Soul Crumbs! We all know the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side, but the bigger question is how?
I recently had a client who told me that she had the goal of starting a coaching business, but was going through a divorce and having a really hard time with all of the stress associated with that. Boy, could I relate! She said she had been coping by spending eight to ten hours a day in meditation. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to give herself what she needed to cope and help other people at the same time. There weren’t enough hours in a day to do both. Sometimes we can have a big beautiful goal, but find that the path there is littered with obstacles. Just like the chicken trying to cross the road, there are cars and bikes and pedestrians all in the way of getting to the other side. Some of our obstacles may be financial, emotional, physical or even spiritual. How do we even start? Where do we get the courage to take the first step onto the road?
I must admit that when my client was talking, I couldn’t help but see myself in her. This is the beauty of supporting someone on their journey. All of us really are so much alike. In my thirties, I had recently gotten married, and my parents were both sick. My mother had been taking care of my father, who was physically ill, while she, herself, was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease. While they were living with us, I was up at 5:30 every morning, meditating, praying, and doing whatever I could to give myself the emotional and spiritual fortitude to meet the day's challenges. I would prepare all of their meals, snacks and medicines for the day, administer the insulin, eye drops, and pills, pack my own lunch, get myself ready and go to work. I would come home, make dinner; sometimes multiple dinners if everyone wanted something different; then start on all the evening medicines, talk to everyone who needed company or entertainment and then finally go to sleep. Every single minute where I wasn’t doing something for someone else, I spent in meditation. It had become my way of coping – my escape. Not because I didn’t love my family, but simply because I didn’t know how to cope with the stress, and I couldn’t resort to another form of coping that would hinder my ability to show up for everyone.
Did it help? I think most of us take on coping mechanisms because we feel it is helping us get through life. People take up addictions to drugs and alcohol because they feel that it is helping them cope when things are tough. In my case, meditation gave me a level of equanimity that helped me get through my days, and it helped me grow in some ways at a time when I had very little time to devote to my own growth and evolution. It also helped because the calmer I was, the more that calm was reflected in my home. That is actually a great topic for another blog post!
So, my client was trying to decide if she should invest in her business to help others, or in coaching for herself to get through this time of transition. It got me thinking about what got me to the other side during my own trials. Would my solution of meditation have brought me to where I am today? When we are using something to escape our reality, it becomes harder to hold on to our power. We give our power away to something that is making us feel good in the moment. In that moment, we aren’t focused on what we can do to really improve our situation. In the grand scheme of things, meditation isn’t the worst escape, but even helpful activities like exercise and eating healthy can be taken to extremes when we are using them as a way of coping with pain that is hidden deeper inside.
Meditation can give us stillness and a deep sense of who we truly are in our power, but in this human life, we are meant to make decisions and take action in service to our own evolution. That can only happen when we are firmly planted in our bodies, deciding where we want to go, making real decisions about our lives and adjusting course along the way. This seems daunting. It makes sense to be chicken. But this is where the Soul Crumbs come in! The little nudges, intuitive hits and guidance that show up just in time to help us learn and understand how to move forward toward our goals.
The chicken has no idea how it will cross the road. The path is unknown, but the destination is fixed. In NLP we call this the anchor. We anchor the destination so that our brain knows what clues and nudges to be paying attention to as the path forward is revealed. From a spiritual perspective, this is a key principle in manifestation. We set a destination, let go, and let God. Along the way, the Soul Crumbs get dropped along the path. If we follow, we get to the other side. This requires faith and surrender to the unknown. We are co-creators with the Universe. We set the destination and the Universe helps us with the how part. In my own experience, I can attest to the fact that the path does reveal itself, and it is very possible to get to the other side. In fact, it is in facing the obstacles that we succeed in getting to the other side. They aren’t there to hinder us, but to give us the fortitude to arrive in our evolved state, ready to live in a new reality, in a new destination!
I guess the moral of the story is: There is no need to be chicken when there are Soul Crumbs!
