Follow Your Bliss: Find Your meaning

I was chatting with a congregant Helen Redhead in the gym. As many of you know she has recently begun competing as a power lifter, she is making great progress. She was telling me some new training that she was involved in. it was something like “Stone lifting”, a bit like you would see in the Highland Games. She has since told me that they are called “Dinny Stones”. I think the idea of getting dressed up was as exciting as competing to Helen. It was great to see her so thrilled and excited, to see her “Following her Bliss.” She told me afterwards that she was going to meet a mutual friend for lunch. She was going to share about past struggles of her own that she had overcome, a wonderful example of her finding meaning from a place that was once suffering, by helping someone else who was experiencing a similar struggle and was looking for hope. Just as she was leaving I thanked Helen for writing this weeks sermon, which is on “Following your bliss: finding your meaning”

I will begin with “Follow Your Bliss”

What does it mean to “follow your bliss”? Well according to Joseph Campbell it is a sacred call to action. It is a call from your soul to light the fire within you to do what destiny asks of you, to bring yourself fully to life and therefore to become a light in the lives of others. Following your bliss is about doing the things that bring meaning and fulfilment despite the troubles that may accompany it. It is about meaningful living despite the very real suffering present in all life. As Campbell says by “following our bliss doors will open up for us where we could only see barriers before.”

Following our bliss is about saying yes to this call and beginning our own heroic journey. In doing so synchronicity will seemingly be abound and luck will follow. By following our bliss we seemingly become guided by something more than ourselves. This is what Campbell observed and it has certainly been my experience, since I began following mine, which is of course this ministry.

Following our bliss though is not an easy ride, quite the opposite actually. Yes, there maybe moments of triumph when all are for us and no one seems to be against us, but there will also be moments of suffering and betrayal when everyone and everything seems to be against us. As Campbell observed that like all heroic journeys there are tests and trials along the way. There are monsters and dragons to slay on the journey although most of these are the ones we carry with us. It is our fear of the adventure that is our greatest enemy. It is this that stops us taking the first vital step.

Human history is littered with figures who have been drawn out of themselves, have followed there bliss and begun their adventure thus inspiring others to do likewise. Some have done this on a mass scale, figures like Nelson Mandela, and many others have done so on a much smaller, but no less important scale. All have had to face their trials and tribulations and all brought so much light to our world. They were not special people though, they were ordinary people just like you and me; ordinary people who followed their bliss; ordinary people who found the courage to be all that they were born to be.

I wonder what it might mean for you to follow your bliss?

I am at my most blissful when singing, especially with folk my heart and my soul are in harmony with. I am singing more at more once again, my soul is calling out for this. I had the most incredible experience this week during “Singing Meditation” as my voice blended heart and soul with that of another, I feel it may lead to more singing and soul stretching. My heart felt so alive, so aroused. Before we began we were chatting and Martin, who was attending for the first time, shared that he had recently found his voice, after nearly fifty years, during a service at Cross Street Chapel in Manchester. It was beautiful how he described this. I shared I had had similar experiences myself at Cross Street all those years ago. I discovered later that another friend, Helen and mine’s mutual friend, had begun to find her voice during “Singing Meditation”. All this was bliss to me, to my heart and soul and was music to my ministry, my purpose, my meaning. I wonder where this may lead. I suspect it will be somewhere wonderful, as we follow our bliss.


“Singing Meditation” was last Tuesday, the 23rd August. It was 22 years ago on that Ethan was born, the little boy who lived six years, but who was the most significant person ever to enter my life. My ministry in many ways is a legacy to his love and life. Certainly my journey through this seemingly unbearable grief is what led me to this work. His mum shared some lovely messages with me last Tuesday, including one in which she told me “You were always good for Ethan, you taught him it was ok to be a sensitive soul.” It broke me that day. I never think about what I gave to him, only what he gave to me. Of course we all still live with the grief of this loss, I have been saved though from despair by the meaning that is my life’s work that has grown from this loss. It has saved me from despair. It has enabled me to help others in their own grief, I have not lost that sensitivity, if anything I feel more deeply as time goes by, as I am sure you have all observed these last few months. Sometimes this makes it difficult, but it is the only way. My life has proven to me that despair is suffering without meaning D=S-M. Despair equals suffering minus meaning.

This leads me to the other question

“How do we find our meaning?”

