If you’ve read my most recent blog post, some of what I am about to share may not seem completely surprising (at least the timeline won’t).
Beginning in late August/early September, everything in my world started to feel just off. That period of time was marked with confusion, clarity, confusion about the clarity, and a very large range of emotions. So many emotions.
A few weeks ago, I did what so many others do when they don’t have an answer to a question - I went to Google. I realized that for the past few months, I have been experiencing a spiritual awakening. As open-minded as I am, I never truly believed that people had the sort of experiences I was having. The writing was on the wall, though, well on the screen - I’d finally found a name for what I was experiencing.
The next night, I experienced a “dark night of the soul”. I will be writing more about this entire experience in a book (stay tuned ;), but it felt like I crawled into my soul, sat down with a younger version of myself then an older version swung open every door that I have pushed close for so long. Behind those doors were all the wounds and traumas from childhood. I can barely actually articulate how hard it was.
I know, so deeply and so intensely, that I had to experience all of that - all of the messiness and hard times. I had to learn that I actually can choose to betray others over choosing to betray myself and I understood what Brene says about standing in the wilderness -
“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are”.
Experiencing all of that meant, though, that I basically had to quiet everything down which meant that I only did the things I either had to do or things that moved me closer to this point (primarily lots of reading, researching and thinking). During this phase, I had to have a tremendous amount of space for thinking and listening - without that, I would not have gotten on the other side. To create that space, though, I had to neglect a good bit of things and was late on deadlines, a lot.
During this time, my mission in life became very clear - to transform the world by expanding our collective capacity & courage to create generative, restorative, and unyielding communities rooted in love & belonging. To do that, though, I need to continue to create a community of folks who are equally as committed to and passionate about creating communities of love. It’s the only path we have to change the world - love is the only way to come back together.
I am currently in an integration phase that will be marked with destruction and construction. I am working to align my external life with the path that has now been set clear by my soul. This means that I will have to disappoint others to avoid betraying myself and my path. Every choice that I am making is being made with a deep level of intentionality and thoughtfulness, but I know that some folks will not understand this transformation. And that is okay.
A lot of things are still unclear, but there are a few things I know for sure -
The universe is about to move some boulders out of my way. Will Smith talks about this in his book, but once we are clear on our purpose on the planet (and if your purpose isn’t others-focused, yet, keep going), the universe will move boulders out of the way to move us closer to the goal.
2022 will be a year of change in my life. In January, I am expanding where I live and will make Houston my primary residence. I will still be back and forth to Greenville quite a good bit at least from January to May. Sharp Brain Consulting will continue to be based in Greenville and we are looking forward to growth in 2022.
I have some big scary dreams that will begin in 2022 and while I am not ready to share most of them, yet, I do hope that you will stick around with me because I do know that we need everyone to be a part of the work ahead - the work to restore and rebuild communities rooted in love and belonging.