Money, Work, and Following Your Bliss: Is it Worth it?
The Saga of Bliss
When Joseph Campbell declared, “Follow your bliss,” the words rang like a bell of freedom—echoing through the fluorescent corridors of nine-to-five jobs and the slow grind of modern survival. For many, it felt like a permission slip to abandon the scripted life and walk a wilder, more honest path. But when it comes to money… it’s just not that simple. And I’ll be the first to admit it—I’ve bitched, moaned, wrestled, and wept over this contradiction.
I’ve lived for 26 years in the heart of the “follow your bliss” movement—Sedona, Arizona. I’ve witnessed the radiant highs and the crushing lows. I’ve seen wide-eyed seekers leap into the unknown only to crawl back, broke and broken. And I’ve watched others walk through doorways they never imagined, flooded with abundance and opportunity. There’s no formula. No spiritual vending machine. It’s not karma points and instant payout.
It’s brutal—watching people born to live freely get trapped in the machinery of survival. Scraping together rent. Trying to stay inspired while the weight of bills flattens the soul. The system doesn’t just make us tired—it makes us doubt ourselves. And in my opinion, it was built to do exactly that.
But even in the darkest corners of this trap, the deeper truth doesn’t go away. We are wired to reach, to grow, to overcome—to create. And whether we like it or not, our inner fire leaks out—we infect each other with our bliss and our burnout. Passion and cynicism are contagious.
For those of us who refuse to surrender to comfort—who choose the uncertain path over the predictable prison—there is always a price. We lose what the world calls stability. But in return, we gain something far rarer: experiences the comfortable only fantasize about, borrowed from those brave or crazy enough to leap into the void.
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Bliss as Initiation
I’ve seen brave adventurers leap into the unknown—only to return full circle, defeated, resumes in hand. And I’ve seen others step through mysterious doors, flooded with synchronicity, opportunity, and yes, even financial abundance.
So what gives?
Is Spirit playing favorites? Does the Universe reward some and ignore others? Or is there something deeper going on beneath the surface of this romantic idea?
Here’s what I’ve learned—through fire, through surrender, through years of trial:
Following your bliss isn’t a shortcut to success. It’s an initiation. And that’s what makes it an adventure. Not a journey I would have had the courage to pursue had I known what was ahead, but one that invokes the mountain climber to risk everything to reach the top.
It’s built in wanderlust. In emergence. A radical curiosity that defies explanation. It’s a condition that tends to provoke the most bewildered looks on people’s faces—which, admittedly is one of my favorite moments. It’s a flame that refuses to be extinguished, even under the most absurdly wet conditions. [grin]
My path wasn’t a linear ascent; it was a spiral. Each chapter demanded a shedding. A new shape. And you cannot access new dimensions of bliss if you cling to the old version of yourself. You can’t stick an oval into a circle. Bliss is a current—it asks you to become the kind of vessel that can hold it.
You Must Change to Receive It
I began as a broken seeker, carrying trauma and illusions inherited from generations of disconnection. My inner child was frozen in time. My nervous system, over and over again, became the altar of transformation—especially through the unpredictable waves of Kundalini awakening that began at 19.
Money, purpose, and fulfillment mirrored my inner state. When I feared the ordinary, I rejected stability. When I feared stillness, I chased chaos. It wasn’t until I learned to evolve consciously—through every grief, every dark night—that doors began to open—alchemical realization.
Growing Pains
Contrary to the fear-based teachings of religiously infected minds, bliss is not the reward of obedience. It is growth—toward desire, toward pleasure, toward embodiment. It is the sacred unfolding of who you truly are.
Bliss is the deeper current rising through you, reshaping everything in its path. It’s not something you choose—it’s something that chooses you. It’s the result of being bitten by the serpent of awakening, and once it strikes, there’s no turning back. The process becomes unstoppable. You know who you are because you can’t stop thinking about it. It haunts you, calls to you, burns beneath every attempt to settle for less. The illusion of a “normal life” becomes unbearable.
This is why I’m an advocate of learning through penetrating, direct experience—and through it, harvesting the fruit of wisdom, patience, and embodied knowing. It’s an essential process, not just for insight, but for transformation. When approached consciously, experience becomes medicine. It disinfects the psyche of guilt and shame. It releases the psycho-emotional energy trapped in the cells of the body’s spiritual architecture. It rewires perception from the inside out—dismantling the lies we’ve inherited and making space for something more authentic to rise.
I was compelled to follow my bliss. I had no other choice. Something in me had already died, and I knew too well the taste of sorrow to go back to the life I came from. I was in no shape to surrender to the domain of my childhood—to the ghosts, the patterns, the cages. My inner plant, fragile yet relentless, was reaching upward—toward light, toward life, toward the Soul-Star of my existence. It wasn’t ambition. It was necessity. A sacred instinct pulling me toward the truth of who I really was underneath the opinions of my caretakers and peers.
And that made all the difference.
Are We Afraid of Growing Up?
Is the spiritual path a journey of maturation—of the inner child growing into adulthood? Is that why some of us throw tantrums when faced with the need to work just to survive?
Yes… and no.
There’s a difference that matters. The journey toward the True Self is something innate—woven into the very fabric of being human. The soul longs to become. To unfold. To blossom in all its beauty, wisdom, and power.
But in our modern world, that path is obstructed. Generational trauma, emotional abandonment, and systemic suppression have created an epidemic of adult children—bodies that have aged, but whose inner essence remains frozen in time.
Instead of growing freely, the soul must now turn inward first. Not to escape—but to retrieve what was lost. Soul retrieval isn’t a metaphor—it’s the process of reaching back through time to free the inner child trapped in forgotten rooms of the psyche.
In this process, the necessary zen of work becomes a skill the earnest freedom-lover must master. Not as a form of submission, but as part of the alchemy. It’s one of the hidden initiations along the bliss journey—the art of changing shape to fit into more expanded forms. You don’t lose yourself in the work. You learn how to bring your soul into it.
This is the real work of our age.
And it’s the heart of what I do.
The Wizzan Way is a path of remembrance and reintegration. It’s not about bypassing the pain—it’s about moving through it with presence. It’s about reuniting with the parts of ourselves we abandoned in order to survive.
This is the essence of what’s unfolding here—through the Wizzan Temple, the emerging teachings, the upcoming membership, and everything I share across the sacred spaces of the internet.
"All Things Permitted Harm None."
—Zzenn
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