It was truly a ‘dream life’! A gorgeous little surf town in southern Sri Lanka, sunny and warm almost the entire year round, living 15 seconds walk from one of the prettiest beaches I’ve ever seen, with a cafe serving delicious coffee looking straight out to the ocean, a community of lovely people and a daily routine that I had settled into like a well-worn glove.
It was a life so lush that if you’d told me in 2021 that that’s how I’d be living, I would maybe have cried. Or fainted. Or both. I definitely wouldn’t have believed it. I would have asked ‘BUT HOW?!’
But slooooowwwwllyyyyyy slowly, there were breadcrumbs from Life starting to stack up suggesting gently to me that it might be time to move on.
Of course my initial reaction to all of these breadcrumbs was ‘but I’m so comfortable here! Why would I ever change it?’. I’ve learned the hard way in my life that when I ignore these bread crumbs, these gentle nudges from Life, then Life ends up getting louder and louder. Until She is SHOUTING. Until she pulls the rug completely out from underneath us and everything comes tumbling down around us.
This has happened before in my life in spectacular ways - enormous plot twists that I never saw coming! The biggest one happened just before my 30th birthday, an unexpected breakup while I was living in Spain which meant having to move my entire life back to Melbourne, leaving my dog Layla behind with my ex, leaving an entire community of friends, leaving my job and coming back home ‘just for a quick visit’, but then getting stuck for the entire duration of the pandemic in Melbourne.
But if I’m honest, there were soooooo so many signs and nudges in the year leading up to this epic plot twist. I just didn’t want to look at them. They were too difficult to face, too scary, too unknown, too challenging, required far too much bravery and confidence that I just didn’t have.
So Life got louder and louder until it all fell apart. But why????
Life is a rhythmic, cyclic Being. Everything has its own flow, its own season. Cycles begin and end, seasons begin and end, things are always growing and flowering and decaying and being reabsorbed into the soil to make nourishment for new growth.
And there is something that is somehow sooooo common in our own lives that never bodes well in nature - stagnance.
Stagnance is the realm of rotting things. Mosquitos, swamps, bad smells, mold, decay, disease.
It’s a lack of movement, a lack of growth, a lack of flowing.
Our own lives are no different, but somehow we conveniently skim over this point. In fact, we often make a critical error.
We confuse stagnance for comfort.
“It’s okay to be comfortable, I’ve worked so hard to get this comfortable!”
"Why would I change anything, if everything is just ticking along?'“
In these moments Life is always giving us nudges but we are not always sensitive enough to notice and to listen, not always willing to accept that it’s time for things to change. In fact, a lot of the time we’re actually very comfortable! We’ve settled into a hypnotic state of the status quo, just ticking along day after day, doing the same things with the same people, at the same job.
Maybe on some level, deeper inside our being, we have a niggling feeling that something isn’t quite right. This is the moment to seize and to decide to DO YOUR OWN PLOT TWIST. Before Life has to do it for you.
When we notice ahead of time that we’re stagnating, that we’ve stopped growing, that nothing new is happening - we get to exercise SO MUCH creative power! We get to COLLABORATE with Life, instead of being a tragic victim to her seemingly capricious ways.
And wen we do it this way, we get to take our time, make it intentional! We get to breathe, to be curious and playful, to be experimental. We get time to build ourself into a more evolved version of ourself that can hold the experiences that we actually want to create with a lot more elegance and grace than the current version of us can - which means that we’ll enjoy those experiences so much more!
One common thing I often hear is ‘but this is good enough, why would I bother changing it?.
My question would be - why settle for mediocrity??
And why ever ‘bother’ doing anything at all??
Another common counter-statement is ‘but then aren’t you just being discontent with your life? Aren’t you supposed to just be ok with what you’re already doing instead of always wanting more?’
But is it truly contentment if that niggling voice in the back of your head is constantly reminding you that maybe you were made for far more than this?
There’s a difference between action coming from agitation and action coming from deliberate, intentional movement - we have to be honest with ourselves about our intention behind our action.
Here are some questions to think about:
What have you outgrown, even if it still ‘works’?
Where are you saying ‘this is what I’ve always done’ or ‘I’ve always been like this’?
