This weekend I shopped for a wedding dress! I’m getting married this summer. The date is drawing closer. I would have never guessed that I’d be stepping into this commitment in a relationship that I so enjoy. In fact I never imagined having a life that I so enjoy.
I would have never gotten to this place without first coming undone a bit. Starting with leaving my first marriage.
I read this quote on Facebook this week: “For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, it’s insides come out, and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.” – Cynthia Occ
I’ve found this to be so true for me. Luckily I’ve become comfortable with that which looks like destruction. Once I was even certain I would need to close my business.
It was 2012 and I’d put three years into building my business with all my heart and soul. It was six years after my divorce, and I’d been struggling to build a good relationship.
I had lots of reasons why I wasn’t finding the right relationship. I was focused on the business. No one I met was as much fun as my business. The right guy wasn’t yet ready for me. And my favorite was that I had never really seen a good relationship modeled for me, so it was hard for me to imagine.
But then I had to look at the truth, which was that I’d created a business even thought I’d never seen that modeled. In fact I’d done all sort of things that no one ever taught me. Not to mention I truly thought I was a good catch.
And when I got tired enough of building my life alone, I got committed to changing. And then I came undone.
Luckily I’d experienced being undone in different areas many times before – death and divorce, a job changing without my consent, and the many times I had to release control and surrender in order to invite in my success in business.
But this time it was truly personal. For me it looked like my mentor saying one sentence that would rock my world for quite some time. It went like this:
“You kind of have the energy of someone who’s gay and doesn’t know it.”
WHAAAAATTTTTT
That’s what it sounded like inside my brain.
You’ve got to be kidding me? Surely it must be something else!
And day after day following that statement, the Universe helped me to come undone. Signal after signal pointed in the direction that this might be true. I was almost 40 years old, and I’d built a full and complete life, and a business that was centered around ALIGNMENT, as a straight person. How could this be?
I was certain I would have to close my business. My business that had been my life for three plus years, and my dream for many before that. How could I have a business about alignment and be so wrong about my own? Who would ever believe me again? It felt like the world was crumbling around me. Not just my world, but THE world. The world would never be the same.
And when I was able to embrace the fact that the world would never be the same for me, and allow myself to come undone… to let go of the identity I’d careful crafted for myself and allow a new, more aligned version of myself to unfold, life began to get better and better.
I’d thought I was happy before, running my business in my pajamas, and ignoring a whole part of my life that was missing. And then I learned what real happy was. And happiness continues to unfold for me… especially as I excitedly plan my first gay wedding.
For most of you reading this, you’ll never come undone in this same way. You’re happily on your sexuality path and that part of your life is good.
But I’d just about guarantee that there is some area of your life or business that is ready to sprout and grow, making you more happy than you can now imagine. And you won’t be able to embrace it without first allowing everything you believe to be true about that area to come undone.
To those who don’t ‘get it,’ your choices will look like destruction. Like it to do those who watched me leave my stable engineering job. Or spontaneously move to Denver. Or propose to a woman.
But deep inside you understand the law of sacrifice, which tells that we must first let go of that of a lower nature in order to align with our higher nature life. The things we’re keeping around because they feel safe and secure and help us avoid our fear, are fear-based in nature. They need to come undone, for the love-based energies within you to grow.
And they’ll come undone likely visibly and publicly, for all who will never be ‘your people,’ to see and judge. Let them. Because they may not know what you know about what it really takes to grow.
What’s your experience with coming undone? How has it allowed YOUR life to grow?