If you’re familiar with my coaching or writing, you know that I believe our living spaces tend to mirror our inner lives. 

Confusion in our minds may show up as clutter in our closets. A deep loss may be held in the space of a room no one uses any more. A new love may see us rearranging our furniture or putting flowers in every room. Everything in our living space is a metaphor.

Well, right now I’m in a house that’s been cleaned out to sell, and my family hasn’t yet found a house we hope to move into. Nothing looks familiar. I don’t know where I’m going. 

And sure enough, this exactly mirrors my inner life.

Maybe yours, too.

In case you haven’t noticed, things are pretty chaotic these days. In my country, political battles rage as experts warn of mass shortages, unemployment, the breakdown of social safety nets.

Nothing looks familiar. We don’t know where we’re going.

People have been telling me they feel as disoriented as I do. Like me, they’ve been asking themselves,

“Am I on the right path?”
“Is there a path?”
“Am I the only one who feels this lost?”

And this isn’t just about what’s happening to nations and neighborhoods. It’s about what’s happening inside us.

I’ve spent years—decades—going on and on about a change in human consciousness. An awakening that won’t just affect a few hermits in caves, but a large number of us. A large enough number, I hope, to save our future on this planet.

As I look around me at my emptied-out house and feel completely uncertain about going forward, part of me is freaking out. But another part is saying,

“Don’t you remember? This is exactly where you’re meant to be.”

Because here’s the thing, friends: 

If we are to awaken, if we are to replace a damaged and damaging culture with something entirely new, we must—we must—go to a place we’ve never been before.

The path to awakening can only be a path that disappears.

In some Asian traditions they call the quest for awakening “the pathless path.” Because your awakening is unique, and it lies beyond all maps. You are making the path yourself, with each terrified step forward. 

Your way toward awakening is written not in structures, but in yearning. If your deepest longing is to wake up, that longing calls into the future, creating what has never been.

So, when you can’t see any path forward, take the next step longing asks you to take. Do whatever feels right in your body, heart, and soul. That one single step may be all you can see, until you’ve taken it.

While you’re doing this, you may feel lost. Absolutely lost.

That’s okay. In fact, it’s absolutely perfect. Because: 

Feeling lost can be the best sign that you’re finding—creating—a new consciousness.

Feeling lost shows that you’ve slipped the leash of your cultural conditioning. 

Feeling lost means you’ve finally moved into the un-mapped, into the terrain of the soul.

So when you feel as if your life is falling apart, ask yourself if you may be falling open. When you have no idea what you’re doing, notice if it’s the first time you’ve decided not to obey fear. When your mind shouts, “I’M LOST!” see if you can hear a silent inner voice that’s whispering, at the very same moment, “I’m free.”

But how do we keep moving, stepping forward into nothing but yearning?

Naming and Befriending the Not Knowing

One way forward is to simply name your lack of certainty, to sit with your not-knowing and make a friend of it—even though that friend is wild and weird, even though it speaks in odd sentences and invites you to strange adventures.

Try this: 

If you feel scared and stuck in the wrong career or relationship, don’t rush to fix it. Sit there and just see it. Say:

“I don’t know what I want any more.”
“I don’t know whether this life still fits me.”
“I don’t know what to do next, and that scares me.”

Don’t run away. Don’t rush to fix anything. Just look right at it, this terrifying confusion, and breathe. Let your body settle.

Or if you’ve lost a loved one, name what you feel:

“I don’t know how to stop missing them.”
“I don’t know who I am without them.”
“I don’t know why it’s taking me so long to heal.”

Sit quietly with this named not-knowing. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a poem, “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower,” translated by Joanna Macy, that feels to me like the perfect set of instructions for coping with a life outside all maps. 

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

Read the full poem here.

To hold not-knowing steadfastly, despite all our fear and unfulfilled hope, is to grow intimate with the mystery.

This is our chance to build trust in the map that comes from within, in the disappearing path, in our own transformation.

So if you feel lost, know that you are lost with many others. Come be lost with us. Come to the stillness where we can all meet each other, in the place where no one has ever been.