The Alchemist

I had been working for 9 years in Harlem at a public school that I  started with two other teachers in 1991. I also had two small children, one 6 years old and one 2. I was responsible for raising 2 million dollars a year for the non-profit attached to the school. The school came out of a deep desire to meet the educational needs of under served students.  It was getting great attention for its academic success and innovative approach. As a result, I had the opportunity to speak at a variety of educational conferences.

On a trip out to San Fransisco to speak at a conference, I read The Alchemist by Paulo Cholelo.  With two small children and a full time job, I was very excited to have the time and opportunity to read it. I read the entire book on that flight and when I got off the plane I had a deep knowing that I wanted another child. I also knew that I could not do that and meet the needs of my organization at the same time. 

Over the next few days, I had a profound realization that the belief that I was indispensable was making me feel that my desire to have another child was impossible. Over the next six months, I would come face to face with my fear of being dispensable as well as my deep desire to fulfill my dream of having a third child. 

One day while in the midst of this struggle, a phrase suddenly came to me that clarified my situation; “If the Family Academy (the school I had started) can’t live without me, then I can't live with it.” This insight was profound in that it showed me that I was so deeply attached to the school that I could not see the organization succeeding without me.  I began to see that I had prioritized the needs of the organization to the exclusion of my own.

I remember driving to work, an hour commute, and listening to the sound track to the movie City of Angels. The songs would play over and over and saturate my mind with both emotions and feelings that I had not known so deeply inhabited me and were yearning to be expressed and released. I cried many drives as I processed feelings of loss, and the knowing of an end of something within me.

I had not realized how much of my identity had been sewn into my work and the recognition that I received from it. I would ask myself out loud “who am I?” And I would say to myself  “no one.” I would then sit and feel which emotions arose within me. Sometimes I would feel a sense of unworthiness as I watched myself try to make up other identities to fill the soon to be vacant one.

These were painful drives as I allowed myself to feel all the different emotions that had been attached to this identity I had so carefully cultivated. For so many years, I had been deeply driven by service as the sole means to define my purpose. Without this formal external job how would I experience service and how would others know that I had not lost this commitment.  I had no idea that those same words (who am I) were to guide me even further into the release of my attachment to the self constructed identity later on. 

I also did not realize at the time that this would be an ongoing process by which I would slowly dismantle many false beliefs of who I perceived I needed to be in order to feel worthy. However, what I did experience at the time was that as soon as I let go of this identity of needing to be indispensable, magically many things fell into place for me.  I found someone to replace me at work within six months of this recognition who literally wanted my job and was capable of doing it. The funny thing was that she too had read the Alchemist. This was a clear sign for me.  

After reading the Alchemist, I had a much greater understanding that I was meant to follow what intuitively felt right to me. The challenge I was to later realize was that I had a great deal of fear and conditioned beliefs that would fog up or blur my intuition. Fortunately, for many of my biggest life decisions, my authentic self was so profoundly loud in its guidance that I had to listen because if I didn't the dissonance was unbearable.