Moving Into 2020

With the onset of a new decade, I've been thinking about the last decade. I've been thinking about the events and looking for the lessons.

It has been a very difficult decade. I have experienced depression. The whole premise of this blog is healing from everything that led to the depression. I've had constant difficulties in the jobs area. I've had long periods of unemployment and then being mistreated and devalued when I do have a job. I experienced a quarter life crisis when I realized that I had spent the decade before this working to become a lawyer, only to find that is was not what I wanted to spend my life doing. I've been floundering ever since trying to figure out what I do want. I discovered that all of people who I had considered friends for most of my life, really were not my friends and hadn't been for a long time. It's been rough.

Lessons of the Last Decade
The biggest lesson of the past decade is that I need to stop trying to make it in the corporate world. I don't belong there. The corporate world violates my spirit and everything I am. I worked very hard and left every place I worked at better than it was when I got there, but have experienced nothing but abuse and dismissal by sexist and/or racist and/or exploitative bosses. Ultimately, that's what the corporate world is. It's a system designed to exploit the majority of people so that a few can line their pockets. However, this lesson has left me quite empty and perplexed. It's all I know and I have no idea how I can get out of that world.

Another lesson is that I need to be pickier about my relationships. Whether it is friendships or a romantic relationship, I need a real tribe. I'm in my 30s and have not really experienced that even though at one point I was sure I had. Despite being burned, I have to put myself out there and be ready to dive deep if I'm ever going to find my tribe.

I discovered that I have very little faith in my abilities. I have experienced quite a lot of disappointments and even some abuse in the past decade and it has severely affected my confidence. The abuse at certain jobs by far had the greatest effect. Quite frankly, I know the people who did it would delight in knowing that their abuse had the desired effect. I need to take my power back and get my confidence level up to where it should be.

Lastly, I need to follow my desires regardless of how little sense they seem to make. I've been incredibly drawn to the idea of becoming a mindset and feminine embodiment coach. I've done a lot of visualization and coaching always comes up. I want to get out of the toxic corporate structure but I also want to subvert it by helping other women do the same. It seems kind of crazy to be thinking about teaching other women to do something that I haven't figured out how to do myself. But, I'm looking at it as the end goal. That's the only way I can make sense of it.

I'm not yet sure where these lessons are going to take me. I'm not even sure how to implement them yet. I will be doing some serious reflecting and journaling in the days and weeks to come.

New Moon Ritual

In my desire to be more mindful, I've started paying more attention to the moon cycles. I realized that I bleed around the full moon. This kind of amazed me because the full moon is about releasing and that's exactly what menstruation is, releasing what is not needed. I decided to honor the moon cycles with rituals for the new moon and the full moon. I'm still figuring out what I want to do for the full moon since I also want to honor my menstruation and how low my energy is during that time. I did come up with a new moon ritual though.

Step 1
First I cleanse myself. I take a hot shower and go the extra step of using a scrub to exfoliate. I take my time and let the process relax my body and mind.

Step 2
During or after cleansing myself, I cleanse my space. I'm a big believer in energy and as an empathetic being I find that energy can really affect me so I want to cleanse the energy in my space. My current favorite way to do that is with sound. I intend on getting a singing bowl so that I can do this myself but until then I've found some really great videos on YouTube for this. I know that sounds strange and not too long ago I would have raised an eyebrow if I heard someone say that but I can't deny how I feel after listening to one. I even left one playing while I went outside and my home felt better when I came back. It just felt lighter. So I set up everything I plan to use for this ritual and let the video play until I feel like the energy is lighter.

As for the items I use during this ritual. First I pull out two cards from the Arcana of Astrology deck. I pull the moon phase card and the corresponding astrology sign. For instance, tonight's new moon is the new moon in sagittarius so I'll pull out the new moon card and the sagittarius card. I have a beeswax candle, incense, some crystals with special meaning to me, an oracle deck that I use, and a special pen and notebook.

Step 3
When I'm ready to start, I light the candle and the incense and then pick a guided new moon meditation to do. Once again, YouTube is my friend here. The two channels I follow specifically for guided meditations are Gaia Meditation and Om Shaanti Meditation.

