Wendy M Kennedy ~ OverJoyed Coaching

August 30 marks nine years since Louise Hay died.

Her work first found me years before, but becoming reacquainted with it in 2009 changed something in me. I was approaching 40—a time when I could easily have convinced myself that I had missed my chance to begin again, change direction, or become more fully myself.

Then I remembered that Louise was older than I was when she founded Hay House.

Her life showed me that we are not too old, too late, or too far along one path to choose another. Some of our most meaningful work may begin only after we have lived enough life to recognize what truly matters to us.

Her teachings also reminded me that the way we speak to ourselves matters. That healing can begin with willingness. That self-love is not something we earn after we have fixed everything about ourselves—it is part of how we find our way home.

Her work has woven through my own life and work ever since—not as a demand to think positively or deny what hurts, but as an invitation to meet ourselves with greater awareness, compassion, and choice.

This September, I will be offering a six-week group inspired by Louise’s work and the principles she shared. Together, we will explore the beliefs and patterns we have carried, the relationship we have with ourselves, and what may become possible when we are willing to see ourselves differently.

You do not need to have it all figured out.

You do not need to be fearless.

Sometimes, you only need to be willing.

More details soon. 💗

Cosmic Weather — August 29

Sun in Gate 40 ☀️ | Earth in Gate 37 🌍

I’ve been thinking about the agreements we make with people that were never actually agreed to.

The silent ones.

I’ll be there for you, and you’ll be there for me.

I’ll make the effort, and you’ll make the effort too.

I’ll remember what matters to you, and you’ll remember what matters to me.

Nobody actually said those words.

But somewhere along the way, an expectation was created.

And then something happens differently than we expected.

They don’t call.

We don’t notice.

They forget something that mattered to us.

We miss something that mattered to them.

And one of us is left thinking:

But I would have…

The Sun has moved into Gate 40 and the Earth into Gate 37, creating the Channel of Community.

I have this channel in my own design, so these themes are familiar to me.

This is energy that has a lot to say about belonging, support, agreements, contribution, giving and receiving.

Essentially:

How do we do life together when none of us does life in exactly the same way?

But I Would Have…

Most of us know those words.

But I would have called.

I would have remembered.

I would have checked in.

I would have handled that differently.

And someone else could probably say exactly the same thing about us.

Because none of us notices everything.

Something that feels obvious to me may never occur to you.

Something deeply important to you may not register the same way for me.

I might think giving you space is the kindest thing I can do while you’re wondering why I haven’t checked in.

You might think you’re helping by stepping in while I’m wishing you’d asked me what I needed first.

Neither of us necessarily cares more.

We may simply have different ideas about what caring looks like.

And sometimes disappointment is where those different understandings collide.

That doesn’t mean we explain away everything that hurts.

Sometimes disappointment shows us something important about a relationship.

But it can also invite a different question.

Instead of:

Who should have known better?

Maybe:

What did each of us believe was supposed to happen here?

Because that’s often where the invisible agreement is hiding.

The Agreements Nobody Made

The 37–40 Channel of Community carries this theme of the bargain — what we give, what we receive and what we can reasonably expect from one another.

And I think the word agreement matters.

Because an expectation isn’t necessarily an agreement.

I thought you knew.

I assumed you would offer.

I thought that’s what friendship meant.

I thought we always did it this way.

But did we ever actually talk about it?

Sometimes we don’t realise how much we’ve been expecting until we’re disappointed.

And the other person may be just as surprised to discover what we thought was understood.

That’s where relationship asks something more vulnerable of us.

To say:

This matters to me.

This is what I need.

I thought we had an agreement about this.

I don’t have the capacity for what I’ve been doing.

Can we talk about what works for both of us now?

Not particularly glamorous.

But very real.

Giving and Receiving

Gate 40 carries the energy to work, provide and contribute, alongside the need for rest after the giving.

Gate 37 brings the desire for connection, friendship, family and community — that sense of we’re in this together.

And maybe the meeting point between them is reciprocity.

Not keeping score.

Not 50/50 every day.

Not I did this, so now you owe me that.

Life has seasons.

Sometimes one person has more capacity.

