The Trouble With Finding Your Dream Life

I used to dream about Sedona.

After all, this is the reason why I moved from Paris to the US, thirteen years ago. I cannot believe that number. In my imagination, Sedona was less a town than an escape hatch. Red rocks. Artists. Spiritual seekers. People living outside the obsession with money, status, and achievement. I imagined a place where I could be a little strange and nobody would ask me to explain myself. Eventually, I moved there. I lived in Sedona for a year and a half. This is one of the useful things about getting what you think you want: it gives reality a chance to ruin the fantasy. Sedona was, of course, spectacularly beautiful. It was also spectacularly expensive. The people who could afford to live there were very wealthy; the people providing the services that made the place function were not. And spirituality was everywhere. Or, more precisely, the business of spirituality was everywhere. There were retreats, healers, workshops, crystals, ceremonies, readings, coaching, transformational experiences. The language was about consciousness and abundance and living authentically. The economics were rather more conventional.

I had naively imagined —call me an Idealist— that spirituality existed outside capitalism. Sedona taught me otherwise. Housing was expensive. Jobs were cheap. Eventually, I left. For a while, I thought I failed in fulfilling my dream and that something was wrong with me. I didn't yet understand that I was beginning to lose something more consequential: My faith in the fantasy of the alternative.

Then there was yoga.

For roughly seventeen years, I tried to build a life around it. I trained obsessively. Yoga teacher trainings, workshops, specialized programs, anatomy, somatics, movement, different lineages and approaches. I spent an embarrassing amount of money acquiring knowledge that I genuinely believed would eventually become a livelihood. I taught in studios. I taught privately. I created classes. I created workshops. I taught teachers. I experimented with formats, locations, schedules and prices. I kept thinking that somewhere on the other side of one more certification was the version of yoga teaching that would finally make sense. There was always another training. Another credential. Another method. Another thing I could learn. And underneath all of it was a simple belief: If I become good enough, people will value this. That turned out to be a particularly expensive belief.

Yoga is beautiful. The yoga business is another matter. There is now an enormous industry built around something that was once, at least in part, about stepping outside the machinery of consumption. Yoga mats. Yoga clothes. Teacher trainings. Retreats. Wellness brands. Studios. Influencers. Workshops. Certifications. Endless variations of the same promise: become more balanced, more conscious, more embodied, more yourself, a better practitioner, a better teacher. Meanwhile, the people trying to teach yoga classes at the highest standards —like their own teachers— struggle to make decent money. I began to feel the contradiction. I wasn't interested in becoming another entrepreneur of enlightenment. I wanted to teach yoga differently —without this ultra commercialization. I told you, I am an Idealist. And finally, at last, I had to admit that wanting that and making a living from it were two different things.

Then I tried again.

This time in Corona de Tucson, rural America, southeast of Tucson, I've been crazy enough to think I could possibly create a tiny yoga space at home. Nothing grand. No glossy studio. No rows of people sweating beneath motivational slogans. Just a small room directly accessible from the street, a few students, my long experience practicing & teaching, —almost twenty years now— and the possibility of creating something human. I gave it a year. One regular student. That was the market research. So I am closing the business.

There is something almost comic about how uncinematic failure can be.

Nobody stormed out. Nobody told me I wasn't good enough. There was no spectacular catastrophe. People simply didn't come. And eventually I stopped trying to persuade reality to become something it wasn't.

This is the part I didn't expect.

I thought I would feel like I had failed. Instead, I mostly feel tired. And then, underneath the tiredness, something else: relief. Because I have spent an extraordinary amount of my life trying to make certain things work. The dream location. The meaningful profession. The spiritual practice. The creative business. The right community. The right version of myself.

There is a particular cruelty in the modern idea of the dream life.

It makes every disappointment feel personal. If you haven't found your calling, perhaps you haven't worked hard enough. If your business isn't working, perhaps you need a better brand. If you're unhappy where you live, perhaps you haven't found your place. If you're not fulfilled, perhaps you need another retreat, another certification, another five-step framework for becoming your authentic self. The market has become remarkably good at selling us explanations for why our lives aren't working. It is less interested in suggesting that perhaps the promise itself was wrong.

I have zero regrets.

That's important. Sedona was not a mistake. The experience was not a mistake. I needed to live there to discover that I didn't want to live there. And yoga wasn't a mistake either. I learned things that have permanently changed how I inhabit my body and my life. The problem was never yoga. The problem was believing that everything meaningful has to become a profession. That everything we love has to become an offering, That every talent needs a business model, every passion needs an audience, and every spiritual experience needs a price. Some things are allowed to remain sacred precisely because we don't sell them.

At 52, I find myself strangely interested in failure.

Not the glamorous kind. The ordinary kind. The kind where you try something for years and eventually say: No. Not because you are defeated. Because you finally have enough evidence. There is dignity in that. There is also freedom. I no longer need Sedona to be the place I thought it was. I no longer need yoga to become the career I imagined. I don't need another certification to prove that I know enough. I don't need to turn my creativity into a six-figure business. I don't need to find my tribe. I don't need to become successful at being authentic. That last one may be the funniest contradiction of all. We have somehow managed to turn being ourselves into a performance metric.

So what now?

I don't know.

And that is perhaps the most interesting part. For most of my adult life, uncertainty felt like a problem to solve. Now I'm beginning to wonder whether it might simply be a condition of being alive. Maybe I will paint. Maybe I will write. Maybe, I will teach something occasionally, when there is a reason to teach it. Maybe, I'll live somewhere near the sea. I'll work less. I'll do nothing. I'll make things nobody wants. Or I'll become interested in something completely unexpected. I don't know. For once, I don't feel compelled to turn that uncertainty into a five-year plan. There is something delicious about not having to make the next thing work.

I stand here, between past and futur.

Perhaps the next chapter doesn't need to be a reinvention.

Perhaps it doesn't need a name. Perhaps I don't need to find another dream. Maybe I can simply have a life. A life without the brochure. Without the branding. Without the promise that this place, this practice, this career, this community, this purchase, this certification, this version of myself will finally make everything click into place. The illusions have fallen away. Some of them took years to build. Some of them cost quite a lot of money. And yes, there is grief in watching them disappear. But there is also a peculiar spaciousness. Once you stop looking for the life you thought you needed to live, you can finally start paying attention to the life that is actually here. And maybe that is where the interesting part begins.

Going further: You Are Tired Because You Keep Doing Tomorrow Today | Alan Watts