MAJOR LIFE TRANSITIONS
Excerpt from a lecture given February 26, 2002
When you’re in the first phase of a major life transition, most people want you to just shape up and get over it! You feel guilty. You feel that you should be able to just get over it. You say, “Something’s wrong with me. I can’t pull myself together. I can’t function. I’m exhausted. I’m overwhelmed. I just want to lie down and sleep. Life no longer has meaning for me. I feel like crying all the time. I’m terrified and don’t know why.”
If you are in a relationship with a person who is experiencing the first phase of major life transition, you are feeling frustrated, emotionally abandoned, unheard and unseen. If you are a nurturing person, you feel guilty because nothing you can do will make your loved one feel better. You can’t fix them.
Twenty years ago, it was rare for me to meet a person who was experiencing major life transition. In recent years, with the acceleration of universal energy, this phenomenon has become commonplace. Of course, we have always experienced transition in our lives. I’m not talking about the usual kinds of changes that we would expect in the natural course of life experience. I’m talking about a transition that commands change in every part of our experience, that forces emotional catharsis, that brings our present lives to an end and brings forth new challenges and new opportunities. Major life transition transforms our state of being.
Through years of observation, I have come to the belief that the years of our lives are predetermined. I am convinced that before entering this dimension of experience, the soul defines for itself the challenges it wishes to meet, the talents it wishes to develop, the relationships it wishes to refine and/or deepen, and the knowledge it wishes to gain. If you’re in major life transition, you have completed your original life’s intention. This is literally a time when your life could end. The fact that you are in transition gives evidence to me that you have decided to remain in body and to take up a new life intention.
That’s why, as you first enter transition, you feel as though life has lost its meaning. You feel done. One client said to me, “I love these people and I love everything about this place, but I’m tired. I just want to sleep.....to close my eyes and not have to get up tomorrow and do this anymore.”
Transition begins with a yearning to go home.......a true yearning to go home, and a true sense that this earthly dimension is not your home. You go through exactly what you would experience if you died. In fact, there is a moment in time when you could pass over, and a decision to remain.
Your whole system shuts down because it’s programmed to shut down at that time. This is why you’re exhausted. This is why things that used to be important no longer have meaning. This is why you get really sick. You have no life-force energy. When you have no life-force energy, you get sick.
Then you go through the same experience you would have if you died. You review your life. You have powerful memories of things you thought you’d forgotten and powerful realizations about how your attitudes and actions have affected and influenced other people. You experience emotions that you hadn’t realized were attached to those memories - sometimes anger, sometimes regret, sometimes grief and sometimes pride or a sense of accomplishment. It’s as though your life is going past you in review, and you’re being shown the effects of it and what you have and haven’t accomplished.
You lose patience with people who are emotionally high-maintenance. You no longer have the energy for them. You want to close your drapes, take your phone off the hook and pretend you’re not home. You are no longer willing or able to offer your energy to people who take and don’t offer back. You say, “I love these people, but I can’t carry them any longer.” You may feel guilty about abandoning them, but you have to….you really have to because when your phone rings and you hear their voices, you want to throw up. You may experience grief because they become angry with you that you no longer are giving them what they need. You say, “Why can’t they see and care that I’m having a hard time and offer to me for a change?” Your relationship with them has been based on your willingness to give and their need to receive. If you expect them to be concerned about your pain - if you expect them to have compassion for you - you are greatly disappointed.
In the next phase of transition, you find yourself yearning for spiritual connection, yearning to be in meditation and yearning to be in communication with people of spiritual substance. You want to educate yourself, to be around people who think, and to develop creativity. You experience short-lived spurts of interest. You may come to me and say, “What’s wrong with me? I can’t stick with anything.” It’s not about sticking with something. It’s about reawakening yourself. You’re exploring your options. You’re deciding where you want to go and what you want to invest in. You’re asking: “Is this what I want to do? Is that where I want to go? In my new life that I am creating, do I want to be an artist? Do I want to be an accountant? Would I love to be a geologist or maybe an archeologist; or would I love to have babies and nurture them? What would I love to do?” You’re window shopping. You’re not yet ready to buy.
