Trust Your Journey: Being with What Is

Have you been noticing the various stages that we all go through on our healing and personal transformation journeys?

You know, there’s the “waking up” stage when we realize that things aren’t what they seemed, and we begin questioning old assumptions and beliefs.

And then there’s the “I can be different!” stage where we encounter fresh ways of thinking, being, and seeing, and we get soooo inspired to reach for a brand new ME. Vision board time!

Or the “wait, what?” discombobulation stage where everything is upside down and inside out. It’s hard to orient ourselves and we have an unsettling sense of not knowing who we are anymore.

We start to wonder: Can we really trust ourselves? If the things we used to trust no longer work, what do we put our trust in now?

And as we grapple with the profound question of self-trust, we often find ourselves at The Point of No Return.

This is the point where the beliefs you used to hold no longer make sense and the strategies you used to use to cope and numb out no longer work.

You can’t unknow what you know now.
You can’t go back into denial and suppression.
You can’t not feel what has been awakened.
You can’t go back to sleep.

You can no longer shrink yourself.
You can no longer stuff down all those feelings.
You aren’t willing to keep quiet anymore.
You can no longer bypass your emotions.

This is the point where you fully realize that there is no going back to the old you.

You can’t revert.

You find yourself in the stormy crucible between the old you that you’re leaving behind and the new you who is waking up and emerging into your life.

When you get to this precious point on your journey, I want you to remember this:

Surrender. Relax. Take a deep breath. Settle in.

The old you was injected with other people’s values and lived in slavery to external approval. The new you follows the deeper wisdom that emerges from within.

The old you suppressed “bad” feelings and amplified “good” feelings. The new you notices, watches, senses, and feels whatever wants to emerge.

The old you gets anxious and attached to outcomes. The new you allows life energy and deeper principles to guide and support you.

This is the stage in your journey where you are best served by immersing yourself in the sacred practice of just being with what is.

Sit next to life, instead of in opposition to it. Let the river carry you downstream, instead of trying so hard to swim upstream. Trust that the next right steps will unfold naturally, even if you can’t see the full map anymore.

I invite you to bring more presence and wonder to this week. Let your attention play and watch more closely, first your internal world and then the world around you and then back to your internal world. Watch the interplay between those things that happen outside of you and those things that arise within you.

For more on this idea of trusting the life as it emerges, watch this video segment of Conversations from the Heart, my free weekly Q&A call.

Looking for a supportive, empathic, and growth-oriented community for learning and practice? Consider joining my free Q&A calls, Conversations from the Heart. We meet every Wednesday at 10am CT via Zoom. Click here to learn more.

Dr. Yvette Erasmus is a psychologist, teacher, and consultant who specializes in transformative education for human healing and growth. Synthesizing mind-body medicine, somatic experiencing, diversity and inclusiveness, nonviolent communication, and integral-relational-cultural psychology, Dr. Erasmus integrates core insights from multiple wisdom traditions and offers various programs for community learning as well as one-on-one consulting. To learn more, visit yvetteerasmus.com.