Trust The Timing Of Your Unfolding

All of this week on WomenBloom we are having a conversation in the forums on a particularly woman-centered spirituality with Jan Lundy, speaker, spiritual director/mentor and author of Your Truest Self:  Embracing The Woman You Are Meant To Be.  Jan has distilled her many years of working with women in to 12 transformational truths.

Jan asked me which of the truths I found most challenging.  There were a couple but the one I probably struggle with most is ‘I trust the Divine timing of my own unfolding’.  Yikes, that is a toughie.  I have made strides in this over the last few years, but I still am impatient to have the answer.  And, when in great uncertainty or ambiguity, my inclination is to fix, fix, fix.  Even if I’m not sure what the wisest course is, I have a hard time not taking some kind of action to fix the situation.

As Jan says, our culture tends to reward people who are very capable and ‘in control’.  ‘Not knowing’ is often interpreted as not being on top of things or as a sign of weakness.  And it’s just danged uncomfortable, to me anyway.

The problem with the ‘fix it’ approach is that you don’t have the chance to listen deeply to what your inner wisdom is telling you.  There is a part of you that does know what answer is right for you, but it takes time and quiet to hear what it’s saying.

I’m noticing this in the reinvention group, my fellow Balance blogger, Sue Cullen, and are doing together.  Finding the right answer takes time and lots of listening.  Some of our ladies are uncomfortable with that.  I think they assume that because the answer isn’t immediately obvious, they must be off track, or lost. 

I think it was J.R.R. Tolkien who said “All who wander are not lost.”   How true.  And we don’t become who we are in an instant.  As Jan points out, learning to live with the mystery of how things unfold opens us up to unexpected blessings, valuable experiences, and invaluable opportunities for growth that we cannot create for ourselves.

I get it, and I appreciate it.  And I suppose it is in learning to practice patience with the unfolding that some of the best pearls of wisdom are to be found. 

Sigh.

Allison Allen is Founder of WomenBloom, a web community inspiring and supporting women to make the most of midlife.