Chaos is in my nature.  I thrive when creating, and suffer when maintaining.  I feel passion when building something and “stuck” when forced to focus on the details. Does that sound familiar, or overwhelming?  Does it sound exciting to throw caution to the wind and dive right into something, or does it sound scary? In my last article, I gave a very broad overview of the two basic natures of people, chaotic and orderly.  I […]

Everyone in life has a nature that tends toward either chaos or order… knowing which one is your nature is essential to happiness and success.

How does your body blind your soul? What does it even mean to “blind your soul”?

Being soul-blind means being so wrapped up in the things going on immediately around you that you cannot see anything else. It is when you become so overwhelmed with the stress and build-up of life that you start losing sight of what really matters to you.

How can your body overwhelm the part of you that is supposed to be in charge?  The same way the old saying says you boil a frog… slowly.  If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump back out, but if you put it in water which you slowly heat, it will sit there while it cooks.

The same thing happens with your soul… if you are dropped in a situation where everything is completely skewed and wrong, you will rebel.  If that situation comes about slowly, though, you can be talked into (or talk yourself into) just sitting there while you let it happen.

I’ll offer an example from my personal life, and it has to do with why I have been gone so long, as well:   My previous job was causing me to work so many hours and stress out so much that it was tearing me apart.  What little time I had at home was not quality time with my family, as it should have been, but instead was still focused on work and the stress from it… I couldn’t let go.

It didn’t start out that way, though… if it had, I would have jumped out, just like the frog in the pot of boiling water.  Instead, things got that way over time, and even when they moved further that way, there was usually something positive, too… a raise, a promotion, etc.  These made it even harder to see that the overall impact was the slow heating of the water, the slow blinding of my soul.

I was even aware of it, sometimes, to some extent, but I couldn’t see my way beyond it… I was blind in my soul, even if my eyes could still see. I knew that it was hard on my whole family, yet even that could not open my sight to what needed to be done.  I kept making excuses, like the economy being so bad that I might not be secure in a new job, if I could even find one… and so I didn’t really look.

In an ironic twist, the poor economy was actually the cause of my eyes opening… my position was eliminated, and suddenly I was forced out of that environment.  I couldn’t seem to do it on my own… I had been there for over seven years, and with the economy in the state it was, I couldn’t risk not being able to take care of my family… even though I was already not taking care of them in a way that matters far more than the money.

It took nearly a week for the shock and the remains of the stress and feelings of being overwhelmed to fade enough for me to begin looking for a new job. In the meantime, there were new stresses… what were we going to do with no more money coming?

I went online and looked for a new job, sent my resume to a few places, and was astonished to receive a call within an hour, asking me if I could interview that day.  I did, and a few days later I was offered the job.  I took it.

Luckily for me, it turns out that not only was this job available when I needed it, but it is a great place to work, too.  I’m also closer to home, and I have no overtime.  My job is no longer overwhelming the rest of my life… and the blindness of the soul is leaving me.

There are three lessons that learned from this experience, that I want to share with you:

1. The big positive things from a piece of your life, things like raises and promotions in a job, or wealth and beauty in a relationship, don’t matter as much as the ongoing small things… if your energy is always being drained, and you take that one piece of your life into every other piece of your life, it’s not good for you.
   
2. You can find reasons to not do something, and convince yourself that they are good reasons, even when you should (and if you were completely honest with yourself, actually DO) know better.
   
3. You can let a piece of your life that is less important, like a job, hurt the pieces of your life that are more important, like family

So what to you do if you look at your life and see that there is one piece of it that is taking over the rest, that is blinding your soul?  To quote from the Bible, “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.”

I am not, of course, recommending that you blind yourself physically… but if one piece of your life, whether it’s a job, a relationship, or something else, is taking over your life, draining your energy,  to the point that you forget to, or can’t, take care of the other parts of your life, then take that leap and do what you have to do in order to clear your soul’s sight of what is truly important.

If you think that your soul is already blinded, if you spend your days drained of energy and feeling overwhelmed, or if you may be headed that way, find a way to take at least a day completely to yourself, with no one else around, and no interruptions.  Take that day to take a look at your life and find out what it is that is sending you down that path… and look at what you can do about it.

You may be able to fix the thing that is causing you the harm, especially if you are only headed down that path, rather than already at the end… relationships especially can start heading down that path, but be repairable (there are quite a few articles even on this site for help with that).  Jobs are less likely to be able to be fixed, but that doesn’t mean they cannot be… you may be able to invest less of yourself into your job and still get it done, and that may keep it from taking over the rest of your life.

If you can’t fix it, though, the only answer may be removal.

Trust me, I know that it is a lot harder to do than to say, yet I have also just been through a really strong reminder of just how important it is.  My life felt like it was falling apart, and I was hurting physically and emotionally, as well as being blinded.  I now feel like I’m not just healing, but moving past where I was before I started heading downhill, and that’s with it having been only about a month.

Please feel free to share your story, either in the comments or by emailing me, and if you want any advice, I will be happy to help if I can… even if all you really want or need is someone to listen.

What causes the most stress during the holidays?  It’s usually one of two things… family (relationships), or presents. Maybe you don’t get along with someone in your family… maybe you don’t get along with anyone in your family.  Or it could be that you have “things that need to get done”, and spending time with extended family keeps you from doing those things. Or perhaps you are one of those ones who worries about gifts… […]