25 Jul Discovering ‘Being’ By Understanding ‘Doing’ Differently

A Legacy of Doing

I am a Doer. I come from a long line of Doers on each side of my family. If there is something to be invented, crafted, engineered, fixed, or cobbled together – we are your people. So you can imagine my surprise when, after three years of rather concentrated self and spiritual study, my ah-ha moment came when I realized that this need ‘to do’ has underpinned most of the suffering in my life. 

Of course, I have experienced joy. I have been in love. I have traveled the world. I’ve accomplished some personal goals. However, throughout it all, the proverbial ‘something’ was missing. Each endeavor was a quest to discover what it is that I should be doing with my life. All the doing was an attempt to fill a void, to assuage the scarcity of love I desired, to quiet the ceaseless ‘never enough’ whisperings. 

Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for the intelligence and adeptness that I have inherited for Doing. I delight in making things. The distinction which has been lacking though is the difference between creating out of universal flow and creating out of ego. Many of my small personal projects, like painting, I believe have been divinely guided. Maybe even some of my entrepreneurial endeavors started out from this higher source of creativity. However, between my own nagging ego and other people’s expectations, each project eventually turned into an attempt to make this, to get that (money), in order to be… successful? Amazing? Worthy. 

Desperately seeking…

Right before my 36th birthday, I embarked upon an embarrassing though significant mission of ‘seeking’. The person I was living with was out of town, my romantic relationship had just completed its 100th cycle of devastation, and all of the glory that my astrologist predicted my 36th year would bring, felt like an impossibility. Why was I still struggling when I had put in so much work to improve myself? I wasn’t hit rock bottom. I know, because I’d already been there, but I was consumed by overwhelming frustration. 

At this juncture, I did what every desperate person does and booked an emergency reading with a palmreading psychic two hours away. The last time I had embarked on such extremes was right before my 22nd birthday. Same physic. Same town. Fourteen years later

The reading went well over the allotted time frame. There were tears, there was laughter. Upon leaving her, I felt exorcised. The two-hour drive home provided ample time for reflection (and more tears). The main take away was that I had to learn how ‘to be’. I was already a master of doing but until I dug deep enough to truly heal and accept my Being – sit in 100% self-love – the external successes would continue to elude me. 

Learning to Be

This notion temporarily (of course, because it was external) gave me hope. The psychic hadn’t provided the answers I wanted, but she did reveal some positive things that I was willing to work with. I could do something about being. I continued to gain awareness through my self-work and spiritual practice, I matured as is developmentally expected, but the concept of ‘Being’ faded into the background as I continued to seek my ‘purpose’. What I didn’t realize until almost a year later – now – is that I had missed her point completely!

Only after making myself suffer even more – by way of additional failed attempts at creating a business, repeated failure in, and dissolution of, an important relationship, sitting alone for countless weeks during COVID lockdown in a foreign country – did I finally grasp the truth of Being. Since circumstances abolished any ability to plan for the future, I was forced into existing only in the present moment. Every time my mind started its circuit of ‘what to do’, I had to bring myself back to what was possible that day, that hour, that minute. 

Hard-Won Lessons in Being

Accordingly, the abyss of not-good-enough is closing. The compulsion towards Doing is wily yet manageable. Difficulties remain, ego flares up, wounds surface, insecurities arise, but now I have a place to go when these things happen – back to Being. My craving for success and approval is tempered by a sense of wholeness that I can rest in when I get impatient, frustrated, or disappointed with material progress. While consciousness will undoubtedly ebb and flow, I’m confident that my lessons around Being will remain. After all, they were hard-won. 

Was it a waste of time, effort, and energy to seek something that was with me the whole time? I suppose it depends on your perspective. Would Buddha have been better off skipping all of the spiritual seeking and frustration, rather just sitting under the tree of enlightenment straight away? Eckhart Tolle’s response to whether people need time to wake-up is, ‘You need time until you realize that you don’t need time.”

So, we all have our paths. My spiritual awakening is as cliche as they come in that not much has changed externally over the last few years. My freelance work remains inconsistent. I’m still trying to get a side hustle off the ground. My love life is non-existent. However, everything has changed. Now I know joy. I finally understand what my purpose is – which is to humbly and expansively appreciate my Being in each moment.