Here's the Secret

there was no master plan!

The year destiny wrapped me ‘round her little finger and tugged my life into a new shape, I was happily renovating my 1870’s Sears and Roebuck kit house, spending evenings rocking on the wrap-around porch, and making gluten-free mulberry-peach pies with berries fresh from the trees in the back yard. I loved my house somethin’ fierce and swore they’d carry me out in a coffin.

I was 33. Thirty-three is three 11’s, the number of visionaries and dreamers, ideologues and spiritual seekers. Think about your own thirty-third year (and if you’re not yet there, pay attention when it comes!).

I hit my thirty-third birthday and life got officially weird.

It began slowly—a roommate moving in with her boyfriend, another deciding to return to New York City—then the dissolution began accelerating toward an unexpected, unplanned, and unforeseen ending.

Perhaps who I was becoming was written in my DNA and this transformation was always there, coded into my subconscious. But my conscious self? She was broadsided; it felt like her life was falling apart. A job suddenly ended, a relationship imploded… the Universe obviously had a bone to pick.

But then something magical happened: she changed the way she was thinking.

She stopped thinking this was being done to her and started believing that this was simply a part of the flow of her own life.

She began to understand that just like the trees we humans have seasons and she was in an autumn.

So she did something strange and scary: she stepped willingly into the endings, allowing herself to be carried forward into the unknown.

This is what I think of as a butterfly transformation: it’s not the gentle skin shedding of snake or the maturing which takes a tadpole to toad. It’s the big kahuna, the change which catalyzes a new way of being.

There was no plan, no intention, no visualization.

Sometimes you have to trust enough to let every bit of your old life dissolve to goo so you can find your wings.

I talk about it all and offer you a roadmap for handling change in your own life in Letting Magic In. There aren’t lessons or exercises, but instead a story that you can learn from. Like many narrative memoirs, it uses a hero’s journey format: showing you first the arc from a rather ordinary life through a series of struggles to an extraordinary outcome.