Career vs calling

I will set my humility down for a second and fully own the fact that I have a gift. I am a teacher, a guide and a healer. I use none of those nouns lightly. I feel deeply connected to each of them in different ways and I am very grateful to understand a tiny bit of why I am walking on this very earth at this very time.

My neurospicy mind has served me beautifully in many ways. My pattern recognition, heightened sensory abilities and ways of divergent thinking combine into a special kind of magic. I have an ability to drop into a space and channel stories, metaphors and words that speak directly to the soul level of those around me. Often times while teaching, if someone asks me to repeat myself, I cannot. At times, I am not completely aware of where the words I am saying come from. Things I have never thought of before will come out of my mouth and I surprise myself occasionally! It is honestly quite fun! This is how I know this work is my calling.

Someone recently spoke about having a job or career verse a vocation or calling. Some people are healers because it is their job. They have a passion for what they do and have learned and studied to be able to do it. And then there are people who no matter what their job actually is, they have been called to a vocation as a healer. Their studies may have taken them down many different paths, but at the end of any of those paths is a clear calling.

I have studied a wide variety of topics in my short lifetime. I am trained as a physical therapist, studied further to specialize in treating chronic pain and pelvic health conditions, dabbled in herbalism and traditional medicine, dove deeply into tarot, am constantly drawn towards any spirituality, studied to become a yoga teacher and have become a jack of all trades and master of none. Through each of these paths, there is a common thread. Every thing I have learned has allowed me to be a better healer, guide and teacher, for myself and all those around me.

This is my vocation; to heal, to guide, to teach. As I continually am drawn towards healing myself, the people in my vicinity experience the collateral damage of everything I do, in the most positive of ways. I believe that is how vocations work. It is not always through the purposeful acts that we lean into our vocation, it is the in between moments. Vocations can be subtle, quiet and a bit hidden. It is not only the intentional acts that drive our vocation, rather it is the living of every day. Perhaps more often than not, vocations have nothing to do with any titles we hold. It shows up in the way we live our lives in every moment.

I have been on a journey of accepting this very idea. Because we live in a world that requests that if we find our vocation, we make it into our job. For me, this fills me with so much friction. A friction that I have been trying to fight for several years now. I do not want to anymore. I am giving into the fact that the way I heal, guide and teach is not through overt, bold and active ways all the time. I prefer the subtle, slow and gentle side of healing. The exact opposite of what our capitalistic, consumer driven, instant gratification culture desires.

The challenge I have been confronted with consistently is that it is so easy to confuse the roles of our jobs with our vocation and vis versa. A job is something that allows us to financially sustain ourselves in the world. Money is necessary, as much as I wish it wasn’t. A career may be something we enjoy but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. I waver back and forth whether it is necessary to love what you do for a job but lately I sense it is less important than I used to think.

Now, I feel as if it would be easier to be indifferent towards your career. Something that neither brings joy or frustration and only requires minimal energy from your being. You can turn on the role in the morning and then after 8ish hours, turn it back off and return to your life unfazed. I mean this in the best of ways, not in the check out and dissociate during your job.

Rather, what the world tells us often is, “love what you do and won’t work a day in your life.” But is it wise to financially sustain yourself with a part of yourself that embodies passion and purpose? Or is this sentence we hear so frequently speaking about a vocation rather than a career?

To speak from personal experience, I am very grateful to have found a job that I love deeply that encompasses my vocation beautifully. This combination though, one that seems so ideal, actually led me towards burn out. Because I am so passionate about guiding and supporting others to heal, I cannot half ass my way through anything. I over cared and over gave until I couldn’t anymore. This is the risk of merging your job and vocation together. Perhaps not for everyone, but for me at least.

When I chose to take some time away from the job that love, I fully believed that I would make my next job even more aligned with my vocation. I thought that if only I could teach, guide and heal in my own way, on my own time, it would be more sustainable for my being. Everyone around me encouraged this belief. “Monetize your skills. Sell yourself. Know your own worth.”

All of a sudden, my purpose became combined with my need to financially support myself. My vocation became tied to my value and worth. Instead of finding more freedom in teaching, guiding and healing, I felt more restricted than ever. Any talks of marketing myself, learning the algorithms or finding my niche felt like an assault to my soul. I couldn’t get myself to do it. I sat on so many ideas and concepts and never followed through with any.

Of course, this flooded me with guilt and shame. Why can everyone around me sell themselves and I simply cannot? How come I have these gifts and abilities but lack the determination to create financial gain from them? These questions along with many others haunted me for so long. And then I returned to working as a physical therapist and something shifted within me.

During the short four months I was working in Colorado I managed to host three workshops, pull together a beautiful weekend retreat and write my portion of a 300 hour YTT manual with ease. All of a sudden my job and vocation diverged and everything felt simpler. I could teach, guide and heal but it did not matter how much money I made from it. I was doing it because I wanted to and no other reason.

This reminded me of something I teach often. Safety is required for creativity and risk taking. Financial safety is more foundational than we care to admit sometimes. When we have a stable income, it liberates our mind from the stress of meeting our own basic needs. I am so incredibly privileged that even with taking a year off, I was never truly in any sort of financial stress. But my mind loved to create stories that were not true about this. Simply not having an active source of income was enough to trigger my mind into believing I was going to die of starvation any second. Yes, that’s dramatic and I will not apologize for it. That is what my mind sounds like in survival mode!

But the liberation from financial stress that came from returning to my career, lead to a different level of creative expression. When I returned to having a stable income, my mind felt at ease. I was able to take risks I couldn’t have imagined a few months prior. And not only take risks but follow through with them. For me, this helped me to decide that I would rather keep my job and vocation more separate than I ever imagined.

My vocation will, of course, bleed into my job as a physical therapist far more often than I care to admit. But I have learned how to create boundaries around how much I give and care. I will never be able to be a compassionless robot in the clinic but I will leave work at work and keep it separate from my own value and worth as a human. Because my calling to teach, guide and heal is innate, it will always show up wherever I take up space.

But I will continue to resist the idea that I need to monetize my gifts. I would much rather give away this part of myself as an act of love towards the humans that walk into my life. Because what I gain by these interactions is far greater than financial security. And I refuse to denote my value into dollar signs. This doesn’t mean I won’t ever exchange my calling to teach, guide and heal for financial gain. It simply means, I don’t feel called to make this part of myself my primary source of income any time soon.

I finally have a bit less shame and guilt around this. I know that my calling to do this work will never end. That the way I live my life will continually sprinkle magic in the wake of everywhere I show up. And it is okay to not have much of a desire to profit off this side of myself. I know someday, everything I said may change. My job and my calling may align perfectly one day. I am welcome to anything unfolding in the future. But for now, I will find a balance between my career and my calling, keeping them in separate hands.