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| Photography by Craig Brandt |
What had come to me as a strongly felt aim, when writing my statement, was to work with women over fifty. It would be based on my former counseling experience, yet now I would be their coach, guiding them to find their answers within. Autumn’s Beauty was my vision. In my practice, the past would be re-seen from the viewpoint of maturation, the present becoming a fresh field, open to ideas (including wild ones), and the future a new or formerly unrealized dream to bring into reality.
During my daily study and training, which included a client to practice with (a friend had volunteered), I developed a simplified acronym: GOA (goals, obstacles, and actions) as easy to remember. Situations could be looked at in those three ways.
Not until several years later did the real purpose of the course reveal itself to me; it was for my personal growth only.
This past August, having just returned from northeast America where autumn would soon be a palette of varying red and gold maple leaves, I noticed that changes, begun in my life months before but put on hold while I had been on vacation, had resumed. They clearly were not my thoughts, but rather individual inspirations or bursts of energy that created intense activity. I rearranged furniture and gave pieces away, gifted valuable, small, medium, and large-sized framed photographs and paintings to friends, put new ways of home management into effect each day, and marveled at how much I liked the new simplicity of my books, reduced by half, on the cabinet shelves. This gave rise to my return to my mission statement of Autumn’s Beauty; I saw that my former life was being created as different now, and I welcomed its originality.
My realization is, “By an openness to follow what happens, even if inexplicable, fulfilling changes may come from beyond our consciousness.”