Your future now is an unwritten book containing a world of possibilities and absolutely no certainties. You’re creating a new life for yourself, and it’s scary as hell. No one can tell you where you should go or what you should do. It’s all up to you. Of course, all the people around you have their opinions, but none of them seem absolutely right for you. Your life now becomes filled with possibilities. You start thinking about moving to the other side of the world, writing a book, going back to school. Of course, you’re not likely to do any of these things right now because you’re afraid to make a change.
Your present life is no longer working for you, but you’re not quite ready to leap into a new one, and you’re not clear enough yet to trust yourself to make the right decisions. You say, “I want this, but oh my God, what if I get it? What’s that going to mean? What will the consequences be? If I get this, I might have to give that up. I think I might be ready to give that up, but oh, what are they going to think of me if I give that up and I do this?” Your mind drives you crazy when you’re in this phase because you’re defining your next life and because everything feels so uncertain….and because you’re afraid to trust your judgment. The best advice I can give you at this time is to just keep asking yourself, “What do I want? What do I really want?” And pay attention to the whisperings of Spirit that are urging you to explore new dimensions of yourself.
It’s absolutely essential in this time to maintain your spiritual connections. Spiritual attunement helps you to define this new life you’re creating. It helps you to create a life that nourishes you and that offers you opportunities to increase awareness. This phase of transition is like driving in heavy fog. You don’t have a clear sense of where you are. Sometimes you don’t even know which direction you’re going. You just have to stay connected to Spirit. You just have to trust. You have to get behind that light ahead of you and trust that Spirit is holding you on path.
The completion of major life transition will bring you into a wonderful reawakening. However, in order to get to that place of greater awareness, you must first travel all the way through the fog bank. The thing that gets you there is determination to become re-empowered in your life and a realization that in order to do so, you must follow that light, trusting that Spirit knows the way.
In the next phase of transition, your soul urges you toward greater intimacy. Your soul urges you to release the aspect of self that creates fear of love and intimacy….. that allows you to experience the knowing of yourself in Spirit through touching another person’s soul. That’s really what it’s about. It’s popularly believed in this time that we can’t love others until we learn to love ourselves. This is not true. We learn to love others first. We learn to love ourselves last. We learn to love others, and it’s through loving others and being in that love that we can finally come to have a sense of our own value. It is from knowing ourselves in love, in the state of love, in the experience of love with others, that we can come to “be loving.” When we’re “being loving”, we can be love. When we are love, then love is us rather than it being something that we’re trying to give or receive from another person. Love isn’t something we give or receive from another person. Love is a state of being.
This level of awareness brings you to a new and deeper state of experience in your relationships. You now realize that love must be nourished…that it can die of starvation. You now realize that you can no longer enter into relationships that take from you but don’t offer to you. Respect for your own being demands that you be valued by others to the same extent that you offer to them. You understand that you are only capable of experiencing love to the extent that you are willing to risk pain. You decide that you want to experience passion…to love deeply. You begin to realize how your behaviors and attitudes have defined your relationships… how you have attracted people whose states of being were in harmony with the life lessons you needed to learn. You come to truly understand that the people in your life have been dancing to your tune; that they have been reacting in response to you and that you are truly the creator of your own experience. You realize that you don’t have the power to change other people, but you have the responsibility to be constantly open to change. You understand that life is a process of change. You understand that change doesn’t mean failure. It just means that one experience ends so that a new experience can take its place. You understand that most of the pain in your life has been caused by believing that other people’s behaviors were saying something about your value. You believed that if they were uncaring, you must be unworthy of care. You constantly went to people who didn’t know how to love, begged them to love you and couldn’t understand why they were upset that you were asking for something they didn’t have to give. You went to empty wells for water. You were angry with the well for being empty. You didn’t know it was empty. You thought it didn’t want to give water to you. Then you decided that its inability to give water must mean that you were unworthy and deserved to die of thirst. In this phase of transition, all of this becomes clear. You release your anger with the persons who were incapable of being what you needed. You release your need to change them. Most importantly, you release your belief that their state of being is a statement about your worth.
Major life transitions can last for many years. It all depends on you…on how rapidly you are capable of mastering the intent of the different phases of transition.
