Getting Lost and Finding Yourself: 5 healing practices

Getting lost and finding yourself? I’m guessing that doesn’t sound very appealing.

But maybe you’ve heard the saying: You need to lose yourself to find yourself. While that may be true it’s not usually something you plan for. More likely, the experience of getting lost and finding yourself happens organically and situationally during life’s challenges and transitions.

So it’s pretty common to resist feeling lost, to push it down and try to maintain the status quo. But at some point it will likely return, because quite often the only way out is through.

It’s also been said that you have to give in to the lostness to get to other side.

From a mythological and depth psychology perspective, this is called the Dark Night of the Soul. Emotionally, these are often depressing, bottom of the barrel experiences.

But in many familiar stories it’s the act of getting lost that allows you to find yourself again. In fact, hitting bottom and losing hope usually leads to the aha moments that help the main character in the story finally see her way out, return to possibility, and eventually find herself again.

Ironically, a major through line of therapy is the experience of getting lost and finding yourself again.

Long ago I learned this, soon after I opened the doors to my first clients. My clients taught me well. I began noticing that many told me they felt lost, that something was missing in their lives or themselves.

The words they used varied. Some felt confused, ambivalent, anxious, or uncertain. Others felt empty, unsatisfied, adrift, distracted.

Yet, their feelings of being lost were crystal clear.

What you might not know is that part of my job is to join my clients and get lost with them.

Sometimes we hope that therapy will fix our problems or fix us, but it rarely happens that way. I don’t have the magic potion to fix you. (And by the way, you don’t need fixing.)

But joining you and getting lost together? I can do that. In this work the process of getting lost and finding yourself happens through partnership and deep connection, with a big side of hope and wisdom. While I’m well trained to help my clients, we still venture into areas without much of a road map, trusting that the relationship we build will uncover clues and sign posts along the way.

Therapist and author Stephen Grosz delves into this subject in his book, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves. Here’s a quote from the book:

Analysis [therapy] is a form of not knowing. It is two people not knowing together and slowly building a picture.

When I see that quote I think about how great it would be if we lived in a world that championed the wisdom of not knowing together.

After all, not knowing and getting lost and finding yourself (as well as all our modern dark nights of the soul) will probably happen multiple times during your life and mine. So why not experiment with getting help and claiming all the wisdom that we don’t yet know?

Turning toward the idea that it’s okay to feel lost is the best place to begin. Then, these relatively simple practices and journaling prompts that I’m sharing today can help you find some room for grounding and nurturing yourself when life feels hard or you feel lost:

• Releasing the need to know everything
• Moving from problem-solving to problem-finding
• Opening up to unexpected wisdom
• Allowing yourself to go with the flow more often
• Trusting that you will discover something important about yourself

As the main character in your own life, you don’t necessarily need to dramatically hit bottom to return to yourself.

Especially during the times we’re living in it’s more important than ever to cultivate practices that normalize and offer some comfort when feeling lost. Because you never know when you’ll be called to take the secret path into whatever dark forest appears before you.

Five Practices for Getting Lost and Finding Yourself, with Journaling Prompts

1. Release the need to know everything.

Personally, accepting how much I don’t know was a huge turning point, because I used to believe saying “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” was a flaw in me. 

I thought there were supposed to be more certainties than uncertainties in life. And I used to consider ambiguity, mystery, inconsistency and contradiction as problems to be solved. Now I know that all of these things are doors that open us up to our deeper wisdom.

Looking back, I remember one pivotal day.

Early in my career I was a counselor for adult students returning to college. One day I counseled a woman who was getting ready to start the program at the university and I enthusiastically asked about her plans.

She said something like, “Well, I don’t know. I’m not even sure I’ll complete the program. I’ll try it and decide later, so I’m not even telling anyone about it yet.”

This was new to me, an approach to life I’d never really considered: it’s okay to go forward with ambivalence and uncertainty, to give yourself space to experiment without needing to make firm yes or no decisions. 

Journaling Prompt: Make a list of all the possible positive outcomes of not knowing, putting off decisions and going forward anyway.

2.  Move from problem-solving to problem-finding

You probably already know what problem-solving is. Problem-finding, on the other hand, is a creative process that relies not only on not knowing, but also on imagination, empathy, unbounded conversations, and open-ended questions.

Problem-finding looks beyond a single answer or solution. In this article, June Kang describes the problem-finding approach:

The essence of adopting a problem-finding mindset is a willingness to question the status quo and more importantly, not to be afraid to truly think about the concept of ambiguity itself.