Sometimes the other does.

Sometimes we give.

Sometimes we need to receive.

And sometimes what another person brings looks nothing like what we would have brought.

Reciprocity doesn’t require sameness.

That’s important.

Because if we only recognise care when it arrives in the form we would have given it, we can miss each other.

And if we continually give in ways that aren’t sustainable while expecting someone else to somehow recognise the cost, we can miss each other there too.

Maybe community needs enough room for difference and enough honesty to talk about what we actually need.

Community Is the Basket

I keep coming back to the image of community as a basket.

Community is the basket.

Not one person carrying it for everyone else.

We all bring something.

We all receive something.

There are times when we arrive with plenty to contribute.

There are times when what we have to offer is very little.

And there are times when we need what someone else has brought.

That doesn’t make one person generous and another person needy.

It makes us human.

And maybe this is where belonging can get tangled with usefulness.

We can become so accustomed to contributing that receiving feels uncomfortable.

Or so accustomed to being independent that asking for something feels harder than doing it ourselves.

But community isn’t only about having something to offer.

It’s also about allowing ourselves to need each other.

Not expecting someone else to be responsible for us.

But allowing ourselves to participate in the natural movement between giving and receiving.

Last week’s Cosmic Weather around Gates 59 and 55 explored intimacy and freedom — becoming honest about what is happening within us without allowing what we find to become a prison.

This week feels like that honesty moves into relationship.

I know what is true for me.

Can I communicate it without assuming you should already know?

Can I listen when what is true for you is different?

Can we be disappointed in each other without immediately deciding someone doesn’t care?

Can we acknowledge when something genuinely isn’t working?

Because allowing people to be themselves doesn’t mean having no expectations.

And acceptance doesn’t mean every relationship has to work.

Sometimes what another person can offer isn’t what we need.

Sometimes what we can offer isn’t what they need.

Nobody necessarily has to be wrong for that to be true.

Maybe the conversation becomes:

This is who I am.

This is what I can give.

This is what I need.

What about you?

Can we meet here?

Maybe that’s what this Cosmic Weather is asking us to remember.

We don’t all experience care, contribution, friendship or belonging in the same way.

We won’t always notice the same things.

We won’t always get it right.

We will disappoint people.

People will disappoint us.

And sometimes disappointment isn’t evidence that someone doesn’t care.

Sometimes it’s where two different understandings of care collide.

That’s where the conversation can begin.

Not:

Why aren’t you more like me?

Or:

Why can’t I be more like you?

But:

What are we actually asking of each other?

And have we ever said it out loud?

Maybe community isn’t built by never disappointing one another.

Maybe it’s built through enough honesty, generosity and willingness to keep discovering how we can belong together — as the people we actually are.

W💗

I love these so much 💗 Thank you for all that you share Donna Ashworth🙏Can you imagine the world if we were all a little more Dolly?!💖

TEN WAYS TO BE MORE DOLLY

1. Chase butterflies and rainbows and remember that success is only success if you make space for the aforementioned chasing.

2. Be so wildly yourself that those around you are encouraged, inspired and magnetically drawn to do the same.

3. Let those who will, judge and mock, whilst you crack on with whatever it is that brings you and those you love, joy.

4. Be remarkably unafraid to be seen as cheesy, cringey or too-much because you know that is actually the very best way to exist in this life.

5. Make kindness your top priority. Make it weird. Make it big. Make it contagious.

6. Create, in the unique way you’ve been created to create. In the way that only you can do so. Do so.

7. Give. Give freely. Give back. Give out. Give in (to the flow). Don’t ever give up.

8. Accept every single soul exactly as they are and show this to be true by accepting yourself in that courageous way, too.

9. Throw love around - let the entire world know you are loving them simply because it’s what each and every soul deserves.

10. Seek and gather all the good stuff along the way. Notice it. Share it around. Let it ripple. Those ripples are your legacy. You might not see it but best believe it matters.

🩷🩷🩷

Donna Ashworth

I can’t stop writing about Dolly today (it’s how I cope) but isn’t that exactly what inspirational souls do whilst they walk with us and long after they take their leave. Inspire. Encourage. Affect.

