Approach your tending shovelful by shovelful.

That said, if you’ve been through a lot, you may be eyeing your own mental porch and feel daunted by how full it is with old stuck emotion. You may think, “How am I going to handle all this weight?”

That’s a perfectly natural reaction.

And we’ll handle that stuck emotion exactly the same as we do when we are dealing with actual snow:

We take it shovelful by shovelful.

One shovelful doesn’t move much. A dozen shovelfuls makes a noticeable dent. An hour of shoveling clears a path across the porch, and a whole afternoon may liberate your porch entirely. Even if another blizzard comes, and dumps more snow on your space, you’ll be able to clear your porch again—much faster than before.

But you have to start by picking up the shovel and opening the door to the porch.

And that’s what we’re doing here, with Tending Transformation Fatigue.

Whether you’re clearing emotion or shoveling snow, the process can be faster if you have more than one person on the task. That’s why having mentors, therapists, processors, and other helping professionals are so helpful. (And if you’re interested in doing that with me, you can consider booking a one-on-one session.)

But I believe everyone can benefit from having their own process. You are the only person who lives in your mind all the time, and you’re the only one who can determine how much strain you’re feeling. Sometimes, you need to gauge how much weight you’re carrying before you can ask for help in relieving that burden.

Here at Tending Transformation Fatigue, I will share my own process. Feel free to adapt it until it suits you, but remember:

If you start to feel overwhelmed or frustrated by the process, just remind yourself that every exercise and question I share is similar to shoveling snow.

The way I suggest shoveling isn’t important.

The amount of snow you shovel at a time isn’t important either.

It’s the task itself that is important: liberating yourself from that stuck pressure.

Keep your cozy going.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s hard to leave a warm house for the cold outside. You need to brave the elements outside to shovel the snow off the porch, but you don’t abandon the coziness inside. You return to it. 

In fact, if your porch is deeply buried in snow, you will likely need to take breaks. You can’t just start living out there, especially in winter. You’ll only be able to spend an hour or so outside, and then you’ll need to return inside to thaw yourself in front of the fire.

If you think of the snow weighing down the porch is frozen emotions, you can think of the coziness inside as the joy you cultivate on purpose.

In “How to Navigate Chaos,” the very first post on the JourneyPen Project, I mentioned that confronting a negative is still mostly a negative. For wholeness, you need to nurture a few positives too.  

That is still true. Pain is rarely unskippable, but we often overlook our joy. We usually have to remind ourselves to add in some spots of happiness in our day.

Tending your transformation fatigue requires both the effort of shoveling in the cold and the enjoyment of the cozy warmth.

In fact, while pain is often the catalyst for change, joy is often the fuel that keeps transformation going.

Through the coming weeks, we’ll explore both.

Ready to dig in?