By Guest Blogger on November 1, 2010

The Secret to More Energy: Tap the Geyser of Your Gifts

I talked to a woman who had been gifted in music, but who hadn’t pursued it as an adult. “I am afraid of failing,” she said, and then admitted she felt like a failure now. She felt tired. I don’t blame her. It takes more effort to create a life you don’t want than to create the life you crave.

An unused gift is a keg of dynamite. It’s dangerous. It leaks out and begins to poison you. It haunts your cells with a hoarse song, “use me or die, use me or die.” Your gifts are powerful energy sources. It takes so much energy to hold back life. It hurts to choose smallness. It aches to muffle cries that no one else hears. It hurts to resist the evolutionary instinct within you to grow, express, go beyond survival, and thrive; to stake your one true place upon this planet.

Brother David Stendl-Ross said “The answer to exhaustion is not rest. It’s wholeheartedness.” I know it’s true. After I left a high-paced legal career, I spent a year napping and wandering in my home like a small child lost at the mall. I felt exhausted and overwhelmed. Finally, I realized I was “resting” in order to avoid myself. I wasn’t exhausted by my efforts in life, but by my lack of efforts—my lack of dedication to things that mattered most to me.

An unused gift (or one you don’t take all the way to harvest) will quietly annihilate your life. I think it’s a national threat. I think the Surgeon General should put it up there with smoking cigarettes, asbestos, uranium, and maybe even small, mean-spirited people who run for office. It’s not that you’ll keel over because you didn’t start taking photographs or sing. But you will walk off kilter. Your heart will sag with an extra thousand pounds. Your voice will crack when you say your name. There is something unrighteous about not doing what you came here to do. And it can change this minute, this very second. You can choose to love yourself this way.

I urge you to do what you love and share it, now. Speak out about a cause in which you believe. Paint cards and give them to someone. Get rid of the mentality that it has to end up in a gallery or you have to get paid a certain amount of money for it to be “worth” it. You are worth so much more than that kind of limited thinking. Besides, you can’t imagine the capacities, passports, and shooting stars you deny yourself by withholding your love.

I remember speaking at a church after my book “This Time I Dance! Creating Work You Love” was published. I led a meditation, a spontaneous invocation. Let’s face it, I’m a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, so this didn’t seem the kind of thing I’d spread on my bagel, so to speak. Not only that, but I’m a finely tuned logical instrument trained at Harvard Law School, so this spiritual, inner voice kind of thing wasn’t originally on my tour itinerary. But the experience was bigger than my ideas about myself. The feeling was definitive, even while I lacked definition. “I will do this,” I heard myself say in the sanctum of my being. “I will say yes.” I knew I was saying yes to leading, serving, honoring this small voice within me, a voice that used a different alphabet and octave of possibility. It made no sense to my “practical” self. There was no money or status on the horizon.

Still, I felt as though I was saying yes to bigger questions. I was saying yes to a larger game. I didn’t know what I was saying yes to, but the act of saying yes felt like love of a higher order. I felt as though Spirit was asking me, will you play for my Team? Yes, maybe, I should have asked about the benefits package, but I was teeming with benefits at the time, and feeling something I’d never want to retire from. The questions came: Will you trust this goodness? Will you follow your guidance and ignore the fears and instructions of the world? Will you do the work you love? I said “yes” then, and I still do.

Oh and I’ll tell you this. There are so many gifts that come from doing what you love. It’s a joke to me that people think they will be poor by following something infinite, invincible, and alive within them. I want to tell them about the increased energy, immunity, clarity and peace. I want to tell them about the ridiculous synchronicities and elves and extra cherries in their cherry bowl. I want to reassure them that they’ll shine in colors invisible to the human eye, but not to the human heart; and it’s inevitable that everyone wants to hire someone who glows.

Mostly I want to tell them about the love. It’s a love that has a texture and a depth like nothing else. It’s a love that makes the axis of the earth finally tilt in your direction. It’s a love that makes all things possible, and nothing necessary. Of course, that love is intangible, but bear in mind that every good thing on this planet started with a great amount of love. Also, you may think love is insubstantial, but let me say this. No tangible item, income or substance, nothing in this whole world or universe, will ever make up for its absence. Take care of your energy. Why pop a thousand vitamins while swallowing poison every night? It’s poison to ignore your talents. An unused gift is a keg of dynamite. It can blow up your life. But if you use it wisely, it can blast through limitations. It can blast through galaxies. It can blast through resistance and the sad illusion that you ever had to struggle or be adrift in any way. It can be a blast.

Tama J. Kieves is the bestselling author of “THIS TIME I DANCE! Creating the Work You Love (How One Harvard Lawyer Left It All to Have It All!)” She is also a national A Course in Miracles presenter and sought-after speaker and career coach who has helped thousands world-wide to discover and live their true life’s work.

Photo Credit: Helga Weber

     
 

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