In the Meantime: Sowing Seeds


I remember when I was 18 years old and I was looking at schools I wanted to go to, there was only one that spoke to me. I foolishly applied to just that one school. I didn't get in, and I was thrown. I didn't have anyone in my life to guide me towards a more thorough process, and if I explored my feelings back then, I wasn't really ready to go away to school, but I didn't consciously know that at the time. It wasn't until I was away at school and became very depressed that it became clear to me that I just wasn't ready to go away for school, nor did I have a clear idea as to what I wanted to do. It took me going through a meantime process of going to a school, finding I fell into a deep hole and having to go back home for awhile to climb out of the whole,  for me to understand that truth about myself. One of my issues at the time was that I felt shame about my not being ready, so I couldn't see my fear until I took a step I wasn't prepared for. My meantime process here took me a good year of being in the unknown until a good next step became clear to me. There is no hurrying our internal processes….we have to let them guide us at their own speed.
There was a time in my life when I knew dancing was not what I was going to do for my career anymore, but I didn't know what would take its place. I always loved to dance, and since the time I was  8 or 9 years old, I had dreamed and daydreamed of dancing. In my time, as a little girl, most girls didn't think of careers in dance in performing, they thought in terms of teaching dance or dancing as an avocation, not as a vocation. I loved to dance, and my time in dance class was the most critical part of my day. I ate, drank and breathed dance. That was a time and place where my soul would fly. Looking back, I see how lucky I was to have had that experience of feeling my soul in my body and recognizing how it felt to be in tune with my essence, and that which made feel so alive. 
Since most girls couldn't imagine a career as a dancer, being raised as I was by very patriarchal parents, my dreams were more in line with being married, having children, and dancing every day in dance class. I couldn't imagine a life without dance. Now, here I was, nearing 30, old for a dancer, and recognizing I couldn't continue teaching, dancing and choreographing the way I was for much longer without significant consequence to my body, which was my livelihood. I saw an end in sight of this chapter of my life and had no idea what else I would do which would support me and also give me great satisfaction. I was in the meantime between careers. I was in a never-never land I had never before imagined. I needed a job to support myself as I went through this crisis. What I did was to go to a short training to become a travel agent as I worked through my next steps. During that time I also had just recently broken up with a boyfriend of 7 years who had just become a chiropractor and was currently dating a young man who was in chiropractic school. I had been going to chiropractors for years for maintenance and to help with dance injuries through many years of hours a day of dance and practice. I didn't consciously think anything of this. In fact, I never considered being a doctor of any kind as I hadn't taken a science class in years, and didn't consider myself good at the sciences.
Somehow I had the wherewithal to know that I had to let my unconscious unwind and work things out as I consciously worked and played a fun game of racquetball in the meantime. I always knew I had wanted to be of service in some way in my career….never knew what that would mean. One night, after about two years of in the meantime I had a dream in which a loud voice spoke to me in no uncertain terms and told me that they didn't know what my problem was; I was going to be a chiropractor. I woke up immediately, very excited. I went to a large park and took a long walk where I decided I would take a chemistry class at night, and if I passed, I would go for it, and go to chiropractic school. That is precisely what I did. I passed chemistry, met my first husband in chemistry class, decided to take accelerated courses to complete my pre-requisites, and started chiropractic school about a year later. My meantime was a very powerful time of incubation while I birthed my next career. 
In the meantime can be precisely that, a time of incubation while something new bubbles up out of the unconscious to take root in your life. In those cases, it is essential to allow yourself the time and space to let something grow underground in the faith that something you have sown will make itself known to you. It is very much like planting bulbs in the fall, and seeing what has taken root and comes up in the spring. And it is a great joy to see the new flowers that you had planted, and maybe even forgotten about, to bloom forth in the spring in their colorful beauty. This is the beauty of our souls when we allow them to flower into being. 


My soothing words of wisdom for the week is about right brain vs left brain:

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