Love to all who this hits hard,

You’re not alone.

Donna

There will be no Wellness Wednesday again this week as I’m still waiting for the work on my space to be completed. I’ve missed everyone and so look forward to welcoming you back soon. 💗

The Cosmic Weather Is Changing

Sun in Gate 59 — Sustainability ☀️

Earth in Gate 55 — Faith 🌍

I’ve been thinking about freedom.

And how often we imagine it waiting for us on the other side of something changing.

When there’s enough money.

When the uncertainty is over.

When someone understands us.

When the relationship changes.

When the business is working the way we want it to.

When we finally know what happens next.

Then I’ll relax.

Then I’ll trust.

Then I’ll be okay.

And I’ve been wondering:

How often do we unknowingly make our freedom dependent on life behaving the way we want it to?

This week the Sun moves through Gate 59, Sustainability, while the Earth moves through Gate 55, Faith.

Through the Gene Keys, their journeys are:

Gate 59: Dishonesty → Intimacy → Transparency
Gate 55: Victimisation → Freedom → Freedom

The more I sit with these two, the more they seem to tell one story.

We cannot become free from something we are unwilling to become intimate with.

Intimacy Comes First

When we hear intimacy, we often think about another person.

But perhaps intimacy begins with ourselves.

Can I get close enough to my actual experience to tell myself the truth?

I’m jealous.

I’m scared.

I want approval.

I’m angry.

I wanted to be chosen.

I’m disappointed.

I care more than I’ve been admitting.

I’m trying to control this because I don’t know what happens if I don’t.

None of those things make us wrong.

And acknowledging them doesn’t mean we have to act on them.

But what we refuse to acknowledge doesn’t disappear. It can begin operating from behind the curtain.

We project.

We blame.

We withdraw.

We control.

We pretend we don’t care.

Or we make someone else responsible for changing something we haven’t yet been willing to meet within ourselves.

This is where Gate 59’s Shadow of Dishonesty becomes much more nuanced than simply lying.

Sometimes it’s the distance between what is happening inside us and what we are willing to know about ourselves.

And Intimacy isn’t about telling everyone everything.

It begins much more quietly:

Can I see what is true without making myself wrong for what I find?

That feels like Sustainability too.

Because hiding from ourselves takes energy.

So does overriding ourselves.

Maybe Sustainability begins with creating a relationship with ourselves capable of holding the truth.

Relationships Reveal Us

And nothing seems to reveal some of that truth quite like another human being.

Someone disappoints us.

Someone doesn’t respond the way we hoped.

Someone misunderstands us.

Someone gets something we wanted.

Someone gets too close.

Or not close enough.

Suddenly we see our expectations, projections, fears, desires and all the ways we’ve learned to protect ourselves.

That doesn’t mean another person’s behaviour doesn’t matter.

It does.

Boundaries matter.

Sometimes a conversation needs to happen. Sometimes something needs to change.

But perhaps we can hold two questions at once:

What happened here?

And:

What did what happened touch in me?

Gate 59 asks us to come close enough to ourselves to know the difference.

And then Gate 55 asks:

Can what I discover be here without becoming my prison?

Freedom Isn’t Not Feeling

This feels like such an important distinction.

Freedom isn’t becoming so evolved that life no longer affects us.

Freedom can include:

This hurt.

I’m angry.

I wanted something different.

I’m disappointed.

I’m scared.

I don’t know what happens next.

The feeling itself doesn’t have to be the prison.

Sometimes it’s the story we build around it.

There is a difference between:

I feel afraid
and
I am unsafe.

I’m disappointed
and
Nothing ever works for me.

I feel rejected
and
I am unworthy.

I don’t know what happens next
and
Something has gone wrong.

The feeling can be true without everything we make the feeling mean being true.

Perhaps freedom isn’t not feeling.

Perhaps it’s being able to feel deeply without allowing every feeling to decide who we are or what happens next.

The Dragonfly

There’s an image in the Gene Key 55 material that I keep coming back to.

The dragonfly begins its life underwater.

For most of its early life, it exists as a nymph. Water is the only world it knows.

When it is ready to transform, it climbs out of the water and attaches itself to a plant or another surface.

