A very long time ago (thankfully) I found myself to be very stuck. To qualify, whether I was in fact stuck or not wasn’t so much the issue as much as the almost unbearable feeling of being stuck. Some call it depression, others angst. Existentialists and French people simply call it life.

As an American man in my early twenties, I felt a great deal of resentment surrounding a perceived cultural expectation to not only go out and build something solid in the world that makes a lot of money, but to be happy at the same time. I felt burdened by it all. Yes, I attended a great American university and got good grades. I even attended arguably the most prestigious graduate school in our nation afterwards with even better grades. However, it wasn’t before long that I found myself swimming in a sea of despair.

I was at that point of awareness that I believed I had the ability to do something great in the world but felt utterly clueless as to what that looked like or where to begin. I remembered my chosen High School yearbook quote with disdain: “The road to anywhere begins with where you are.” As a seventeen year old, this notion had felt hopeful and bold; as a young man with a Masters from Harvard teaming with strength, virility and visions, it felt a mockery.

I experienced a confusing paradox: While I felt melancholic and defeated, I also felt passionate and creative about ideas and beliefs. I was conscious for the first sustained period of my life of a personal relationship to my Source. As Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it: “Faith is a miracle, and yet no man is excluded from it; for that in which all life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.” I truly felt that passion for life, however I felt paralyzed when it came to bridging the creative, spiritual impulses with actually doing something.

After a series of terrible challenges and general upheaval in my little world, I took leave of my non-lucrative position making bagels in suburbia, grabbed my tent and my dog and headed for the desert. I decided I needed another “vision quest.” However, in hindsight, this label at least that time, was a cover up for a desperate Hail Mary shot towards the end zone. I was at wits end and had no idea what else to do. I parked myself in the middle of the Mojave Desert where I had previously had positive experiences.

Not this time. I sat in my tent beneath the scorching sun and cried. I hiked atop the tallest mountains in sight with my dog and my walking stick as if getting as high up as possible to some imagined heaven would provide better acoustics when I pleaded my case for guidance. I sat and I sat. After six days, I felt more empty, hungry and miserable than I had been when I first arrived.

I didn’t hear a loud voice from above with clarity and grace directing me to some wonderful terrestrial assignment.

What I heard was a still, small voice from within me that said: “Stop hurting yourself. You do not have to suffer.” At the time, the awareness that I could leave the barrenness of the desert was a non-event. Ho-hum. I already felt like a spiritual “failure” not having been given the command from God Central to do great things. So, the notion that I could just pack up my sleeping bag and head home seemed fairly miserable in the grand scheme of things.

However, I would say there have been few more important lessons in my life. The understanding that I choose my suffering like I choose my coffee in the morning is as profound as they come. The consideration that I do not have to suffer in order to create change or forward movement in my life is monumental.

Not knowing what I want or can do to make a difference in the world is one thing. Knowing that I don’t have to beat myself up for that lack of clarity is another. The compassion around choosing to love myself along the journey (even when it feels like an impossibility that this could actually be my journey) is one of the deepest truths I have learned.

I hope it helps you on your journey.

“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. C.G. Jung

It was a fascinating synchronicity in my life. As my house was pelted by thundering winds and layers of thick, unrelenting snow last week, rocks, bottles and bullets flew in Cairo. The inundation I experienced here in Chicago felt in some ways to be overshadowed by the revolution taking place in Egypt, and yet, in other ways the two events felt strangely aligned. I skipped back and forth between CNN and the Weather Channel, watching for a break in both relentless storms.

While elements of change ebbed and flowed from the heartland of the United States to the ancient sands of the Middle East, I couldn’t help but ponder the significance of an apparent web of momentous physical and psychic events occurring on our planet and in our consciousness.

I suppose I unconsciously took it for granted that folks in the Middle East were not willing to fight for their rights. Regime after controlling, oppressive regime in the Arab world seemed to have taken advantage of a few convenient scapegoats (the U.S., Israel, capitalism, Hollywood, “The West”) through the years, conveniently overshadowing their own horrible human rights violations, the economic rape and pillaging of their common citizens and the general manipulation of hearts and minds.

