I’ve had several conversations this week with clients and friends who desire to create new situations in their lives.
They’ve talked about wanting to create new eating patterns, exercise routines, careers, businesses, living spaces, romances, hobbies, budgets, friendships, more time with their spouses and kids, etc.
It’s all very admirable. After all, it is springtime and we’ve had a rough cold winter at least here in the northeast. We are emerging from the freeze with renewed zest for getting back into our lives and planting the seeds for our next stage of growth.
However, I have noticed a glaring pattern in most of these conversations. I have sensed stress, strain, fatigue and burnout as the underlying energy fueling these new desires. There is a sense of running away from these uncomfortable feelings as the source of creation for something new, as opposed to choosing from a place of deep desire and inspiration.
It took me a while to get what was going on.
I feel the work I do is sacred. 
As a holistic psychotherapist and life coach, I work with clients all week long who are going through major transitions of one kind or another; relationship endings and beginnings, career changes, geographic changes, death or loss of a loved one, health challenges, etc.
In my recent blog entitled, Is Your Old Life Dying?, I wrote about the way in which life is speeding up these days and so many of us are seeing our old lives fall away while being called to birth something new. Many times we have no idea what this new life is supposed to be or how we are going to create it, but the old way of living simply feels outdated, suffocating, uninspired and boring. I especially see this in the clients I work with who are in their late 30’s to mid-fifties and beyond.
I listened to a call by one of my mentor coaches this week, Martha Beck, in which she talked about the rapidly accelerating pace of change that is taking place in the world, and in all of our lives, like never before. There is a quickening going on and we are finding situations in our lives collapsing in a way that we are being called to reinvent ourselves, over and over, often in profound and dramatic ways.