2018 summoned me to step beyond the edges of my comfort zone, tracking me down when I tried to run away from my soul’s purpose, continually rerouting me so that instead I would run towards it. But as Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art, “The more important a call of action is to our soul’s purpose, the more resistance we will feel towards it.” Resistance and writing go together like peanut butter and jelly.

My client’s chest heaved and sweat dripped from his brow as he settled onto his yoga blankets. He had sprinted from work to make it to our 7:30pm session, commenting that work had been crazy. I asked him if this stressed him out or if he thrived on it. “Both,” he admitted. “But it’s a good thing,” he paused. “Well, better than the alternative.”

Just as I clicked both kids into their car seats after visiting a friend and her new baby in the Jersey Suburbs, white pellets started dumping from the sky. I had to crouch down to see out of the windshield. Gripping the steering wheel tightly, I questioned whether or not to pull over and wait it out. But I worried that if I did that we could get stuck so I kept going.

The other morning as I raced around trying to make breakfast, make lunches, and brush three sets of teeth, while trying to convince two children under the age of five to change out of their pajamas before 7am, I could feel myself tightening up. One of my teachers says to try and catch yourself when the first domino that leads to your negative emotional state is falling rather than when the 50th has already crashed down.

I arrived at the Advanced Soul and Destiny Retrieval course in Joshua Tree, California with a right eye that looked as if I'd gone a few rounds in the ring with Mike Tyson. For the past six months, since the last time I went to California, I've had a blocked tear duct in my left eye, which caused tears to roll down my cheek so often that the skin under my eye began to shrivel from the salt. After seeing two regular doctors, going to acupuncture twice, visiting the eye doctor twice and then the eyelid specialist twice, a plastic surgeon had to cut the tear duct open to relieve the overflow. "You've got small tear ducts, Lady. What can I say?" he told me.

On the second day of my retreat to Costa Rica one of the students asked me if I missed my kids. My heart sped up. It was only Monday. I wouldn’t see their sweet faces until I arrived home Saturday and even then it would be by the feint glow of their nightlights as they slept. Had I made the wrong decision? Was I just being selfish? I did miss them, but it was the idea of missing them that made me panic more than the actual experience of being separated.

The pastor at our church says we wildly overestimate what we can do in one year and we vastly underestimate what we can do in five years. During a recent healing session with a client who was working on creating her vision for the year to come, I opened my mesa, the sacred cloth that holds my healing stones, and noticed two pieces of paper. While she worked on her vision I opened the papers. On one I wrote my goals for 2016.