Jessie Harrold's Blog

Today, I want to share with you the 5 Things that almost ALL of my coaching clients are grappling with right now, one way or another. 

It’s such a privilege to have a backstage pass to the circumstances of so many other people’s lives. Although I never would have expected this when I originally trained as a developmental coach, the tremendous gift of doing this work is feeling so so SO much less alone in the things I am going through, too.  Not only that, but the conversations I have week in and week out allow me to track the trends in our experiences as ever-evolving women and help others feel less alone as well.  So, my intention in sharing these things with you today is to point to our commonalities in the hopes that you can find your place among us who are all, in our own ways, muddling through.

Here we go:  5 Things My Clients Are Grappling With Right Now

1) Losing themselves and finding themselves again in motherhood.  They are grieving what no longer feels possible – at least right now – because of the demands of early motherhood.  They are trying like hell to discern what to hold on to:  can I still have the career I desire?  Can I still drink hot coffee in the morning?  Can I write?  Can I rest?  They are reckoning with the fact that there are some parts of themselves they’ve been longing for that are like the shed snakeskin; the burst-open chrysalis:  no longer able to contain their bigness.  They are mapping out the edges of that bigness:  what is possible now?

2) Feeling the onslaught of midlife.  They are walking the initiatory fires of the middle years which (I am also realizing myself) have a way of being relentless.  It’s a parent in hospital and a kid having a mental health crisis and a troubling new health issue and the rollercoaster of perimenopause.  Those of us who are the children of Boomers Who Didn’t Talk About These Things are feeling gobsmacked by the at-times-impossibleness of modern midlife.  No one told us.  Like the new mothers in my practice, the midlife women I work with are being called to become big enough to hold the complexity and immense difficulty they’re facing.  They’re realizing that all the tools and the resources and the resilience they’ve learned over the years doesn’t hold a match to the storms of these middle years, and that instead they must learn to come undone and remake themselves, again and again and again.

3) Realizing they can’t keep pace with capitalist, patriarchal white supremacy anymore.  The things that they used to be able to do – and even want to do – without a second thought are becoming impossible.  It’s becoming impossible to juggle it all, have it all, do it all, be it all.  And though us rebelhearted ones might like to think that it’s empowering to give those systems of oppression the finger, the truth is: we live in those systems and we were raised by those systems.  Saying no, choosing rest, setting boundaries, disappointing people or letting go of dreams is hard.  There can be tremendous grief as we realize that we can no longer survive (let alone thrive) in the only environments, relationships, workplaces or communities we’ve ever known.

4) Learning to trust themselves.  We all have a Knowing.  Some of us have more access to it than others.  Most of us are denied access to it in a culture that dominates our brains and bodies with information and expectations.  And not enough of us are surrounded by people who will honour and uplift our wisdom.  Though we’re separated by a screen and sometimes by thousands of kilometres, I imagine myself with an ear pressed to my clients’ hearts, with my eyes scanning between the lines of what they share with me, listening closely for their Knowing.  “I hear you there. I hear your clarity.  What do you already know?  How do you know it?” is the chorus of so many of our sessions.

5) They’re learning how to live in an increasingly unrecognizable world.  No one can deny it any longer:  the world we expected to live in, to raise our kids in and to grow old in, is crumbling before our eyes.  It’s hard to know what matters anymore; what will matter in ten or twenty years.  Every single one of my clients is simultaneously broken and broken-open by this.  This time is unprecedented in so many ways: it’s difficult and it’s grief-filled, AND, as with all edge-times in our world and in our lives, it is filled with generativity and potential.  My clients are radically reprioritizing their lives, they’re doing work that makes a difference, they’re raising kids who don’t fit into the status quo, they’re advocating for justice and liberation within the causes they’re passionate about, they’re unsubscribing from the paradigms and ideologies that have harmed them.

All of this sounds hard, and it sounds heavy – and it’s true that most people come to me when life has gotten to be more than they alone can hold.  But it’s my job to also see all the ways that these things are not just breaking us – they’re making us.  It’s my job not to bypass the challenges that face me and all of us – but to set out every day with a search light, looking for what glimmers in the dark.

That’s the prayer that I whisper as the candle I light before every client session sputters to life; that’s the intention that I set for myself and for all of us as I walk through the woods or before I set my feet on the ground for the day.

May it be so.

And please know that if you’re experiencing any (or all) of these five things in your life, take my word for it:  you’re not alone.  You’re in good company.

