Last week I had a really hard day. I had hard conversations in multiple areas of life, and received devastating news that will force me to either expand or contract. The type of news that in an instant, gives you the choice: are you going to be a victim (because you can, and it would be an acceptable response to the circumstances) or are you going to choose to continue moving forward in your own personal expansion (which none of your doctors recommend and may not make any logical sense under the circumstances).
It was the type of day where the compounding impacts rippling through all areas of my life in such a short time span, a year or two ago, would have put me in bed for weeks or maybe even 1-3 months.
The type of day that would make most people (myself included) question everything: their business, their parenting strategies, their relationships, and of course at the core of all of that, themselves.
These days are part of being human, and when they arise, there are opportunities to be found within them. Here, we have choice:
- Do we let this type of day completely shut us down, halt all progress and return to a false sense of safety in staying small and contracted?
- Do we let this type of day force us into perpetual fight/flight type of expansion where we’re forcing situations we aren’t ready for yet, pushing through, and anchoring ourselves onto the road to burnout?
- Do we let this type of day invite us to pause, reflect, honor what is, and then re-evaluate how to move forward from a place of connection to ourselves?
Throughout most of my life I would have pendulated between the first two options – in and out of burnout and illness. Back and forth between living in fast-forward and living in shut-down. Sympathetic activation and dorsal-vagal collapse.
Living this way is like living on a hamster wheel – exhausting yourself going nowhere; continually repeating the same cycle.
This is where radical self-responsibility comes in all the best ways.
Am I a victim in some of the news I received yesterday? Yes.
Does that mean I have to live from that place? No.
What energy am I going to mobilize from, now, with the information that I have?
This is where choice and radical self-responsibility collide.
I can choose not to further victimize myself by acting from that place in how I choose to move forward.
I can choose not to self-destruct through acting from a place of perpetual fight/flight, boom-bust cycles (even though yesterday’s news feels like it has to be one or the other).
I can choose to pause.
It is in that sacred act of pausing, that clarity often appears. Like magic, my next right step lays itself out before me. It is from this place that I can move forward with a sense of deep inner connection and intuition. It is from here, that I know, all will be well.
If you’d like to learn how to embody this energy so you can take forward action from a place of wholeness and self-connection, join my waitlist to work with me 1:1 or stay tuned through my newsletter for some exciting updates on how to access this transformation in a more self-paced and accessible way.
