Happy Holidays! It’s been awhile since we connected, and I wanted to share what I’ve been up to and my greatest lesson for 2018.
To be completely transparent, this year has not been an easy one for me, and the reality of this year and what I had been creating hit me a few months ago. I started to receive downloads that my choices weren’t rooted in the alignment that I was seeking and that if I was really going to create the life I had envisioned for myself, I was going to have to start to do things differently.
What did I need to do differently?
I needed to fully match my desires with my choices. You see, while I would say I wanted one thing, I would then proceed to choose the opposite. Now, of course, while I wasn’t doing this all of the time, it was enough for me to realize something needed to change.
So, I started to pay more attention to my choices. I stopped forcing things. (This is a big practice for me that’s definitely a work in progress and one of the biggest pieces of growth for me in 2018, as I made many choices this way to feel safe and like I was moving forward. Instead, though, it cost me time, money and peace.) Oh, and with this, most importantly, I started choosing calm.
This isn’t always easy, as my primary driver has always been doing and getting things done, even at the cost of connected choices and choices that would actually create more ease in my life. This year, one of my biggest patterns was trying to make choices that would bring me to the next step of my dreams easily. While these choices felt aligned – they weren’t aligned for me – yet. And, what I ended up creating was the exact opposite of what I was truly desiring.
What did this look like? Painful “misstep” after misstep. If I was going to use an analogy for this, it was like, instead of taking the straight path, I was taking a detour. Now, don’t get me wrong, this detour was still going to get me to the same point, I just prolonged the trip.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with this. I believe that part of our path, and our growth, are these detours and challenges. In fact, a Facebook friend of mine created a post, asking about their friends’ top three accomplishments for this year. As I thought about my response, if I had answered, mine would have been:
1. I failed (and got back up)!
2. I failed again (and got back up)!
3. I failed again (and you guessed it)!
4. Oh, and my book, which will be out in the next month or so, so stay tuned!
Even in describing this year, I’ve lovingly called it a growth year, which to me, is really exciting, as you can’t uplevel if you don’t grow. Let me say that again because it’s really important. You can’t uplevel if you don’t grow. And, of course, awareness is definitely an important key to that growth, and I am grateful for a strong intuition that ensures that when it’s time to make a change, I receive the message (sometimes, over and over!) until it not only lands, but I actually choose it. 🙂
And, in truth, if I didn’t have a strong foundation in growth and knowing how to lean into the hard stuff, this year would have been much harder. (Less than a decade ago, I can say fairly confidently that I would have lost it in a big way.)
Instead, even as the storms hit, I felt like I was the calm in the storm of my life. With this, I felt a sense of inner trust, and I felt free of the physical-reality constraints that stress us out and can determine how we feel about our life in any one moment. This wasn’t a perfect science and sometimes, I did lose it, but this foundation helped me to return to my truth.
What is this truth? Calmness, alignment, joy, abundance. ease and connection to myself and others, all with even more transparency, honesty and vulnerability. This is an ongoing work in progress, but moving forward, if it doesn’t bring me this, if it isn’t rooted in this, if it isn’t rooted in this next version of me, I’m not choosing it. This is my commitment to me – and to you!
What this means for you is that it’s my intention that everything that I create for my community is rooted in these. Also, important to note: it’s my desire that in holding this space and honoring myself in this way that not only do I uplevel, but so does my entire community.
I will do my best to model this for you, and I hope it helps you to know you are worthy of the life that you are desiring, that you don’t have to settle into what you think you deserve or even, what you think that you can have. That life is so much richer when we are taking steps from this perspective and it doesn’t have to be hard or take a long time.