Turning points can be very challenging. At such times, we tend to view our situation as a problem, especially when its degree of difficulty leaves us in emotional overwhelm in unfamiliar places at unaccustomed angles. Very edgy. Others may be reassuring us that it’s just a phase or an opportunity or something similar, but their words, however well-meaning, usually have about as much impact on us as does spitting into a gale. Reading about being on shaky ground or being uprooted is very different than actually experiencing it, and very few of us are quick to find any comfort when confronted with with sudden, disruptive discomfort.
One of the problems with turning turning points into problems is that we then tend to overoccupy ourselves with looking for solutions, trying to think our way out of our apparent misfortune, desperately searching for some clarity, nonturbulence, and relief from our confusion. But not so often do we recognize that our confusion is simply an exaggeration of what usually is already occurring in our mind, a confusion that’s largely manufactured by confining or trying to confine our turning point’s energies — our distress, disorientation, anxiety, excitement — to our head.
Fleeing to our headquarters, however, only prolongs and feeds our difficulty. Trying to outthink our seeming problem keeps us ricocheting between warring or oppositional factions within us — should I go, should I stay, and so on — leaving us stranded in the duststorms of beckoning maps, blinded to what is really needed: Directly facing and going toward, into, and through the operational dynamics of our turning point, not just with our head, but with our entire being.
Turning points are times of increased energy, surplus force, times of fertile chaos and uncommon chance, times when a leap into more fitting level of being is not only more than possible, but also necessary for our evolution. If we keep on trying to figure out what to do — wanting to know what will happen if we do take the jump — when we’re in the midst of a turning point, then we risk losing or at least seriously dissipating the very energies that we need to actually take the leap. That is, if we wait too long, the edge will lose its edge; the forces that could have carried us toward a deeper level of being may not be there in sufficient supply or intensity, having been eroded and drained by our continued resistance to taking the jump when it was time to do so.
The more fully we enter the depths of our turning points, the better, so long as we keep our eyes open and our trust alive, a trust that’s not just cognitively based or inculcated or otherwise superficial — a naïve or unawakened trust is not really trust, but rather just a cocktail of foolhardiness and hope — but a trust that, to whatever degree, emerges from and resonates with our core of being.
Such trust allows us to blend with (but not disappear in) the currents of our turning point, to freely yet discerningly embrace, know, and embody the turbulent richness of it, the crosscurrents and whitewater the frothing chaos and luminous forces of its waves, and, ultimately, its purpose-revealing depths.
If we thus trust, we will not, at least initially, necessarily know where we are being taken, but we won’t need to know, because we’ll inevitably be carried to a new shore, a truer shore, one more deeply aligned with what we really need. Right timing is essential. Too late doesn’t work, because we’ll have missed the necessary momentum for our leap, and too soon doesn’t work either, because prematurely taking the leap only leaves us in over our heads.
In the latter case, we are not adequately prepared; we’re just looking ahead, impaled upon our nostalgia for the future, doing little more than thrashing around in the waves, fighting just to surface, just to survive. Even if we are cast up on some shore, it will just be, regardless of its appearance, the same old shore, the same old life, featuring the same old inclinations that first propelled us into our premature plunge. It is not very difficult to turn a challenging turning point into a crisis, to get so worried and distressed about it that some sort of relief or release becomes exaggeratedly important to us. As various remedies are pursued — narcotic, erotic, and so on — the imperatives of our turning point recede, becoming but not much more than peripheral disturbance or muffled noise, an anemic halftone or faint knocking to which we turn a blind eye or deaf ear, thereby leaving ourselves stranded where we’ve already been long stranded, clinging to our compensatory doings, merely dreaming about a deeper or truer shore.
Finding ourselves thus marooned and at the same time not wanting to directly feel the sheer pain of what we’re really up to, we may then turn our dreams of a truer life into fantasies of some kind of “higher” domain, a place of immunity from pain, typically starring a more evolved us. Eventually we may get disillusioned and slide into cynicism, or we may remain with our fantasies, making an informational idol out of possibility and promise, haranguing ourselves into making good resolutions, not realizing that another, counterbalancing aspect of us that doesn’t give a damn about such resolutions will inevitably sabotage them. Turning points ask not for a flight into thinking and fantasy, but rather for courage and an openness of eye and heart, along with a willingness to come fully alive. This is about letting our innate warriorhood emerge, a warriorhood in which love and power work together, and in which vulnerability is a source of strength.
A certain disintegration often is needed, if only of obsolete structures, whether external, internal, or both, so that a deeper integration can occur. Thus do turning points often ask for a falling apart that leads not to fragmentation, but to a deeper wholeness.
