This Is What Happened After I Left Everything
Following your heart is the safest place you can be.
Five years ago I left two businesses I spent most of my 20’s and 30’s creating. For 15 years I was a psychotherapist, a role that came naturally to me. I was good at my job and over the course of time, built a successful practice that turned into avenues for other gigs such as lecturing at universities and giving workshops on topics that were advancing the field.
With a business partner, I also founded and designed a space in midtown Manhattan for psychotherapists to practice, a prime piece of real estate in NYC that also became a great success.
I was living a comfortable life. I was following to the best of my ability what felt right and fulfilling to me in the moment. Yet, over the course of my career as I was accomplishing great things in areas I was skilled in, I realized my passions were beginning to change and my heart was calling for something different.
There was a vague sense of emptiness always present inside of me, a haunting cloud of sadness not big enough to consume me but loud enough to consistently agitate me. It gave me the sense that something was missing. This cloud that started as a whisper and turned into a shout spoke these words:
“You’re doing what you think you should do, not what you really want to do.”
After years of trying to band-aid my emotional aches and pains with fun travel adventures and getting more creative within my profession, I finally left my life in New York, the city I had been in love with for so long, along with my dearest friends and everything else I worked so hard to build.
I moved to Berlin, Germany and spent a year and a half simply exploring life through travel and engaging in the ordinary.
After a year and a half of giving myself space without pressure to decide who I would become or what I would do next, came the very intense vision to make art. A vision so strong, that for nights upon nights I couldn’t sleep.
I knew I was being called.
Yet, I never studied art before nor had I ever attempted to dive into something in such a big way without the structure of teachers or a school to guide me.
But here I was finding myself taking the leap. No planes, trains or automobiles-just me, my body and my heart-acting on something I was just beginning to truly embrace: the knowledge that if I wanted to make a change I had to tolerate the fears that come with being in the unknown.
Arriving sometimes as a massive wave crashing down on me and other times as a voice telling me I’m not good enough, my fears began to paradoxically communicate this message to me:
“Girl, if you honor your heart and take the leap of faith, you’ll fall deeper in love with life and receive gifts you can’t even imagine.“
We are taught the unknown is an unsafe place to be, yet following your heart is the safest place you can ever be.
It’s the one place we can trust.
And this is exactly what happened. In the year after I left my life of “shoulds”, I fell deeply in love with life.
A love coming not from being with the man of my dreams or being recognized for my achievements, but from identifying, honoring and expressing the desires inside me without having a damn clue sometimes where it will take me.
The love we forge inside ourselves has no limits.
After having my big vision, I poured myself into making art for five months, clueless as ever yet fully convinced by my vision. On the sixth month, I took another leap. I came out of my Facebook and Instagram hiatus and I bombed the hell out of both, with all of my work and as scared as ever.
Within a month, I sold over 8 pieces and received two commissions. By the end of the first year, I found my works being exhibited in two different galleries in Berlin.
Now, several years later, I am represented by a gallery in Berlin and being commissioned often for a special kind of painting I developed in the first year I began.
This doesn’t mean I don’t freak out at times and it doesn’t mean I don’t need side jobs to help me through the financially challenging life of being an artist. It just means that the process is unfolding and things are progressing and that I am moving deeper into the process of trusting myself and life.
So, without further ado, the eight most important things I have learned thus far.
1. We are here to bring our ideas and inspirations into form.
We are here to create stuff. The stuff we create hopefully becomes the source of our work and at least becomes the fuel for our hobbies. This may be making art or taking care of children or operating on a brain or sweeping floors. It has to resonate with you.
When we express our ideas and inspirations as strange as they may seem, we get in contact with life force energy. You know, the stuff that makes us feel alive. On the other hand, when we spend most of our time doing what we dislike, that which we ignore or don’t express gets energetically trapped inside our bodies. And when our passions, ideas and emotions get trapped inside our bodies, we begin to suffer from insomnia, depression, addictions, physical ailments, emptiness and other fun stuff.