May we find all the others who are walking this path too; may we link arms and walk it together.

The post 5 Things ALL My Clients Are Grappling With Right Now appeared first on Jessie Harrold.

Every so often, a pattern or experience shows up among my coaching clients that is so pervasive that I feel like I just have to share it with you.  It’s really one of the great pleasures of my job:  I get to witness, firsthand, how, although everyone’s journeys are unique, and we’re hardly ever alone in our challenges.

This one goes out to all those readers who are peri/menopausal and raising kids right now.

So, picture this:

1) You’re in perimenopause or menopause.  That means that you’re most likely 37 or older and starting to notice changes in your experience of your body and the world that range anywhere from premenstrual rage to hot flashes to – as I so *joyfully* (not joyfully) experienced last summer, long-term bouts of vertigo.

2) As such, your estrogen levels are beginning to drop.  Estrogen is, to put it bluntly, the “give a fuck” hormone.  It’s responsible for your urge to caregive, and when it drops, many women experience things like not caring what other people think and wanting a little distance from the people they’ve devoted their 20s and 30s to looking after.  Shifting progesterone levels also play a role here, the result of which is quite literally an impulse to flee the scene, as it were – to crave solitude more.

3) Friends and I have joked that this is our “move to the hut at the edge of the woods” era, and I think there’s probably some truth to that.  Our foremothers were likely finished raising their kids, for the most part, by the time they reached this age.  The little historical reading I’ve done notes that many midwives and other wise women didn’t fully step into that role until they had reached the end of their most intense childbearing and childrearing years (geez, no wonder I found attending births while raising young kids so impossible!).  Cue:  the move to the edge of the woods or the edge of town; the locus of many a historical wise woman’s dwelling.

4) The thing is, a great many of us modern mothers are still in heavy parenting mode as we enter perimenopause and menopause.

5) Heavy parenting demands + less estrogen = an impossible-feeling push and pull of a part of you that, quite literally, physiologically, wants to be done with all of this caregiving – and then the associated guilt, resentment and even rage of being needed more than ever.

6) Now, add in the fact that most of us perimenopausal and menopausal mothers are also parenting kids who’ve been through a pandemic.  A quick Google search of “post-pandemic children’s mental health” yields hundreds of research studies and personal stories, and myself and so many of the other mothers I encounter know this in our bones:  our kids aren’t okay.  They’re experiencing anxiety, depression, school avoidance and other really, really significant challenges.  Their lives might be unfolding differently than we thought they would.  Without wanting to sound cliché, we are truly parenting in an unprecedented situation.  We’re clearing the path as we walk it; making the rules as we go.

7)  As a recap:  we are feeling – both physiologically and psychologically – the urge to stop caregiving (like our ancestors would have at our age) but we’re still neck-deep in parenting a generation of kids in crisis.  And so it follows that a lot of us are in crisis too.  And that we’re making ourselves wrong for how much we don’t want to be wanted so much right now.

(me too, y’all)

My friends, if I had a solution to all of this I’d be a bazillionaire – but it did occur to me that it might be helpful to connect these dots for you, in case you’re feeling disorientation or confusion or guilt or resentment about being in this real pickle of a situation in your life right now.

Another conversation I’ve had with other mama friends recently is that, as our children get older, we lose social media or public writing as a venue for venting about our experiences – and connecting with others who might be going through the same thing.  I know, social media is such a double-edged sword, and there’s a part of me that can’t even believe I just wrote that last sentence, but it’s true:  I’ve spent the last 10 years writing about motherhood online and feeling the camaraderie of everyone else who was going through similar highs and lows.  Now that my kids are in their pre-teen and teen years, I need to be more mindful of their privacy, and I don’t feel freely able to share the experiences I’m having of parenting them.  I’ve met a lot of other mothers who are noticing the same:  it’s as if, overnight, a large source of our supply of support – and the associated normalization that comes with it – disappears.

And so, here it is for the kids in the back:  you’re not alone.  Far from it.  There are a good few of us who are looking up “hut at the edge of the woods” blueprints and wishing there was an instruction manual for these challenging years.

The post On entering your “hut at the edge of the woods” era appeared first on Jessie Harrold.

