Thriving Through Uncertainty

by Tama J Kieves

  WOODY ALLEN

  True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

  SOCRATES

  I want to talk to you about finding your way—your electric, true, one-of-a-kind way. You have a way. But first you must let go of what you think you know about your situation.

  “I have no idea what to do with my life!” I cry.

  “You said you like to write,” the therapist says in a calm, collected, obviously goading therapist’s voice.

  “Okay, but what am I going to do with my life?” I snort back. The notion of writing is not an idea. It’s an idiocy. It’s an embarrassment. I’ve got to make a living and survive, I tell myself. That’s a fact. I build a stone wall around my heart.

  Back in the days when I was practicing law and craving another life, I could not even consider becoming a writer. Writing was like a haint, a bad spirit wandering in New Orleans, a ghost begging for recognition. I avoided the wayward thoughts. They haunted me anyway.

  I don’t know when I finally listened to something other than my loud, insistent “rational” mind. But when I did, a writing career became a lone bread crumb on a path, and then the path, and then a gong, a festival, a homecoming, and a stratosphere in which I could finally breathe. It changed the facts in my life.

  Sometimes you can’t find your answers because you don’t want to find your answers.

  You want different answers. Or you’re positive at the get-go what will work and what won’t—before you’ve tried a thing. But an inspired life requires us to move past our “known” identity and into our unknown potential.

  This is frightening to only one part of yourself. It is a clarion call to another. If you want to know the truth, you have to be open to all possibilities.

  Are you willing to realize your way, even if it conflicts with what you think the way is? Spoiler alert: Life is more mystical than the tiny brain that seeks to organize it.

  I’m a story girl. So here goes. Years ago, I was teaching at Hollyhock, a retreat center on Cortes Island, in the majestic wilds of Canada. Before my program began, I headed to the beach for some solo time. Living in Denver, I do not miss any chance I get to bow before an ocean, offer my dry skin to the Great Moisture Gods, and purify my lungs in salt air.

  By the way, I am terrified of getting lost. That’s because I get turned around at the drop of a hat. I have no sense of direction. Sure, I can help anyone find inner direction. But when it comes to external direction, you’re better off asking a tourist than me in my own hometown. And don’t get me started on tools. Basically, a compass is to me what it is to a zebra. Only the zebra has a chance.

  I was born and raised in New York City, where pizza parlors and street signs adorn every block. And there are no less than 8 million people to ask, who all have strong opinions and who may not only walk you to your destination, but just may want to feed you pumpernickel bagels, advice, and comedy along the way. Hollyhock is remote.

  I tell myself I’ll only go for about fifteen minutes, being mindful of the hour, the thinning light of the disappearing day, and the nearing of the time when I need to lead my workshop. I cut down some path to the beach and am swallowed by awe. This is a beast of an ocean. This is a strip of beach at the end of the world, fierce, the kind of place where eagles fly—and they really do fly here. There are no knish vendors anywhere. There are no people.

  I walk for just a little while before deciding to return. But walking back up the beach, I feel as though I’ve gone too far. I’m not seeing my exit, so to speak. My heart flutters with its peremptory “We might be lost” theme. It’s not quite the Jaws music yet, just a tinny mosquito version. It’s no big deal, I calmly tell myself, proud to be a Zen girl in the moment as I walk back the other way on the beach. I’m looking for a particular rock that was my landmark.

  There are some homes I could climb to, so I remind myself I’m not entirely alone. I see some sort of path near an empty home with a worn yellow frame. That’s not it, I know. I would have remembered that. I walk on. I don’t see what I’m looking for anywhere. Okay, calm down. Pace yourself. I don’t have my cell phone with me, moans the worrier. Yeah, like I would have cell reception here at the end of the world.