Let’s recap. In the first phase, your system shuts down and you are urged to reassess the life you have lived and to understand the consequences of your behaviors and attitudes. You spend most of this time internalized, listening to a fascinating internal dialogue and remembering past events with such emotional intensity that they seem more significant than your present experiences. You are totally disconnected.
In the second phase, you are in gestation: floating in embryonic fluid, assessing your life that is to be, exploring all of the possibilities and deciding what you really want from your next experience. You begin to realize what you have been doing and what you now need to do differently. You begin to understand that you are responsible for the quality of your relationships….the quality of your entire experience.
As you enter the third and final phase of transition, you experience a powerful sense of expectancy. You feel all of the spiritual forces that have been weighing you down now getting behind you and propelling you toward the experiences that you have decided that your next life is to become. It begins to bring your life into alignment… the people, the opportunities, everything that is necessary for you to go into the experiences that you’ve defined and decided for yourself. In this time, you are more spiritually directed than you have ever been or ever will be at any time in your life. In this time, if there is any experience or any person in your life that is not in alignment with where you need to go, that is not adding to the quality of your experience, that is in any way holding you back or detracting from you, it will be taken from your life by force. In this time, if you are in a job that isn’t in alignment with where you need to go, that isn’t offering value to you…that job must end. If you haven’t quit it already, you will be dismissed; or the business will go bankrupt or burn down. Something will happen. It’s guaranteed.
Whatever is in your life that is not adding to the quality of your life, that you haven’t given up for yourself, will be taken from you. If you’re married to an abusive alcoholic, if you haven’t left him yet, he’ll leave you. He’ll probably fall in love with another woman and leave you after you’ve been staying with him for all these many years because you thought he couldn’t survive without you.
You’ll love this transitional phase once you get through it. You hate it while you’re in it, because you feel totally disempowered. If you relax, if you trust Spirit, if you accept the opportunities that are offered to you….if you bless rejection, knowing that it is pushing you away from where you don’t belong toward new, wonderful opportunities and experience…. this transitional experience can be an exciting adventure. Most of us fight it. We grieve that which is taken from our lives. I have come to view this experience as a spiritual weeding of a garden. We have become attached to our weeds. Even though they are casting shadows over us, inhibiting our growth, we love them and we grieve when they are taken out of our lives.
But if we trust Spirit to the extent that we know that everything is in purpose and that all experiences will add to the quality of our being, we can come through this transitional phase with the least amount of discomfort. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me….” This is the way you feel as you complete this transition. You have walked through the valley of the shadow of death and now you know that Spirit is with you. You not only know that Spirit is with you, you have a new, more intimate relationship with your spiritual essence. You have a wonderful new sense of personal empowerment. You have detached from the pains of your past. You have a wonderful excitement generated by new relationships and new opportunities. You have a realization that this world is a wonderful and exciting place filled with uncountable possibilities and experiences just there for you to explore.
Addendum from Dixie Yeterian
This account of the responses to major life transition is not a promise that you will feel wonderful at its completion. Your emotional response to this event depends on the quality of your attunement to your spiritual sources. What I have given you here is an accounting of typical responses to the experience. If your soul is of a maturity that would have urged you to read this account and to have resonated to the description herein, I would expect you to understand that life for you in this dimension is not intended to be easy. Young souls don’t have to make decisions or choices in life; more evolved souls make those choices for them. Children are cared for. Children are fed, sheltered and protected from the consequences of their behaviors and attitudes. We adults clean up their messes for them.
If you are adult enough to be experiencing major life transition, you have to clean up your own messes. You have to realize that the mess was yours in the first place and that if you made the mess with the participation of a child, you are the accountable one. Just as there are many infants who enter this dimension in new bodies, angry and protesting the fact that they are once again held hostage to this dimension and its requirements, some souls complete major life transition saying to me, “I can’t believe I agreed to stay around this place. I hate it here. I want to go home.”
It’s all about your attitude. Once you have contracted to be in this place, you’re going to stay until your contract is completed. So whether you do so by leaving your body and returning with a new one, then going through the powerlessness of infancy and childhood to become your potential…or whether you decide to experience the discomfort of major life transition in order to take on new purpose in the same body… it’s still about attitude.
The lessons we are given are never in the events…. they are always in our response to the events.