Has your year been really challenging in lots of ways….but….when you allow yourself to pull back and gain the overview, you can sense just how positively impactful and on track it has all really been? Can you sense how you have actually been getting much more in alignment with who you really are all along the way, if not always by the most predictable or tidy means? Can you sense that it has all been part of a new level of alignment taking shape, as though something is being orchestrated, however chaotic it may sometimes seem to be at the ground level?

If you can even mildly glean that this applies to you then take pause for a moment in order to fully allow the realisation of this to swell in your consciousness. Take some time out at the end of the year to appreciate just how far you have come, no matter how messy or symptomatic your life still seems from within, and maybe jot down some of those things that have improved for you. Because its just so important, for your ongoing sense of progression, to notice how much nearer you now are to some aspiration you hold dear, unfinished business though it may all seem in this moment, or to notice all those many pieces of self-knowledge you wouldn’t want to give back in exchange for easier circumstances, as have been picked up along the way. This is how we give ourselves the ongoing momentum to continue moving forwards, not to mention how we come to see the bigger picture of the way our lives are truly playing out so that we aren’t always bogged down in the small stuff.

This is where I have just got to myself, right at the point our circumstances are about to change yet again and at a time of the year that I often like to take pause to really notice where I have been, where I have got to and where I am headed next. So, as ever, I’m going to share my example in the hope it encourages you to notice your own imperfect perfections of alignment with wherever you are headed, in your health, your living circumstances, your life choices or whatever most motivates you forwards.

Anyone who already follows this blog will already know that we made some very big changes this year and that circumstances around our selling-up and relocating have been much harder, less predictable or easy to pin down to our long-envisioned conclusion than we ever imagined when we first sold our house (a challenge in itself) and moved 170 miles north, into temporary accommodation, believing we would have completed on the house we are buying long before Christmas. No such luck! All these many months later, having spent a third of a year in less than ideal rented accommodation, living out of boxes, with most of our possessions spread out between two different storage locations in completely different parts of the country, and all of this of course being particularly hard on my chronic health challenges not to mention personal preferences to do with a need for routine and containment, our year looks like it has been one giant stuck point, a crock full of frustrations and triggers, but has it really?

Because, seen from another angle, the whole of this journey has been about getting more in alignment  and every single step taken has been an important step nearer to that, compared to where we were before. This has also been one of the truisms of my chronic health journey; sometimes, when it feels the absolute hardest, I can be sure that I am making the biggest headway and getting much closer towards the breakthrough I long for, I just have to take that overview.

Whatever the hardships, I’ve been listening particularly intently to intuition this year, have been following the breadcrumb trail and am getting much closer by the day to something I’ve been trying to get much more aligned with, being a truer sense of who I am and how I want to live, for years. Personal growth has been in a boom phase; I’ve learned so much more about myself, gained infinitely more appreciation for who I really am and what is truly and deeply important to me as I’ve worked hard to integrate this knowing into my future life. Along the way, I’ve learned how to set better boundaries and how to retreat from the fray of what I don’t want to engage with, taking this opportunity of all of life’s springs and hinges being somewhat loosened to hone the exact life that I really want. There’s been a far stronger sense of being the creator of my own experience than I have enjoyed for many years and that’s taught me a lot about the potential for me to continue doing this more mindfully once things settle down more.

Even this chaotic life of moving about, keeping so busy, living on the hoof is far more in alignment than where I was before, stuck in my life, on my sofa, in the long drawn out track record of the chronic illness years. This year has certainly broken the chain of events, which I suspect I desperately needed to do to get my wheel out of the mud.

As a result, I feel far more alive, hopeful, empowered, inspired and far less stuck, victimised, buried alive.

There are also big clues to me being far more resilient than I used to be (or previously appreciated), as my husband pointed out to me just yesterday when we were reviewing our last few months (sometimes, taking the viewpoint of someone who sees us every day can help us to climb out of the trench of only seeing how hard and symptom-focused thing seem to be on the inside). From his point of view, and he’s right, I’m showing many more signs of robustness and stamina than I was a year ago and that’s down to a lot of things, no single one, yet without having to pinpoint the exact reason why its occurred, its important to notice this and not just let it slip by. His appraisal really helps me to dare to hope that there’s more of that wherever it came from, especially once we settle down into some sort of a routine and much more comfortable living circumstances again.

Even this looong waiting process to “land” in our new life feels like, at some level, the universe has my back as things more often than not come together, if not always in the way that was hoped for or expected (and this in itself is an important thing to come to terms with, especially for one such as me, being such a control freak). I’ve learned that it’s not so much a case of pushing hard against any resistance that crops up, as the old life often was, but one of steering or holding steady a vessel that is generally moving in the right direction that gets me to where I want to go.

