One thing they don’t tell you about upleveling into your next stage of alignment is how painfully it can bring up everything that’s not in alignment.

When you call in new friends who show up for you and treat you well, it will make it obvious which friends don’t.

When you call in new creative partnerships that support you and align with your growth, it will make it obvious which ones aren’t making the same cut.

When you call in new lovers who engage with you in fearless intimacy and mutual nurturance, it will make it obvious how much you were willing to compromise these things in the past.

When you decide to love yourself more than you’ve ever done before, anything that doesn’t reflect that love back to you will no longer be a match.

And that’s how everything in your life can be going as well as it ever has during all the years you’ve been alive and yet you can be experiencing pain, sadness, and grief.

Some of the people, places, and things that it is obvious are no longer in alignment with you won’t be easy to let go of. Sometimes there will be deep history, attachments, connections, promises, memories, and projected timelines that will make you feel sad to build a future that doesn’t contain them. Rewriting your narratives to reflect your new standards can mean letting go of things that once meant the world to you when you didn’t know any better, and knowing better now doesn’t always make letting them go as easy as you think it should. This is what we mean when we talk about attachment. Trying to hold on to connections that were formed in a lower vibrational space even as you’re raising your own vibration means that unless equivalent growth is happening on the other end, the cord will stretch as the distance grows greater, and either it will keep you miserably tethered to a frequency you know you’re outgrowing, or it will snap.

There’s only so long that you can make excuses for people who aren’t considering your own feelings and circumstances in return; there’s only so long you can twist your mind to justify that which isn’t a fit. At some point the strain becomes too great.

And sometimes there’s anxiety and uncertainty in not knowing what else will come in to fill the gaps. How do you move forward when you’re still waiting on the right thing to align? You don’t. You cultivate patience. You trust. You accept the discomfort of not knowing and you find somewhere in yourself another store of blind faith that you’re supported. Segura fé.

Not everything you love can come with you. That’s the nature of free will. When no amount of tugging will make for a budge, you have to leave Artax in the swamp.

With growth comes grief.

We don’t like to talk about that part, but it’s there.