Sacred Spirals: Lessons Learned Running Too Hard Too Fast

Sometimes I get angry when I remember that life works in cycles, and not a straight line.

It’s not really the cyclical nature of life that angers me; it’s that we are taught that it is not. It’s that in our Western culture we are taught that if we just try hard enough, and do it right, that we can by-pass the back-peddling and bee-line straight for the heavens. 

I know these false promises well. I have lived them and written about them and tried to let them go for years.

I have also been on the West Coast long enough to know that on the way to the top of a mountain there will be switchbacks. Giving yourself a little talking to for failing to bring the right climbing gear, sure. But telling yourself that if only you had tried harder you would have been able to glide straight up like a gondola. Now that is just cruel.

That is why the red-hot anger rises up my throat when I realize again that I have been measuring myself against an unnatural line of accomplishment.

Can you relate?

I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets angry for finding themselves in the same quandary that they found themselves only weeks or months or years before.

I mean how many times do we need to learn the same thing?! (*throws hands up exasperatedly and looks towards the sky*)

When I get over my anger (which I have), I find it comical that we are so good at telling ourselves (and believing) that trying harder will stop the world from going round, and place us on a staircase that leads only up, to higher and better ground.

It is actually quite a beautiful flaw of humanity that we can believe in such an absurd alternative reality. But blindness (even blissful blindness) always comes with a cost. And the cost of this, frankly, delusional belief, is that we keep trying harder and running faster even when there is no where to run to, or from.

If another species capable of empathy were looking down on us, I’m sure they would see beauty, but they would also be sad. And they would whisper to each other, “With the magnificence of creation existing on this planet all around them, where are they going to, and why are they going so fast?”

Oh my, the truth of this hits me hard. I have caught myself again running.

I have come full circle on another cycle of expansion and integration; I am practicing “holding it all”. But because of the conditioning of our culture running deep within my veins, instead of feeling celebratory and accomplished, I have been resisting and resentful, and judging myself for not being “further ahead” on the imaginary linear trajectory of success.

Well, F--- that.

Mine is a practice of rewriting, and this story of straight-lined success is one that runs deep. So, I will keep practicing to come home to myself in the present. I will keep circling around the mountain, rewriting this story in the depths of me, and reminding myself at every switchback that “I have not gone backwards”: It is an illusion.

You must always retreat, and circle around, to arrive at a higher plane.

I am at a higher plane within myself. I am more deeply connected with my soul. I am more expansive, and more aligned. External accomplishments are not adequate measures of what I came here for.

So here’s what I have learned (and keep learning again):

Some years we go forward, and some years we switch back. Not because we are conceding the climb, but because we are, in our rest and recalibration, cultivating the depth, the breadth and the stamina needed to keep showing up to the journey our souls came here to have.

Life always has been, and always will be, a sacred spiral. 

The straight-line to success is a lie. It is a product of our Western culture that has forgotten that humans are not machines, and success is not separate from Life.

Remembering with you.

Xo,

Danielle