We’re past summer solstice. Welcome to this tender, tender season.

My dear kindred spirit–

If you feel lost. If everything is a little swampy. If the world feels swirly. Like you can’t quite remember who you are anymore. Like you can’t quite get your bearings.

Then you are probably RIGHT on the brink of a big transformation.

You are probably well on your way toward the next iteration of yourself.

You are probably being tugged by something that has instructions for you.

You’re probably JUST about to burst forth as the next, bigger, braver, wiser version of you.

And I bet you’ve never felt like more of a mess!

I bet you feel wildly sensitive and angry at surprising junctures, and you cry at inappropriate times and stare off into space, and none of your clothes fit right, and you suddenly hate all your furniture, and everything is breaking.

It’s so ironic and also maddening.

Because when we’re on the cusp of our next phoenix moment is when we feel the most damp and embarrassed and bewildered. When we’re building, strength and power and clarity is when we feel the most puny. When we’re actively stepping into a triumphant new chapter is when we MOST feel like we’re flailing and lost.

Luckily for you, I feel like I’m flailing and lost A LOT of the time, so I can show you the way through. You’re welcome.

No one talks about this on Instagram or TV, but I talk to the kindred spirits all the time, and I know all our secrets, and I am here to tell you that this happens to everybody. At least, everybody really interesting.

We just get lost.

We feel like we missed our turn. Maybe we were following the wrong instructions? We were trundling along, and then wait–whoah. It’s profoundly disorienting. Like we fell off the path of our own life.

Listen to me, friend. This is the moment when you have to quiet the outside noise. You have to stop resisting the sense that you’re dissolving… and just dissolve. You have to dive into it.

It will be terrifying; I’m sorry to tell you.

Nonetheless, take a breath. Submerge.

Go deep inside yourself, right down into the pool of your own essence. Swim down into your own secret caverns. Imagine that you hold treasure inside you– because you do– and your job is to seek your own soul and commune with it like your life depends on it. Because it does.

You must hold your own face with such tenderness. You must look into your own eyes with such profound understanding that you weep with adoration and awe. You must greet yourself with utter loyalty. You must keep faithful watch for the you who is trying to emerge.

It will look on the outside like nothing is happening. Like you came to a stop. People in your life with be dismayed. YOU will be dismayed.

But on the inside, you are working alchemy. You are tapping into a rich magic so potent and rare that every system in your life will try to keep you from it– because when you tune into that inner chord, you become your own authority.

You become your own authority.

This makes you mighty. It makes you dangerous to all forms of oppression. It also makes you deeply kind, but that’s another missive.

Anyway, while this deep cosmic magic is working inside you, you’ll still need to take out the garbage and answer your boss’s emails, which is the real drawback to this being human business.

Everything will scream in you that you cannot stop, you must charge ahead, you must figure this out NOW, whatever this even is. Stop anyway, or at least jog in place. Because if you can keep all the organisms of your ecosystem alive– your plants, animals, job, humans, your own spirit– while also bringing this fierce quality of presence to your own inner rebirth– eventually something completes itself.

Suddenly all the formless soupiness coalesces into a longing. A direction. A dream. An idea. A plan.

You just have to hang in there until it does.

You have to stand to watch for this tender fierce thing to happen; you have to shoo away the world and its agenda for you long enough that you can hear your own soul’s instructions. It’s rarely convenient, but it comes for us one way or another, and we do better to work with this mysterious alchemy than to fight it.

I always thought feeling lost meant I was doing something wrong. But I wasn’t wrong; I was just getting new bearings. I was just trying to turn into the next version of myself. It turns out that rebirth, like our first births, is usually messy and drippy and intense and doesn’t follow a tidy timetable.

I am trying to tell you as plainly as I know how: it’s okay to feel lost.

It isn’t the end of the world, just the beginning of a new one.