Trust where life is taking you

There it is.  The edge of the cliff, metaphorically – one of those moments in life where there is a key decision point, perhaps an opportunity to move out of your comfort zone.  How on earth to let go?  

That is always the question.  It’s one that people encounter when they do ropes courses where you literally step off a cliff (of course, held in lots of safety material!)

There have been a few times when I’ve done ropes courses and I will freely admit I HATE them!  When that edge of the cliff is there and I have to take the step I get frozen, sometimes drenched with terror (and sweat) even though I have all that “safety” stuff around me.

Maybe it’s karmic or past life or something like that – but that edge is the stuff of nightmares for me.

Then there was the time, early in my twenties, I was in Jungian therapy and working for an advertising agency.  Yet, inside I felt the push for more.  I just didn’t know what the more was. I didn’t know what I was being drawn toward.

Joseph Campbell writes about the Hero’s Journey – how the Hero is called toward something.  Truly, in my early twenties, I didn’t feel a call toward anything in particular…I just remember trying hard not to feel the internal push for more…the longing was scary.

In Jungian therapy I was encouraged to practice in my meditations, actively imagining stepping off the cliff, letting myself move into the unknown.

Frankly. I HATED that too!

Yet I practiced.  Maybe it was stubborn persistence, but I was determined to conquer this fear.  I hated being in fear (still do but that’s another story).

Through that long process of encountering that fear I learned to sense into fear.  

Was the fear a signal to stop?  

Was the fear a normal signal of stepping out of my comfort zone?  

These are the questions we encounter at various times in our life.

Sometimes the signal is to pause, regroup, strengthen where we are.

Sometimes the signal is to urge us to leap.  Into the unknown.

Going into this endeavor of living with an open heart makes all the difference.  

It does mean engaging with life as an adventure.  

It invites us to explore life as a gift, playfully engaging with us to find out we’re more than we thought we were.  

That first experience, of consciously stepping off a virtual cliff, hasn’t been my last.  

And I’m not even sure it has made the subsequent times any easier.  

I have, however, seen my life consistently change for the better from each of these steps into the unknown.  

That first time, all that practice, all that not-knowing over a long period of time, led me to leave the known world of advertising, leaving the expectations of having an externally successful life…to moving into an ashram (which at the time many of my friends and family considered weird, after all that was in the 80s).

It ultimately moved me into the life I am now living. One where I have integrated so much, let go of many old fears, become more fully me, and married a man who is my greatest gift.

But who would have known back then?  

Not me.  Back then the future loomed scary and vast and overwhelming.

Now, I look back, and I hear Joseph Campbell’s voice in my head, “…it’s like there were invisible hands guiding me along the way.”  

We’re living in some really crazy times now.  A lot of uncertainty in our external world across the globe. Painful destruction by water, fire, eruptions from volcanos, the earth splitting from earthquakes, and other climate crises. Political and social upheaval.

This is a time when it’s even more important that we access, and stay riveted, to what I call the Vertical Axis, this internal connection that we all have to our inner knowing, opening to the Divine, the Sacred, whatever word we use to call that.  

It’s in persistently and consistently returning to our inner knowing, our Vertical Axis, that we hear the unique call of our Soul.  

There are plenty of times we doubt that access, feeling alone, lost, confused.
We stop looking for it.  We forget how to access it.  We miss the tiny moments of the Sacred moving toward us, enveloping us, soothing us.  

May this letter to you be an invitation to remember.  

To pause.  

Wait.

And expect for love to come to you.

Expect it.

And be delighted and surprised by the many tiny moments of love waiting for you.