On Being A Meaning Making Human and Why You Should Do Your Personal Work.

Why should you care about any of this stuff? Because you are going to make meaning whether you do so actively or passively. Whether you fight the process or work with the process in your favor. Because how you spend your energy will make a huge difference in your level of fulfillment. Have you ever had a stretch of time where you’ve felt exhausted and like nothing is going right? Yeah. Me too.

I found out I couldn’t become a LPC (licensed professional counselor) during a particularly rough patch of my life, when everything already was going wrong. The licensing board had changed the requirements while I was still deep in the grieving process, unable to do much more than function. As you can imagine, this filled me with all kinds of negative emotions. First, justice: this was the ultimate in unfairness. It was felt particularly cruel as a young widow with a small child. There were themes of abandonment and self-pity. Also righteousness: how could anyone do this to me? Hadn’t I been through enough? Under all that there was a shame, that I couldn’t do what everyone else I’d graduated with would be able to do, and that once again, I’d be the “weird one” out there, struggling. Then there was the indignity that the solution seemed to be I’d have to not only fight the board, but ALSO go BACK to my graduate campus to finish some things they now required to be done “inside of a degree program”. At first I was full of spite and anger and shame (a great motivator) and I thought, I’ll do it. I have to.

But as I sat down to write the letter that would hopefully convince the board to let me take this route, a letter that was supposed to lay it all out there: my late husband’s death, my single-mom state, etc; anything that would make them pity me, nothing came. I was physically unable to type up this story, which was supposed to be easy; after all, it was my story. And this was my future. Hmm. Wasn’t it? Wasn’t this the dream I’d worked for? Hmm.

And as I sat there, finally taking some time (this is essential) to truly feel (this is also important) into what I wanted, I was granted, mercifully, a vision:

The vision was of a roaring river, flowing wild and free and naturally, and there I was, like a giant boulder, standing in the middle of the river, facing upstream, my arms held straight out in front of me, my palms flat in a “halt” position, screaming “STOP!!!” at the top of my lungs.

And at that moment, sitting in front of my computer, I realized something important.

I realized that I’d been standing in the “river of my life”, and screaming STOP, since my husband died. I didn’t want to move on. I wanted to go back. I wanted to turn around, and force the water back upriver, to a time when he existed on this plane. And I was angry. And I was sad.

And as the river rushed all around me, moving forward with or without me, I realized just how exhausting it was to try to hold it back.

And that’s exactly what I felt. All the time. Exhausted, worked against, as if I were holding back everything all the time.

The truth was the river was my life path, and it was moving forward whether or not I was on board.

I saw how if I kept standing there, I’d always be angry. I’d always be tired. I’d always be the victim; I’d never understand why everything wasn’t quite right, and why nothing came easily for me.

So in my minds eye, in the middle of that vision, I let go. I let myself fall into the river.

And the river stopped raging, and I was floating along peacefully. And I thought to myself, “how can I take this even further? How can I become even more aligned with the river, even more of the river, until there’s no difference between the river and myself?”

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my first true attempt at energy work, at aligning myself with the universe, with understanding we are the same.

So as I was floating along, I let myself become a rock. As a rock, I felt joy. I felt the joy that someone/thing feels when it’s in the right place, exactly as it should be. I felt the joy of being a river rock in a river, and I knew that I could access that joy as a human, also. Then from a rock, I disintegrated into river sand. And from sand, I let myself become the water. And now I was the river. And there was a sweet nothing, a being, just fulfilled.

After my vision, I closed my computer, and I decided to trust that what was supposed to happen would. I learned so many things in that moment: I learned that my feelings about things matter. That they are arrows pointing the way toward the path of my life. That that path may not look like any path that’s come before; that I have to trust that if I follow what brings me fulfillment and joy, that I’m being the river. That I’m on the path. That the universe is rejoicing because I’ve joined with it.

And that’s the next part; when the universe rejoices because you’ve eliminated the division between you, you are full of sweetness and love. And that looks very very specific to you. (That’s why social media can be really damaging; there’s a sold version of happiness/fulfillment. Don’t strive for it; appreciate it, but know your path to your heart, and your own heart’s song will be very very different from another’s!)

I said this was a short post. I apologize, it isn’t. There was more to say!

I’ll wrap it up to say that all of this was to say that you should care because you are a meaning making human. You can’t help it. You’ll make meaning passively or actively; it’s just what you’ll do. And in that meaning making you can be in your joy and fulfillment, or you can actively be working against yourself, exhausted, tired, and mad. The exercises I’m posting here in this blog and the stories I’m telling are ways to make meaning and be in flow, so your best life, your happiest, most joyful, most fulfilled self can emerge. It wants to! What will you choose