Trust me, I was a psychotherapist for 15 years.
2. Follow your inspiration without attachment to the outcome.
Usually when we get an idea, we come up with a detailed vision of how it will work out. While this is an important first step, what’s more important is to let go of the outcome shortly after. In other words, hold on to the main idea but throw out the run-on sentences, forget the grammar, and who cares about punctuation.
Why? Because the visions we hold for ourselves are often based on current belief systems not always in line with our fullest potential and often based on unconscious programming. There is a higher self, a greater vision within you that will guide you towards everything you need along the way as the process unfolds.
That is, the knowing will almost always come through the doing.
3. Trust the process.
Speaking of which, here we come to one of the hardest things to do. I don’t know many people who enjoy feeling uncomfortable while waiting for a result or who like the shame that sometimes arises after being vulnerable in a new way for the first time.
The fact is, though, we really only have two choices: We can feel like shit doing the same things we do every day and go nowhere or we can move towards parts of ourselves we haven’t yet explored and let ourselves be vulnerable.
And yes, it will feel scary and uncomfortable and you will want to run like hell but this is what is required if you, like me, want a life that brings joy rather than the same old story with the same old suffering.
Trusting the process…it’s kind of like a new world vision we must develop, a new narrative to embrace-where we understand that walking through the pain ultimately leads to a lighter, more magical reality whose expansion has no limit; where embracing the process is, in fact, the point of life instead of any end game such as fame or monetary or professional success or whatever.
When we trust the process, we gain trust in ourselves and when we trust ourselves, anything that appears in our lives — the good, the bad and the ugly-becomes a source for a greater love story.
4. Mistakes lead to the greatest discoveries.
Honor, honor, honor your mistakes. Being an artist has taught me more about this than any other experience. Most of my biggest painting “mistakes” have been my best sellers and some of my most impulsive moves have led to the discovery of techniques that give me most joy when I am creating.
5. Confidence is not the absence of insecurity.
On the contrary. When we own our insecurities and fears and carry on despite them, we step into our confidence. That is, rather than fear being a sign of weakness, it is a sign of being human. And guess what? You know all that enlightenment talk? It’s really about feeling our feels, being in our bodies, and being real.
The route to Nirvana is through our authenticity.
6. Create space.
When we are bringing something into the world or waiting for something to come to us, we must create a balance between rest and action. One underemphasized aspect of manifestation is the importance of passivity, of creating space for the seeds we have planted to grow. For example, does the pot of basil seeds you planted grow into a plant you can eat more quickly if you overwater them? Same idea. Don’t force the form. Slow down and let the space speak.
7. As we support our callings, life supports us.
We live in a world where money is a thing and our basic survival depends on that thing. But money in its highest form is a tool for our creative expansion. In other words, that we have to make money means we have the choice to think creatively about what we can “do” to make this happen. It helps us get in touch with what I am talking about in rule number one. When we do what we feel inspired to do rather than what we feel we should do, we set in motion the law of abundance.
Which means that as you share your gifts, you receive back twofold and often this can come in the form of money. In other words, when you align with what you are here to express, when you connect with your flow rather than some societal or parental ideological stream that has no clue about who you are, then life aligns providing you with everything you need to fulfill your calling.
This does not mean, however, you don’t have to get side jobs along the way. I have found that jobs which are not my passion, often give me the structure and security I need for my creativity to flow uninterrupted.
So, be brave but also be humble!
8. What heals us, heals others.
So why should you follow your heart, express your ideas, and pursue the excitement moving inside you? Because it will heal you. And when you heal yourself, you heal the planet.
Conclusion
So what happens as result of all this?
We get many of the things our society suggests we should attain: success, money, recognition, fill in the blank but instead of being an end game or the source of our self-worth, these gifts become enjoyable by-products of simply following the inspiration and flow of our hearts.
We fall in love because our aliveness comes simply from honoring and expressing ourselves as we are.
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Where your fear is, there is your task.”
– Carl Jung