Blog

Last week when I was in Maui, the woman I was working with – Sophia – picked me up at the airport. We drove to run an errand, and then headed to our first appointment of the weekend. At some point, she turned the corner to drive parallel to the beach. As she did, she said, “I came to this beach this morning to say a blessing and to ask that the weekend serve your highest good.” 

My mouth gaped open. 

Not because of the blessing. 

But because it was the exact same beach that my ex-husband had told me that he wanted to get a divorce, 8 years ago. 

It was in that moment that I didn’t care what happened during my weekend with Sophia, I knew it was all being divinely orchestrated to give me whatever I needed.

But first, back to that day on with beach with my ex-husband.

We were on vacation with my parents, his mother, both of my brothers and their families – all celebrating my mom’s 70th birthday. It wasn’t a convenient time to announce you’d like to get divorced, if you know what I mean. 

But – and this is the part that’s important – because I didn’t want to ruin everybody else’s good time, I shed a handful of tears on the beach, then wiped them away and went back to the party. I didn’t tell anyone. I pretended like everything was ok, when I was falling apart on the inside. 

And I as I spoke about this with Sophia, it became clear that the beach moment with my ex-husband wasn’t significant in my life because of the words he told me that day, but rather, because I put everyone else’s needs above my own. 

I didn’t want people to be uncomfortable.

I didn’t want to ruin their good time.

I didn’t want to take all of the attention to deal with my problems. 

I didn’t think that the thing that was tearing me apart on the inside was worth inconveniencing them for. 

My time in Maui last week was many things, but one of the main things was about taking up space, letting my needs matter the most, claiming my right as a person to have needs. (And, trust me, I’ve done a ton of work on this, but this was next level taking up space.)

I developed the muscle memory treating myself with the love I extend to others. (And as I result, I have more love to extend to others.)

Something about doing this in a place where I had such a distinctly different experience felt like a full circle. I could see that I wasn’t that woman who returned to her family gathering 8 years ago, trying to act as if nothing was wrong. I could see that I didn’t need to carry her invisibility anymore. 

And I knew that I would never allow myself to be invisible or have a need go unaddressed again in favor of someone else’s comfort. 

The proof is in the pudding. 

Two days ago, I could see circumstances starting to swirl around me in a familiar dynamic of one where I’d typically put my needs aside with my family. I wasn’t angry, I wasn’t sad; I was just really clear that I wasn’t available to participate with this kind of behavior anymore. 

I took a giant leap…and left. I don’t yet know what’s on the other side, but I do know that I’m taking up more space in the universe these days. And when we take up more space, the universe meets us with bigger things to accommodate the space we occupy. (More opportunity, more money, more love, more of what we want.)

This is the power of breaking patterns. 

We all have patterns. And it’s so easy to write them off in the day to day experience of them as no big deal. But when they influence the way you live your life so much that it keeps you small, the patterns that run you are a big deal. 

It doesn’t mean something is wrong, or that you are broken. In fact, you are human. 

It just means that breaking the pattern could totally change your life. 

And wouldn’t that be fun?

“Gah, Rachel…everything was going so great! It was like one thing led to the next, and then the next, and it all lined up perfectly. And then it all just came to a complete stop. What happened?!”

People ask me this question all the time. 

And today I’m going to answer it, because what you do when you hit this point (and we all do), matters a lot if you want to get back to that place of it all lining up perfectly again anytime soon.

The moment when you flip from lots of positive momentum to none is a crucial one. 

You feel something you don’t want to feel. 

And maybe something happens to make you feel something you don’t want to feel, but the feeling is that part that’s important here.

Let’s say you get into a car accident. And you know it was your fault. So you feel guilty. (But you know admitting your guilt will cause more problems than you care to deal with, so you pretend that it wasn’t your fault, or you make up a tiny, white lie.)

You refuse to acknowledge the guilt. You push it away. 

And before you know it, you feel stuck. Or all the things that were going so well have fizzled or slowed way down. 

What went wrong? 

It’s not the feeling that you had. It’s the failure to acknowledge it or consider it. 

On an energetic level…

To break this down from an energetic perspective, when things are flowing in your life, your energy is moving. In and out. You’re putting energy out, things are flowing in. 

And when we experience a feeling that we don’t want to feel, we have to push it away. To close up so it can’t get in any deeper than it already has. This leaves you in a closed off state of being, and you’re unable to receive – to let energy (in whatever form) in. 

We have to create separation between ourselves and that feeling we don’t want to feel…and that separation then exists between ourselves and EVERYTHING.

And that’s when everything stops. 

How to get that momentum back.

It used to take me days to notice that something was off. And I’d have no idea what caused it, and I’d end up just feeling really frustrated, like the universe just didn’t like me or something. 