Summer has arrived in full force here in my household and on the land I tend.  The peonies are showing off in the front garden, waving heavily in the Atlantic wind.  My annual harvest of beach roses is drying – a small one this year, on account of bad timing, an intolerable amount of mosquitoes and an impatient puppy.  The little patch of sage I transplanted in the Spring is loving its new home, proliferating like I’ve never seen sage proliferate.  My herbal medicine teacher always says that the plants we need the most make themselves known to us, and so I’m guessing sage is here to help me with the night sweats and mood swings that have dominated my perimenopause experience – or maybe she’s portending hot flashes to come?  At any rate, I will be harvesting gratefully and enjoying the woodsy waft of sage and its cooling effects every time I make my herbal tea for the whole year, it looks like.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cycles and seasons this year.  I mean, I always think a lot about cycles and seasons, but my apprenticeship to the iterative fluctuation of all things has taken on a new depth in recent months.

I think there are a few reasons for this heightened awareness.  It’s definitely because my household now contains two cycling females at either end of the menstrual journey.  Those bookend times are intense and unpredictable, and it’s tremendously reassuring to contextualize our experiences with a knowing glance and “I think it’s Day 23, isn’t it?”

It’s also in no small part because we’ve just gone through a really challenging season as a family, and we know that there will be more to come.  Holding the long perspective – remembering in our bones that this too shall pass, but without all the placative energy – has been a necessary balm.

I think I had a bit of a break-up with this way of thinking for a long time, worried that I was bypassing, or that I was not being empathetic enough with my clients when I gently reminded them that maybe things would change, that maybe this was for now, not forever.  But now I think of myself as the one holding that long view like a treasure in my palms for them when all they can see is what’s crumbling around their feet.  And the Earth holds the long view for me in the same way:  sometimes every footstep of my morning walk is an incantation of both hope and knowing that “Spring will come, Spring will come, Spring will come.”

Cycles and seasons have been a central theme in my conversation with my clients these days.  My current client load (what’s a better word than “load” – if they’re a load, it’s one I delight in carrying; I’ve got a great backpack) are mostly navigating new motherhood, perimenopause or….both.  Somebody needs to write a book on that increasingly-common BOTH experience.  Dang.  But I digress.  I find that supporting them to make meaning of their experiences just doesn’t make sense without locating them seasonally and cyclically.

That means that we might be having a conversation about the frustrations of career challenges, but anchored with the reminder that, in the first 2-3 years of motherhood, you’re growing an entirely new identity and have probably had daycare-induced pink-eye 78% of the time (no, just me?), and that the ability to make career changes or goals will feel more possible, in time.

The same goes for a perimenopausal client who shows up in session feeling like she’s gonna set her life on fire.  It just feels prudent to ask what day of her cycle she’s on, and if she tends to feel this way at this time every month.  That way I know, as her coach, if I should, you know, metaphorically get the matches, or if it’s maybe a better idea to help her find some strategies to navigate this time of the month with a bit more equanimity.

It’s not that we don’t still address the challenges and explore how to move through them, but we do so with the knowledge that the current cycle or season may be playing a meaningful role in what’s happening and that it will, by definition, change.

When we’re going through difficult times, it’s actually beautifully adaptive to focus on the challenge at hand.  We learned to do that in our don’t-get-eaten-by-a-sabretooth-tiger days, when the prospect of one threat caused us to narrow our perspective and hyper-fixate on anything that could cause threat.  The downside is that this happened – and still happens – to the detriment of our ability to see nourishment, beauty, and the possibility that this too shall pass.

It’s a perspective that is filled with compassion and reassurance.  When I locate myself within the season of my month, year and life, there’s a part of me that softens and whispers:  “Ah, honey, how you’re feeling make so much sense.”

And so with that I wonder:  what season of your life are you in right now?  Are you in Day 23 Season, or Summer Season, or Matrescence or Perimenopause or Newly Diagnosed or Divorced or Retired Season?  Can you make a little more sense of your experience – and have a little more compassion for yourself – when you think of it this way?

As for me, I’m with the peonies – heavy with the richness of Summer and full of colour and flash as well as the knowing that Fall will come, and I’ll need a good harvest of the sweetness of this time to get me through.

The post On cycles and seasons (and maybe the *exact* thing you need to read right now) appeared first on Jessie Harrold.

This post was originally published in Volume 21 of my monthly newsletter, Imaginalia.  If you’d like to find out more about Imaginalia and sign up to receive it in your inbox each month, head over here.

I think it’s official:  I’m entering that phase of life where one can no longer ignore the (sometimes harsh) reality that bodies don’t last forever.

