Trey’s Chihuahua mix, Lola, knows what she likes. And as you might imagine, Lola gets what Lola wants in the Cutler household. She’s steadily focused on mealtimes and provides reminders of her need for outside adventures. She doesn’t walk the neighborhood so much as she sniffs every inch of it where another dog has relieved itself within the past six to 12 months. And, once she’s back inside, she has a wonderful preference for cuddling up against whoever seems most sedentary.
If you want to see Lola in true bliss, you need to catch her when she is scratched or kneaded by someone with long fingernails. In those moments, it’s obvious from Lola’s expression that time stopped for her, nothing else matters, and she is in rapture. That sounds a lot like flow!
We’ve explored a lot of avenues in our continued quest to experience “flow” or “being in the zone” — that state in which we are fully present and meeting the challenges of the moment with a calm, clear focus and full access to all our resources. As part of that journey, we’ve noted that flow often creates a sensation of bliss, but we’ve not really considered bliss as a possible passageway to flow.
Joseph Campbell and Bliss
If anyone became synonymous with bliss, it would have to be Joseph Campbell, a bright, young literature student who attended Dartmouth and Columbia in the 1920s before pursuing advanced studies in Germany and France. When the Great Depression hit, Campbell rented a small shack in Woodstock, New York, and spent the next five years reading nine hours a day. As he poured through modern and ancient texts from around the world, he began to see patterns among the mythological and religious stories of different cultures, ultimately crystallizing in what Campbell would refer to as “the hero’s journey.”
In 1949, while working as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Campbell published “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” which centered on that archetypal hero’s journey. Years later, Campbell and his book were propelled into mainstream popular culture when George Lucas credited the book’s concepts with significantly influencing Lucas’s “Star Wars” films.
Shortly before he died in 1987, Campbell sat down with Bill Moyers for a series of interviews to be aired on PBS. The interviews were titled “The Power of Myth,” which also was the title of the book version of the interviews published posthumously. Although Campbell spoke and wrote about the hero’s journey and his concept of “following your bliss” years before, his comments to Moyers seemed to become Campbell’s iconic “follow your bliss” teaching moment.
His advice was simple, if somewhat controversial:
“Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.
“When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
Not surprisingly, some seized on Campbell’s words as a call to hedonism, leading him to quip later in life that “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.’” By encouraging others to follow their bliss, Campbell wasn’t trying to advocate the pursuit of immediate gratification but rather a more arduous path to a more worthy ultimate destination.
Bliss and the Day to Day
As noble as the hero’s journey sounds, most of us work hard to get through days that feel largely predetermined. So, while we would like to feel like Lola when she gets a good back scratch, our days often land somewhere between overscheduled and manic.
With that in mind, we offer four practical suggestions for following your bliss, even in the busy, post-Covid veterinary profession.
1. Create the Space to Connect With Yourself
Campbell was a strong advocate for creating what he called sacred space. It could be a room or a specific time during the day where you briefly step aside from everything going on with the world. “Where is your bliss station?” was how he put it.
Campbell recommended dropping into that sacred space regularly. Maybe it’s easiest in a private room, under a favorite tree or sitting on a park bench. The point is not the location or duration of the sacred space, but instead that you consistently quiet the outside world and connect with yourself as in a meditation practice.
2. Note What Makes You Feel Most Alive
If we are our own best guide and know (at least at some deeper level, if not yet at the conscious level) what makes us feel most fulfilled and alive, then we have to tune into that intuition to benefit from its guidance.
In a speech about following dreams, film director Steven Spielberg said that one’s instincts and human personal intuition always whisper and never shout. So, we say that the benefit of creating a sacred space is that you intentionally give yourself the means and opportunity to hear the wisdom of that soft internal whisper.
3. Choose to Bring More of It Into Your Life
When that whisper “tickles your heart,” as Spielberg put it, you know you are onto something. Campbell counseled us not to be afraid in those moments and instead follow where those feelings point us.
We can all think of times when we chose to follow that kind of intuition, and we can see clearly how the choice changed everything that followed. That’s likely how you found your way to veterinary school or into a relationship with a loved one. It’s also what can lead you to your next generation of blissful experiences.
4. Trust That You Will Call Forth What’s Best for You
Bliss experiences need not be mutually exclusive. Once you explore the possibility of following your bliss and begin to trust those moments of feeling something tickle your heart, you’ll likely find bliss in more places and experiences than you ever imagined.
Moyers asked Campbell, “What happens when you follow your bliss?” Campbell’s response was simple: “You come to bliss.”
That makes sense, and who would not want it? When Lola finds bliss, she’s present and content, and she remains at peace for a good while afterward. May we all find that kind of presence and contentment more often.
BLISS-FREE
Film critics and the public thrashed the 2021 movie “Bliss,” starring Salma Hayek and Owen Wilson. One Rotten Tomatoes contributor called the movie a “messy sci-fi drama … sadly short on bliss.”