SEPTEMBER - 2020

YARO BLOG SEPTEMBER 2020

 

LIFE   AFTER   LIFE

                                                           El Camino de Santiago Spain - 2006

Y. Starak & A. Moffat as pilgrims

Dear reader,

I am now reflecting on my years of retirement and the challenges that kept me well and occupied with family and art. In my ‘other life’ I was working 9am to 5pm most days of the week lecturing students at the University of Queensland dept. of Social Work and Social Science. Those were indeed wonderful years; teaching, researching, and publishing. At the same time, I was a founder and co-founder of several Gestalt Therapy institutes throughout Australia.

Now, in my New LIfe, I am an artist; busy painting portraits of friends and family and exhibiting my work with my partner and wife Gemma Garcia. Even the terrible situation with the COVID virus cannot stop us. We are now very busy with our creative work. (see www. arttherapygestalt.com).

Someone said to me, the other day: “WHAT NOW, HOW IS LIFE AFTER LIFE?” I was not sure of the meaning but decided to reflect on this challenging question. My own calling to a new life was my first experience walking the CAMINO in Spain and a real calling to a new way to walk life. And that is exactly what Michael is describing below, those were my own feelings as a pilgrim walking the 900+K.

My mentor, Michael Meade, indicates that a sign of certain courage is needed to follow what is calling us. This is also linked with my previous blogs on the SOUL. Here is his article that I am happy to share with you and hope you can also “follow your bliss” in the next stage of your life.

A certain kind of courage is required to follow what truly calls to us; why else would so many choose to live within false certainties and pretensions of security? If genuine treasures were easy to find this world would be a different place. If the path of dreams were easy to walk or predictable to follow many more would go that route. The truth is that most prefer the safer paths in life even if they know that their souls are called another way.

What truly calls to us is beyond what we know or can measure. It uses the language of hidden treasures and distant cities to awaken something sleeping within us. The soul knows that we must be drawn out of ourselves to truly become ourselves. Call it a dream or “the treasure hard to attain”; call it a vocation or the awakening of our innate genius. Call it what you will, upon hearing the call we must follow or else lose the true thread of our lives.

A true vocation requires shedding anything that would impede or obscure the call. A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow. As the old proverb says: “Before you begin the journey, you own the journey. Once you have begun, the journey owns you.”

 After all, what good is a dream that does not test the mettle of the dreamer? What good is a path that does not carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.

In the soul’s adventure, we become a self-unknown, a self-unexpected, and in that way, we find the greater soul and genius self within us. Answering the call gives primacy to unknown places and foreign lands; it requires that we seek farther in the world than we would choose on our own. We enter our essential “creatureliness” and learn to sniff at the world again. We learn to read the wind and find our way by sensing and intuiting, by imagining and by dreaming on. Eventually, the dream of the soul becomes the only hope; it becomes a prayer and a map as well. In allowing the journey to “have us” we become lost; we lose our usual selves to find our original self again. Lost souls are the only ones who ever get found.

- Michael Meade, "Fate and Destiny, The Two Agreements of the Soul" 

Father and son finding treasures of the unbelievable by Damien Hirst