40 days of Shiva Nata – yeah! It’s an expedition! And the expedition’s theme for me is: stepping in. As in, stepping in to the roles I have in my head. Stepping into future me, with her habits and charms. Stepping into the people I know I am inside – and stepping out of the old, outgrown chrisalises (chrisali?).
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Doors:

This is a month of doorways, of saying “Hello, door between the old and the new me! Thank you for marking so clearly a pathway of change.”

Some doors will be covered with blooming flowers, welcoming me from a gloomy space I’ve been in to a bright and exciting field of where-I’m-supposed to be. These doors will make the decision to pass to the other side easy.
Other doors may be murky and shadowy, with cobwebs – due to a monster fear of letting me cross, of what might be in the new room.

My task with these doors is to turn up the lights on the other side. Maybe by sneaking my hand in to turn on the lights. Maybe by acknowledging that there is night on both sides of the door, and giving it permission to turn to day on thte other side, and seeing more of what’s involved.

Other doors might be hard to find – I can search for them.
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Mirrors:

The other metaphor for meeting future me is stepping into the image I see in the mirror and becoming that person I’ve imagined. A doorway to myself as well as a doorway to other areas and levels of life. Still rich in visual metaphors, I will imagine the costumery required, the mood, the smile, the attitudes of the girl in the mirror. And I can become her… by stepping in.
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A sidenote, and arguing with Narnia:

Whenever I think of mirrors, I think of the last metaphor in the last book of The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis (which I have read at least double-digit times). Their old world has basically ended, and the god-leader-lion takes them… through a door (hey I didn’t realize that part of the metaphor was there until I started typing this) into a better-Narnia, the “true” Narnia, of which the Narnia they played in was just a pale shadow. The metaphor for how much more alive this new world was: Seeing a city out of an upper-floor window, and it looks fine and all – but then you turn around, and see a glimpse of that city in a mirror pointed out that window, and the image is incredibly much richer and deeper and more meaningful then your first glance of the city.

It actually used to make little-Beth kind of mad – she wanted the real life view to be deeper and richer – it made more sense to her that you’d see the view in the mirror first and it was eh, but then you turn around and the view out the window was the real and meaningful one. But maybe that sense of barrier was important – something has to happen to make the rich-and-true real.
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Thanks to now, I’m ready for then.

Regardless, I am ready to step into the deeper richer me, with the patterns and habits I want and need to move forward. With huge love to the place I am now, and the places I’ve been – obviously I’ve gotten close enough to the door to be able to step through, and that’s huge – I’m willing to step through the door now and feel how things are different now.

Good luck to me!

What slightly-future yous can you claim and work towards stepping in to?

(oh, and the Shiva Nata practice for day 1? Working through Level 3 more, figuring out new stuff I hadn’t realized before. For example: I knew you could rearrange the order of the movements.