and this provides us with a deeper sense of our true path in life.

I am sure if you pause for a moment and consider the difficult times in your own life, you will likely see now the meaning and choices that arose from these periods for you.  

A psychosynthesis map that I have used with my clients over recent months to explore their experience is the Two Dimensions of Growth – see the diagram below: 

This map points to the journey we are making in our lives. We can think of the dotted line in the middle reflecting the connection and movement towards our higher purpose.

In our Western society and within organisations, we are often more attached to the Quantitative Axis — the achievement and accumulation of success in our personal and professional lives. The Qualitative Axis represents connection with our ‘spirituality,’ our values and deeper vision for our life. 

Recently, many of my clients have experienced the depicted ‘Crises of Meaning’ (or Existential Crisis) where the impact of uncertainty at work has made them question their constant drive for success, and as a result there has been a reactive impulse to move towards a deeper sense of purpose. 

(As you can see there is also a ‘Crisis of Duality’ on the vertical axis but more about that in a future blog post.)

This resultant movement will often create a significant change in the individual’s life, and coaching is a mechanism to support them to work this through and move from a place of reactivity to conscious choice and responsiveness.

Coaching a client through a crisis of meaning provides them with the opportunity to work through this time of change through learning that they do not have control of the outer conditions, and yet can change their inner response. Through this development process, they start to truly see the relationship between their inner conditioning and the outer world.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

As you experience the major challenges of this time, you may be questioning your future and direction in life. You may be reflecting upon an existential question such as what is my purpose in this life?

The Two Dimensions of Growth provides a map of how to live more consciously and connected to our purpose. As you consider it, here are some key questions to ask yourself:

• What might it be telling you about your true path? 
• What life do you want to be living?
• What are you passionate about?
• What are your gifts?

“Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.”

— Rebecca Solnit

How can you truly follow your bliss? 

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

— Joseph Campbell