Pick Up the Phone!
How to hear and live your calling.
Ring!
“What is your calling?”
My friend Luc asked me this question on the phone today. We were debriefing a recent men’s group. On our group, a feeling came up of a deep internal void that we all felt.
That void is something my current friend and lover, and former partner Shelby, also named in me. In my exploration of “poly-amor-y,” Shelby was hurt because she could sense that part of my draw to explore love with other people had to do with trying to fill this deep void. Because I love her, that made me stop and really take a look at myself.
There have been times in my life where I haven’t felt that void. And I started to wonder why.
When I look back at my life, the times I haven’t felt the void have been when I’ve been following my inner calling (like right now, in fact).
And so it all comes back to Luc’s question: "Faolan, what is your calling?”
Just so we’re all on the same page, a calling, to me, is:
The visceral sensation/knowing that draws, pulls, and tugs us toward wholeness, truth, peace, and the ultimate fulfillment of our soul.
A calling is NOT:
The rational spinning of the mind that tries to keep us safe or figure out the solution.
Callings are risky. They don’t always make sense. But that doesn’t make them less real.
I was on a call yesterday with a client of mine who was worried about her son who wants to drop out of college. My client is highly successful and was worried about her loved one. Reasonable? Certainly. Useful? Maybe.
I told her that if she’d seen my life four years ago, she would have told me to do anything but what I’ve done. In other words, my calling hasn’t “made sense.”
My path hasn’t been rational. And that’s key here. Was it rational for me to turn down my corporate job offer, which paid good money to become a life coach, all with no training… and live out of my car while doing it… AND take on thousands of dollars of debt along the way? Hell no. Did it work out? Hell yeah, it so freaking did!
Would I recommend my path to someone else? No, because they have to take their own risky, wild, and REAL path for THEM. Each person’s calling is inherently unique and special, because it represents their connection to their highest self, which is inherently a spiritual thing.
Many years ago, I was trying to describe my mystical experiences of God to one of my best friends, Seamus. Eventually, we came to an understanding by describing a bike wheel. There are many spokes which all connect to the center. If the center of the wheel is Pirsig’s Quality/God/Wholeness/etc, then each spoke of the wheel is each of our unique lives, callings, and slightly different mystical perspectives. What’s important here is that even if our spiritual paths look a little different, we are each returning to wholeness in our own unique way. That’s the journey of following a calling.
The word calling is similar to another word, vocation, which comes from the root “Vocare,” in Latin meaning: “to call or summon.” A question that arrises is: Who is doing the calling or summoning? To understand this, we have to understand that there’s a certain sense that allows us to “hear” our calling, and that sense is intuition.
On a walk today, Shelby told me about an Instagram post she saw that said: To hear your intuition, you have to unclog your conduit from all the muck of trauma in it. That matches up with what my dad told me he learned at Sun Moon Dance, where the wisdom tells of the importance of cleaning the bone marrow from the bone flute, so that the music of God and Life can flow. It also aligns with the Buddhist idea that to play the flute truly well does not have to do with skill, but with fundamental enlightenment.
It follows that the more we clear our trauma patterns—the beliefs that have formed in response to pain to protect us—the more we’ll hear our intuitive knowings. I believe those callings come from our deepest selves, from our roots, and from Life itself.
So, to follow a calling, it demands a few steps:
Recognize all the muck inside your Divine flute.
Clear it all out by doing the deep trauma and shadow work.
Listen. Then play.
Tangibly, this requires developing self-awareness through:
Being alone with the self (journaling, long walks without stimulation, meditation, psychedelics, being in nature)
External mirroring from trusted people (coaching, therapy, romantic relationships, affinity groups, honest friends, etc)
Once you’ve identified something which looks and quacks like muck, conclude that it is in fact, muck, and then clear it out by honoring and expressing your repressed feelings. This can happen through various modalities like:
Somatic healing (body-mind-soul connection: embodiment, dance, breath work, hands on healing etc)
Neural pathway reprograming (using neuroplasticity to rewire beliefs: deep visualization techniques, inner child work, microdosing, affirmations, etc)
Creating art (allowing direct expression of emotion from inside out: painting, singing, writing, etc)
Once the trauma has released, listen to what is deeply true for you, and then go for an adventure, as in, take a leap! Play with life, and see how it feels!
A while ago I realized that life doesn’t have to be such a big scary thing. We only live once, and painful things will inevitably happen. Everyone I love will die. I’ll die. You’ll die. So, we may as well enjoy life! In the process of enjoying life, there will be moments of clarity and guidance which come not initially as words, but as a feelings. These feelings are callings, and they not always be easy to listen to.
Relationships with women I’ve deeply loved have ended because I feel an internal calling. Jobs I loved and chapters I loved have ended because I’ve felt called away. My loved ones have not always understood me, and that’s been hard and lonely. But it’s all been worth it to honor this deeper inner feeling, knowing… Calling.
Later this year, I’m moving to Guatemala. Many people have asked me why. I’ve made up a rational answer for them, but the honest one is just that I felt called to go there. I don’t know why, but I do. My soul needs to go there.
So, while you’re going through your life, start to feel into your body. What feels right? What feels true? What feels like it’s being asked of you from deep inside yourself? How could you honor that, even if it’s really hard, demands sacrifice, and will take courage? Finally, what would actually fill that void? Follow that.
In conversations with my Coach, Joshua, I will often say something and then immediately feel the truthfulness or untruthfulness of what I’ve said. I’ll then stop our conversation and hold myself in that moment, so I can speak with clarity what is deeply true for my whole self. I always know what’s real and true for me. I can always FEEL it. I can’t think my way into knowing, I just know.
The question is: Will I trust it? Will I trust my knowing? Will I follow my call? Will you?
The cost of not trusting our knowings, of not following our callings, is perpetuating the internal void which sucks us down into compulsive misery. And let me tell you, that is just not it.
Lots of love,
Faolan
PS. If you’d like to share this blog with someone you know who may benefit from reading it, please click the button below!
PPS. If you’re not subscribed already, please subscribe below.