Compromise or growing pains?
Only you can know.
It takes commitment to consciously change to live more aligned with your energy and values. Luckily, it becomes more difficult (edging on impossible) to compromise your needs and wants once you’ve started respecting them. Once you’re aware of what isn’t working, game over — you must move toward action. Trying to force what’s not right or go back to outdated ways of being will make you sick and miserable.
Sometimes it’s confusing what our bodies are saying — we don’t know until we do. As we grow more trusting of ourselves, it gets easier to sense what does or doesn’t feel right. The flavor of ‘this is wrong for you’ is different from ‘this feels shaky and also right’. Glennon frames it as discerning whether a fear is ‘scaring you to go’ or ‘scaring you to stop’. Only you can determine whether it’s a yes or a no. Only you can feel in your body whether you’re squashing or hiding. You know what’s right when your body tells you so — it isn’t for anyone else to decide.
Are you compromising, or is it actually ok and you’re just having growing pains? You’re the only one who can answer this question.
Grow or not.
Life will present all kinds of situations that invite you to grow (or not). Everything can be your teacher, and there will always be a point of clarity in every situation. There will be a moment, or a series of moments, in which the body says ‘no more’ or ‘I’m done’, or ‘yes, please, continue’. You will either realize that now you have to make moves, or that you can settle into the rightness of what used to be scary. There will come a point in which it simply must happen because it can no longer be contained. You’ll know when it’s time, because that is when it will happen.
If you don’t pay attention to the little moments your body says no, it will build and then you may have a messy blowout of a confrontation. And that is also ok, because we are all just collecting experiences to learn and feel from. Maybe next time you’ll listen to the first no rather than the fiftieth. The body is persistent, it wants you to listen and won’t stop until you do.
When we trust that we’ll respect the no’s we can also trust and enjoy the things that feel like ‘yes’. Isn’t that what we’re here for anyways?
Compromise is not always discernible from the outside — it’s what we feel inside that matters. Being generous does not necessarily make you a doormat. Valuing honesty does not mean you cut people off after a single white lie. (But it might mean you don’t give second chances after a betrayal of trust). As Brené Brown says — we can have open hearts and strong spines. We can care deeply about meeting others’ needs, while still prioritizing our own. There is nuance and there is balance to every engagement and relationship, and different people in our lives require different things.
It’s all unfolding correctly.
You can trust, and are right to trust, that everything you are meant to know and do will be unlocked in the right timing. Everything you are doing and feeling today is important.
What’s meant for you won’t miss, because it can’t.
xx, maggie
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