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.

The post The work of the second half of my life: 10 years in business + the 3 things I’m focusing on now appeared first on Jessie Harrold.