What If You’re Not Moving Forward?

1/5/21

Dear friend,

Last week I wrote about trusting the timing of things. (If you missed that article, you can read it here.)

The day after it went out, I met with a friend who had read it. She asked, "What if you've learned to trust the timing of things so much, it keeps you from moving forward?"

I love that she asked this question.

And maybe you can relate.

For example, what if you're a recovering perfectionist (like I am, like she is)? Perhaps you know the life that used to be one of striving and pushing and hustling to prove your worth, but now you reject that as the baseline for your existence. Now you live firmly in the belief of your belovedness for simply being, not for doing.

It can be hard to trust the nudge into any kind of doing when you've intentionally unlearned a life based on that.

(This is totally my story. When I was required to take a course on the spiritual disciplines early on in my graduate program after I'd spent seven years deepening into the reality of grace and my belovedness, I had no small degree of a bad attitude going into that class!)

Or here's another way it could look.

Maybe you've worked long and hard on inner healing, learning through the process about your many parts—your child part, your teenage part, your adult part, your healing part, your growing part, and all the many other parts of you there are—and now your deep, integrated reality is one of listening to and caring for all of your parts with kindness, attention, and compassion.

At any given time, one of those parts may not want to do the thing that's in front of you, presenting itself as a next step forward. What do you do then?

In these moments, the question is always, "What's the invitation here?"

And the tough thing is, there's no one answer to this. This is the work of discerning our true invitation in any given moment or situation.

There's a lot that can be said about discernment, but perhaps one place to start is with the teaching of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who gifted humanity with immense wisdom on the work of discernment.

He spoke of three ways discernment can look.

• The first is to know immediately, even if we can't explain it. Something inside us just knows the thing we're being invited to do.
  

• The second is to notice our interior movements of consolation and desolation. As you hold each possibility, does your inner spirit drop, grow listless, wilt? Does it surge, enflame with life, pulse with joy? Noticing the subtle inner movements of consolation and desolation can help us know our true invitation in a discernment situation.
  

• The third and last is to weigh things out and simply make a decision. This is the suggested way forward when we don't instinctively know what to do and are not noticing clear spiritual energies pulling us toward fullness of life or absence of life in a discernment. We weigh things out and then decide, requesting the grace of peace to confirm it.

I'm curious if there's anything you would add to the conversation about moving forward or staying put when competing desires, interests, or concerns weigh in. Feel free to reply and share your thoughts with me!

Yours in ongoing discernment,
Christianne