Over the last number of months, truth be told, the last year, I have not been ready for, or in the space of growth. I have been in a wintertime – the wintertime of grief. Knowing that my father was dying, being with him when he died, and then grieving him once he was gone, took all of my spare energy. But now (hopefully) that the winter of my grief is lifting along with the winter of 2016, and as spring approaches, I’m moving energetically into a place of growth and new life. And it’s become so clear to me, that to open a space for growth, you need to be in the right frame of mind, you need to be ready. And at long last, I am.
So how do we create the right space?
One thing to know about creating it, is that you can’t force it. There are times you can’t actually create it, because in order to create it you would have to be forcing it. You can’t actually make a carrot grow any faster by pulling at it’s shoots. You’d actually just pull the carrot out of the ground and ruin it’s chances of growing at all.
But when the time is right, when you start feeling that pulling in your soul, just like transforming a frost-bitten field into one that is fertile and ready to be planted, there are steps you need to take:
- The first one is to clear away last year’s debris. Take the time to grieve and let go of whatever is standing in your way. That could include grieving a loss like the one I had, or it could be the loss of an idea, the failure of a project, or the disappointment of dashed hopes. Whatever it is that each of us needs to let go of, it’s important to get clear on what it is, like really clear, like make a bit of an inventory, of what you feel about the experience, and then to do a ritual that has you hand that back over to the universe.
- The second one is to add the fertilizer. We could make a lot of manure references here, but really what I’m talking about, is what you need to get your hopes up … to get excited about possibilities again … to see what could be in the future, as opposed to focusing on the past or on what is missing. For me, this is where I reach out to friends, where I let myself talk about what excites me, where I let new ideas flow over me, knowing that I will only pick about 1 in 10 to pursue, but when I bathe myself in the possibilities of the ideas, I generate potential in the world around me, and people and ideas start coming to me like I am a magnet. I, of course, am a flaming extrovert. So talking to people is how I create that momentum. You need to figure out what creates that momentum for you, so that you can really tap into flow, both yours and the universes.
- The final one is to create the rows and trellises where the seeds will be planted. This is about creating enough structure, formats, frameworks, that allow you to take those precious ideas out of the realm of hopeful possibilities and into the realm of true growth. Structure is what’s necessary to help ideas become reality. Those structures could be anything from a mastermind group to mind mapping sessions with your idea, to creating an inventory of all your ideas and culling the ones that are only so-so. Without structure, it’s almost like wine grapes – without those guard rails that help the wine grapes grow, you’ll only get stunted, half-realized grapes, and your ideas are too important to only grow to dwarf size.
Ok, over to you:
What do you want to grow in your life this coming spring? Please share your comments below.
