Transitions are often times the hardest; in between what was and what will be. The in between is often known to be the place where beauty resides whilst the pain of not knowing where the future will take you.

This is the place I have been lately.

In between.

In fact this has been a bit of a theme this year.

Breathing between the thoughts and emotions that arise.

This year has been full of change. Change that steps forward and back. All internal; on an emotional, physical, spiritual and at times mental plane.

2019 started off with a bang and kicking ass like Sylvester Stalone ever since. It has been a year of change. But like any path of change, it has come with a lot of growing pains.

As summer faded into autumn and autumn begins to fade further towards winter, I was struck by a tree on my street that was in transition from green to a brilliant orange. Its outsides looked like my insides feel. Part of me is brightening while another part of myself fades out being replaced by a deep layer that has been hidden underneath.

Transitions are the most important moments in our lives Being a Type A person, my history hasn’t encompassed many moments of honoring the transitions. Much like most people who are achievement oriented, I have always gotten caught up in forward thinking and movement. As something completes, I am suddenly thinking about what’s next. But 2019 has not allowed for much of that momentum.

This year has been teaching lessons; both hard and deep. Life serves up just what you need when you need it. It is up to all of us to either take the opportunity within the challenge or to pass it by while roiling in self- righteous anger that we are being challenged in the first place.

When we are fighting tooth and nail against the tidal wave of change we lose sight of the fact that there is something for us to learn.

Things don’t happen to us, they happen for us

This has been something I have learned along the way.

The passage of time gets marked by life circumstances. We get to choose how we experience them within. We can resist and therefore persist in our own pain and suffering. The other option is to open up yourself to taking in the pain and transforming it into light.

This is the process I have been in this year. It has been a very different year than those previous. There hasn’t been much forward movement. One could easily say that there hasn’t been a lot of movement at all. And yet, they or I should say my inner critic, would be very wrong. There has been a lot going on behind the scenes. On the inside where it counts the most.

Much like a lot of my clients, I too struggle when I don’t see immediate results. I struggle at times with wanting things to come to me faster and brighter than the Universe is ready to serve them up. Whenever I am in this place within, I am never happy. So this year I have been working on softening that inner critic. The one who tells me that I “should have” made different decisions than I did. The one who tells me that it’s too late for certain things that I want. The one who judges me oh so harshly.

I am so over all the judgments and self inflicted pain. Mistakes can be made but only if we allow them to. One could even say that they are not mistakes at all but instead just life experiences. When focused on saying and doing only the right thing, mistakes are often seen as a huge shame based experience that one should pay for eternity. When softening all that shit, we are allowed to transition into a space of being perfectly imperfect in every sense of the word. Sooooooooo…..

I have been softening all that shit.

And it feels really f’n good.

So this is where I am now. In between here and there; imperfectly perfect in every sense of the word.

Our chat is beginning to remind me of this song by India Arie that has been on rotation in my Spotify.

I am not pieces of the brokenness inside,

I am light.

As I continue my journey through 2019 and beyond, I do so with a great depth of self compassion that did not lie here within at the start of the year. Life changes are not easy but they become more freeing as we allow for all of them to occur with a fluid sense of acceptance and letting go of needing to control the path.

I am not mistakes that I have made.

I am not the pieces of the brokenness inside.

I am light. I am light.

Yes. I am light and so are you. So keep on breathing. Keep on opening up to the transitions that lead to your transformation.

It is said that we are either moving backwards or forewords. There really is no standing still or being stuck. We get to choose whether we allow the winds of change to move us towards greater light and love or if we resist the storm and in turn get swept up in it.

I believe this to be true.

We are either working towards change or moving further backwards. As a client said to me recently

This is really f’ing hard.

To which I said…

Yes, yes it is. But that’s how it goes. If you want life to get better than you need to walk through the pain. Period.

That’s how it goes. We find the light when we enter the dark. If we try to skip over that process, we will never find true happiness.

So as I move forward towards the end of 2019, part of me still feels the sting of the pain and another part of me is skipping down the street kicking the leaves around with a smile on my face. As a friend told me recently…

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

Yup. You can extrapolate from that whatever works for you. We experience many deaths over a lifetime and I believe we also experience many lifetimes. We have to allow the endings to occur so that a new beginning can be formed. This is not always easy because we often don’t want certain chapters to end so let me say it louder so you can hear….

Allow whatever chapters need to end so that you can have a new beginning.

Let life teach you the lessons you need to learn so that you can find the light within the dark.

I am divinity defined.

I am the God on the inside.

I am a piece of it all.

I AM LIGHT.

Cheers to releasing and embracing a new beginning!