Step 4
 Once my mind is focused from the meditation, I do whatever oracle card spread I've chosen (usually something I've found on Instagram) and spend some time thinking about what cards I pulled. The oracle deck I am using currently is the Kuan Yin Oracle by Alana Fairchild. I do plan on getting others that are a bit more balanced for this though. I take that special journal and write down the questions I asked and the answers the cards helped me come up with. In the same notebook, I use a technique called scripting or pray rain journaling. With how popular the Law of Attraction has been lately then you have probably heard about scripting. For me, I write out an ideal situation, based on the answers I got, in the present tense focusing on the emotions such a situation would give me and gratitude. It's a way for me to get clearer about the things that I want and to get my brain focused on moving in that direction. My next step is to write my intention for that moon cycle and I end the whole thing with the words, "So it is".

It sounds like a lot but the whole thing takes about an hour, maybe an hour and a half if I spend a long time journaling.

I've been doing this for a few cycles now and so far I have been enjoying it very much. It is helping me slowly change my mindset and figure out what I want.

The Universe Is Toying With Me

It's interesting and annoying how the universe works. Just when I began thinking about which career path to take, I came across a class on Udemy for Wellness Coaching and it was massively discounted. I bought it because I was pretty sure it would be a great way to figure out if coaching was the direction I wanted to go. That was the interesting part. The annoying part is that a couple of days later I was let go from my job. I had just started trying to figure out what my next step should be and now I don't know what I'm going to do.

Career Path Conundrum

For the first time in a long time, I feel the urge to write. I've been frustrated with my lack of desire to write. I could not figure out why something that had helped me so much was no longer drawing me. I think I finally figured it out. I journal to heal, to work through jumbled thoughts, to bring things I have suppressed to the surface. It's so valuable and so necessary but so exhausting. I think I was exhausted and needed time to go with the flow. Everyone needs a break sometimes and with all of the struggles I have had in the real world, I just could not keep taking those on as long as I was putting so much energy into healing. I think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs explains it best. Food, shelter and safety has to come first. When those things are a struggle you just will not be able to focus on anything else.

For the time being I have those things taken care of and am now able to look beyond that again. However, my focus has to be on my career. It has been as you can see from my last few posts. Hating my job is so destructive. Dreading each day, being bored, not growing, and sleeping away the weekends due to exhaustion is not how we are supposed to live. I'm struggling though. I see two potential career paths but both will require a lot of time and energy. I find myself frozen at a fork in the road.

One career path is as a Business Process Consultant primarily for small business and coaches. It will fulfill my need to solve problems, stretch my creativity, and build something on a business level. My time as temp helped me discover this skill and it turned into a desire but I know I started thinking about this because I have not journaled in so long and no longer felt qualified to pursue becoming a journaling coach. I know that things happen for a reason and the path twists and turns. That time away from journaling could have been what I needed to explore other areas of my life and develop other skills. This new career path could just be a way for me to avoid the work required for my other potential career path. I am not sure.

My other career path is as a Wellness Coach. I've wanted to become a journaling coach for awhile but I moved away from it when I stopped journaling.  I never let go of it though and have thought about expanding the idea to include herbalism. This career path excites me more if I am honest but it is still so ambiguous for me. No path is truly clear but this feels more like a mirage than a path.

This is a very odd conundrum for me because in the past when I was struggling to make a decision, I knew I was leaning towards one. This time, I don't feel like I'm leaning either way. It's a brand new type of struggle for me.

My Oracle Card Reading

I was thinking about my last post. I have recently been intrigued by oracle cards. I don't believe they have divination powers or anything like that. I view them the same way I view journal prompts. They are a way to look at something in a new way or bring subconscious thoughts to the forefront. So I thought I would try pulling some cards to see what shakes loose.

I won't go into details about oracle cards themselves but I pulled a spread of 4 cards. One to get to the heart of the issue, one for how to heal, one for the special guidance that I already know deep down, and one for guidance for the future. Once again, these cards are similar to journal prompts so the results could be viewed as very generic but they did get me thinking.

Heart of the Issue: I am still tethered to past hurts and lessons. I have not cut cords and completely unlearned lessons so I have been unable to move forward. I will keep repeating the same cycle until I have completely released the past.

