Integrate #12: Your Fresh Chapter
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Integrate: Home
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1: Find Comfort
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2: Hold Space
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3: Create Ease
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4: Practice Intention
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5: Get Curious
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6: Be Vulnerable
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7: Live in Contradiction
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8: Explore Possibility
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9: Practice Ease
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10: Empower Change
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11: Stay Connected
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12: Your Fresh Chapter
Integrate Series #12: Your Fresh Chapter
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~ Rainer Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
No matter what changes you want to make in your life, the willingness to change means learning to embrace uncertainty as a constant practice. It means failing. Not getting it all right the first time. Taking the wrong paths until one feels right. But, what if you could trust that this messy and (sometimes) emotional path IS starting a fresh chapter? That Rilke was onto something when he said…
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
What would living the questions look like for you? How could you “let yourself off the hook” if you were able to focus on asking yourself the right questions instead of beating yourself up for not having the “right” answers?
Uncertainty will always be difficult. We are hard-wired to want answers. As we wrap up this Integrate Series, it would be nice if we could package everything up for you and promise that the hard part was over. If only it were that simple to start a fresh chapter.
You may not yet be able to see how you’ve changed over the course of our Odyssey together, but with the benefit of time you will continue to see where you have come from and begin to chart your course for what parts of yourself and the world you will explore next.
Since we met, you have taken risks, gained new skills for approaching your life, and become part of a community that will be here to celebrate your victories and catch you when you fall.
This is not the end. It is simply your next beginning.
Activity
Sit down with your journal or a good friend and think about all of the periods of uncertainty in your life where amazing things have been waiting for you on the other side. What have you gained because of this uncertainty? How might you harness those skills to feel more empowered to create change in the future?
Write or Create
Read More
There is no right way to tackle the reflection prompts below. You can answer any, all, or none of the questions. You can either write the answers in a more traditional journaling format (either in a physical journal or an online journal) or you could explore the creative process of art journaling. Other options are to sit down with someone in your life or connect with someone in your tribe and ask these questions of each other. Whatever reflection mode you choose, you are welcome to answer any, all, or none of the questions. This is simply an opportunity to carve out some time to reflect and see what emerges.
- What skills have I gained that help me cope with uncertainty?
- What am I proud of myself for, since my A Fresh Chapter experience began?
- What questions do I want to focus on?