Striving, achieving, accomplishing and goal oriented was how I look back on my 20’s and somewhat of my 30’s. The focus was on a singular goal. Play D1 soccer. Check. Run a marathon or several. Check. Live in the PNW. Check. Career supporting women and children. Check. The latter one is a bit more broad and I’m still serving women and children, but the check was mostly focused in a particular work environment. This is also began my shift into living more intentionally shaped by the social work values that are still a core part of me today.

Anyway, being goal oriented built my focus and helped me to visualize where I wanted to go and helped keep me forward moving. All great things, especially as I was traversing those decades of my life. Even in the midst of moving towards those goals, I also had misaligned adventures which too shaped my experiences helped me to understand what I wanted more of, what I needed to let go of and what definitely wasn’t for me.

As I head into my late ’40’s, I feel I’m no longer singularly focused on a goal, but rather setting broader intentions for the second half of my life. Intentions of freedom, ease, creativity and fun. While my younger self was guided into achievement, my current self is guided into wholeness. Bringing the parts of myself back into alignment with my entire being and making choices from a place that is congruent to my values and intentions.

I’ve also found there are set backs along the way, but the hurdles are different. As I set out on achieving a running goal or going for a job and not getting it, I experienced this as an “ok, let’s regroup and push again” while now when there is a challenge, I’m more aware of how my body experiences it. I’m able to sit with the discomfort, observe how tension arises, how my breath releases whatever is stored in my body one layer at a time and I’m able to re align back to my intentions of freedom, ease, creativity and fun.

Settling into living more intentionally, I’m more present to what my body is saying, I have more capacity to hold the energy its in every (mostly) moment and using my breath to guide me. I now can more intimately know for myself how the body holds on to experiences that it was too overwhelmed at the time to complete the emotional cycle. I now know the bravery it takes to be able to sit with how the body feels because for so long, I was too scared to do so. I now know the courage it takes to listen to what shows up when my breath directs my focus not on some outside gain, but the subtle message my body is communicating to me through the inhale and exhale. I can now feel the difference when my chest tightens versus or alongside my legs tingling. One of them means something totally differently than when they are met together. I can feel my body heave even without tears when I feel sadness for past pain. I can feel the emotional release of a tense jaw and headache when I’ve let go of another layer of loneliness. I’m starting to recognize I don’t have ruminating thoughts when my body is expressing something, but rather seeing how my mind tried to make sense of how my body was feeling as though there was something wrong with me. I’m understanding, there was never ever anything wrong with me. My little body many years ago was overwhelmed and didn’t have the skills at the time to cope. At the same time, my little body knew what it needed to at the time to survive. For awhile now, I’m recognizing on a microlevel, I’m no longer needing to survive. With that, I’m shifting beliefs and forging a whole new path for myself.

Expanding the vision for how I want to live my life touches on the parts of myself that I’m on the journey of exploring, experimenting and shifting into. The fullness of life is harmonizing the being and the doing. I’ve spent many years focused solely on the doing. Now I get to embrace how being flows with what I chose to do!