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A Life to Love

Our longing and our discontent can guide us to our best possible future. Long time life coach and entrepreneur, Mary Morrissey, encourages us to notice our longing and our discontent.
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Our longing and our discontent can guide us to our best possible future.

Long time life coach and entrepreneur, Mary Morrissey, encourages us to notice our longing and our discontent. So many of us go along from activity to activity, day to day not paying attention to these helpful sign posts. Are we fully enjoying the lives we are living?

We may not give ourselves permission to entertain our longings, or to acknowledge our discontent. If we did, we might be called to make changes which could expand our lives in ways that excite us, but also terrify us.

Humans don’t like change. Fear is the “border guard”, which keeps us hemmed into a life that may be ‘fine’ but not incredible. 

Fear provides subtle habitual messaging to keep us reigned in. For some of us, we experience ‘imposter syndrome’ -feeling like those around us have not yet discovered how inept or unqualified we really are and that anxiety saps our energy and our willingness to extend ourselves. Others subconsciously replay declarations of some other shame-based messaging that tells them not to extend themselves or draw attention as they may appear foolish or ridiculous. There are many versions of this contracted messaging and we all have it to varying degrees. 

We don’t need to be paralyzed by it. We don’t need to remain hemmed in, living life as if on a treadmill rather than as this incredible opportunity to challenge ourselves, expand our experience and truly live.

As Morrissey says, some people don’t live ninety years, they live one year ninety times. 

So, now to our longing. Tuning into it can be akin to brainstorming since we allow ideas to emerge for consideration without judgement. We otherwise risk a ‘kink in the hose’, which may block the flow of our best insights and ideas. 

A question that can assist the flow is: What would I love? This can apply to what you would love to do, to be, to have and to give. It can apply to relationships, vocations, health and pastimes. What brings you energy? What brings juiciness? What puts a pep in your step or lights a fire in your belly? And for now we simply enjoy these as we jot them down. Morrissey says, we “put the ‘how’ on hold”. 

It is common for that old wet blanket fear to rear its head with rules, restrictions and commentary. Just thank it for sharing and carry on!

Discontent, as another signpost to our best life, can be a challenge to bring into consciousness. Suss out where there are feelings of ‘stuckness’ and constriction. These are indicators of places we are longing to expand past those previously held borders of experience. 

Once again fear may be lurking with taunts and warnings about not messing with the status quo potentially causing loss of relationships, jobs and the ‘steadiness’ of our comfortably uncomfortable lives. These are possibilities, but we need to remember that any loss makes room for the new and better which will be more in alignment with the life we actually desire and within which we will flourish.

Practice placing attention on the dream, the longings, despite that pesky fear’s messaging. Remember where our attention goes, energy flows. 

What would you love?

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