Taking the Call: Challenges as adventure

Recently on a call with my mentor I noticed an old familiar friend surfacing as I was about to share a conflict I had with my husband. After all these years of doing this work, she still shows up—this anxious part of me. That used to make me feel like I was failing, not "getting" it. Now I know the work isn't making her disappear, it's learning to create the conditions to meet her in a loving way every time she arrives.

I came to the call feeling like I had blinders on, my world shrank—What does this conflict mean? Did I do something wrong? Handle it in an unloving way? I should know better. What will be revealed? Aaaaargh, fear was present as well. Suddenly I was responding from a place I thought I had outgrown—so I turned toward the fear, the anxiety, without falling under its spell. By feeling it, quietly witnessing it, I stepped outside of its grip—lovingly containing it, staying with the feeling without collapsing into it. My old friend can have a seat at the table and settle as I remain present in my body here, now, holding my history without being pulled back into a smaller version of myself. I'm learning: getting pulled back isn't a problem. It happens. The practice is recognizing it and choosing differently.

And the call itself? My mentor held space for all of it—the fear, the presence, the vulnerability. In that holding, adventure emerged. Open-ended inquiry. Play. I brought forward the challenging content. There was relief in sharing the intimacy, yes—but there was more. Within this relational space, symbols started appearing. Inquiries arose. My world started to open up and I could see new dimensions, perspectives. It felt as if we were in a lab experimenting with this and trying that.

What made this possible was approaching it as an amateur, not an expert. The expert stance shrinks the field—it needs to already know, to have the answer, to be competent. The amateur stance opens everything: I don't know what this means yet. Let's look together. We followed the energy—where would it take us? So scintillating and alive, not prescriptive. There wasn't a hidden agenda to "solve" or "heal" or "get anywhere". What emerged was engaging with life in this new way.

This is the invitation. We are taking a slow walk up a mountain, it is a call to adventure—not going for the quick helicopter trip. Instead taking the call, venturing into unknown terrain. It takes stamina and it is work, at times some heavy lifting as we slowly scale the mountain, and we keep coming back because it's engaging, because it matters, because it's ours—it's our personal myth we are tending to—an archetypal journey where we meet all the figures alive in our story. And one of the ways we meet them is through play.

Play is inherently open-ended, without a goal. We're surrendering not just our defenses, but our attachment to outcomes, to what we thought we wanted, to all the shoulds and ought-tos. Our defenses have been working so hard. I'm learning, inch by inch, to show them there's another way. In those undefended moments, when I can let go of where I thought I should be going and meet what's actually here—that's when what's real and generative emerges. The parts that make us whole. The aliveness we've been longing for. This slow steady walk is sustainable and nourishing, not the quick-fix helicoptering-ourselves-to-the-top kind of ride.

After the call, I checked in with her—that old familiar friend who arrived so anxious. And you know what? She was skipping along. Being a kid again. Playing. And the conflict with my husband? I found myself holding it—and him—with more compassion, more spaciousness.

This is what becomes possible when we take the slow walk up the mountain, when we approach our challenges as calls to adventure rather than problems to solve. The parts that have been working so hard to protect us? They get to rest. They get to play. They get to be transformed by the journey itself.

There's a twinkle in our eye and a skip in our step as we, like the Fool in the tarot, turn towards our challenges as a call to adventure. We start to believe in ourselves. We're going at our pace, exploring our journey.

If any of this speaks to you, I'd love to connect. I offer a free consultation to anyone curious about exploring this work together.