These are all just ways of getting to know this monolithic thing you call “my potential.”

You’ve lived with it most of your life and it’s so familiar that you probably never really examine it closely. At times it may have been a motivating force in your life, like some kind of beacon calling you to keep reaching, but now it seems more like sleeping on sandpaper sheets.

So, just with all I’ve written to this point, you have a lot of homework to do! Don’t skip it, even though we are going to move on here.

It’s hard to be neither here nor there. You had a life, a trajectory, motivation, all these potentials, all these ideas of what your life could be and who you could be in it. You had an idea of what you wanted and what would make you happy. These things are in the past.

Then there is the future, which you are having a hard time picturing in that more or less solid way you used to be able to picture it. You are going through a transition, but it doesn’t feel good. You used to be more solid. Your idea of yourself was more solid.

And now you are feeling like more of a blob. People around you are going forward in their lives. You see them going forward. You might not really feel you are, and that life is moving forward without you. You can’t go back because you see how empty that is, but you can’t move forward in any meaningful or satisfying way because you have changed and you can’t use the old tools, the old motivations, the old coping mechanisms. They don’t work any more.

You are in a transition period. It feels like limbo and it’s disorienting, confusing and painful. This is a place from which people naturally start to rev their engines and dig themselves deeper into a mud rut, or they grab hold of a rope thrown to them by some person or organization or ideology or religion or cult.  It’s natural, but the former will just keep you stuck in limbo longer and the later will lead to a very long and low rent detour. Not to mention the hangover! Or, they do something like get married or have a baby or some other Big Life Change that is sufficiently overwhelming and demanding, to force a refocus of their lives.

You are in a dismantling phase, a transition. It is painful and confusing, and I’m sorry, but there is no way to escape those feelings, even through “spirituality”…which can be one of the worst detours ever. It is not the last one you will go through. It happens at the end of certain stages or cycles. This is a huge accomplishment. It doesn’t ever feel that way, but getting to the end of a cycle and letting yourself actually digest and alchemize all the dead mind stuff and old persona paradigms rather than continue to find novel ways to prop them up so that the show can go on for another season…this is awesome. Congratulations are in order!

The process is yucky, and I can’t make it feel any better, except to let you know you are not alone. And also, this may be really most important…there is nothing wrong with you. When you hit the wall at the end of a cycle and nothing really works anymore, your first reaction is that something is WRONG and needs to be fixed. You work like mad trying to find a way to fix it. You scour books, blogs, forums, ancient texts…whatever! There is nothing wrong with you. It does not feel good to be in The In Between, but you are exactly where you should be.

You can spend a long time in this liminal space, but you don’t have to. It will be hard anyway, but you can make it harder than necessary, or…only as hard as it needs to be.

In martial arts, one expects to be thrown to the ground, hard. You know it will happen, so rather than avoiding it, you learn to fall well. There is a point in sparing when you know it’s over and you are going down. Up until that point, you are using all your Upright strategies. At that very point of recognizing the reality, that you are going down, you immediately switch into your Falling strategy.

In life, you need to have both. But you are almost never taught to a)recognize and admit that you are going down and b)how to do that like a pro.

I want you to really take to heart all that I’ve written here up to this point. It will take a while to work through all the questions and unravel your feelings around power, death, potential and being in limbo. You need to do this work.

There is no escape, but there is a way through that is more graceful and less about gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes and pulling your hair out! I’ll see you on the other side!

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