I showed-up at the 2015 retreat with fresh emotional wounds hard won from the struggle of weighty decision making about my husband, Eric’s, next career move. Eric had gotten 2 job offers: A) from a company we will call F.U.ber, from the get-go we expected it would be painfully unpleasant, but secure and lucrative; and B) from a company called Sonos, which we expected to have good work life balance, in a nice Cali Coastal town, but with risky prospects for money and long-term career success. Spoiler alert –we chose A.

The truth is, we always chose A: We always chose the option we perceive of as safe, with financial security and option value for future career prospects. We chose to carefully preserve what we have and ‘keep the door open’ for having the same/more in the future. But this time, the choice wasn’t automatic. It was weighed, agonized over, and when we finally turned our back on the dream of B — a sweet job in a sweet small town with lots of time for other stuff we enjoy – I decided to ask myself why I always chose A? What do I believe about money, security, option value? Is the fight to achieve these things, or the struggle to make such weighty life decisions in general, worth it?

This then My Friends is the launching place for the next few blogs. I will explore my contemplations around these questions, my detour into insight into self and self belonging, and some helpful thoughts from my teachers.

I started out by asking 2 of my teachers, Neecha and LP Nut, for advice on how to proceed. I explained I had started seeing the suffering of being stuck in my patterns, of always choosing A (where A is preserving, security, $ and the option for more  preserving choices, security and $ in the future), but I didn’t know a way out. Here were the replies I got:

Neecha told me a story about a woman who used to drink till she blacked-out every night. She would always ask her husband what happened in the times she couldn’t remember and he would always give sketchy replies. One day, she remembered that her husband had tried to killer her after she had drunk too much. From that day forward, she never drank again out of fear. Fear Neecha explained is the way to stop doing something. It was a good answer, and a true answer, but I wasn’t quite sure how to use it. So I went and asked LP Nut for his thoughts…

LP Nut pointed to a tree in the forest. It had once bore a huge number of pine cones, but it had since fallen down and started to die. He said, the cones were dependent on the tree, the tree on the roots, the roots on sun, soil, rain. We think we can depend on one thing, one person, job, money for security. But the truth is there are so many factors. He said to go look for examples where I quest for security, for preserving. Does it work? At what cost?

This, was something I could work with, that I knew how to begin to tackle. So stay tuned for the next installment in contemplations from the 2015 Retreat…where I think about security and preserving.