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Passion: What You Want From Life
Everyone has been made for some particular work and the desire for that work has been put in every heart. Rumi, 13th Century
Follow your bliss. Joseph Campbell, 20th century
We all have an inner mechanism that spontaneously draws our attention to what we are meant to be doing. That mechanism is operating when, out of the hubbub of life, some one thing emerges to capture your interest while everything else fades into the background.
When your attention is drawn in this way, you are usually being called to do something. If you allow yourself to respond to that call, energy and enthusiasm builds until you are moved to take action, while completion of the action is accompanied by a sense of delight and satisfaction in your accomplishment
When what you do is accompanied by interest, excitement, passion, desire, motivation, enthusiasm, delight, fulfillment, satisfaction and a sense of purpose and meaning, you know that you are doing what you are meant to be doing.
If nothing gets you excited, if you feel bored, stuck, unfulfilled, lacking in a sense of meaning, then the inner mechanism that draws attention to what you are meant to be doing is probably impaired in some way.
The state of emotional numbness where nothing excites you is a form of depression. You make yourself go numb because there is something you don’t want to feel. And often the very thing you are afraid to feel is your passion. Why? Because as a child you learn that the easiest way to be a good boy or girl and avoid the consequences of breaking the rules is to stifle what you want and focus instead on what you are supposed to do.
Thus for example, to keep yourself working at your desk, you learn to stifle your desire to be outside in the sunshine.
You numb yourself by restricting your breathing, by tightening your muscles, and by engaging in addictive behaviours. Kept up over months and years, numbness becomes chronic, leaving you emotionally flat and out of touch with what you want, whether or not there is something happening in the moment that you don't want to feel.
When you close yourself off to what you don’t want to feel, you also cut yourself off from what you do want to feel. It's very difficult to grit your teeth for eight hours in order to get through another boring day at work and still feel enthusiasm for something else when you go home at the end of the day.
As psychotherapists with over twenty years of experience, we help you open up to knowing what you want, while finding ways (other than making yourself numb) to follow through on your obligations.
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