One
When you lose old beliefs, you’ll also lose old coping mechanisms. You won’t have the same tools to work through worry, grief, or despair. The same prayers, words, and rituals won’t work anymore. You’ll put them on like an old wool sweater that shrunk in the wash. What used to bring comfort will bring constriction.
Before you find what fits, you’ll have to know your shape.
Before you learn what works, you’ll have to learn yourself.
Two
People in your life will feel like you’re abandoning them.
Three
You were always meant to step across someone else’s limit for you. This is what it means to grow.
Four
You’ll lose what you thought was your identity. Eventually you’ll see, you’ve always been you. What you thought was an identity were roles you shaped yourself to fit.
Five
People in your life will think you’ve forgotten who you are. Eventually you’ll see, you are shedding layers. To them this feels like betrayal. To you this feels like authenticity.
Two things can be true.
Six
A change in you will catalyze a change in others. They may not like this.
Seven
Change is loss, and loss is painful.
Eight
Even good change.
Nine
Systems like homeostasis. They like to return to what they know. You will learn to tolerate the discomfort of not being able to return to what you knew. The discomfort of disequilibrium.
Ten
For awhile, you will only have loss. Before the new, you will only have loss.
Eleven
You will feel empty without the beliefs and structures and community that used to fill you up. Eventually you’ll see, you are not empty. What feels like emptiness was your soul making space, and a spiritual wide-open place can be terrifying. A spiritual agoraphobia.
Twelve
Open space is not empty. It is full of possibility.
Thirteen
Creativity is spirituality, and spirituality is creativity.
Fourteen
The point of a sacred text is self-discovery.
Fifteen
You will experience withdrawal from the drug of spiritual bypassing.
Sixteen
Radical honesty is a way out of shame.
Seventeen
What you thought was God was sometimes shame. Your brilliant brain invented shame to keep you safe. To keep you attached to a caregiver when survival depended on it. Like a scraped knee, you kept your palm clenched over a wound thinking it would hurt less to keep it covered. Eventually you’ll see, when you turn toward your shame in love, wounds heal into resiliency.
Eighteen
What you thought was God was sometimes an inner critic. And your IC doesn’t tell you what is true about you; it tells you what it FEARS to be true about you. Eventually you’ll see, when you turn toward your critic in love, fear releases into creativity.
Nineteen
When you hear a birdcall, remember to breathe.
Twenty
The calling of a bird is to be a bird.
The calling of a tree is to be a tree.
The calling of the sky is to be the sky.
The calling of me is to be—who’ve I’ve always been—
me.
Twenty-one
The same is true for everyone else.
Let them be them.
Let you be you.
Let the rest, rest.