The Passionate Life

"Let yourself be silently drawn by
the stronger pull of what you truly love.
It will not lead you astray." // Rumi

Living by your passion means living surrendered to what you deeply love and desire for yourself. When you surrender to your soul’s vision and mission for you, it will lead you on the path that is authentically yours and satisfy you in a way that nothing else will ever do in this life.

Yet, most of us are afraid to live by our passions.

Our fear of living by our soulful passions is of course tied to our social conditioning and ego whose job it is to keep us firmly functioning according to societal rules, regulations and expectations, which we believe will afford the security and belonging we need. So, we are generally convinced by external authorities that living by our passion is impractical and unnecessary because it will not yield the livelihood, money and material requirements of a comfortable existence or the material existence we should aspire to and want for ourselves. Our parents and ancestors may have worked and sacrificed for safety, security and comfort— essentially survival. Their values were firmly established.Certainly, the criteria we are shown for “a comfortable life” depends on the society culture and material circumstances into which we are born and often have little or nothing to do with our dreams, desires and soul’s longing.

So, multitudes of people work at jobs that bore, irritate and frustrate them, out of survival needs or resignation, “working for the man” and living for the weekend. This generation of so-called millennials, feel something is missing and voice an aversion for a life focused on material attainment without the juice of passion to nourish it. Yet, very few people are brave enough to take the risk of living the passion filled life if it means material instability or discomfort. So, those sporadic stories we hear about CEOs of Fortune 500 companies leaving their multimillion dollar positions and lives to run away to the south of France to grow lavender… enthral, amaze and frighten us in our comfort zones.

Maybe more awe inspiring are the well known life stories of those geniuses or famous personalities who were taken by their passion to great heights of material wealth, notoriety, tragedy and early deaths. Life stories of writers, painters, musicians, activists, politicians, explorers and adventurers simultaneously fascinate and terrify us because their lives clearly illustrate how they were consumed by their passions.

They did not necessarily make considered decisions or informed choices to accomplish what they did. Their stories tell of a tidal wave of the preordained carrying them forward, all else sacrificed to the passion, including their own lives, to allow what was being actualized though them to be birthed into the world. They were led by their soul’s guidance which would not allow them to do or be anything other than a Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Mozart, Marilyn Munro, Judy Garland, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr. Nelson Mandela, Einstein and so on. Despite the naysayers, the nonbelievers, the traumas or debilitating circumstances, the death threats or personal limitations, they were carried by a passion we may envy and secretly long for and whose power to disrupt our comfortable lives stops us in our tracks.

Our conditioning is so strong that we are afraid of the discomfort, tragedy, death or destruction
which may befall us if we step out of the approved comfort zone of our lives. So much so that
we are even unnerved by the ordinary every day experiences which are part of our human existence. When we fall in love with someone we may become afraid of losing the love, the person, or both! When we have a child we are afraid of what may befall him or her. When good things happen and our dreams come true, even a little, we are afraid of “when the other shoe will drop.” We live in fear rather than love because presumably it keeps us stable, secure and safe— sort of —but not necessarily happy. Living in fear keeps us on that hamster wheel of doing and achieving in the ways that society dictates. So, we deceive ourselves into thinking, hoping, we will find our happiness and freedom in the cage we procure for ourselves from the proceeds of our sold passions.

However, we have been shown through various experiments and examples in life that even when the door is opened, the caged bird doesn’t fly out and away, the domesticated pets we keep in our homes have been essentially disabled from their primal selves and can no longer survive in the wild easily. When we tamper with the natural flow and inclination of any person or phenomenon, imbalances inevitably occur. Our attempts to fix such imbalances are like a haircut gone bad. We keep clipping a little here, a little there, until the hair is shorn and no longer the beauty that we wanted to create.

The human ego believing it’s God, thinks it can do no wrong. Fear is its primary tool of influence and coercion. It works against whatever it believes will threaten our safety and material goals. Our ego works against even those dreams, longings and passions which may lead us away from the socially accepted path. It uses fear in its efforts to protect us and keep us within the acceptable confines we accept for ourselves and with which we may slowly smother ourselves.

Reason, rationality and its handmaiden called compromise, serve to dampen and deaden the life of our passions. Our desires are then replaced by stress, anxiety or lethargy with which we are left to entertain the memories of desires, dreams and childhood determination dismissed in favour of the so called real world and its requirements. Yet, the longing for what we think is just an impossible dream or irreconcilable passion may well be the real life and our soul’s mission wanting to come through us into this world as something extraordinary, unusual or unique at the very least.

Are we willing to take the risk?