Explore your Life Map
If life is a journey…
…do you know where you’re going?
…do you have a map and compass?
…do you have a guide?
Have you drawn your Life Map yet?
"I believe that every person is a spiritual being having a human experience...And that the point of our brief time on earth is to come to grips with what is eternal inside us." This was not written by a philosopher or a theologian but by Scott O’Grady, the U.S. Air Force pilot who was shot out of the sky in June 1995. Landing behind enemy lines in war-torn Bosnia, he amazed an anxiously-watching world with his ability to survive in a hostile countryside for six days until he was rescued. An experience that might have traumatized someone else became transformative for him. He attributed his courageous spirit to the belief that his life had a higher purpose — one he could work on anywhere.
How can we find the inspiring goals and life purpose that help us live meaningfully in this age of anxiety? Does everyone have them or are they reserved for a chosen few like Scott O’Grady?
Most of us do not have the type of mission or talent that will put us on the cover of Time magazine. We are trying to pay the bills, meet our personal goals, treat others decently and, if all goes well, to enjoy our lives as much as possible. Sometimes it is hard to find the heroic element in our lives. All too often we seek our heroes in books and on movie screens. Yet the heroic is there in our own lives. We only need to take the time to look for it, and to reaffirm it.
One way we can search for spiritual direction is to draw a Life Map. Few of us can take the time to reflect on our life by writing an entire autobiography, but drawing a Life Map can render many of the same benefits. I still remember the feeling of astonishment I had when I drew my first Life Map, and I saw my whole life represented on one large piece of paper. I was amazed at how patterns emerged, how I could begin to see some design and direction in what had often seemed to be a confused, winding path filled with detours, successes and failures. After drawing a Life Map of my past I drew a Life Map of my future, which helped me become more conscious of my dreams and aspirations.
Since then I have developed the Life Journey Guidebook and the Life Map technique and used it with many of my clients and workshop participants. In drawing their Life Maps and talking about them with me, people often have "Aha!" experiences. They see how old dysfunctional patterns have kept them trapped in a "comfort zone" that prevents them from moving forward. They discover life designs and patterns that provide them with clues to their life purpose.
One woman, Donna, in a recent workshop could hardly contain her excitement when she rediscovered a long-forgotten life dream as she drew her map. A few weeks later, she called to tell me she is already taking steps to make changes in her life. Phil, a married middle-aged man who was doing Life Journey coaching with me, looked at his map and saw that he had represented a romantic relationship in college with a broken heart and realized that a part of his heart was still numb from that experience. Through processing his emotions about the break-up he was able to bring a depth of passion to his marriage that had always been missing.
Why draw a Life Map?
Why draw a Life Map? We are on a Life Journey — a mythic voyage from birth to death. We use a map to answer the most important questions: Where have I been? Where am I? Where am I going? A Life Map helps us answer a deeper question: Who am I and why I am I on this journey? It provides us with a spiritual perspective on our life’s path.
This map is both a historical record and a creative tool for visioning the future. Perhaps the most important thing we use a map for is to help us plan where we are going — to map our future. The Life Map is a tool for conscious living, a way to create the life you were born to live.
On our journey we may encounter broad highways, steep rocky paths, mountains, swamps and barren deserts. Sometimes we speed along, knowing exactly where we are going. Other times we stumble along. Sometimes we seem to lose our way completely. Sometimes we have companions, sometimes we travel alone.
Along the road are rest stops or "way stations" where we pause to consult our maps, ask for directions, find a guide, and reflect on where we are going. Drawing your Life Map creates a way station in your life. You can take time out and get a birds eye view of where you’ve been and where you’re headed.
Mapmaking Technology
You are the mapmaker. Like the great mapmakers of the past, your tools are simple—paper and pen. Any large piece of paper will do. I recommend a sheet of poster board because it provides a big area and a firm surface. An assortment of pens, colored pencils and colored felt-tipped markers will give you a good variety of writing implements to choose from.
The skills you bring are your memory and your imagination. (Fortunately, artistic ability is not necessary to draw a meaningful map.) Your map can be chronological or impressionistic. There are no rules about what your map should look like. What makes Life Maps so fascinating is that they as diverse and individualistic as the lives they represent.
The defining structure of the Life Map is the Lifeline, which represents the path your life has taken or will take. It can be expressed as a straight line, a series of steps, a spiral or any freeform design you choose. You can show the ups and downs of your life, the forks in the road (major decisions) and the roads not taken (someone you didn’t marry, a job you didn’t take). You can use symbols, pictures, and words to mark important events. You can visualize your map as a landscape or use other images and metaphors. Color can be used to differentiate phases of your life. Maps have words and symbols. You can label things, make little drawings, or use symbols such as storm clouds, lightning, a broken heart, a mountain, a bridge, a house, etc.
How much time you spend on each map is up to you. Don’t try to do it when you are feeling rushed or hassled. Set aside a quiet evening or a weekend afternoon. Create a private workshop for yourself. Take time to visualize your map. Remember as you visualize your past that there is no right or wrong way to look at your life. You have been telling yourself a certain story about your life up to this point, and by drawing your map you have the chance to become more aware of your story, and to rewrite it if you wish. The stories we tell about our life become our truth. They give our life the meaning, or lack of meaning that it has; they create our identity. After drawing your map you might take some time to meditate on your Life Map and write down some of your feelings and insights.
