Follow Your Passion?

Hi, Allyson. How do I know when I’m following my bliss/passion? When I can stay ultra focused on what I’m doing for hours, when I forget everything else, when I feel the pride of accomplishment, and when it just feels “right.”

What does it mean, to follow your passion? Well, passion is something I’m a bit of an expert on. In my life as a spiritual counselor I held free seminars for many years on Passion, mostly because quite a lot of people don’t feel it…because first and foremost, passion is a feeling, a kind of driving force, an ineffable energetic embrace that simply will not let you go…but of course, it’s you generating it! Which is precisely why some people never experience it, because their feeling abilities have been stifled.
Most of us – even many artistic types – live mostly in our minds…even when we ‘think’ we are living in what people like to refer to as our ‘hearts.’ We are taught, first and foremost, as children, and especially later, as teenagers, to think…not to feel. In fact, feelings are often derided as evidence of weakness…yet later, when we ‘grow up’ and realize how limited the whole thinking thing really is, we try to develop that whole ‘follow your heart’ (ie: passion) mentality but it is usually just that, a mentality, with the mind translating for us, feeling as information.
Feeling is a body thing, not just a heart thing, a whole body thing. Passion, therefor is a whole body event. When I’m making art I am on fire! I literally get hot…and sometimes dizzy. Mind? What mind? Mind comes into play later, in assessing what I’ve done but it has no place in the midst of my creative frenzy.
Following my passion means doing what I love and what loves me back.
That said, I’m a business woman too…I have to market my passion…and I do and then I allow the mind all the space it needs because I can market my passion but way more thinking has to be involved when it comes to the business side of things. Passion has its place and if I want to share mine with the world, I need a good mind as well.

I believe that this advice is only some what helpful. I think the trick is figuring out what we are passionate about. Often taking the time to get really good at something can make it a passion but until you put in the effort – you don’t know. You could miss out on some pretty amazing things if you only look into things that deeply interest you from the start. Sometimes maybe better advice is to pick something that has value for the world (and will make you money) and then get really good at it so you are passionate about it and you learn to love it.
My favorite article related to this topic is by Paul Graham – How to Do What You Love: http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html
Super long article but I think it is worth the read and worth some thought.
(Yes – I agreed with Cal Newport 🙂

I think you also have to make a living. Coming from families of art and theater degrees we encouraged our children to get a degree in something that would provide a living. They could minor in the arts, but being an independent, self supporting person had to come first. I know passion passion, but with the ever present economic uncertainty practicality had to be a priority. I may sound like a soul-less individual with no passion for what I do, but that is not the case. We have earned decent incomes on the fringe of our college majors, but it was the ability to develop other skills that kept us floating along financially…technical sales and computer skills for graphic design. When the passion can be successfully indulged to a point of making a living go for it, but we didn’t want our family to suffer for our art. Now we can look at passion, no it isn’t sad. It is delightful to rekindle those fires, they maybe different ones now.

I just had to blog on this topic because it is such a hot topic in my life right now. I’ve been discussing it a lot in my social circles, but it seems to continually resurface in more and more areas. In short: The peace and serenity, not to mention the healing, received from my artistic process from inspiration through sharing is the surest sign that I have found my bliss and I’m following my passion.

I agree with Lisa Call that this advice (Follow your passion) is only somewhat helpful. For me it has been a process of breaking down the barriers that were holding me back from doing what I love. I am going through a discovery process right now to better understand and define my passion. What “Follow Your Passion” does not address is the financial side of things. It may be a while before you can receive financial rewards for your passion. It helps me to have a plan, to envision where I want to be in 6 months, a year, 5 years.
(I am thankful for my friend Patsy Kolesar to have suggested your blog to me! There’s always good topics covered here and I’m finding the comments very useful too.)

I think we are talking about long term passion here. The passion that gets us going every day. Family causes us to be passionate and to tend the fields and fires of our lives, in order that the family we love is taken care of. Our thoughts and ideas and feelings drive us forcefully to try and implement new things or to become better at old things.
If we are talking about short term passion, it may mean that we moved the mountain from our garden to make room for a tree or that the mountain of our mind has been shifted so that we make room for our great invention. I really believe that passion is ongoing. It is a mighty force and powerful tool, but without the subtlety of thoughtfulness, luxury, strength, refinement, and innocence, passion could become chaos.
From David Curtis’ book, “Paintig With Impact” “Impact is usually more successful if acheived through sublety, rather than affects that shout out to the viewer.”
Quiet passion, for me, shines out like a fresh flower, much needed rain, or a baby’s fragrant skin. Wow can I get my face into that little neck! Passion is born and born again new every day on my knees, in interaction with people and in my kitchen. (Well, maybe not the cleanup!)
Vibrant passion is the excitement of a happy surprise, the double sunset on the Alaskan waters, the brushstroke of a new color, finishing an amazing new work of art, or maybe for a numbers person, the excitement of the correct answers!
It is the dance of life, musical, sensual and empowering. Vibrant passion is more difficult o sustain, but joyous non the less.

I think Rene and Beth both hit on something that has to be taken into consideration by women just because of all the necessities of life in general. It is so difficult to comprehend the desire to create and the drive to “feed the need” so to speak of your younger, earlier years as a young woman, possibly wife, possibly mother and the demands made upon us as humans in a very materialistic and expensive life.
An artist just can not block out life’s demands, close the door on responsibility and feel free to create at a whim even though the mood strikes them. It is as though you are swept up in the current of just living and meeting the demands of having to make a living. I feel that is why a lot of artist got a late start even if we were trained in art at an early age we found nothing to put food on the table or pay the electric bill.
Here is where I feel that passion comes into play, you have done your “thing” to make money necessary for living expenses, raised your children and given them all the opportunities to succeed and finally you feel that you have lost “you” along the way. Now is your time to find what it was that gave you that first sense of urgency at a younger age to create and what exactly pushes your buttons now and fly with it. Do all types of creativity and not get locked into just worrying about finding your thing, re-invent the child in you that first got excited by creating.
Most of us realize that to have done any of this any earlier would have been to cheat our spouses, children and been a struggle for our families and been very selfish…unless of course you were talented enough to create something that was marketable right off the bat and helped to support your family with your art from the beginning…kudos to those that did.
I have said this before, most artist feel the passion deep and if they do not try to fulfill that desire they will become ill and feel a deep resentment. It is a shame that life does not start at the end and go forward we could all enjoy having the money and the time before the responsibility and the struggle.
Passion is when you can do something that drives you emotionally without fear of failure, finance or criticism toward a goal that you have envisioned in your heart as well as your soul.

I agree with Wendy and Karen’s comments. How interesting would Leonardo da Vinci be if he “only” painted (no designs or writings)?
Taken at face value, I feel that “follow your passion” is not good advice because following implies that one would have to discover a passion and then do it. As many others have posted, passion is an emotion to be felt, not a thing to be discovered. I would tell people to “be” passionate. For me, that means being whole-heartedly connected with whatever I am doing at the moment.

When I am following my passion artistically, it is a yoga. Translation for that word is ‘union’ my whole being is in intuitive union with all that is. I am not aware of any limitations at all. It’s more getting out of the way so that intuitive grace can move thru me. The passion of this gets me thru the hard times. The times when circumstances are lessons to contemplate, and sometimes hard ones. Then my passion to continue keeps me going. Gets me back to the grace of that union with the flow of life and doing what’s right. It’s that flow that is always in a positive direction even when slowed down by difficult circumstances.