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I’ve been remiss to restart Soundbites, caught between winter’s call for hibernation and the pull to stay connected and birth a new year. How do we hibernate without hiding? I’d love your help if you’ve figured it out and your company in the journey of exploring. From the book that introduced me to the verb of winter:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; we* don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that we lived in the summer. We prepare. We adapt. We perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get us through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

— Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (*I’ve changed “they” to “we”)

These words hit differently this year, as I replace “them” with “we” to include myself. I’m done pretending that I can generate and sustain the same energy throughout winter as I do in summer. Where I’m at, it’s COLD. And I don’t like it. It stings. Yet, I love the feeling of warmth hugging a frozen tickle and bundling up in fluffy, fuzzy, furry fashionables. I don’t like missing out on shared experiences with friends and family. Yet, I love the simplicity of only needing to check in with myself for a spell. Like in comedy, it’s the contrast that brings delight.

But I haven’t yet found the delight in the contrast of wanting to rest—to spend more time closing out my old year—against the pull of starting strong and the burden of being a coach wrapped up in the hype of “new year, new you” action. I’ve been wronging everything about New Year’s—the timing, traditions, pop culture. Until a friend challenged me: What if this is the perfect time to celebrate? How does that impact how we celebrate?

1. From the calendar’s story, when we wrote that winter is not the death but the birth of a new year, we wrote that winter is also the womb, a gestational season, and its conception. This makes now a fitting time to impregnate myself with the futures I will birth in due time—shifting my focus from the action of giving birth RIGHT NOW to concepting. And just like that (finger snap!) … intentions, mottos, resolutions make different sense.
2. As for how to celebrate, I’m giving myself permission to honor my own pace inside of the Human Race. I know I need a grizzly bear’s den of space to keep reflecting, exploring, and experimenting as I create what will later be birthed, knowing that not everything conceived will survive beyond this season.

The delight, I’m discovering, lives in the juxtaposition of hibernating while connecting through the sharing of unfinished discoveries. And my practice is to give myself lots of space—several Soundbites if you will—to let intentions root deeply in the dark, quiet soil of winter before asking them to bloom.

As you winter, what delights are waiting for you in the space between hibernating & connecting?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments or my inbox. Cheers to however you’ve chosen to conceive and ring in your new year!

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Published on Unstruck Soundbites Substack. Photo by USGS.

Fear of the unknown and inevitable is universal and wise. It signals that we’re paying attention. That we care about being alive. To honor our fear is to honor our aliveness. To honor our fear is to listen for its lessons. It was never meant to stop us, but to wake up—alert us to the wild wonder that we’re alive—simultaneously existing and becoming.

This week’s quick yet spacious read ^[1] and inspired practices comes from a poem commonly attributed to Khalil Gibran ^[2]

“It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.”

—FEAR, KHALIL GIBRAN

When I think of my fears, my first instinct is typically to avoid, hide, dissolve. And then I think of the river becoming the ocean, surrendering to gravity and the inevitable. I imagine myself holding my breath until I realize that I belong here—I can breathe here. It’s in this belonging that I can let go of what was and retain what always will be inside of what’s new. It’s in this belonging that I don’t have to disappear into my fear and can expand beyond. This kind of belonging and becoming isn’t one-and-done. (No one steps into the same river twice, after all.) It’s a practice, that like all practices, find power in repetition.

A Grounding Practice: River Meeting Ocean

• Stand and imagine yourself as a river
• Feel your “headwaters” at the crown of your head
• Slowly move your attention as you “flow” downward through your body
  • Notice where you feel contraction or constriction, resistance or fear
  • Notice where you feel expansion
• As you end at your feet, notice what it feels like to meet the “ocean” and then become the ocean as you extend energetic roots into the earth, lengthen in your energetic tether to the sky, and feel into your “3D” presence

Questions for Reflection

1. What wisdom lives in the place where your resistance meets your longing?

2. What’s your ocean—your future that you’re resisting and becoming?

Footnotes

1. One of the many reasons I love songs and poetry is for their power to stop time—I can get lost in their lines, feeling a memory long forgotten, seeking to soak in their magical ability to shift my mood, a mystery begging me to linger. And when I linger, they extend an invitation, an offering, a question—along with a reminder that I’m not alone. I call these spacious reads for the space they create for me to simply be with myself. Contrast that with the art and media I consume to escape being with myself.
2. While commonly attributed to Khalil Gibran, I wasn’t able to find a primary source of this poem. I did find a reference to a possible source by another author, proposing that it evolved (and was channeled) through multiple authors.

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A few years ago, I engaged with a CliftonStrengths based coach and it lit me up! After a couple of especially hard years leading through massive uncertainty inside a new global pandemic, to be reminded of my strengths instead of the struggle refueled me.

I brought her in to coach everyone in our small company and spent time focusing on and building on top of what we were great at. It was a breath of fresh air and gave us a shared vocabulary to grow together. We’d survived and were now ready for a respite—to thrive!

Ironically, illuminating my strengths highlighted the shadows they cast. Self-Assuredness, for example, had long been my superpower for plunging into the unknown, confident in my resilience and ability to quickly learn, adapt, and excel. I hadn’t realized that others would see my assuredness and assume that what I shared was “the unanimous truth” instead of my experience. I felt compelled to preamble: “I can’t say for certain, but my gut tells me…” or tag on “at least that’s my take/how I see it” despite decades of perfecting agentic communication to fit into a masculine business culture.

