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The Survival Dance and the Sacred Dance - James A. Pearson

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A year earlier I’d been living in Uganda, running a social business I spent six years helping to create. But I was profoundly burnt out. And the harder I tried to make things better, the deeper I seemed to sink into depression and anxiety. So finally I pulled the eject handle. I left the business and moved back to the US with no money, no home, and no real sense of where to point my life. But the scariest part was how my identity just seemed… gone. I’d invested so much in being a “social entrepreneur” that without it I didn’t feel like I knew myself anymore. But moving to a new city means meeting lots of new people. And inevitably one of the first things they’d ask is, “What do you do?” Every time someone asked me I felt a stab of shame. I didn’t want to be judged by my boring job. But I also knew there was some deeper part of me longing to be known. I just didn’t know who that part was. Or how to access it. It was in the soup of that lostness that—on a sort of desperate whim—I bought

How to balance livelihood and longing, and discover your true work in the world In July of 2014 I moved to Seattle and got a job. It was a boring, pay-the-bills sort of job, which was what I needed at the time. A year earlier I’d been living in Uganda, running a social business I spent six years helping to create. But I was profoundly burnt out . And the harder I tried to make things better, the deeper I seemed to sink into depression and anxiety. So finally I pulled the eject handle. I left the business and moved back to the US with no money, no home, and no real sense of where to point my li

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