by Michelle Potter Artist - Energy Worker - Wayshower | Jan 12, 2021 | Blogs, Life Lessons
Being ‘in between’ is an odd feeling. Like those awkward years when you feel like an adult but you’re told to sit at the kids table. For a time you feel like you don’t fit anywhere, but you do know that you have outgrown a part of yourself and that it is time to move on.
The type of language that people use doesn’t sit right with you any more. The places or people that used to give you joy or inspiration, no longer give you peace or comfort. Something just feels blah.
You know you can’t go back, but you also feel that you can’t go forward, not yet anyway. It’s like you are in a holding pattern until the path that you are supposed to take starts to appear in front of you.
Time where you need to be content to just ‘be’. Just sit in the ‘I AM’ for a while. This is the most difficult part of the ‘in between’ for me. I’m used to going full steam ahead. I create, and create, and create to the point of exhaustion.
I create for joy to myself and others, to earn an income, to keep my mind busy, to see how far I can push myself, to improve my skills. I create for fun, to feed my soul, to heal, but I also create to distract myself so that I do not have to focus on things that will cause me emotional distress.
It’s like a double edged sword, and sometimes I would say an addiction. You can become addicted to anything, even creativity. Once you throw the word ‘addiction’ into something it has a negative connotation. It means that you feel you have to do this ‘thing’ in order to feed an aspect of yourself that you feel is missing. Perhaps this ‘addiction’ distracts you from the real problem or emotion that you won’t, can’t or are not ready to face. Perhaps this addiction has turned into a belief system where you feel you need it to function. The epiphanies only come when you change your course and you step away from those behaviors.
Stepping away from things that you do every day allows you to see with more clarity. You just have to go camping for a week to realise how much you can live without. The ‘in between’ can be an uncomfortable space to be.
2020 gave rise to a lot of people all over the world, and continues to do so. The New Age or Spiritual movement calls this a ‘Mass Awakening’. Putting people outside their routine and comfort zones where they have to really look at themselves and reassess who they are, what they want from life and how they can contribute to mankind.
This movement has also given way to a lot of new programs, courses, self help and well-being resources that perhaps you had not thought of delving into before. My Facebook feed is saturated with sponsored advertisements and no doubt so is yours. The temptation is always there to sign up for another masterclass class (BTW I can’t stand this term!), course, or program while you are sitting in the ‘in between’. A past mentor of mine would use the term ‘perpetual students’ referring to certain individuals who would take course after course rather than going out into the world and fully integrating what they have learnt into their lives. Resisting becoming teachers or mentors themselves through sharing or living in alignment because they are forever in search of perfecting or growing their knowledge.
Trust me, the butterfly part of me always wants to try new things, even if it’s to work out how I can learn and understand them so that I can create something of my own. But I know that this is not the time for me to do that. I know that I need to be comfortable in my discomfort. I know that rest is what I need in order to find inspiration. I know that I do not need to take another class or course or workshop at this time. I know that ‘not’ being busy does not devalue my worth.
So if you find yourself like me, stuck in the in between, be kind to yourself. Do not feel that you have to go and seek things to validate your existence. Circumstances will change, they always do but it is where you find yourself when that happens so that you do not miss the opportunities when they appear.
Michelle xx
by Michelle Potter Artist - Energy Worker - Wayshower | Jul 25, 2019 | Life Lessons
If you follow my website and Facebook Page you may have noticed some gradual transitions over the last twelve months. These changes have occurred as my higher self has been calling and I have been listening. Slowly implementing changes and moving back into studying as I have had a yearning to fully integrate all that I know I am.
The term Visionary Artist was an identity someone else tagged me and at the time I accepted it. If you are told the same thing over and over for many years, no matter what it is, at some level of consciousness you are going to question yourself and perhaps even start to believe it.
Calling myself a Visionary Artist never felt quite right. There is no doubt I am an intuitive Artist, but I am also lots and of other things. Having this label was like locking myself in a room. The same script repeating in my head that I had to find that one thing I was good at and to excel at it. I have learned so many skills and I will be forever grateful for the lessons and the teachers in my life. Without them I would not be who I am today. My mentor at the beginning of my awakening and art career was constantly telling me to focus. Be the bee, stop getting distracted by other things and concentrate on what I was good at. Go deeper within myself, heal, build a structure, an identity and create. It made a lot of sense at the time because when you are on the start of a spiritual awakening and truly searching for who you are, you are often open to suggestion and seeking trusted mentors that are knowledgeable and wise. Learning to work with and see the teacher for who they are, at some stage may also become the lesson. If your mentor has a God complex (believe me there is plenty of them out there) or is not evolving with you it’s likely the student at some point in time will surpass the teacher. It is us who must learn and awaken to the knowledge when it is time to thank them and move on.
When you are in the right flow with Spirit then opportunities will open up. Synchronicity just happens, the right people and situations come across your path so you can achieve your visions and be rewarded with the abundance you so deserve. It’s like driving to a new destination. You still control the vehicle, but you make all the right turns and get a lot of green lights along the way. Its Spirits way of letting you know that when you are aligned to your true pathway even the Stop signs are opportunities for you level up energetically so your light shines brighter, and your purpose becomes clearer. I thought I was in the flow and I would occasionally see small glimpses of the possibilities awaiting me, but they were short lived and never seemed to build momentum. It has pretty much been uphill all the way and I seemed to be getting a lot of red lights! At times it made me question who I am and at what point do I say the path of the Visionary Artist is clearly not the direction that Spirit wants me to take. That time is now.
Stepping back from my Artist identity last year and getting really honest with myself I discovered something. The Stop signs have been necessary for me to understand that life is happening for me, not to me. That everything that I have been through has given me a collection of experiences and such a deep level of understanding that there is absolutely no uncertainly in my heart of who I am and what I came here to do. Hence the change of my business logo and what I identify with in my current reality. In order to become all that we were born to be we must be prepared to evolve and lose the tags that others put on us as well as those we put on ourselves. Know that we should not be the same person we were last year, last month, last week. From the wise words of Muhammad Ali – “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
Michelle Potter
Artist – Energy Worker – Wayshower
