Some ideas for navigating your transition.

In between the two is the neutral zone (a term coined by William Bridges). In the neutral zone you don't know what to do or where to go, what comes next and how to make it hurry up and happen.

The neutral zone is challenging and hard and we're tempted to wish we weren't in it. We'd like it to be different. I'm sure you've been there. I know I've been, many times. For example when I separated from my partner and also left my job. And there are the little transitions of daily life also.

It helps to remember this: If you can accept and bless what's here now, you make room for the new to come. (Or "what you resist, persists".)

The Hidden Core of Resistance
We may not actually be resisting what we think we're resisting.

Consider this example: a man retires after 40 years in a company. He's had good and bad experiences there, but a life.

What does the retirement mean to him? What does he think it says about him? For example, it may say that he's not going to have any friends now because he's not really a very likeable guy, without the work excuse for people to interact with him. It may say that now he has to deal with some unfinished business with his wife. It may mean that he's not valuable if he's not a wage earner.

All these are common things for men, by the way, and not strange at all. They're unmasked by the retirement.

Actually this can be the chance to find buried treasure, real gold. Because it gives us a chance to know that we're worthy and good for ourselves, able to come even closer to our partners. (Or whatever it is.)

Major transitions always bring unresolved things out into the open. It's as if they too lived with the thing that's "died," and now are on there own.

As the 4Gateways belief goes: "Acceptance sets us free. When we can own our Shadows, the alienated parts of ourselves, and respect them, we have the possibility of change and happiness."

What we don't like in the neutral zone becomes a "shadow," a part of ourselves we deny we have. A protocol to work with the shadow is this:

Be kind to yourself as you,

1. Notice what's bothering you, a brief description.
2. Describe it in the third person - "S/he is acting like . . ."
3. Address it in second person - "You are acting like . . ."
4. Be it in first person - "I am acting like . . ." (Again, be kind to yourself. This statement is never true, but we can believe it and so, live the effects.) Our willingness to actually feel what we're not wanting calls the bluff of this illusion; the resistance entrenches it.