While at my master mind meeting last week, we were challenged to share our core compelling story - to reveal the soft underbelly of our business success. What prompted each of us to pursue the path we had and why did we feel the passion we did about our businesses? What was the ONE thing we really DIDN'T want to talk about - because it made us feel vulnerable, exposed, silly, stupid, needy, or just plain weird?

It's no big secret that I was suicidal in my late teens and again in my late twenties. I even wrote about it in my "How To Read Your Own Hands" study course. However, it's one thing to write it down - it's another thing to express it to a live audience of 80+ people.

In my 29th year, I was depressed, deeply depressed. I knew that there had to be more, but what? I was trudging to and from my day job, knowing that there had to be more to life than answering pointless emails, attending pointless meetings and making money just to pay the bills and buy more stuff. A bigger TV was not going to cure the angst and agony chewing a hole through my gut.

I wanted to die not because I hated myself or this beautiful planet; I wanted to die because my life lacked meaning. Although I love the freedom and security money provides, I am not motivated by money. I am motivated by meaning. I was well into my "dark night of the soul." I was having a spiritual crisis. I may as well as have been dead because I was committing spiritual suicide already - I could not find the POINT, the REASON, the MEANING.

Late one night, in desperation, contemplating the various methods of extinguishing my life available to me, I called a dear friend in hopes she would talk me out of it. (I didn't really want to die - I just SO BADLY WANTED TO LIVE!) I told her what I was thinking. Her response was not what I expected. "Beth, that is the most selfish thing I've ever heard. If you kill yourself, I will chase you from this lifetime into the next. I will never stop hounding you. You need to get outside of yourself and find a purpose to your life. You need to help someone else. Do you really have no idea how loved you are? That makes me sad - that you have no idea how much we need you."

Her slap upside the head was exactly what I needed. I thought of my mother and the potential guilt she might feel - thinking that perhaps she had done something 'wrong' to cause my misery. It was nobody's fault, there was nothing wrong. I was simply lost. Many spiritual teachers speak of this emptiness as the beginning of true living.

"Well," I asked my friend, "what should I do?" She said, "How about asking?" "Asking whom?" I said. "Spirit," she said. "Ask the Universe to show you." And so I did.

That night, kneeling by the edge of my bed, my knobby knees digging into the floor, I asked: "Great Spirit, God, Goddess, Universe, whatever name you choose to go by, please help me. I beg of you. I am on my knees. I am at my lowest low. If you show me my Life Purpose, I will forever be your humble servant." I did not realize, at the time, the intensity nor consequences of the prayer I was making.

Two weeks later, a knock came at my door.

(...to be continued in Spiritual Suicide ' Part Two.)

Copyright (c) 2008 Elizabeth Davis