Because I’ve been able to put my finger on the thing that needs to happen to shift the energy back into a reception-mode, I’ve been able to shorten that cycle, sometimes to minutes. (It depends on how tuned in to my own energy I am when I block that feeling I don’t want to acknowledge.)

So instead of wallowing in how great things were and now they’re not, all you need to do is go back to the moment when you felt something that you didn’t want to feel (and as a result, pushed away).

Go back to it. 

Feel it. 

Acknowledge that it was there.

See if you can see what it was trying to communicate with you. 

If there’s anything to do, do that. (This might be having a conversation with someone, doing something to find clarity around the particular topic, or just taking more space to feel it all the way.)

It make take a day or two or three, but this will lead you back to flow. (Because that’s really all flow is – doing the thing that feels right at the right time in a way that makes it seem like everything is conspiring for you. In order for this to exist, every kind of energy has to be available to you.)

Your turn. 

Can you see it? When’s the last time you felt some kind of flow and found yourself stopped or stuck? Can you trace it back to a feeling that needed some airtime?

I’m not one to focus on being broken (because I don’t believe anyone is), but there’s something that happens to many women that feels a lot like being broken. It can occur when they have children, get a divorce, burn out from a demanding job, get really ill, or more naturally when they hit late 30s/40s. 

An unrest happens within that calls for a recalibration. 

And unless you know what’s really happening, you can a) feel like you’re losing your shit and not really understand why or what to do about it, and b) the tools that you reach for to address it have the potential to cause more damage than good. 

What is happening is a whisper for wholeness. A pursuit of integration.

You are being shown that something internal has been out of balance, and it’s time to restore your own natural state of being. (This is not the same as your usual way of being that you learned along the way.) And likely, your masculine has been in overdrive, and your feminine is under-nourished or acting out. (And your masculine is exhausted, and your feminine is pissed.)

But first, a clarification of what I mean when I say masculine and feminine. Whether man or woman (or non-binary), we all possess both energies, in varying proportions:

The masculine (or yang) energies represent doing, action-oriented, goal-focused, production, achievement. 

The feminine (or yin) energies represent being, creation, feeling, life-force, intuition, nourishment, surrender.

When these energies are out of balance with the masculine getting more focus, we feel tired. Burnt out. Our adrenals suffer, we likely drink too much coffee, and then wind down with alcohol. We feel attached to the outcome more than enjoying the ride. We link our identity with what we achieve, or whether we win.

When these energies are out of balance with the feminine getting more focus, we feel unsupported, unstable, like we can’t get momentum. We are probably doing much less than we’d really like to, but feel frustrated at a lack of progress. We change our minds often, and can have the tendency to feel powerless. We second guess ourselves because this isn’t really the way most of the world functions. 

The cold, hard truth.

Westernized women have become conditioned to fit in and compete by enhancing our own masculine qualities and underplaying our feminine qualities. To conform to the societal standards of production. To make people comfortable by not being so emotional. And in doing so, we are denying ourselves, and in the greater extreme, killing ourselves. 

We need both. 

The life-force, intuition, creating feminine needs the structure and support and production of the masculine. The feminine births the thing, the masculine comes forth to make sure it stays alive. The need is not one-sided. The masculine needs the feminine just as much as the feminine needs the masculine.

This is true for anything sustainable you are trying to create by yourself, or with others. 

When these energies are balanced within ourselves, we can be unstoppable. Inspired, focused, nurtured, and sustainable. 

The pendulum will swing. 

In order to become fully integrated, where you understand and appreciate both your masculine and feminine, and have them represented in the right proportions for you, we often need to swing the pendulum one way or the other. It’s not always extreme, but the pendulum has to swing so that each part can see itself fully, and to heal the parts that have been locked away. 

Think about it, if you’ve spent most of your life doing and achieving and ignoring your feelings, in order to be a person who can do and achieve and have feelings, you may need to put some attention on your feelings while you get it back in balance. 

If you’ve been tired for a long time, it’s gonna take some time to recover from not being tired. 

You’ll get to know new parts of yourself. You’ll get to find new ways to interact with yourself that feel so much more like you. You’ll find compassion and acceptance to replace the judgement and criticism. 

Act like your life depends on it. 

Acknowledging all of who you are, and living from that place, makes the outside reflection of that inevitable. Your life will line up with who you really are. It can’t not. This, in and of itself, is an incredible gift.

Here’s what I do know. If you hear the call to recalibrate – if you feel the nudge – and you choose not to listen, the recalibration will happen anyway, but likely way outside the bounds of your preferences. 

When you choose it, you get to reap the full benefits. Full internal power. A sense of self you are proud of. Peace. Contentment. Freedom.

Are you feeling the call to recalibrate? Are you choosing it, or is it choosing you?