Its old outer skin splits, and the dragonfly begins to emerge.

But its wings aren’t immediately ready for flight.

They are soft, folded and compressed.

Fluid from within its body is pumped into the wings, helping them expand. Gradually they unfold and strengthen until this creature that has only ever known life beneath the water can do something entirely new.

It can fly.

I love that image because the dragonfly doesn’t transform by rejecting what came before.

The water wasn’t a mistake.

One way of being sustained it until another became possible.

And perhaps our emotional lives are a little like that.

We often approach transformation as though we have to get rid of something first.

I need to stop being afraid.

I need to get over this disappointment.

I need to release this anger.

I need to feel differently before I can move forward.

But what if our emotions aren’t necessarily standing between us and freedom?

What if they are part of the material of transformation?

Fear can move.

Grief can move.

Anger can move.

Desire can move.

Disappointment can move.

Joy can move.

Gate 59 asks us to become intimate with what is here.

Gate 55 reminds us:

What is here isn’t necessarily the whole story.

The dragonfly nymph has no experience of flight.

It cannot look at the life it knows and find evidence for the life that is coming.

And yet transformation is already happening.

Which brings me to Faith.

Maybe Faith Begins With Willingness

I keep coming back to something I learned from Louise Hay many years ago:

Just be willing.

I’ve always loved the simplicity of that.

Because sometimes trust feels too far away.

Sometimes we genuinely don’t believe things will work out.

Sometimes we can’t see another possibility.

And telling ourselves to just have faith doesn’t change that.

But perhaps we can be willing.

I’m willing to see this differently.

I’m willing to believe there may be something I can’t see yet.

I’m willing to loosen my grip on how I think this has to unfold.

I’m willing to let this feeling move.

I’m willing to discover what comes next.

And sometimes, when even that feels too far away:

I’m willing to be willing.

There’s something about willingness that creates an opening.

We don’t have to know how.

We don’t have to manufacture certainty.

We don’t even have to completely believe another possibility exists yet.

Willingness simply cracks the door open.

And perhaps that is one way Faith becomes embodied.

Not:

Everything will work out exactly the way I want.

But:

I don’t need to know what this becomes in order to meet what it is.

Faith doesn’t have to be confidence in the outcome.

Faith can be willingness without certainty.

Where Have I Put My Freedom?

The Shadow of Gate 55 is Victimisation.

And I think that word needs compassion.

People hurt us.

Circumstances affect us.

Things happen that we didn’t choose.

Saying this hurt or this wasn’t okay isn’t victim consciousness.

The shadow becomes more subtle when we begin placing our freedom somewhere outside ourselves.

I’ll finally be okay when this changes.

When I have more money, I’ll relax.

When my business grows, I’ll trust myself.

When they choose me, I’ll feel worthy.

When I know what happens next, I’ll surrender.

There is nothing wrong with wanting any of those things.

The question is:

What have I decided I cannot experience until I have them?

Because sometimes underneath our wanting is an invisible agreement:

Life, you go first.

Give me the evidence.

Then I’ll trust.

Then I’ll believe in myself.

Then I’ll be free.

And perhaps this week asks us to notice where we’ve unknowingly placed those conditions around our own freedom.

Where have I mistaken getting what I want for being free?

A Practice for This Week

When something has emotional charge, try separating three things:

What happened?

Stay with the facts.

What am I feeling?

Let yourself tell the truth.

And:

What am I making this mean?

About yourself.

About someone else.

About your future.

About life.

Then ask:

Can this feeling be here without becoming my prison?

You don’t have to get rid of it.

You don’t have to find the lesson.

You don’t have to turn it into gratitude.

And you don’t have to know what happens next.

Maybe you can simply say:

I’m willing to see what else might be possible from here.

And let that be enough for today.

⸻

Maybe freedom isn’t life finally behaving.

Maybe freedom is no longer requiring life to behave in order for us to belong to ourselves.

We can want things.

We can hurt.

We can be disappointed.

We can celebrate.

We can ask for support.

We can change what needs changing.

We can have absolutely no idea what comes next.

And still belong to ourselves inside all of it.

Gate 59 asks us to come closer to what is true.