The equation D=S-M comes from Viktor Frankl. In “Man’s Search For Meaning” he wrote “Man is not destroyed by suffering; he is destroyed by suffering without meaning.” He discovered that if we have a “why” to live for we can endure anything. More than that actually it is this that allows us to thrive, to be all that we are born to be. To not only improve our lives, but to serve our world. This in my eyes has parallels with Campbell’s idea of finding your own bliss, only in less flowery language and imagery.

Like finding our bliss, uncovering meaning is no easy task, how do we do so? Where do we find meaning in our lives? What about those who tell us that life is essentially meaningless? Is there one meaning? Is there one truth?

Now Frankl would suggest that it is for each of us to discover our own meaning in any given situation. That this is our task; that this meaning may not be in the given moment but in some place in the future; that it is to be found in some purpose or meaning yet to come. Again, there are parallels with Campbell’s idea of finding your own bliss. Campbell saw no one meaning, that life itself was meaningless in one sense. Our task is to discover what our bliss is to inspire others to do the same, in so doing our lives become meaning filled. The meaning is not given to us, it is revealed through our lives.

Campbell made his discoveries through studying ancient texts and stories, Frankl developed his observing and experiencing the horrors of the Nazi death camps.

In “Man’s Search For Meaning” Frankl gives an account of his struggle to find meaning when held as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps of the Second World War. He lost most of his family and friends in the camps and yet he never lost hope in humanity.

Frankl was the founder of what has often been referred to as the “Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy” Freud founded the first which was based on the central role of the libido or pleasure principle in human psychology. Alfred Adler founded the second which emphasised the importance of the will to power and the significance of the superiority/inferiority complex in human behaviour. In contrast to these two schools Frankl’s psychology is based on the will to meaning which he saw as the primary motivating force in human life. He named it “Logotherapy” taken from the Greek term logos, which means “word”, “reason”, or “meaning”. Think of the opening words from John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” The word here of course is “Logos”. There is an implication here that meaning has a transcendent origin.

Frankl saw a spiritual dimension beyond the biological and psychological. He saw the suppression of this as the root cause of our human malady. Therefore, the task of “Logotherapy” was “to remind patients of their unconscious religiousness” and to uncover the spiritual dimensions of their lives and enable them to recover the capacity to choose those values which give our lives worth and meaning.

Now this meaning is of course different for everyone, again we see parallels with Campbell here. As Frankl said himself:

“For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”

Frankl claimed that meaning is discovered through creative and worthwhile activities, by creating something beautiful or doing good – I believe that one of the greatest sadness’s of our age is the fact that the phrase “do-gooder” has become a term of mockery, that it is somehow seen as wrong and suspicious to do good - Meaning can be found through experiencing and sharing in the beauty of art or nature or through loving or ethical encounters with others.

Even in the most horrific and terrifyingly hopeless situations we still have the capacity to choose our attitude towards whatever circumstances we are faced with. It is our response to life’s events that shapes our souls. Remember Frankl developed his theory during the utter despair and horror of the Nazi death camps. As Frankl himself said “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

There are those that say that life has no meaning, that nothing matters in life. I was once one of these people. These days I see no truth in such statements. These days I see meaning in everything, even in the most painful moments in life. In fact it has usually been through coming through these most painful moments that the greatest meaning has emerged. Not immediately always but eventually as I have been able to give back to others from the experience of the suffering I have experienced and or witnessed. These last few months have proved this once again This in no way justifies the suffering please do not get me wrong, I am in no way suggesting any such thing. To quote Dorothee Soelle, “no heaven can rectify an Auswitz”. No what I am saying is that through living openly meaning can emerge. Meaning can merge from living by the way of the Lure of Divine Love. Such love draws us out of ourselves and meaning emerges as we live from love and our most painful experiences are transfigured into meaning and purpose. The suffering is still as real, but meaning begins to emerge as we are saved from the hell of despair.

We can also know bliss in our lives, by uncovering whatever it is that makes us feel alive. I have witnessed it again in the lives of ordinary people in this extraordinary week. I have experienced it too. Spiritually speaking it has been quite a week, my heart has felt close to bursting at times. That said this week has not been without pain, but even in that meaning has emerged and I have experienced utter bliss.

So follow your bliss, find your meaning. I am not here to tell you what the meaning of life is. I would be cautious of anyone who suggests that they have all the answers to such questions. What I can tell you though is that meaning can and will emerge from you, all you have to do is follow your bliss. In so doing not only will your life be meaning filled but you will inspire others to do the same.

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