Guest Post by Kate Brenton, Bestselling Author of Rebirth
Recently, I was interviewed by a yoga studio owner that asked a timely question, “You’ve talked a lot about serendipity and signs, but what do you say to the listener that has had no signs? That has had nothing going their way? What would you tell them?”
I smiled quietly into the camera and honestly answered, “I would say that was the last three years of my life and to keep going.”
When we look at someone’s success we don’t see the before, but even more insidious is that when we are really down, for some reason, we have difficulty seeing the possibility. I know I did. I was frustrated because I knew and believed that I created my own perspective, and had the power to change my life, but I was working so hard and nothing was changing. I was perplexed and exhausted.
What I am speaking of here, in this paragraph, to you, is that sometimes we are placed in growth phases where “doing everything right” doesn’t cut it. Life of its own accord has changed the rules, and is asking one thing from us: to surrender. To doers this is the hardest polarity to comprehend.
When I was writing Rebirth, I truly did not know I was mosaicing my own story of growth. It was only when I was writing the second to last chapter that it dawned on me that each story I was sharing for its own merit, was also threading through my own journey. That each chosen marker of wisdom was a talisman on my own path, and the truth of the messy, disorienting, phase I was emerging from was revealing herself. This was not being abandoned or unsuccessful. I was being grown.
What was remarkable to me was that my vision for years was obscured. I had been someone that understood planning, goals and structure, but motherhood and dissolution of a partnership left me tending to things I did not know how to prepare for, and I was always prepared. However, this time Life needed me to move from another muscle set, to lead from a knowing, from a trusting of faith. Something I believed as an idea, but hadn’t used for a life strategy.
Then here I was, a new mom, writing a book at a dining room table that was not my own, because the call had come and I had answered. I remember just before the publishing contract someone saying to me, “You spend a lot of time on that podcast and it doesn’t make any money.”
I was sitting at a table eating, legs crossed, fork in hand; I blinked. I felt a small dip in my stomach, when a voice inside—who I hadn’t heard for awhile—quietly cautioned me that this was not the thing to let go of. Her quietness gave me pause, even as my mind agreed that the podcast was not producing monetarily. I kept a solid face. I gave a non-verbal acknowledgment of the statement and decided to stay the course, with or without support.
And I did, and it worked because of that voice of faith. It wasn’t until the final manuscript was completed two years later, and I was walking my dog around the block, on the phone with my publisher that I realized a great weight was gone. It was not the weight of the book per say. It was the freedom from accomplishing an intent, and a promise I had carried for a very long time. Yes, to write. But moreso, to do what I came here to do. The closer it is to your soul growth, the more you will be tested, and that is why your best course is to surrender and trust the roadmap of faith that will guide you through to your own Rebirth.
You can find out more about Kate on her website, podcast, Instagram, Substack, Bookbub, and Good Reads.
You can find her book, Rebirth: Real-life stories about what happens when you let go and let life lead, on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or IndieBound.
Rebecca J Whitman 