Friends, welcome to the 7th edition of the "Tracking Your Wyrd" course.
Thanks for coming back. I'm grateful you're here.
So in our last letter, I offered you a suggested assignment, which was to write about a mountaintop or peak experience. In this letter, I promised we'd track your wyrd on that mountain. And that's going to require that we go back a couple of letters, and revisit my love letter on values where I wrote this:
And the things that are most valuable to you, your values in life, they are part of your wyrd constitution. They are the qualities that give you your particular hue, your color tones, the ways you are shaded and inflected. Or, to use a musical analogy, they are your home tone, the key tone of the scale that is your particular music.
We hunted our wryd in the things we were grateful for, as I suggested those things we are most grateful for point to our values, and our values point to our wyrd.
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So let’s do the same thing with your peak experience or experiences. Because I want to suggest that when we are having a peak experience, we are very close to our wyrd, if not directly embodying it. The reason why the experience fills us up so much, makes us feel more vital, more ecstatic, more ourselves really, is because we are expressing our wyrd and/or having our wyrd acknowledged. We are doing something in alignment with our Genius, with our particular giftedness, and it feels awesome!
When I track my wyrd this way and look at a few of my peak experiences, they always come down to three basic values—love, service, and connectedness. It’s pretty much guaranteed that anytime I’m expressing these three values, I feel lit up from within. I stand taller, I move with more confidence, I feel deep joy and fulfillment, I feel on purpose. |
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And this makes mythological sense, because if we imagine that we’re here on this gorgeous blue marble called Earth to express the Genius that was woven into our very being by the Fates and Mother Necessity, then we are on purpose when we’re being our wyrd. One of the qualities of a peak experience is that we feel fully present, and this makes sense too—we’re present to the glorious truth of who we are, and we’re in complete alignment with our chosen lot in life. There’s nothing else to do—we’re doing what we came here to do or came here to feel or came here to express, so we don’t perseverate over the past or fret about the future because all is right in our world, right here, right now. |
This letter’s invitation is to look at your peak experience/s
and discern what values were being expressed.
I’m going to suggest you look for three values, your own particular holy trinity—and look over the values that came out of the gratitude exercise, because you will probably notice at least some overlap. The next obvious thought experiment is to move beyond peak experiences—come down about a 1/4 of the height of the mountain (if a peak experience is 10/10 on the “isn’t life grand!” scale, come down to the moments when you feel about 7 or 8 out of 10) and see if these same values were being expressed then—I suspect you’ll find consistency there.
Because that's the gold in this assignment.
When we’re feeling ennui in life, operating at a 2 or a 3 on the old excitement meter, feeling listless and lacking in a profound sense of purpose, then we turn to our holy trinity of values and we look for opportunities to express them. Using my holy trinity, when I’m trudging through a blah patch in life, I just need to look for opportunities for love, service, and connection to pluck me right out of that patch and putt me down the field into purpose, the goalpost of living our one wild and precious wryd.
I have two resources to share with you in this letter.
Click here for a list of values you could use to track your wyrd. It’s a long list, and a lot of the words are similar, but they carry their own inflection, so you may resonate with one word but not with its familiar cousin. If you print this out, I suggest going through and highlighting or putting checkmarks by the ones that are most important to you. On your first pass, you’re probably going to have far too many checkmarks—that’s normal! The list is a bunch of positive values, so you’re likely to feel positively about most of them!
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One way to sort them, if you’re having difficulty landing on three, is to draw some concentric circles, and place your values inside the rings—the center being your wryd trinity (or two, or four or five, whatever makes the most sense to you), the set of values that most defines your unique giftedness and talents and genius, and then move to your second most important set of values, and so on, until you have your own dartboard of values. It could be a lot of fun to cut out or write down the values that speak to you most, and draw those concentric circles on a big piece of posterboard, and then shuffle your values into those circles until you’re satisfied.
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The other resource is this website (click here) where you can take a personal values assessment for free. If you find the above list too overwhelming, this assessment might be an easier place to start.
Until our next letter, Friend, keep being your wyrd!
Until our next letter, Friend, keep being your wyrd!
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"There was a little girl, Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very, very good, But when she was bad, she was horrid." With love, From that little wyrd girl |
If you’re interested in a more in-depth study of how to bring your wyrd and your genius into more congruence in your vocational life, consider my course Deep Vocation: Restoring Your Soul’s Purpose, Power, and Pleasure. Click here to learn more.