How to Follow Your Bliss

The phrase “follow your bliss” has become so well-known in America that you may think it comes from some ancient source of world wisdom, handed down from time immemorial. You would be only half wrong. The catchphrase was actually introduced to Americans a little over 25 years ago by the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell, who used it in an interview with Bill Moyers in 1987 in the now-famous PBS series The Power of Myth.

Campbell was both an author and a college professor who taught hundreds of students at Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York during his long and productive life. As he explained to Moyers, “My general formula for my students is "Follow your bliss." Find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it.”

When the phrase caught on in the 1980s with an American public eager for reasons to pursue their individuality and personal passions, critics began to find fault with what appeared to be an excessively selfish pursuit of hedonistic pleasure. “Bliss, indeed! Keep your nose to the grindstone, work hard and you may achieve something someday, young man!” But this “If-it-feels-good-do-it” interpretation of the Campbell quote misses the mark. In fact, it is almost diametrically opposed to what Joseph Campbell really meant. In his later years, Campbell was often heard to mutter under his breath, “I should have said ‘follow your blisters’.”

Part of the confusion stems from the ubiquitous American notion of “happiness” and our inalienable right to pursue it at all costs. And cost it does, as American happiness is usually summed in equations such as: “I’ll be happy when I have lots of money; when I have a corner office; when I have oceanfront property; when I have an advanced degree; when I have a Lamborghini; when I have a rich husband, etc.” Bliss has little relation to happiness in that sense.

The key distinction between Campbell’s “bliss” and American “happiness” is that the latter too often revolves around “having” whereas “bliss” is all about “doing.” The phrase itself implies the action-orientation of the idea. One does not “have” bliss. Bliss is an experiential by-product of some action and that action is the following of a special kind of path, a deeper yearning, a truer passion than the mere accumulation and laying up of material wealth and status.

Campbell’s use of the word bliss comes from one of the world’s most ancient religious traditions, the Hindu Upanishads, where the disciple is urged to reach the place of Sat-Cit-Ananda, that is being (Sat) in the place of pure consciousness (Cit) which is absolute bliss (Ananda). Another English word used to translate the Sanskrit word, ananda, is rapture which may carry more of the spiritual connotation for the American ear.

Campbell took this idea and brought it down to earth by asking himself in what way he could attempt to live into this principle in the Western tradition of which he was a part, since spending a life in monkish meditation was not going to be his path. As he explained to Bill Moyers:

I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked.

Bliss, then, is a kind of rapture, rather than an amplified happiness. It is a kind of ecstasy in which one is “carried away” from the little self orientation into an intense spiritual joy. Obviously, this cannot be a perpetual state of being for most folks. (Although there have been several well-known examples in recent times of people who walked in this state for months or even years, Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie being among them.) For most ordinary mortals, bliss is a periodic state of being which serves as a reminder and guidepost of who you really are and what you really want to be doing.

Finding the path of bliss requires self-reflection and the courage to act upon what one sees when looking into the deep heart’s core. Campbell’s advice to those who would seek this path was:

“When you follow your bliss -- and by bliss I mean the deep sense of being in it and doing what the push is out of your own existence -- it may not be fun, but it's your bliss and there's bliss behind pain too.”

This linking of bliss with pain and “the push out of your own existence” corresponds with what other sages have advised over the years. The great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, realized at mid-life, after his painful break as the favored disciple of Sigmund Freud, that he was disconnected from his sense of this push out his own existence and made radical efforts to reconnect with what was most central in his life. To do this, he turned within to ponder what had most fascinated him as a child and deliberately began to recreate the experience, in spite of the fact that it must have seemed incongruous for a well-respected, middle-aged doctor to be doing “childish” things with his spare time:

“I went on with my building game after the noon meal every day, whenever the weather permitted. As soon as I was through eating, I began playing, and continued to do so until the patients arrived; and if I was finished with my work early enough in the evening, I went back to building. In the course of this activity my thoughts clarified…”

Yes, the eminent doctor was making little castles out of small stones in the mud and sand behind his Zurich home and all the while trying to feel his way back into the flow of his own life.

The poet, Mary Oliver, says it simply and beautifully in her poem “Wild Geese” with the lines:

You do not have to be good…

you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves…

Of course, you must be able to stand your ground and endure the ridicule of the world as you pursue your own soul’s center. You are trading the idealized forms and rewards of the social world for the unknown quest to find your own adventure and its unknown rewards. However, as Joseph Campbell promised,

“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living.”

So, returning to the opening sentence of this article, if you thought “follow your bliss” was an ancient aphorism, you were half right! It is the oldest message for all spiritual seekers and here is stated in its latest reincarnation. “Bliss,” said Campbell, “is the message of God to yourself. That is where your life is.”