A few years ago, in my nurse practitioner’s office, I nervously produced a sticky note of health concerns I was experiencing, hoping that she would have enough time to address all of them in one appointment.  I made a joke about it and she said, “oh honey, once you reach your forties, you’ll have some years where we see each other every few weeks.”  Glancing at my list of mostly-quirky, mostly-just-annoying bodily quandaries, I chose to hear what she didn’t say:  that there will also be some years where I don’t have any reason to visit her at all.

After having lost that primary care practitioner and then going through the very long process – as all the Canadians reading this will know well – of finding a new one, I found myself in a similar sticky-note-at-the-doctor’s-office situation last week.  A couple years of falling through the cracks of the Canadian health care system – as well as a couple of years of intensive caregiving where my own self-care fell short of my attention – meant that I needed to catch up on things.  A pap, a mammogram, a skin tag removal, a vaccine, you know.

I had decided to get an x-ray of my spine.  I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease in my 20s, but, being in my 20s, I shrugged it off, mostly forgot about the diagnosis, and carried on being young and invincible.  Now in my 40s, I experience a fairly significant amount of chronic pain on a daily basis, and some of it is in my back.  I thought it made sense to see how things were going in there.

The words that are still ringing in my ears this morning as I write this were “bone-on-bone.”

My new nurse practitioner is a Scottish ex-midwife.  I’ve worked with a good many midwives with her vibe:  she’s kind and all rainbow overalls and jokes about your cervix, and she’s also blunt as hell.  As we peered at the x-ray of my spine, she pointed out a pars fracture of my lumbar vertebrae, a slight scoliotic curve, and the complete lack of any kind of disc at all between two of my lower vertebral bones***

“You see?  It’s basically bone-on-bone in there.”

The whole experience was both wildly validating (oh THIS is why it hurts so much!), anxiety-inducing (ohmygod I’m falling apart) and mystical (these defects and injuries are an exact mirror of the ones my teenage daughter is also currently grappling with).

In the week since this appointment, I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with my body.  Interestingly, I’ve also recently had quite a few people reach out after having discovered my first book, Project Body Love:  My quest to love my body and the surprising truth I found instead.  

Those of you who have been around here for a while will know that I have a funny relationship with that book.  You can read more about that here, but, in short, I had a bit of a Glennon Doyle situation happen with it (you know, where she wrote a book about staying in her marriage and then got divorced right after it was published?).  Right after I published Project Body Love, I had a major health crisis that lasted the better part of a couple of years and caused me to question a lot of what I wrote.

Well, maybe not question it, per se, but to see more complexity than I could see when I wrote it.  I wrote it from a place of being a relatively healthy (fat) person, and so when I subsequently struggled with my health, I had to figure out how to love my body – or at least be in relationship with it – even when it wasn’t as able, or wasn’t working the way I wanted it to.

Sometimes I feel like I could write a whole new book on what happened after Project Body Love was published – about how I came to peace with the food and movement and care that my body needed outside of the framework of dieting and over-exercise.  When I published PBL, I was still very much in a “fuck that” part of my journey, misconstruing the supports my body probably actually needed with diet culture, misogyny, and patriarchy.  My rebellion got in the way of my healing.  I was too close to my days of dieting and over-exercise to see how it would be possible to offer my body what it needed to thrive without falling into a rabbithole of disorder and obsession.

So, anyways:  people have been reaching out to me, mostly having read Mothershift and then realizing that I have another book tucked in the archives and picking it up too.  In the last few years I’ve mostly felt complete with Project Body Love, but clearly, Project Body Love is not complete with me.

The result of all this has been a perfect storm of grief.

You see, my back injuries and degenerative disc syndrome are a direct result of the things I did in my 20s to try to change my body.  They were also things I did to prove myself to myself and to the world; to be cool; to be attractive; to make people pause and notice me.  There’s a whole soup of formative childhood experiences, the effects of living in patriarchy and probably, you know, being a Capricorn that made me a do what I did.***  I’ve paced the labyrinth of that healing work enough now; more reflection and rumination won’t serve me.

But I do wish that I hadn’t treated my body that way.

For the last week, my 43-year-old self has been running back to my 23-year-old self, wrapping her in my arms and saying:  you don’t have to do this.  This is harming you.  You can’t see it now, but please, please trust me.  You’ll wish you’d been gentler on yourself.  You’ll wish you could see that you don’t need to work so hard.  You’ll wish you could see all the misconceptions and misperceptions that have you feeling like your body is not good enough, that you are not good enough.  This is your only body, and if you want to live in it – and enjoy living in it – you. need. to. stop.

