In this present-moment exploration with Rick, we talked about what actually gets in the way of living out our deepest purpose. A lot of it comes down to two things: a continual need for catharsis, and a habit of prioritising feeling good over facing what is difficult. Both are real needs. Neither is wrong on its own. But when either becomes the only pathway we know, it can quietly keep us from the life we are here to live.
When release becomes the only route
Rick described a pattern many people will recognise: emotion builds, gets expressed through crying or shouting, and then there's a sense of completion, a feeling of having released what needed to come out. I asked him whether there were other pathways available to him for feeling open and liberated, ones that didn't rely on that cathartic release. His honest answer was no, that expressive release was the one thing that worked for him. That answer is worth sitting with, because it points to something important. Whatever our default tendency for finding relief is, it can become the only tool we know how to use, and that limits us.
The capacity to stay
I have a different default. Where Rick's gift is release, mine has been more of a stoic capacity to hold burden, to carry weight with a kind of grounded steadiness rather than needing it to move through and out of the body straight away. I don't mean repression. I mean the capacity to be with tension without it becoming heavy, contracted or unmanageable. That quality has helped me in my purpose, in my relationships, and in standing through moments that could otherwise have derailed me. But just as Rick's gift can become one-sided, so can mine. I have used purpose and mission to avoid other parts of my life. The point isn't that one capacity is right and the other wrong. It's that life keeps calling us to develop the one we're missing, rather than doubling down on the one that already works.
This showed up directly in the conversation when Rick talked about starting and abandoning study after study. Each time resistance or boredom or emotional difficulty came up, he treated that as a signal he was on the wrong path, and he stopped. We talked about the difference between a habit of releasing tension that helps us come into alignment, and a habit of releasing that actually becomes a defence against ever inhabiting a bigger mission, because bigger missions always come with resistance built in. If the only skill we have is walking away from resistance, we never find out what's on the other side of it.
Going deeper in one place
An image came up in the conversation that has stayed with me. Somebody digging for gold gives up after four feet in one spot and moves to another, digging thirty or forty shallow holes and finding nothing, while someone else digs six feet in one place and strikes gold on the first try. The gold isn't the reward for trying many places. It's the reward for going deep enough in one place. There is no traffic beyond the extra mile, because most people stop at the mile and turn back. Beyond that point you're mostly on your own, and that is often exactly where an unexpected life opens up.
None of this is an argument for enduring suffering for its own sake or grinding through everything regardless of cost. There is a real difference between penetrating through burden as a kind of spiritual practice and pushing an unregulated nervous system into a mess. The skill is knowing which one you're doing.
Two kinds of mentorship
The other thread in this conversation was mentorship. Rick named something a lot of people feel but rarely say out loud: a longing to be close to someone whose knowledge and way of being they want to absorb, before they've fully worked out what they're building toward. I've had that experience myself with two very different mentors. One gave me access to years of recorded teaching and a model for how to build and communicate a body of work. The other, over many years, became the imprint of the kind of man I wanted to be, not because of any technique he taught me, but because of how he lived. Mentorship in your craft and mentorship in how to be a human being are not the same thing, and most of us need both, often from people who didn't come from our own family or culture.
What struck me most in this conversation is that mentorship of that depth is rarely handed out freely. It tends to go to people who are already meeting life, already showing some discipline or devotion in an area, because that visibility is what draws a mentor's attention in the first place. You have to be meetable if you want to be met.
Two Capacities for Liberation
Cathartic release
Moving tension, pain or heaviness out of the body through expression such as crying or shouting until something feels complete.
Stoic holding
Carrying burden with grounded steadiness and dignity, without repression, so that difficulty does not automatically signal the need to quit.
