What will you choose for 2017? Will it be fear or faith? Doubt or trust? When we shift our perspective, our life shifts towards our goals. The beginning of a New Year marks a time for many of us to reflect, reevaluate, plan and hasten to take ACTION! However, I invite each of you to not be in such a hurry to make lofty lists and rush out the gates of January proclaiming great change.
We are about to end a hectic season and a year that has taken its toll on many of us. Winter’s stillness calls us to mirror her example by going slower, inward and listen into the stillness.
I am well aware that our culture does not support a slower pace. However when we remain gluttonous, cramming ever ounce of everything into our lives, we become sick, either physically or mentally unwell.
We desperately need the time to breakdown and digest our life’s lessons, fully savor or heal from them, and to also integrate those experiences so we can use them as fertile soil in which to plant our Soul’s intentions. These fertile soils are a rich and necessary part of our life’s foundation. But guess what? It takes time to create the dark, most nutrient dense soils that will support the best growth.
I was the Queen Bee of impatience and frustration when I stepped deliberately onto this spiritual path 10 years ago. The change I sought happened far too slowly to my liking and desperation scorched through the marrow of my bones relentlessly. When my patience was as thin and frail as tissue paper, I’d come back to the council of one of my original spiritual mentors. He’d say repeatedly and lovingly, after I’d cried my frustrations out loud for the 100th time, “Lynsie, it takes the time it takes.”
What an irritating and emotionally grating thing to hear when you’re flailing in the dark for a foothold, anything to pull you out of the pit of uncertainty, doubt and fears that nothing will ever change. But things do change, always, in the time it takes. Until one day you gaze with compassionate understanding at the person you once were with all her insecurities, outbursts of anger, fear drenched sweat and bottomless doubt.
As I move into 2017, the past 10 years have created a fertile foundation that is enabling me to move more fully into my vision. Without this foundation, there would be nothing for me to stand upon, to root into so I could grow. But it has taken a long time, and yet no time at all. What is ten years of dedicated work to better my life versus a lifetime of fear and insecurity?
Many of you may be feeling the scales of your life to be out of balance, the scale that weighs frustrations and fears heavier than the scale that weighs faith and trust. But each time we sit to meditate, to get on our mat and practice, to be of service to our community, remember who we really are, we enrich our lives and the fertility of our foundation.
This is what has changed the most for me this past year, tipping my scales towards greater faith and trust, but I had to breakdown the ills of my life first, make them into something beautiful and place them with deliberation on the opposite scale.
What I am choosing for 2017 is to make certain that my faith and my trust out weigh my fears and my doubts–every single day. It is my new mantra and I invite you to adopt it as well. It is only when the scales tip in favor of our positive thoughts, our unshakeable faith and unmovable trust that we will be able to experience life from a new perspective.
This new perspective has enabled me to take a bigger step towards my vision. Actually it’s not really a big step, just simply the next appropriate small step forward. Starting in early 2017 I am leaving my primary job to focus solely on what beckons me from the stillness within my heart. It is now time, because it has taken the time it takes to get me here where I am fully confident that my faith is stronger than my fears and my trust is more powerful than my doubts. I was not ready 10 years ago or even 10 months ago. But I am now.
Are you ready to take the next steps on your Journey to Awakening Balance?
