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Response to Deciding What To Do With Your Life

The following text is a comment that I passed on to Steve Pavlina regarding his post Deciding What To Do With Your Life. Because Steve allows trackbacks and not comments, I’m posting the comment here. It was written yesterday.

Steve, thank you for all your great writing. This post reminds of something I was always fond of saying: if we don’t take our own destiny in hand, the universe will do it for us, sometimes tossing us around like so much flotsam and jetsam. We need to know what we want to do with our lives, as you wisely point out.

Your writing has helped me take take my destiny back into my own hands. This magnificent occasion happened today, while reading your article Jnana Yoga & Bug-Free Beliefs. But it was actually a synergy of several of your supportive (karma), loving (bhakti), knowledgeable (jnana) articles  on self development (raja) helped me to the conclusion that my mental model was all wrong.

I spent much of my life helping people set and achieve goals, learning many forms of meditation, questing for knowledge, etc. I even converted from being a Brahmin Hindu to a Buddhist, and somehow to a Broodist - hence my wrong mental model.

Nine years ago, I had big plans to walk around the world for 10 years, learning languages and cultures and healing. But somehow I let myself become flotsam and jetsam, despite enjoying brief encounters with enlightenment and awareness.

Last night, after about a week of reading your articles, my mental model started to change. Today, while reading your “Jnana Yoga” post, I knew what it was I wanted to do, what I always wanted to do. And then, coming across this post I’m commenting on, my mind and heart were confirmed about what I want to do with my life.

Four years of deep, debilitating, harmful, illness-inducing frustration from being unemployed and feeling unwanted and unnecessary ended today. I’m not the first person to tell you that your writing’s changed their life, and I won’t be the last. When you are ready to learn, the master will appear. Thank you, Sensei Steve