I was awake til 10am downloading and alchemizing last night so I really hope this is helpful but here’s what I emerged with:

Hey fyi guys your more mature form may look like failure as viewed through your immature form.

An obvious example is fame: your younger self wanted fame to fill the wounds your older self learned how to heal. So you don’t need it anymore, but you can’t believe it. Your immature self stops you – it tells you that you’re giving up. But you’re not, you’re healing.

So much of this won’t make sense until you’re there. But then you’ll get there and have to explain to the clinging remnants of your past self that it needs to trust you.

Ask yourself what’s “giving up on your dreams” vs what’s shedding your ego. The answer to your path is in your body. It’s where you feel joy. Not the comfort of clinging to a narrative, but pure, embodied, present-moment joy.

I’m having a hard time with it because I continually want to be understood. And if I’m seen veering from the path, I don’t know if those following me will trust that it IS the path. And for some reason that still matters to me. I want everything to make sense. There’s no question that I’m doing the right thing but it’s really hard right now. Because this is not what it looked like before.

I read this amazing thread on twitter last night from a professional dogsledder, her worst run in years: https://twitter.com/blairbraverman/status/955510709416316929 She ended up making two U-turns on the middle of a frozen lake and her dogs started distrusting her. “Every time you ask your lead dogs to do something they don’t understand,” she writes, “you lose a little bit of their faith –

and you regain that faith through clean runs. Pepe’s smart. She was not impressed to be turning two u-turns on a lake within the first ten miles of a run.” And eventually one of the dogs got so spooked it turned and attacked one of the other dogs right there in the middle of the frozen lake, causing severe wounds that required attention from two different vets.

My higher self is the musher in this story and my physical self is the dogs:

*shouts at the sky* DO YOU HEAR ME I AM NOT IMPRESSED WITH TWO U-TURNS IN THE MIDDLE OF A LAKE ON THE FIRST TEN MILES OF A RUN.

But look what happened to the dogs when they freaked out and didn’t trust the musher.

So, fine. I trust the musher.

The signs are everywhere.