when it all comes tumbling down
on resistance as redirection, ancestral work, and finding flow
I’ve been examining my relationship to trust lately. I’m someone who typically forces things to happen in my life. I think it’s a strength and also a weakness. For someone with two mutable placements in my Big Three, I can be pretty inflexible when I set my mind to something. It must be the salience of my Taurus moon.
This dogged determination to make things happen serves me when it comes to my creative projects, advancing in my career, finding a way when there is no way.
More often that not though, lately, I’ve been noticing how my vice-like grip on forcing things to go according to my plan is robbing me. Stealing away my ease, flow, and joy. My oracle cards read me right before sitting down to write this.
I pulled the card Intention and I’ll pull out this one line to share with you. “Ego says “I will force this thing to happen with my power.” Spirit confidently states it’s intention, then surrenders to something greater and trusts the process.” - Frank Elaridi
I think the selection of the word power is interesting here. As humans, we have a lot a power. Our will is a strong force. Strong enough to build civilizations and AI and figure out how to fly to the moon.
When I’m met with an obstacle, I try every other route before finally accepting that maybe what’s on the other side isn’t meant for me. My sheer will has taken me a lot of places… but I’m tired.
I’m wondering if it would be more worthwhile to direct our power towards the routes where we’re met with ease. Is the act of pushing what creates the resistance in the first place? What would happen if we practiced surrendering to the flow of our life, instead of resisting it?
Especially in this season of my life, where I’m living more nomadically than I’ve ever lived and am living off a combination of my savings and side hustles, which will hopefully become my main hustle.
Basically, this is my life in a meme right now.
If it sounds delusional, it’s because it is. I’m starting to make peace with the fact that the delusion is just part of it. It’s part of having a dream placed on your heart more amorphous than words can even really capture. It’s part of knowing there is a way in which you envision waking up and feeling everyday, a way you want to feel in your life.
I always say my life is the biggest piece of art that I’ll ever create. It’s a never finished, constantly evolving, beautiful mess of my own creation. A messy masterpiece. But that’s the thing. It’s not entirely my own. It’s easy to get so zoomed in on my vision for my life — the things I want to do, the places I want to go, the people I want to keep with me. I can easily lose sight of the Greater Artist at work.
This past week, I’ve been handed the humbling reminder in the form of plans not going according to plan (do they ever?) Which is really, an opening. Whenever something unexpectedly shifts, begins or ends — a relationship, job, home, your health. It creates space for something more aligned to enter.
We can make all the plans we want. What happens when you get laid off? Or fall in love? Or lose love? Do we ever really lose in love? Or the dozens of other unplanned occurrences that make up the magic and mystery of this big beautiful life.
I’m learning to let go of my own ideas of what my life is going to look like and surrender to the flow of my life. That’s how I got here. Writing to you from a small surf town in Nicaragua. Sharing my innermost thoughts with hundreds of people every week. I often find myself surprised where I end up. It’s almost as if the steps I take are not my own. It’s a wild and wonderful way to exist. Electrifying, even.
I’m so grateful to have cleared the space for myself and to have this opening in my life to make way for new versions and new timelines to open up. I feel it all happening all at once and it’s scary and exciting and overwhelming. Where will I go next? Will the money run out? Will the opportunities stop coming? Will this work? Will I fail? What does it mean to fail? And still, even though I’m choosing to live in this way, rooted in water, I feel resistance to the unknown and uncertainty. I’m learning that courage is transmuted fear the way faith is transmuted doubt.
Can I commit so boldly to creating the life I want, to make space for the partnership and community that I want, to doing the work I want to and feel that I am here to do? To fall in love with the process of becoming, because becoming is all there is. Can I remind myself that it is always better to allow life to unfold instead of forcing it to be just so. Because even when you have arranged everything just so and manage to extinguish the little fires everywhere, your Ego might snag a few moments of satisfaction, and then the wind blows, and everything comes tumbling down.
There is nowhere to rush to. There is no destination. There is only the process.
If you are someone, like me, who lives in the future, try as you might to stay rooted in the present, think about it this way — When you “arrive” to the relationship, job, home, life, that you can’t stop dreaming up and thinking about do you want to have gotten there by force? Or by a gentler agent?
I think of my grandma, who despite building everything she thought she needed and wanted to feel secure in this world, never felt truly safe or free or happy. I see a lot of myself in her. In the misguided search for security. In the distrust that people will do as they say. In the doubt that love will stay.
Although her physical form left us some time ago we’re still working through it all, together. In the space in between.
I hope this resonates or encourages you or at the very least makes you feel less alone in your messy masterpiece of a life.
Keep showing up for your life, in the little and big ways and it might just surprise you.
Thank you for being here.
Take Care,
Asha Nia