Don’t package your passion

Three years ago today I started my blog about my dream to have my own crystal shop. 9 months later I did, of sorts, then 18 months after that I closed its doors.

For the next 6 months I continued to sell crystals in my lovely friend Fiona’s sparkly dress shop a few doors down. For most of those six months I ran a weekly crystal workers group which was very well attended and liked and sold the odd crystal in the shop but then some time around July I stopped.  I didn’t know why in terms of a logical reason rather that my intuition was telling me to do so. Various feelings, some pretty painful, had been emerging from different experiences in my life and it was time to focus on self–care and my internal world.

From this I discovered Five Element Acupuncture and a holistic form of counselling which has been an incredible powerful pain-busting duo in my life. It has also led me to confront some discomfort I had been feeling about my work and my purpose.

This morning, on my Facebook group I wrote this:

“Hello everyone, I hope you are all well and thriving during Scorpio season! Not only do we have the usual time of Sun in Scorpio but the great expansive Jupiter is there too to ensure that this time we look deeply into our souls and express who we truly are..warts n all!
So in true Scorpio fashion I wanted to update you all about where I am and some decisions I have made about Astro-Rocks…

Well, I’ve decided that I am no longer going to be in the business of selling crystals. With a thorough and honest look at myself this year and some focused self-healing I have had a number of revelations, some surprising, like this one. It just isn’t me. It’s part of me but not enough to feel like it fits. Don’t misunderstand, I am not walking away from crystal (I don’t think I could if I tried as they are so integrated into who I am! ) rather I am walking away from the business of selling crystals. No doubt I will still enthuse, share, teach about and give away stones I have bought for myself from various places as I have always done and I will still meditate, practice astrology and explore the metaphysical world but right now I just don’t feel comfortable making a business from it in the foreseeable future”

That’s it.  It just isn’t me.  For the longest time, so long I have forgotten where and why it started I have been saying “One day I will have a crystal shop” that it became my overarching narrative.  Until that one day actually happened.

I am so unbelievably blessed to have followed and lived out my dream, this dream. How many of us get to do that? In fact, how many of us get to see our dream from the other side?  How many of us get to experience what that truly feels like? There is no substitute in my mind for learning by doing.  It’s my only way of functioning. I have no regrets but I do have a whole heap of insights that I would not have come close to uncovering without living out this dream.

When expressing how I feel to others I call it seeing the Dark Side of the Moon.  The side that is hidden from us and the Light Side that is constantly illuminated by the Sun.  Our dreams are full of light, hope, fantasy and imagination and like the moon can be an illusion or part of it illusory. On the dark side is the reality of experience.  Some parts of the dream are not what had hoped or imagined and other parts are so far away from our frame of reference it’s almost impossible to process. This was my experience and I learned more about my true nature in 3 years than my whole life-time.

Over the next few weeks and possibly months I will be sharing my insights in the most starkest form on the experience of following my dream. I will also be exploring the reality of commercialising our passion and purpose and the programming that is contained within it as well the difficulty we all face in breaking life-long programmes around money and consumption. I believe this is a post-commercial world now and those programmes are obsolete.  It’s time now to follow our passion without turning it into a commodity.