Thriving Through Uncertainty

by Tama J Kieves

A calming thought isn’t just a placebo. It’s a weapon of choice that stops fear in its tracks. It can wake you up. By taking direction of your mind, you can engage in actions that serve you and others, instead of ones that don’t. The Buddhists call this being skillful.

  Calm is the new black. It’s what you want to wear in times of change, trust me. I want my airline pilots and emergency room doctors calm—okay, not drooling and Thorazine calm, but centered, so they can summon the specifics of their training. And I want to be calm, so I can make exquisite choices instead of knee-jerk reactive ones.

  Besides, the story you tell yourself is the story you live. It’s uncanny how true this is. I have an example that knocked my socks off, though I didn’t have socks on at the time.

  I remember taking an intense vinyasa yoga class. The teacher started telling us that we would be moving into wheel pose. I swear I could feel my lower back muscles text my brain, “Boss says pain in 5.” Then Anastasia, our muscled guru, said something that caught the whole class off guard: “Pretend this is the easiest pose you’ll ever do.” Wheel pose, the easiest pose you’ll ever do. It was such a wildly suggestive thing to say—like pretend doing your taxes is like having sex with your favorite movie star, only better, and audits, oh, you don’t even want to know.

  Because wheel pose is a nightmare. Yes, it also might be a tiny bit true that I make it like climbing Mount Everest without gear because I resist the pose, when really it’s only as hard as climbing Mount Everest with gear. Usually, I wait to get it over with in any class. Yup, that’s me, tightening with every namaste.

  But thinking of it as an easy pose, I softened. I imagined it could be easy. It was a preposterous idea. Maybe it was a hypnotic suggestion. Maybe it was Vedic voodoo, calling forth the mercies of noodle-bodied Hindu gods. I think it was a nunchaku to my head, thwacking me with responsibility for my experience of my experience. Because thinking of it as easy helped me to breathe deeper and focus on what I could do. My wheel pose that day was so much better. Yes, just in case you’re wondering, it’s still easier for me to eat my body weight in milk chocolate. But it was freer and that was a miracle.

  I invite you to become a ninja of freedom. Take responsibility for your perspective. Step out of imagining the world you think exists. Choose to catch your mental breath. What are you telling yourself that is upsetting you? Can you tell yourself something else? This is a rhetorical question, because I know you can tell yourself something else. Think of something that calms you down, even if it’s simply that you do not know what anything means right now. This is the right use of your mind. This is the beginning of freedom and directing your extraordinary faculties.

  Whatever you’re going through, no matter how much fear you’re in, this much I can promise you:

  You are just one thought away from a miracle.

  TURNING POINTS:

  You Are Just One Thought Away from a Miracle

  Uncertainty is going to happen. But crazy-town and electric violins are optional.

  If you want an incredible life—which I know you do—you must choose how you experience your experience. Because your response to your life is your life.

  We do not fear uncertainty. We fear our certainty—as in we become “certain” about what things mean.

  You have no idea what experience can open up for you—as you choose to use your mind in a way that strengthens you.

  A calming thought isn’t just a placebo. It’s a weapon of choice that stops fear in its tracks.

  The story you tell yourself is the story you live. It’s uncanny how true this is.

  Think of something that calms you down, even if it’s simply that you do not know what anything means right now. This is the right use of your mind.

  Whatever you’re going through . . . you are just one thought away from a miracle.

  WHAT’S FALLING APART IS WHAT’S COMING TOGETHER

  The creative force of change that is impairing my current life is also guiding my expansion. It’s the same stroke of the paintbrush.

  TAMA KIEVES (journal entry)

  What could you not accept if you but knew that all events, past, present and to come were gently planned by one Whose only purpose is your good?

  TAMA KIEVES (from A Course in Miracles)

  Most of us don’t relish change. The Persian mystic poet Rumi says that if you asked an embryo why he or she remains scrunched in the dark “with eyes closed,” this is the answer you would hear: “There is no ‘other world.’ I only know what I’ve experienced.”

  There is no other world. We have all sung this dirge in one form or another. There is no love for me outside this loveless marriage. There is no money for me beyond this draining career. There is no way to have things fall together now, because if they were supposed to come together they would have; I must be riding on a rickshaw while everyone else caught the plane.

  It takes enormous courage to believe that things can be different. Or that there is a life beyond what you can see or even imagine—or a you that is whole and inspired.

  “There is no other world,” says your fear. And to this I say, with great deference to your pain: Poppycock—whatever that actually means.

  Because change is always what’s for dinner. Buddha said that all suffering stems from trying to hold on to your chocolate mousse. Well, he didn’t say that. He said we try to make things permanent. The nature of reality is fluid. Real life cracks open, breathes, disintegrates, and expands. It always expands, even when we feel like things are stuck or going in the wrong direction.

  Life is designed to shimmy. We are designed to let go of our lobster shells and grow into new ones.

  Your true happiness does not come from a stable stock market, a feast of jobs or potential relationships, or climate control. It’s about learning how to thrive in the times when you lack control.

