Today was a huge breakthrough moment for Nisha and I. We went live!!! Oh, the joy and the excitement we shared as we clocked the birth of Restore Process online.
As she and I were talking, I was reminded of this creative journey-this creative journey we are all on; Creating a Life. Stages of the creative process can be excruciating. And I have quit before. I paint with watercolors and I learned while painting, that I often would meet a time when I wanted to give up on a painting; it just wasn’t coming together, it looked horrible, it wasn’t portraying what I was trying to show. And I learned that I had to just keep going. If I would tweak it a bit, and then another bit, then all of a sudden it would come into a painting that I could be proud of.
In this process of Creating a Life, the same is true. And I met the same stages here in creating this business. While I was writing the e-course, Create Your Life A Treasure Map to Wellbeing, I met challenge after challenge. Everything in me that was afraid to let myself really show up in the world had an investment in keeping me small. I have experienced those times before in my life.
While writing, I also have been reflecting on the difference of how sometimes creativity feels like such hard work, and sometimes it is such a process of Flow. What makes the difference?
Nisha recommended that I read The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I did. It confirmed exactly what I already knew experientially. While we are incredibly magnificent human creatures, we have come to maturity through the process of learning how to be a person in our culture. As a result we often switch over to living in default, instead of being the empowered creator that we were born to be. We have taken on some mighty challenging beliefs and perspectives. Restore Process has come into being as a way to help us waken from that hypnosis that makes so many of us feel inadequate, unworthy, and hold the fear that we are an imposter-if people really could see us as we truly are, they would see we are just a mass of insecurities. I told Nisha about the following excerpt from one of the e-course modules.
“I’m reminded of the story of Odysseus who on his journey had to take his ship between two very treacherous points, Scylla and Charybdis. Schylla was a sea monster who would pull the crew off into its maw, and the Charybdis was a whirlpool that could suck a ship down below the water. That story birthed some of our sayings “having to choose between two evils,” “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” and “between a rock and a hard place.” I think of Scylla and Charybdis as threshold guardians.
My experience has shown me that at every time I try a new direction in my life, I need to pass through some gateway, some rite of passage, cross a threshold and meet its guardian, and it is never a pleasant experience getting through. This time seemed even more challenging than others, because my inner critic was raging about all the times I have not completed something, or the fact that I would ‘amount to nothing’ as my father and mother said, or showing me all the times where I was too afraid to put myself out into the world to be seen. It has been painful. I have felt vulnerable, afraid; afraid to go forward, afraid to stop; and demoralized. I have cried, I have wept for days, I have felt at the mercy of my own victimness, I have been discouraged about the nature of humankind, and more. And is the nature of the movement through one of these passages, I didn’t remember about threshold guardians which show ferocious faces as you approach the gate, but are benign when you look at them from the other side.
Fortunately, I just kept on keeping on, one step at a time. I had someone who was helping me create my website (which was my way of having support and keep me accountable.) I chose every day to either accept where I was, be with it, and find something to take a step forward that would not directly arouse my inner resistance (one of the freebies that I will give you with this course is an essay about dealing with resistance). I would not write when I was not inspired. This is too important. And I was in a time bind that felt like a noose around my neck. Just another guardian of the threshold.
I chose photos for the website, I looked at movies to showcase on movie nights, books to put in the book club, and edited my book called “Sounding One’s Song.” If all else failed, I would read to distract myself from the internal noise. Selectively though. If I messed up with what I ate, or read, or watched, it could take me down for a day or two – and that happened as well.
But you are reading this. I obviously made it through those narrows, that dark night of the soul. It could have been no other way. I needed to confront the demons that had stopped me so many times. When writing on the ofsuccess.law blog, I pretended wasn’t really putting it out into the world, for I hadn’t built a way for feedback, and I rarely told people in my day to day world that I had been writing on a blog for many years. It was easy to write there. Here I was writing to share my knowledge and wisdom and going to ask for payment.”
I don’t know about you, but it really is reassuring to know that there is a process that I can trust strewn through all the chaos of creating. When I realized I was crossing an important threshold in my life, then I could keep on keeping on.
And yes, there are hard times. There are times that gives us sleepless nights. That’s part of the adventure. When I am living as my most expanded, largest self, I know there is a purpose in the challenge. Such happened two nights ago. I hit a huge technical wall in our website, and spoke with Nisha about it last night. We both thought we were going to be delayed for almost two months because of a technical glitch. She got up this morning determined to find a different solution, found it, called me, and while we were on the phone together, our website went live. It was a jubilee moment.
We were discussing how to reframe guilt…which is what brought up my memory of Scylla and Charybdis. It is so important to not have guilt about our walk through the threshold. When we gather together our courage to walk through difficult times, we walk the path and it usually if not a particularly fun walk. But walk it through we do. We problem solve. We enlarge our perspective, we put pen to paper, brush to the painting, truth and heart to open interactions between us and our important others for brave conversations.
When we have walked through the gate, gotten through the difficult discussion, the writer’s block, whatever the obstacle is, we get on through it. When we turn and look back, we see that we have in fact learned some things that are so important, that we have met the challenge, and there was value in having walked that passage. Then we can celebrate! And celebrate we should. This is a huge walk. This is a gargantuan accomplishment. We are walking though our Big Leaps!!!
Be Brave
Walk it through
Celebrate
Then the Flow happens!!!! Then the magic of timing just happens, and it is as if the Universe has swung into complete alignment with us. And it is almost as if we are living lives sprinkled with magic dust. That is what Elizabeth Gilbert calls Enchantment. I can’t wait for you to join me in this journey. Most of us need some assistance on these important journeys.
We humans need support, we need to belong, we need to hold ourselves accountable, and we need to share our sorrows and exhilarations. This is our Lives that we are creating! Nisha has been that companion for me as I have walked through the challenging aspects of my creating this e-course and this website. I want to be that companion for you – at least here through this blog, or through my e-course, or through my coaching. You deserve to be living the very best life you can create for yourself. You deserve caring and support as you walk through your thresholds.