Have you ever felt lost?

This past year moved me in unexpected and welcome ways. 

Pre pandemic I was the proverbial frog slowly and comfortably boiling myself alive. I was getting more and more bruised as I blindly bumped up against the realities in my working life that were no longer…working.

The world stopped and this gave me permission to do the same.

The reality of a world where no one had easy answers or clarity about the future made it easier for me to let go of my own ambitions and plans. I was able to rest and have the internal resources to face some difficult facts.

I love the changes in myself that have emerged, but as the external world starts to move back towards some sort of normal, I feel lost. I am not sure what my path forward looks like.

Without realizing it, I had made that feeling of “lost” into a problem I must solve.

The day after I wrote and posted a piece about my difficult feelings regarding the end of the lockdown here in the UK, I picked up a book by Martha Beck. One of the things I enjoy about Martha Beck is the way she connects disparate disciplines in her work. Her self-help ideas are infused with the wisdom of great literature and modern science. 

One of her favourite topics is the narrative poem “The Divine Comedy” by Dante. She sees this seminal work as a timeless guide on how to navigate our internal terrain as we search for deeper truth and meaning in our lives.

In the first cantica, “Inferno”, Dante, our hero and narrator finds himself “lost in the dark wood of error”. In more modern words: the man was hopelessly lost.

(Fun little aside: Dante is 35 years old at this point which would be exactly midlife in medieval times. I love that the concept of a “midlife crisis” may not just be a modern invention.)

Marth Beck makes a commentary on this that stopped me in my tracks.

She says that finding ourselves lost, finding ourselves in the dark wood of error is an experience we will have many times in our life.

For me, that was a smack the forehead moment.

Of course this is true. I was operating under the assumption that I should always know what to do next. I had a hidden belief that being lost meant I had done something wrong. Worse, that feeling lost might mean there was something wrong with me!

As soon as I read Martha Beck’s words, I saw how untrue my assumptions were.

Who among us has not enthusiastically followed a path that led us to a place where we felt lost? 

A relationship that felt full of promise but ended in ruin. A fantastic financial opportunity that led to bankruptcy. The horribly confusing experience of longing for a child, loving that baby deeply and yet finding yourself in the terrifying swirl of postnatal depression. The inspiring new yoga teacher who turned out to be a total creep. A friendship that no longer seems to work, no matter how hard you both try. The dream job that turns out to be attached to the narcissistic boss from hell. 

And we don’t even need to be voluntarily following a path to get lost. Out of the blue, life can bring us horrible and tragic circumstances that blow us into terrain we have no idea how to navigate through.

In fact, if hordes of humans were not finding themselves in “dark woods of error” on a daily basis, there would be no such literary genre as a “memoir”.

And there we find ourselves, in the forest, bewildered and blinking in the harsh light of truth thinking: “What the f**k just happened?”. Or even worse, we actually knew all along that we were heading into a dead end but we kept going until we became so entangled in the undergrowth we fell on our face.

What a relief to think of this experience of feeling lost as a normal and necessary part of navigating our way through this one precious life.

 A defining feature of being lost is that we don’t know the way forward.

Me, I had an underlying and painful belief that somehow I SHOULD KNOW WHAT TO DO NEXT. A belief that I need to hustle and think and scramble and struggle and work it out. 

I have a small frightened self who wants to rush ahead and plunge into the future. Why? Because I think it is hard for us humans to accept the truth that the future will always be unknown. The truth that our control is limited. 

And even more uncomfortable, the truth that no matter how much we consider our next steps, no matter how wise and thoughtful we are, there is no guarantee that our new path will not lead us into a lovely new section of the dark wood of error.

One of my teachers has always said something really important about their mastery in teaching a movement process.  They claim that the reason their lessons go so well and so fast is because they always slow down and take all the steps. They don’t skip steps.

In life, I often find myself suffering unnecessarily because I don’t slow down and take all the steps.

 The jump from feeling lost to desperately trying to work out a way forward does not allow for the experience of just sitting, feeling, tasting, knowing “lost”. It skips over the step of lost.

And the fun part is that the anxiety, self-recrimination and uncertainly created by the belief that being lost is a problem creates exactly the opposite conditions of what seems to be helpful in navigating our way forward.

I was telling a friend about this realization that I was lost and the relief I was feeling about simply accepting that fact. She reflected back to me how deeply “not lost” I sounded to her. How in touch with myself I seemed.

So often the paradox seems to be that when we dare to inhabit a feeling, a reality fully we transform it at the same time. If we are fully present to all the difficult feelings of being “lost”: the regrets, the mistakes the bad turns taken without proper navigation we start to uncover the lessons, the internal resources and the new starting point of self-connection. 

We may not know how to move forward, but we can start by getting still right where we are. We can place our feet on solid ground and give ourselves something real to push off from when the time is right. We have seen how quickly the world can shift around us, but we have a centre inside that we can always orient to.

The acceptance of being lost immediately helped me orient myself in the journey of my life. When we are present to ourselves and our feelings we are never lost. We can always come home to ourselves and find refuge, comfort and love until we know what to do next.