I grew up with a very overprotective mother. Who could blame her, when I was six years old my infant brother Marc tragically passed away when he was 6 weeks old.
Her fear of losing another child became the mantra of my life – “Better you should cry than me.” I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere or do anything that all my friends were free to do. It didn’t take long for my mother’s fears to become my own.
While our parents slept, my adolescent friends began to step out and test the waters of their independence by harmlessly sneaking out in the middle of the night. Really I thought, you guys are crazy, no thanks… I’ll stay home, safely tucked away in my bed. And in many ways that’s exactly where I stayed for the next 35 years.
Whenever something came up that felt remotely uncomfortable or risky, I retreated. If there wasn’t a parachute, I wasn’t jumping. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even getting on the plane. I learned to avoid risk at all cost. And everything was a risk…. don’t do this, don’t do that, don’t eat this, don’t try that, my life was a resume of everything I didn’t do. While my comfort zone became the prison I needed to break free of, clearly I wasn’t brave enough to venture out alone. So life lent me an unexpected hand; life huffed and puffed and blew my house down. I lost my husband, my home, my financial security, all the “comfort” I had worked so hard to hold onto. All gone. Puff. And you know what was left when all that blew away? FREEDOM!
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
Yes Dorothy we are not in Kansas anymore. Many times we experience a storm (divorce, loss of a loved one, unemployment etc..) that blow us out of our comfort zone. When there is nothing left to hold on to we have no choice but to let go. Then grace steps in and gives us the opportunity to WAKE UP. That is when we can choose to break free of old ways of thinking and begin to think with our right mind. When we listen to the comfort in our heart instead of the imprisoning fear in our head we find the courage to venture out of old beliefs onto the road that lead us to our own personal Oz.
You don’t have to experience a tornado to realize your dreams, you just have to step outside of your comfort zone.
The yellowbrick road is waiting there to guide you to the place where the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.
Listen to the whispers,
Mindy