Call to Trust Part 2

What did you notice about your default? What are the automatic ways that you cope with life when it's not going exactly the way you want it to go? I hope it has been insightful to explore and bring awareness to that.

For me, it's been really challenging to see some of those things about myself and to recognize the impact that coping and defaulting has on my life. But it’s also been a beautiful opening into a new energy that wants to emerge. As I have shared previously, when things weren't going the way I wanted, my personality kicked into overdrive and planning went into full effect.

I would frantically put pieces together to try to make myself feel okay. And I started to notice, as I became more aware of that default and how it was playing out, that underneath it was a great deal of fear. Fear that if I'm not hustling to make it happen, if I'm not putting the pieces in place the way I think they should be, then I'm going to go without. I won't have what I want. Life won't turn out the way I had hoped. I'll be missing something that really matters to me.

Now, of course, the irony is, all my planning and trying to control things in the past hadn't worked because here I found myself in a circumstance that I would not have asked for. And yet here I am. So, even all our plans and all our strategies, they don't save us from life. Life is going to happen. And really, there's very little that we have control over. 

Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have power in our lives. In fact, I firmly believe that you and I are powerful creators and that we're always co-creating our reality. Always. But we're doing that as a co-creation with life itself.

Life is sometimes going to give us things we didn't ask for. And what we do have a say in, is who we're going to be in response to that and how we're going to dance with that energy.

What I noticed is that all my attempts to control and plan my way through life were really bankrupt. That way of living wasn't going to work for me anymore. That's when I knew I had to surrender to something else. There had to be another way to go about this. Now I've long held this commitment to let life live through me, right? To trust my heart, to light the way and to be willing to courageously step in the direction that life is calling me to.

But, like I said, that's easier to do when things are going the way you'd want them to. It's a hell of a lot harder when things are not exactly how you planned. And now here I was and my planning was bankrupt, and I had to wave the white flag. Okay, life. Okay, Spirit, God, universe—whatever is animating this thing and making it all unfold. I give up. Maybe I don't know.

Maybe there's not so much to know. And maybe the life that wants me can't come to me through my mind, through my planning and all my figuring it out. But the life that wants to live through me requires that I surrender to the flow and let it take me where it takes me. I need a deep breath. I don't know about you, but that has been such a challenge for me. And it's required that I approach things in a much different fashion.

While I had been living this way for a while, this is the next level that we're talking about here. So, I began getting quiet and dropping my need to know how things are going to go.

Now, I don't know about you, but this is another place that oftentimes people don't want to take action until they have 20 steps mapped out. You know it's going to do this and this and this and you feel some sort of guarantee about the outcome, which is always an illusory sense of control and safety anyway. Because we don't know how things are going to go. That's the truer truth of it, right?

We don't know. And I've been asked to step into that I don't know in a big way—and to stay there, not grasp at a plan or a sense of knowing. Just to take the next right move as soon as it clearly emerges.

It's taken lots of patience. I've done lots of waiting. I’ve slowed my pace tremendously. I decided sometime in the summer that I wasn't going to create anything new or offer anything new. I wasn't going to create a program, sell a program or do anything. I decided to just get still and wait. And to play a little bit because that was the message that was coming through for me. Rest and play.

And so I trusted that because that's my job: to just trust what spirit gives me in the moment without having to know how it's going to all turn out. 

What's there for you when your strategies are bankrupt, when your default is no longer working? What new energy wants to come through for you? How is your life and the circumstances that you find yourself in? How are they inviting you to be different now than you've ever been before?

Get quiet with yourself and just ask. Ask your soul; ask your heart. What new way of being wants to emerge for me? Am I willing to drop my strategies and surrender into that?

That's the question we have to grapple with, and it's not for the faint of heart. That's the question I invite you to journal about and work through for yourself this week: If I drop my strategies and my default, what would be possible then? And am I willing?

I'll see you next time.