I knew that 2017 was going to be a year of change, but after 2016 I imagined the change would be welcome and easy compared with the challenges of the previous years. For someone like myself who has been teaching stress management and spiritual truths for decades, I imagined that I would be prepared for those changes by applying the very principles I teach.
I knew that it was time to leave my home of almost 19 years and live by the sea, but I didn’t know where specifically except that I wanted an even, temperate climate and to live where I could share my teachings and thrive in a community of like-minded people. What I didn’t know and was unprepared for was the massive upheavals it would create. Like the global turbulence of the hurricanes, earthquakes and fires, my life seemed to parody those events.
I leaped off the cliff. I sold my place (it went under contract a day before I was planning to take it off the market and wait until 2018 to sell), gave more than 50 plants away as well as many other beloved possessions and I moved everything into storage and different friends’ homes and became a gypsy. I had not done that since my twenties and back then all that I owned fit in a few boxes and suitcases in my mother’s garage.
A dear friend told me when my place did not appear to sell, that when Boulder was done with me, it would spit me out. “Go!” I officially had no home on December 7 and then just as I was preparing to leave for NY for the Christmas holidays, all of my university work connected to Boulder dissolved. Now I was without a home, my business in shambles and everything that I had built up for the past 19 years apparently gone. Never did I think that packing, putting my place on the market and moving with total uncertainty would be so stressful. But now I was mid-air off the cliff and not sure that I had opened my parachute or even that I had a parachute.
Had I known the stress and traumas I would go through, I would have stayed comfortably where I was. As another dear friend said, “that’s probably why you didn’t know, because you would never have done this.” Yet, it was not my mind that was telling me to follow this very insecure path, it was my soul. What I didn’t expect is that every fear and shadow would also be stirred and surface.
As I write this on the last eve of 2017 in a sub-zero, chilly cold spell in NY, I wonder how the great, brave masters of diverse traditions weathered their leaps of faith figuratively and literally.
I wonder how so many “ordinary” individuals have been able to move beyond great losses and emerge triumphantly and then I realize perhaps that is part of all of our journeys.
We are each of us teachers and trekkers of life who at times create cataclysmic shifts to awaken our sleeping giant within and contribute to the greater whole sometimes knowingly and often unknowingly.
As I embark into the unknown, summoning the principles I teach—faith, courage, hope, integrity, light, kindness and love– I invite you to embrace your own journeys in 2018 with new vision and restored qualities that you are needing.
I also invite you to share your journeys with me and stay in touch. If I can be of service through my courses, French classes, products, books and Psychic/Numerology readings, I look forward to working with you. Use the navigation menu to learn more about these offerings.
To a 2018 that allows each of us to embrace our unique gifts and walk our paths with hope, joy, support and renewed faith,
In the New Dance of Life,
Francoise
