Something in my business needs to die

A couple of months ago I wrote about when the spark burns out, because I hadn’t been feeling myself in my business this year.

I talked about how following one of my highest revenue months I froze and seemingly fell off the face of the earth. I stopped showing up and completely pulled back. I started questioning if what I was offering was actually what I wanted to be offering, or if I just found myself going through the motions.

I don’t do well doing things that I don’t want to do. I need to be passionate about what I pour my heart into or else I either refuse to do it or I will complain about doing it the whole time I’m doing it. The only exception being when I choose a hard path that I’m passionate about, because hard and passion-filled are not mutually exclusive and oftentimes the things that I’m passionate about require a level of devotion that involves a lot of hard work.

I’m not here to take the easy road, but I do tend to find myself on the more pleasurable road, and I love that about how I have chosen to live my life.

• Dating and practicing fully receiving

• Flirting with life, and people

• Saying yes more

• Saying no more, too

• Living with less urgency

• Working with a biz coach to parse out my thoughts and feelings around where I’m taking my work next

• Taking mini overnight trips to the mountains and playing in the river like a lil nymph

• Taking care of my physical body again with pilates, massages, acupuncture, etc.

• Spending time with my family in Canada

• Picking sea glass on the beach near my hometown

• Going to concerts and dancing my ass off again

• Resting more and leaning into my own pleasure on a deeper level

• Thinking more about what I want the next chapter of my life to look like

I lost a lot of steam in my business when things started feeling as though they weren’t working anymore—not in the external sense, because this was just after my highest income month ever. I can always make that work, but more in the internal sense similar to when I quit corporate in 2016, or right before I got sober in 2020.

Each of those times—in 2016 and 2020—I had to fully surrender, to let something go that I had been holding onto for dear life. In 2016 it was my relationship, all my belongings, and my great job with great, stable pay for a young University drop-out like me. In 2020 it was the bottle that kept me from facing myself and the emotions I was numbing. I had to fully let go and fall into the uncertainty and discomfort, and every time I’d find myself on the other side of the veil with new wings like a butterfly who just found out what type of beauty comes from a full trust fall into the soup.

Things that I was doing (then and now) are no longer working for me. I no longer feel excited about my work, which is where the metaphorical “death” comes in. I’m letting everything that no longer works fall away so I can find out what does work for me going forward.

Instead of showing up for my business I started spending more time binge watching new series, scrolling through social media again (on my desktop because I had already deleted the apps from my phone but I still found a way), and just doing “busy work” like opening my email 27 times a day because it felt productive even though the only emails I was getting were from other people doing their own thing, but I didn’t have any excitement to do anything else.

Every time this happens it’s because there’s a part of my identity that is ready to die. A part of me that no longer wants to take centre stage, but rather is ready to be alchemized into a new form in the foundation of my being, much like the example of sobriety and my corporate persona, which are still parts of who I am, but they aren’t at the forefront of how I show up anymore.

This time it’s surrounding the part of me who is a coach and astrologer. These parts of me started to feel empty, as if the physical shell of me was showing up, but what was happening on the inside was a disconnect from the passion. I no longer felt excited about the work I was doing. Although I could hold space for others, I didn’t want to in the same way as I did before. It was almost like I was showing up because I knew I was good at it, but my heart wasn’t in it in the same way.

And if you know me like I know me, it’s really hard for me to continuously show up for something I’m not fully passionate about, if I do it at all.

I’m pressing pause on my coaching and astrology so that I can fully let this death cycle happen. My plan is to show up more here on substack to share my process, stories from the past and present, and just anything that lights me up in the moment.

I’ll be using this time as a little experimentation period.

Which means I’m also pressing pause on my New Moon Workshops that happen each month. This is not me saying they will never be back, but I have a feeling they will be reborn in a new form, if at all.

With that being said, I’m grateful for those of you who continue to support me financially on Substack. I considered pausing paid subscriptions, but I decided against it because I know there are people here who want to offer their support in this way, those who still gain value from the words I share, those who will want to access old paid articles that still hold up, and who want access to new paid articles coming in the future.

Your support does not go unnoticed, and it is currently the only thing sustaining me at this moment (other than my own savings which are dwindling fast). I’m learning it’s okay to receive even (and especially) when I’m in a less externally productive season.

I need to trust that this season of uncertainty and discomfort is something I can fully lean into, and in order to do that in a way that feels good to me I need to willingly let some things fall away in the meantime. I need to let the external pressure valve release some steam so I can fully lean into the beauty of the unknown without trying to force an outcome on a timeline that is not mine to control.

SO if you also find yourself in a season of uncertainty, how about following along? We can go on the journey together!