There is nothing I love more than when I am working on something, wondering about something, or making changes in my life, and then, the world reflects that back to me. It happened this morning while I was taking a yoga class, coming in the form of a question posed by the teacher.

“Who am I in this?”

She was referring to the choices that we are presented with personally and collectively each and every day. The decisions, small and large, around what we will do with, how we will be with, what we are faced with. This matters. Perhaps more than at any other time in history. It is showing up on every single level of existence. And it is born out in the astrology of our times which is asking, will we choose control or will we choose freedom? Will we choose the old or will we choose the new?

This coming year is a year of choices; with the decisions we make being really big. What’s happening now has literally been marked in the heavens. And it is calling each one of us forward in our own way.

This takes a lot of courage, and I know this one personally. Other than the experience of having children, I have never been as challenged on some level as I have this past year when it comes to who I will choose to be through all of this. I find so many similarities between now and when I was a young mother. The steep learning curve. The lack of control. The challenges in deciding outside of the mainstream. The search for the like-minded. The judgment; mine and others. But most of all, the deep call from within to choose from within. As it was with raising kids, it has been a messy, glorious, confusing and strengthening journey.

In my best moments, I would not change any of it. To decide who and what you will be, separate from what the external pulls for, I think, is the very point of being here.

To know yourself, sovereign unto yourself, is what every living being, except human beings, do and do quite well. I know I have written about this before, but it’s worth repeating. Nothing, not a single thing in nature changes its Nature because of external demands. No animal stops doing what it does because we do not like it, or agree with it.

The wasps on my porch, the porcupine that eats my fruit trees, and the anonymous animal that has burrowed into the barn and pooped all over the place, will never, ever, stop doing what it is doing because I don’t like it. Not one of those creatures will change its Nature to fit in with my expectations of them. We humans, on the other hand, regularly do this.

This is a hard one. We all want to belong, and so we all do things against our very nature. Fearful that without the adjustments and the distortions we will be left out. Ostracized. Harmed. But there is a big difference between belonging and fitting in. So, where do you decide how to be in this based on the need to fit in? Based on the stories you tell yourself about what a good person is? Based on what you watch coming across a screen? Based on your fears of being who you actually are?

Here’s something to try. The next time you are in an interaction with someone, and the conversation is creating some kind of pressure in you, pause and feel. Is there a fear, an anxiety, or a stifling of what you really want to say or be? Are you pretending to feel one way, when you actually feel another? Instead of leaving yourself, becoming what you believe the other person expects you to be, stay with what is happening for you. Feel it. Be it. Let it reveal its Nature to you. Staying with yourself is the essential ingredient.

Then ask yourself, “If I had all the courage, integrity and authenticity I needed, who would I be in this right now?”