Hope is a word that gets used a lot in the infertility community. It sounds good and positive but when you dig deep into examining how you actually feel when you are in a place of “hoping” you’ll be surprised at what you uncover.
Hope is an uninspirational feeling with massive amounts of expectation. It is very passive and doesn’t require any action from us. Hoping something will happen doesn’t give you full responsibility for taking steps to make the thing happen. Hope is dependent on something else and rather than claiming our own power we end up giving it all away.
I hope I get pregnant.
I hope I lose weight.
I hope my marriage doesn’t fall apart.
When you live in a place of hoping for things to be different than they are you are trading the current moment for something you think will feel better in the future. We often use the idea of hope as the promise of something we can’t control.
When we hope, we let go of our own responsibility in the situation. When we hope we don’t do. We passively wait for things to happen and then are surprised when they don’t go in our favor.
But letting go of the idea of hope and relaxing into knowing that our lives are going to be filled with challenges no matter what helps us reclaim that responsibility that we had let go of before. Life is going to push us to the edge of our comfort zones, and when we embrace that we can use those challenges as opportunities to go beyond where we are at, to evolve and to participate in the fullness of the human experience.
Instead of reaching for hope the next time you are trying to get through something difficult, try out a different emotion instead. How about certainty or confidence or courageous? These emotions are available to you right now and they are so much more engaging than hope. They will inspire action better than hope ever could.
Hope doesn’t require much of us. It doesn’t require us to show up and be seen or heard in the ways we know we need to. If you are into your infertility experience you know what I mean. The more hoping you do the less action you take and the more out of control you end up feeling. It’s a vicious cycle when you know what you want but you end up abdicating your responsibility in the process.
Are you passively hoping for a change in your life and getting nowhere? If you are ready to stop hoping for things to happen and actively move forward, reach out to me to get started.