Why Learning to Reparent Ourselves Is A Game Changer At Mid-Life
Mid-life is a classic time of transition. It’s often marked by a growing restlessness, a sense that we are meant to evolve into someone else.
During transitions our identities shift, and we pass through three major stages. In the first stage we honor endings by making peace with the pass. The second stage is one where we are asked to stay open as we evolve and pass through a liminal zone. Finally, the third stage is one where we expand and step into our newly evolved sense of self.
For anyone seeking to make major changes in their life, 2020 is a little like winning the lottery. Its high-octane energy includes six eclipses, two retrograde cycles and three major planetary cycles coming to an end, with new ones beginning.
This shifting and intense energy is here to help us all to evolve. We are being confronted with choices about who we want to become, what parts of ourselves we want to leave behind and what parts we want to stop hiding from and to bring more fully into the light.
The uncomfortable part is that we don’t yet know who we are becoming. It’s like there is a gap in our consciousness waiting to be filled. We can see who we want to become, but we don’t yet know how we are going to get there. In this sense 2020 is asking us all not just to grow up, but to hold ourselves responsible by becoming the parents to ourselves that we never had.
In my own life there has often been an exquisitely pain gap between who I knew myself to be versus the version of myself I knew I was capable of becoming. It sometimes feels like I have been stuck in the liminal stage of midlife for almost a decade, since I was 40 and got divorced. I now know that this transition, like a lot of women, has been about really owning my power. Mid-life is when we are given a Second Chance at owning our power.
For most of my adult life I have had an uneasy and inconsistent relationship with owning my power. As a child, there was a sense that I was “too much.” That my feisty Aries rising and intense Scorpio energy was more than my parents could handle. As a result, I learned to sublimate my power, as a lot of women do. To not consistently use my voice or to use it in a way that was not in integrity with who I saw myself to be.
This year I’ll be turning 50 (gulp) and I can feel the camera lens bringing into even sharper focus who I want to “be” by November 6. This sense of urgency is likely being spurred by the fact that 2019 was a mashup of some painful endings, the death of my children’s father, and exciting beginnings, my first -born started college in Ireland. In the midst of this awareness, I can feel a new “inner parent” emerging that wants to help me bridge once and for all this gap in my identity.
In our birth chart Saturn represents our parent, our teacher, here to teach us about discipline and reward us for our effort. The challenge is that for most of us until we hit middle -age Saturn feels like our harshest critic, the voice we just want to ignore.
For most of my life, my “inner parent” has been broadcasting a steady and consistent stream of self-doubt along with looking outside myself for approval.
I don’t know about you, but I am ready to throw out the old tapes . I can feel a new consciousness emerging that is going to provide the fuel to close the gap between the two versions of myself that have been evolving for the past decade. To be clear it’s a consciousness based in self-respect and self-love for all the hard work most of us have been doing to arrive at this stage in our life. We will not become who we are meant to be with a voice full of criticism and judgment.
Fortunately, this year we are all being given an incentive or a boost to cultivate a more powerfully supportive inner parent because Jupiter is moving steadily closer to Saturn all year. In December the two will conjoin and combine their energies. This is is a cosmic boost meant to solidify the maturation of our inner parent so it can accompany us on the journey for the next 35 years of our life.
Are you ready to learn to re-parent yourself in a different way?
Learning to reparent ourselves means that:
We finally accept and acknowledge that owning our power IS a responsibility.
When we don’t own our power---our power to make a difference in the world and the lives of others—it’s a way of staying small and not taking responsibility for the things in our life.
And when we learn to reparent ourselves, we can finally forgive our parents for not being able to fully embrace, accept and nurture that part of ourselves that was waiting to shine all these years.
As you navigate 2020 listen to the voice of your inner parent and let me know how it’s going. I’d love to hear from you: Laurel@LaureloSullivanCoaching.com