Have you ever felt weighed down by the expectations that others have placed on you, those ingrained in family behaviors, societal norms, and cultural habits? How much of your life really reflects who you are at your core, your essential nature, free from those outside influences?
As we move through life, especially in our later years, we often start to question these expectations. When we can actually identify them, they can feel like a yoke around our neck. The freedom to live authentically—as our true selves—feels more important than ever.
I’ve been on this journey of ‘unyoking’ for most of my adult life. Much of the journey has been with others, in circles of women or together with men. I find that being with others, being mirrored, in judgment-free spaces, has been the most healing.
I’d love for you to join me on this journey of self-discovery! Together, we can unwind, unpack, and explore the parts of ourselves that are waiting to be seen and acknowledged.
As we create our futures and embrace our purpose, doing it not from a place of conditioning, but from a place of relaxed, wholehearted authenticity, is a much more joyful and empowering experience.
Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Each day, I choose to continue this uncovering process—to hold myself with compassion, to understand my patterns, and to explore where these patterns are stored in my body. Some days, I do struggle with judgment, and I know that doesn’t serve my growth. This is where I embrace my humanity!
Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
Each day, I choose to continue this uncovering process—to hold myself with compassion, to understand my patterns, and to explore where these patterns are stored in my body. Some days, I do struggle with judgment, and I know that doesn’t serve my growth. This is where I embrace my humanity!
Each experience brings me closer to my essential self. Rewiring is the process of identifying the patterns that our conditioning has given us, and sifting through them to discern the voice that we can claim as our own. We recognize it, feed it, love it, and compel it into existence, laying new neuronal pathways that will make following the soul’s path less resistant and smoother.
Consider where you are on your individuation path. Are you ready for another catalyst to uncover your conditioning? As you face the rest of your life and decisions that will impact its trajectory, do you want to make those decisions from the past, or from a part of you that is beginning to experience the light of who you are?
Please do consider joining us in the several opportunities for unwinding through rewiring. Let’s do it together in a held, non-judgmental and loving space, and together, fully embrace our soul’s path. This is one of the essential ways to bring more light into the world, and certainly our personal worlds.
Here are the upcoming programs; let’s continue our walk together!
Below please see additional compelling quotes from James Hollis, from the book “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life”:
“Rather than ask, what does my tribe demand of me, what will win me collective approval, what will please my parents, we ask, what do the gods intend through me? It is a quite
different question, and the answers will vary with the stage of life, and from one person to another. The necessary choices will never prove easy, but asking this question, and suffering it honestly, leads through the vicissitudes of life to larger places of meaning and purpose. One finds so much richness of experience, so much growth of consciousness, so much enlargement of one’s vision that the work proves well worth it.”
“The false gods of our culture, power, materialism, hedonism, and narcissism, those upon which we have projected our longing for transcendence, only narrow and diminish. Of each critical juncture of choice, one may usefully ask: “Does this path enlarge or diminish me?” Usually, we know the answer to that question. We know it intuitively, instinctively, in the gut. Choosing the path that enlarges is always going to mean choosing the path of individuation. The gods want us to grow up, to step up to that high calling that each soul carries as its destiny. Choosing the path that enlarges rather than diminishes will serve us well in navigating through our idol-ridden, clamorous, but sterile time and move us further toward meeting the person we are meant to be.”
“The poet Dante began his famous, fabulous descent into the underworld with the recognition that midway in life he found himself in a dark wood, having lost his way. Despite our best intentions, we, too, frequently find ourselves in a dark wood. No amount of good intentions, conscientious intelligence, forethought, planning, prayer, or guidance from others can spare us these periodic encounters with confusion, disorientation, boredom, depression, disappointment in ourselves and others, and dissolution of the plans and stratagems that seemed to work before.”
“Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution is the idea of individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be—what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or, especially, the easily intimidated or inflated ego. While revering the mystery of others, our individuation summons each of us to stand in the presence of our own mystery, and become more fully responsible for who we are in this journey we call our life. So often the idea of individuation has been confused with self-indulgence or mere individualism, but what individuation more often asks of us is the surrender of the ego’s agenda of security and emotional reinforcement, in favor of humbling service to the soul’s intent. This is quite the opposite of self-indulgence; it is the service of the ego to the higher order manifested to us through the Self.”
“Individuation is a service not to ego, but to what wishes to live through us. While the ego may fear this overthrow, our greatest freedom is found, paradoxically, in surrender to that which seeks fuller expression through us. Enlarged being is what we are called to bring into this world, contribute to our society and our families, and share with others. It is wholly false to think that individuation cuts a person off from others. It cuts a person off from the herd, from collectivity, but it deepens the range in which more authentic relationships can occur. It may be necessary for us from time to time to absent ourselves from the world in order to reflect, regroup, or revision our journey, but ultimately, we are to bring that larger person back to the world.”
