Shared Wisdom Guest Post
Featuring Domini Heddermen from Renaissance Housewife

As I begin this new post, a blank page sits enchantingly before me. How I’m enjoying my new writing life. Since I was a young child, I’ve always wanted to live this life, and now here I am: filling in the empty pages that have sat empty for so long. I can truly say that I’ve started to live my dream. One of them, anyway. But the start of this feels like the start of so much and I feel I’m at the edge of truly living for the first time.

I’m not convinced millions of people are reading these things I say. But it doesn’t really matter. I have to get the things off my soul. I’m purging, in an effort to clean house and get ready for a new paradigm.

And aren’t we all in search of a new paradigm – a new way of being, a fresh outlook on this life we live. Without it, we stagnate. We’re stifled. We can’t see past the daily grind of going to work, washing our clothes, cooking our meals, and cleaning our toilets. We merely exist. What kind of life is that? But so many of us – including me – settle for it, day to day, thinking, “Some day my ship will come in” (a frequent saying of my mom’s).

There exists a flow of energy above our heads that we can tap into if we only pay attention to who we are as people. Be quiet and listen. What is your soul telling you? When you take the time to listen, you will hear what it is you’re supposed to be doing. But when we’re always busy, always moving, and never listening, how can we truly discern what the best path is for us? Staying busy all the time and never taking time to listen and contemplate what our dreams truly are could potentially lead us down a false path. A path that doesn’t make us happy.

And when you begin down the path of your own true and authentic life, you’ll all-of-a-sudden feel more alive than ever. You will have an overwhelming sense of peace, contentedness, and joy. Total living. Just what you’ve always dreamed of, there for the taking. Why wouldn’t you want that?

My personal renaissance came recently. As you might have read, I was doing okay as a young adult, doing okay when I was first married, and starting to wonder about things when the babies came along. Then, to sum up quite a few years… I was doing okay again. I was just kind of plugging along, doing everything I was supposed to do because I was supposed to be doing it. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But I felt empty, as if I wasn’t tapping the depths of who I could really be.

But then, in 2009… my mom was diagnosed with cancer and died ten months later. And, before that, we’d already gotten the diagnosis for my beloved father-in-law, Tom, and lost him in an incredibly quick six months.

Things fell apart for me. In a way they never had before. As a couple, how can you reconcile losing two parents to cancer within months of each other? How can you not go crazy and feel strange stirrings in your soul? Out of the tragedy of loss rose a stronger, purer person who doesn’t pretend anymore that “okay” is good enough.

Every particle of the universe is humming with energy and constant motion. I feel like I can leap into this pool of forward energy now. When I do what I love, I leap into the pool and am propelled forward by forces too huge for me to understand.

I now watch for that flow of energy that is all around me. It is there, waiting for me to tap into it. Instinct leads me, which often seems counter-cultural to a lot of people. But it makes me happy. And it makes my husband happy. And my kids are gleefully soaking it up, as kids will do. So I’m not going to apologize for living from my soul.

I’m only encouraging more people to do the same.

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Thank you so much, Domini, for choosing to live from your soul. This is my wish for us all, and your inspiring words will help us do exactly that.

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