You Were Born to Rise
Good Easter Monday to you all! I hope your weekend had beauty and wonder in it. I was thinking of you!
As the organizing bug has bitten me HARD, I was tooling about the kitchen, pulling items out of the cupboards and putting them in plastic bins with darling labels, I contemplated Easter.
Family members who were feeling extra cautious meant no visits and then we canceled plans with friends in LA just because I had a sense we needed a clear weekend to rest and regroup after launching my new weight loss bundle this last month, It made me wonder how we should celebrate the day in a simple, thoughtful, delicious and fun way…
(check out this yummy gluten-free cinnamon roll french toast I made!)
We’re not religious. We have a beautiful faith and a peaceful, joyful spirituality that we live more than we talk about because that works for us and serves others to feel loved.
So, when I thought of Easter, I asked myself: What is the universal message that lives in this holiday… something that can apply to us all?
And what came to me was this:
We are born to rise.
- We are born with this ability to go from lying down to crawling… to standing and walking to running.
- We are born with an ability to get back up when we fall.
- We are born with resilience to recover from sickness or tragedy or loss.
We are born with this immense rising power within us.
As my dear friend, Cynthia Occelli, so powerfully said...
That thought is a comforting one as last week with my coaching clients was particularly intense…
Over 90 percent of my clients have been sexually, emotionally, or physically abused in their lifetime. The stories that would make you sigh deeply with compassion and grief, seemed to rise to the surface for at least half of my clients last week. I felt so much for them and can relate to how hard it is to get out of bed when your heart feels like there’s an anchor of past pain weighing it down to the ocean floor.
You feel like you’re sinking and it’s tempting to feel like you will never be anywhere else but down.
It’s hard to remember that you will rise, sometimes.
I get it.
There was a book I remember as a child growing up in church called, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Coming” by Tony Campolo.
As daunting, hopeless and permanent it felt to the followers who watched the death of Jesus on that Good Friday, the reality for Christians centuries later is that it was only temporary…
That a day of rising happened too.
So now, when people look back at the memory, they take in a whole picture of the death AND the resurrection. And then, the additional point of that message is that when we look forward in our life, when hard circumstances befall us -- or we choose them and fall into them -- that we can remember and draw upon the rising power that lives in us.
This is particularly personal and close for me. My name ‘Stacey” is Greek and it means “of the resurrection - like a phoenix rising from the ashes.”
Additionally, my astrological sign is Scorpio. The signs tend to have three iterations of them: Basic vibration, middle vibration, and highest vibration. The basic vibration is a scorpion: I’m fine if you leave me alone but if you come toward me in a way that I see as as threat, I will kill you.
Lovely, right?
Middle vibration is an eagle… which I often identified with as a child when people asked me what animal I could relate to, I would say “an eagle”. They are powerful, free, and have perspective from high above.
But the highest vibration of that zodiac sign? Yup. You guessed it:
A phoenix rising from the ashes.
When I discovered this many years ago, it made sense that I had such a deep experience with my power to rise as it was not only written into my soul and life -- but also my name and date of my birth.
Sounds all groovy and empowering right?
Yeah. Well, hmm... Honestly? I’ve been tempted to change my name to Beyonce or something with less of a "Greek tragedy" ring to it...
Because the challenge is this: When you rise from ashes it means that there can be a lot of fires in your life that cause those ashes to be in your life. Places that feel like death and destruction. Times that feel like it's the end.
It’s no fun and I don’t wish it on anyone… including myself.
And yet, without it, we’d never experience the rising part of us that is written into the fabric of our being. Just like we would not have known Jesus’ resurrection power without the Good Friday part of the story.
So, I want to remind you today, my friends, that if you are feeling more of the ashes of your life in these moments -- I know it’s painful -- and I know that it is not the end of the story.
What feels like the end is actually the middle. Every hero’s journey has some point where we think, “There’s no way she can get out of this!” And that’s the moment the whole thing begins to turn around.
YOU are designed with rising power within you which is evidenced in everything else you have ever gone through. Look back at all you’ve grown through, healed from, and risen higher.
Now, with that lens, look at your future.
You are still here.
And that rising power that is written into your spiritual and physical DNA is still at work.
So, whether your name is Stacey or Beyonce or whatever, the bigger point is that you are born with an ability to ascend and soar to such high places within yourself and in life.
I just wanted to take a moment to remind you of the power within you.
I just wanted to remind you that
You are born to rise.
Love,
Stacey
(blog cover image courtesy of Stephanie Greene on Unsplash - thank you!)
