Shambhala Mountain Center Blog

By Tama Kieves, who will be teaching UNLEASHING YOUR CALLING: Create the Work & Life You Love at Shambhala Mountain Center in May. Next week we will feature some practical benefits of doing the things you love.

Here is my dearest hope for our changing times. I hope more of us will turn our eyes away from the crumbling wreckage of conditions we knew, and turn our eyes toward what is now available.  Alfred Lord Tennyson said, “The shell must break before the bird can fly.”
 
Many of us put our dreams on hold to take care of the “more important” matters of earning a living.  Many got comfortable in the postponement fantasy of “retirement.” Someday, in utopia, over the rainbow, we’d be able to do what we’d really want. We’d grind our teeth on Mondays meanwhile, or sleepwalk through the week and collect our paycheck. I think the Universe is now saying, now or never. You didn’t come here to planet Earth to wait for your chance. This is your chance. You have more love, genius, and invincibility inside you than you realize. Do what you love now. Tap your secret advantages. Doing what you love isn’t just fun. It’s crucial. 
 
I’m not saying you have to quit your job or abandon all attempts to support yourself. I’m saying that it would help you immensely to take things you love off the back burner and put them on the front one. Think about it. How can it be that the activity that gives you the most aliveness and fulfillment is extraneous to your life? It’s not just that you’ll enjoy the hours you spend on painting or playing chess. It’s that doing what you love changes your brain chemistry, your energy levels, and your entire outlook on life.
 
 If you’re in a rocky situation, doing something you love, even for 30 minutes can take the edge off of everything.  I don’t know about you but when I’m starving, it’s hard for me to be a civilized human being. I may not howl at people or snatch ice cream cones out of their hands like a chimpanzee, but the thought does cross my mind.  Now, when I’m fed, I’m absolutely charming. I have latitude. I have manners. I think of philosophical things to say or write. I can bear to wait in line without imagining throwing someone’s cell phone out the window and twisting their head off. You see, it’s just best to feed me.

It’s the same on a soul level. If we’re not doing what feeds us most, we’re walking around starved, with secret dry grasses, and then everything seems to enflame us. One of my clients hated her job, hated every nanosecond she had to spend there. But an interesting thing happened when she started to make writing her novel a priority in her life. She noticed that on the days she wrote, she felt calmer, like she’d gotten a massage for the tension in her soul. It wasn’t that she now loved her job. But she didn’t feel as though a thief had come in through the window and stolen her most cherished goods and even hope, day after day, leaving her with debris, regret, and forms to fill out.

Oh, I hear the restless murmurs in the background already. They spit, “Are you crazy, write poetry in an economy like this? Take salsa lessons? Play video games with my grandkids?”  Yes, by all means step away from your somber, limited mindset. You can always go back, if you like. But meanwhile step into the light. You were given your desire for a reason. You were given the talents you have. I wonder just how rich your life will be, once you tap your ultimate security.

In meditation we cut through our fantasies and relate with life as it really is. Then something magical can happen. In an article published in March’s issue of Shambhala Sun Magazine, Judith Simmer-Brown says it’s exactly the same in our relationships. Here’s an excerpt.

Judith will be exploring these themes at Shambhala Mountain Center in April.

Romantic love, no matter how delicious, is the primary symptom of cultural malaise, the central neurosis of Western civilization.

By romantic love I mean that which focuses upon the loved one as an object of passion, devotion, and fixation. The loved one becomes the answer to all of life’s problems, the source of all our happiness, and potentially, the source of all of our woes. But, if we are honest with ourselves, we can see that romantic love is deeply unhappy love, addicted to misery and suffering, cloaked in fantasy and separation.

Romantic love has become a kind of religion in Western culture. In his landmark book, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont traced the development of romantic love in the courtly tradition of the Middle Ages, describing it as a Christian heresy. He described how Christian nobles transferred their devotion from the unattainable god to the unattainable lover, imbuing her with ideal traits beyond any mortal woman. He argued that such a view of romantic love survives today; even now, one of the most pervasive and unacknowledged forms of theism is our romantic life. We have made the lover into a god, and we are in love with love rather than with the lover. The lover is cast in a specific role in order for him or her to remain a god.

What are the qualities of romantic relationships? First of all, romantic love thrives on separation. The unattainable love is the most attractive one—someone who is married to someone else, living in a distant city, or in a nexus of the forbidden. The girl or boy next door is not a good candidate for romantic fantasy, and neither is one’s spouse. Separation makes the heart grow fonder and more passionate, because with separation the fantasy of the lover can be kept alive. The reality of the person cannot threaten the fantasy. For this reason, many newlyweds become quickly disillusioned over the mundane realities of married life. The courtship was so exciting, but marriage is too real, too ordinary.

Because romance thrives on separation, it is sexy but never sexually fulfilled. If one were truly satiated sexually, then the romance would be threatened. Often, the lover chooses the mystical option of desire, giving up the living, breathing sexual partner for the fantasy of the unattainable lover. Illicit love affairs are hot, but are rarely resolved in marriage.

Secondly, romantic love is frightfully impersonal. We are looking for our “type”—an intellectual, a jock, an ethereal blonde. Our typing can become very subtle, including our lover’s taste in clothes or way of walking. But we are in love with a fantasy; the person of the lover is absent. It actually helps not to have the person around too much, because they might destroy the fantasy. We have a terror that love may become too real.

Making the lover into a god, we foster a sense of poverty in ourselves. This is a lack of completion, which manifests as insatiable desire. We feel inadequate and helpless without a lover. When we have made the lover into a god, we can never join our lover. We are stuck in a situation of desperate longing, of neediness and insecurity. This is why de Rougemont called romantic love a Christian heresy; passion means suffering, and we have misplaced our devotion onto a fantasy, which has trapped us forever in unhappiness.

To explore how we can see through fantasy, find the gifts of disappointment, and relate with the magic of reality, click here for more information  on Judith Simmer-Brown’s weekend retreat at Shambhala Mountain in April. 

 An excerpt from the March 2010 issue of Shambhala Sun magazine. Shown here by permission of Shambhala Sun magazine, a non-profit publication of Shambhala Sun Foundation, www.shambhalasun.com

Sue Frederick talks about using your own intuition (and some of her valuable tools) to hone in on the unique way you can contribute to the world through your next career direction.  One of the things she explains is how examining your birthday can lead to a profound alignment between who you are, what you will excel at doing, and how you can benefit the world by doing it.

CLICK HERE to watch Sue’s Interview on YouTube

If you’re in need of forward direction, Sue will be teaching the workshop See Your Dream Job at Shambhala Mountain this month! Simply follow the program link for more information and to register.