Life Lesson #8 - Follow Your Bliss

This summer I took Team USA's good name on Van's Warped Tour for a couple dates to spread the word about roller derby. It was the craziest 48 hours of my life (that month ;) which involved meeting amazing people, driving over 1,000 miles, lots of push-up contests, and sleeping less than 6 hours the entire time.

While that's a story for my other blog, I was reminded of a lesson I had forgotten. For the past x-amount of summers, a band called Senses Fail has faithfully returned to the tour. I had the pleasure of meeting them and actually driving them around my hometown of Casper, Wyoming about three years prior to this date (this was back when I worked with a local production company putting on concerts and coordinating bands). So as I'm sitting at the Team USA booth with my amazing helper for the day, Salt City skater Ursula; I hear a familiar guitar rythym coming from the stage directly behind us, which turns out to be none other than Senses Fail.

The lead singer Buddy, goes into his tride and true motivational speech based on the one and only Joseph Campell. The first time I heard about Follow Your Bliss was at the very Senses Fail concert back in Casper many moons prior. It seriously changed my life. From that day on, I kept a picture of Joseph Campbell in his younger days next to my desk with the Follow Your Bliss mantra beneath it.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

J.S. explaining his inspiring ideals:

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence:Sat-Chit-Ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being."

Roller derby and film are my rapture. It took me four years of staring at that quote to finally take action. I have officially quit my day job as a bank teller and am pursuing roller derby coaching and freelance film work full time. I've never been more excited and full of sheer bliss in my entire life.

Your lesson from this is more of a challenge. Find out what your rapture is and persue it with every ounce of your being (especially if it's one of those two =).

I leave you with a Joseph Campbell interview exerpt:

Campbell: "Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt?"

Moyers: "Not in a long time."

Campbell: "Remember the last line? 'I have never done a thing that I wanted to do in all my life.' That is a man who never followed his bliss."