Image: Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

E pele o family! As always, I hope that this message finds you well and bright. While my posts on the site haven’t been as frequent lately – don’t worry, that will change once the semester is over – many of you are keeping in touch with me on facebook and twitter and I thank you for your energy! I also offer a hearty thanks to those of you who attended Sacred Healing & Wholeness in Africa & the Americas, the Symposium that I hosted at Harvard University a few weeks ago. If you missed it, you definitely missed a really dynamic event, but there will be lots of written and multimedia output coming soon so stay tuned. The workshop with Yeye Luisah Teish was also phenomenal! I am so grateful to her for her grace and wisdom and am honored to count her among my spiritual elders.

The spring has proven wonderful and I am looking forward to sharing more energy with you this summer. Believe it or not, with each new step I take down this road of life and learning I get extremely nervous! Nervous about getting it wrong, about disappointing myself or others, about what people will say – or won’t say – about… everything.

As much as we try to avoid nervousness, the truth is: if you don’t get nervous, you don’t care enough. Doing anything that we feel is important should make us nervous, because any time we step out and do something – especially something that hasn’t been done before – we face the threat of failure.

But remember this: threat and opportunity exist at a crossroad, and you can’t reach the opportunity without going past the threat. There is always a chance that things won’t turn out the way we plan, but the only way to truly fail is to let the threat prevent you from taking advantage of the opportunity. We are strong, we are capable and we are people of faith and action! Once it has been read, Esu has opened the road, and Ogun has cleared the path, it is up to each of us to push through the nervousness and doubt that will naturally arise to claim what is ours. 

Today and every day, I pray for all of us the strength to move through the intersection of threat and opportunity. Let us embrace our nervous energy and then turn it up a notch and channel it into greatness. Ase!