Last time I wrote about how energy follows patterns and, when those patterns are disrupted or outgrown, we often cling to them or try to replicate them in order to avoid chaos and pain.
These patterns are very important.
They are the channels that convey powerful currents preventing us from being flooded or overwhelmed with emotion, impulses, anxiety, or even inspiration. Whether they are healthy or unhealthy they serve as an operating system, chain of command, and flowchart for how many of our life processes should be conducted.
If you have to deal regularly with feelings of inadequacy or lack of self worth, you might develop a pattern of needing validation and reassurance from a friend or partner.
If you feel easily threatened or belittled, you may develop a pattern of striking out at others, even preemptively, in order to retain some personal power or teach people to keep their distance.
When your internal or external circumstances change significantly, these patterns seem even more important because you feel compromised by instability, and even less capable of dealing with those unmediated feelings of “not enough-ness” or vulnerability.
The problem comes when patterns turn out to belong to to the old you and your old life.
This new self is being asked to release its dysfunction, or compulsion or insecurity. Transitional space is extremely uncomfortable and our unconscious impulse is almost always to cling to the past (the known) or rush ahead to the future point where you have everything figured out again.
The thing we are being asked to do is to recognize that we are in transitional space and pay attention to what no longer belongs there.
Our old solutions will fail us in order to get us to update them. And we are very rarely given the replacement parts in advance.
This means that for as long as the transition takes (not totally up to you), things will stay unresolved and feel uncomfortable. We have to be willing to pass through, what a teacher of mine called, “the place of no longer and not yet.”
You are no longer who you were, and not yet who you will become.
While you might feel tempted to fill this place with solutions, distractions or newness, the best move is clutter clearing. This is a time to release what no longer serves you or speaks to who you are. Who you are becoming has yet to be revealed, so determining what patterns and solutions will serve that new you will also have to wait.
It is an act of faith and great patience to merely remove what doesn’t belong (or accept what has been removed for you) and trust that the rest will come at the right time. In a way it is like preparing a nursery without knowing what you’re giving birth to, or when.
You are preparing a place for the new patterns and the new understanding of self to arrive. If it is cluttered with obsolete versions or makeshift adaptations, there’s no place for them to take root.
The better a job you do preparing the space for your next self and your new life to call home, the better the results are likely to be when they finally arrive.
Part of demonstrating that you are ready and willing to move on is clearing space, emptying out and thoroughly completing the previous stage. It is facing the fear that you won’t survive without the old pattern, being willing to be uncomfortable during transition and trusting that the next thing will come and it will be worth the wait.
Are you experiencing uncomfortable transition? Has a pattern you relied on become obsolete?
This is the kind of Spiritual terrain that I help people navigate. If your Spirit is prompting you to have a conversation like this, I encourage you to get in touch with me.