  My workshop starts soon. The light is fading. Crazy girl is starting to rampage: You are on a remote beach in a remote place where you had to take two planes, two ferries, and a cab to get here and they actually told you with pride that bears have been sighted, as though this might be a good thing. So I decide, fine, let’s just go to one of the houses, hang your head in crybaby I-am-not-Cheryl-Strayed-or-any-kind-of-rugged-individual-who-can-find-her-way-off-a-freaking-beach shame, and beg for help. I scrape myself up to the closest home. I knock on the door. No one comes. I pound on the door, discreetly. Okay, now wildly. All right, then. This is not an option. Now I know I am alone. It’s getting darker.

  I need to find that rock. I didn’t walk that far. I pass the empty house with the yellowed border. Okay, I know it’s not that way. I walk down the beach again. Adrenaline thrums through me, which might be helpful if, indeed, it turns out I do need to fight off Bigfoot. Do bears come down to the beach? This is not a helpful line of thought. Zen girl is gone.

  I am lost. I am alone out here. I am supposed to be leading a five-day retreat in less than twenty minutes on finding your way in life. The irony hits me later. I wonder if they will find my lovely bones. For what feels like the millionth time now, I go back by the path near that house with the yellowed border. While I know it’s not the way, it’s obviously a path somewhere out of this Canadian Bermuda Triangle, so I take it. I am desperate. I am open to anything. I don’t know what else to do.

  Just moments after I start walking up this path, my knees buckle with relief. I tremble with gratitude and wonder. I see my rock. I see the goddamn rock. I want to kiss it. No, I want to make out with it. It’s the rock I’ve been looking for this whole time, my landmark, my arrow, the one that completely disappeared from sight. I understand now that I would never have seen it from the beach. I would never have found what I was looking for in the insistent way I was looking for it. I was drop-dead convinced that going up the path by the house with the yellowed border was wrong. And I was wrong.

  That’s when I got the joke. Those who are lost should not insist that they know the way.

  I found my way by opening up to the unfamiliar. I found my direction by experimenting, by just going forward in a direction whether it was right or not. I needed to move forward to get more information, not just pace back and forth on the same path, doing the exact same thing I’d done before.

  “You have a way. But first you must let go of what you think you know about your situation.”

  According to A Course in Miracles, a miracle occurs because you undo what your mind says is true. Because what you assume is true may limit what you could experience. Are you willing to see things differently? This is the question that opens the way for a miracle. It’s like Buddha said, “The mind that perceives the limitation is the limitation.”

  For most of my young adult life, I believed it was true that I would starve if I decided to be a writer. I “knew” that creative people did not make money. I knew I had no connections in the publishing world and that it would be hard to break into a competitive industry.

  But my hallelujah-take-me-home shift came by finally asking myself, What if you’re wrong? What if you could have your dreams come true in this lifetime? What if you’re called for a reason? What if your life is asking you to go in this direction because you are meant to experience this direction? What if you don’t know everything that’s possible?

  I felt suffocated in my “safe” life. I had to have another possibility. And so, I did the “unthinkable.” I became humble. I chose to believe that maybe my sense of reality wasn’t everything the universe had to offer. Maybe I didn’t yet know or realize my own capacity or destiny. Maybe I
didn’t yet appreciate the radical potential of coming from love—of higher-vibrating atoms singing at the top of their lungs, bright light and the right thoughts. Maybe I hadn’t yet experienced a sense of life-altering grace because I’d never embraced what I wanted—and grace would only rush in to support the truth, not the lack of it. Maybe it was time to open myself up to new experiences I just couldn’t imagine.

  It’s now decades later. With four published books and readers spread across the world, I’m standing in the life that my younger self “unrealistically” dreamed of, even though she had no idea how to get here. I am here now because she let go of the limits she assumed she knew to be true. She walked beyond conditioning. And that created new conditions. It seems destiny provided more options than “reality.”

  You may not be as stuck as you think.

  I assure you, you are not limited in the ways you might believe. You are not small or even lost. You are in the place where you can decide to open your mind to new possibilities. Walk down an unfamiliar path, if even for a little way, to get perspective and insight. Wherever you are, the presence of love can find you. Your own inspired intelligence can guide you—unless you insist on being right.

