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Like many compelling adventure stories, the divine comedy begins in the middle midway. Through the journey of our life, says dante. I found myself in a dark forest for the right way was lost. He doesn’t mention how he got to the woods what he was doing when he wandered off track or how far he’s gone. All this information is literally foggy.

The only thing dante really knows is that he’s alone adrift and confused the experience of noticing we’re on the wrong path in what feels like the wrong life comes to almost all of us at some point, a few years into a job, a relationship or a living Situation, we may suddenly realize that everything seems off, like dante, we’re a bit dim about exactly what’s wrong or how we got here. But in an empty moment, when we’ve finally gotten the kids off to school, or we look up from our desks at the office and notice, everyone else has gone home or we’ve just had another ghastly fight with the person. We thought we’d love forever. We stare into space and think what am i doing? What is this place?

How did i get here? It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This is often how people are feeling when they consult me. I’Ve sat through countless first sessions with clients who are so baffled by their own dissatisfaction. They can barely find words to describe it.

They stammer. I wish i knew my purpose or people say, follow your passion, but i have no idea what mine is, or i thought working hard and providing for my family was the right thing, but i feel so empty. A few of these people are clinically depressed or physically sick, but mostly they’re just lost the most common reason. We end up feeling this way is by doing what we’re supposed to we learn from our culture. How a good person is supposed to behave, and we behave that way.

Then we expect the promised rewards happiness, health, prosperity, true love, solid self-esteem, but the equation fails to balance. Even after doing everything we can to be good, we don’t feel good confused. We figure we’re somehow not doing enough or not doing it the right way, but the harder we work at finding the path to well-being, the less well. We feel i’ve worked with many people who were so far gone in the dark wood. They didn’t remember anything else.

By the time they came to me, their disorientation had become extreme. There was jim the physician who grew more and more repulsed by the thought of touching people until he finally had to close his practice or evelyn. The magazine editor, who, though, a ravenous bookworm at home, gradually lost the energy to track simple paragraphs at work. Fran, a devoted mother of four began, forgetting so many of her children’s play, dates and school events that the whole family lived like a herd of spooked horses, nervous and jittery. None of these people was mentally ill, just far gone in a hazy wilderness.

I recognize this murky terrain know it well. In fact, i’ve been to the dark wood of error. So many times i should have set up a hot dog stand somewhere in there from childhood. My one overarching life directive was do whatever it takes to win approval raised in a devout mormon family. I obeyed every rule of my religion and worked hard at school.

Then i went off to harvard which was about as far from my childhood culture as i could get without moving to pluto, i managed by letting everyone i encountered assume that i agreed with them passing for a devout mormon at home and a rational atheist at school. This strategy worked perfectly approval everywhere, except that, after a while i couldn’t move physically, i mean at the ripe old age of 18. I developed mysterious excruciating soft tissue pain. All over my body, i couldn’t focus mentally. I started binge eating.

I felt out of control and broken and borderline suicidal. I had to take a year off school, the better to focus on my complete physical and emotional deterioration. Oh, i was quite the little ray of sunshine. Looking back at that experience and the stories of so many clients, i feel enormous gratitude for all our confusion and despair. Those feelings meant that our internal guidance systems were working perfectly signaling wrong way as clearly as they could with nothing, but the best of intentions.

We’D lost the way of integrity suffering arose from our bodies and hearts as a result and riveted our attention on fixing

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