Have you ever agreed to a deadline before you had any idea how you’d meet it?
At the end of a business coaching call this week, my mentor asked me to send him my 90-day plan before our next meeting. What 90-day plan? I thought. I had seen things quite clearly until a bump in the road threw everything up into the air. I had no idea where to begin or what to map out. Of course what I said out loud was, Absolutely.
What typically happens to me first is that a panic comes forward, followed closely by the mind spinning with ideas and thoughts on how the task can be accomplished. I find neither of these very helpful. There’s a value to brainstorming, but to be honest, there’s enough of a storm inside my head without trying to invite one. And while it’s good sometimes to stretch my creative thinking capacity in this way, I find it better when I’m already in a tizzy to simply hold and wait.
And so I did. I spent days calming myself as best I could, being with my clients in the present moment, slowing my pace by hiking or swimming or lying under a tree at the river park to watch the wind shimmer through beech tree leaves like sunlit chimes. I stopped the car once to witness a magnificent sunset glow with brighter and brighter gold, then soften to rose, then fade to gray. I enjoyed breathing in and out, reminding myself that I need do nothing else.
Gradually, the layers around my heart began to dissolve.
And even as these inner icebergs melted away by day, at night I felt that familiar tension in my throat—the one that gets stuck, the one that says I must speak, I must be heard. The voice pushes, and the more it pushes, the more my throat hurts. I say I’m listening, but it won’t speak up.
It’s only when I create a safe space of divine love for the message to emerge that this voice will share. It will not respond to any other quality or technique. It must feel the resonance of authentic, unconditional love. And I’m the one responsible for bringing that vibratory truth.
I held the experience much of the night, and by morning the pressure had released. Within hours I knew what needed my attention in the next 90-days. It wasn’t a list, though it will turn into a series of physical, practical tasks. It was a consciousness, a container. Around the perimeter, a circle of protection surrounds the sacred work to be tended. And as I embody this living sanctuary, Love flows through the work and through me, unobstructed, into the world.