Writing your own story
Until we take the time to become consciously aware of our stories, we continue to repeat the distorted stories we have heard others tell about us — stories that prevent us from being who we are really meant to be. As a coach and counselor I help people change the stories they tell about themselves. When anxious or depressed clients come into my office, I help them become more aware of their stories. I remind them that they can take back the power to write their own stories and become the authors of their own lives. Often after just one session they walk out of my office feeling much better about themselves. Nothing has changed yet in their outer lives, but they have begun to write a more positive story. Instead of playing the role of helpless victims they begin to see themselves as heroes and heroines who have overcome many obstacles and survived. They begin to write stories of their future that inspire them to live more authentic and adventurous lives.
When you visualize your Life Map, remember that your story is also the story of all humanity. Your life partakes of all the great myths and legends. You can envision your life as a great adventure. What is it that has motivated you throughout your life? What is the secret quest you are on? When you were a young boy or girl you had not yet lost the sense of life as a glorious adventure. Whether you are trying to earn a degree, pay your bills, raise a family, start a business, adjust to a major life change brought about by illness, divorce or job loss, remember that you are on a spiritual quest. With this awareness you can transform the mundane into the transcendent. Your life matters to the cosmos.
This is the hero’s journey — to return to the wellspring of consciousness and find out what it means to be truly human. Instead of merely copying stories we have heard, we need to write our own story. Each of us deserves to be the author of our own life.
Finding your hidden treasure
When you have drawn your basic Life Map you can draw other versions of it. (You can contact me for more detailed information on Life Map drawing). You can update your map from time to time. Sometimes it helps to draw the most negative story about your life so you can see how toxic it is — and then ceremonially burn it.
Meditating on your Life Map, you can begin to sense what has been guiding your life. Somewhere in your Life Map, where you may least expect it, you will find a hidden treasure. In fairy tales and myths the hero or heroine often finds the treasure in a place that is desolate and dark, a region of danger and difficulty where few dare to venture. This place is our shadow, the darker side of our self — the place where we have thrown all the wounded parts of our self that did not meet with approval from parents, peers, and society.
Yet at various times in life, and especially during midlife and other transitions, we meet new challenges that don’t seem to respond to our usual techniques. At these times the call to wholeness and healing becomes much louder before, and we unconsciously begin to reach back into our dark interior for some long-forgotten part of our self. Those on the hero’s path are actively searching for their lost treasures, and integrating the light and dark sides of themselves.
Our greatest gift often comes from the place where we have been wounded the most deeply. Many creative and successful people are "wounded healers" — people who overcame a problem and transformed it into their life's work. Bill Wilson founded one of the most successful organizations in history through facing his own wounds. Today millions of people benefit from Alcoholics Anonymous and similar programs. My client, Paolo, deeply anguished by his daughter’s disability, put his computer savvy to work and founded a company that designs and produces computer-assisted communication devices for the disabled. Another client, Vanessa, a talented secretary who found her path to executive positions blocked by gender bias, opened her own consulting practice, providing career development training for office workers seeking to reach their full potential. Such people bring passionate enthusiasm and a sense of purpose to their work because they listened when their "inner voice" called them to take on a challenge.
When Joseph Campbell advised students looking for direction in life to "follow your bliss," he chose his words carefully. He didn’t tell them to follow their obvious talents, their social expectations, their ego gratification or even their happiness. He used the word "bliss," a word we associate with a state of passionate spiritual ecstasy. Like many before you, you may discover your greatest treasure where you least expect to find it. To find your greatest gift, search in the dark regions where you have hidden your wounds and your passions.
Follow your passion in drawing your Future Life Map
The goal of the quest, the hidden treasure in the world’s most resonant myths, is always greater aliveness, more life, abundant life. The treasure is the gift of life: the Holy Grail in the King Arthur legend, the "living waters" that bring healing. Yet it is not the acquisition of the treasure that transforms the protagonist into a hero or heroine — it is the quest itself.
The right quest generates passion in the hero or heroine. It is in searching that we come alive with the inner passion that gives life its color and vibrancy. Passion is the fire of human life — the fire in the belly that propels us forward through challenges. Deep, enduring enthusiasm, unlike momentary excitement, comes only when we have aligned our life with a higher purpose. This means opening up to the deeper flow of wisdom in our psyche. Thoreau advised, "Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows."
After reflecting on your Life Map, you can take the awesome responsibility of creating your own future by drawing a Future Life Map. This map begins with the present moment and ends with your death. Yes, death. It’s going to happen some day. Sooner or later, we will reach the end of our lifeline. As Samuel Johnson wryly observed, the prospect of death "concentrates the mind most wonderfully."
What do you want to experience between now and then? Be bold, dream big dreams. Let your first map be the hero’s map, unfettered by the limiting lie we call "reality." Your future Life Map can be one of many, as you explore alternate futures that emphasize different aspects of yourself. After you express your deepest, wildest, most creative dreams you can focus them into more down-to-earth maps that help you plan the next year, or the next month.
What is important is that the successes and failures we experience are our own. Only by following our deepest desire can we find genuine success. All truly successful people have defined success for themselves. Success is not a distant goal, but a process, a state of mind and a way of living life. To know that we can handle anything, to know that we can turn everything into an opportunity for spiritual growth — that is living successfully.
Drawing a Life Map becomes a small way station on our journey, a brief time to stop amidst the noisy rush of everyday life, to gaze back at where we have come from and to envision our future. And, perhaps, most important, to ask why we are on the path.
For more information
The Life Journey Guidebook is a powerful tool designed to help you live more consciously are creatively in today’s challenging times. If you would like to find out more about Life Map drawing and Life Coaching please contact Robert Gerzon at 978-369-3539 or email him to receive additional information.
Portions excerpted from Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety
© Robert Gerzon, 1997, all rights reserved.
Find out more about Robert Gerzon’s highly acclaimed book Finding Serenity in the Age of Anxiety.
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