As I practiced my preambles and footnotes, I listened to myself. And, self-doubt slipped its tiny wrench in, wedging a bigger and stronger gap between the knowing in my body and the knowing in my mind. What if this has always been a ruse? What if I really don’t know? What if I’m one of “those people” who talks a bigger game than they can play? What if I lead others down a bad/wrong path simply because I was so certain when I shouldn’t have been?

This sent me into a tailspin. I was, despite my assuredness, also trying to play within a world of right and wrong—and that world has no place for self-knowing. In my quest to be right, I was making myself wrong.

In my quest to be right, I was making myself wrong.

It didn’t stop with Self-Assuredness. I fixated on the “cautions” affixed to my other top strengths (Relator, Achiever, Strategic, Arranger), determined to control my impact—to be “perfect,” thus minimizing my impact.

Furthermore, when I started training in Somatic Intuitive Healing and somatic coaching with bodywork, we held the key tenet: Cause No Harm. Let me tell you, as someone with no prior training in a medical field or massage—I was frightened to hold a body. What if I did something, unintentionally, to hurt them? While I rationalized the fear (reverence for another body is, after all, appropriate), it limited my options: I could either do great good at the risk of great harm; or little harm at the risk of little good. Once again, I found myself inclined to play small.

Looking back at this trajectory, it feels obvious. I heard “you’re too much” so I over-compensated by being “too little.” Mind you, what I heard was the voice of my own insecurity. What I’d come to learn, largely while I was participating with powerful coaches inside of a nine-month program for leaders committed to transformation in the service of others, is the power of choosing to own my impact vs control it.

Ownership requires me to be responsible for my impact, without exhausting myself trying to control the infinite factors that influence how another is impacted. Now, instead of ping-ponging between too much and too little, around right/wrong, my focus in on the impact I want to have—and trusting that I can cleanup when I miss. It also frees me up to trust in others’ resilience, and fostering resilience is a large part of the work I do as a holistic transformative coach.

To circle back to the beginning, in the way that life is more of a spiral than linear, owning my impact frees me up to have choice as I play to my strengths. Sure, I still feel a tinge of apprehension but now, instead of it owning me, I can center and choose into the impact I desire.

Have you ever received feedback on your strengths that tripped you up? How did you get through to owning your superpowers vs shying away from them?

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My journey into coaching and somatics began in 2006, as a first-time executive director. During a 360, my CEO reflected that I was brilliant with the technical side of business, but challenged with the people. And, so, off I went to an embodied leadership training course that would change my life—albeit not overnight or in the ways I’d expected.

My leadership coach referred me to a Somatic Experiencing therapist, where I healed from developmental, sexual, physical, and emotional traumas. I took up Aikido, learned how to move past freeze, take up space, love myself, end abusive relationships, and find physical anchors for confidence and trust.

After leaving that job, I started a virtual agency, an international startup, a local entrepreneurial peer support group, and pursued a series of hobbies including photography, cycling, aerial, acro, music, road tripping, travel, and of course the requisite Pacific Northwest backpacking and party-throwing. In between ventures, I’d work for founders to turn around sinking ships and launch new ones, leading teams and products to profitability as an interim or fractional director or producer. While my professional passions and roles would shift, I’d continue to work with coaches, trainers, therapists, and healers. By 2019, I was in the best shape of my life—physically and emotionally.

We Always Need Water, even when we’re not thirsty

When the pandemic first hit, I felt unflappable. I became a first-time at-home caregiver, ramped up my community service, and slowly began to take on more client challenges as my own. I slowly neglected to prioritize my well-being and by early 2021 faced burnout. I wish I could share that I handled it with grace, but the truth is likely messier.

Luckily, these challenging times came with significant life lessons:

• When I water a plant (ahem, myself) “back to life”, I don’t get to stop watering it
• I’m human
• Change is constant
• Healing is forever
• I have the most incredible angels
• I had a new act to begin—and a spiritual life to nourish

A New Act: the Sanctuary

During the great burnout of ’21, I packed up my home of 16 years and downsized—and began building a personal sanctuary. It was time to come back home to myself. I finally had the space to listen to my own inner wisdom—and something much greater than I’d ever imagined.

I enrolled in (a) the same somatics program as I had in 2006, this time to become a coach, and (b) a trauma-informed somatic intuitive healing program. More would follow, as I fell deeply in love with the new level of depth this afforded me in my work with others.

On February 1, 2023, I had an itch to start a podcast. I didn’t know what it’d be about; but, while recording, I read a poem, pulled a Wild Unknown Animal Spirit Card, and Unstruck Sound (the podcast) was named—and 3 months later, Unstruck Sanctuary followed.

The name comes from a concept found across myriad cultures and spiritual traditions, roughly translated from Sanskrit as “Unstruck Sound.” It refers to the primordial sound that exists within all aspects of creation and life—an underlying vibration/frequency that gives rise to (a) everything in existence and (b) a belief that you can live a more fulfilling life when you have the space and support to connect with (and feel your connection to) this lifeforce and inner wisdom.

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