It is well

Who here has had that college life crisis (or 10) of frantically worrying over what you want to do after it’s all over? Carter used to tease me about how often I changed my mind, about the many career ideas I’d bounce off of him. His course had been set for the last decade of his life. Major in biology. Med school. Orthopedic surgery. He had it all planned out.

And now he’s studying plant science and is more excited than ever.

The thing is, sometimes the right path has to find you. Sometimes the steps you take on a different path ultimately lead you to the right one.

Carter started helping with plant research to get experience for his med school application. Then he found that he loved his work with plants more than anything else he was doing in school.

I’ve considered more career paths than I can count. Preschool teacher, artist, lawyer, marriage and family therapist, journalist, author, editor, art historian… (just to name a few). I had this idea that graduating from high school I had to have it figured out. I picked a major, started school, and felt pretty good about it. And then I left for 18 months to serve as a missionary. Upon returning home, I realized I did not want to be what I had settled on before leaving. New alternatives crossed my mind often. I loved helping and serving people.

I was still unsure what I wanted to pursue. Registration week was always the most stressful time because I had no idea what the heck I wanted to do. I would set my classes, then add some other classes that sounded interesting, then delete those classes and wait-list a few more. Lots of interesting classes, but none of them bringing me closer to an end goal. I was lost and wandering, bewildered by the inevitably life-changing decision I, as a twenty-something, was expected to make.

Then I met a chiropractor at the county fair, who did a sample evaluation on Carter’s back. I hardly knew anything about chiropractors except they help with back problems. And my dad thought they were all crazy… But I randomly decided to throw myself into researching more.

It was here that I started exploring the path of holistic medicine. Realities that had never occurred to me just made sense as I investigated more of the core of chiropractic practice. I was amazed with all I learned about what I had thought was an ordinary medical profession.

So I started investigating a career as a chiropractor. I decided to sample a couple prerequisite classes for chiropractic school. I found myself taking psychology.

It wasn’t until listening to a TED talk for a psych assignment that I realized my passion for mental health. I realized how little we knew about the subject and how much we could gain by increasing our awareness of mental health.

So I jumped into the psychology major! Still intending on Chiropractic school, but with psychology as the means to the end, I elected to minor in yoga as well. All registered for a new semester at (yet another) college, I was eager to take all these classes that finally had some direction to them.

And then we went to the temple during the winter break.

Something in that session struck me, as I realized the important union between our body and our spirit- that this is what makes up our soul. Basically, God told me that I needed to pursue a career path that bridged the gap between the two. Not just physical health, not just academics and intellectual pursuits. But mind, spirit, AND body. United, one, the same.

At first I was frustrated. I had finally come to a conclusion about my schooling, was finally excited about my classes and didn’t feel like I was limiting myself by the path I had chosen. When I had finally come to a small conclusion about my future, it seemed that God was trying to steer me in an entirely different direction. I was frustrated and stressed out again! Also nervous to tell Carter that I had, yet again, changed my mind about school.

But as I began researching possible classes and career paths, I realized how perfectly this new direction only clarified the direction I was already headed. I guess God really did know what he was doing the whole time 😉

So why do I need to tell my entire career exploration life story?

For the last several months I’ve been struggling to find the perfect niche for my blog. It seems that every successful blogger has a more specific niche than what I’ve been going for. I want to blog about life. Lifestyle. Happiness and simplicity. But it seemed that I needed something specific to focus my attention and help find a following.

So here it is!

Soul.

Mind, body, spirit…

Loving yourself, your environment, your relationships… it’s just as all-encompassing as I wanted it to be, but now I’m realizing that it really does all fit together as it should! Life isn’t composed of irrelevant segments. It is an intricately woven tapestry, dependent upon each individual thread and color! Just as one thread supports the other, every piece of a happy, full life supports the other pieces.

So here’s what I’m aiming to do. Inspire, lift, and help others to take better care of their soul, spirit, body mind… whatever you choose to call it. Combining the factors of your physical, emotional, spiritual, environmental, intellectual, occupational, financial, cultural, and social well-being, we can all get to a point where we sigh in relief and say to ourselves, “It is well”.