“When you know you can handle even the most agonizing pain, when nothing is off limits or out of reach from the love of your own essential self, when your trauma bubbles have been pierced and deflated, when the resistance to seeing what needs to be seen and healed falls away, your heart blows open. This heart-opening translates into unspeakable joy; an unimaginable depth of intimacy in relationship with yourself, others, and the Divine; a renewed sense of purpose; heightened creativity; optimal health; sexual awakening; a loosening of mental contractures that leads to open-minded intellectual curiosity and the willingness to not have to know; and the capacity to experience a childlike yet awakened sense of awe, wonder, and playfulness as you engage vitally with synchronicity, magic, and the mysteries of life itself.” Lissa Rankin, MD – Foreword in “Bringing your Shadow out of the Dark. Breaking Free from the Hidden Forces that Drive You”. Robert Augustus Masters.
It’s been a long ride: 13+ years navigating across the video games industry in various roles from sales and event management to consultancy. At its adrenaline peak, it counted almost 20 traveling events per year, thousands of meetings, and millions in revenue generated across the entire period. And a constant manifestation of connections that led to magic on their own terms for the third parties involved. A lot of fun in the process, surely, in meeting a myriad of authentic people from all around the world. From the outside, it looked like an ideal job and career, mixing fun, traveling, and deal-making.
Yet, I have never considered myself a gamer. In fact, I have not played a game in more than 6 years, and even during my active industry involvement, at most, I would indulge myself in a toilet break Grand Theft Auto sequence or perhaps a FIFA game at a friend’s house. If I had to prioritize, I’d always choose tennis, traveling, reading, or simply meeting people. I often felt like an intruder as my passion was elsewhere. Yet, it worked.
Life throws us opportunities that may or may not align with our purpose, and often we make compromises. I remember starting my first games job when I was out of money living in Budapest; while attempting to cruise through a PhD, I also half-heartedly chose as a means to legally continue my European spree and not return to my hometown, Bucharest. At that time, Romania had not been granted EU membership yet. Such compromises appear natural to the vast majority, especially since securing that initial base of socio-economic security is vital.
The Quest for Alignment
While acknowledging the inherent privilege in stating it now, I have long inquired if there is more to life itself than satisfying our very basic career needs. In other words, how can we navigate the mystery of life, acknowledging our purely transformative nature and highest potential, while graciously surfing through challenges and opportunities? How to reflect long-term while seeing our potential for growth and spreading our skills alongside others into purposeful professional endeavors? Is it possible to choose a career with a heartfelt “hell yes” rather than a calculated “why not”? And how to allow ourselves to embrace the dance of constant transformation, which is, after all, our inherent condition?
Finding Your North Star
Based on my own life-unfolding story, I argue that the answer comes simply and magically from finding our own uniquely designed North Star dream. Being on the life journey is foremost a feeling. It is a subconscious and inevitable constant check-in with ourselves on whether we are positively aligned with our own values and whether the direction we are heading is following our utmost dreams.
To simplify, the level of personal happiness comes from a mix of meaning and process. Meaning is aligned with clarifying and living up to one’s life mission and vision as well as feeling one’s own choices matter. The process is the actual flow of creativity unleashed and the possibility to co-create easily with others. It is the playfulness unleashed which brings the element of fun into life. It is seeing life as a game with all its mysteries unfolding, and being okay not to make decisions from uncertainty while feeling intuitively the direction unfolding.
By taking the above to organizational work, I would thus hypothesize that a company’s retention timescale of its employees is positively aligned with:
a. the connection between individual workers’ personal values, dreams, and the feeling one matters and is valued in the decision-making process;
b. the playfulness arising within the decision-making process – is there a creative flow or not?
So how can one find our own unique North Star that each of us is connected with? In a previous article, I wrote about the power of heartfelt intuition in guiding our decision-making; about the importance of stillness in connecting us to our own natural animal instinct, which is the source of our existence after all, allowing us to sense opportunities and danger from afar. However, it is easier said than done. Modern society has also detached us from feeling into our own emotions, into trusting our gut feeling. Despite horrific wars happening in some parts of the world these days, our biggest danger as modern society is, in my view, our inability to focus on what really matters: ourselves. This media-induced ADHD comes from encouraged internet scrolling, from being bombarded with Instagram and TikTok stories that are as diverse and irrelevant as they can be and placed into a short time sequence of 5-10 seconds, which shortens our attention span to the same time length. So, given the mental confusion we are cruising through, how can we manage to find our own aligned North Star so we can enter that journey and thus embark on wellbeing both personally and career-wise?
A Framework for Discovery
Through many years of trial and error, I feel finally aligned to offer a commonsensible framework for action. This method should not be seen as rigid or following a dogma or even holding a preaching element. It is simply what is working for me to transition from a purposeless life of making professional choices rationally and/or out of fear of missing out into fully embracing and dedicating myself to the heartfelt projects we are currently building alongside beautiful souls from countries as diverse as Nepal, Finland, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Uganda, or Brazil. It is what we call the Compassionate Eco-Leadership Framework. To quote one of our chief strategists, Visa Viren, “it provides a socio-emotional learning method by holding space for exploring the compassionate not-knowing and genuine stories of self and collective transformation.”
The Journey Through Me, We, and Co-Creation Spaces
As part of the self-reflective soul-finding transformative journey, there are a few spaces one enters and leaves. Before embarking on the trip, let’s consider the main character as a Timeless Traveler compassionately exploring the unknown into a playful detective journey.
The Me Space
Following a compassionate eco-leadership pathway, the Timeless Traveler starts from an internal process of reshuffling and asking oneself: Who am I? What do I want? What is my dream? Here, the Traveler is confronted with the delicate balance of what to bring in and what to leave behind.