  Let me tell you, it can be a glorious thing to be wrong.

  It’s a wonderful feeling to realize that you have thought such tiny thoughts about yourself and your possibilities in this world and you are wrong, wrong, wrong and the truth of gratification still awaits you. It’s a relief to discover there are solutions, strategies, and support you can’t foresee—but that exist anyway.

  Sometimes, only those of us who are willing to be lost can truly find our way.

  TURNING POINTS:

  Your Answer Is Never Where You’re Looking

  You have a way. But first you must let go of what you think you know about your situation.

  Sometimes you can’t find your answers because you don’t want to find your answers.

  You’re positive at the get-go what will work and what won’t—before you’ve tried a thing. But an inspired life requires us to move past our “known” identity and into our unknown potential.

  If you want to know the truth, you have to be open to all possibilities.

  Those who are lost should not insist that they know the way.

  My hallelujah-take-me-home shift came by finally asking myself, What if you’re wrong? What if you could have your dreams come true in this lifetime? What if you’re called for a reason?

  Wherever you are, the presence of love can find you. Your own inspired intelligence can guide you—unless you insist on being right.

  It’s a wonderful feeling to realize that you have thought such tiny thoughts about yourself and your possibilities in this world and you are wrong, wrong, wrong and the truth of gratification still awaits you.

  STOP FIGURING IT OUT, LET IT OUT

  Choose gloriously. Seize your wild-want, not that freeze-dried politically correct mild want . . . only the real dream has the power.

  TAMA KIEVES (from This Time I Dance!)

  Think less, feel more.

  OSHO

  Maybe you wonder how to discern your true-life direction, but let’s be real, you can’t even decide what to watch on cable TV sometimes. So, let’s have a little talk.

  I’m in the business of helping people get resounding answers for their most pressing decisions in life. Now, it’s not uncommon for career-coaching clients to call and say something like, “I love gardening, day-trading, playing the oboe, hiking in jungles, Russian love poetry from the nineteenth century, and I’m in commercial real estate. So how do I put that all together?” Then they pause and wait for their magic answer. They will be pausing a long time, I assure you.

  I will tell you what I tell them: It’s tantalizing to have a thousand ideas, but really, you don’t have a thousand different doorways with your name emblazoned on every one of them. The mind is a big, goofy flirt and just loves ideas and promises. But in any given moment, your powerful heart has committed itself to only one clarity, maybe two.

  You don’t even have a decision to make. It’s already been made and encrypted within you, like the rhythm of your toes softly padding on the floorboards and the delicate, determined map of your fingerprint. It’s just there, strange as the moon, and yet familiar as your breath.

  And even if you do have many interests and directions, you polyamorous lover of life, you still have only one thing you wish to do right now. That’s all that matters. Let’s get concrete. You don’t want to do everything in this moment. This moment has its own decree. And each moment will guide you to where you belong, unless, of course, you argue with yourself and resist.

  Remember, the mind likes to window-shop. It fancies the life in this country charm boutique, then wants to try on the red leather boots in another. But the soul invests all of itself. It’s not shopping for mild distraction. It’s not enthralled by possibility. It’s tracking the scent, the scent of destiny.

  You can’t talk yourself into sticking with one thing when it doesn’t stick; a ribbon isn’t Velcro. You crave transformation. You’re not answered through rationalization, though you can talk about it all night. Something within you knows your power and cannot rest in less.

  “Of course you feel unclear. You’re scrabbling around for clues, arrows, reasons, statistics. . . . You’re looking with the mind for answers of the heart.”

  So how do you get to the answers of your heart, gut, soul, or inner weather forecaster?

  Well, I have to tell you a story.

