Some Essential Questions

A list from James Hollis.

I’ve added two new pages to my site.

The first is a collection of my favorite healers and resources.

The other is an events page, which includes some events for the paperback of On Our Best Behavior and its corresponding workbook, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness, that haven’t sold-out yet: There’s a Friday evening discussion and Saturday workshop in Montecito at Godmothers; brunch and conversations in San Diego and Chicago; and a September evening event in San Francisco. More will be added soon!

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I’m struggling through a post-vacation emotional hangover. My week in Montana did what all good vacations do, or at least the vacations I remember from my ‘20s when I really stepped away from work for a stretch and thought about my life choices. (When you work through your vacations, which has been my M.O. for the past 15 years, you don’t create any space or get to take perspective.) But back in my magazine editor days, every time I returned to New York City after a vacation, I would think hard about my life choices—and sometimes make some shifts. The questions I’d ask myself weren’t particularly specific, but more like: What am I doing? Why? Why do I live where I do? What am I trying to do here?

Robert Delaunay, Manège de cochons, 1922 Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Bertrand Prévost / Dist.RMN-GP, Custom Print

At that time, I had no awareness of repeating patterns, or limiting subconscious beliefs, or the ways in which fear was—and continues to be—the driveshaft for many of my choices, rather than my heart. But the distance from my day-to-day allowed me to see my life more clearly. Plus, once the busy-ness subsided, breaks gave me enough space for my feelings about my life to emerge. Many times, I went back to the office knowing I couldn’t emotionally tolerate the status quo—and tackled a job search, or stopped dating someone, or picked up a new hobby.

I wrote about this last week—“The Roots of Busy”—but my time away solidified something I’ve been feeling in my heart for years: I am ready to kick the covers off some of my old patterns and stories that have worn out their welcome in my life.

I was helped in this revelation by a tiny amount of work I did on vacation for an upcoming podcast episode: I read How to Manifest, which is Lacy Phillips first book (coming in October). Lacy is the founder of To Be Magnetic, which is the gold standard in manifesting. Lacy’s process is not about superstitious beliefs or aligning your thinking with what you want (or conversely, ruling out negative thoughts). It’s a much deeper process that requires clearing your own internal blocks. In a nutshell, you’ve got to see it to believe it. And then you need to do battle with those subconscious parts of yourself that have you convinced that you can’t have it or won’t be able to do it. (I wrote a bit about Lacy and her concept of “Expanders”—finding people who are doing what you want to do or have what you want to have and studying them rather than deprecating them—in the Envy chapter of On Our Best Behavior, which is out in paperback next week.)

Lacy offers lots of good questions in How to Manifest to help you identify where you’re stuck—and so does James Hollis, one of my very favorite Jungian psychotherapists. (You can hear our podcast conversation here: “On Finding Our Soul’s Vocation.”) He offers a list of questions at the end of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, which I keep close at hand and am working through (again) in the coming weeks. I’ve done this before and found it exceptionally helpful.

Here they are:

1. Where has life, in its unfairness, stuck you, fixated you, caused you to circle back and back upon this wounding as a provisional definition and limitation of your possibilities? Why do you continue to cooperate with the wound, rather than serve something larger, which serves you in return?

2. Where has life blessed you, given you a gift? And what have you done with that gift? How have you accepted the responsibility that goes with it?

3. Where are you blocked by fear, stuck, rigid, resistant to change?

4. What is the fear beneath the fear? The fear that intimidates you only gains its power from the wiring beneath it, the wiring of history, which leads to a deeper fear, a fear from your past. This circuitry activates the old message that this fear, this issue, is larger than you, and so you ignore the conscious, empowered adult you have become since then.

5. Where was your father stuck, and where has that stuck place shown up in your life? Where was your mother stuck, and where has that stuck place shown up in your life? Are you repeating their lives, their patterns, or trying to overcome them by compensation, or treating the problem in a way that brings harm and further self-alienation? Is this the legacy you will pass on to your children?

6. Where do you avoid conflict, the necessary conflict of values, and therefore avoid living in fidelity with who you are?

7. What ideas, habits, behavioral patterns are holding you back from the large journey of the soul? What secondary gains do you receive by staying mired in the old—security, predictability, validation from others? Are you now tired enough, hurting enough to begin to take the soul’s journey on?

8. Where are you still looking for permission to live your life? Do you think that someone else is going to give it to you? What are you waiting for, someone else to write the script of your life for you?

9. Where do you need to grow up? When will this happen? Do you think someone else will do it for you?

10. What have you always felt called toward, but feared to do? Does this possibility still summon you, symbolically if not literally? What new life wishes to come into being through you?

Why is now the time, if ever it is to happen, for you to answer the summons of your soul, to live the second, larger life?

Hollis offers that it should be uncomfortable, if not even painful, to answer some of the questions—that those feelings of deep discomfort are clues that you’re onto something worth wrestling with. In many ways, these questions are a path to your vocation, what you’re truly here to do—but living the questions requires growing yourself up.

As he writes in in A Life of Meaning: “Vocation, for example, is one of those summonses of the soul. We all do jobs to earn our living, but what is our vocation, our vocatus, our ‘calling’? Our calling often requires commitment, discipline, courage, consistency, and persistence. It’s not about comfort, fitting in, being normal at all.” He continues, “We were all born knowing what is right for us. It was called instinct, but when we were tiny, dependent, vulnerable, at the mercy of the world around us, we had to adapt to the fate into which we were thrown. As Jung often mentioned, most of our troubles come when we have lost contact with our guiding instincts, that energy within each of us that’s in service to becoming who we are in the world.”

May we clear the hurdles to reconnect with those guiding instincts on our path to wholeness. And may we grow ourselves up to fill the shoes we were meant to walk in as well.

Stay sane out there friends.