Finding Your Inner Light - Part I

When the Path You Chose No Longer Feels Like Yours

Many of us reach a point in life when we ask ourselves what we have actually been living for.

When we were young, we followed a path that promised to bring us a happy and fulfilling life. Of course, it was a path that was available to us, although we might have hoped for a better one.

We were willing to sacrifice our energy and time in the hope of a better future.

On the surface, many things might have actually improved. Maybe you advanced in your career, built a comfortable financial cushion, created a family, had children, or achieved some of the things people usually associate with a good life.

Or maybe you never fully got there, but exhausted yourself trying to become the kind of person you were told you needed to become.

Either way, something still feels off.

And that’s when the first doubts arrive.

You question whether the path you have been walking was actually the right one for you.

One thing is for sure, though. Sacrificing your life for a better future doesn’t make any sense anymore.

But then comes the question:

Which way should you go now?

And that’s where many of us start to feel lost and hope for a guiding light.

The uncomfortable truth is: no one else can hold the torch for you forever.

You will only find your path once you find your inner light.

Image by Matheus Bertelli on Pexels

What Is Your Inner Light

There is nothing esoteric about this inner light. We all have it. And we have seen it so many times in others.

When we were children, little things could easily excite us. We literally beamed our joy into the world. Our innocent laughter was contagious and could even lift people who felt low.

This spark of aliveness never truly gets lost. It might get buried for a while, though. And that’s when life starts to feel dull and dark.

I remember showing my 82-year-old grandfather how I could give voice commands to my smartphone. For him, this was pure magic. He wanted to know how it worked and whether I was playing a trick on him.

For a brief moment, I could see his eyes light up, as if an inner spark had been awakened.

He had always had a natural interest in anything related to technology. That curiosity stayed with him throughout his life, even as life led him down different paths.

But like so many of us, he lost touch with his passions when life became harder. That’s how life becomes a matter of functioning or surviving in the chaos around us.

The Flow Of Life

Maybe it’s the natural flow of life that we lose touch with that light.

As children, many of us still depend on some kind of protection and care. Some receive enough of it for a while. Others are forced to stand on their own two feet much too early.

Sooner or later, we leave home and learn to carry more of life on our own. We learn that adult life can be pretty tough and that the world is no longer welcoming to us everywhere we go.

And still, most children want to grow up, conquer the world in their own way, and find out what life has to offer. Of course, what life has to offer is not only freedom, love, adventure, purpose, and all the other possibilities we might have dreamt of.

Maybe we need to experience the rougher sides of life, like a hero does.

A typical hero’s journey often begins in a familiar world. Then the hero is called into the unknown. He stumbles, falls, doubts himself, loses direction, and has to face what he never wanted to face.

You might object that you never wanted to be a hero. But you may well have chosen a path that you never really wanted to walk.

Maybe you wanted to be an artist, but then you were told that you needed a proper job to make ends meet. It could also be that your dreams wouldn’t have worked with reality, as painful as that sounds...

When Life Feels Like Too Much

Life can easily feel like too much when we believe we have to carry it all alone.

No matter how strong or smart we are, we are not made to survive completely on our own.

These days, it may feel like we can. But we still depend on others in almost every part of life. The food we eat. The places we live in. The people we turn to when we are sick, lost, or overwhelmed.

My point is that we are all in this together. But often it doesn’t feel like that, especially when we are in an environment that does not seem very empathetic.

In such environments, we might easily learn to abandon ourselves until we start to feel as if we have lost ourselves.

And then it is understandable that everything feels like too much.

---

Coming Next…

This was the opening part of the Finding Your Inner Light healing series.

The next part will be published next Friday as a separate piece, alongside the ongoing Notes To Myself cycle.

It will be for those of you who want to go deeper.

---