Gate 55 reminds us that what we find doesn’t have to become our prison.

And perhaps the dragonfly offers one final reminder:

We don’t have to understand the wings while we’re still in the water.

Sometimes transformation begins with something much smaller.

A little honesty.

A little intimacy.

A little less attachment to what the feeling means.

And the willingness to leave the door open to something we cannot see yet.

Just be willing.

I’d love to hear from you:

Where in your life might you not be ready to trust yet…but you could be willing to leave the door open?

The Cosmic Weather Is Changing

Sun in Gate 29 — Devotion ☀️

Earth in Gate 30 — Passion 🌍

I’ve been thinking about the little disappointments.

The things that, in the grand scheme of life, really aren’t that big.

Something takes longer than we expected.

Plans change.

Someone cancels.

Something we were looking forward to doesn’t happen.

A conversation doesn’t go quite the way we hoped.

Sometimes those things move through me incredibly quickly.

Well, that’s disappointing.

I feel it.

Adjust.

Carry on.

And sometimes I can almost immediately see something else.

Another possibility.

Something I hadn’t considered.

Maybe even a gift.

There are times when I can genuinely trust that although this one thing didn’t happen the way I wanted, that doesn’t mean something has gone wrong.

I don’t need to know why it happened.

I don’t need to know what comes next.

There’s simply enough space around the disappointment for me to remember:

This moment isn’t the whole story.

And then there are other times when something equally small takes a little longer to move through.

Not dramatically longer.

Not because I’ve secretly turned it into something enormous.

It just lands differently.

And I’ve become really curious about that.

Because disappointment never arrives to an empty room.

It arrives in the middle of an entire life.

Where we are emotionally.

What else we’ve been carrying.

How connected we feel to ourselves.

Whether we’ve been doing the things that feed us.

For me, where I am in my emotional wave absolutely matters.

When I’m feeling connected, doing work I love, keeping the rituals that support me, creating, connecting and giving my energy somewhere meaningful to move, there’s more happening in my life that feels good.

The disappointment is still disappointing.

It just isn’t the loudest thing in the room.

There’s more access to possibility.

More perspective.

More trust in the bigger picture.

At another point in my wave, particularly when I haven’t been feeding myself with those things in the same way, the exact same disappointment might need a little longer.

The possibility I could see immediately another day might not be visible yet.

The gift might not be available to me.

And perhaps that doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong either.

I don’t have to force myself to find the gift.

I don’t have to manufacture gratitude.

I don’t have to decide I should be handling it differently.

I can simply recognize:

This is where it found me today.

And trust that where I am now isn’t necessarily where I’ll see it from later.

So instead of:

Why is this bothering me so much?

Maybe the questions become:

What did this disappointment land on?

What might I need more of right now?

Not to make the disappointment disappear.

To nourish the person experiencing it.

And sometimes there’s something else happening too.

A small disappointment can touch a much bigger desire.

The cancelled plan might touch our desire for connection.

The delayed answer might touch how ready we were to finally move forward.

A comment might touch our desire to feel seen.

A change we know we’ll adjust to might touch a future we had already imagined differently.

So perhaps instead of measuring how disappointed we should be by the size of what happened, we can become curious about:

What was I really wanting?

Because desire isn’t wrong.

And that feels particularly alive as the Cosmic Weather moves into Gate 29, Devotion, with the Earth in Gate 30, Passion.

In the Gene Keys, Gate 29 takes us through:

Half-heartedness → Commitment → Devotion

while Gate 30 moves through:

Desire → Lightness → Rapture.

And together, they feel less like an invitation to master our desires…

and more like an invitation to become brave enough to care deeply about being alive.

🌿 Desire

We want things.

Of course we do.

We hope.

We anticipate.

We imagine.

We get excited.

We fall in love with people, experiences and possibilities.

We create futures in our minds before we ever arrive in them.

There is so much life in desire.

And there is vulnerability too.

Because the moment we really allow ourselves to want something, we also create the possibility of not getting it.

And sometimes the disappointment isn’t only about what didn’t happen.

It’s about the story we’d already begun building around what we thought would.

How it would feel.

