Shhhh.... How I Quit My Job
/Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Viktor E. Frankl
About a year before my sister in law Lisa died, I’d been asked to lead a few yoga sessions at the Omega Institute conference in New York City Body and Soul. This was a great honor; it was 1997 and I was a relatively new teacher and I’d only been teaching part-time, but I felt in my heart that this was the work I was truly meant to do.
One day, on one of my hospital visits with Lisa, I brought the conference catalog, planning to share it with her. This was a bold move for me. I usually didn’t bring up anything about my career around Lisa. It seemed insensitive to talk about my future when hers was so uncertain. But this time, not only did I share with her my big news, but I also confided that, deep down, I’d been considering leaving my corporate job to teach yoga full-time.
There had been a voice inside me urging me to make such a move for a while. A little voice. A whispering voice.
Early on, I had no idea how much credence to give this voice. I loved my job, but also, in my mind, my job was who I was. All the foundational ideas I held about myself were validated by my job. (Jillian the Achiever. Jillian the Tenacious. Jillian the Succeeder.) So why would this voice be suggesting I move on?
I remember telling Lisa all my reservations about leaving my job: I was on a solid career track. I had benefits and vacations and a title and an office. I was good at what I did. It was what I’d always wanted. And it seemed like exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
Her response was delivered with a conviction I wasn’t expecting; I still hear her words in my head.
“Do what you are called to do,” she said.
The more we pause, soften, and listen deeply to what’s stored inside us, the easier it becomes to relax our “shoulds” and our “supposed to.”
The practice of pausing and listening to our deeper inner voice rewires us. It allows us more access to our big-picture thinking, more comfort when we’re in a state of “not knowing,” and a greater capacity to pause before responding to challenging circumstances in our lives. It becomes easier to feel our own spaciousness and flexibility, allowing us to experience our relationships—and our life—in ways that we were not able to before. In other words, our perspective begins to change.
The Static of “No”
I remember a day, months before I’d shared my conference catalog with Lisa, that I had tried to honor my little inner voice. On a Friday afternoon, I walked into my boss's office and handed him my resignation. Over the weekend, instead of celebrating, I spiraled out.
“Oh, no! What have I done? If I don’t have a ‘title,’ how will people know who I am? Without this job, who will I be?”
That Monday, I asked for my job back. (Thank you, Matthew.)
This uh-oh phenomenon is typical, as its roots are in our “primitive” brain. We are neurologically programmed to hear “no” more easily than we can hear “yes,” so it can often feel more “important” or more “true.”
Of course, there are times where we will need to heed “no.” Historically, “no” has probably kept us safe. As a species, “no” has probably even kept us alive. But we need to understand that our wisdom can sometimes be clouded by the “static” of “no.”
We also need to understand that even if we do hear our inner wisdom clearly, we may not yet know that we can trust it.
Our wisdom rarely lives in those negative repeat thoughts running through our heads all day long. Rather, our wisdom arises in the space between those thoughts.
Most of us are trained to pay attention only to our thoughts, circumstances, or even the many things we’re so busy “doing” all the time. We get ourselves from one 'experience' to another, sometimes effortlessly, and yet we still don’t have a relationship with the part of us where our wisdom lives. We simply have not been taught how to pause and notice what is happening inside us regularly enough that we know how to trust the insight we receive.
The good news is that yoga and meditation offer us all the opportunity to explore and become familiar with those in-between moments and to practice listening within. The better news is that paying kind and curious attention to the spaces between our “activity” is something we can start doing right away.
Pause. Check-In. “How Do You Feel Today?”
I begin every class I teach and every workshop I lead by asking my students, “How are you?”
Usually, people smile. Some say, “Good.” But I let the question seep into the room. This question sounds like a pleasantry, but it’s where we need to begin.
Then I ask, “How do you feel right now?”
The room stays quiet for a time, and almost without exception
I can see people begin to hold their breath. They freeze a little bit.
How do I feel right now? They’re not accustomed to asking that of themselves.
“What do I need to know?”
I’ll say, posing a question I’ve embraced from my years of study with Erich Schiffmann.
To truly pause and open to this question a few things need to happen...
We need to find our breath.
We need to feel grounded and safe so we can relax into the present moment because it is only here that we can answer these questions:
How am I?
How do I feel right now?
What do I need to know?
At first, all our problems may arise. All our “should.” All our “have to.”
All the ways we protect ourselves. All the ways we are not spacious.
But if we can stay present and continue to practice allowing our breath to center us so we feel safe - things begin to shift. And we can practice coming back to the present and our breath again and again, until we can begin to hear and trust the voice inside us that knows how to hold and heal us.
We make space inside ourselves so that being can speak. —Martin Heidegger
Shhh! Listen
Sometimes it’s confusing to listen openly to what arises within us because at our deepest level of understanding the feelings we are faced with can be complex and even contradictory. That's okay. We are learning to practice and make space for it all.
Over time, I learned to trust what I would hear inside me. A few months after my conversation with Lisa, I quit my job again, this time for good. But it took a while for me to feel completely okay about the change. I was teaching yoga full-time for 2 years before I could say I was a yoga teacher without adding, “I used to be in marketing.”
None of us are our roles or our circumstances. Still, it’s so easy for many of us to confuse what we have or what we do with who we are. We are not our job titles, not our PhDs; we are not our salary, our cars, marriages or divorces. Lisa was not her cancer. This had always been clear to me about others, but it took a long time for me to see this about myself.
Listening deeply allows us to broaden our perspective of who we really are. Eventually, it allowed me to see how the true strength of yoga was never about mastering headstands. It was about the courage to embrace my authentic self—a position that, for me, was much more challenging. And truth be told, still is.
Listening deeply allowed me to know that I was not my marketing job. It was not my achievement. It was not my anxiety. And... I was not 'the little girl' who must tirelessly work to feel a sense of belonging or love.
We Are Bigger Than We Think We Are
As our perspective changes, it’s easier to see not only the difference between our experiences and who we are but also that we are all much bigger than our circumstances. Once we can relax in that space between stimulus and response, not only are our options different, we are different.
Imagine a life where you knew just how to tune in to your inner voice. Imagine getting into an argument with a loved one and rather than automatically spiraling into that tirade or that crying jag or that eating binge, or running for another glass of wine, you instead paused and gave yourself a moment to breathe. A moment to welcome all your feelings. A moment to feel safe. A moment to really feel your feet on the ground. To take another breath, and another and another, until you felt okay enough that you could listen within and receive your own deeper wisdom - your quieter inner voice. In that space, our possibilities expand. In that pause lies our freedom.
This article is based on an excerpt from my book Deep Listening.
Practice Now
LISTEN
A Pausing Practice
A 5-Minute Meditation to Pause and Get Grounded.
WATCH
Mini-Sequence to Listen In
A-One Minute Practice to Release Tension and Create Space To Listen In.
READ
Create Space to Pause
Two Practices For Creating More Space To Pause and Listen In.
