Today is my birthday. My forty-first birthday. I am so intensely grateful right now. I have talked a lot about how this season in my life has been one of unfurling, releasing, and stripping back to the pure power and brilliance at my center. (It’s really at all of our center.) This has been a season of transcendence, of rising above all sort of historical limitations and past dramas and just even recent levels.

I usually have a sort of high-minded, spirit-filled imagery and vocabulary around this work and play and journey, but I recently saw a quote that does an extraordinary job of articulating what I’ve been experiencing. It’s a quote from a character from the Toni Morrison book, Song of Solomon. The character, Guitar, explains to another character, Milkman, why a peacock can’t fly any better than a chicken.

“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

This. This perfectly conveys how I came to be able to do so much flying in my life and my work this year. I started shedding the shit that weighed me down. I didn’t slam it down or wrench it off. At 41, I’ve learned to release and to shed. Here are some of the things I shed this year.

I shed a lot of polish. I shed invulnerability. I shed persona. I slowly started to show up as 100% of who I am in more and more and more areas of my life. I revealed a lot of my journey, not just the endpoint. I opened up my soul in a big, big way.

I shed perfectionism. I shed a lot of comparison. I realized not just logically, but deep in my spirit, I had a shift

I shed a lot of hesitation about doing this. I realized that another thing Anne Lamott

I shed a lot of hesitation, period. I shed hesitation around fully, completely adoring myself, and my beautiful world and life. I shed hesitation about acknowledging how much mastery I’ve developed over my experience of this world. I shed the hesitation to fully appreciate my own magnificence and worthiness. I received these things. Fully. Without hesitation. Regardless of circumstances. I practice this every single day.

I shed “apologetic”. I more and more, every day, am able to receive the privileges of my divine inheritance, of my divine intelligence, of my beautiful life and time, without apology, without resistance.

I shed a few tears, and that was beautiful, because I’ve always been afraid of feeling sad. This year I was not. And what freedom that is, to be able to let all sorts of emotions come up, flow through, and flow out, without creating new spiritual sticking points or touchiness or triggers.

I shed even more conformity than I already had. I shed the need to participate in a bunch of cultural and societal nonsense.

I shed a lot of what my therapist would call outdated operating systems. It was work, but I released some stuff that had served me, had served my family, even, for generations, but was no longer serving me now. I shed grievance after grievance after grievance. I shed unlove. I shed some beliefs that were holding me apart from what I want and deserve. I shed some things I’d been holding to, literally since childhood.

I shed the habit of occasionally, but grandly, getting in my own way, in a big way. I shed the need to delude myself that it’s even possible to know 100% how things would come out before I do them. (Ha!) I shed the need to have any reason to do things other than that I love them, and enjoy them and find them spiritually rewarding.

I shed fogginess. I received so much clarity.

I shed layers. SO many layers. Layers of “should”. Layers of encumbrance. I realized what I’m here to do, and then I contradicted myself for awhile, trying to do things I thought were smart or more legitimate. But I’ve shed a lot of that, and I’m now in a space of attunement and alignment with what I want to do, what I’m great at doing, what people receive great value from. What I receive great joy from doing.

This year, I shed the need to figure everything out, to force things to happen, to make things happen, to do nose to grindstone, to try so so hard. To do machinations, to use a friend’s favorite word. I realized that the best things in my life were certainly effortful, but effortful in an easeful, expansive way. In a way of allowing things to happen.

I shed a lot of impatience.

I had a lot of fun.

And I’m about to have way more. Way. Join me!

XO
~T