When I look back at our “interesting” year, I begin to appreciate how far we’ve come in terms of engaging with life in a way that had become far too dialled down in the old life. We’ve had exponentially more experiences in a year than we’ve had for many a previous year…and this coming from me who supposedly has chronic fatigue and too many physical limitations to take on very much. What’s more, we’ve relished so many of them, as I appreciate looking back at all the hundreds of photos I’ve taken which makes it seem like we have rolled several years worth of holidays into one giant adventure of being constantly in new places, trying new things. I’ve noticed that I am living in the present moment far more, taking in all the details of life as it unfolds, than I had done for many a year in the life that was almost too predictable to be borne a moment longer. We really needed to get back some of our zest for life and this year has certainly done that for us!

I’ve also not let any pre-sense of my supposed limitations hold me back but have had steady faith that the resources I will need will show up for me at just the right times…and they have, with almost unfailing consistency. This alone has been one very BIG breakthrough for someone who had become so convinced of their physical limitations that this fear had become the container they were locked inside of until now (as identifying too much with any health condition will so quickly and easily do if you let it). A lot of the time, I have had to cease focusing so much on predictions as to how well I would cope with something because there was simply no room for all that, given what we were dealing with, so I began to assume a much more level playing field for myself as I took things on. Guess what, this has resulted in so many pleasant surprises, in terms of my stamina and powers of bounce-back recovery, all along the line!

In other words, I’ve mostly ceased needing to plan every single detail up ahead or worry that my body won’t deliver, pre-grieving the worst case scenarios before they even happen, and have taken things much more “as they come”. The very fact that I am still house-hopping, almost nomad living, with such impunity, packing up our stuff every few days as we have been doing for part of every week for months now (in order to spend as little time as possible where we have been unhappily renting full-time) and now, at last, leaving here to move house, four more times over the festive season tells me so much…this being me, the person utterly gridlocked into their own solid routine just a year ago!

Beyond the upheaval and stress of it, I’ve really got to smile as I appreciate the change in me because I’ve become pretty good at all this; hell, I’ve even enjoyed it (part of me wonders how I will ever settle down again)!

Throughout all of this and ongoing, I hold steady the vision of where we are headed (not just the place but the kind of lifestyle we are after there) and I’ve made that a daily reality in my minds eye. Holding that vision constant, living “as if” it is a given, has walked us towards it in plodding increments yet, importantly, that vision has also had the room to evolve as the journey has shown us more and more about what we really want than we previously knew. As it happens, “what we really want” has morphed in some really important ways this year, as we have had opportunities to sample things, temporarily, that seemed more ideal than they actually were before making them too permanent to get out of. If everything had come together too quickly, we might have made a whole lot of wrong choices, based on what we had assumed, so I think this factor of “right timing” and “learning along the route” is just so important to remember about any process we think we want to be over-with speedily…as in, we need to realise that speed isn’t always in our best interests, not if we still have a lot to learn (the same also applies to any healing process, where we think we want an instant cure). As I’ve had to appreciate time and time again, we tend to get what we need more often than what we (think we) want and this year has been another point in case for me.

So, as I’ve written about a few times, if this place where we have been temporarily living (but only for four more days now…) has been a, literal, dark valley then perhaps it was somewhere we needed to pass through I order to get to the other side!

We might not be there yet (when are we ever “there” since the whole of life is a journey) but I can feel the alignment taking shape now. Yet its only when I take pause to compare with just how out of alignment I felt a year ago that I fully appreciate the difference and how all it takes is just that one first step, with the intention of making the change, as I took just over a year ago, followed by the next most logical step, to set off on a whole other trajectory that eventually gets you there in the end…but you do have to have the courage to take that first step to start the process off. It all begins there and, whilst it doesn’t have to be a giant leap straightaway, just simply a recalibration towards whatever feels better, every single healing process starts with this one minor readjustment, however inconsequential it may seem at the time.

The point is, where you find yourself a few weeks, months or years later can be so very far away from where you first started that you simply won’t believe that you did it…but you did, you made that first move towards something instead of running away. That’s what my last year feels like, now that I appreciate the enormity of our move and our massive change of circumstances, navigating financial, health, work and other circumstances along the way that would have seemed utterly impossible to deal with if I had anticipated them all in the beginning but here we are, muddled through. If I had known what all of this would entail in advance, I would probably have been far too daunted to embark in the journey…but, thankfully, I didn’t look down from the tightrope, I just concentrated on that one first step and am very glad of the fact. Already, it’s been the best possible thing we could have done, in far too many ways to list, and we are most certainly getting there.

I guess the point I am trying to make is, don’t miss your own milestones because you are too immersed in the hardships of the journey. Allow yourself to step back from the journey and really notice how far you have come since a few months, perhaps a year or half a decade ago; really allow yourself to see all the things you now handle that you wouldn’t have been able to imagine coping with a while back or simply notice how much more aligned you are with something dear to your heart. Appreciate and congratulate…then move on towards wherever you are headed with all-new gusto!