Realizing others have already spoken the words we’re searching for is a gift, especially when we find ourselves stuck in the same place for extended periods of time. In order to see past our routine thinking all we have to do is borrow another’s insights and let them help shape our solutions. This comes in handy when the world gets a little heavy and we’re bogged down. Some weeks are like this, we’re stuck in the same old rut, there is nothing left to say, figure out, or do, and this happens to be one of those weeks for me. It’s a week when all my jazzy solutions and breakthrough ideas fail me. When I am overwhelmed, or exhausted, or just plain sick of everything I turn to writers I love and listen to their words and wisdom.

This always acts as a catalyst, a jumping off point, and gives me a little push to see things from a different angle. It’s a way to help navigate the places I continually get stuck or see into the fuzzy places I can’t quite put my finger on. This week has thrown a lot at me, there’s so much that is out of my control, and the things that make me feel fragile, depleted, deflated, and not so shiny begin to pile up. This is the perfect time to borrow someone else’s words. I pick a book from one of my favorite writers, someone who’s already traveled the road I’m on, and randomly open it to a page and see what is offered. I’m looking for the surprising insight that comes through synchronicity.

And of course I am never disappointed. Here’s what happened when I opened up Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves, somehow it dovetailed perfectly with the mood of my week, and maybe yours too.

What is the non-beautiful? Our own secret hunger to be loved is the not-beautiful. Our disuse and misuse of love is the not-beautiful. Our dereliction in loyalty and devotion is unlovely, our sense of soul-separateness is homely, our psychological warts, inadequacies, misunderstandings, and infantile fantasies are the not-beautiful. Additionally, the Life/Death/Life nature, which births, destroys, incubates, and births again is considered by our culture the not-beautiful. It is good to make a meditation and daily practice of untangling the Life/Death/Life nature over and over again…when we are untangling this nature, it would be good for us to (say) something like this, What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in order for me to love? What not-beauty do I fear? Of what use is the power of the not-beautiful to me today? What should die today? What should live? What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when?

This is the never-ending process isn’t it? Sorting, deciding, choosing. We always get stuck when we refuse to choose. And the longer we hesitate the harder it becomes to see clearly, act decisively, and transform. Sometimes the fear of change keeps us at a standstill, and we become easily overwhelmed or swamped. But the only way to the other side is to go all the way through, and this means consciously looking at the things we’d rather ignore. Those things that aren’t flattering or pretty or comfortable. To get unstuck we have to ask ourselves the hard questions and make decisions about what stays and what goes, what lives in our lives and what dies. So I thank Clarissa and the strange synchronicities of the universe for reminding me of this when I couldn’t remember it myself.

And with that I leave you to untangle what has you caught, to bravely shine a light in the darkness of mindless doing and reclaim your burning authenticity. Sometimes the most difficult surprise that startles us is the only thing that can save us.

Borrow someone else’s words, let them remind you of what you’ve been missing.

kb