Advice to my younger self

On self-compassion, living your purpose, and choosing a path with heart

I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I was just trying to save my soul.

I’ve been reflecting on the time that Vision-Bearer paid me a visit. When I sat down to tell that story, I didn’t intend to write so much about my experience working at The Coca-Cola Company. Maybe talking about my coworkers turning my cubicle into some kind of shrine is me indulging my ego on some level; on the other hand, I think that happening stuck with me because it touched me deeply. It felt like a soul communication — a crystallized image of the despair Thoreau spoke about in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays. “What is called resignation is confirmed desperation,” Thoreau wrote.

Seeing that empty cubicle turned into a shrine of my coworkers’ longing for freedom and meaning may have been one of the first times I realized that the desperation and despair I was familiar with in the poorer strata of our society were just as pervasive in the white collar, successful classes. It was a witnessing of the persistent truth of Thoreau’s assertion that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

I wasn’t thinking about any of that on the day I quit that job. I just knew in my bones that if I didn’t get out of there and follow my heart, my soul was going to start dying.

As I thought about my inclusion of that scene in the Vision-Bearer piece, two key ideas emerged from the mists of the past.

One, there’s no way I meet Vision-Bearer if I’m still working at Coca-Cola.

Which path to choose? Photo by DK.

Some obvious reasons to back up that assertion come to mind. Losing the security of a guaranteed paycheck encouraged me to downsize and move from a hip neighborhood in midtown Atlanta just a block from Piedmont Park to a crappy roach-infested tenement in Marietta (definitely not a hip Atlanta locale).

Geography isn’t everything — hypothetically, Vision-Bearer could have found me in midtown. But it plays its part: my move from midtown to a working class town out beyond the perimeter put me in the right place at the right time.

Even more importantly, my choice to throw away the ostensible security and prestige of a salaried position at one of the world’s most famous companies and pursue my dreams of living free and making art constituted what the Toltec sorcerers would call “an act of power.” It set me on a different path — a path on which I was available to receive a visitation from Vision-Bearer. That act of power was a living prayer to Creator: “I am serious about realizing my vision for my life.”

The second insight is realizing that my coworkers celebrated my emancipation / jailbreak so enthusiastically because they desperately longed to be free and to be living a life of purpose. But they were too afraid to risk it.

I’m not saying there’s no dignity in working for a company that sells beverages whose first ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup. And I would go on to work for a pharmaceutical company and one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies before I completed my escape from the corporate world. But I remember we all had to go to this in-house seminar where the top brass of the company laid out their vision of world domination. They displayed charts showing the average amount of 12-ounce beverages consumed by the world’s population and talked glowingly about how the fact that so many of those beverages weren’t yet Coca-Cola products meant that the company’s revenue stream could continue to expand exponentially into the future. (If The Coca-Cola Company was a country, it would boast the 84th biggest economy in the world, just ahead of Costa Rica.)

They talked about the plans they were implementing to attempt to double Coke’s share of the beverages consumed around the globe. They didn’t mention high-fructose corn syrup or diabetes or America’s crushing obesity epidemic or the fact that Americans ingest 10.8 pounds of sugar (along with a substantial amount of artificial colors and flavors) per person per year — from Coca-Cola products alone. (Source)

In light of the product we were selling, it all seemed pretty obscene to me. But the thing that really got me was watching a presentation on how the company had developed a new refrigeration technology that would enable us to vastly expand our market share in areas of rural India where people were very poor and lived without electricity. By being able to keep our products cool for days in places where there’s no electricity, the Coke guy gushed, we’ll be able to deliver cold, delicious Coke to places in India where children have never even tasted a Coca-Cola!

OK, wait a minute. So this is a part of the world afflicted by crushing poverty, where “more than 40 percent of children are malnourished or stunted.” And y’all are cheering because we found a way to open up this market and sell them Coke?

Most of the lovely people on my team felt the same way I did about that seminar. But most of them weren’t going to voluntarily leave the supposed security they got from working for Coca-Cola.

I get it. We need to have a place to live. We need to eat. Parents need to clothe and feed and shelter their kids.

But there’s only so much damage you can do to your soul and get away with it. As Don Juan said to Carlos, about the importance of choosing our path wisely:

“Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.”

