I want to tell you a story about something I don’t yet fully understand. Which, if you know me at all, is both terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure. And if you don’t know me – well, welcome. You have arrived at a good time. I am deep in the middle of something.

Here is what I know: I am co-creating a program called Sacred Transitions in Nepal. An immersive, transformative journey in the Himalayas, which is a place where the mountains don’t care about your to-do list, the ancient temples have seen it all, and the ground beneath your feet is soaked in centuries of spiritual practice. It is a program that brings together many of the things I have spent decades learning and teaching about transitions, somatic wisdom, nature, and the deeper currents of the soul. It has been a process of quite a few months, with a dear friend of several decades and now, a professional collaborator.

Here is what I don’t know: how this thing will actually come together. Whether enough people will say yes, and stay yes. Whether the logistics will align. Whether I am slightly out of my mind for attempting to co-birth something this complex in a country on the other side of the planet, where the time zone alone feels like a spiritual practice in patience.

Let me be honest with you (because that as what I do here), even when the honesty makes me squirm a little.

This. Is. Hard.

Not the vision part. The vision is alive and clear and has been pulling us forward with an almost gravitational insistence. I can feel it in my body – this deep knowing that Nepal is the right container for this work. That the combination of ancient wisdom, breathtaking landscape, and intentional group of travellers can create the kind of alchemy that shifts something fundamental in a person (including “us the facilitators”). I have experienced enough of these transformative spaces in my life – from Egypt to Thailand to Fiji to the forests of the Pacific Northwest – to trust that certain places on this earth have a way of cracking us open in ways that a conference room or a Zoom call simply cannot.

No, the vision isn’t the hard part. The hard part is everything between the vision and the reality, like the moment of landing in Kathmandu.

It is the logistics – which, for someone who works with the mysteries of the soul for a living, can feel about as enchanting as filling out tax forms. Coordinating across continents and time zones. Navigating accommodations and transport and meals and the thousand small details that nobody thinks about until something goes wrong (even though we work with a wonderful local Nepal travel company for almost all of it). It is the kind of work that doesn’t look spiritual at all, and yet – I am learning – might be one of the most spiritual practices of all. Because it asks for presence. Patience. Immense trust. And a willingness to keep showing up for the unglamorous bits while holding the sacred thread of the bigger picture.

And then there are the participants. Oh, the participants.

People reach out. They are excited. They feel the pull. Something in the program description lands in their chest and they say, “Yes. This is for me.” Deposits are made. Conversations happen. And then – life. A family situation. A financial concern. Challenge in securing travel insurance. A wave of doubt that crashes in at 2 AM and whispers, “Who am I to go to Nepal for a transformative journey? I should be practical. I should stay home. Maybe next time.”

And they withdraw.

I understand this. I do. I have been on the other side of that middle-of-the-night conversation with myself more times than I can count. Transitions are, by their very nature, disorienting. They ask us to let go before we can see what’s coming next. And saying yes to a journey like this – literally and metaphorically – is itself a transition. It is a threshold, and thresholds are uncomfortable places. I wrote about this not long ago: the in-between is where the old no longer fits and the new hasn’t yet arrived with instructions. We wobble there. We second-guess. Some of us leap. Some of us step back.

Both are valid. And both break my heart a little, in different ways.

Because here is the tension I live with every day as this program takes shape: I am pouring my energy, my vision, my resources, and frankly a good chunk of my nervous system into creating something that might not happen. Or it might happen differently than I imagined. Or it might happen exactly as it needs to, in ways I cannot yet see. And my dear friend and a co-creator of this experience does the same thing on the other end of the world.

There is a particular kind of trust required in this work. It is not blind optimism, for I have been around long enough to know the difference. More like the faith of a gardener who plants seeds in soil they can’t see into, waters them with no guarantee of bloom, and trusts the mystery of what happens underground (and, here, note that I am not a gardener at all). You tend what you can tend. You release what you can’t control. And you try not to dig up the seeds every five minutes to check if they are growing (I am not always successful at that last part).

Some days, the tension between “this might not work” and “I must keep going” feels almost unbearable. The inner voices have a field day. You are overextending yourself. Nobody is going to come. This is too ambitious. Who do you think you are? And alongside those voices, quieter but more persistent: This matters. Keep going. Trust the process. You have been here before.

Because I have been here before. So many times. Every program I have ever created – the Right Livelihood Quest, the Awakened Living Program, Navigating Transitions – each one started in this same fog of not-knowing. Each one asked me to walk forward without a map, holding the lantern of vision in one hand and a spreadsheet in the other. Each one taught me that the birthing of something meaningful is never clean or linear. It is messy. Humbling. And it has its own timing that stubbornly refuses to match my preferences.

But here is THE thing that is important for me to remember – and this is what I keep coming back to when the doubt gets loud – I have never co-created something like this, in a place like Nepal, with the particular alchemy of wisdom traditions, somatic practices, and transformative work that this program holds. This is new territory. And new territory, by definition, means I don’t get to feel competent and in control. I get to feel like a beginner. Again. Hold on… again?

“The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of small humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound.” – Carl Jung said that, and he clearly knew what he was talking about.

So I sit with the mystery. I do the work that is in front of me, be it the emails, the planning calls, the conversations with potential participants, the coordination with my co-facilitator. I tend to the vision with as much care as I can muster. And I practice what I preach: being in the not-knowing without rushing to resolve it. Treating the uncertainty as sacred space. It is not comfortable, true – yet it is deeply alive.

Some mornings, I wake up and think, “This is going to be extraordinary.”
Other mornings, I wake up and think, “What have I done?”
Most mornings, it is kinda both.

And perhaps that is exactly the point. Perhaps the mystery of Sacred Transitions is that the transition begins long before anyone boards a plane (well, this one is funny because this is exactly what I tell all the participants of my various programs EVERY TIME, including this one!). It begins here, in the planning and the doubting and the trusting and the showing up anyway. It begins in the tension between what I can control and what I must surrender. In the willingness to hold a vision that is bigger than my comfort zone and more important than my need for certainty.

Nepal, with its ancient mountains and its temples and its unshakeable presence, doesn’t need me to figure it all out in advance. It just needs me to arrive. And I think, maybe, that is what it is asking of all of us who feel the pull.

Show up. Bring your full, messy, uncertain, beautiful self. And trust that the ground will hold you – even when, especially when, you can’t yet see the path.

The mystery continues. I will keep you posted.

If something in this reflection stirred something in you – if Nepal is whispering your name too – I invite you to explore Sacred Transitions in Nepal. Even if you are not sure. Especially if you are not sure. That is usually where the real journeys begin.