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Relocation is a common goal at the threshold of retirement. Sometimes it’s to move back to a beloved place, sometimes it’s to be near grandchildren, other times it’s to experience an interesting place at a deeper level. A client, originally from the Pacific Northwest (PNW), had taken a job in the desert southwest. Over the years, she had built a whole life in her desert southwest home – interesting activities, friends, church, adult kids and grandkids nearby. But the reason she left the Pacific Northwest, the job, was no longer going to be in her life. She was retiring.
Her life in the desert was good. She was happy. But she felt there was something missing. She missed the moisture, the rainy days, the trees and the abundant green of the northwest. She said she especially missed the smell of the earth after a rain. She didn’t have family in Oregon anymore, but she felt like it was her true home. She wasn’t sure if the PNW dream was just an old dream that had gotten stuck in her consciousness by playing it on repeat over the years or if it was something she really wanted.
If you read my Fan the Flame article, I invited you to stop listening to your start-and-quit stories of yesterday, and to start thinking about why you keep starting. This isn’t quite a start-and-quit story but it’s quite relevant because it gets at one possible reason we keep starting, or thinking about, the same goal.
It is easy to get caught in a redundant thought-cycle like the groves on an album. The same song keeps playing in our head. We often don’t stop to check if it’s time to put on a different album. Perhaps the reason we’re not making progress on a goal isn’t lack of discipline, energy or time. Maybe, we’re no longer really attached to the old goal. We’ve changed, we’ve grown, we’ve evolved. The goal was just an old mental story stuck on replay – and our lack of progress toward it might be our own instinct protecting us from investing in something that we no longer actually want.
Relocation is just one version of this. For you it might be the thirty pounds you’ve tried to lose four different times. The garage you’ve committed to cleaning out every January for the past 10 Januaries. The trip to Paris you’ve been “planning” for years. The business, the hobby, or reconnection with old friends. It looks a little different in every life, but you recognize the experience – a goal that keeps resurfacing, that you keep restarting or thinking about, that you can’t seem to either finish . . . or finally let it go.
We get caught up in these old goals from an earlier version of ourselves (hello, bikini body), guilt (“I have the time now so I really should . . . volunteer . . . take care of my dad . . . babysit my grandchildren”), or the quiet pressure of society’s expectation of what women of a certain age are supposed to want (that senior bus tour through Italy, following a guide holding a little sign up in the air). There’s nothing wrong with any of these things - unless they don’t really belong to you.
A common question we ask ourselves is, “What do I really want?” Admittedly, it’s not a bad question. It invites a pause and brief mindful reflection. The response to this self-inquiry is often a shrug accompanied by, “Uhm, I don’t know.” Uh oh! Now what? Many people will just set the thought aside, eventually leaning back into the old goals-on-repeat and get stuck in the mundaneness of daily life.
A higher value question is, “What is asking to be called forward?”
Huh?!? Some ideas and goals have been with us for so long that we mistake their age for the truth. But “what is asking to be called forward,” gets at the heart of what is worth preserving because it holds real value – what holds real value for who you are right now and for who you’re becoming. By contrast, it highlights what needs to be left behind. Dragging old baggage forward weighs you down and prevents you from expressing the highest version of yourself. Knowing what’s being called forward is what resources you for the future you want to have.
This is frequency work disguised as goal setting. Frequency is the soul piece in how I work with women — the layer underneath the to-do list, where you find your way to the actual vision for your life instead of just the next task on the list.
I come to this work through IGNITE Her® Frequencies, a design framework rooted in the ancient wisdom of the I Ching. In my own design, this particular instinct traces back to my single-most dominant frequency — the I Ching identifies it as Gate 32 — the pull to preserve what has lasting value while avoiding the repetition of past mistakes — its highest expression is bravery. Bravery to discern what has value to us and what doesn’t. Bravery to release the form without discarding the wisdom. Bravery to fail forward rather than clinging to the familiar because it’s comfortable or, maybe, once worked.
I didn’t choose to be wired this way — I just am. So it’s probably no accident that mining the past to resource the future is the work I keep coming back to, for myself and in service to the women I work with. And the practice of raising frequency doesn’t sit in tension with any faith-based beliefs and practices that you already have — rather it supports your clear expression as a conduit of that faith.
By not automatically following the pull of an old dream nor instantly dismissing it, my client with a PNW vision gave herself space to investigate what was underneath her desire. We took a deep dive into the retirement experience she wanted to have – how she wanted to feel, what she wanted her days to look like and what experiences she wanted to immerse herself in. We deliberately didn’t name a location for the vision. We wanted to create a neutrality around the zip code. Instead, she held those desires in her body, not just her head. Then, we assessed the characteristics and opportunities in her desert home, in her old Oregon town and another PNW location, all relative to the vision she held for her future. What did she want to preserve from her pre-retirement desert life? What did she need to bring forward in her life to be the highest version of herself? Would relocating even serve her vision?
She researched and made a couple of trips to the PNW. Once she had the information she needed and had done the frequency work, she found her best fit – not in her previous town, but still in Oregon where she bought a condo. She spent that first summer there, out of the extreme desert heat, and her kids and grandkids were able to visit. She went back to the desert in the winter. She eventually sold her desert home and stayed with her kids whenever she was in town.
The relocation goal wasn’t the only goal in her vision. It was more than a shift in geography. She wanted to paint, and the landscapes surrounding her new home gave her the exact inspiration she needed. The goal wasn’t to get good and sell her art, the goal was in the painting itself – the immersion of herself in the landscapes she had held to for so long. This kind of creativity is a sacred act for an artist.
It was never a question of should I stay or should I go. Or what do I really want. It was about what was being called forward. Discerning what was worth preserving for the future. Raising her frequency to the level of bravery. That’s when goal setting becomes frequency work – and frequency work is an integral piece of ending the start-and-quit cycles.
It’s important to note the bravery didn’t come in one big action. The path to get there was kaizen-in-action; not perfect steps all lined up from the beginning, but continuous progress — one action at a time while holding a vision. If you want to know more about kaizen, you can do that on the Weighted Wisdom About page. It is a core practice that sustains how I show up in life and informs all that I do.
🎙️💿It’s your turn💿🎙️
Is it time to take the old album off repeat and change the music? Or is there something in the old song that’s asking to be sung again? What capacities do you need to carry your vision forward – literally? That’s where we’re headed next.