I wrote this a year and a half ago…

    "Occasionally I come up with mottos for my life. It's entertaining and sometimes pithy. Or maybe they're just mottos for the moment, since I keep changing my mind and creating new ones. But one of the overarching lessons I keep running into through my trials and tribulations is this one: Stop holding back, Girl!    

    Which is a little scary because I'm not exacting a shrinking wallflower.  And maybe that is the point because I think I need to scare myself a little."

I never posted it; it's been sitting in forgotten draft mode this whole time.  It's interesting to see where I was then.  That unfinished post was about my tendency to curb my gut instincts.  It was about letting my fears get in the way of starting things, of second guessing that I knew what I was doing, or that what felt right was too strange, or what I wanted to accomplish was too much.  It's funny how often the strength of our power and the strength of our doubt mirror each other.  I was essentially afraid to trust myself. 

But part of me must have remembered that motto because since then I've finished a novel and I'm starting another.  I've pushed myself out of my comfort zone a number of times.  I've tried new things.  I was successful at some things and not others.  I've been proven wrong when I thought I knew something and I learned because of it.  It was hard, but it was great.

Lately I've been getting a lot of messages from the universe that seem to boil down to an entirely different motto…

Let go. 

I just got used to not holding back, to getting things done, to just do it!  I accomplished quite a bit in the last year and a half.  I've gotten real good at being in control of all the details to accomplish things!  I became the master of my own destiny.  Except now I'm supposed to… not be the master.

*groan*  I'm not sure which motto is scarier.  And have no doubt, I am scaring myself, I am uncomfortable.  I know (with the gut instinct I've learned to trust) that in another year or two there will be more progress, there will be more accomplished, there will be more learned, and there will probably be another step and a new motto.  I know this!  But I gotta ask… why does every incidence of growth require so much dang discomfort? 

(Until then, breathe and repeat… "May I open to my experience just as it is. May I open to my experience just as it is. May I open to my experience just as it is." Taken from the Self Compassion Pause.)

                 – wg