Last week I was talking to my sister. She is going through a transition with her business and she said something that struck me. “The void is uncomfortable.” It stopped me in my tracks. This is true for me, too.
The void. The quiet. The space between. The empty. The alone. This is an uncomfortable place for me. It is much easier to fill it with something, anything. A phone call to someone on my “list”. Another zoom. Food I’m not hungry for. The complaint I have rattling in my mind. Anything to fill the space before potentially feeling.
Recently I have been intentionally going into the void. Pushing past the to-do’s and the skin that tries to cave in around me to create more of this space, more quiet. In that, I aimed to feel what went well in OE in this first year and what didn’t go well. It is what didn’t go well that is most challenging to look at for me. The places I fell short and took short cuts. The places I didn’t show up as the woman I want to be in the world. Places I let the masculine world determine my fate rather than the interior landscape I inhabit. Seeing the year in reverse and peering at all the places I avoided going into something that has less clutter, less mind chatter.
This space, the quiet, is the only place I can feel. For the same reason we recommend every OE customer Empty before they shop, I can’t feel what is overstuffed and filling my every cell. Feeling needs breath. It needs me to pull back the layers like I’m slowly undressing a lover anticipating the bare skin underneath. In this uncovering what I find is something that wants my attention. I am often mean to myself in this unraveling into the void. My mind makes mean voices. Can I imagine what that feels like to this quiet, new space I am opening?
Emptying allows more space to feel. This is what brings us to know what we want next. What we desire.
Today I have more questions than answers. I softy remind myself that is ok. I know from experience it is better to live into the questions than force the knowing. For anyone that is feeling the discomfort of the void this week, like me, for today… welcome it. Allow it. Amidst the discomfort, let it creep in like crawling vines. Allow the space to empty. What I am finding is that unknown beauty lives in the void.