  Boys and girls, we live in dynamic times. And we are dynamos. We are dynamos being roused into our powers.

  “The voice of eternity within us demands to be heard,” says the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, “and to make a hearing for itself it makes use of the loud voice of affliction, and when, by the aid of affliction, all irrelevant voices are brought to silence, it can be heard.” That’s a high-class way of saying that pain can awaken you to your big-picture life, and the only relevant voice there is your True Self.

  You are not the erratic conditions of this moment. You are a powerhouse. You are a continuous force of evolution. You are a phenomenon, a surprise even to yourself. An inspired life is more than the life you planned. This is the nature of thriving. There is an orchestration, a calculation, sometimes an ambush, yet always an intelligence fueling the “chaos.”

  I never imagined that my life could get so out of control. But I found myself sitting on a beach in Northern California, staring at the waves, thinking about taking my own life. I couldn’t bear to practice law for one more day. And I could not let myself quit. Just the week before, I couldn’t summon my usually ferocious willpower and write the brief in front of me. There was some other will going on now.

  I was so tired. Fighting myself all the time. I hate this job. You have to stay in this job. The boxing match that never ended. I thought I was being practical. I thought I was being strong. I look back now, years later, and realize I was fighting against a tidal wave. I was pushing back the hunger to live my full expression—and the most amazing awakening that has ever happened to me. I was resisting my True Life.

  “It’s a strength to be undoing that which no longer works for you, even when you think it does. Undoing is progress, not mayhem.”

  I came home from California a mess. A few weeks later, I walked out of my career without a plan or a viable source of income. It was an end and a beginning. Years later, now in a life in which I have taught so many others to awaken their inspired lives, I can’t imagine that I could have ever chosen another life, a li
fe that denied my creativity, my essence, my life’s purpose, and the wildest happiness I’ve ever known. But I tried to hold on to what I knew at the time. We all do.

  We all have a True Life, the life that does not look like our plans, yet perhaps arises from a deeper wisdom within. This other intelligence sweeps past our conditioning and defies our expectations of how things should go. This life brings us to surrender or acceptance even when we do not yet understand what’s going on. It brings us to the truth of our bones. The True Life always prevails. The soul’s desires are formidable.

  I have seen brilliant transformations in people who have faced addiction, health issues, or the death of a loved one. I have seen these shifts in those who seek to express their life’s work or experience true love. Whatever the situation, the shift is always the same: You can’t do what you’ve always done—and then over time you can do what you’ve never done. And always in the end, you have touched the eternal within you. You wouldn’t go back for anything.

  This is the gift of uncertain times. Know that it’s a strength to be undoing that which no longer works for you, even when you think it does. Undoing is progress, not mayhem.

  The artist Pablo Picasso wrote, “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.” And the philosopher Nietzsche said, “You must become a chaos before giving birth to a shining star.” These are not poetic elaborations. They are descriptions of how a metamorphosis works. First, things fall apart before they fall together.

  A mother doesn’t have to understand or even trust the birth process to give birth. Your next expression wants to be born. Great and mighty forces marshal their strength around you. It’s your time. You’re uncovering a new way to breathe and feel safe in the world, even though you can’t imagine it. Change may wear a wolf suit. Still, don’t be fooled. It’s wild, abundant magic come knocking on your door.

  It’s okay to feel as though you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t. You can’t supervise creativity, alchemy, reinvention, evolution, and the divine flower rearrangement of your life. Yet if you trusted the Energy behind this miracle of change, you wouldn’t want to control a thing. You’d throw everything you had into the blender and watch it yield a grace beyond all reason.

  This is your choice. You can move into co-creation with your life instead of trying to turn the larger forces into something smaller—while continuing to yearn for a larger life.

  Here’s the work. It’s not about staying in control. It’s about staying in love.

  I know this isn’t easy to do. But you can take the fun bus or the misery bus, because either way you’re going for a ride. If you want to thrive, this is your practice: Let go of how you think things should go right now. Taste the possibility that something wise and beautiful is taking place. It is.

  For right now, I’d like to offer you two simple strategies for embracing the raw juice of change.

  Don’t Get a Grip: Be Gripped

  Do not try to make this transitional time look like what your old life looked like. This is revolution, darling, and it will torpedo your armed guards and old rules.

  Lisa left her position as a pharmaceutical sales rep to reclaim her spirit, which she had squelched for years. Initially, she soaked up the newness of time off. That lasted for about six days, which isn’t even six seconds in the algorithm of transformation.

  Then the mad griffin of responsibility shrieked in her ears, “You’re worthless.” And Lisa began to realize that she had spent her life in constant activity to fight off this underlying feeling. This is one of the hallmarks of transition. You meet the irrelevant voices that are telling you irrelevant lies.

  “I’ve slept in and I didn’t even shower until midmorning,” Lisa whispered on the phone, as though the KGB might be on the line, when really it was just her inner critic—which might be worse. “I wore my blue bathrobe for hours,” she whined. I couldn’t see her, but I was willing to bet she was even making the shape of an L for “loser” on her forehead. “Oh, the transgression,” I mock sighed. I was pleased with her incremental freedom. She was gradually shedding old skins, the type A snake molting into a new, unorthodox, available being. Shedding does not feel like building. Shedding does not feel like nailing it. Shedding is not a time for excelling.

