Embracing Change Through Personal Growth
I’ve spent my entire life embracing change. I know that change can be quite difficult for some people, so let me share with you what I’ve learned about the life skill of being able to embrace change.
I grew up with a very stable family in a quaint village in Upstate New York. We traveled to visit family several times a year, and often packed up the car for road trips down the East Coast to visit various Civil War and Revolutionary battlefields and the occasional theme park, but our adventures were humble and rooted in the things we shared a love of. History and family. Nothing really changed, year after year, but it was a nice childhood. Still, I always felt I was different at my core. I was always bursting for something to change, for someone to show up and invite me on a quest across the globe, for something grand and exciting to unfold across my path in life. My head was always somewhere else. I don’t know if you believe in past lives, but I do. I never felt like New York was my home or my destiny. I couldn’t be convinced that I didn’t belong in a castle in the highlands of Scotland, or a temple in Ancient Egypt, or in a villa covered in frescoes in Ancient Rome. Somewhere my soul remembers the adventures of my past, and it has instilled a drive in me to adventure and seek out knowledge of who I am through experiencing life in other places.
I think in a way I was also repelled from my hometown by the experience of being the black sheep of my family, and living in a home where we never talked about big dreams or adventures we wanted to take, or the questions we had about humanity and the universe. Yet, these were the things on my mind and my heart, and once I realized my deep curiosity about the world was not going to be fostered in my environment there, I would need to seek out this wisdom in the world.
I’ve moved every 1-3 years since I left home for the first time in 1999, I moved across the world at 20 to live in Australia for six months, and in the 12 years I spent as a military spouse I got very practiced at allowing life to take me where it was going to take me and accepting that I was coming along for the ride. Now that I am no longer married or tied down by military life, I see incredible futures laid out before me. I see another career change, my fourth to date, I see retirement abroad, I see many adventures both by myself and side by side with my son.
You may be wondering why uprooting my life over and over again doesn’t phase me? The simple answer is, I was built for this. Maybe you weren’t. Maybe you haven’t had the opportunity to find out yet. The most important thing I can tell you is that your intuition will not lead you astray, so when there are big changes on the horizon, don’t waste all of your time and energy searching for guidance out in the world, from people who aren’t you and don’t come with all of your incredible complexities, history, and perspective. They won’t know what’s right for you. You already know, inside. You must become the archaeologist of your own soul. You must excavate your inner workings and desires to uncover what is in alignment with who you are at the core. Once you become practiced at this, you will start to feel what is right in your body, and also what is wrong. Ask your inner-knowing what to do and your soul will provide the answer.
How do you do this? Meditate, journal on things like what you truly value and want in life, sit in silence and connect through your breath, hand on your heart, and ask yourself simple questions - start with “what do I need to know right now?” and wait to hear whatever message pops up in your head. I hear it as a voice in my mind’s eye that talks lovingly to me. I also ask my body whether something is right or not and I wait for it to let me know. Yes is one sensation, no is different. Yes feels so incredibly YES that I can’t miss it, and no feels so incredibly NO that within seconds I know that I have my answer.
The next step is to trust yourself. Embrace the yes’s with your whole heart. Jump into them with the confidence that you will be okay, no matter what happens. I know that’s easier said than done, but focusing on the future when thinking about upcoming changes and not ruminating on the past or the what ifs will help you approach them with positive forward-moving momentum. Be intentional about your thoughts. Visualize the outcome you want, imagine the good things that could come from it, allow yourself to feel good, even if what is changing may be scary, or may be producing less than enthusiastic reactions from other people in your life. You are not responsible for their experience, only your own.
It will also help you to understand the unique quirks, needs, and tendencies that are ingrained in you on a soul level. Take some time to go in depth on your astrological chart, your human design, your numerology. These are tools for exploring what comes naturally to you, where your natural talents and needs lie, how you function best, and what may be a greater calling or purpose for you. When I started diving into astrology and human design my entire perspective on life changed. I did my own research, of course, but I also had readings with trusted experts that helped unpack all of the nuance of my charts and broke them down into more digestible takeaways. After a couple months of study I had made breakthroughs that explained my entire life, my relationships, my patterns, my struggles, and needs that I had never realized were essential to my wellbeing before. I feel I know myself so much better now that reaching for my authentic feelings about changes on the horizon is easier, I know I can trust where they are coming from, and I can feel more intuitively if something is right for me or not.
