Are you Rising Strong?

‪#‎risingstrong‬ What I love about Sunday is it's a time for me to renew. I've been reading Brené Brown's new book, Rising Strong. It talks about the difficult Act 2 of your story. It's the no-fun part where you're too far down the road to turn around and go back yet you can't see anything familiar. You're in the dark and you hate it. 

Marci Shimoff might argue that in the life trilogy of going from Intention to Attention to No Tension that it's the No Tension part of our journey from here to there. That's what Act 2 is all about. It's that part where you've gotten clear about your intention and have applied everything that you are and know into giving attention to it. Yet, there comes a point where there is nothing more you can do. Nothing you try works. Doors you knock on don't open. Folks who said they'd help are nowhere to be found. It's that place where the hustle and bustle of doing goes away and you find yourself in an eerily quiet space. Marci says that's where you have to release it to the Universe to do the magic. 

What makes it the hardest part however is it's as if someone turned the lights out. Life has shut you down and no longer supports anything more. In the Grander Scheme, nothing else is required of you; yet you see nothing that even looks like God/Universe is on board. It's as if He's closed up shop and gone home too. Though, I'm not experiencing that now, Life experience has taught me to expect those Winter seasons where there is no more harvesting to be done. You just have to allow nature to sleep in a cold, hard cocoon until the kiss of Spring awakens it again. I haven't fared well emotionally during those times, if I were to be honest with you. God knows it and I know it. But I hear something Wise inside perking its ears to a rustle as the Bigness of God rides on the winds of awareness. 

He's showing me what's behind the curtain so that I can embrace the Act 2 of life, the No Tension of life, the Winter of life when it comes around again. What's behind the curtain? It's the struggle where the caterpillar instinctively fights. He doesn't know what he's struggling for. All he knows is that he must. It is not until he breaks himself open that he sees the Light that has been there all the time. And in that Light, he is a Higher Form of himself. Totally unrecognizable to those who were not privy to the cocoon experience; yet more powerful than He ever imagined. To me, that's what Rising Strong is all about.