A Call for Conversation

After nearly seven years of monthly posts during a prolonged life transition, my energy is shifting towards rooting into relationship through conversations with my new extended community of humans and wild others.

Read my update and/or listen to the recording at the top of the page for updates on what’s been going on this year and how to join the conversation with me!

Hello! It’s been a while. Last I wrote, it was mid-winter and I was planning to write a book to share with you about all I had learned about self-love. Now it’s mid-summer and I’m just beginning to surface from a consuming transition into a new job and new home. I’ve felt blessed and humbled in ways I couldn’t have imagined, as these opportunities chose me far more than I chose them.

Here are a few things I’ve learned and been changed by, followed by a few questions for you regarding what – if anything – I can offer you in the coming months or years.

• It’s okay to be wrong. And I’m wrong a lot, so I’m getting better at not making big promises – to myself or anyone else. As much as it felt like a brilliant idea to write a book in little bits to keep me connected to my inner world while building new communities, it wasn’t. As generous as it seemed to offer to host an open-ended, no cost weekly workshop, it wasn’t something I could sustain. The good news is, I let myself try, fail, and change, and I believe that’s how we grow.
• Self-love is wonderful. It’s vital. But it’s not everything we need and it’s certainly not the end of the story. Every time I seem to have found THE thing, THE answer, it turns into just another doorway to what’s next. My Life knew this before I did. The moment I had learned key lessons in self-love, it gave me new relationships and community to take those lessons into. I wanted to deepen and share my knowing. Life had other plans for me. The good news is, I let go and followed Life’s lead.
• I love AND hate being in a leadership position, both because (as I was told earlier this year by a team member), I can act like an asshole. I love having the authority to make things happen. I like when people (at least pretend) to listen to me. I’m increasingly less afraid to sound like I know what I’m talking about (even when I don’t) or to make decisions with many unforeseen and embarrassing outcomes. But I hate being (or at least feeling) like I’m responsible for all sorts of things I can’t (or shouldn’t) control – like other people’s feelings and actions. My steep learning curve in “how not to be an asshole” has included wonderful new skills like letting people sulk without doubting my decisions, helping people work through their own conflicts instead of trying to fix them, and focusing more on how to be effective at what I was hired to do versus trying to make this company into what I need it to be in order to feel safe and important.
• What life is inviting me into is co-creation. As soon as I got this job managing a team, my writing muse dried up. After almost 7 years of blogging at least every month and writing several articles, every time I sat down to write, nothing came. It saddened and scared me a little. But when I decided to trust this shift I soon found that what I use to write about, I am now TALKING about. Whenever in conversation with new friends, everything I have learned and loved and grieved comes out in response to what they are rumbling with and we are both enlarged in unexpected and AWE-some ways. I’m becoming increasingly less interested in self-improvement and self-expression and far more interested in what comes through us when we look at juicy questions and feelings and “problems” together.

I continue to be fascinated by the idea of being in relationship with and growing Soul, especially in conversation with wild Nature. These longings have been recently fueled by new opportunities to participate more deeply in teachings from my beloved Bill Plotkin and Francis Weller. I’ve always believed being a teacher, counselor, or coach would be a much more soulful path than healthcare administration – and railed against the world and my own limitations for “failing” to make this transition – but I’m finding solace in where I am called and the idea that our gift isn’t what we do, but who we are.

Here are some things I’m learning about soul work that are opening new (primarily internal) doors for a more harmonious relationship with life as it is right now:

• Soul is what we are born with. It is our gifts and our medicine, and also our unique temperament, style, and way of being. It’s not something we find or do, but something we ARE. In this way, we cannot fail to fulfill our purpose. We can only participate in or nurture what we already are to greater or lesser degrees. This makes a relationship with meaning far more possible in any set of life circumstances. And it makes our gift to the world not something we seek out and perform, but something that naturally overflows from us when our relationship with what we already are is strong.
• Soul is just one facet of what we are – not the only part of us that matters. I also need to know how to transcend and not take everything so seriously. I need to know how to indulge in sensual enjoyment of the present moment. And I need to be a nurturing, generative adult in relationship to myself and others in my life. Sometimes – quite often as my ongoing relationship with chronic fatigue tells me – Soul needs to take a backseat with all of its creativity and longing and fixation on meaning so I can just take care of my body and rest my mind.
• Soul is made and expressed in community, in relationship with the Other. Our focus on self-help and inner work is the result of our isolation – our lack of human community and nature connection. What we truly are is expressed – as is all life – through our place in an ecological niche – a vast web of relationships. There is much healing that can and must be done internally to transform relational wounds and become a vessel where Soul can grow, but we only come to know Soul through how the world reflects it when its expressed. It longs to touch the world through us in its own unique way.

This brings me to my questions for you:

• What can I offer through written and spoken word that would have value for you?
• Is there something I’ve shared in the past that you want to learn more about?
• Are there things I’ve written about that have moved you and that you want to stay in relationship with?
• Are there questions about what it means to be a human on the planet right now that you’re exploring?

While I’m not in a place to commit to holding space for others at this time, I’m happy to share words as part of a dialogue with you, words in response to some curiosity or love or longing in you, words that can continue to be re-energized by your input and response. Just reach out at nancy@innerwoven.net and let’s talk!

This project has over the years been such an important part of my journey, and many of you have expressed gratitude and encouragement for my writing, and my individual and group work. I am being called not to shout my truth from a mountain top, but to be in living conversation with life and with YOU, and if that serves you, let’s do it!

If you don’t see much posted on this site in the coming months, know that I am simply responding where I am invited. I am participating in a rich and deepening conversation with my work team, my neighbors, my growing tribe of virtual friends, the red-tailed hawks and hills, and the emerging movements of my own Soul. And if and when I am guided to offer something more through this space, I’ll be back.

Nancy