Choosing for Yourself
When you step outside of the box, when you swim outside the mainstream, when you choose your path, there are many bumps in that road that challenge our commitment to keeping going. Freedom is not free, and there is a “cost of living.”
Case in point: I developed a successful practice in the years between 2015 and 2020. Through that time, I was dealing with terminal liver cancer that was resolved in 2019. Still, I had plenty of work to keep me going. But what I did next was I left the safety of contracting with local mental health facilities and emphasize people in need of my services to find me.
Despite knowing how to develop websites, SEO, and some marketing from my 17-year career in web development before 2014, when I tried to reinvent myself on the Internet, it has been little more than a failure. However, that is not a victim position. Instead, it is an honest assessment of how my choices directly led me to where I am today.
And where is that? Traveling to Latin America as I have been the last ten months. One by one, the clients I took with me virtually in that time have found their freedom or otherwise are in a position of recovery from substance abuse to where they no longer need a coach, counselor, or meeting. This is a great success and one I feel good about having to play some role regardless of how significant.
Giving and Receiving
During the years between 2011 and 2019, I told people over, and over that, first, I was not going to die. Secondly, I was going to travel internationally when I survived. So, I did just that, and in October 2020, I went to Colombia.
So, the question becomes: when I help others in a way that has an endpoint when they are “healed,” what is it I gain from this experience.
First off, it is in pursuit of my life’s purpose, which is to help others. But additionally, it allows me to afford the life I lead, which is extraordinarily little by US society standards.
But when there are few or no clients, the giving is still there, but the support that provides a place to follow my life’s purpose is threatened. So, at least in the way, I am pursuing it now.
Just Another Poor Me Post?
No, it is not. As stated above, all of these things are the direct outcome of my own choices. I fully believe that the best learning comes from overcoming the most significant challenges. Even if they are problems that need to be solved within a matter of weeks. I have been in similar positions before, but that was much easier as, for starters, I was living in my home country. I had a car, a place to live, and a contract job of some form. Now, I rent month-to-month with a single income from my coaching and counseling.
Perhaps that last part needs to change? That is not the plan at this point, and the release of two new coaching packages is just a few days old and the best ones I have come up with in the six years this site has been in existence. So I am going to keep going. “I don’t buy your myth of death” and “This is how it feels to heal” are two of the phrases I coined while I was sick with liver failure. They were born of my work in Shamanism. They had nothing to do with anything I learned in my clinical certification as a recovery coach or a drug and alcohol counselor.
So Now What?
I keep going, is what happens now. Like none of the events of the past 24 hours need to have anything to do with the next 24 or even 24 days. Keep on keeping on, as they say. Another thing I need to do is to stop viewing my work as a way to make a living; it is a tool to assist me to the places I want to be and love it. To quote a favorite lyricist: “Without love in the dream, it will never come true.”
It is all just a part of the cost of living at this time.
https://windandraven.com//affordable-online-recovery-coaching/