Yes. And then, no.
Usually we only seek spiritual solutions to our problems after all human means have been exhausted. We have to “lose” our preconceptions, expectations, projections and our illusions in order to be prepared to hear and obey the promptings of the inner voice of our soul and seek, what Paulo Coelho calls, our spiritual destiny.
This is not easy. We must abandon everything we know to be true in order to open our minds to the possibilities of an alternative reality. As Greg Braden says in his book The Spontaneous Healing of Belief, this usually involves a trigger such as sudden death, illness, unemployment, divorce, or betrayal. The more entrenched our beliefs, the greater our attachment to those beliefs, the greater that trigger needs to be. And the trigger necessarily entails loss.
For ten years my husband and I moved six times, four of them internationally. We had two school-aged children so we agreed Ian would resign from the large paternalistic company that made most of the big life decisions for us, including where we lived, to move back to Australia permanently.
Two years later Ian took a job in Jakarta. This came out of left field for me and I was not happy. I had spent a relatively lonely two years in our adopted city, Sydney, on the basis we were there for the long haul. In addition, I had just managed to get a much sought after freelance job writing Australian stories for the international weekly newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor. This was a lifelong dream of mine and I was extremely reluctant to walk away from it, and I felt miffed that I was being asked to.
I can’t say our three years in Asia (our two years in Jakarta were followed by a year in Singapore) were the best years of my life. They certainly had their challenges and difficulties. However, looking back, I now realize that having the opportunity to employ a maid in Jakarta freed me up from the constant and seemingly endless domestic tasks that filled my days prior to this time, providing me with the headspace to consider things deeper and more complex than what to cook for dinner.
This new freedom was, without doubt, the beginning of the journey that led me to a new career. Jakarta gave me the time and freedom to read and research metaphysical ideas, and the energy and desire to contemplate, ponder and piece together the complex issues and implications of what I was reading. This led to writing my first book, published in Australia in 2010, with the second about to be published
Paulo Coelho’s spiritual allegory The Alchemist provides a blueprint for the spiritual sojourn to enlightenment and mastery. Through symbol and metaphor, it beautifully depicts how our desire to change direction and travel towards our spiritual destiny temporarily neutralizes the immediate consequences of our prior thoughts and beliefs, and provides us with all the assistance we need in ways that can seem miraculous.
When we follow the promptings of our soul we come to understand that we have a spiritual destiny, as Coelho says: “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation. All things are one. And when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
Once we begin to listen to, and obey, the dictates of our soul, the Universe rises up to meet us and we are able to access, and harness, its wisdom, knowledge and power. We learn to live as masters of our destiny, able to manifest all the things we need to live loving, rewarding and peaceful lives. We “lose” ourselves to find our true selves.
