A New Chapter

Out with the old, in with the new

Video Credits: Dr. Jennifer R. Cohen

Dear friends,

I am at the point in my journey where I am being called to rest.

I’m being called to process over a year's worth of learning, and where we are now, is the perfect place to do it.

This house sits at the top of a mountain off the road of a local Tico village. We’re in San Vito, a remote Eastern town in Costa Rica. The landscape is lush, the mountains rolling. The fog winds through the valleys and rests gently on the ridges of Baru, the surrounding mountain ranges.

On the farm we have ducks and chickens, and two sweet dogs– Tika and Sirius. Coffee and sugarcane are the main production crops, but a desire for self-sufficiency is what fills the remaining workable land.

Fruit trees fill our bellies, tropical delicacies of all varieties.

A center for wellness sits overlooking a bowl within the mountains, and a lookout point is perched at the highest point on the 17 acres of land.

Venturing down into the jungle you will eventually find yourself at a creek , accessible from two directions. The creek is walled with towering cliffs, dense jungle forest, and fast rushing water filling the crevices of the rocks. In the stillness there are pools for bathing, and for communing with the land.

It rains here most afternoons, which is a relief from the morning beating sun.

Life is providing me an opportunity to live simply. To eat good food, to meditate, to move, to be with myself and to finally treat this trip like the much needed vacation it was meant to be.

A vacation where my days aren’t planned.

They are mostly spent outside and without an agenda.

Without a to do list, without a sense of urgency, and without the constant stimulation of my cellular device.

I am filled with an overwhelming sense of safety.

My nervous system feels an instinctually ease, something it hasn’t been able to feel for most of my life.

When my stress begins to rise threatening this peace, I am given an opportunity to hold what has risen—like my unhealthy relationship to work.

The people pleasing, the obliging.

The tendency to meet others needs before my own.

The confusion in understanding what those needs even are.

The fear of if I met them shamelessly would I still be enough?

Would the work still get done?

And what would the consequences be if it didn’t?

Am I capable of setting the boundaries needed to honour everything that I have learnt?

This is where I have recently arrived. And these things that I am carrying with me are heavy. They are weighing me down. And they are showing up as fatigue, as a low level hum, begging to be seen, to be held, to be released.

And this thing that I am holding is–in its most pure form–exhaustion.

Not exhaustion borne from burnout, it’s exhaustion borne from the patterns and the habits that are no longer serving me, from parts of me that no longer fit, from the uncomfortable feeling of outgrowing myself.

So I find myself in need of a change. In need of creating a new chapter, one that is abundant in the results of my own teachings.

And that chapter begins by prioritizing me as a human, me and my needs and not feeling guilty for it. For me that looks like taking a bit of a step back from Substack. It means writing for myself rather than from a place of appeasing the irrational and unfounded expectations that I have told myself my audience has.

It means that essays will be sent out when my creativity strikes and when the well is overflowing.

My essays are the result of my ability to process my life and turn it into something worth sharing, and my vessel for understanding is backlogged. There is time needed to let that river flow again.

I anticipate that this next year will bring me a lot of change, and I'm looking forward to taking you along on that journey within a capacity that serves me just as much as it hopefully serves you.

Thankyou for being on this journey with me, and I'll see you soon.

Gabs