The plant already knows how to grow.
Honoring the process did not always come easy to me. Something I’ve come to learn about myself is I don’t like feeling unsure. The floor may as well be crumbling underneath me as I scramble for solid ground. It has been really hard for me to sit in the in-between, where there is no answer.
An image comes to mind as I reflect on this. I can see myself spending so much time and energy preparing my armor, checking every piece and making sure there are no gaps where a knife could get through.
I believe that is why I’ve always daydreamed about ideals. They have helped me map how life should look, as long as I got everything right.
My effort to make life feel more certain has been a way to armor up. To avoid mistakes or disappointment. This has rippled through every area of my life.
It often looked like self-monitoring. Hiding away my depth, my curiosities, my desire to explore, to ask questions, to acknowledge my fears, and to discover how I really felt about something.
It also looked like mastering my body through strict exercise regimens and eating plans, to feel, well, powerful and in control.
I even found purpose in an endless spiritual quest to be better and make meaning of things. I wanted to live from revelation and conviction, always searching for what I believed and why. This is something I still value, but pursuing it with exhausting hypervigilance wasn’t truly about living from conviction. It was another way to strive for protection and approval. A bulldozing fervency to be right, more spiritual, and, if I’m honest, more superior. I couldn’t see the beauty in letting things be in process, letting questions remain open, or allowing understanding to take its time. I just wanted to feel secure in where I stood.
And oh how it was woven into my marriage and motherhood.
I believed an ideal marriage meant we “worked on the relationship,” not just putting the other person and their needs first, but literally putting our marriage on a pedestal. Well, it was fascinating to test that little gem over the years, only to have it fracture into a million pieces.
All it helped me achieve was a fixation on how things should look, an obsession with my husband’s every move and our kids’ behavior, burnout, and eventually the manifestation of my greatest fear: feeling abandoned.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get handed a manual when I got married or became a mom. I had an idea of how I wanted it all to play out, along with some wild determination to do things differently from what had been modeled to me. What I couldn’t foresee was how years of secret codes, mindsets, and patterns were embedded in almost everything I did.
When I couldn’t make sense of all that, and realized none of it was leading me to the fruit I wanted, I started wondering, Maybe I’m not worthy of love?
So many different expressions of the same longing… to be loved.
The idea of certainty seemed to be the perfect way to cover up all evidence of my inadequacies… my humanity.
Eventually, this exhausting ruse to run from my fear of failing stopped working. And I found myself collapsing into darkness. The unknown had found me and I felt so afraid. But I found something there. I found what I was running from. Apparently not just my pain, but my hopes and desires too. Chasing ideals was really a glossed over passion for a full and beautiful life.
I fought it for a while. I didn’t want to be still in the uncertainty. And when I realized there was no way around it, I tried to force the lesson stillness had to offer, so I could get out of there quickly. But then I started with tiny moments of separation between me and the urge to avoid it. That is when I discovered the power of the pause, like putting on an oxygen mask in the middle of a crisis and taking a deep breath before your next move.
The more I practiced these little pauses, the more I noticed. Something started to become glaringly obvious. I realized that trying to improve what existed between me, my husband, and our kids had become a behavioral management program. It hit me then, what needed to change. I needed to come back to myself.
Creating space around what was so automatic helped me understand that the abandonment I felt in my marriage was ancient, something I had known since I was young. In a complicated way it was perpetuated mostly by how I related to myself, steeped in scenes from my childhood. My husband could trigger it, but he wasn’t abandoning me. He was trying to manage my happiness because I had given him that responsibility.
The cycles we had been in for fifteen years started making sense. I would suppress, control, and monitor until the pressure built and I’d scramble for relief, often coming out sideways toward my loved ones, followed by my collapse.
We had both put ourselves last and hoped for reciprocation. But deep wounds had left a bottomless pit at my core. Nothing satisfied. No one else could do the work required for me to love myself.
As I began what I call inner-world work, my life started to reflect the healing I was experiencing. The way it rippled outward was kind of a shock, because it came through doing less: letting go, learning to trust, and allowing my husband and our kids their own process and agency. So different from what we were used to.
They felt respected. Perhaps inspired, too. They seemed to respond to this as an invitation to help build something new. I was experiencing my power, and it wasn’t through force or manipulation.
Together, we all found our way to a life that felt at ease and rich in real love, real joy, real struggles, real safety, and real support.
And still to this day, what happens in the pause is what heals me.
Taking the time to question and track what is happening within me is my lifeline in the spiral. When an ideal tempts me to overhaul my life in pursuit of it, you better believe I now weigh that ideal against what is actually here, in the now… in my own messy humanity, and that of my loved ones. I listen to my body and ask: “Is this what I want to experience?”
This is me being a mother to myself, holding the hand of the younger part of me whose favorite dress-up costume is still that armor. Here, my intuition, my curiosity, my pain, my joy, and my fragility all get to be part of the conversation. This helps me move closer to feeling at home in my skin rather than searching for security in something outside of me.
Whatever I discover in that move toward myself, in that little pause, continues to teach me how to honor the process. I think of it like tending a garden.
I cannot force a flower to bud. No matter how hard I try, I cannot will it to happen. With all my good intentions and well-meaning effort, I could keep pulling up the plant to check its roots, weakening its chance to thrive each time.
The plant already knows how to grow. It just needs water, sunlight, good soil, and time. I can tend to what is there, pay attention to what it needs, and leave it in the ground long enough to thrive. Something can be alive and flourishing even when I cannot yet see evidence of it.
Honoring the process is learning how to respect and protect what is still in process without demanding that it reveal itself before it is ready.
So now, when I feel myself rushing toward a plan to have everything perfectly figured out, I try to stay with the messy shit, for just a little longer. I usually find that the uncertainty is only part of the story… a storm cloud overhead. Meanwhile, in that secret place, my roots are running deeper.
This is actually what we experience together in Capacity Lab (formally The Greenhouse). We gather around convictions like Honor the Process and explore what it is like to stay with ourselves a little longer, perhaps finding room to let go of some of our armor and own our humanity a little more.