This definitely true. I have been mistreated at every job that I have had and I always struggle to release it. I still find myself getting very angry about what happened at my last job. I also struggle with letting go of the things that I have been taught about careers and the proper steps. I come from a conservative, religious, right-wing family and have had everything that comes with that drilled into my head. The steps for being successful ( go to college, get a job, move up the ladder) have worked for everyone in my family, except for me. I am the example that it doesn't work for everyone but instead of acknowledging that, I am constantly being told that something is wrong with me. I have to get out of the corporate cookie-cutter mindset and take the leap to something else, even though I have no support.

How to Heal: I need to surrender to the changes going on within me and around me, while remaining strong in my convictions about what I should be striving for despite what people are telling me.

Releasing everything I have been taught and moving forward is really my only option.  I know that the standard 9-5 job will never work for me and no amount of criticism, lectures, and advice will ever change that. My mind is slowly wrapping around that but I am a bit frantic as I try to figure out another path. I need to tone that frantic energy down by surrendering to the process.

Special Guidance: Do not judge myself or my situation. Trust my discernment and focus on using it to make my future choices. Trust my vision.

Most of the time I just feel like a fool for being in this situation. I've been trapped in this cycle for so long and I feel foolish for not being able to get out. I know that judging myself this way does not help but I'm still doing it. I need to find a way to take that energy and put it into connecting with my intuition and developing discernment.

Guidance for the Future: Keep pushing forward. Choose to rise instead of being taken over by depression. Have compassion for yourself as you have had a very hard road. Remember that you have been given power to co-create your reality.

This one annoyed me. If I knew how to rise instead of being taken over by depression, I wouldn't be in this mess. My depression has always been situational. It rears its ugly head whenever some part of my life is in shambles, especially when it's something that I have worked very hard on. So all of the standard advice about how to get rid of it never works for me. Daily nature walks can never change the fact that something I poured my heart into blew up in my face. I have yet to find a way to keep that kind of depression at bay. I do find it very hard to truly have compassion for myself so that could be the main issue.

Whatever one thinks about things like oracle cards, doing this did help me calm my mind and begin to organize my thoughts. I feel a bit more grounded and I have a bit more energy to keep moving forward.

Trying To End A Cycle

I am really struggling in the area of career right now. I am still unemployed and have very little in the way of prospects. I am also just very tired. I have always struggled in this area. Whenever I find myself unemployed, it lasts for months and even years. Then when I finally do find a job, it turns out to be a dead end and I end up being mistreated. I get used and abused, then let go for some bullshit reason. This has been my cycle since the beginning and I cannot seem to get out of it. Something has to change but I cannot figure out what or how.

Jobs are not one of those things that you can really just wait for the right one to come along. You need to be making money. You have bills to pay. You need to eat. There isn't a way around that unless you have someone willing to take care of you. I consistently find myself in a position where I am completely broke and only have one option for work. Then the job quickly turns out to be terrible and completely drains me so that I am unable to work towards something else. Then I get angry at myself for being so exhausted and scatterbrained. That's when the depression rears its ugly head and the downward spiral begins.

Something has to be different this time or I will end up back in the same cycle.

Guiding Word of the Year for 2019

I have really struggled with deciding on what to do with this year's guiding word of the year. At first after thinking about it for awhile, I considered keeping my guiding word for 2018 going into 2019. My issues with my former employer gave me so much stress and really derailed my progress in 2018. I really did not focus on that guiding word much so I wanted to try again. However, it didn't give me that settled feeling that I usually get when I find my word of the year. So I decided to keep reflecting and see what happened.

I don't know exactly where the revelation came from but suddenly I realized that I live my life in fear. I have been stuck for awhile because I've been fearful and too tired to address it. It was pretty sad to realize. When I started this blog, the catalyst was the Anias Nin quote I have posted on top, over there. ------------>
I was tired of hiding and not growing so I started journaling here to work through my blocks and heartache. I healed in many ways and made big changes in my life. I was really proud of my progress. However, some of those changes and chances I took blew up in my face in a big way and forced me into a situation I worked very hard to avoid. Now I'm living in a very conservative city as a woman of mixed heritage with no friends because I don't fit it, being mistreated at every job I've had, and with no real prospects for advancement despite being highly skilled.

Now I realize that I am paralyzed in fear of taking another chance and that has to change. I'll never get out of this situation if I don't start taking big chances.

My guiding word of the year is:
Courage

I don't know how I am going to put this into action yet. It's going to take more reflection to get a better handle on what exactly I want. I have a basic idea, but I will need to be more specific before I can make a plan.