When the Puzzle Piece Clicks

We often don’t realize the internal shifts that have occurred until something in our life calls for our response. 

Something happens and we notice our initial thought responses. Sometimes they surprise us. 

In the work that I do, I find I have more opportunities to notice my own beliefs and shifts because not only do I have my own life experiences, but people come to me sharing theirs. And it is in those moments that a thought sometimes surprises me. 

Currently, one of my client’s grandmother is in the hospital. I can hear my client’s pain and fear, afraid her grandma will give up and leave this life. She is trying to stay positive and remind her grandma that everything’s going to be okay. And it’s not working. Her grandma isn’t listening. 

My immediate thought was, “maybe your grandma is right.” How interesting is it that we take the responsibility on of trying to pull someone from their pain. Especially the elderly. It is so human for us to do so. The more I learn about the process of aging and death, the more I realize how much trust and wisdom exists within the population that we often cast aside. We decide they’re not in their right mind. That we have to make choices for them. I think back to my last grandparent to leave this life… my grandmama Joan Hadrill. It has been this past year where I’ve had a whole new reverence for who she was when she was alive. The values she embodied, the change she created. I always knew she was amazing but there is something more rooted and connected in my body when I think about her. She was diagnosed with a form of ALS that moves rapidly. In her final months she couldn’t speak and had a very hard time breathing. Her body was shutting down, yet her mind was as acute as ever. She would write on an iPad to communicate, still cracking jokes and fighting the good fight. She eventually made it clear that she was ready to go. That time unfortunately feels a bit like a blur to me. Only 5 years ago and part of me feels like I wasn’t there. I didn’t know anything about life and death. I didn’t know about the deep deep wisdom that lived inside my grandma. Because of this, I didn’t know what to do or who to be. I disconnected. When I think back to the woman I was, I see a little girl. She was lost, realizing at her grandmother’s celebration of life that she had absolutely no legacy at that point. She had no purpose. 

What I have realized in the past few years is that my purpose is to remember the deep teachings of the women before me. It is to honour the Feminine that has been suppressed for centuries. It is to be wild. It is to be free. It is to stand for the truth in each moment. One of these truth’s is that people are more powerful than we collectively allow them to be. We want to tell people how to be, and what to do and it’s created a culture of adult children who begin to look for that. The fear of the “wrong choice” has created a culture of walking on eggshells and manipulation. It’s created a culture of paying for the playbook, looking for the steps. Ultimately it’s created a culture of people playing a game.

Reading some of the stories that have been passed down from ancient cultures and traditions, I hear about the wise women connecting with the life/death/rebirth cycle. The Feminine knows when it’s time to let go. She knows that everything has a cycle. This is something that we collectively have a very hard time with. 

The rules and laws I follow don’t fit in to many of the rules that society plays by. They’re bigger and I feel such a strong duty to hold them even when my reality tries to fight it. Scarcity is one of the energies that plagues how we run things in society and it’s one of the systems that has had a big hold on me. I can feel myself ripping away, dipping my toes in the truth of abundance and the belief that energy moves in many different ways. Death and rebirth is one of them. I can feel this knowing anchoring in my body. 

One of the misconceptions that many have (and I have had) is that when you break the current system’s rules and start playing by bigger universal laws, that you leave behind the humanity of what is here and that you don’t have compassion for people who are fighting real real trauma and pain. That might be true for some but what I know deeply is that my work is here, in the mess. It’s about holding the universal laws in my body while being with those who are just starting to get a sense of them.  If you’re reading this and you know me from high school or university, you may be thinking what I’m sharing is wacko. I laugh even now as I read these words back because I remember seeing people from my past step into what I thought were absolutely kooky lives (I actually at one point thought some of them went crazy) and so I get it. I really do. I think part of the reason it can feel so weird to read these words is that I’m trying to put words onto something that is really just a feeling. That’s part of my work. When we hear words, we associate them with the ways in which we’ve previously related with those words and ideas. But I’m putting old words to something very new for many. It’s like if you’ve only known water in the form of ice and I start talking about drinking it (thank you Olivia for the beautiful analogy of how we each have our own interpretation about the same thing). It doesn’t quite make sense to you and it sounds crazy, but then one day the ice you’re holding melts down your wrist and then boom, you get it. 

Isn’t that how so much of life is? We learn something and we know something, but then there’s this point where it clicks into place. The puzzle piece finds its slot in your being. That’s what this remembering feels like. That’s what I’m here to help others do. And that is also why I’m not here to throw puzzle pieces at you. There’s nowhere for them to go unless your slot is open. Those that I work with have most of the puzzle pieces but haven’t quite clicked them into place. I help you make space for what you’ve already chosen to make space for. 

So all these words are saying is that I believe most of us have enough puzzle pieces. We don’t need to get more. We can stop searching out there. All we really need is a place to fit them, and that part is scary because it may mean that we change the way in which we relate to what’s currently around us. All I can say is, from what I’ve experienced, the fear of what we lose is phantom. Every time a puzzle piece has clicked for me, it feels GOOD. It feels TRUE and I feel more WHOLE.

If you’re relating to this journey and have felt that fear, know that I’m with you and that there are many people who are. It’s a weird time we’re living in but truly, I think it’s absolutely beautiful.