When I was about 25 years old and began working as a professional tarot reader, I found myself dealing with a lot of the same questions over and over from almost every client I met. It didn’t matter who they were, what their situation was, or what kind of life they lived. There was always one question that came up time and time again.

 

Am I on the right path?

 

For years, I tried to approach this as a question that I would answer with a yes or no response and then give some insight into why I came the to answer I did. If it was yes, here was why, and I wanted to tell them what they should keep doing to stay on track. But if the answer was no, I wanted to be able to tell them why so they could change things.

But over time, and especially in recent years I’ve come to realize that any time we find ourselves stressing out over the question “Am I on the right path” that we’re just wasting out time and putting ourselves in a holding pattern of fear.

We ask ourselves this question and seek an answer because we’re afraid of fucking up. We don’t want to waste our time or someone else’s time, and we definitely don’t want to make an idiot out of ourselves by doing something silly. So we’ll stop dead in our tracks to go into a painstaking period of analysis, going over every thought, word, and action until we hit a point of perfection, knowing without fail that we’re doing it “right.”

The problem is, no matter what you do, you’re in a sense doing it right.

Sometimes the right path is the path that doesn’t lead to success, or what we might think as success in our given situation. Sometimes the thing that we need to experience and we need to learn comes from the result of failure.

In hindsight, we can always see this. We always realize later down the road that if that marriage hadn’t failed or we didn’t lose that job or we weren’t forced to give up on a dream that we would never have learned a valuable lesson that brought us to greater happiness. But at the moment, we almost always fail to remember this. Instead, we’re too worried about screwing things up and setting ourselves back that we’d rather do nothing than something.

 

[Tweet “Knowing how to fail is often more important than knowing how to succeed.”]

 

I don’t believe in destiny, that everything is predetermined and that no matter what we do the good and bad things in our lives were going to happen to us. What I do believe in is lessons from the Divine. I believe that everything happens for a reason, to teach us something and to give us the opportunity to either elevate ourselves and more toward enlightment…or not. We can always make choices that hold us back. But ultimately the choice is ours, as it the lesson it gives.

So if you were to ask me, “Am I on the right path,” my answer would always be “Yes.” The question that you really need to ask yourself is “What can I do given where I am right now on my path that will elevate me?”

That question might seem a little heady, so think of it this way.

If you know, the path is always going to lead you to where you need to go next, all you need to concern yourself with is that next step. What can you do right now, with where you are and what you know, that will make you feel as though you are moving toward a better you who is manifesting their desires.

Worrying about the end result or where your path will ultimately lead isn’t necessary. All that matters is what you’re able to do here and now because the path is always going to be right even if it doesn’t look or feel like it at the time. Later on, you’ll always find a way to understand why even the “wrong path” was actually “right.”