When Many Callings Pull at Once
Cuando muchas vocaciones tiran de ti a la vez
A student shares the difficulty of distinguishing intuition from conditioned instinct, and the paralysis of having too many callings. The teacher explores how fear disguises itself as rational thinking and how to move toward what truly calls.
When Many Callings Pull at Once
A student shares the difficulty of distinguishing intuition from conditioned instinct, and the paralysis of having too many callings. The teacher explores how fear disguises itself as rational thinking and how to move toward what truly calls.
After listening to the previous student share, I realize I'm a very strong overthinker too. I also identify with having a hard time making decisions. Especially now, I feel like so much of the decisions I've made in my life have been conditioned by my parents, my family, my culture, society, everyone who's influenced me. It's so hard to find my own voice and my own calling. Sometimes I feel like what I think is my intuition is actually an instinct, a conditioned instinct. Like when you're curious about something, like a hot stove, and then your mom hits your hand and says, "Don't touch that, you're going to get hurt." That happens so often that you just think, "No, that's not for me. I'm going to get hurt." That's a conditioned instinct. But my intuition is saying, "I'm curious about it." And it's so hard to make that distinction at a more subtle level. I can really feel what the previous student was saying. Maybe I'm not in that particular situation in terms of a relationship, but just making choices in my life that could lead down a certain path or open certain doors. I feel really stuck at times.
The key ingredient is fear
That's exactly what happens. The key ingredient here is fear. It's all about fear. Conditioned thinking operates as a way to manage and reduce fear. And what is fear? Fear is an avoidance strategy, a strategy for how to avoid pain. Instincts, which I would define as the impulses inherited for survival, operate partly through fear.
I'm not saying anything about needing to risk our lives. What we need to risk is the sense of what we are. This work moves toward fear, or as one of my teachers says, "fearward." But it's not a blind fearwardness. It's not, "Jumping in front of a bus is fine because I'm afraid, so there we go." It's specifically the fear that surrounds our sense of self.
It's going to involve a similar tension, a push and pull between a deeper desire and the contracted self. That universal desire I've been talking about will bring us fearward, because listening to it requires a surrendering of our sense of self. These two are at odds. The part of us that creates a sense of self through contraction will identify expansion as life-threatening. It will activate the biological response of self-preservation.
The threshold of fear in awakening
This is why, if you read stories of awakening, you will very commonly see a massive activation of fear and heart rate. There is a threshold where one goes so deeply into fear that transcending it becomes possible. It's a very tricky thing to point to and teach, because it requires recognizing, in the moment, what specific fear needs to be faced.
Stepping in front of a bus is not the fear I'm recommending you face. But if you've had a lifelong passion and desire to do something, and you rationalize that it's something you should ignore because it's too late, or it's in the past, or it was naive, and yet it's still calling, then what's there?
I'm saying this as an example. It doesn't have to be a lifelong passion. It could be very simple things: a kind of relationship one longs for, a kind of work one longs to do. It's usually forms of relating one longs for and forms of service. An artist following the artist's calling is surrendering into a service of that calling. And if it's truly developed, it becomes a service to the world, an outpouring of creativity. But it could be anything: engineering, inventing, taking care of others. It's whatever is calling.
Too many callings
That's the thing for me. I feel like there are so many calls. I don't know which one is for me.
All of them. And which are you most afraid of? Which one has the greatest strength in how it calls and how scary it is? The thing you want the most is usually the thing you're most afraid of, the thing you will rationalize most strongly against. Did you get an answer?
It's always the thing that you don't want to go to, isn't it?
See, it's not that hard. You don't have to say it out loud.
Just leaving all the stuff I've done before and venturing into something completely different. Why does it always have to be the hardest thing ever?
Is it really the hardest thing? Have you experienced times of peace around it?
It just feels so irrational. People say, "Just develop what you've done in the past." And that makes so much sense, to build upon what I've been doing. I see it as, "Okay, this is the natural progression. This is what I should do. This makes sense. I could do this." But then there's this whole world out there, and I'm getting older. It's either I do it or I don't. But then I think, well, I'm at this point in my life, I have to provide for myself and my son. I'm trying to juggle everything.
Rationalization is not the problem
Notice: those are rationalizations.
I'm trying to rationalize everything again. I'm overthinking about it again.
Don't worry about it happening. Just recognize what it is. We can say, "Oh, I always overthink, and my problem is that I overthink, so what am I going to do? I'm stuck because I overthink." No. All you need to do is notice that it's rationalization, and then ignore it. Let the rationalization rationalize. Let the thinking think. Don't listen to it. It's as simple as that.
The moment we make rationalization the problem, we think, "Now I need to fix the rationalization so it doesn't happen before I can do the thing I'm afraid of. Now I need to solve the rationalization problem." No. Just ignore it and do the thing you want to do. It really is that simple. It's hard because it's scary, not because it's complicated. It gets confusing because it's scary, and then we turn ourselves into a mess of confusion. But that confusion is just a way to distract from the fact that we know what we want and we're afraid.
Making fear your friend
It all comes down to fear. The solution is simply to start operating toward what you want and to make fear your friend, instead of the thing you're trying to keep away and manage. We just don't like the sensation of fear. Then it becomes such a big deal because we don't like the sensation. Think of fear as one of the spiciest ingredients in the buffet of life. When you're able to move in and out of activities and experiences where there's fear, it no longer becomes the thing your whole system is operating to avoid. That's the only conditioning that matters here.
The body's false alarm
I know you have a very scientific mind, so I'll describe this as a simple map. There's the fear of the organism: biological fear, the instinct of self-preservation, survival. Then our mind develops and creates an idea of ourselves, what's referred to as ego. Ego becomes the thing we're trying to preserve, not the body. I don't mean ego as in, "You said something that offended me." I'm literally talking about the sense of self that is a thought construct.
Whenever that sense of self is threatened, the instinct of self-preservation activates in the body, but the body is not actually under threat. When the mind-based sense of self is threatened, there is a physical reaction in the body, all of the chemistry, all of the activation, as if we had a gun to our head. The racing thoughts and doubts manifest as physical fear when it's really just our thoughts.
Recognize that the situation doesn't align with the intensity of the fear. The fear is a self-preservation response. It's as if a bus were hurtling toward you. And yet all you're thinking of doing is something beautiful: following your passion and desire. It completely freezes you. You're paralyzed. You cannot move in that direction. Notice that this is the fear we need to move toward.
Fear becomes fuel
When you do move toward it, that fear becomes an energy. It becomes fuel, and it will be recognized as excitement, as passion. It's like a musician going on stage. At first there's a fear activation, but then it transforms into passion and excitement. Everyone has had this experience: going toward something they were terrified about, and then it works out, and all of that fear becomes aliveness. It's just energy taking a shape. It's a movement out of the known into the unknown.
The deeper you go, the more you recognize there is no past and there is no future. There is only this. And so we listen to what is speaking now in ourselves.