Stepping into a bigger room

Last year, in late November, I drove up across the Golden Gate Bridge, through the green Marin hills, all the way to lovely Sebastopol to meet several of my AOA colleagues for the first time.

I got lunch with Joe and Mattia at a Vietnamese spot, and then followed them to Joe’s house to jump on a 2-hour all hands branding meeting. It was a fun, brainstorm-y type session. We all came up with our own answers to questions like:

• What 3 emotions do we want to evoke for ppl?

• If our brand was personified as the voice of a character, who would it be?

• What 3 words define us ?

• Etc

One word that someone suggested has stuck with me to this day — it was a Hebrew word that meant “stepping into a bigger room.” I can’t find it anywhere online or through ChatGPT, so I just have to refer to it here as “stepping into a bigger room.” (Please let me know if you can find it).

Fast forward 10 months, and I find myself on a precipice — how I would imagine it feels to step into a bigger room.

Doodle by Dan Allison

After nearly a year of consistent internal plumbing and exploration through both AOA and Aletheia, there is an undeniable shifting happening inside me. I am molting. Still very much me, as I will always be … and yet not at all.

In the last few weeks I have been in what has felt like a very stagnant period. I haven’t worked out consistently, and I’ve avoided (and found it very difficult to do) any sort of writing, art, meditation - anything that requires me to be with myself, and see myself.

These periods of stagnancy almost always bring a kneejerk wave of shame and not-enoughness. There is the idea that I am being “lazy” and “useless” and “not living up to my potential.” There is the idea that all the work I have been doing “is not working” because look here I am, not thriving.

Thanks to the work (lol) and to the wonderful people around me, I have found a far more compassionate lens. I realized that this retreat into stagnancy has been my body’s way of slowing down and protecting me from intense change.

Put a different way — there is a part of me that knows the jig is up. We have seen very clearly the pain of my patterns. We have seen the walls of the jail cell I have painted myself into. I know that what comes next : Stepping into a bigger room, an expanded consciousness.

Doodle by Dan Allison

While that sounds great in theory, in practice it feels like stepping up to the edge of a cliff. And oh, my heart, how much fear there is to jump. Everything will change, she tells me. And I can feel it too, how much loss of control and identity and “safety” lies beyond.

And so while I can, I avoid myself, I try to stop the world, I try to clamp it all down.

Of course, it is far too late. I can try to fight the rising tide for as long as I want. In fact, that is probably what needs to happen until I realize the pain of the fight. Something something about change not happening when you want it to happen, it happens when the pain of holding on becomes greater than the fear of letting go.

Or, just maybe (maybe!) I might get lucky, and the room might simply decide to step into me.

Doodle by Dan Allison