There is much in life that requires courage. And just because we may master it once doesn’t mean we won’t have to face it again in some other aspect. It also takes time when we find ourselves facing yet another layer we wish to shed and trusting that courage will be granted to us yet again. It’s building that inner muscle one day at a time that eventually you begin to feel a new strength gaining that you didn’t know you had.

I’m feeling this as I’m closing in on nearing the half-way point of going through the second draft of my manuscript, I’m Fine Just the Way I Am.

When the spark occurred last winter, seemingly out of the blue, as I drove to meet a friend for lunch, that perhaps I could write about the dark period I faced last year, I just wasn’t sure I could do it. It felt so incredibly vulnerable.

But then it began to morph into a possibility that perhaps by sharing my story, it could help someone else. But yet, I just wasn’t sure. And while I began this manuscript mid-way through 2018, there were many days I felt like I was trudging knee deep in muck…slogging through with so many doubts and fear that plagued me step-by-step.

Little-by-little courage started to make itself known which led to a growing confidence in writing this book. My writing flows so much easier these days than when I first began and it feels incredibly good. 

Just yesterday, as I do to each week to help set the tone, I randomly pick an oracle card from Tosha Silver’s deck, The Wild Offering. It’s a deck I have sitting on a small table in my bathroom. Perhaps an odd place you may think to keep an oracle card deck. But I love seeing the card I picked for the week where I can reflect on it several times throughout my day. 

When I finished my writing session this morning, I reflected on this line of the card: “You make space for something larger to take hold.” 

Writing a book I believe takes courage. It has taken for me the willingness to be with my shadows, my pain, and my fears, and to transcend them. While I’ll always be a work in progress and still falter at times, I have a new gained confidence I didn’t have a year ago.

The fear that felt so intensely consuming does not have the terrifying charge it had to it just a year ago. Writing for me is a way in which I’m able to witness myself transform. Going through the second draft, I have this new confidence that is guiding me that I wouldn’t have had, had I not been willing to take the necessary inward journey I did last year.

All of this has contributed to what I believe Tosha’s card is saying that it has made space not only for the evolved me to come through, but by also sharing this with other’s through my writing, may just perhaps allow for someone else to find the courage and confidence they seek to expand into who they wish to be, too.

And then that person holds that new vibrational space for another to do so…and it causes a ripple for yet another and another.

XO,

Barb