In 2011, after 7 years of an intense entrepreneurial journey working 7 days a week I had a burnout. I had neglected all the signs of exhaustion my body had given me. I had constantly filled my agenda with “to dos” and ignored my needs for relaxation until I had to face it the hard way. Starting from an asthma attack, I had to spend two weeks in the hospital. All the injected vitamins could do was to restore my vitality to only walking around the bed; forget about working and multitasking.
I was already going to therapy at that time, but I was unable to accept that I was facing a real problem in my life. Staring at the walls in my hospital room made me reconsider my lifestyle and my happiness level. If success meant money, I had succeeded. If success meant fulfillment, I had seriously failed at it. So at 27 I found myself dealing with a success that brought along an even bigger failure with it. The failure of not knowing who I was, what kind of life I wanted to live, and how to identify red flags in my race for more.
The physical recovery took weeks, but the emotional one took way longer. As I was not prepared for success, I was not prepared for failure either. I did not know how to deal with any of it. I only knew how to do more of what I was doing which was working. Bringing balance and meaning to my life was an even stranger story to me. Where to start from? What to do? How to talk about it? How to deal with fear? With all of these questions, following the working path seemed like the only way out to ignore the uncomfortable journey of discovering my real needs.
But I did want to have a better life and to know more about who I was. So I started going to yoga after therapy, then reiki, then family constellations, then energetic healing, then personal development workshops, then emotional release therapy, then theta healing, then NLP and many many more.
You name it, I did it. The more I discovered, the less I felt I knew.
There is a hypnotic flow of personal development events, tools, and quick fixes. Once you go on this path, it is so difficult to find the balance or to stop.
I had many “aha” moments and I felt I needed to share them. Some of my friends looked right through me when I opened up about these spiritual-personal-development topics with them. They could not understand that we were having a conversation about something that was not science based or that there weren’t any numbers to prove it. Does this ring a bell to anyone?
So I started to make new friends from my spiritual-personal-development activities. We talked for hours about concepts, nuances, feelings, interpretations of ideas, dreams, planets and so on. But only with a few of them could I also talk about my business, my interest in formal education or investments.
Initially, I thought my old friends were not up to date with the development trends. The extreme of looking at life only based on logical rational pragmatic views felt unbalanced to me. There cannot be data about all the things we feel and experience. If we cannot measure something, it does not mean that thing does not exist and does not affect us. I always gave them examples of love and fear. We cannot measure them or have statistical data about our history with love and fear, but they definitively impact our lives.
On the other hand, my new spiritual friends went to the other extreme. The extreme where pragmatic life does not matter much, wealth is for the lost ones, and numbers are for the insensitive ones. I was fascinated by their light hearted detachment in the beginning. I could agree that we have a soul that does not need numbers and money, but we also have a mind and a body, and all of their needs that do.
Then, I understood. I do not blame or judge one category or the other. I actually appreciate both of them and I want to learn from them. I want to live a balanced life, where the mind, the body and the soul harmoniously have their needs and their curiosities met.
“Too spiritual” is almost the same thing as “too rational”. But on different sides of the scale. The beauty of these extremes is that there exists a middle ground. I’ll meet you there.
I keep my curiosity to learn as much as I can and grow in many areas of my life. A journey of growing and blooming means growing as a professional and blooming as an individual. Wisely and gracefully. Sometimes with specific concrete results, and other times only with twinkles and inner expansion.
Where do you find yourself now?
Which are your stories on meeting the rational and spiritual?