The navigational directives of a turning point spontaneously emerge when we choose to enter its waters, having recognized and openly acknowledged that we actually are at that significant transitional juncture known as a turning point.
To make a me-knot and distressing fuss out of a turning point is to unnecessarily resist Life, to deny Life its inherent flux, its built-in changeability and mystery. A turning point is a charged arising, loaded with fuel. It is an emotional, as well as a physical and psychospiritual, event/process. It tends to proceed optimally when it is given a fitting freedom of emotion. Without such freedom, such a raw undamming of feeling, its waters — waves, currents, storms, and all — won’t exist for us except as a problem requiring an inordinate amount of control and shore-hugging.
There are big turning points, and there are much bigger ones, and there are small turning points, and very small ones. However miniscule or subtle it might be, every moment is a potential turning point. Each turning point intelligently entered into and made good use of prepares us for bigger or more demanding turning points. In its letting go and dissolution of old forms, every turning point is a kind of death. The more that we we turn away from taking good care of our small turning points, the more that we deny them their full existence and fruition, the more that we try to drink, think, eroticize, drug, or fantasize them away, the more likely it is that crisis will show up, catalyzed into being by our not handling our turning points more skillfully. Crisis as such is but the endarkened offspring of aborted turning points, offering us no offramps from its demands.
If we don’t heed a crisis, a bigger, more hard-hitting crisis almost inevitably appears, gatecrashing our slumber, really clobbering us; we may complain about this, perhaps playing victim to it or taking merely intellectual responsibility for it, repetitiously wishing that things were different or fairer, not noticing that each moment carries the same fundamental opportunity, the same basic invitation, an invitation that, when fully embraced, becomes but a sacred demand that we do whatever it takes to journey toward what matters most of all.
A turning point may really hurt, but it’s basically a good hurt, a purifying hurt, a hurt that deepens and hones our receptivity to what we must do. Our choice is not so much to enter or not to enter our turning point, as it is to make or not to make good use of it. We can’t truly escape our turning points — we can fend them off and anaesthetize ourselves to them, but we can’t actually flee them (even when we homestead on the surface), for they are part of us, revealing and reflecting our evolutionary state, as well as potentially serving to transport us into a deeper life. Big turning points are often potential quickenings of the Awakening process, shocks of marvelous/hellish magnitude, veined with an intensity needing only the spark of our full participation to become but grace in action.
We often tend to look for clarity within a turning point, not realizing that its opaque turbulence, its churning crosscurrents and unpredictable tides, are inherent to it, offering not clarity, but— if we dive in — a passage into a deepening clarity.
Despite their chaos, turning points house at their center a deep organic stillness, a vibrantly silent pulsation of unbound Being. This stillpoint, this clearing of transverbal lucidity, cannot be found, but rather only embodied and expressed, for it exists at our own core, already present no matter what we do. This is not the stillpoint of dispassionate inwardness, nor of any strategy to bypass or transcend desire and vitality, but rather is the very heart of feeling, the breath of Being, the dimensionless abode of what we truly are.
The hubbub around the center of a turning point, all the wildness and color and chaos and uprooting, is simply the fertile outreaching of that turning point, its flowering, its song, its marvelously opportunistic circumference, its interface with our resistance. If its turbulence is entered into without restraint and with sufficient awareness, we’re not then just spun around on the surface, forced to go in circle after exhausting circle, but instead are spiraled toward the core (which may feel as though we’re going down the drain when we let fear occupy us). And sometimes not even spiraled, but simply propelled from one fluid orbit to another closer to the nucleus, a deeper concentric circle of the unrehearsable flow of What-Really-Matters.
This is the opportunity of a turning point. It is present in every moment, but some moments possess more of a timely buildup of available energy. Our work, our labor of love, is not to waste this energy, but rather to ride it, to yield to its momentum, to use it as well as possible. Do not look for clarity in a turning point. Do not look for security or guarantees. Simply trust, not out of submission, but rather out of awakened surrender, realizing that what is asked of you through your turning point has always been asked of you.
Furthermore, the riper that you are for the needed change, the more compellingly you will be asked, until one day you won’t be asked or invited, but will be absolutely required to participate, and participate fully. You then will have no choice but to take the leap, but it won’t matter because there will be nothing else for you to do. Such is the freedom of not needing to have a choice.
Turning points are but signs of our readiness for a certain leap, a passage into a more fitting level of Being. Use them as such.
Instead of looking ahead, look inside your looking. Look as you leap. You won’t regret it.