Despite my grief – or maybe because of it – I am experiencing a strange also-reality:  here I am.  Maybe I regret the things my 20-something self did that are now impacting my 40-something body so dramatically, but, here I am.  The thing I’m learning in my own journey and in those I support clients with is that life sometimes just fucking deals you a hand, and it’s not your job to push it away but to figure out how it informs your life.  To figure out what’s still possible.

But not without tending to the grief of everything you wish were different.

For me, the ability to grieve makes everything that’s still possible, possible.  It means that I can look squarely at the circumstances of my life and say:  here I am.  There are things that I wish were different and there are things that I can still do to support myself, but also, it’s okay to feel sad about how this has unfolded.

The grief of the way I treated my body is probably a grief I’ll always live with:  I’ll keep aging and my body will keep doing what bodies do and I will always be reminded of my desperate attempts to be thinner, cooler, prouder.

The only thing to do is to stay current with it:  to allow my grief to surface and to have a good cry or go for a walk about it or write about it or tell the chickadees about it.

I often find myself working with clients who are grieving the loss of an old self – or on the cusp of a big decision that they’re worried they might regret.  Grief and anticipatory grief like this can feel so daunting when we don’t know what to do with it; when we haven’t been taught the skills to work with it by a culture that deifies having no regrets and moving on.

But the secret of grief – and knowing how to grieve – is that it’s the surest pathway to a braver, richer life.  Grief literacy means we have a map and a method for confrontingthe hardest shit life can throw at us.  Sidling up next to the possibility – or maybe even inevitability – of loss means that we’re more available for love.  For the fullness of what life has to offer.

I sometimes ask Mary Oliver for advice, and grappling with the changes in my aging body felt like as good a time as any to turn to an elder for support.  And so I opened one of her books to a random poem, and this is what she told me:

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

I wonder about the vivacity of what was – that bold 20-something hungry to prove herself to the world – and how the way she lived her life is married to what is and what will be.  I think about the continuance of the seasons and what rich compost is made available as we descend into the second half of our lives.  May the grief I feel now be compost that nourishes a healthier relationship with my body as it ages.  May my experiences and what I’ve learned from them feed the seeds of my children’s relationships with their own physicality.  May my grief and how it informs what happens next cultivate healing backwards and forwards in time.

May it be so.

What about you?  Have you gone through a life transition or rite of passage that has changed your body?  How have you grappled with that?  What happens next?

The post On body changes, getting older + a Project Body Love update appeared first on Jessie Harrold.

The following post was originally published in Volume 22 of my monthly newsletter, Imaginalia.  If you would like to find out more about Imaginalia and sign up to receive it each month, head over here.

This month marks the ten year anniversary of my business.

All of this (waves hands wildly) started while I was pregnant with my youngest who, incidentally, also just turned ten.  I knew I couldn’t go back to my job after my maternity leave, and so I started making plans. I wrote blog posts in my cubicle as I awaited the arrival of my baby – and my escape from what had become career hell.  I wrote my way into this business in the form of these posts about what mattered to me and what I wanted to help people with.  I didn’t publish a single one of them until this work had spent nine months incubating.

(For anyone who wants to start a business and likes to write, this is a great tiny experiment that I’ve recommended to many clients since:  start writing blogs or social media posts about topics you care about and want to explore in your work.  The experiment is pretty safe-to-fail in the sense that you never have to publish any of it if you don’t want to:  it can merely be a creative tool to investigate what your work is and how to start talking about it)

My business started out in the era of the 4-hour-work week, when every entrepreneur’s vision board had a picture of a laptop on a beach.  I wanted to be a digital nomad too, but to work from my dining room table so that I could pick my kids up from school every day.  I imagined I would have warm cookies waiting for them and that being “there” for them was my ultimate calling.

(I think I’ve baked them cookies after school once in ten years and though I’m “there” for them, I’ve since unpacked some of the heavy societal and inherited baggage that made that my original ultimate dream.  This is probably a topic that deserves its own entire issue of Imaginalia!)

Almost two years ago now, I could feel a seachange in both my work and my personal life unfolding.  I’ve been following a breadcrumb trail of questions about purpose and meaning and vocation and longing ever since then.  I’ve been exploring new ways of working and different reasons for doing what I do – because sandy laptops actually don’t work that well, and nor do hyperindividualistic dreams of “success.”

A client once said to me:  “this is the work of the second half of my life.”  It was like she had rung a bell in my chest, and I have felt the reverberations ever since.  Yes.  I feel like I am stepping into the work of the second half of my life.