What might happen next.

What it would mean.

Sometimes we’re grieving something that existed partly in our imagination and was still completely real to us.

I don’t think the answer is to imagine less.

Or want less.

Or protect ourselves by never getting too excited.

I’ve lived enough life to know it doesn’t promise to follow the story I’ve written for it.

But I still want to write stories.

I still want to dream.

I still want to get excited.

I still want things to matter.

Because the alternative to disappointment isn’t necessarily peace.

Sometimes it’s simply not letting ourselves care enough to be disappointed.

And I don’t want that.

🌿 Lightness

This is where the Gift of Gate 30, Lightness, has been opening differently for me.

I don’t think Lightness asks us to care less.

And I don’t think it asks us to find the positive in everything that happens.

Maybe Lightness is releasing our insistence that the story we imagined was the only good story available.

That doesn’t mean pretending we didn’t prefer it.

I can still say:

I wanted that.

I’m disappointed.

I wish it had happened differently.

And leave a little space beside those truths for:

I don’t know yet what else this might contain.

That yet feels important.

Sometimes I can see another possibility almost immediately.

Sometimes the gift becomes obvious later.

And sometimes I may never call what happened a gift at all.

I don’t think trust requires me to.

Because some disappointments aren’t little.

There are losses that contain real grief.

Relationships end.

Dreams don’t happen.

Something—or someone—we thought would be part of our future isn’t.

Those experiences deserve whatever time they need.

Lightness cannot become another expectation:

You should have let this go by now.

Maybe Lightness isn’t about how quickly we move on.

Maybe it’s about not allowing disappointment to permanently close the part of us that is willing to want again.

And perhaps trust isn’t:

Everything happens for a reason.

Or even:

Everything is going to work out exactly the way I want.

Maybe trust is quieter.

I don’t know enough from where I’m standing to know the whole story yet.

I can let this be disappointing without deciding what it means about everything that comes next.

🌿 Half-heartedness

And this is where Gate 29 starts speaking to Gate 30 in a way I find really interesting.

What happens after we’ve been disappointed enough times?

Sometimes we protect ourselves.

I’m not getting my hopes up.

We’ll see.

It probably won’t happen anyway.

I don’t really care.

We hold something at arm’s length before life gets the opportunity to take it away.

And suddenly Half-heartedness looks different.

Sometimes half-heartedness isn’t a lack of passion.

Sometimes it’s passion wearing armour.

If I don’t give myself fully to this, maybe it won’t hurt as much if it doesn’t work.

If I don’t get too excited, maybe I won’t be as disappointed.

If I keep one foot out, perhaps I’ll be safer.

I understand that.

But I also know what it costs.

Because eventually we aren’t only protecting ourselves from disappointment.

We’re protecting ourselves from aliveness.

🌿 Commitment

So perhaps Commitment isn’t simply about staying with something.

Maybe it begins with being willing to say:

Yes. This matters to me.

Knowing there are no guarantees.

That’s a vulnerable yes.

And it requires discernment.

Because wholeheartedness doesn’t mean saying yes to everything.

I’ve learned that being capable of carrying something doesn’t necessarily mean it belongs to me to carry.

Being able to make something work doesn’t mean I need to.

And something having once been a wholehearted yes doesn’t mean it must remain one forever.

Commitment can ask us to listen again:

Is this still my yes?

Not because we’re looking for an escape the moment something becomes difficult.

Things we deeply care about can ask a lot of us.

But because our life force matters.

And I want my yes to mean something.

🌿 Devotion

And maybe that’s why Devotion feels different to me now too.

I’ve been thinking about devotion not only as:

What am I willing to give myself to?

But:

What am I devoted to giving myself?

What feeds the life in me?

What brings me home to myself?

What gives my energy somewhere meaningful to move?

What makes me feel creative, connected, curious, alive?

Those things aren’t extras.

They aren’t rewards for finishing everything else.

They change the way I meet my life.

When I’m feeding the things that feed me, disappointment doesn’t disappear.

But there’s more life around it.

More possibility.

More perspective.

More access to trust.

And there’s another layer here too.

Underneath the particular outcome I want, there is often something deeper I’m devoted to.