Where are you settling for ‘mediocre’ or ‘good enough’ in your life right now?
What you you actually LOVE to be doing instead?!
The niggling voice in my head was constantly telling me that I’d stopped growing. That I wasn’t giving myself any new opportunities to experience Life in a different way so that I could learn more about myself and more about Life itself. That I wasn’t evolving anymore, just stagnating. So I decided to engineer my own plot twist! Did I know how I was going to afford it? No. Did I know what the next chapter was going to look like? Also no. Did I know that I’d love what I was planning to do? I guessed so, but I wasn’t 100% sure.
We always want the guarantee first!!! We want to be able to act with no risk, create huge changes with huge benefits in our life in complete certainty and safety and comfort. But the unknown is always terrifying on some level, because it is unknown! Of course it is scary!
Feeling scared, feeling this kind of friction is actually a GOOD THING. It is an invitation, not a threat! Boredom, restlessness, quiet resentment, the feeling of ‘just getting by’ - these are all clues, not trivial things to distract yourself from or suppress.
And if the thoughts “What if nothing better comes along? What if I never find a better partner or a better job?” pop into your mind? - this is indicative of a huge mistrust in yourself and in Life, if you have this inner narrative it’s a critical thing to take action on!
So then, how do you know how to do a good plot twist??
Ask yourself what you feel very passionately about at the moment. What is the thing that you can’t stop talking about, can’t stop thinking about? What would you love to dedicate more time and energy to? What lights you up??
And see if you can identify an area of your being that you really want to level up! Something that would open up a lot of new doors for you that are currently closed because you don’t have that skill, that confidence, that knowledge, that experience, that level of bravery. And then find something you could do on purpose to up-level yourself in that way. The key thing to remember here is that it IS going to feel like a stretch! It’s going to feel uncomfortable acknowledging these things to yourself, and to think about changing them. This is GOOD! It means that you are BRAVE and proactive! Extraordinary things come to people who are brave and proactive!
That’s exactly how I did my own plot twist. I’m always very passionate about my movement practices, so I decided I’d love to up-level my yoga practice. I could also sense that it would be a HUGE up-level in my life to be able to hold space for large groups of people, to teach, to lead people through practices, to be perceived by a large group of people and feel okay with it. And beyond ‘okay’ - to learn to love it and feel safe and comfortable in it!
So I decided to pack up my life in Sri Lanka, I signed up for an Ashtanga-Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training in Goa, India and started getting myself ready for it. If I was going to collaborate with Life on this new adventure, how could I be a better player? Because I was ‘doing the plot twist before the plot twist did me’, I had plenty of time to get myself ready for it! I got to ask myself, how could I hold this new experience more elegantly? What skills could I deepen over the next 6 weeks, what new things could I learn that would allow me to show up with even more presence, even more curiosity, even more openness?
I committed to doing an ashtanga yoga for an hour every morning after my morning kalaripayattu class (I was doing 4 classes per week but knew that the YTT would have multiple yoga classes per day). I started reading more about yoga philosophy and integrating it into my own understanding of Life. I started packing up my room again, letting go of a lot of things, packing my life back down to the size of a rucksack once again. I meditated more, spent time getting my body strong and supple and practiced gently letting go of ‘home’, saying goodbye to Hiriketiya.
The whole plot twist, the entire YTT was utterly delightful! I learned SO MUCH about myself, so so much! I met so many extraordinary people, I discovered a lot of new things in my yoga practice, I also illuminated a lotttt a lot of new things that I still need to learn and identified a lot more places with room for growth.
The path always illuminates in front of us as we walk it.
We desire sooooo much to see the next 200km ahead of us in perfect clarity, but Life is far more mysterious and fun than that! How boring to know exactly how everything will work out. How dull to allow no room for magic or mystery!
So we take the first few steps, sometimes shaking with fear. Sometimes completely alone. Sometimes doubting everything but stepping out anyway. And the path always lights up the next few steps. And the next few after that!
We get to walk with trust, knowing that we can hold our own self and knowing that Life will always hold us.
And when we learn that we can trust, we get to walk with joy, with curiosity, with playfulness!
We get to collaborate with Life!
And what a precious discovery that is.
So, what’s your next plot twist?
Rae xx
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