no one is coming to save you
No one. No calvary. No superhero.
You don’t need ‘em. You are the Superhero. You save yourself.
When I finally got this, like reeeeeeally got it, I felt reborn. Liberated.
No one’s coming my friends. Let that sink in. If you give it a minute the idea will soothe you like a newborn in a tight swaddle. It emancipates you from the expectations of others. From waiting on someone else to throw you the tube or give you permission.
Remembering this has pulled me out of the deep many a day. Recently that itchy, squirmy, fidgety feeling rose up in me. When you feel like so much is pressing up against your insides you might burst. Ideas, passions, and pursuits that lay in wait. Dormant but begging for action And their side kick, fear. Oh, the fear. We can’t forget about that.
I felt caged. Like Arjuna in The Bhagavad Gita, I was puddled on the floor of my chariot paralyzed with the affliction of doubt. A meowing lion.
I’ve been playing in my cage, actually. Decorating it, even. Delaying. Avoiding. Taking myself from one meaningless task to the other. Burying those big dreams, those pressing up against me sensations.
God put those there on purpose. Listen, Sara,
they beg. He put them in all of us. Yes, you, too.
“That thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is calling us to” reminds Pressfield in The War of Art .
That thing.
I’ve been doing anything to distract myself from its call. The dishes, folding laundry, mom stuff. Organizing drawers, changing cat liter. I mean anything to marinate in the low hum of anxiety caused by not doing the thing versus taking one small action step towards the thing.
The source of everything is love or fear. If you peel back the onion far enough, these two behemoth emotions are the core. I was marinating in fear so deeply buried I almost didn’t know it was there. It only showed up in the symptoms. The visible stuff, the leaves of the tree - avoidance, procrastination, distraction. You know it, too, right?
Fear that following my gut might make me vulnerable, unsafe, exposed (absolutely it will). I’ll do those things later, tomorrow, next week. Translation = never.
The roots, the source of this fear, stay hidden.
“F those roots!” my inner voice offers, they’re too complicated. It’s dark down there, wet, dirty, gross. Nobody wants to go there. To deal with that. That’s lame, boring. Move on! Call a friend, grab a drink, scroll Instagram, ignore it. Stay on the surface. Its bright, happy, and easy up here!
I know I’m doing meaningless stuff. I justify it because technically, yes, adulting is required (dishes, laundry, bills). But that stuff is not the music inside me. It’s not what I have to offer the world. It is not my dharma.
If I died tomorrow do I really want my last days to be spent organizing my linen closet, correctly syncing my photos across all devices and running ridiculous errands like returning $5 socks to the Amazon drop off?
We are finite. We do not have All The Time. We have now. Like, right now. It’s a lot to digest. It feels big, overwhelming, paralyzing. So we stay on the surface. We pour the Chardonnay, buy things we don’t need, post the pretty vacation picture and organize the junk draw (again). We scroll and click, over schedule and under sleep. We move fast and busily. We stay superficial but “productive.”
The problem is the things we’re doing don’t (really) matter. Our true dreams, the things that matter and terrify us, shrivel inside. They die, but not really. It’s worse. They go unlived. And unlived dreams destroy us.
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”
I’ve written about why we avoid the stuff our souls call us to. How we’ve given it (insert your dream here) such a divine halo that if we attempt it, we will not do it perfectly (obviously) and our f-up’s will mar this pristine image we have of the thing. And us doing the thing. Basically, it’ll be all our fault, it’ll be crap, we’ll be a criticized failure.
Stay in bed, pull the covers up, surround yourself with carbs, Netflix and your little glowing rectangle.
The answer is to do the opposite. Get up. Act. Mobilize your inner troops.
Want to be a painter? Get out your brushes. Open a bakery? Bake the damn muffins. Run a marathon? Lace up, sweetheart. Get after it.
That fear gets quieter, weaker, lower case. But you gotta act. Move towards. Turn the wheels.
I heard the voice (don’t do it! stay where you are!) and moved anyway. Each baby step gave resistance the bird. It moved me toward the thing rather than away. The quality of the thing made no difference. Who cares if your painting sucks or the muffins are a bomb! What matters is the action. The pursuit forward despite the voice signals the Universe to come alongside you. Let’s go! This chic means business! The voice means you’re on to something Big. Follow it. Use it. It’s your compass.
For me, action looked like getting back to yoga. To teaching. From that first class I could feel it. My eyes were shining again. I was lit up. I was not just alive, but A L I V E.
It’s spilled over into all the other bits of my world. I’m happier steeped in the groundhog dayness of Motherhood. Putting on jumpers, braiding hair, kissing boo boo’s, intensely loving on and being the Source for my small people.
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” — Carl Jung
There is a wake the f up sensation that floods us when we step through fear. When we act. For so long I inched along the bridge between quietly wanting, wishing, dreaming about teaching again only to immediately talk myself out of it.
I thought the rising up of fear meant stop, be cautious, stay in your lane. I was reading the signs wrong.
That churning stomach and pounding heart mean green light, Go.
Grow, expand, try, live, be seen, take up space. It’s okay, your allowed. That’s why you’re here.
All it took for me to get back to teaching was to get out of the way and allow it. To move towards it. A few quick text exchanges and I was picking up a key to the studio and on next weeks schedule.
This ease. This simplicity, it’s what we’re afraid of.
If you would just release the brake, not even pressing the gas yet, you start to roll forward. Things start to shift and come to you. You are quickly propelled from thinking to doing. That all we desire - the cross country move, to start the podcast, to build the company, have a baby, quit booze, repair our brokenness - all these things are so close, a matter of lifting your foot from the brake, that we freeze.
I nearly did. Because when we take action, fear double downs. It realizes that you mean business and it feels itself weakening. It throws a hail mary and hits you with everything it’s got. One last chance to keep you small, stuck, sitting on the sidelines.
We’ve all experienced it.
But once you decide to do the thing anyway, a whole bunch of stuff starts to shift. The doing is the flare gun that signals the universe you’re ready. And when it sees that opening to flood into your life, fasten your belt my friends.
I still hear the voice, it tries, bleakly to lure me back to the “safe place” of defeat. Becuase it know this: you can do it, and if you do, your life will shift so dramatically that you will leave it’s sorry ass in the dust forevermore. You have been unleashed. You have been set free. This is true for me in every area of my life. It’s true for you, too.
I write as much as a reminder for myself as for you to remember Who You Are. The Superhero. The knight in shining armor. Right this moment you have everything you need to rescue yourself and charge into you life. Do it. Take one step, then another, then another.
As always, I’m rooting for you. This life thing is better together, e-mail me, I respond. I’ll take the steps with you.