“You’re gonna have to let things be a little messy.”
I’ve heard those words throughout my life - in readings, coaching sessions, transformational trainings, downloaded in my own meditations.
My stomach would turn every time.
If the word “messy” also makes you nervous, you’ve come to the right place.
It’s hard to articulate exactly what messy is, but we know it when we’re in it. It’s a feeling of being out of control. It’s a feeling of being in limbo and being unsettled.
It’s knowing that you can’t predict and map out all the steps, follow through with calculated precision and check off every box just as planned. And having that experience feel so wrong.
Behind these steps and this discomfort is what has been my life’s work:
Releasing control.
I realize control is an illusion.
And yet, I grew up thinking I needed to control as many circumstances around me as possible, always.
Throughout my twenties I followed it to a t. I mapped everything out everything as much as I possibly could. Everything around me needed to get in line. And yes, that included people around me too.
I was constantly running things in my mind. I needed to be two steps ahead of “life”.
In hindsight, it sounds exhausting. In the moment, it was the only way I knew how to live.
I now see that at the root of it was twofold:
Being terrified of life happening (Because the world was a scary place where horrible things happened and they could happen to me and I needed to at the very least prepare and prevent them), and
Being so sure that I wouldn’t be able to handle life getting hard (Because I had spent my life avoiding sadness, conflict and anger and I wasn’t about to start now. Because I didn’t think I was built to overcome these emotions and they would swallow me whole).
I remember the first time I had to truly embrace messy. It happened when my son’s father and I started trying to get pregnant. For once, I recognized that this thing, I couldn’t perfectly plan. I didn’t know when or if it could happen, I couldn’t “project plan” how the pregnancy would go, I couldn’t schedule the birth date or experience.
Most recently, thirteen years later, I had to embrace what felt like mess in a period of my life that called for me to slow way down in my business. I felt a spiritual pull to focus on healing, family, relationships, and home. I fought it and in the process unconsciously created my own mess. I’ve had to peel layers and layers of control within me. It shook me to my very core.
There is an unexpected alchemical magic in these pivotal moment of “mess”.
They show you what you are truly made of, and that maybe you could live life and let things be messy.
Maybe you could release control, allow yourself to be supported, and make room for beautiful things to come to you.
Maybe your “mess” is shaking you up in different ways:
Not knowing what you want to do next with your career
Being in limbo in your long-term romantic relationship
Following through with a soul calling and allowing other things to be messy for a while as you pursue it
At some point, you get tired of fighting it.
You throw your hands up in the air, and you just say “Fuck it!”. You just release it.
I’ve found that (for us control freaks), this moment is the beginning of your liberation.
Releasing control is a practice. I’ve been at it for thirteen years. Profoundly beautiful things have come to me when I recognize that I am not alone, that the world is safe, that I am co-creating with the Universe, that I don’t have to be running everything.
Here are three ideas you can try to start practicing releasing control:
Start small: Find something you do every day that you feel the need to control, and decide to just stop. Maybe you tell your child to do something daily. Maybe you get annoyed at the same thing not happening all the time. For one week, stop saying it, release it. Notice your reaction with curiosity. Journal and take deep breaths. With each exhale, feel yourself releasing it.
Put your focus elsewhere: If you’ve been hitting your head against the wall for a while in pursuit of something that feels really hard - give yourself a rest with a fun different job for a while. For one week, decide that your job is instead to do something creative and fun. For one week, you can paint, dance, go to yoga, read a silly novel. Check in with yourself one week later and notice your shifts and your insights.
Sit with messy: Find something more significant in your life that you feel you need to control, and decide that for one week you will allow it to just be, you will allow whatever happens to happen, you will trust that things will eventually work out. Take it as an experiment and simply watch what happens. Sit with breathing deeply through it and expanding your capacity to be with what’s messy.
If you imagine control as an energy - it feels constricting, scared, tight, limited, hesitant. It’s suffocating and it takes over.
The energy of messy instead, has the space to be free, light, expansive. It has the space to transmute and become, and come into a new order rooted in trust, not control.
The release of control makes that space.
It makes space for wonderful things to come to you.
It makes space for the Universe and others around you to step in.
It makes space for matters to be resolved without your heavy intervention.
It makes for who you truly are to surface.
And wow, from this thrilling joy of your authentic expression, inspired action takes hold and it is so sweet.
Are you willing to embrace it? Let me know in the comments!
Cheering on your freedom and celebrating your mess.
👑 Book time to chat
If you’d like support this Fall in starting a new chapter in your life that comes from your wholeness, joy and truth - let’s hop on a call and talk about working together. I’d love to support you through this journey.
