Poorly Wrapped Gifts from the Universe

 

Shortly after I became a Reiki master, I met someone who I was crazy about.  I remember our first date was getting lemonade and just talking, walking, and laughing in Battery Park until we got kicked out at 3 am.  That was a magical summer as he was the air to my fire.  When the fall arrived, he realized he wasn’t ready for a long-term relationship after having left one just before we met.  The disappointment came crashing down and paralyzed me in many ways.  While my intellect understood he wasn’t ready for me, my heart was tired of yet another disappointment. 

I remember my Reiki teacher telling me one day that I may need to begin “healing my relationship to disappointment.”  It took me a while to understand what she meant but eventually I realized it isn’t the disappointments themselves but the stories I make up around life’s disappointments.  Sometimes disappointment would activate my victim, “why me” emotional patterning while other times it gave my false ego a chance to chime in and tell me I’m not worthy.  Then there were the disappointments that fueled my false beliefs around how the world “really works” and forget what your higher self is saying. 

There are many stories we tell ourselves when experiencing disappointment whether the source is another person, a situation, or the world at large.

BUT. . .

Over time I’ve come to learn that those who handle disappointment without self-doubt and false stories see those moments as an invitation to let go and discover a new direction they hadn’t considered before.  I often hear people talk about how grateful they are for those pivotal moments when the universe set them on an even better path than they could have imagined.

For myself, I know that when I examine my own disappointments in the rearview mirror, I am deeply grateful.  To add humor to the process, I will call those disappointments “poorly wrapped” gifts from the universe. 

This year has been full of a lot of personal and collective disappointment.  Not being able to see loved ones, make the plans we’d hoped for, find the opportunities we were seeking, and watching the world become more divided instead of united.  It’s a lot and yet many people I know have shared with me the unexpected blessings and opportunities they’ve received this year.  Not even the chaos of 2020 could stop the flow of abundance they were destined to receive.

There is no switch come midnight that lights up a perfect new world experience nor is there a magic wand to make everything easier and better.  But just as the day gives way to the night, the night in return gives way to the day.  It’s during the transition that we have an opportunity to flip the stories we tell ourselves with an understanding that the past doesn’t have to dictate the future if we shift the mindset and energy we bring to the present.  It’s how we allow the flow of change to emerge in a way that is aligned with soul and not the entangled stories we unconsciously carry in the psyche.

When my heart broke over 15 years ago, I didn’t allow the grief to flow completely because of my own false stories.  In turn, some of that grief stuck with me for way too long.  Disappointment is a part of the equation in life, but it isn’t the destination.  It’s up to us to decide how our relationship to disappointment will work for us and not against us.  Will it just create more inner resistance to receiving future blessings and opportunities? Or will it become a wave that you ride back to the shore so you can see more clearly what’s next on the horizon? 

No matter where your disappointments landed in 2020, how will you capture the good parts about a situation not working out and take them with you into 2021?

How will you define those disappointments instead of letting them define you?

Going into 2021, I’m taking my time to marinate in the energies that will best nourish me in the coming months, prioritizing self-care over making too many commitments.  Winter is the season for the inner work that will best support aligned action throughout the year.  Nature doesn’t just flip a switch come springtime and bloom overnight.  There is a lot of underground work that goes on before the flowers can emerge.  When we do the inner work with patience, self-love, and appreciation, we build the foundation for what we desire to unfold with ease and in perfect timing. 

This is the time to DREAM, BREATHE, and ALLOW.

This is the time to DREAM without limiting what is possible.

This is the time to BREATHE and create space for those possibilities.

This is the time to ALLOW your desires to morph into something new. 

Looking to the Horizon

 

Last weekend I watched the film, The Glorias, based on Gloria Steinem’s autobiography, My Life on the Road.  While there is so much more to Steinem’s life as an activist, feminist, and journalist than the film could possibly include in 2-1/2 hours, I was moved by the way it captured her inner dialogue with four different versions of herself.  In between the film’s segments that danced back and forth between her past and present, black and white scenes would take place on a bus where she would have different conversations between her young child self, teenage self, younger adult self and her older self.  They would hold court on the twists and turns she would take and the decisions she made along the way to lead a life that challenged societal expectations of women. 

At one point in the film she interviews her teenage self as if she’s a host on a TV talk show.  Her inner teenager describes her dreams of going to Hollywood and then settling down to get married, have three children, either a boxer or a golden retriever, a house decked out with a dance floor among other things and a convertible.  Then she pauses, looks at Gloria and asks why she isn’t married . . .

This moment struck me, because how many of us could look back on our original childhood dreams that were seeded without realizing all the twists and turns that would unfold us in ways beyond what we could imagine.  My teenage self would have given me a puzzled look if she found out what I do today, but when I think about everything that interested me outside my initial childhood dreams, being drawn to the mystical aspects of life and having natural sensitivities that felt more like a weakness than a strength, it all makes sense.  In having these conversations with my inner child, I’ve come to understand that becoming who your soul came here to be sometimes means letting go of the original dreams and expectations you placed on a younger version of yourself.

Whenever I hear someone in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond say, “I’m still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up,” I sense a certain self-imposed expectation that they need to have their life figured out in a way that passes some kind of approval rating by society.  To that I say, “None of us have it figured it out.  That is why we are here to begin with.”  Each of us came into this life with a soul contract to learn something and engage with what we learn to contribute to the greater whole.  The circumstances in which we are born, the blessings and challenges we experience along the way and our own internal knowing help to reveal what that contract means to each of us.

This chaos cycle initiated by the events of 2020 is in many ways an invitation for the dreams and expectations of the collective to be released to allow for the next stage of humanity’s evolution.  These last weeks of the year hold some beautiful opportunities for each of us to begin our own inner work to contribute to the collective shifts that will be unfolding in the years ahead.

A new moon solar eclipse on December 14^th is inviting each of us to recognize and begin shedding the expectations and beliefs we’ve placed on ourselves that keep us small and in turn reignite our passions in a whole new way.  Then on December 21^st for the Winter Solstice, Saturn and Jupiter come so close to each other that they will appear as one giant star in the sky just a few days after each of them enters Aquarius.  Jupiter carries the archetypal energies of expansion and optimism while Saturn presents us with an energy that keeps us grounded and practical.  Every twenty years these two planets come together in this manner to usher in a new generation, so to speak, but this time around they are also ushering in a whole new era.  This 20-year meeting of the planets has been taking place in the earth signs for the past 200 years and now they will be meeting in the air signs for generations to come, building on an energy of equality and collective unity. 

Two of the most magical moments in a day are at sunrise and sunset - when the night surrenders to the day and the day surrenders to the night in return.  As we look to the horizon of this next 20-year cycle, these last weeks of 2020 are an invitation to begin healing from the deferred dreams, disappointments and losses, and look with courage to the mystery of what comes next, having faith in yourself that everything you need is already within you and the road ahead will be revealed in right timing.