Over shadow is truly at the core of it, too. It takes a lot to blur the deep human longing for wholeness, joy and love and it relies upon an overarching, bloated shadow that swaddles our essential love for life in rags of doubt and resentment. The greatest tragedies in human history have typically occurred as a result of similarly monolithic entities who have successfully brainwashed the collective consciousness with a tribal cool-aid aimed at using our inherent desire to protect against ourselves.

Not dissimilar has been the environmental snow job on the planet…

The only thing that matters is our advancement. You want to protect our evolution as a species, don’t you? Then who cares about strip mining? Who cares about aerosol cans and light bulbs? Who cares about sucking the earth dry in a matter of a few hundred years what took millions to create? You want to be the best nation, don’t you? The strongest power? Drink, drink, it tastes like fruit punch…

The archetype of the wounded healer is one that has long resonated for me. The notion that in order to truly help others heal one must have done his or her own fair share of suffering and grown from it, i.e. placed the pain and near death experiences (physically and/or emotionally) into a constructive context, is probably the most potent response to “why bad things happen to good people.”

However, when an archetype is not expressed in a meaningful, transformative, dynamic way, it “loads up with energy and becomes inhuman” (Marie-Louise von Franz). I believe that is the situation we are facing on our planet these days.

Without transforming our collective suffering thus creating a sacred wisdom of the heart borne from pain, we risk the creation of something terrible and ugly in its place.

Without choosing to learn from our arrogance, immaturity and selfishness as a society we don’t really grow up as a species and end up retarding our psycho-spiritual development as well.

So many of us live our lives in a state of reaction to Life.

Many of us tend to believe that life is happening to us and that our best chance at attaining happiness is to take our lumps as best we can and hope for the best. Maybe we’ll win the lottery and all will be well.

I believe that all of us, you and I, have an opportunity in this life to not only be free, but to be in a state of peace and joy as well. However, in order to get to that place of peace, we require liberation. Liberation not necessarily from the physical chains that bind us or prisons we occupy; liberation from the thoughts and ideas that keep us trapped in disappointment, resentment and sadness.

Victor Frankl was an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist who spent much of the Holocaust in a concentration camp. Upon his physical liberation from that veritable Hell, he wrote about the process that kept him alive all those years in captivity. More than anything, Frankl suggested, the realization that even locked away in a concentration camp was he free provided the greatest awareness that fed a deep sense of empowerment. He became clear that no matter what anyone does to us, no matter our external circumstances, we always have the ability to choose our attitude.

(T)here is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, and existence restricted by external forces…. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. (1963, Man’s Search For Meaning, p. 106)

This sense of choice when it comes to our state of mind, our affect, and our response to the world is, at its core, our Liberation. The manner in which we answer the beauties and the challenges of life is what sets us free to joyfully dance to the pulse of creation in each heartbeat.

At its core, it is this choice which liberates us to Life.

What liberates you to your life? What thought, opinion, or decision frees you to make love to life as the sky makes love to the earth?

For days before the “Blizzard of 2011,” I interacted with a number of people from friends and neighbors to random strangers. Everyone seemed to have something to say about the storm.

Some were skeptical. “They don’t know crap about predicting these things. They never get it right…”

Others were apprehensive. “Geez, I’m not sure what I’d do with all that snow. I mean, I guess I’d be ok, right?”

Then, there were a surprising number of angry people. “”God, I need this like a need a hole in the head. Another damned storm. I hate this.”

Once in a while, however, I’d run into someone who seemed simply delighted by the prospect of being snowed in for a couple days. “I love it when we can watch all the white flakes flying across the sky from our warm window! And then we get to go play in it when the sun comes out!”

So, the storm came and went and yes, it was The Big One they expected it would be. While there were some real inconveniences for a small number of Chicagoans, most of us got home early enough before it hit, stopped at the supermarket for extra treats and grabbed a video to boot. When the sun came out, neighbors came out to cross country ski, shake their heads and smile and help each other dig out.

We survived. And how quickly we forgot about the feelings we had about the storm before it came…

One of the things I am so grateful to have learned in my time HERE is that my attitude really does matter. Not just for myself and for what I manifest for my personal well-being, but also for what I create for the people around me. I actually have an impact on the world whether I like it or not. Whether I choose to be conscious of it or not.

What a difference it makes in our world when we share hope, joy and excitement with those around us instead of fear, anxiety and anger. In fact, you have a unique gift to share with those around you in every situation, in every moment!

So, please remember this: The words you use matter. You matter. You matter to me.