I wrote something once about my father in which I described our relationship as "a long-running experiment, one marked by a few exploded test tubes along the way." I suspect Julia Mossbridge, author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work, might appreciate the metaphor. Mossbridge is a personal coach and scientist whose first book explores the matter of how we humans discover our true calling in life. Specifically, she’s concerned with how to make that process more orderly and less painful — more scientific, if you will.
In Unfolding, Mossbridge, a Ph.D. student in cognitive neuroscience (psychoacoustics) at Northwestern University, presents a kind of primer on how to create the life you want. At first glance this may sound like the offerings of a thousand other self-help books out there. But as a spiritually oriented scientist, Mossbridge brings a unique approach to her discussion of such topics as creativity and anger, faith and fear, and community and purpose.
Here we enter a kind of laboratory of the heart, a place where experimentation and soul-searching honesty are encouraged, as we discover and explore the meaning of hidden emotional and spiritual truths at work in ourselves. In a sense, Mossbridge is asking us to make of our lives a research project, to consider old truths in our lives in new ways — ways that will help us expand our possibilities for living more authentically, in tune with our true natures.
Liberating Truths
After years of reading self-help and psychology books that tackle dauntingly complex topics such as how to figure out why exactly you’re here, I’ll admit I’ve found in myself a certain tenderness toward simple definitions. I’ve also learned that new perspective frequently entails some shift in our vantage point, as opposed to a qualitative change in our objective situation. We simply look at an old state of affairs in a new way, seeing choices and options we couldn’t see before — choices and options that were perhaps there all along.
In other words, we discover some previously unknown truth about ourselves. And so we grow.
Mossbridge brings a researcher’s skill to this discovery process. It’s all engagingly described as the author skillfully zeroes in on emotional dynamics, patterns, and themes as they play out in people’s lives. We learn, for example, about a woman Mossbridge coached who chose to become a social worker. Apparently, it was her calling, selfless, helping person that she was. Yet she felt little excitement about her college courses. Why? Because the hidden truth in her life was that her parents used to tell her she was selfish whenever she wanted something her disabled sister couldn’t have.
Accordingly, she became ashamed of certain desires, such as her love of dance. As Mossbridge recounts, the woman had to bring this inner truth out of hiding before she could creatively embrace her heart’s desire. Doing so, she eventually came to combine her love of dance with social work in a career as a movement therapist.
Mossbridge is especially concerned with how to work with such difficult core emotions, to avoid letting our shame, fear, or other anxieties lock us up, which can leave us paralyzed. I imagine most folks will probably pick up a book like Unfolding because of similar concerns. It’s not perhaps that many of us don’t already know where our passion lies, or where we would like to go. We just wish it wasn’t so damn nerve-wracking!
Consider the matter of fear, for example. (If you haven’t noticed, it’s a very popular emotion these days.) Speaking from experience, I’ve found fear will most likely rear its troublesome face in my life whenever I’m really engaged in trying to move things forward in some way. I’ve stepped outside my comfort zone, I’m on the verge of some breakthrough, and wham! There it is: fear. I think of it as a hazy, choking cloud of dust I kick up as I erase and redraw the boundaries of my life along a wider arc of choices and options.
What I reaffirmed for myself in Unfolding is that this cloud of fear is really my soul asking me to pay attention. The message is that something important is happening now, I’m widening the circle of my life. I’m changing. And I’ve got to stay focused if I want to see my way clear to the boundaries where the dust falls away and the opportunities begin.
Of course, we always have a choice about how we respond to fear. We can view it as Mossbridge describes we might — as a "flashing neon arrow," a road marker on our path to enlightenment. Or we can let it debilitate us. Unfolding speaks to a type of spiritual courage with its reminders of the ways fear can serve to focus us, to navigate us to happier, more fulfilling shores. We can over time find stronger, more affirming navigators as we change and grow, declares Mossbridge. We can grow and change and do it less fearfully.
Where such spiritual courage begins is in our willingness to become truly intimate with our fears, to consciously experience their meaning and power. That may sound rather obvious, but Mossbridge offers a unique approach to examining fear issues, suggesting that there is often a kind of paradoxical dynamic to the way we experience fear. This paradox finds expression in a type of dynamic interaction between our conscious fears and what Mossbridge describes as underlying "mirror-fears."
What exactly is a mirror-fear? Often it’s an unacknowledged, even opposite fear to what we are consciously fearing. It is also frequently a revealing window into our most powerful and deeply held fears. Consider, for example, the young man Mossbridge worked with who was afraid he would die before he reached age thirty. "Because of this fear," she writes, "he was treading water; he was generally dismissive of his experiences, decisions, and goals. His behavior clearly showed his mirror-fear: He was scared he would not die before he reached thirty. If he were really in this life for the long haul, he would have to become more conscious of his path. Becoming conscious of his path was his hidden, deep fear."
Another young man was terribly afraid he was gay. But as he eventually came to learn, his mirror-fear was actually that he was not gay. Because underlying his mirror-fear was an even more primal fear, that there was just nothing special about him. Unwittingly, he had come to experience the idea of being gay as being special. Going beyond all these attachments to what he thought it meant to be gay or straight, to just experience his own uniquely human self, was the path he had to walk to claim some clarity about his stance in life.
Wonderful Life, Difficult Life
In the arena of self-help or personal growth books, it has become at times difficult to discern the useful from what is simply marketable. In Unfolding, Julia Mossbridge delivers a highly creative contribution to the field of self-improvement. Her writing style is friendly and accessible without veering into cliché or the usual new age rhetoric. There is subtlety and consideration to the thought here; the book contains the voice of an open-minded, original thinker and spirit. The result is a deceptively straightforward book. Reading, I found myself provoked into some heartfelt, bump-in-the-road-type soul searching.
I think maybe that’s the point.
These days — especially these days — we live in such a highly fearful, stressful world, a world of risk and economic insecurity and other people’s hidden agendas and our own neuroses and a thousand other challenges. M. Scott Peck wasn’t wrong when he began his best-seller, The Road Less Traveled, with the simple statement, "Life is difficult."
I will confess that I wish it were easier. I wish I were enlightened enough to embrace my abundance with effortless ease. But instead I stumble along and do my best to be myself and live with some modicum of emotional awareness. That’s why I like a book like Unfolding. The author doesn’t come across as the next great self-help guru. Nor does she speak of self-improvement as some grand epiphany, as if the enlightenment that matters must descend upon us in a chorus of trumpets and angels.
Getting better and better at just being ourselves, Mossbridge concludes, creating a life and a community that resonates with who we are and what we are here to do, is more likely to happen in increments. It is more light seeping into shadows, more process than revelation. Yet the wonder of it all is that the more we free our creativity and passion, the more we express our natures, the more the subtle hues of our unfolding will gradually acquire a bolder, more brilliant sweep.
I don’t know if it’s because being now well into my forties, I have these moments when I feel gruesomely old, which explains why reading a book such as Unfolding makes me want to say such obvious things as here is a young writer wise beyond her years. But it’s true. This is a wise book. And as she is still in her early thirties, it’s likely that we will be hearing more from Julia Mossbridge.
I think this is also a good thing.
Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul’s Work, by Julia Mossbridge (New World Library, 2002).
Visit www.unfolding.org.
Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.