Parachute: Trusting Our Leaps of Faith
It’s been a quiet season of heart these last few months.
I’ve been sorting through a lot, trying to see my bigger picture, and continuing to seek answers for the questions in my heart: what is my bigger purpose in life, what tangible ways do I feel called to share that with the world, and how best do I direct my focus at this time in order to keep building my dreams of writing, speaking and teaching?
I sense revelation and renewed vision are getting closer, but they’re not quite here, and something I’ve definitely learned during my time on Kauai is—
You can’t force a vision before it’s time: It is the act of sorting and grappling with our questions, which helps clear our mind and heart to set the stage for when the bigger picture is ready to come into the light.
It’s coming, it’s close, I can feel it through instinct. Intuition. A felt sense. Messages from spirit. Signs and synchronicities. A resonance in my heart that says, “Trust the timing, know it’s getting closer, and when it arrives you will be asked to take a leap of faith.”
I don’t know exactly what ‘it’ is. But something else I’ve learned during my time on this island is that you can’t control what vision you’ll receive. Could be a new book or project. Could be a new collaboration opportunity. Could be a newfound sense of purpose. Could be bringing something that feels dead in the water back to life.
Only time will tell.
I have come to learn on this beautiful, terrifying, electric Kauai journey of reinvention that I can trust whatever shows up.
I’ve come to learn that each piece, each insight, each tiny epiphany and giant revelation is all leading me somewhere. Each losing of self, each newfound truth, each contraction and expansion is all leading me somewhere. Each doodling, each wandering, each confusing and musing— is all leading me somewhere.
When I first arrived here almost three years ago, I didn’t understand I could trust the alchemy of my process.
I didn’t realize that all the small pieces, creative musings, and questions of my heart were all working together to guide my steps.
I expected specifics. I expected concrete. I expected a blueprint.
I expected a strong sense of vision would show up, opportunity would knock, and I would be filled with a sense of spiritual purpose and vigor. Then I’d get to work building this new thing that would set me on my new path.
What I found instead is that the path isn’t linear. It’s been a spiral of change, healing, manifestation, confusion, constant calibration and divine force that keeps pulling me deeper into the heart of the universe, asking me to surrender and trust on greater levels.
Though I haven’t always liked it, I’ve come to respect they journey, and I’ve come to see how terribly boring it would have been if my original expectations were met.
Sure, I have to admit there is some part of me that sees how the certitude and early success would have been wonderfully satisfying. Yet I’ve come to appreciate the wild ride life has taken me on where I don’t know what’s around the bend, where I create each step on the path as I go, and where I have acres of space to roam the cosmos of my heart in search of my ongoing questions of self.
It is a gift to be able to ask the questions. A gift that I didn’t have space for back in the structure of my old Alaskan life.
I had stability, but I didn’t have much room for expansion. Then I moved to Kauai, so I could have room for expansion, and I spent the first couple years frustrated that I hadn’t yet created a sense of stability.
I kept expecting to land. To get my feet firmly under. To create a new vehicle for my work, prosperity and purpose.
Instead, transition, transformation and trust are the themes of the last few years, and something else I’ve learned in this time is—
If we are seeking a life of juicy intuition, wild expansion, and the creative freedom to fully express and live the dreams in our heart, then we are going to have to learn to find peace in the middle of flux and flow.
The closer we travel to and with the heart of the universe, the more we will be asked to keep leaping.
Certainty doesn’t leave a lot of room for spiritual growth. Leaps of faith are the only way we are pushed so far out of our comfort zone that we are forced to expand beyond our previous ideas and understandings and seek higher perspective and new ways of being.
During the leap, we likely won’t know where we are going. We won’t know quite where we’ll be landing. Yet there is potential here for us to surrender the need to know in favor of embracing the soulful growth that comes from the process.
We will be asked to trust the process in bigger and bigger ways, and though we may feel we are free falling through the cosmos, I have also learned through experience—
The more we learn to trust the process, the more we realize we have a parachute on our back the entire time guiding us safely into new terrain. All we have to do is pull the cord.
We pull the cord every time we stop focusing on the feeling we are free falling through air and instead choose to turn inwards.
We pull the cord when we tune into our hearts, our intuition, our spiritual connection, our instincts, our inner knowing and our feelings.
We pull the cord when we open the eyes of our heart to the truth that the eyes of our mind can’t always see: We are always supported, guided and held.
The parachute is our truth, the free fall is just an illusion.
It is the journey through unknown space that is our gateway to knowledge and our initiation to understanding our divinity and our unique relationship with the magic of the mysteries.
It is through that understanding that we are then driven to create, build and manifest change in our material world that aligns with the truth of our soul.
In an effort oriented, results focused, product driven society I am coming to see we have it all backwards: First we receive the vision and new knowledge through undergoing the process, then we create aligned change from this space of new knowledge.
This morning during my morning spirit time, I felt a strong sense of Archangel Chamuel.
He always comes through like a steadying hand at my back: arms of comfort that help you feel the support from the unseen world, which is always available to us. Then I got that tingly feeling in my spine and my mind, which always precipitates a message coming through—
Why must you fear the uncertain waters?
Do you not know they are in your life and you are here at this crossing because you are ready?
You are ready for the challenge of experiencing the divine in a unique and novel way.
Hush now, still now, allow me to breathe you through troubled waters and carry you on a wave of calm through the uncertainty.
I’ve thought a lot about what he said ever since.
What might life might look like if we always knew we were carried? What might life look like if we focused on the parachute and not the fall? What might life might look like if we allowed ourselves to be breathed through uncertain waters?
I think a lot more space would open up for each of us. Space to trust. Space to be curious. Space to recognize the subtle ways we try and control the outcome.
Space to cede our need to know for a more magical, soul quenching life of mystery and wonder.
