Listening to Our Life

Paying attention to what our life has to say when the Placeholder Phase begins.

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”

- <Let Your Life Speak> by Parker J. Palmer

In the last newsletter, I introduced the concept of the “Placeholder” phase. In the Placeholder phase of our life, we experiment and run new ideas because whatever we’ve been doing no longer serves us and we don’t feel connected to it anymore. After throwing in different and unfamiliar ideas for a while, ultimately we find the idea that feels right for us with great clarity.

This is a simple summary but the actual experience of the Placeholder phase is quite complex and nonlinear. No one knows how long it lasts or what they can expect at the end. Sometimes, we enter the phase without knowing. 7 years ago, my Placeholder phase started the same way, elusively.

The Elusive Beginning of My Placeholder Phase

I was building a successful career in tech for about 14 years. Everything seemed fine in my life; but the truth was I was burned out and depressed.

This was an ironic state because I was already doing everything I could do in terms of wellbeing, from practicing yoga/meditation, eating healthy food, to taking time-off regularly. I felt good after yoga/meditation, eating healthy food, and especially after a great vacation. However, when I was at work, everything was reset to what it was before and I was feeling miserable again, suffering from all the unsatisfying nature of my work - conflicts of interests among teams, misaligned goals, demanding requests from various people and teams, clashes between different personalities, etc.

I started thinking again about how to “get out of” those situations. How do I stop suffering at work? Shall I move to a different team ? Shall I change my role or move to a different company? Maybe I should go on another meditation retreat and spend some time in silence again?  

Surprise - I’ve tried all of those already! Changing roles or teams (multiple times), spending a long time on a silent meditation retreat (multiple times), moving to different companies (twice). I even moved from Korea to US to “feel better” at work. I have already done everything to change the external conditions as well as internal conditions in order to feel sane and good about work and life.

I was running out of all the familiar solutions. I needed to take a very different approach from what I did before, although I didn’t know what it was going to be. The only clear thing to me was that it wasn’t about changing any external conditions. I started wondering, “Is it about ‘changing’ at all?” Perhaps it’s just about observing my mind and really understanding what I need fundamentally, an intuition emerged. That intuition gently nudged me to sign up for a 10-day meditation retreat at a local meditation center, being in silence for 10 days in a mountain with no cell phone connection, detached from the world completely.

I was already meditating, but I never attended a meditation retreat. Being in silence for 10 days with my own thoughts only seemed unbearable. Although I wasn’t sure if it was the “right” thing to do, it was indeed a very “different and unfamiliar” approach from everything I did in the past. This was how my Placeholder phase began without realizing it did.

The Power of Listening to Our Life

Looking back at how my Placeholder phase started, I can see the power of “listening” to our life that Parker J. Palmer often talks about. We live in a world full of messages megaphoned through various kinds of media about how we should live in order to be happy and well. There is so much and some of them are really valuable messages. But the most important message is what “my” life tells me what it intends to be and to do. To be able to really listen to it, we need some practice and support to have an empty space, or a blank canvas in our mind for the message from our life emerges.

In my case, it was meditation and reflection through the mediation. Being fully immersed in it for 10 days was painful at first few days but extremely helpful to guide me to the next right thing to do and build confidence with my own experiments down the road. For some, it might be keeping a journal or having a coach. For others, it might be praying or dancing. Whatever it is, any practice that lets us pay attention to the intentions and intuitions that our life wants to tell us is extremely necessary when we enter the Placeholder phase, and throughout.

Question: What is your practice to listen to your life; not someone else’s life, or some popular opinions of life, but your life?