In the ‘Me space,’ echoes of the Traveler’s past and glimpses of potential futures intertwine. It becomes a sanctuary to reflect on the self, to understand the layers that define their essence. The Traveler finds solace in the dance between what was, what is, and what could be.
With newfound awareness, the timeless Traveler moves fluidly between the evolving landscapes, embracing the dual nature of exploration—both external and internal. The narrative unfolds as a poetic journey, a dance through the veils of the unknown, where discovery is not merely a destination but an ongoing, harmonious process.
It is an initial me-centered process of self-awareness which, if done diligently, leads to self-compassion and to self-engagement into taking steps to improve one’s own happiness and wellbeing. This part holds various names: it can be seen as the Hero’s Journey back to the heart; one can perceive it as shadow work or a deep emotional intimacy endeavor, switching thinking for feelings and entering a deep intuitive state.
The We Space
As the Liverpool Football Club’s anthem powerfully claims, “You’ll never walk alone,” the Me Space naturally intertwines into the We Space of either family or close ones, friends, communities, schools, or offices we cruise in life with. Here new questions arise such as: Who are We? Why are We together? What makes us powerful and unique? This is the pathway of community recognizing, community finding, and as a consequence, community belonging. This process of collective awareness, compassion, and engagement may align us closer to those around us by entering deeper empathic connections, or it may move us to search for new environments and collectives that we feel drawn to in line with our refreshed found life missions and visions.
The atmosphere in the ‘We space’ resonates with a call to attune to the shared essence of this space.
As the Traveler immerses into the ‘We space,’ the surroundings come alive with the presence of fellow journeyers. Each individual contributes to the collective tapestry, inviting a shared exploration of what moves in this harmonious convergence. Together, they weave a symphony of interconnected stories, an intricate dance of shared experiences.
A subtle realization dawns—a recognition of the ‘We space’ inhabited not only by individuals but by humanity as a whole. Bonds form as the timeless Traveler connects with others, sharing the threads of their unique narratives while discovering the common threads that bind them.
In the heart of this collective journey, a profound revelation emerges—an interaction with the surroundings reveals that the ‘We space’ extends beyond the realm of people. It is not only inhabited by us, as individuals, but also by us, as a planet. The interconnectedness of all living things becomes palpable, echoing through the shared consciousness of the ‘We space.’
The We space is inevitably closely intertwined with nature. From the harmonious symmetry of our body system to the support of the communities we’ve re-enacted or joined in, a simple truth arises inside us: it is the feeling that WE are NATURE, and that self and collective care truly means nature care. An active sense of care arises for our own system, for our planet who we know is suffering. And as a consequence, a deep need for reversing man-made nature global and local problems such as climate change becomes so prevalent that the timeless Traveler decides to choose a local problem within its community and out of urgency and empathy to try to reverse it. And from a genuine and deep social impact need, the Timeless Traveler enters the co-creation space also known as the purposeful North Star journey into action.
The Co-Creation Space aka the North Star Journey
Entering this realm asks for a contemplative pause, inviting each participant to discern what to relinquish and what to carry forth into this shared crucible of inspiration. Furthermore, the Traveler and others joining will bring with them an Artifact, a talisman of transformation, that tells their own story of change within the ‘We space’.
Within the ‘Co-creative space,’ the air is charged with the electricity of shared inspiration—an ethereal dance of collective imagination.
Participants, attuned to the rhythm of creation, contribute fragments of their essence to the evolving narrative. Here, the boundaries between self and other blur even further, dissolving into the fluidity of a co-created existence.
As the timeless Traveler and fellow journeyers engage in this dance of co-creation, new realities emerge like blossoms in a cosmic garden. The space becomes a dynamic interplay, a constant movement between the introspective solitude of the ‘Me space,’ the interconnected harmony of the ‘We space,’ and the vibrant synergy of the ‘Co-creative space.’
In this trinity of spaces, the Traveler discovers the beauty of balance—a delicate choreography where individual expression, collective resonance, and shared creativity intertwine. Inviting to consider: ‘What moves between Me – We – Co-creative Spaces?’
The narrative unfolds as a rhythmic journey, where each step resonates with the pulse of co-creation, inviting the timeless Traveler to become both witness and participant in the ongoing symphony of existence.
The ‘Co-creative space’ becomes a portal to infinite possibilities, where the dance between self-discovery, collective unity, and shared inspiration forms the very fabric of the Traveler’s transformative odyssey.
It is in this realm that the purposeful life and career choices naturally occur. Arguably once found here, the meaning and process of one’s own existence have found peace, and it is naturally unfolding. Focus, Resilience, Playfulness, Joy, and the power of the Unknown allow for transformational power.
This is the North Star finding. It is the strong vision and mission one can bring alight by raising their frequencies and as such attracting and inspiring others to join in, and build a movement. It is a pathway of transformation because, after all, we are all changeable, and life and its lessons teach us constantly what brings us flow, and what does not. By entering the timeless traveler process one can move from being a gold miner who was destroying land in exchange for payment onto becoming a tree planter being equally paid by NGOs specialized in reforestation and social impact. A CEO of a major company can switch from holding a vision of profit by all means into building a human-centric designed program that allows for genuine and ethical corporate social responsibility programs. And so on.
A Life Played, Not Just Lived
After all, the entire life journey can be seen as a game. And although I am not a gamer, I am definitely a player of life. We all are. With our own rituals, rewards, and challenges, successes, and failures, roles-playing and storytelling, we are all part of this magical realm of never-ending transformation. And if we can connect to and feel the vast realm of our emotions with equanimity, we can then compassionately navigate all waves and switches of directions while holding our anchor continuously onto our heart-found North Star. And timelessly travel towards it.