Navigating Life at the Edge

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In unforeseen ways, life might occasionally drive us to the edge of our comfort zones. We may find ourselves standing on the precipice, gazing over the edge of the cliff, and daring to jump into the unknown.

Many of us may turn around at this point because we feel ill-equipped to handle the changes that are calling out for our embrace.

As someone who has stood at the brink for the last two years of my life, it has become a familiar and damned place.

I have set up camp here, watched the sun rise and the light fade into the distance to welcome the twilight more times than I care to remember. I have hidden in my cave and, when loneliness arrived, made my way back to the village to be comforted by the familiar for brief moments, only to end up back at the edge of the cliff upon rousing from my fitful sleep once more.

Sometimes, I would resentfully attempt to throw myself over the edge ‘just be done with it’ but like an anti-gravity chamber, would find myself suspended in mid-air, staring the void in the face but never closer to falling into it.

I would cry myself to sleep, wondering ‘why me?’ As an isolated and distant observer, I watched the people in my life, seemly content, busying themselves and making their way through the world. All the while I sat at my perch at the top of the cliff, thinking in circles and demanding to understand why ‘it’ hadn’t happened yet.

This is the funny thing about navigating these deeply transformative spaces and moments of our life—understanding that we cannot take any of it personally.

Finding ourselves at the edge of the known and familiar is very much the same as an invitation to die, though not in a literal sense.

 I am currently working with the concept of ‘Death and Dying’ and it has been a profound gift of remembrance. It’s odd to think that the concept of dying is such a scary thought to most of us when in reality we are dying all the time. The death of our very cells are essential for our survival and evolution as human beings. The death of old, outdated versions of us creates the spaciousness to bring to form a clearer intelligence that lies dormant within, waiting for the opportunity to reveal itself.

Think back to moments in your life where there were changes that presented themselves—was there always a choice to say yes, or to turn away from them? Or were there moments where these transitions simply happened, regardless of your willingness to meet it?

At the crux of it, and whether we like the thought or not, the edge demands to be acknowledged and silently but intentionally invites a release of the stories that keep us bound to old versions and identities of ourselves.

It took me a long time to understand the ways in which I kept myself shackled to that spot at the precipice, telling myself that life was happening to me. It required me to take moments to go beyond the surface questions to truly sit with myself and ask, ‘what is life asking of me and how am I withholding this offering?’ It required deep surrender and the courage to face my fears and self-limiting beliefs that kept me tethered to dead roots.

Eventually, there comes a point where the stories we have told ourselves that justified our comfortable patterns, behaviours, and relationships must be released so we can rise up and embrace a new opportunity to transform and grow. In this process of allowing and acceptance, we begin to tend to the earth of our inner world with nurturance and love, which in turn grows the most radiant gardens of abundance and beauty within—a harvest that can be enjoyed by everyone we encounter in this magickal life.

 As it tends to go, life has a funny way of bringing us back to this reckoning moment over and over again until we are able to take a deep breath, stop clinging, and trust that when we are ready to fall through the familiar, something divine will be there to catch us.

And as a wise friend recently reminded me, what awaits us on the other side is almost always much better than we can ever imagine.

So, ask yourself, what aspects of yourself wish to encounter expansion at this very moment and what’s stopping you from leaping over the edge into the fullness of that lived experience?

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Stranger No More

A poem by Kirshnee Moodley

I know not yet

What is to come

But the road I’ve travelled

Reminds me where I’m from.

If I dare look behind

I could see

The dreams that lay waste

Like the deadened wood of a once magnificent tree.

But were those dreams mine to start?

Or something I felt I needed to cling to

Just to play a part?

Without them I am not sure who now lives in my skin

Am I the angel

Or am I the jinn?

Afraid to look in the mirror

In case I see

I cannot recognise the person staring back at me

Have I ever known the me that is inside?

Or did I simply leave her to die,

To be swept away with the tide.

Her voice beckons out for me to take heed

To bring her back to the shore

And to let her take the lead

For She has always been there

From the very start.

She is the presence of divine love

That lives infinitely in my heart.

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About the author

Kirshnee Moodley is a Transformational Soul Coach, energy intuitive, writer and passionate proponent of self- compassion, mindfulness and personal development.