I might want one particular opportunity.

But underneath it, perhaps I’m devoted to contribution.

I might want one particular relationship to look a certain way.

But underneath it, perhaps I’m devoted to love and connection.

I might want one particular version of my future.

But underneath that form may be freedom, creativity, service, belonging, adventure or beauty.

So when life changes the form, perhaps eventually I can ask:

What remains true underneath what I wanted?

Not to make myself feel better.

Not to rush myself toward meaning.

But to remember that losing one expression of something doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve lost the deeper thing I’m devoted to.

And sometimes the thing not happening when I wanted it to gives me something I couldn’t have known I needed.

Time.

Space to feel.

To understand.

To see something differently.

To integrate something that perhaps couldn’t have been integrated on the timeline I would have chosen.

The gift wasn’t visible when the disappointment arrived.

It became visible later.

And that matters to me.

Because it means I don’t have to rush myself toward meaning.

I don’t have to immediately decide something happened for me.

I can let myself experience what is true now…

and leave room for life to reveal something else later.

🌿 Rapture

And then Gate 30 takes us all the way to Rapture.

I don’t imagine Rapture as finally becoming so evolved that life no longer disappoints us.

Maybe it’s an extraordinary willingness to experience the whole thing.

To desire.

To love.

To hope.

To anticipate.

To be surprised.

To be disappointed.

To grieve.

To laugh.

To have something work out even better than we imagined.

And sometimes to never understand why something happened at all.

And still participate.

Still care.

Still want.

Still allow life to touch us.

Because devotion doesn’t guarantee outcome.

Love doesn’t guarantee permanence.

Doing everything “right” doesn’t guarantee the result.

And perhaps the deepest invitation of these two gates is to stop asking life for that guarantee before we’re willing to give it our heart.

Can I give myself wholeheartedly to what is true for me without requiring life to promise me what I’ll receive in return?

That feels like Devotion.

And perhaps Rapture is what becomes possible when we stop needing every moment to prove life is going our way before we’re willing to be fully inside it.

🌿 A Somatic Practice — What Is Underneath the Disappointment?

Bring to mind a small disappointment.

Something that feels safe enough to sit with.

Notice what happens in your body as you remember it.

And simply acknowledge:

I wanted something different.

Pause.

No reframing.

No silver lining.

Then ask:

What was I really wanting?

Let your body answer before your mind builds the story.

Maybe it was connection.

Recognition.

Movement.

Relief.

Love.

Possibility.

Or maybe you simply wanted the thing you wanted.

That’s enough.

Then ask:

What did this disappointment land on?

Notice where you are today.

Not where you think you should be.

And then:

What needs feeding in me right now?

Not:

How do I fix this?

Not:

How do I get over it?

What would bring a little more life into you?

And finally:

If I didn’t need to know the whole story yet, what might I be willing to leave open?

You don’t need an answer.

Sometimes the practice is simply leaving enough space for something we cannot see yet.

🌿 This Week I’m Sitting With…

What was I really wanting underneath my disappointment?

When something small takes a little longer, can I become curious about where it found me instead of deciding I shouldn’t feel this way?

What am I devoted to that genuinely feeds the life in me?

Where might half-heartedness actually be protecting me from the vulnerability of caring?

What remains true underneath the particular outcome I wanted?

And perhaps the question underneath all of it:

Can I release the story of how I thought life should unfold without releasing my devotion to living it wholeheartedly?

Because I don’t think I want a life that never disappoints me.

To guarantee that, I’d have to want less.

Hope less.

Risk less.

Love less.

Care less.

I want a life that feeds me enough to keep caring.

A life where I can say:

I wanted that.

I’m disappointed.

I can’t see the gift from here.

And sometimes, later:

Oh.

I couldn’t have seen this then.

Maybe trust is allowing all of those moments to belong.

Being wholehearted in what we choose.

Tender with ourselves when life doesn’t meet the picture we were holding.

Devoted to what keeps us alive inside.

And open enough to remember:

This moment doesn’t have to tell me the whole story.

And I would love to hear from you…

What helps you stay open to possibility when something doesn’t go the way you hoped?

W 💗