This post is taken from an email of gratitude that I wrote to a woman who is new to my sphere of influence. Not a client, not yet a friend (but soon to become one), she is simply a wise and older woman who offered me an opportunity to network with other older women and men who are creating new life stages, beyond the idea of retirement. Her motto, lived: ‘We are not done by a long shot’. LOL, that works for me.

The conversation with her and what it elicited in me, I think will help others.

Long story short, in our conversation, I was running an internal discourse around commitment, obligation and means (money); this was taking me nowhere else but downhill into personal oblivion. Not where I want to live.

I know how to do oblivion well, when I forget myself. I also know how to get out of that place. How many of us really do?

So, I share this with you, because allowing myself to be seen and heard, now, is significant to my ability to help others who live with chronic and deep pain. The physical, the emotional, the financial and the spiritual; the disconnect from Self. These are the things I know about; these are the considerations I have lived. Even as the expert I know myself to BE, I am still in discovery of my own revelations. That will never end as long as my body lives and breathes.

There is always, in all ways, more to uncover and discover.

I think about all the times, I sat at tables of executive boards, hashing out solutions to problems and ideas, yet fearful that I’d be found ‘wrong’ in my thinking. So, I’d stay silent, giving space for each person to speak up. And, in the end, I would finally pick up my courage and bring a solution home, still questioning what I had synthesized from all of the positions put forth, next to my own, often unexpressed. 

So, there I was in a class of 55. I had four days to digest the learning. I was excited to learn yet felt unsure about getting it right. Would I ever grok what the trainer was sharing about how it ‘should’ feel under my hands when my hands were on a body? I just wanted to get it right. How many of you who are healers and coaches have been in that place?

A straight forward, simple, congruent NO is a full and complete statement. Nothing more to say.

Except that, in so many instances, women won’t let themselves declare it, much less own it without suffering the gift that keeps on giving: guilt. That feeling of guilt becomes so pervasive, that, of course, we would do anything to avoid feeling it. 

The following email was written to a client in response to her own continuing journey of seeking to live a life of joy, even when shit is hitting the fan. Like so many women, I believe she has been in that search for a very long time with the always-looming question, “If my life is so good, then why am I feeling so empty? If I have everything I need, then I have no right to feel the way I do. I lack for nothing, yet something is missing.” OR, my favourite, “my time is running out; I have to get on with it!”