Since publishing my last Musing Inhabiting My Deep Desires, the implications have been percolating in me.

As a little girl, one Christmas my friend Sally and I both asked Santa for stuffed animals, Sally got a BIG dog, I got a little lamb. In response to my disappointment, my Mum taught me that we each have our own package or path to walk in life, and that we couldn’t pick parts of another’s life and put them into our own. For many years this served me well. I really did prefer my package in life, and for the most part was satisfied with the way things were.

I only recently recognized that in my child mind, I’d also taken on the belief that everything in my package was or needed to be small. Truly desiring BIG lay outside of the realm of possibility. I’d lived much of my life not risking connecting with my deep (and BIG) desires – those inspired intentions that flow into all of us from Life.

The iterative cycle of creation we move through.

As I shared in my last Musing, my experience of tapping into the resources and clearing the path allowing power to flow more freely through me in the creation of my desires.

I’ve found it easier to take action intentionally in ways that support the expression of my vision of those deep desires, and, have felt delight in the way support is emerging from others, and in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

There’s a part of me that gets really excited when I see and feel the ease of the creative freedom – that sweet spot at the center of that Venn above when all the pieces necessary for the expression of that part of the inspired intention are in place.

But in a couple places this week, I’ve discovered – again! – how easy it is for me to fall into the trap of assuming that if I just say the right words, or follow the directions and do things perfectly, things should unfold easily. Can you see the challenge here?

Some people might call this pride. For me, especially when we’re in partnership with others, it feels more like taking on more responsibility than is mine. Other times, it simply seems there are creative processes that are more complex and take more time to unfold.

I’ve experienced both of these this week.

In one situation I was partnering with another, and despite our best efforts, we simply couldn’t find our way to coming to a space of shared agreement. Thankfully, even though it was really challenging, we both were able (and willing!) to sit in the discomfort of not finding our way to reconciliation in that moment, and come back together the next day. As I reflected on what had happened, I realized what had been getting in my way was the notion that I should have been able to find the right words to create that opening we both wanted. Once I got to the place of allowing what I/we could do in that moment to be enough, everything in me relaxed. And the next day we found ourselves easily able to meet each other.

	Puzzles – sometimes it takes a while to put all the pieces together …

In the other experience, after putting it off all winter, I finally on Friday initiated the  treatment for the sun damage on my skin (face, chest and arms) my dermatologist had prescribed.

Since then I’ve been living with the pain and red, itchy, ickiness that results as those layers of damage skin are sloughed off. I know it’s an important part of caring for myself – still it was challenging to choose to apply something like that when you know what it’s going to be like. As I said to Bruce today, it feels like I’ve intentionally rubbed poison ivy on my body.

Thankfully it’s only a 3 day process of application, so I’ve just today completed the last one. Though I don’t plan on going out anywhere for the next few days, this has been a powerful in-my-body experience of recognizing that sometimes there’s simply no way to speed a process up. Things take as long as they take, and our job is to care for and nurture ourselves in the best way we can while the process is unfolding. Yesterday part of that took the form of distracting myself from the discomfort by watching the Royal Wedding – I loved watching the marriage of honouring ‘old’ traditions while opening to ‘new’ possibilities!

Over the last days I’ve come to hold both of these experiences as Life’s invitation to expansion of possibilities in the way I be with myself in the pain and disappointment of being helpless to make things go as fast as I’d like! This isn’t the first time I’ve considered this, but this time (especially with my skin treatment, but really in both situations) I’ve become even more clear about the fact that some things are like a complicated jigsaw puzzle, and take as long as they take to be completed. And making ourselves wrong about how long it’s taking is at best counter-productive and only adds to our discomfort.

I’m curious about your experience – how do you be with you when things are taking longer than you’d like to come to fruition? Do any of these challenges feel resonant to you? Have you found ways of supporting yourself in them? Are you interested in exploring any of these ideas further?