  Some years ago, I was presenting several workshops on a cruise ship. At the port in Cozumel, Mexico, I decided to snorkel. On the empty scenic beach, the resort blasted Mexican and country music from huge speakers just in case we Americans, straight from a noisy cruise ship, got instantaneously bored or agitated and ran riot because we were left alone with our minds for half a second without distraction. Admittedly, some of the vacationers did look bewildered with no “hoot and holler” win-big-bingo game in progress.

  Of course, I, one of the peaceful, loving “gurus” on board, immediately hated the music, resenting the carnival-fake-forced-fun loudness of it all. I could feel the vinegar in my blood. I ached for quiet. Plus, I had a headache, which, let me tell you, does not play well at all with cheerful accordions and guitar twangs. Then, of course, feeling like the five-headed alien (all of them with headaches) who obviously doesn’t know how to have a good time, I was also annoyed with myself for being irritated at all, in Cozumel, on a weekday, on a Gratitude Cruise, I kid you not.

  I waded into the ocean with my snorkel gear. The surface of the water was choppy and no matter which way I turned, the color and texture looked the same. Like that churning water, my mind felt jangled and overstimulated, muttering to itself in one continuous argument, like a street person I once saw in New York City having a screaming match with someone from long ago or not of this world.

  Then I dove below the surface. And my experience changed dramatically.

  I entered this new dimension of extreme silence, swaying blue neon fish, lilac-colored coral, undulating movement, and expansiveness. It was magic. A whole new realm engulfed me. Any sense that it was Monday or that I was Tama disappeared. I was jolted into wonder. In this dimension, I could see things I would never have seen from the surface. Beauty erased all conditioning and inner cross talk. I felt a sense of wholeness. And of love.

  It’s a great metaphor for how we will discover our truth. Beyond the noise and below the surface of the choppy water, another world awaits, a living world of color, texture, and distinction. It’s always there. Yet it’s invisible to your ordinary surface mind. The whole ocean looks the same until you dive deeper. It’s the same thing with our minds. Ideas all look the same at the level of the mind.

  Of course you feel unclear. You’re scrabbling around for clues, arrows, reasons, statistics, and even a broc
hure with a money-back guarantee. Maybe a little insurance policy attached. Now we’re talking. But you’re unclear because you’re trying to find a neon blue fish on dry land, where it will never be. You’re looking with the mind for answers of the heart.

  Your true answers are below the surface of the choppy daily mind.

  They await you in inspired time. They exist in another state of consciousness. You won’t dive deeper by being reasonable. It’s love that changes everything. It’s play. It’s peace. It’s not trying to figure things out, but letting them out instead.

  I have endless things to say about this, which is why I do what I do for a living. But let me offer you three nonlinear ways to beckon the deepest answers of your knowing heart.

  Find Peace, Then Answers

  Most of us are desperate for clarity or direction, because we believe it will bring us peace of mind. Ah, grasshopper, it works the other way around. It’s peace of mind that frees answers.

  Agitation stirs confusion, like a madman running through the crowd screaming, “Fire, gunmen, aliens, bad hair, the apocalypse, and people are coming over and you haven’t cleaned the house!” And then asking, “Oh, what do you want to do with your life?”

  Settle down. Give up your need for an answer. I know that’s hard. It’s the secret of life and it works. The master sage Lao-tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, “No desire is serenity. And the world settles of itself.” I take that to mean we stop trying, grasping, and climbing the walls. And then the big-sky Buddha mind envelops us or we slip into surrender, the feeling of inner quiet that sometimes comes after a long hike or good cry. From this ground of being, we don’t require answers to feel okay. And with this self-love and acceptance, we can do anything. That’s when we start to know what we really want to do.

  Where do you find stillness? Or feel your most intimate feelings? Is it in a run along the river bank, on a blue meditation cushion, journaling, or talking to a friend or mentor? Look to connect with your spirit more than you look for answers. Peace is the gateway to intimacy, insight, conviction, and self-knowledge. When you stop pushing yourself for answers (or pushing away the truths you know), you will see what is already there.