It’s Not What It Looks Like

Is something coming up again and again, plaguing you because you can’t seem to get a real handle on it? Or is it something that simply doesn’t give way to anything you try to do to change it?  In other words, is there something in your life that makes you feel stuck and unable to move on?

I’ve had my share of those, in relationships, parenting, money, work, my awareness of my own growth.  Some of them show up fairly regularly!  When I’m in the midst of a spell of stuckness, it feels pretty miserable. I forget that that’s not the whole story, that stuck isn’t just what it looks like. It’s also an opportunity.

“For what?” you ask.

To look deeper, to find meaning, to learn and grow.

On Retreat

A few weeks ago, I chose to go on retreat. Which is another way of saying I chose to make space around my stuckness, to sit with my Self, with my reflections, and to open up to higher guidance from the Wisdom within me and from the natural world around me.

It didn’t start out at all well for me, I didn’t even want to set out on that grey, cold, damp day. When I arrived at the woods I couldn’t find a place to sit and reflect, as I had pictured, because the ground was practically one big puddle. The whole endeavor looked bleak.

But that was the point.  My retreat felt like a failure, or a pathetic attempt at most, until I went deeper and let Wisdom make the connections: my stuckness, like the retreat, was all about having expectations that reality couldn’t live up to, and then feeling crappy and stuck because of it.

I realized that the constraints I had been feeling, the barriers I wanted to (but could not) remove could also look like ladders, or serve as foundations to build a much richer vision than what I was formerly seeing.

The point, again

I thought I had got the message, until I found myself appalled by the Symbol of the Retreat, an object that appeared at my request, but looked beyond disappointing, it looked like trash!  When I saw some faint writing on the piece of mud-caked yellow rubber, I thought THERE would be some redeeming, profound message to be found.  But when the writing washed off in the stream, but not the dirt, I had to laugh, because the same lesson was staring me in the face, under the cool surface of the water. The issue was my disappointment, not reality.

Once I let myself come to terms with it, in my real-world laugh-out-loud moment, alone by the pond, in the rain, I felt so free!

Now You

Taking the sacred space we create here together, through our intention, let yourself slow down your breathing, relax your muscles, connect to the Wisdom that lives within and beyond you, and ask:

Where am I resisting reality?

What constraint, what barrier, what disappointment can I see with new eyes?

Write what you are reframing for yourself in the comments now— don’t put it off until the awareness fades! Writing it anchors the awareness, and I can hold it with you!