The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose(6)

I’m particularly struck by the conversation I had with author, speaker, wife, and mother Shauna Niequist. Shauna was married, raising two sons, and traveling the country with a full-time job when she realized she could no longer ignore the ever-increasing warning bells that the life she wanted did not resemble the life she had.

As we talked, Shauna shared how, in her case, the signs were both physical and spiritual. And how, by finally taking the time to listen to the call and create the changes she most needed, she found peace.

Life is about growth and change, and when you are no longer doing either, you’ve received your first whisper.

Pay attention to what makes you feel energized, connected, and stimulated. Follow your intuition, do what you love, and you will do more than succeed.

You will soar.

—Oprah





Bishop T. D. JAKES


When you are not using your life, your time, your energy, for your highest and best use, and something in the back of the brain is going, Ding, ding, ding, ding!—you’re missing it. You’re missing your life, your purpose, your passion, your excitement, your enthusiasm. I want to shake you, and rattle you, and stir you up to understand that every moment is a gift. Every second is a gift. Every thought is a gift. Every idea is a gift. Every opportunity is a gift. Everybody you meet is a gift. You are gifted with opportunities to begin to maximize what you’ve got.





SHAUNA NIEQUIST


SHAUNA NIEQUIST: If we went out to dinner and talked about the things that mattered to us most, I would say family matters so much to me. My spiritual life matters to me. A deep sense of connection with the people that I love matters. Play and memory making and adventure, that’s who I am. But if you looked at my day-to-day life, you would say, frankly, who you are is actually exhausted. Isolated. Anxious. Not sleeping well. Always hustling to leave something early to come late to the next thing. I was skimming in all of my most important relationships. Hoping that they’d still be there when I got back from this thing or that thing. I was forced to realize that the gulf between the two lives was growing at quite a rapid rate.

Any journey like this has a million different plot points. A lot of warnings that you don’t take heed of and they get louder and louder and louder. But I was starting to realize that I was avoiding silence and stillness at all costs. Thinking maybe I wasn’t just busy from a scheduling standpoint. Maybe I was hiding from something. But I hadn’t quite articulated that yet.

That all crystallized when our family went on a trip and people recommended a beach that they said was the best snorkeling ever. So I went with my son. He was eight at the time. We’re holding hands. I mean, it’s one of those picture-perfect parenting moments. Where you say, This is it. I’m going to hold this in my heart forever. But it was like I had two halves of my brain and two halves of my heart. I had this deep—I think the best word I can think of is self-loathing. This sense of I hate myself. I hate being myself. I’m the problem. I’m the problem with everything. I’m ruining everything. This set of voices that didn’t seem to have any bearing. I couldn’t figure out why they were coming out at this point except I realized it was the only time I had been silent in as long as I could remember. Complete, total silence. Not my kids. Not my husband. Not my to-do list running in my mind. Not me running from one thing to another. Not a television show. Not a song on the radio. Complete total silence that I did not choose. And it was in that silence that I realized there are a lot of things that I’ve been running from, that I’ve been hiding from, and I’ve been using busyness sort of as a defense, as a barrier against facing, Where are these feelings coming from? What are they about? What will it look like to heal them and bring them out into the light?

OPRAH: You loved your life on the outside, but had become someone you didn’t want to be around …

SHAUNA: Yes, I was exhausted. And for me, my exhausted self is my worst self. I’m short-tempered. I’m anxious. I get controlling about stupid things. Things need to happen my way when I’m really, really tired.

OPRAH: Something you said struck me: that you were productive, but you knew you were not well.

SHAUNA: When I look back, I had migraines. I had vertigo. I had what our family affectionately termed the stress barfs. Where I would just throw up several times a week when I got anxious about something.

OPRAH: You weren’t sleeping.

SHAUNA: I would wake up every day at three a.m. These are warning signs. I wasn’t listening to my body. I wasn’t listening to my soul. I was just continuing to work.

OPRAH: So even when your body is saying something’s wrong, you weren’t paying attention. Because waking up and barfing is your body saying, Hey! Your body is trying to speak to you. I always think that everything is speaking to you all the time. Your life is speaking to you all the time. But even then, you couldn’t hear it or you called it something else.

SHAUNA: I think I was so invested in the perception of being known as a highly competent, responsible person. And that was so important to me that I sacrificed my physical health and my emotional health.





DANI SHAPIRO


DANI SHAPIRO: I was waking up at three o’clock in the morning, every morning, in this state of existential panic. I didn’t know what was wrong, but there was this feeling that I was falling and that there was just nothing to catch me. And I intuitively knew that it had to do with a spiritual crisis.