This past month I had the pleasure of working with several individuals in my private practice who have permitted me to share some of their stories with you. I have taken those and expanded upon them to develop a useful tool for readers. I call these the “Three Points of the Circle.” The first thing you may wonder is…”but three points makes a triangle, not a circle!” Indeed if you connect these points with straight lines, but if instead, you connect these points with curved or arced lines, you get a circle. So, when we see beyond the immediate logical answer, we actually get something wonderfully different. Read on if you’re curious for more….
The first point is to follow your heart. Within your heart is what you hear more commonly referred to as your “intuition.” Your intuition does not live inside your logical brain or your head. It lives within your heart. So no matter how analytical and intellectual you believe yourself to be, when you follow your “intuition”, it comes from within your heart. Your heart is the center of who you are.
The second point is that while much of life and ordinary reality is made up of divisions of time, such as years, months and days, our true inner lives and our souls have no sense of the clock and do not abide by calendars as we know them in ordinary reality.
The third point is that life is not meant to be lived in a straight line, though in American culture today, we are taught by society that an “upwardly” straight line equals “success.” But if we meander, if we travel on and on, only then are we able to savor the moment and celebrate the unexpected - the triumphs along our way. If we think of a straight line, that very definite oneness forces us to go from “beginning” to “end.” If that were the case, we would only see the end in sight and soon enough forget the beginning and middle. We become always goal oriented and not open to the unexpected and the special.
By putting these points all together and “connecting the dots”, we get this wonderful thing called the “circle of life.” Who you truly are is your circle called life.
Life is a circle, not a straight line. Though we often think of life as a straight line, from birth to death, it is not. Life is a circle much like a wheel with a hub that is the heart and spokes that are the lines that divide different parts of our living moments into years, events and much deeper, to the unconscious aspects of our inner being, the self or soul.
An individual I work with, a 45-year old woman who had found tremendous professional and personal “success” in earlier years in that “upwardly” straight line I mentioned, recently found herself right back to the financial and personal circumstances she faced over 25 years ago in college. While she did everything “right” her whole life and achieved so much beyond an average person by her mid-30’s, at one time having a net worth of several million and being a generous philanthropist to the needy, today, she finds herself on the other side of the giving line. Today, she shops at discount stores for plastic boxes to assemble a makeshift closet for what little clothing she has left. In a span of less than 12 months, due to the economy, she lost a half million dollar home and sold all of her possessions to survive. She has nothing left but a few possessions and her beloved pets. Yet, she called me one morning and started the conversation by telling me that she was shopping for the same things that she did when she was poor in college- plastic crates and boxes for makeshift closets. We all remember our poor college days, but in those days, we didn’t know what we know today. Less than 5 years ago she was shopping at Neiman Marcus and she was on the cover of a magazine for her philanthropic and charitable work. Then she laughed and said something remarkable to me. She said “I could be really sad about this whole thing, but you know what, these plastic closet things have really come a long way! They are so well-made these days and there are so many options and styles, I’m so excited about it!”
And I reminded her that life is a circle – though we may find ourselves where we were 20 or 30 years ago with our finances or circumstances, life is not a race, it’s not a straight line we have to follow towards increasing amounts of fame or fortune. Life is a circle! Life is this wonderful continuous circle – and because of advances and innovations in our outside world, when we find ourselves traversing that circle, though we may feel that we’ve gone right back to where we started, that part of the circle is actually very different. It has shaped and changed and evolved…just like our souls and inner selves do.
As we travel this circle, we grow in wisdom and rounding any curve of it, we can sense change, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood to old age and to what we know as death.
Another client I have been working with lost her parents at a very young age and was adopted into a household where she was accepted. Though she felt loved, she did not feel right or that she was in her right life. Her life felt untrue. She began to work with her deeper self at the soul level or the hub of the circle and by going into her own deeper reality she found that her life was different than the straight line she was living. She found there were many facets and aspects she could meander through. She found that the curve of her life had valleys and peaks and that she could travel along the spokes and do inward or outward. She felt unlimited. She felt she could explore possibilities. She felt her dream life informed her waking life. She began to believe that her birth into her body was but one of many possible lifetimes. She felt there were no endings and really no beginnings.
She felt free. She began to live from her heartbeat outward into the world. She chose new and different experiences and relationships. She celebrated moments without expecting a different ego influenced outcome.
She gave to others. She fell in love. She traveled around the curve of her life and ventured back and forth to and into her hub or true self. She noted the different parts of her circle. She began to think of death as the beginning of a new life. She lost fear and anxiety. Fear became true moments. Anxiety drifted away like a cloud of disbelief.
To think of living as a continuous event gives us the courage to move forward in a more meandering fashion and not in a hurried, often harried straight line with the anxiety that a dead end can provoke.
Once you remember that the center or hub of the circle of life is our heart and within that drumbeat is the energy force we call self or soul, you’ll find the power to continue to traverse the circle in ways that feed your soul…for life.
Thanks, Mercedes! That helped.
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