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I lay back under my makeshift tent, shielding my eyes from the glaring sun that zaps my energy. The quick goats and the pokey sheep, it reminds me of the uneven flow of my own life. Starts and stops, changes in different directions. I let my thoughts meander over my life. The past six years of living in this spiritual commune, a rural aesthetic life, such a change for a city girl. Before this was the year spent in Japan after high school, following my Asian interests, traveling alone and teaching English whenever I found students. Before that, there were the chaotic years of growing up in a large family of ten.

Laying there contemplating my former life changes, I couldn’t have known that just one month later I would leave that lifestyle and begin yet a different journey. Even though I had wondered about my future, I couldn’t have imagined all the exciting possibilities, shifts and changes yet to come, including a vocation specializing in assisting others with life changes. There have been many centers of my life and this was certainly one of them, a period of deep personal growth as an adult woman. My communal life is 23 years in the past. Yet, it’s images, experiences and lessons are deeply ingrained.

After six years withdrawing from the bigger world to live an intentionally simpler, spiritual existence, I was disillusioned by problems that the communal “family” never openly addressed. For example, members came and went, sometimes those I’d forged close relationships with, but it was as if they’d never lived there when they departed because we never talked about them.

I’d met and married someone a year after joining the group. We’d both adjusted to the requirements of long, hard work days and twice daily meditations, but not the dictatorship of principles from the founder and his staff, the founder’s less than spiritual behaviors and the unspoken challenge that wanting to ask questions meant our allegiance wasn’t solid. We were told to leave after submitting a letter and posing “one too many questions.” We were literally driven off the property we’d considered our home, by one of the unpaid family staff members assigned to the task, just as the rest of the community sat down to dinner.

Imagining possible repercussions from submitting such a letter, we’d managed to have a little food money and a friend’s place to stay short-term. This began a series of changes for us, reintegrating back into the Santa Barbara community, finding jobs, getting ID’s and bank accounts and voting again.

After a few different jobs, such as cooking for a sorority and working at the local college campus, my marriage began to take on an “in the real world” perspective. I wanted a better style of living, one like I’d known in my early years. I wanted to achieve certain personal and financial goals. It seemed the city girl background and higher ambitions were more a part of my makeup than my husband’s, at the time. I returned to West Los Angeles and attended school and classes and slowly formed a career direction and relationships more closely honoring my deeper values and respect for myself.

My direction has always been clarified through growing me. Sure, I’ve taken personal growth seminars, read books and essentially was a learning junkie-still am. In addition to my life skills and coach training, I hired my own coach and business consultant. I took classes, attended lectures. I’ve been “therapized” and “counselized” and gosh knows, I knead myself, inside and out.

I have a fitness consultant and health advisor, two close friends and scads of wonderful family and associates that inform, advise and model their excellent choices. My best companion is my husband. We had both learned so much after leaving our former marriages, we were sincerely ready to make our relationship a priority, nurture it daily and commit for our lifetimes. That’s been happening and it’s extraordinary. His arrival at my 40 years of age, 12 years after my divorce and other men I’d dated, was certainly another center of life change. Our wedding was a fairytale come true…but this is a full story in itself. All my supporters hold candles that shine light on the pathway.

If any of this sounds like you, you may be saying, “But this can’t be the fastest route to making changes.” My response is, it depends on your personal and professional growth needs. In all that learning, I can honestly say, the more I’ve settled down to liking me and trusting myself and my inner guidance, the easier my path has unfolded.

I have wondered if I’d gone down different avenues what kind of person I’d have become. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the person writing this article. Every experience, change or choice, has made me who I am today. My husband often reminds me, I wouldn’t be the person he loves. I’d be someone else. When given that perspective, life looks good again.

Yet as thankful as I felt then and do now for this awareness, there are still times I catch myself having regrets and I imagine I’m not the only one. How many of us focus on what we didn’t do, what career options we didn’t choose, which situation we didn’t achieve or person we didn’t relate with?

It is understandable we might focus on what we don’t have, because we don’t always appreciate where we are. So, I strengthen the appreciation muscle daily. I remind myself I could have those other dreams, but then I’d have to surrender other things important to me, like time with loved ones and time for myself. These are stronger values for me. I haven’t had to endure the choices of career and family to the degree other women might, but usually the cream, the most important values rises to the top, if we look deeply enough. I go with the choices that make me feel most at home.

As far as the end of the trail, I don’t know if my life experiences will add up to anything. But, I think the mathematics game to getting ahead is not the approach to take with life. It’s not always 1+1=2, sometimes it doesn’t add up at all and in those times my background, experiences and training have allowed me the adaptability to let go, hold on or take off in new directions. Of course, I’m not always as resilient as I need to be. There are times I imagine myself in another place, another time and am frustrated at my own stumbling blocks. Yet, I have heard that, “the only difference between stumbling blocks and stepping stones is the way you use them.”

I learn daily it’s not about the form life takes, but the quality of living while expressing my true character in the process. It’s not the financial value, because I may never reach financial independence with any of my contributions. But I can sure succeed by being responsible for how I interact with each person I meet. That starts, first and foremost with how I treat myself, respecting my eclectic experiences and the richness my past provides.

With all the lefts and rights and ups and downs in my roadway, I see the only true direction is one of welcoming openness to change in its many forms, not sizing up an unknown future through the limiting perspective of what I have or have not done in the past. I know no matter how ordinary my life may seem at times, I am unique in my expression.

When I find myself getting stuck in comparisons or not always relishing the life I live, I remind myself of a little card I’ve seen in my homeopath’s office. It reads, “You must give your own story to the world,” Carter G. Woodsen. That’s just what I’m doing in my own way, in my own time…because I’m always changing. 

Laurie A. Sheppard is a master certified Life Coach and Career Strategist to mid-level professional women and women entrepreneurs who want to make quality career and personal changes.

Ready to change your life? Contact Laurie at info@creatingatwill.com or call her at 310-645-2874.  Sign up to receive monthly career tips

c. 2005, 2006 This article is free to publish in its entirety, with a courtesy email to info@creatingatwill.com