Transformation

The last nine months have easily been the most difficult of my adult life. What I have come to understand through navigating this time is that the challenges are the gift; if accepted, they lead to immense transformation, resurrection, rebirth.

I have found this to be true for my coaching clients as well. Illness, unstable housing situations, loss of employment, the end of a long-term relationship, the loss of a loved one, all of these things meet every one of us at some point. For some of us, they come together, all at once, like a storm. But the beauty of this disaster of circumstances is that it calls our best selves forth and in so doing forces us to shed those aspects of our old selves that have stood in the way of our best possible life.

At a time when so much in our lives, in the world, causes stress, even suffering, it is easy to get fatigued and shut down, to duck and roll. But when we do this we are no longer present to life; we are no longer living. We take the greatest gift we have been given – our sentience – and toss it away.

So the practice is to become present with what is, whatever is, in our lives, to experience the often painful emotional terrain. To actually sit with it. To let the flood of emotions wash through us, for the emotions themselves point us toward the exact changes we need to make. The fear focuses us, the anger grounds us, the sadness helps us release. From there our physical and spiritual bodies are freed up; we can move forward.

The practice requires patience and trust that we have everything we need. Our innate power and wisdom are always available. All that is required to let it surface is to use our emotions as they are intended, as information, the tools to help us shift. Our emotions are an immense source of knowledge and power.

It is easy to confuse the story about our emotions or even the story about our circumstances with the wisdom of the emotions themselves. But they are not the same thing. The stories are what circumscribe our emotional bodies, bind them so that the emotion is difficult to release.

We are not our circumstances. We are so much more majestic, powerful and vibrant than this. By letting the emotions move through us, by not binding them up with the stories of what happened—who did what to whom, how much the past is writing our future—we can allow the suffering parts of ourselves to die and the creative, resourceful and boundless parts of ourselves to emerge.