When it’s time to start over

Starting over is f’ing hard, and I’ve done it sooo many times.

• Moving every 5 years growing up
• Moving every 1 year as a young adult
• Leaving my parents’ church
• Leaving religion
• Restarting my spiritual journey after divorce
• Losing the spiritual communities I’d engaged in during Covid
• Moving (again!) in March of this year

That’s just a smattering of the instances I’ve experienced of starting over, and I’m just jaded. So done. Post 40, it’s feeling a lot harder to move and start over in a new place. There’s less energy and excitement, and more anticipation that it will be just like the old, so the will to re-engage is feeling pretty dwindled.

What’s hardest for me these days in starting over in a new place is forming new relationships and especially community. In a world of people consumed with intent to meet their own needs, there feels like little space to explore what true relating and community could be when it’s merely an expression of loving from the core and out, in all the ways humans can connect and share and see each other. The more I recognize what that more real relating could be, the less urge there is to continue to try for old ways that are more based on trying to get and take from each other.

Yet despite this jaded feeling on the outside of my energy, there’s an inner desire and core urge to express in new, alive ways, in a new context that’s made available in the new place. And perhaps in that more external jadedness, there’s less of getting distracted by sparkly objects and more of that internal steadiness that sees the ways life may express through me. Returning to that core desire to meet and relate in external expressions of loving, there’s a peace under all that jaded feeling.

There’s also a knowing that I come to something new to express differently. That there isn’t the capacity to leapfrog in evolution the way my soul’s longing to do and maintain the same containers of relating that I built before. Moving, starting over, becomes a new frame that enables the big shifts that are needed in order to more fully express what’s urging to come through me. It invites greater expansion.

And at the same time, it can feel empty, hollow, pain-filled, because there are large gaps that used to be filled by whatever container existed in the past, and now it’s not there.

That’s f’ing hard.

But maybe it’s needed, and it’s loved, to experience this loss, this gap, this sense of nothingness in the old places that used to bolster the human during the path of running the life by mind. And the choice remains to continue in this path of being guided into what true life is, and what it can be in experience.

This past week has been another instance of energy ebbing away after putting a lot out, in an attempt to meet external demands.

Some inner voice summarized insights on the low times that are speaking to me right now, and maybe they can comfort you as well in your next experience of the lull:

The human is not as low as it imagines itself to be because it experiences low energy. Low energy may be experienced from any state, because it is available within the game. It is not to be resisted or embraced, but experienced, allowed, and moved on from.

Our life is consistently joyous, peaceful, and loving in many expressions, but a life with the mind attempting to experience a version of this without us by taking isn’t meant to be pleasurable.

We are leading into the fullness of us coming through, and this naturally clears. If pain percolates along the way, we would be with the human in the midst of this, loving here without concern for why there is pain or demanding it to be gone.