Calling Back Your Spirit

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be."
-- Abraham Maslow

A while back, I worked with a woman – let’s call her Martha – who had experienced many different forms of depression throughout her life. Now Martha was getting a divorce.

She had married because trying to become an artist was leading nowhere. She wanted to raise a family and when she met her husband, he was such a good upstanding guy that it was easy to see how nicely marriage would change her world. That was 15 years ago.

For the past few years, things had been a mess at home. Martha and her husband had no common ground. He did not understand her artistic ways – pointing out all the reasons that they could never stand up in the real world. And Martha didn’t understand her husband’s pragmatic approach to life and money management.

Martha still had the artist within her and was attracted to many creative ways to make money. But they never passed her husband’s reality check and every one of them eventually folded.

In the midst of the divorce, Martha came to me for some coaching to help her get through this phase of her life, get back on her feet, and design her new life. She needed to make money and was sure that in order to do so she would need to become more "realistic" like her husband. The "Catch 22"was she hated being realistic. She felt like she was selling her soul but she was convinced that her artistic ways would end up taking her nowhere – except into poverty. Needless to say, such a dilemma led to significant energy and mood disruptions.

The core of Martha’s problem was her disrupted experience of personal power – especially her personal power in relationship to someone or something else.

There are many forms of personal power. The one Martha was evolving was connected to her experience of physical power – her ability to create the physical environment to support her physical survival. Power is our life energy and Martha felt like she had none. Long ago she had given it away to others who could provide for her.

Martha had never really experienced that she was able to attract this life force – this power - to herself. So she ended up borrowing it from those around her. In her mind, she had survived this long through the energies of other people because her life force was essentially corrupted and was not capable of sustaining her. She was convinced this was her "inherent flaw."

The task in front of Martha now was to "call back her spirit" from all those relationships and other people and things that she had given it to. The challenge was to develop sufficient internal strength so that she would be able to express her personal power in a physical form (generate the money she needed and wanted to live a rewarding life) in a way that did not require her to turn her back on her artistic ways.

I guided Martha through a process of developing a clean relationship with physical power, inviting her personal power back into her energy system and breathing the life force back into herself. She learned to honor her own spirit and use it to ignite her own power in the world.

For Martha, it was necessary for her to descend into the "realistic vs. the artistic." By transcending her perceived limitations and self doubts she brought back into herself the power that she had given away to experiences, people, places and things over her life.

She realized that there was nothing wrong with being realistic but that it just wasn’t her. She was an artist. So she started living like an artist. She decorated her room so that it reflected her style and preferences. She visited museums, lively artistic chat rooms, and tried out different artistic groups. She read books about artistic creation rather than realistic creation. Eventually she started her own business as an environmental beauty consultant. It floundered in the beginning but as she let her spirit lead the way she soon got strong enough so that she could be just realistic enough to achieve a strong and secure marriage between the two worlds. Eventually she left her suburban home for her dream home in the woods by the lake. I left her with her spirit happily bringing forth her creations – and nicely supporting herself in the world.

Our internal experience of personal power is necessary because it is the foundation from which we create our health and well being and all of our interactions with the physical world. Without full possession of our spirit, we can experience no personal power – either internal or external.

If you feel life-less and listless, lack passion, are full of fears and anxieties - you may have lost your spirit. No one can live well without their spirit. The task of calling your spirit back is no easy task. It is a vague task without linear steps and directions. It can be lonely because no one can tell you exactly what you need to do. It can be like a dark night of the soul. Calling your spirit back into your body is something in which every person needs to find their own way.

Even though calling back your spirit is a uniquely individual task, the presence of guide who has been there and back is a crucial part of the process. The guide holds the space of transcendence for you- beckoning you forward as you make your path toward your destination, which is yourself.

If you have lost your spirit (and something inside of you always knows), it is time to call it back. Find those experiences, places, people and things that are draining your life energy and shut off their supply of power from you. Go ahead and begin the journey back to yourself. Bring your life energy back to you and let it flow out into the world and within your own self, creating healthy and well personal worlds.

Ways to Call Back Your Spirit:

"First tell yourself what you want to be: and then do what you need to do."
-- Epictetus