A woman goes to visit her insurance agent and says,
“I would like to collect on my husband’s Morris’ life insurance policy.”
“But, madam, your husband is not dead.”
“I tell you what, you come to our home and spend an hour with him and then tell me if you think he’s still alive.”
Morris’ situation may not be so unusual.
This is what happens to most people as they become older if there is no awareness. When the life energy of youth wears off, and there is no interest or curiosity to go deeper to discover the true life energy inside and start questioning our conditioning, then what is left is just a feeling of deadness.
Then we may blame the fact that we are older, but this has nothing to do with age. The energy in youth may have masked the fact that there was no true connection to life energy inside and so it only becomes visible later.
Then inevitably life with age slowly becomes boring and dead and we feel dull, uninspired, and perhaps even depressed.
The way to begin to come alive again is to start to look at how we compromise, how we hold back our energy, how we live a life that perhaps somebody expects from us, rather than having the courage to live the way that is true for us.
Living with passion means taking risks to move into the unknown even if it’s scary, to see that it is our choice how we live each day.
It involves questioning our beliefs and ideas and start to wake up our natural intelligence.
Living with passion is not based so much on what we are doing. But rather, it’s based on how we are approaching life and ourselves. It’s based on the attitude we bring to everything we do. Instead of searching for some deeper meaning and finding an answer from the outside, living with passion means giving meaning to our own life by how we live it.
This can show itself by discovering and developing our creativity and contribution in life whatever that may be, learning to love more deeply, or simply beginning to notice and appreciate all the small gifts that life brings each day, finding new, exciting and fun ways to perhaps do the same things.
This is not easy when we have not separated from our conditioning.
For example, Anthony was raised by an emotionally and physically abusive father and a depressed mother. His father imprinted him with a deep feeling of being worthless. (He told him so repeatedly.) And his mother’s complaining imprinted him with a profoundly negative attitude toward life.
Now, he finds himself in a job he doesn’t like, unable to find a partner to share his life with, and lacking motivation and energy.
Anthony’s trauma of having a depressed mother and an abusive father profoundly affects his ability to love himself or life itself. It is important to recognize how deeply this naturally will affect our life as an adult until we do deeper work to get space from this.
To begin to come alive again means that we have to directly confront the life negative conditioning that we may have received. A child who is not given positive inspiration and guidance, taught to believe in him or herself, and raised in a secure loving environment, often lacks the tools to develop his or her creative gifts and is scared to open to love. We may often have to find what we missed as a child by reaching out for support now as an adult to receive what we didn’t get, until we can begin to find it inside.
In our essence we are all full of joy, fun, love, energy, curiosity and wonder. It is just that our essence has become so covered with our woundedness and we have become so identified with that, that we don’t have access to it any longer.
There is another possibility of not being connected to our true life energy and passion, and that is that we may believe that we are living passionately because we’re able to maintain a high level of intensity and energy and feel that we’ve moved through any kind of sexual or energetic repression that we inherited from our childhood.
However if this involves a lot of pushing and insensitivity to ourselves and others, we may be using intensity to run away from our deeper fears and insecurities, which perhaps we judge as weak or self-indulgent.
This is a natural reaction to having experienced a lot of deadness and/or repression as a child. And in a certain way it is a good step to at least be in contact with some life energy.
However if our aliveness is not balanced with a deep sensitivity and vulnerability it cannot be true aliveness as it is not connected to our source.
It will eventually burn out, exhaust us and we will then swing to the other side into low energy and depression.
Here are some examples:
Sylvia is an intense and highly intelligent 40-year-old woman who comes to us, because she is having difficulties in her intimate relationships. She seems to be continually attracted to men who are unavailable for intimacy or already involved elsewhere. She’s done a lot of work on herself but tends to be drawn to groups which give her a powerful energy experience but don’t seem to give her lasting transformation of her fears and insecurities.
Behind Silvia’s intensity and passion is a frightened and insecure little girl that she is not in touch with because she judges her fears as weak and she is scared of exploring the shock underneath in the deeper vulnerability.
Andre has a strong energy and doesn’t hold it back. He tells us that he has explored his sexuality in all kinds of ways, climbs mountains, paraglides, and goes on diving adventures around the world. We notice, however, that in the workshops with us, the women are afraid of his intensity and have even expressed openly that they don’t feel comfortable around him. He claims that he is just being “in his energy” and can’t see that he is not sensitive to other people’s boundaries.
Learning to live with passion involves both being willing to confront our fears and insecurities by taking risks, but at the same time being deeply aware and sensitive to our fears and insecurities both in ourselves and in those we come close to.
It’s a balance between aliveness and awareness, a balance between passion and vulnerability.
Here are some points from our third Learning Love Handbook, Living with Passion:
1. Risking to discover and trusting our individuality and authenticity and to feel, think, and act from that truth rather than what we were taught.
2. Regularly moving our body to raise the life energy.
3. Being willing to feel, embrace, and share the depth of our fears and insecurities with love and understanding.
4. Beginning to discover and express our unique contribution in life regardless of what form it takes and regardless of the results it brings.
5. Waking up our curiosity to learn and grow from life situations rather than living like a robot.
6. Balancing life energy with cultivating the inner space of meditation.
As we come more and more alive and become less identified with the limitations of our conditioning we begin to appreciate life as it changes moment to moment.
We stop taking life and people for granted.
We become curious and able to learn and grow from the situations that life brings us.
Life becomes an amazingly fun adventure instead of a drag.