All my life, I’ve heard, “You are so intense” and “You have so much energy” and “Does everything have to be so deep with you?”
All my life, I’ve heard, “You are so silly” and “You are so funny, you should do stand-up” and in the last 17 years, “I bet you are the most fun mom ever.”
You know what? I am intense and I am silly.
Together, these ways of being undergird and call attention to my life’s calling: to bring aliveness into the world.
I have felt this call literally ever since I can remember.
Often, I love my calling. It is a delicious, rolling unending curiosity. It is mine.
Sometimes, I do not want this calling,
I want a different calling. Something less exhausting. Less public. Something I can do alone in my studio.
Do you ever feel that way about your calling?
Do you doubt it or wonder if it’s real or wonder why you can’t make more (any) money doing it?
Do you still insist you don’t know your calling?
All of the above is normal.
A few brief thought about callings:
Your calling is something you can’t help but do and that doesn’t mean you recognize it or believe it or like it.
Your calling is not unique – your natural expression of it is.
Your calling isn’t about making money. It can make you money and that’s not its purpose. I do my best work waving to the kids walking to school or hanging with Lilly’s friends on a tired Friday night.
When you’re exhausted or comparing yourself to others, your calling becomes a smothering, a draining, a burden. You may pervert your calling to one extreme. Me, I get overly serious and pedantic. I speak in a low ponderous “yoga” voice and I forget the alive part. I don’t trust my natural silliness.
When you insist your calling make you special or famous, please stop.
Your calling is here right now. It doesn’t require you to do anything but let it come through you. Yes, you can learn things to more masterfully express your call – and that can bring money and fulfillment – and that’s not the point.
The point is to let what wants to be expressed through you be expressed through you.
The point is to follow your call and bring back the boons, the gifts, to yourself and the world.
The point is to listen and serve.
The point is to have fun!
I might have been sinking into pedantic writing for a minute, which goes with my pedantic yoga voice. That comes up whenever I think silly is not good enough, serious is better.
Here’s my invite to you today: Listen to how your call wants to bubble and spill out of you today and let it.
I’m off to make a video for my new course with Michele called Teach Now talking about this very thing – because so many of us hear the call to teach as part of our bigger call, and we doubt that, too.
Thanks for reading this.
P.S. Teach Now closes at midnight this Sunday. Get the first call free and listen for clues so you can win a free flat screen TV, and I-Pad and a gold-plated calling – not. But there is a prize. A really good one. You have to sign up to find out what it is. Go here.
