Waiting, confidently; what’s next for Kirby

“This waiting is easy, knowing that one day soon you will be able to pursue and accomplish your goals.”  This is paraphrased from Julie Henderson’s interpretation of the I Ching, the book of changes.

If you are a follower of this blog, you may have been wondering why I have been so lackadaisical in my writing of posts as of late.  The I Ching, which I have cultivated a solid relationship with over the past three years plus and who knows how much time previously, states and continues to echo when I ask again and again, the above sentence about confident patience.

But I am not good at waiting.  I have a strong Saturn in my astrology chart – it is in my blood.  I need structure, I need a mission, a goal, a destination.  But apart of my waiting as of late has been just the opposite.  Not knowing where I am going or when I will be able to put forth effort to get wherever that unknown is, I have been in a holding pattern at best and a void of confusion and desperation at less-than-best.  For some time, I thought it best to pursue a future in California, studying somatic psychology at the master’s level as my next destination.  However, it seems this was erroneous as well – although the process and the journey of exploring this path must have (hopefully) served me – and now I am changing course once again.

I will explain this new direction below.  And I want to make it clear that I have allowed this new information to settle for a few months and I am solid with it.  So I feel it is stable enough to let the cat out of the bag:

I began to question what I was doing when I was sick recently.  I had the shingles (the herpes zoster virus manifesting along the left trigeminal nerve of my face to be specific) in the month of March and I had a lot of time to lie in bed and contemplate how much more pain medicine my body could endure…  and other facets of life.  🙂    California is a beautiful state, the school I was looking at was top notch and there are many great Buddhist centers, teachers, groups, etc in the San Francisco Bay Area.  But I questioned all of this in the manner my heart has made its decisions previously – when it was ready, it made it abundantly clear that my mind was not in charge and that my vision had changed.  And once this deep knowing sets in, my superficial mental jabberings lose any sway.

Instead I began to think about several variables from my past and present – my heart teacher (my root lama) suggesting I move to Florida to live closer to his center, the fact that I have more friends down in that part of the world than California, and the way in which the cost of living is lower down there as well.  If you are a Buddhist practitioner, you might say, your root lama made a recommendation for you – why didn’t you follow it to begin with?  Well you might say I am a Buddhist practitioner and I am a follower of my heart.  If I am not entirely certain about something, I kind of need to explore the options on my own.  I want to make my own decisions.  The more and more I experience, the more I am learning that my root lama’s wisdom is rarely if ever “wrong.”  But I suspect I will be questioning more options in the future – although maybe I will be careful what I ask him – if I don’t really want to know, or don’t want the guilt associated with going against his recommendations, then I shouldn’t ask!

Long story short, I am heading down to Florida next week to check out Tampa and its surroundings – grad schools, neighborhoods, the beach – to see if it is a good fit for me.  The way my heart is becoming clearer would indicate that this exploration is unnecessary, but it will be nice to connect with my teacher and friends as well.  Plus I might be able to look at some housing ahead of time.  Depending on my energy and time, I will keep any potential readers informed.  (Recovery from the shingles is surprisingly challenging.)

So wish me luck and thanks for listening to my ramblings.