  I wrote a section called “The Year of Sleeping Dangerously” in my first book, This Time I Dance!: Creating the Work You Love, because I wanted all the guilt-ridden achievers out there to know that sometimes breakthrough change requires rest, self-care, and staring into space and middle-earth like your cat. (And at readings, everyone thanks me for this part of the book.) There are secrets and shifts you can’t manufacture by scratching things off of your left brain’s to-do list. Your True Self is not listless. It’s invincible. It’s inevitable. It’s got bigger plans.

  You don’t have to get a grip. Be gripped, as in moved from within. I know you think that if you let go of self-control you will turn into a zombie or lag behind the wunderkind cosmopolitan crowd. But I promise you trust is the fast track—it’s the only track—to your right life.

  Fall in Love with the Unknown

  The unknown is not the enemy. It’s an invitation to become even more alive than you were before. Please resist the temptation to grab at ready-made solutions and definitions too soon. In the haste to end uncertainty, those of you who are impatient—and you know who you are because you’ve probably skipped to the exercises already—may opt for promises and detours that do not match your essence. In an authentic life, there are no prefab answers. Hold out for the fab ones.

  One of my friends tells me she married the wrong man when she was twenty-two because she “didn’t want to wait forever.” A student once confessed that he knew he was exhausted but took on a higher-level project at work anyway because he wanted to prove to himself he wasn’t weak. He ended up on a gurney having emergency stomach surgery. I’ve also watched clients go back to school for another degree, program, ribbon, bauble, or certification just because “I’m going to school” sounds so much better than “I’m freaking out like a cat in a hat. I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.”

  What if you’re not stuck? What if you’re not adrift? What if you’re supposed to be right here in the dead center of it all for reasons you can’t see yet? Something else is going on. Birth doesn’t follow strategy, but it does follow a trajectory.

  The unknown offers you an unparalleled life. Trust that your gut and soul have a way. And that a Creative Intelligence only paints in shades of love. The caterpillar must dissolve so that the butterfly can emerge. It’s so unbecoming. Yet lean into your becoming.

  When our plans fail, our destiny begins. We’re off the map. We’re on track for an awakening life. Nothing is the same. It’s a rite of passage.

  If change blows apart your best-laid plans, there’s wild magic to be had. It can be painful initially. Yet it’s grace that stirs all winds. Remember:

  You are not your conditions.

  You are your response to your conditions.

  You are your strength, love, intelligence, and choices. And you are more powerful than you know. That’s why this change is here. You are growing.

  TURNING POINTS:

  What’s Falling Apart Is What’s Coming Together

  True happiness does not come from a stable stock market, a feast of jobs or potential relationships, or climate control. It’s about learning how to thrive in the times when you lack control.

  The shift is always the same: You can’t do what you’ve always done—and then over time you can do what you’ve never done.

  It’s a strength to be undoing that which no longer works for you, even when you think it does. Undoing is progress, not mayhem.

  A mother doesn’t have to understand or even trust the birth process to give birth. Your next expression wants to be born. . . . It’s your time.

  Change may wear a wolf suit. Stil
l, don’t be fooled. It’s wild, abundant magic come knocking on your door.

  It’s okay to feel as though you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t. You can’t supervise creativity, alchemy, reinvention, evolution, and the divine flower rearrangement of your life.

  You think that if you let go of self-control you will turn into a zombie. . . . But I promise you trust is the fast track—it’s the only track—to your right life.

  When our plans fail, our destiny begins. We’re off the map. We’re on track for an awakening life.

  IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO CREATE A BAD LIFE IF YOU’RE GOOD TO YOURSELF

  It’s amazing to listen to the love within you more than your fear, and to discover a consistent constellation of abundance that dwarfs the scope of any plan.

  TAMA KIEVES (from Inspired & Unstoppable)

  If you listen to your heart and you love yourself, everything good will come from there. Really, it’s just not possible to create a bad life if you befriend yourself.

  TAMA KIEVES (journal entry)

  As a career and success coach, I hear my fair share of wanting to bulldoze through change, especially when life seems to throb like a toothache, turn into the life you never thought you’d have, or slow to a crawl through the rubbery land of powerlessness.

  Everybody wants to rush through transition like it’s a bad root canal. But transition is a threshold. It’s a sacred life appointment—the crossing from one world to another. You will reclaim yourself here, be infused with messages you could receive no other way. This is not just positive mumbo jumbo. I am describing to you a possibility that exists for you, right now, right here, and will not come again, at least, not in this way.

  I know, maybe you’d still rather have the root canal.

  Maybe your phone doesn’t ring with new clients. Or no one calls you back for a second interview. You still can’t believe your wife left. The recent diagnosis hangs in the air like a sword, a curse, a question, a dream, not yet admitted into regular life. And there is the terror of feeling as though you’re not on solid ground—and may never be again.