Self-reflection practices are essential to being able to integrate your shadows and fears as well. And if there’s one thing I think we can all agree on, it’s that if you are someone who resists or struggles with change, your real issue is fear. You must explore your fear. I know it’s hard, I know we’d all rather ignore it and just stay in patterns that make us feel safe, but often the problem with that is that your ego is running that show. It decided ages ago what safe meant for you, and it’s trying to keep you from changing, even if that means you continue unfulfilling or even destructive patterns in your life. How many of us became people pleasers in our youth and have continued to judge every decision in our lives by whether or not other people will approve of it? We continue this behavior because we learned at some point that it got us love or validation or caretaking that we desperately needed as kids, and our ego continues to tell us that if we did something differently, like made the decision to move to Europe and try to live out our secret dream of being a digital nomad, that we would suffer as a result. We could lose love and support from our people, we could be on our own, we could end up failing miserably, we could lose the safety of the life we have now. Better not. Better shove that dream back in a drawer and never open it. Better stay safe. This is the power of fear and ego and an unexamined psyche.
I’m not saying it’s easy to open the drawer and work out why you are scared to do something. But just think about the fact that if you are scared to do something that means your fear is fighting against something, and what is that? It’s the potential of what could be. Does the potential feel good to explore? If you stay open and curious about it does it fill you with excitement? Examine what’s on the other side of the fear before deciding if it’s worth pursuing. If what’s on the other side is not meant for you, your intuition will sense that. Sometimes we resist change because it is forced on us and we don’t want or resonate with what it would mean. That’s also valid, but you have to bring it all out in the open before you decide how to proceed. If the change is something you want but are too scared to pursue, I recommend journaling on why you’re scared. Really break it down. I can’t do this because I am scared of blank. And why is that? Why is that? And why is that? Keep asking why until you have distilled the essence of your fear down to its core wound. This is often something that happened in childhood that made you feel that you had to be, believe, or behave a certain way, or that you could not be, believe, or behave a certain way. What is the story you have developed in your life to deal with this wound? This story is probably something you’ve told yourself your whole life to compensate for this wound. And what would it mean if that story weren’t true?
For example, I have a core wound around feeling incapable and weak. My story is that no one believes I’m strong or capable enough to do things on my own or succeed in life without help. The results of this story cause me to often seek safety in relationships with people who can take care of me, and it also makes me hyperindependent because this insecurity also makes me want to prove people wrong and show them that I can do everything on my own and I don’t need help. These behaviors are both underpinned by the fear that this story is true. It’s a tough set of beliefs and behaviors to rectify. But what if it weren’t true? What is the belief I accepted as a child that I was weak and incapable wasn’t actually true? Why does it have to be? I was a child, I didn’t understand anything except how certain people made me feel. Did they mean to make me feel that way? I think about it, I don’t actually think so. Was it based on any kind of objective truth? Also, no, beside the fact that I was a child and probably couldn’t do a lot of things yet because I didn’t know how. Have I lived my life since then as a weak and incapable person? Hell no. I’m strong, resilient, brave, and capable of so much more than I ever thought I was, and the proof of that is in the life I have lived. The honest truth is that this story is fucking bullshit.
Recognizing this. Allowing this to be my new truth, and sending my old belief away with gratitude for how it may have helped keep me safe at certain points in my life, made space for a new reality and a knowledge that I actually am strong and capable. No buts, no doubts, no fears that this is somehow going to be proven to be wrong. So when facing change these days, instead of my mind hearing that old story and filling me with fear and doubt about whether I am capable of doing something, now I am able to face it with more confidence and trust that I will be able to figure it out and I will be okay. It’s a process, of course. It’s not perfect, but the change has been huge in helping me face tremendous change over the last few years.
Going through a divorce at 38 years old can really shake you. Even if you think you’ve got your life figured out and you’re a pretty stable and successful person, that fear will pounce on you the second you realize that you are going to have to figure everything out on your own from now on. Will you be okay? Will you be able to make ends meet and provide for yourself and your child? Will you be able to stay in your home? Be the sole head of your household? There are endless questions that all have the potential to put you into a tailspin of fear, doubt, and hopelessness. But, I was able to look at everything I’d done up to that point in my life and deduce that I was strong as hell and I was smart and I had support and ingenuity and the will to figure all of it out. It’s not that I didn’t have fear, it’s that once I examined the fear in the context of my limiting beliefs about myself and the stories I had created to fight for those limitations, the fear lost all of its power. It was replaced by my new story, a story about a woman who could get through whatever came her way, and be okay in the end. That new story gave me the confidence to make big changes, embrace the growth I was going to experience on that journey, and be able to say with 100% certainty that I would be okay no matter what.
Believe me, I know that change is hard. But if you can tune into your intuition, use tools to help understand yourself and your needs better, and examine what fear may be holding you back, you can make more empowered and authentic decisions about your life and face the future with hope and confidence that what lies ahead of you could always be happening to change you for the better.
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