I’ve shied away from sharing my journey too much this year because I am one of the lucky ones surrounded by generous humans and sunshine but there have been moments my loves where I have questioned all of it.
My writing and work has been very focused on the education side of my business and a number of project that are yet to see the light of day. Fingers crossed I have some news on these soon.
It’s been a strange year and not just because of the ongoing collective challenges occurring on the planet right now.
There are phases of your life where it’s necessary for a deep shedding of all you thought you were and what might happen in your life.
I feel like it’s important to share this as so often there is a focus on only the positive and a bypassing of the necessary discomfort of change and growth.
Maybe it’s midlife, maybe it’s the pandemic, maybe it’s simply being someone who feels and pays attention.
There are so many doing it so hard and I have felt like I should shut up with my deep feelings and just be grateful:) even when I know it’s not a hardship competition and both can exist in a place with compassion.
Maybe you can relate?
There is never a guarantee that the life you hope for or have been asking for is the one you are going to get, and we can get stuck hanging on to what is not meant for us believing so much bullshit about it being our fault for not trying hard enough, (or not manifesting it ugh!) when the truth might in fact just be that it’s simply not your path for the walking.
There are timelines of events and life paths that just simply are not yours.
How much more honouring and self loving is that statement in place of a lifetime of relentless striving and basing your enough-ness on achieving a particular outcome.
Grieving these tiny deaths of self and story has come hand in hand with so much external grief this year, the kind that can change you for better or worse. The kind that either cracks open your heart to the truth of being human on a rock hurtling through space or can see you shut down and armour up closing your eyes to the magic all around us.
And so I have focused furiously often with a tight chest and tears in my eyes on the magic around me.
And I’m lucky to have more than a few beautiful humans hold my hand while doing it. Whilst also dealing with more than their fair share of grief.
What I have observed is there is nothing fair in much of it, in good or the so called bad.
This thought can leave you bitter or in brutal harmony with the duality of life. I choose the latter.
I don’t feel like I’m a stranger to heartbreak but in the past it has been the kind of heartbreak that tells the story of self betrayal, of all the big and small ways we abandon ourselves to “get the thing” and the heartbreak that follows after such sacrifice when still even then “the thing” (love usually) is withheld from you.
Or should I say “me” because that has been my experience.
But this year it has just been good old fashioned loss that none of us escape in life and I have been deeply weighed down by the harshness of it. The loss of a dear companion, of not being chosen to be loved, of opportunity passing me by and of the grief of those I love knowing I can do nothing to make it easier for them.
Despite what all our new age and spiritual tropes would have us believe not everyone gets their happy ending and again the invitation here is to open our hearts even more bravely in the face of this truth.
I have had more compassion than ever before for letting myself feel my feelings.
And I have taken extra steps to drown out the often deafening desire for external approval and stayed true to a path covered in wild flowers and dust and self approval that might never make sense to anyone else.
I’m finding as I navigate my 40’s that the clamour of what we “should” have achieved by this age is somedays really hard to ignore. It’s taking all my life long practices in anchoring in my own unique path and truth to continue to trust the unfolding of how life wants to move through me.
For those of you reading this feeling that it’s quite a down or low ebb sharing please know it really is not.
Coming out of this cycle of shedding and letting go I feel a level of trust and contentment that whatever life has in store for me I will expand to receive it.
There is not holding back.
This season has been entraining me and expanding my capacity for ALL of life, through the presence that it takes to be with the hard.
In nature water carves its path to create the spaciousness required to carry all the fullness coming in the next downpour.
My heart is big enough for all of it
So is yours x
