Lessons From 2022

Happy New Year!

We are officially at the beginning of 2023 and it's time to get back to some more of my regular routines, including my weekly blogs! The platform had to change because Revue is shutting down shortly. But other than that, nothing changes. You can subscribe and be notified when I write these. The blogs remain open though and you can read them at any time. I have transported the other blogs I wrote on Revue over to this platform as well.

So, now that the housekeeping is out of the way, what I wanted to do today was actually a sort of year in review. I wanted to talk about some of the lessons I picked up in 2022 and how those lessons have changed things for me. Life is not what it was in January 2022 and I am not who I was at the beginning of 2022 either, so with that, let's begin.

The theme of 2022 was personal power. That wasn't so much a choice as it was just the path I found myself on. The last couple of years have really been about getting my feet under me in terms of my power. I had to figure out how to be in the world, how to interact with others, and then to realize that not all relationships were dangerous to me.

What's the danger? People taking my power away or me feeling like I needed to give up my power in order to maintain the relationship. Neither is okay. What happened in 2022 was I learned how to use the power I had in a way that didn't create more trouble.

One of the things I started talking about this year was recognizing the pain in other people so that we don't have to throw pain back at them. The idea of being able to be in a relationship and not throw pain around, even when it's thrown at us, is part of that sense of personal power that I had to find.

As a mentor or coach, it was important that I wasn't encouraging people to throw pain around, especially since I'm trying to teach people how to change their lives. Understanding and being compassionate towards others means spending less time defending ourselves and more time just figuring out how to respond better to other people. Our responses to each other matter. It's more than just being nice to each other. They matter because they determine what the other person may do next.

We can and do unknowingly trigger each other all the time. Personal power gives us the ability to control that pain response. We can get the extra second we need to recognize the trigger of pain within ourselves and then avoid the disaster that comes from projecting that outward. It's just a matter of being aware enough of ourselves and having enough control over ourselves to be able intervene within ourselves before we lash out.

Letting my guard down, recognizing that I could control me and that I could shift what was happening by how I responded, changed a lot of things in my world. I could make the choice not to fight. By not arguing and not engaging, it changed how others responded to me.

A lot of us have to learn how to be okay taking up space in the world and I was certainly one of those people. I spent a lot of time being very scared of my own goals. When I tell you I understand what it's like to run away from what you want, it's because I've done it for years. Not only did I run away, there were many time where I also felt forced to walk away because I didn't have the power to do my own thing.

One of the things that I did for myself was become more stable in my work. I was constantly taking things down and putting them back up again. That little bit of self-sabotage happened because I hadn't yet decided that I was allowed to go after my own goals. I hadn't yet decided that I was allowed to take up space. Well, that shifted right at the end of 2022.

I learned a couple of things in this process of taking things down and putting things back up again. The first is that it's okay to change. Permission to change is important and it's something that I talk about all the time. We need to have our own internal permission to shift. If we don't give ourselves that or we don't feel free enough to move in our own way, we get stuck. Learning that I could move about the cabin freely, as it were, meant that I had given myself permission to change freely.

The second part of that was the idea of stability, because if I was shifting all the time then I was as stable as a broken rocking chair. That's not good for business. The deeper message in there was that I could offer things that I wanted to offer. I didn't have to do what I thought other people wanted. What you saw was me figuring out what I actually wanted to offer. What did I actually want to offer versus what I thought other people wanted me to offer?

That carried over the idea of permission. Giving myself the freedom to change also meant giving myself the freedom to offer the things that I wanted to offer. Part of the reason that coaching was so much of a struggle for me was because of my feeling that relationships were dangerous. By learning that relationships were now safe because I had the ability to manage myself, I also got to learn that I could do my own thing and that not everybody would leave me if I did.

If I get up and out of all this, I can start to recognize that everything that I have done for the last 8 years was necessary for me to be able to do what I wanted to do the way I wanted to do it. I had to get rid of all the quirky thinking. I had to release a lot of the pain that I was holding on to.

Sometimes, when people want to go after a goal or a dream, they wonder why they get certain lessons or why they get shown certain things. Honestly, because of how the pain we carry is all connected to itself, there are many habits and behaviors that each of us have that are connected to the pain in ways we don't realize.

One of my favorite questions to ask is, "Who do I need to be in order to be successful with this?" That opens up the idea that there are things that we may need to understand that we aren't aware of yet, that are stopping us from being successful. It boils down to understanding what we're missing.

I have control over the direction I go in, I don't have control over the lessons I need to pick up along the way. When things happen, they don't mean that we need to stop going in a certain direction. They mean we need to understand why we're being shown this thing.

I've revisited numerous old cycles in my life over the last year. I wasn't being punished. I wasn't being asked to stop what I was doing. I was being asked to check out the scenery. Going back through the cycle from a place where you are no longer triggered by it, gives you the opportunity to pick up things you missed before.

Sometimes the purpose of cycle repetition is literally to show you something about the cycle that you weren't able to see before. For me, a lot of it was just understanding why the cycle was happening in the first place. By changing my response to those old cycles, the cycles ended. They stopped happening. I was suddenly aware of why they were happening in the first place and what my role in them was.

I started out my healing journey looking for truth. I wanted clarity around why my life was the way it was. How had I ended up where I was 8 years ago? How did I find myself in so much pain? What did I need to do to fix it?

Those questions led me down a path of self-awareness. I didn't plan the path, it just showed up in front of me. By asking the questions, I was given the answers. It took a while, but I got them. I got the answer to why I ended up in so much pain. It was because the powerlessness or pain that I had picked up had caused me to make choices for myself that I didn't want to make. I felt powerless in my own life and that made me create a life that I didn't even want. When I finally decided that it had cost me too much, the pain was too much, I changed it. I took my power back.

I got shown my wonky perception and train-wreck worthy behavior. I got shown the dysfunction in some of the relationships around me. I was shown how to respond differently so that the dysfunction would stop. I was shown how to question my reality, not to be skeptical of it, but to understand it better. I was given psychic, clairvoyant awareness so that I could lift the veil on my life and find truth.

I learned how to not beat myself up for the crazy behaviors. I learned how to stay out of the blame, shame, guilt, and victimization that comes with recognizing the actions of other people and getting sneak peaks into what they are going through. If I wanted the truth, I had to be able to handle it and that meant I couldn't punish myself or others with it. It required total acceptance of what was and what is without judgment.

Can you see the themes of everything that I talk about on social media and in other blogs?  They were all things I had to learn for myself in one way or another.  These were all lessons that I got on my path. I was given tools I didn't know I needed to do what I want to do. Who knew?

If I could give you one thing it would be to trust your path. Trust the lessons that you get. You're being asked to understand things that you may not think you need, but you do. The clarity around that comes later. It comes after you're already through the lessons. You can get there if you just keep going.

Once again, Happy New Year everyone! Have a magical year. Trust yourself and trust your path. You're the only one that can change your life. I'm here to help when you're ready.

Love to all.

Della