Easy Does It

I had a reading with a client the other day and I found myself saying to her, “you are not missing something. There is no other life that you forgot to step into. You haven’t failed because you didn’t meet some sort of arbitrary set of expectations.”

Many of my clients are women in midlife. They are worn out and exhausted from trying to “have it all.” Unfortunately the New Age movement has not entirely helped in our ability to have realistic expectations about our lives. We have been taught that if we meditate X number of minutes a day, do the next big cleanse, adhere to our yoga routines, practice mindfulness, raise our vibration…(sound familiar?) the floodgates will open and we will FINALLY have it all.

I have been in this practice supporting people on their spiritual paths for over 15 years. I can tell you in my most gentle, yet straight forward way, that you are not doing yourself any favors by adhering to a perspective of attaining some sort of spiritual enlightenment for the sake of manifesting it all. What is happening in that ideal, is a disconnect from a more gentle, realistic, yet magical expression of your current life. It’s exhausting to continue to uphold an ideal that strips your current life from YOU. You are what’s missing right now. Your compassion for yourself, your willingness to be at peace with the present life around you, without asking what needs improvement.

I am not here to tell you the magical formula for doing life. However, I will gently show you some of the pitfalls and mind traps. The words I’m writing right now are generally for the perfectionistic over-achieving midlife woman who has trained herself to do the system “right” and get it down, so she can finally enjoy all the gems the universe has to provide. Enjoy your spiritual practice. Meditation is fun and relaxing. Creating a vision board is a way to channel pretty creative energy. AND…hold your expectations in check. Be gentle with yourself and your life. You may have been brainwashed to believe you can have it all by the generation before us, and also by the well meaning but somewhat slightly toxic messages in the new age movement, but stop for a moment and ask yourself if that’s really what you want?

There is nothing wrong with your idealistic, visionary, creative mind. You want what has been promised to you through the messages you’ve received over time: freedom, liberation, transcendence, enlightenment. You have been working your ass off on your yoga practice. You are putting nothing but organic foods into your body. And you are likely still sitting here reading this blog and wondering when the life you’ve been manifesting for years is finally going to show up? The career? The relationship? The money????!!!???

Breathe a minute. Look around the room. Center yourself in your heart space. Smile. It’s perfect. And so are you. Just as you are. Right now, right here. The cosmic joke of it all is in the mind cray-cray we burden ourselves with that what’s really your life is in the other room. Nope. Stop listening to messages that tell you it needs to be somewhere else, something else, something bigger, greater, you are drowning yourself in the “go big or go home” mentality, and it’s not serving you the way you thought it would.