Navigating the Threshold of “Becoming”

What does it mean when life, as you’ve known it, suddenly changes in a blink of an eye and you find yourself dropped into the desert and the unknown?

Or maybe it happens so slowly that you wake up to realize everything in your life has been dying for months or maybe even years.

However you find yourself here, you are now standing at the threshold of realizing that what was previously so important to you no longer holds its place on the trophy shelves.

You wonder, ‘who am I now’ and ‘what do I value and honor in my life’?

This can be more obvious when we cross thresholds such as losing our jobs, divorce, health issues, financial struggles, becoming empty-nesters, retirement, the expert trap (being an expert in something and losing your passion or love for it or feeling you must sustain the role of expert by tucking away your own transparency to maintain status) or the death of a loved one.

There are many thresholds that invite us to this edge. Sometimes one at a time.

In my case it was almost everything at once.

As I started my departure from the corporate world, I stepped straight into the heart of becoming for the next 8 years. The uncertainty and the loss of any placeholder representing my sense of self was excruciating at times. Followed by exasperation every time I tried to formulate a new plan. It was really none of my business how things unfolded. My job was to allow and notice all the ways I tried to fight the unknown.

I vacillated between feeling like a caged animal and a stoic blue heron patiently hovering over its prospective meal.

As my awareness grew, I felt like a permanent fixture stationed at the watchtower of my mind; noticing every tendency to fall back into what was comfortable and familiar even when those things didn’t feed me.

On the heels of these impulses were reverberating life experiences telling me to be still and wait, ‘something new wants to be born.’

I still revisit remnants of resistance related to this space of ‘becoming,’ specifically through my expression with work. I no longer fit into the corporate model and I’m not exactly a ‘spiritual teacher’.

I am an ordinary human on my journey to rediscover the essence of my true being through meeting my life experiences directly in each moment and to guide others to do so.

The journey of becoming

In my experience, the journey of becoming is a time when we realize that we don’t have a role or life to cling to that will help define who we are.

It’s a invitation to return home to listen, notice resistance and receive what life offers rather than map strategies to mask the thrashing grasps towards a sense of safety, belonging; or whatever the core pattern that drives each of us happens to be.

In the simplest form, the phase of becoming has been a journey of trusting life and expanding my capacity to be aware and present for everything that arises.

What I’ve discovered are opportunities, people and invitations that I could have never dreamt of showing up.   At the same time my ideas of how it should look are poked, like a pin in a balloon, over and over again.

What does it look like to let go of the ‘how’ and stay with the longings and invitations that don’t necessarily make sense to our ideas and mental vision?

To be a pioneer and to discover why we are here and what we are called to do requires learning the answers moment-to-moment. It calls us to trust and cut through the beliefs and stories that limit our capacity to feel at home despite any external circumstances and internal judgments.

“This journey of becoming is an intimate dive into the discovery of what is True versus what is perception.”