So many people choose, repeatedly, to settle. Time and again, their soul whispers to them to pick up that paint brush or spruce up that piece of furniture you’ve been threatening to paint for years now or write a poem or a memoir. Or to finally leave that abusive partner or soul-crushing job. To break up with that toxic “friend” who is always working against their happiness and fulfillment. To stop putting up with a life that they know isn’t the life they are supposed to be living, Yet they keep rationalizing, keep making excuses, keep procrastinating….they keep saying “No!” to their own soul.

They’re afraid they might be homeless. They’re afraid their spouse will be angry or will leave them. They’re afraid of what their friends and family will say. They’re afraid they’ll be called selfish or labeled as weird.

They aren’t considering the needs of the soul and they lack the faith to believe that if they follow that still small voice in the heart, they will be — somehow, some way — taken care of.

I was lucky enough to believe I’d be taken care of — perhaps to an unreasonable degree. I sincerely believed (or told myself that I did, anyway) that quitting Coca-Cola and embracing life as an artist would lead me to success as a celebrated novelist and/or a famous singer in virtually no time at all.

I didn’t realize that choosing to reject the corporate/Matrix machine and seek a life of creativity and freedom would — along with other choices along the way — lead me through years of feeling broken, crazy, and alone. I didn’t realize it would lead to me becoming homeless. I didn’t realize it would lead to me being shunned and avoided by my family and by many of my old friends.

In my experience — both in my personal life and in observing friends and clients who have found the courage to follow their hearts, listen to their inner guidance, and expand their awareness — choosing the path of soul fulfillment almost always puts us at odds with those closest to us. Our family, our partner, our church, our boss, our friends…

When you make the conscious choice to raise your vibration and follow your heart, you might think your courage will be celebrated by the people who say they love you. But the reality is that your deviation from the norm is more often taken as an affront, a betrayal even, by those closest to you. Those who thought they knew you. The ones who thought they had you under control. The ones who sometimes, in a rare moment of brutal honesty, tell you the exact moment when they self-abandoned, when they dug in their heels and refused to move forward into more life, when they betrayed their inner child by choosing the security of an abusive relationship or job over the uncertainty of adventure. Instead of honoring your courage, these “black magicians” often do their damndest to rope you back in, shower you with contempt and ridicule, mock you as a feckless dreamer, and attempt to drag you back down to their level of vibration by any means possible.

And then there’s our own stuff to contend with…

I wish I could say that I internalized the wisdom Vision-Bearer tried to share with me on that day in 1998 and immediately got about living my best life and fulfilling my purpose.

But my road has been a long and winding one, with many wrong turns, cul-de-sacs, and blind alleys along the way. Maybe what John Lennon said was true, that life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.

Or maybe — and I feel this is even more to the point — we are so heavily programmed and shame-bound as children growing up in this degraded society, it takes a whole lot of persistence in the inner work over an uncomfortably long period of time before we are actually capable of self-authorship, of writing our true life story and living into it.

In looking back over this period of my life, I can certainly see that I made many choices from a place of fear and low self-esteem. Although my intentions were good, I was still unaware of the Will-disabling toxic shame that was running the show of my life from the subterranean levels of the mind.

A couple days after returning home from Pilgrimage #3, I did a long meditation and asked how I could move forward. I’d been out of work for six months by now and I’d spent all of the money I’d saved from the pharma company job. During that time off I had done a lot of writing. I had also completed The Artist’s Way and had started a practice of faithfully writing my morning pages every day — a practice that I would keep up for the next several years and which was tremendously instrumental in my soul growth and personal development.

But I was broke and anxious and I needed money.

So in my meditation I asked if I needed to go back to work?

-Yes.

“Where?”

-Doesn’t matter.

“What should I do?”

-Send your resume.

“What about my writing?”

-You’ll find time time to do it when it’s time.

These answers made me angry at first. Like the kid at Christmas who gets the little thing, the necessary thing — new books or winter coat — but not the extravagant thing he asked for. Oh well. God knows a whole lot better than I do and (I’m laughing out loud now) it’s a relief to have some direction.

Later that night I built a fire in the back yard and smoked half a joint:

Began to feel that the exact opposite of my conclusion after meditating was in fact true: that to give up now and go back to work full time in an office would be proof that my trust (in God’s willingness to provide for me) only extended to the zero point. That to give up now would be to take a good healthy few steps backward.

I had asked for guidance, received it, then almost immediately discarded it. Under the influence of marijuana — which, for all its potentially helpful properties (at least in small, occasional doses), is not an entity known for encouraging us to jump out of our comfort zone and into action.

