Another thing we need to normalize—how frustrating it is to unlearn the physical response of anxiety. The moment you realize how frivolous you’ve been with your body, your mind, and your heart—and decide to change—is often the moment you are tortured the most. You are instantly reminded of past decisions, bumping into people who knew who you were and not who you are. I’ve said this before, and I will continue to say it until I’m comfortable in it: healing requires divine determination, monumental moxie, and grace-held vulnerability.
This kind of unlearning reverts me back to a place of childhood, making me feel immature when I am, in fact, practicing wisdom. For instance, when You showed me that my morning meditation ritual was connected to the breathing exercises I now use to reregulate my nervous system, everything shifted. This kind of care and love has been impactful—decreasing, and even replacing, the anxious tells of tight chests and lost breath in moments as loud as trying a new exercise class and as quiet as opening my banking app.
Abundance has its own way of checking you from a place of love—a place that reveals why you learned to prioritize financial freedom and embrace budgeting before you even had the money to fund those budgets. I felt this as I reflected on paying off two debtors this past month. The first was easy enough. But as I spoke with the representative, I found myself second-guessing the option of another settlement on my credit report. I had tuned them out, and in a split second, I felt the beginning of a spiral into analysis paralysis.
I began thinking through every option and outcome instead of taking advantage of the solution in front of me. Then my training kicked in, and I remembered I was not steering the ark. A flood of thoughts followed—lessons from credit counselors, goals I’d set in prayer—and slowly, they began to erode the looping negativity. Within sixty to ninety seconds, I experienced both unlearning and relearning: anxiety quelled and a second debtor paid in the same month.
I took a deep breath and sat with how it felt to take those steps toward my goal so decisively. I felt peace—in my stomach and in my chest. I felt gratitude in my smile.
The fortitude developed in moments like these is what abundance expects us to live aligned with in the present.
That backbone helps us stand firm when old thoughts attempt to infiltrate our minds, pulling us back toward lives we’ve already chosen to move on from. Some believe people never change—that if someone once misused drugs or manipulated others, we should always expect the same behavior. But my wholehearted belief in the God of transformation doesn’t remove accountability; it makes self-reflection bearable. And that is why it is okay to normalize the range of emotions that accompanies our acclimation to faith-manifested timelines: unfamiliarity, joy, peace, uncertainty, excitement, frustration, enlightenment, agitation, disappointment—need I go on?
I write this mid-journey, offering a glimpse of the relationship.
Snippets of a conversation.
These are the moments—
no steering wheel on the ark,
just my courage and obedience
covered in God’s bloody promises.
~ DreamGirl✨🌿