It’s hard to describe the experience of problem-finding in the moment.

You’ve likely experienced problem-finding before but didn’t have a way to name it. Actually, you don’t always know when you’re in it, but at some point the process begins to carry you along. You get sparks and insights that add up to something, even though you might have trouble articulating what that something is.

I’m not a surfer, but metaphorically I think problem-finding is similar to riding a wave. You wait, sitting in ambiguity. And when that wave does come along you have to go with it. No time for figuring it out or applying the pros and cons. Instead, you jump on, trusting the wave to carry you to its natural ending. And then you do it over again.

Journaling Prompt: Write about a problem you’d like to solve. Instead of seeking a solution, explore everything you don’t yet know about it…What don’t I know about this?

3.  Open up to unexpected wisdom

Personally, I’ve come to see we have all these day-to-day opportunities to receive wisdom from others. And when we slow down it’s almost like it’s in the air and we can begin to miraculously soak it up through our pores, without even realizing it.

As John O’Donahue eloquently wrote: 

The senses are our bridges to the world. Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world [and wisdom] in.

A colleague once said something to me that woke me up this truth.

While I can’t repeat her words, they were beautifully wise and I was profoundly touched. 

That moment shaped much of my work going forward. Looking back, I can see that there are two important parts to actually practicing it.

The first is about believing that humans have a deep connection with each other even when it doesn’t always feel that way. The second is about trusting the inherent wisdom within each of us, and opening up to receive that wisdom through empathy and imagination.

Journaling Prompt: Write about a time when you were given the gift of wisdom from someone else who wasn’t intending it. Focus on your sense memory of that experience as if you were in it right now. Describe the wisdom you received. (Often this comes later, after the actual experience with the other person.)

4.  Allow yourself to go with the flow more often

As much as I appreciate the importance of getting lost and not knowing, there have been times when I thought I didn’t know enough. During particularly challenging times I sometimes wonder: How can I help people move from lost to found? How can I help those who experience devastating losses…homes, jobs, relationships, people, health, and security?

Thankfully, something clicked as I moved toward the confusion and lostness. I began to understand that it wasn’t about knowing at all, it was about being with each other.

And being with all of it: the mystery, the lostness, the not knowing. Yours, mine, ours.

That’s been an important memory to hold onto. Now more than ever I understand that when we step into the stream of not knowing, it will hold us and carry us. It might sound strange, but it’s the giving in to not knowing that matters most if we’re trying to go with the flow.

Journaling Prompt: Imagine a wave or current carrying you into the unknown. Instead of fighting against it, imagine and write about what happens when you join with it as if it is an ally. Where does it take you? What do you discover?

5.  Trust that you will discover something important about yourself

Do you want to know the best part of getting lost and finding yourself, of not knowing together and building that picture together that Stephen Grosz talks about in the book I mentioned earlier? 

It’s this: you finally see that you were always there, even when you feel lost. Not only do you see yourself fully for the first time (even if it’s a transitory moment), you also see that the picture you’ve been building was always a work in progress.

It’s the day when you get a glimmer that you were there all along.

For whatever reason(s) you lost track of yourself and it’s okay, because you’ve already started deepening your relationship with you and getting reacquainted with yourself.

And then you…

• begin to loosen up instead of holding yourself so tightly
• experiment with taking off your masks and taking risks
• find you don’t care so much what anyone else thinks
• reclaim the parts of you that are quirky and uncommon
• discover that you are original, rare and quite wonderful
• learn that your becoming has always been there

Journaling Prompt: Imagine being in a beautiful place and ascending (easily) a flight of stairs. You greet yourself at the top of the stairs and discover that this is not your future self, this is you right now. Have a conversation (in writing) with no agenda other than to honor and deepen your relationship with you.

What I hope for you (and all of us) when you’re in the midst of getting lost and finding yourself is this:

• slowly building the deeper story of you
• companioning yourself in a kind and loving way
• believing that your own quiet wisdom and the wisdom you’ve soaked up during your time on this planet will bring you home to yourself

* * * * *

If you’d like  support with knowing yourself, finding yourself, and feeling freer to be who you truly are, my free course — Finding Yourself Again — is a good place to start.

My course can help you gain insight on the critical voices and beliefs within you and begin to transform them with creative and imaginative approaches. It’s based on the same practices that have helped my clients reclaim what’s missing and move toward what matters.

FINDING YOURSELF AGAIN

* * * * *

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. 

-Rebecca Solnit

* * * * *