I have a confession to make:
I’m a fixer.
I like to take people’s problems, the pains they’re experiencing, their challenges, put a BandAid on them, tie them up in a nice neat bow and send them on their way.
Newsflash: as someone who dedicates their career to holding space for women as they go through major life transformations, both as a doula and as a coach, being a fixer is BAD. Really bad.
Because fixing people’s problems for them is fundamentally disempowering to them.
And it denies the inherent complexities that constitute all of our lives. None of us are simple creatures with simple problems to which simple solutions can be applied.
If that were the case, eating less and moving more would ensure weight loss, sincere apologies would mend wounds, and career dissatisfaction would be solved with a quick browse through the classifieds.
But sitting with complexity is hard.
Sitting with other people’s pain, sorrow, confusion, and discontent, letting them feel it, feeling it with them, and allowing them the space to find their own messy way out of it is hard.
For me, this is a practice that I engage in every day. For me, it’s about breathing deeply and allowing silence and asking good questions and getting curious and closing my eyes and feeling my feet on the ground and just getting okay with what is. As it is.
And, increasingly, I’m able to do just that. Increasingly, I’m able to sit with the messy shit, and let it be. And trust that the messy shit will work itself out…or not…with no more help from me than the space I hold and the light I shine.