Losing Our Way

“Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the right way was lost.” – The Divine Comedy by Dante.

The experience of noticing we’re on the wrong path in what feels like the wrong life, comes to almost all of us at some point. 

Are you experiencing some of the symptoms? 

• Feeling purposeless. The sense of purposelessness does not disappear with achievements, but persistently remains.
• Emotional misery, including neediness, nervousness, panic and depression.
• Physical deterioration, including elevated blood pressure, increased stress hormones and reduced immune responses.
• Consistent relationship failures that may lead to feeling persistently disconnected and lonely.
• Consistent career failures, which might mean that what you’re doing to make a living is turning you into the walking dead.
• Bad habits you can’t break, including overdrinking, numbing yourself, shopping, binge eating, staring at the internet or social media all day and night without stopping to sleep or eat.

Often these symptoms reveal where we might be in denial and out of alignment in our lives.

Once we admit that our lives aren’t really working, we usually try to fix the problem by working harder, eating better, and generally being better. Perhaps the problem isn’t how hard you are working, but rather that you‘re working on things that aren’t right for you. Instead you are doing what you think you’re ‘supposed to do.’

The unpleasant things we force ourselves to do, the areas where we lie about our feelings, the times we obey shame are sometimes the very aspects of our behavior that we believe to be most virtuous. For instance, if you are a stay-at-home who has never really enjoyed being around children, you may be proud that you’ve forced yourself to do what appears righteous. Notice when you go against your true nature to live up to standards you believe are right, you usually hate it.

To get out of the dark woods, and back on the right path, you often have to go in among the things you’ve been keeping from yourself. It’s time to let yourself know why you are lost and emerge from your areas of denial. It means accepting that certain parts of your life are as they are, even though you wish they weren’t. Leaving denial is the most productive and yet terrifying thing we could possibly do.