Transition or Transform
(Your Two Paths to Freedom)

You’ve no doubt heard me talk about the ‘mountaintop cabin’. It’s the place you dream of when you want to escape your everyday concerns. The place you would go to meditate, practice yoga, enjoy Reiki (and the like) without any disturbances. It is an oasis from the busyness of life, from work, from everything that pulls you away from your essence – from that deep place you visit when doing your spiritual practice.

Of course, as alluring as that mountaintop cabin may be, for most people, it can never be more than a dream. You have bills to pay and responsibilities to take care of, so while you may yearn to lead a different life, while you may be dissatisfied with the way you currently spend your days, you can’t find a way out of it.

You know you are meant for more. You know what you are currently doing isn’t a true reflection of the real you, but you are trapped by practicalities, trapped by the expectations of friends and family, and to do anything different seems an impossibility.

Rationalizing Misery

With the material and social world tugging at you, with no clear way out, you tend to plod along, doing what you have always done, rationalizing your actions.

What else could you do given your situation?

And isn’t the best thing just to accept reality and soldier on?

You tell yourself such things, but the longer you live a life that isn’t true to the inner you, the more dissatisfied you feel, and the more uncomfortable your intuition makes you feel.

Worse still, after a while, it isn’t only your intuition yelling at you to change direction. For keep persisting in going against your inner wisdom, and eventually health and emotional issues will catch up with you.

Even so, you press on, rationalizing that you couldn’t do anything else, trying your best to convince yourself that your emotional and health challenges have nothing to do with your job and daily activities.

Deep down, however, you know they are connected. Deep down you understand that in life, we don’t truly have free will.

No, our only choice is to follow our intuition (our inner guide) or be miserable.

And the further from our true path we stray, the bumpier our life becomes until eventually the Universe forces us to do as it commands, to live in alignment with our inner being.

We’ll get sick. We’ll have a nervous breakdown. A bus will hit us. We’ll get cancer. One way or another, the Universe will force us to listen – always with bigger sticks until we take notice and do as it desires.

If you look back over your life and the lives of others, you’ll have to admit that the Universe is pretty effective in ultimately getting what it desires.

All we can really do is determine how painful or smooth our journey will be.

Do as the Universe commands, and life will flow freely. Rebel, and we will suffer the consequences.

How to Change Your Life (When You Feel Totally Stuck)

To break free from the bind of our current circumstances, I believe we need to either ‘transition’ or ‘transform’.

To transition to a richer, more soulful life, we need to think about what we truly want, and then be honest with ourselves about what that truly is.

In my experience, most people never admit to themselves what they would truly love to do in life because they fear that it is impossible.

After all, why dream about such things if your dreams will only be crushed by the harshness of reality?

But if we always crush our deepest desires before they have a chance to flower, then we will never give ourselves the chance to chase after them, to make them a reality.

Once we clarify what we truly yearn for in the deepest part of our being, however, and once we admit this to ourselves, then we can begin the process of ‘transitioning’.

Then we can set about learning the necessary skills to transition over to our ‘dream life’ – even if it will take us many years to accomplish this.

The thing to remember here is that even if it might take us five years to upskill and gain the know-how to put our dreams into action, we are going to be somewhere in five years.

So is it going to be in the same unfulfilling place as we are now? Or will it be in a place where we feel excited to live each day?

What’s more, even if it takes us many years to transition over to doing something more meaningful, in the meantime, our goal will give our life purpose. It will make our current hardships more tolerable.

Better still, our relationship to our current job will also improve because now it is funding our future. It is supporting us while we learn the necessary skills to live our dream. As such, we will even begin to appreciate what it is doing for us.

But if taking years to transition over to a more meaningful occupation sounds hard, I’d like to put it to you that it is going against your intuition that is truly hard.

For do that and your energy will be out of alignment, out of harmony. Do that and a part of you will be resisting everything you do. You’ll be dragging yourself in one direction while your inner being tugs you in the other.

That is what is hard.

But if you can get all of your energy working in unison, if your mind, body and spirit all flow in the same direction, then you’ll be like a steam train that has gathered momentum and can keep chugging along with barely any effort..

Transforming Your Life

If you are still convinced that there is no practical escape from your current job, from the way you currently spend your days, then there is still a solution: transformation.

This is the ultimate Zen approach. It declares that it isn’t so much what you do but how you do it that matters.

As such, you can keep doing whatever it is you are doing, but with a change of attitude. Now you see it as an opportunity to refine your spirit. You see it as a worthy challenge.

It is about living every moment to its fullest, about being present, about not battling where you are, but opening yourself up to its blessings.

As the Zen saying goes: ‘Chop wood, carry water.’

Maybe a part of you feels you are made for more, but every moment provides you with the opportunity to connect to your inner being, if only you choose to seize that opportunity.

Ultimately, I believe that if you can truly transform what you are currently doing, you’ll end up transitioning to something that aligns with your soul’s path.

For transform your job and you’ll be dynamic. You’ll be energized. You’ll seize the opportunities that come your way – opportunities that allow you to not only be fully present in the moment, but fully present in an occupation that is in alignment with your deepest being.

Whether this is true or not, what I do know is that if you are dissatisfied with your current life, you need to act. And if you can’t immediately jump into something that would fulfil you, then you need to either transition over to it or transform the way you do it.

If not, your life will get bumpier and bumpier as you waste more and more time, as you spend longer and longer straying from your inner being’s true path.