Your Unfolding Path July 2000	Click Here to See Carol's Current Column
	by Carol Adrienne, Ph.D.

"When Things Fall Through"

When Melanie Jones met with her boss to discuss her lagging sales quota in the high-powered world of fashion, he asked her, "So Melanie, what do you want to do?" Being a self-described "sales junkie," she replied, "I want to sell something" to which he replied, "No, what do you really want to do? Are you happy?" Melanie said, "The truth fell out of my mouth like two pearls. ‘I want to go. I want to leave.’" That was on a Friday. I remember crying that weekend and thinking that this part of my life was over. It made me sad, but I knew I was doing the right thing."

Melanie’s experience, coupled with email correspondence from another woman who wrote me, Sheri Laughlin, prompted me to think about what we can do when things fall through or don’t happen when we think they should. Sheri and her husband are currently living in Mexico, and have been struggling patiently with trying to adopt a child there. Sheri is also asking questions about her "contribution to the world" in addition to possible motherhood. Both women’s lives provide proof that life is always providing us with clues about what to do next, even though we might overlook those clues in the moment.

I believe that one of the first steps to making a stronger connection to our life purpose—even when we don’t know what that might be—is telling the truth to ourselves when something isn’t working. The gift of things falling through is that it accelerates the truth telling. Interestingly, Melanie had had strong negative feelings about her job situation for a long time. She said, "I really hated this last job. I felt that many of the people that I was encountering did not care about developing personal relationships or even any sort of business kindness. So many people were unhappy in my culture, and I was interfacing with people who didn’t want to buy our product. People’s eyes would glaze over when I started to talk about it."

In Sheri’s case, she is realizing that no matter how much she has been attempting to push the adoption process, there is a deeper level of fate or destiny being working through in getting the right child for her family.

Like many of us, Melanie and Sheri tended to power through their feelings of unhappiness by deciding to work harder and negating their inner disquiet. In Melanie’s case, the feelings were indicators that her sales path, while useful for providing income and developing strength in business methods, was not the path that would ultimately make her feel happy and fulfilled. However, a deeper purpose to all the experiences, good and bad, began to emerge as she looked back on what she learned. "I can see now that it filled in all the blanks so I could put together my own company. Everything I learned in every job has helped me to get to where I am today."

In Sheri’s case, she began to follow her intuition and speak up in a women’s group that she had been in, but which felt to her to be mired in apathy and backbiting.

In our discussion about what Sheri’s major contribution to the world might be, I did an analysis of her birthdate. It looked to me like she had a gift for being optimistic and a good communicator—especially with women, and that using her gifts in any situation would be a major contribution to the world. She wrote back saying, "One of your thoughts sent an electric shock up my spine...the idea of being here to communicate optimism and to help raise people's energy – especially for women. For the past three months, I have been having an experience with a group of women in which I followed an intuition and started speaking directly to them about modeling positive attitudes...and the idea took on a life of its own. One woman named us The Flying Tiggers (as opposed to Eeyores). People are calling me for advice, and choosing to contribute their best to some really impactful charity projects, whereas previously the group had been mired in gossip and complaining. I had even mentioned to my husband how strange this experience has been. I felt a little foolish about the whole thing since I am prone to bringing on my own depressions by negative thinking, and certainly I don't feel that I have an edge on optimism or on any great insights. Always before I shunned groups of women. (p.s. in the middle of writing this paragraph, I had a call from someone looking for advice on handling a situation....)"

Do Something Different to Break the Focus and the Old Pattern

When things fall through, write down your story. Then write another version of it as if you were telling the events as if they led to a completely different (positive) ending. Look for the greater purpose. Change your daily schedule in some way. Take time to be with yourself with no one telling you when to come and go. The month after leaving the job, Melanie took time for herself instead of jumping back into something immediately. "I took naps. I walked, slept, I watched Oprah, and started to daydream. I felt like a different person."

Instead of trying to force external changes, Melanie also gave more attention to what it was that would make her feel alive and happy to go to work. "A year before I quit, I had done a huge vision board, and decided to change my life. I made it out of big piece of cardboard, and pasted on pictures from magazines of things I wanted in my life, or that represented a good feeling. I found sentences and words that expressed how I wanted to feel and what I wanted to happen. One of the first things I put on there was, ‘I’m ready for a change. The adventure is about to begin. Take life into your own hands.’ The board is like a story. Everything on this board has led me to where I am today, including my boyfriend. Every single thing I cut out pictures for came into my life. I keep adding to it."

When things fall through, it’s an opportunity to review what you’ve put on the back burner. What have you always wanted to do? In Melanie’s case she had always enjoyed sitting in a circle with children and getting them to laugh and talk about their views on life. Her inner guidance was pointing her in this direction when she volunteered at a school some years before. When her job fell through, more than one friend prompted her to "go speak to kids. You’ve always loved children." Both internal and external messages were pointing to a new and exciting challenge. A few months ago, based on her long-time desire to work directly with children, Melanie established a non-profit foundation called Speak to Children. Her mission is to help children find joy and meaning in today’s society, where a consumeristic environment, lack of adequate parental care or economic factors often create low self-esteem, apathy, or lack of conscience.

There is a reason why things have fallen through. At the end of her email, Sheri wrote, "Adoption Update: The whole thing fell through, and I feel like laughing and smiling and running free through a meadow of flowers. To be extricated, for now, from the craziness of the bureaucratic process, is such a gift. I had done some exercises from your book [The Purpose of Your Life Experiential Guide] to get clear about why I wanted another child. I learned that a lot of what I was missing was that I simply needed to be a part of the family I already have. I love the notion of ‘Ama de Casa,’ Soul of the Home as a housewife is called here. And being more of the soul in our home is what I can do right now. Miraculously, the very day the little boy we were trying to adopt was given to a Mexican family (instead of to us), the orphanage I volunteer with called to say they had received government approval to allow their children be offered for adoption. Two-year-old Alicia is one of the orphans, and the first adoption we attempted; she is now one step closer to being able to come to us! There are still many legal hurdles before that will happen. All I know for now is that I am at peace."

In looking back on her life, Sheri recognizes that through her experiences of betrayal and abuse, she had bought into a sort of victim mentality for years, suppressing the love and concern for others that was a natural part of her youth. Now, she says, she has come to not only accept her love of connection to others, but also sees it as part of her life purpose. She has come to a simple affirmation of how she wants to live each moment: Put more heart into it. "A friend called yesterday with an idea for improving how we welcome newly-arrived women to Mexico, and I think I'm going to put some time into this to try to make it a more permanent feature here before we leave. It would be a great way to wrap up my stay here. The idea that came to me, was to hold new-arrival sessions in my home and to [start a discussion about] the problems and concerns the group was having, rather than to stand up in front of the group, in an impersonal setting, and rattle off the do's and don'ts of living in Mexico. Maybe a little mariachi will be playing in the background..."

Anyone interested in having Melanie Jones present a school or camp program, please contact her at (415) 752-7110.

Carol Adrienne, Ph.D., is an internationally-known workshop facilitator and author whose books have been translated into over fifteen languages. Her books include The Purpose of Your Life: Finding Your Place in the World Using Synchronicity, Intuition, and Uncommon Sense; The Purpose of Your Life Experiential Guide, and The Numerology Kit. She also co-authored with James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide and The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision--An Experiential Guide.

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