I had plenty of empirically sound reasons by this point in my life to mistrust the whole category of “jobs” and “work.” I was an empath with zero boundaries, so most work situations available to twenty-somethings were going to be very draining for me. Most of the jobs I’d held had either been some kind of office work or manual labor. (I did have a couple restaurant jobs in my teens and those were awful enough that I vowed never to do it again.)

But the voice in my meditation had not told me I needed to go back into an office on a full-time basis. I asked where I was supposed to go to work and it said, “It doesn’t matter.” Just do something to break the spell of money victimhood that is settling around you like a heavy cloak.

Advice to my younger self (and to anyone who wants to break out of bad programming and live your real life)…

If I could go back and counsel my younger self, I’d do my best to explain a few things to him.

First, I’d confirm that he was correct in his understanding of the Matrix / debt slavery system. I’d validate his understanding that there was nothing good in being confined for forty hours a week in a spiritually and emotionally toxic office space where instead of learning guitar licks or reading a book, he had to pretend to be engaged and busy even when (as was often the case) he had nothing (and certainly nothing meaningful) to do. I would agree that such work was detrimental to his soul and was definitely not aligned with his soul purpose.

I would also point out to him that he didn’t actually hate work; he just hated being bored and feeling confined and being forced to spend much of his waking life engaged in meaningless busy work — in close proximity with negative, low-vibrational energy vampires.

I would show him that there were tons of jobs out there — such as landscaping, house painting, lawn mowing, delivery driving, free-lance editing, carpentry — that he could do or learn to do, and that he would actually enjoy doing. Whole areas of commerce in which he could be free to move around and choose jobs or companies or clients that he actually enjoyed working with. And I would drill into him that regardless of the limiting beliefs he still carried from childhood, I would always support him in leaving a toxic situation and moving to a better one.

I would encourage him to be patient with his craft and to take a long view on his dreams. I would tell him, gently enough so that he could at least hold this idea loosely, that he was probably way more fucked up than he realized with all of the toxic shame and incredibly limiting beliefs he had absorbed in childhood. But I would also point out how much he had already accomplished and overcome. I would encourage him to keep doing what he was doing with his artistic and spiritual work and I would show him pictures of me, his future self, living an even more beautiful and fulfilling life than he could dream of at the moment.

And I would encourage him to fill his mind, every day, and as much as possible with perspectives that challenged all of those limiting beliefs and that would help him to really know that his lack of self-esteem and burdensome self-doubt were (a) not the truth of his soul and (b) not his fault.

I would show him that he had chosen to incarnate into a situation where he would be damaged in the ways he had been damaged. And I would confirm to him that only he could learn to heal those wounds. But I would make sure he knew that those persistent negative emotional states and self-hating thoughts (all of the stuff that alcohol and drugs can blot out for a while) were not his fault. That most of the things he loathed in himself were not actually his, but were implanted into him through the mechanism of toxic shame — the primary emotion used by the Matrix to control and enslave us.

Finally, I’d encourage him to realize that anyone who insists that you have to change in order for them to be OK is to be avoided like the plague. I’d hypnotize him into believing — as an instinctual, gut-level reaction — that “what other people think about you is none of your business.”

I would teach him to understand that anyone who tries to force, coerce, or shame you into denying your inner knowing or going against your soul must either be cut out of your life or confronted with their behavior. And that if you choose to confront them and they refuse to honor your truth or are incapable of responding as an adult, then they must be cut out of your life immediately and with zero remorse.

So, yes, if I could go back and relive that period of my life, I would definitely put as much of my soul and energy and attention into my writing and music as I possibly could. I would try to trick myself into getting sober a few years earlier. And I would, ideally, start building skills that would enable me to work outdoors and would allow me to earn enough money to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly while I kept working on my writing and music.

In theory, at least, I could have saved myself a lot of suffering if I hadn’t had to do it the hard way. But then again, who knows? Life is a mystery and Noel Gallagher’s assertion that “all the roads we have to walk are winding” rings true.

In the end, I take comfort knowing I did the best I could with the resources I had available. Before too long, I would encounter Don Juan’s advice on choosing a path with heart and would hold those words close to me as I moved forward through life:

“Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions…Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use.”

We all possess the courage to change the path we’re on. And, in the moment when we listen to the direction of our soul, we can make an act of power — however small it seems — that will change the entire course of our life from then on.