There are three major shifts that I am exploring as this transformation evolves:

1.  I am – and my work is – more deeply spiritual.  

I’ve been oriented toward the mysterious and the numinous since I was a small child, but there was a long stretch of my twenties and thirties where this part of my identity went dormant.  I had a science degree; I was a budding researcher – I wanted to be taken seriously, and I thought that revealing my spiritual curiosities would discredit me.  And then I tried being “spiritual” in the way that everyone else on the internet was back when I started this work:  I did my yoga teacher training, wore mala beads, and collected crystals.

Now, like so many other women in midlife, I’m exploring my own authentic spirituality.

It was during a particularly harrowing few months last year that I experienced – was it a spiritual experience?  an awakening?  maybe?  What I know is that after it happened, I felt held.  What I know is that after it happened, I have felt more equanimous in the face of what has been a year of personal transformation (much of it the kind I didn’t expect or want).  

I don’t profess to know any sort of god(dess) now – I’m still a Capricorn with a science degree, after all – but I’m a lot more available for mystery.  As Mary Oliver said:  “mysteries don’t compromise themselves,” so I’m okay with not knowing what to call this shift in my spiritual landscape.  What I know is that I feel a thousand times more resourced.  What I know is that I’m quicker to, as a teacher of mine says, mythologizerather than pathologize what is happening in my life.  I’m quicker to see how the challenges I experience are making me, even as they may also feel like they’re breaking me.

I’m quicker to see this in my clients lives as well, more able to trust the process that’s unfolding and to hold a bigger vision for what is possible for them – without bypassing the labyrinthine and often difficult path they may be walking to reach that possibility.

This brings me to the second thing that is unfolding:

2.  I am more deeply connected to a lineage of wise women who have done this work for thousands of years.

This deeper spiritual orientation in my life and in my work has felt like a remembering that, over seventeen years as a doula, I’ve come to trust birth like a higher power.  Even when it, too, looks labyrinthine and often difficult – and even when it doesn’t go as planned.  I first got into this whole line of work not because I liked babies or even because I thought birth was cool (though both of those things are true).  It was because I had a bone-deep knowing that a well-supported birth could change a mother’s life.  Later, I got curious about what could happen when all of our transformational experiences were held in this way too.

My elders are the womb-to-tomb midwives who were skilled in the art and science of being with women as they stepped across the threshold of transformation.  In the way of these wise women, times of tectonic shift in our lives were known to be normal, cyclical processes that held tremendous potential for personal, spiritual and collective growth, even when they were deeply challenging.  These guides skillfully partnered and communicated with the numinous so they could hold ground at the epicentre of transformation.

And so it is that I am ever-deepening my capacity to do the same.  I am guided and supported by mentors, ancestors, a steadfast search for magic, and by the rigorous and ongoing initiation of motherhood.

Finally, the third thing that is transforming in the second decade of my work is:

3.  I believe this work is for the collective, not just the individual.

I guess I’ve always hoped that my work would have impact that overflowed beyond the individual humans I worked with.  But now it feels necessary.  It feels necessary to create something in response to the times we’re in.  And not just to hope that it has deeper impact but to ensure it.

I often talk about radical transformation as the kind of change that changes everything; the kind of change that reminds you of who you are.  But there’s another way to think about the word radical:  it is often a word used to describe that which is countercultural.  And so it is that I’ve found that the radical transformations of the people I work with are also radicalizing – a rebel-hearted response to the transformation of the world.  It’s a response that says “Not this anymore.  Not like this,” both to the individual conditions of our lives and the collective condition of our society.

I also think that helping people develop what I’ve come to call “transformation literacy” is necessary in the midst of the collapse of empire.  History (both far-reaching and recent) shows us that we will only continue to experience more frequent and more dramatic changes in our personal and collective lives in the coming years.  And so, in everything I do, I am asking:  How can we more skillfully adapt?  How do we evolve and not devolve?  Who will be galvanized?  Who will lead?

I feel excited for what the next decade of this work will bring.  I imagine I will continue to coach a sweetly intimate handful of people and also keep teaching programs, and I’ve already got three (WHAT?) more books in various states of progression, so that’s happening.  As with the first ten years of my career, I trust that I will be mysteriously and wondrously nudged in the direction of work that inspires me and that matters to the world, even in some small way.

I’m so grateful to you for being here – some of you for every one of the ten years I’ve been here!  I hope that I can continue to support you in whatever way I can.

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