Touchstones

Sometimes the uneasy feeling comes on quite unexpectedly. Something seems slightly off kilter. Maybe there’s a sleepless night or two. When I do drift off to sleep the uneasiness seeps into my dreams, and I awaken the next morning feeling like I haven’t rested at all. On the surface everything seems okay. Health good, family fine, job going well…

It’s uncomfortable. I get impatient and want the feeling to go away. It feels like there is something that needs doing; but I don’t have a clue what it is. It’s the same feeling I get once in a while when I walk into a room and forget why I’m there. If I try to force myself to remember, it only drives the thing I’m trying to remember farther from my grasp.

In her recent book, “The Second Half of Life”, Angeles Arrien explains:

Indigenous people of the American Southwest believe that to cultivate wisdom and character you must develop the capacity to be fluid and flexible like water, warm like fire, and solid like a mountain or you will experience soul loss. Its symptoms can take the form of inertia, apathy, anxiety, emptiness, depression, futility, or numbness. It may also appear as confusion, preoccupation, restlessness, self-doubt, irritation, a tendency to be extremely critical, or a lack of vitality. These states often signal the end of something important, such as a long-term job or relationship, and the recognition that something new and regenerative has yet to emerge.

Arrien goes on to say:

…it is essential…to listen deeply to what we may be longing for and to recognize restlessness and dissipation as a sign of the soul urging us to grow and move toward something new.

The disturbance I feel is the truth of my heart letting me know it’s time to enter a new chapter in my spiritual growth. Far from being something negative that I want to be rid of, it is a signal to be on the look out for the path that will lead me to the next gate I will pass through on my journey.

I have to be patient and alert. I must not try to numb myself; but feel the unease fully. I will do my best to turn into this feeling and not away from it.

And always, I must trust that my heart knows what to do.

In fact, the dis-ease I feel is merely my heart reminding me that the journey is long and I must be on my way to a new, unexplored place…

…if I am ever to make it home.

pete