My Year of Bliss-Following
Some of you know that my experiment for all of 2021 was to follow my bliss. I was suffering a really nasty case of writer's block, at least as far as my fiction went, and I thought the best way to navigate through it would be to do only what my heart most wanted to do, to the fullest extent I possibly could, for every single day of 2021.
My intent was to not just follow my heart, but to do it in absolute faith. That's where things seemed to get a little shaky. Turns out, I had a pretty deep belief that a lot of other things in my life could not possibly work unless I were doing things the way I'd always done them. And so they...um...didn't.
Things stopped working
Several things in life seemed to go terribly wrong. I realized my own hand in creating the troubles, even as I saw them unfolding all around me. It seemed difficult to stop the momentum. But then, because I had no choice, I looked for new and improved solutions in the problem areas. And when I looked for different solutions, lo and behold, there they were. Right where they'd been the whole time, showing me that my belief had been flawed. There were other ways to do things, I didn't have to do things the old way, after all.
Things leveled out after that and are heading back to good again. I hope.
Habits and Beliefs
When we've done things the same way for a long, long time, doing them in a different way is going to shake up everything in our lives, because it's all intricately connected. Deep down, we think life can only work if we do it the way we always have. This prevents us from following our heart's desire for something more. It prevents us from finding ways that work even better than the status quo. It prevents (temporarily) our expansion, the very purpose for which we came.
When we change one thing in our lives, all the other things have to shift into new positions to make the machinery work smoothly again. It's that shifting process that feels to us like pain, disruption, and difficulty. I feel like most of the big crisis points in my own life have been the times when I was growing the most. But those hard patches are sometimes just all the components of our experience shifting around, making room for new elements and incorporating them into the whole. Hard times are just our life's machinery making adjustments.
2021
Last year brought multiple seismic shifts to my life and family. It's felt like a difficult and challenging year, and sometimes I thought that maybe my plan had brought it all on. Following my bliss had led nowhere good.