Coming Out Day
Soooo, like many of those out there not always doing what they love I managed to not live my hearts desire for many years. It made me literally sick and tired. Let’s go back a few years. I owned a lovely little spa in a fabulous area of Kansas City. I had employees, a business coach, owned commercial property, made great money, had clients out the wazoo, and I went home every night tired and feeling alone. I wouldn’t even take every other Saturday off from work, because, what would I do if I weren’t working? I worked 12-14 hours a day 6 days a week. I had my own practice, I managed all of the business transactions, and I managed the employees. When I went home I managed my dog, my cat and my home. Everything was in order. HA!!! I hadn’t slept through a night in over 6 months. I was obsessively working out. I was obsessed about what I should and shouldn’t eat. “Managing” had taken over my entire world. I was holding everything together with an iron grip is what I was doing.
New Years Eve that year I spent the night at a girlfriends house who lived on the outskirts of town. In the morning I got up and came downstairs for breakfast, what a beautiful sight. She was reading the paper. Her husband was making biscuits and gravy for all of us. The comfort and ease struck me. Bob, her husband, turned to me and asked, “So what are you going to do about the spa this year?” My mouth answered before my mind could filter it. “I am going to close it and sell the building.” I stood there with my mouth open in disbelief.
The moment the words came out of my mouth I experienced a great peace. And then count, one, two… panic set in. I had never before considered closing, selling, or changing, any of it. It was my baby. My baby I had fought and worked so hard for. Who would I be without it? I literally slept through the night that night for the first time in what felt like forever. Obviously this was my truth, as scary as it was.
By the end of January it was done. I moved my practice to my home; the employees found their new home bases for business, I signed a contract with a realtor to put the building up for sale. You know when things move like that you are doing the exact right thing.
Not that I was done avoiding or anything. That would take me another 5 years…
I had known for some time that the next stage of my business was to teach, speak and mentor. I futzed around with little things instead. I even had a client hire me to come to her home and teach, and I treated it with little more than disinterest. I was overwhelmed. Who was I to say that I could teach other people how to live the heart’s desires? Who was I to say I had special insight? I just needed one more class, one more training, one more certificate or degree. Then I would probably be good enough to do this.
I even hosted and paid for the design of a website for 2 ½ years that said “under construction” because I couldn’t seem to make myself write the copy necessary to have anything on the website. I was fighting looking at where it would take me. I was resistant to any possibility that I was ready to move into the new me. I went through 3 years of being a recluse; very little social interaction, very few clients, and even fewer dates. I stopped working out. The inertia in me was strong, or so I thought.
I have always been a spiritually focused person. I certainly have gone through periods of more and less focus on that aspect of myself, but all in all I was more in than out for most of my life. In those three years I became so very deeply connected to my spiritual life. I realized that I had created a barrier between my work life and my spirit life. In becoming a successful businessperson I bought into the belief that I had to separate out my spirit to succeed in what I perceived as the masculine world of business. Without my spirit I was only a small fraction of who I really am, so I made my masculine self even bigger, stronger, tougher so that I could appear to be more. So that I could “have it all handled.”
Falling apart could never have been more valuable. By giving only a fraction of myself I was only giving my clients a fraction of their value. But I was so scared to lose clients if I told the truth about who I really am. So I finally took a leap last year when I dedicated the largest room in my home to my spiritual practice.
Now remember that my clients come to my home. This space was my workspace until I changed things around. This made everyone curious about what was now going on in the old space. I found clients wandering in, “just to take a look.” This was the universe telling me to take down even more of that barrier.
It was time to truly come out of the closet about my spiritual life. Time to tell the truth and tell it loud and proud. I am a shaman, mentor, coach, and teacher. I have amazing and beautiful gifts to give to my clients and students. I can meet them where they are and still be fully myself. Actually, I can’t meet them where they are unless I am being fully myself, living my heart, my spirit.
About that website, I tossed it, bought a new domain name and channeled all of the copy for it in a very short period of time. My secret, I committed to doing something that required me to have it all in order. It’s amazing what you can do when you have a deadline. Is it perfect? Nope, but it truly reflects my heart. It is an extension of my spirit. It is how I live my life and whom I aspire to be 100% of the time. Am I always on top of it? No, but I spend more and more time each day living this truth and that is perfection for me.