Realizing Where We are

REALIZING WHERE WE ARE
1.1 After taking a career course I had some rough ideas on what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to lead people, inspire them, cheer them on and I wanted to express myself. I wanted to be able to use my mind to see solutions. And I wanted to grow and at the same time stay young. The biggest and most important thing to me seemed to be working with my body but at that time I wasn’t sure in what context. So I focused on the other things that I thought I might like to do.
1.2 I looked into management at the company I was with. I thought that maybe I would like to get into management. I also started to take acting lessons to see if that was something that I would like. I was dimply aware that I wanted to work with the body but I wasn’t sure in what context.
1.3 Thinking that I wanted to be famous actor, I quit my engineering job fully believing I was going to be discovered and taken to Hollywood. Somehow, that didn’t quite happen. Instead I started to teach more and more yoga, which was good because my retirement savings were running out. Meanwhile I still thought that I wanted to act. Actually what I wanted to be was famous and I though acting was a pathway towards that. But then I realized that what I really wanted was a job that made me happy.
1.4 I continued to teach yoga but even after a few years I still didn’t think of myself as a teacher. When I met other teachers, especially famous or well known ones, I didn’t like telling them I was a teacher because I’d never been to India to study with a Guru, I’d never been given approval and I’d learned from a book. But I was teaching, and I was helping people and eventually I realized that the only person who really needed to approve of me as a teacher was myself.
1.5 Of course the irony of it all is that when I’d taken the career course I knew that I wanted to work with my body in some way. I just didn’t realize that teaching yoga I was doing exactly that. And even when a roommate commented that I appeared to like teaching yoga better than I did doing acting it still didn’t click.
1.6 I realize now that sometimes we have what we want, we just don’t realize it, as if clarity applies to not only knowing what we want but also recognizing it when we have it.
1.7 It reminds me of what happened to me in university once when I got one of my math tests back. I’d solved one of the problems correctly but didn’t realize it and crossed out my answer. The Teaching assistant who marked it gave me a perfect mark because I did know how to solve the problem even though I had crossed it out.
1.8 In acting, knowing what we wanted in a scene, that want pulled us along, we didn’t have to think, we just had to let go and let our desire pull us. And I believe that is what happens when we know what we want in life, once we recognize that idea, it pulls us towards itself even when we forget what the idea is.
1.9 Maybe that’s a little like Love. Love pulling us towards the things we love even if we don’t know it or realize what it is that we love (or whom).