A Journey of Transformation by Virginia Sada York
This piece is a chapter from the multi-author book, The Younger Self Letters, published June 2021.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher
Dear younger self,
It is very poignant writing back to you, age 35, in your shattered life. Love is broken and work is fragile. Love, work, health – these are the foundations. Yours are shaky.
Though it’s a terrible time right now for you, know there is destiny unfolding right now for you. Writing to you takes me back to re-experiencing the pain of waves of upheaval in that time – the passing of your beloved grandmother who anchored you so, your vibrant marriage ending so sadly, and now you are poised to leave your demanding corporate role plus moving house too – all within 18 months. So much change. I promise you, it will make sense backwards, you will see the purpose for your learning. You just need to keep living forwards right now, in this dark storm, where you are feeling quite lost.
I know you are reeling – losing the sense of who you are or how to manage each day, somehow having to perform in the fast slipstream of demanding life up a skyscraper. This age of 35 marks a new era for you, a deepening and widening that plants the seeds of the magnificent oak tree your life will become. It brings up everything in you to investigate, to reform, and rework into the beautiful sculpture your life will later become. But it’s painful right now.
Your marriage of 15 years has shattered spectacularly and sadly in the 18 months before this, and daily grief and upset are tearing at your insides. His new partner was unbearably cruel to you, writing without prompts to your work email and calling your work mobile with insults and taunts, so there was double upset and trauma to deal with. Many sleepless nights. Such sadness at what was lost with your former husband. Pain is high.
You have so much to learn at 35. How to be alone for the first time in your adult life; how to set up a business, for the first time in your life; how to find a new social world; how to practice new skills like meditation; how to live alone in a big house when he moves out.
This time of rebuilding your life will bring you to your knees frequently. Now is when you will dig deep to find ways to calm your mind using new skills of meditation. Some resting of the busy mind is helpful. You will learn meditation soon, which brings some peace. You will learn how to dance to release your grief and rise again into a new era of your life.
Life is a training process.
Life is its own training process and this difficulty and turmoil will build compassion, empathy and understanding of the challenges of life. This becomes a great asset for your future. But at the moment, managing each day is hard. You just work harder to lose yourself and numb your pain.
I see your sensitivity right now will make you a more talented therapist in the years ahead. So it’s all messy right now, but you will learn so much!
How to be alone, but not lonely;
How to balance your life with work and home life;
How to trust your intuition; and
How to flourish, celebrate, and use more of the creative person you are.
Be authentically you.
You will never be a hard-headed business person – hell no! Your intuitive, creative, bohemian, free-spirited, right-brain self will lead you to dance a unique path in your life and work. Your creativity develops insight that will access transformative processes for your future clients.
Your deep conversational skills (a sweet reframe from being a talkative child and later adult!) mean you can find the story and material for working within any person and unravel deep learning for all types of people.
And because you will go on to rigorously study in many modalities, you will offer a potent container for learning and change and many of your clients will work with you for years. You will play a part in their journeys. Remind them of the unseen layers of existence. The heart of vulnerability. I tell you all this because in many ways you are just setting out on your journey, changing and investigating, drawing out the gold of learning from your own life.
Transform your first career.
You took the safe road and majored at university in education and literature at university, then you landed a great role in book publishing as a young junior editor. Later, you trained in PR and advertising and video production, and soon you are flourishing in a busy career in PR, then advertising and corporate communication. Now, age 35, life has expanded you. You take on more responsibility, enjoying seeing your capability grow. Then bang – life delivers the next level of challenge, in business and personal life.
I want to focus on a pivotal moment in your life – one that wakes you and surprises you on the path of change. Can you recall this one?
…you heard the booming yet invisible voice, right?
“You are going to be a dance therapist in the corporate world.”
Well that was weird! A shock! This is a defining moment in your life, and it will take many years to make sense. I see you looking up from the free-form ecstatic dance meditation you are doing for the first time in a crowded room, during a six-month-long personal development course you are doing in the raw months after your 15-year marriage ends. You are close to a decision to leave your demanding corporate job to set up your own company. You are bravely diving into personal exploration as you reel about such a major change time in your life.
I see you in my mind’s eye – hair disheveled, panting at the end of an intense dynamic moving meditation, looking up into the ceiling in the crowded room of sweaty bodies, trying to understand where that almost-audible mysterious voice came from. The sky? Your head? Another dimension?
“What?” I hear you saying inside. “Where did that voice come from? What does that even mean? What on earth is ‘dance therapy’? I know both words – dance and therapy – but how does that combination of words and even sentence make any sense?”, you ponder. Well, honey, yes, it did all come true. Many years later, yes. But that day was the start of a huge next chapter for you. Here you begin the alchemy journey, learning to let new ideas and material bubble in your life, activating rich learning experiences.
My greatest pride in you is seeing how you become a queen of bravely enduring and courageously sustaining yourself, navigating to a new life. I want to send you some ideas and guiding wisdom to help you along the way to your future.
Know that you will be sent wise beings – high-calibre teachers who inspire and teach you. Ken McLean, your Aikido sensei in Sydney, will come into your life soon when he agrees to come each Monday morning to your fledgling company, to begin each week with an Aikido session for all staff. This will be the beginning of a new body language, such as learning to centre and blend, looking for harmony through conflict and interaction, and to radiate energy and follow the line of Ki, a teaching stream you will be in throughout your life.
Another is Dr Marcia Leventhal, famed US dance movement therapy pioneer and PhD clinical psychologist, who opens you to the Quantum world through dance movement training. You studied classical and modern ballet for years but now you train long and deep to the top advanced clinical level in dance movement therapy, and this will sustain you and become pivotal in your work ahead.
Alchemy, or transformation, becomes the theme of your next business in your 40s – assisting others in a truly transformative way. First, you will have to experience being transformed yourself, from married to single to partnered to married again. From training as a teacher, to a career in publishing and communication, into a master leadership development coach. And become a qualified and experienced dance movement therapist as well! Then finding your voice in your poetry and your dance. You even uniquely blend dance and movement practice and principles into your special style of leadership coaching in the corporate world.
Right now you are only 35, and it is still a couple of years before you will meet a dance therapist for the very first time. You are intrigued to explore some sessions in dance therapy for yourself and eventually become drawn into the study of it to become a practitioner yourself. In your first session, despite years of dance training, you cling to the walls of the art deco hall in Melbourne, scared to be so fully visible, so free to express, with another person fully gazing at you. It is powerful and terrifying, this dance therapy thing, but magically draws you in.
The reconstruction of a new life, single for the first time as an adult after 18 years in a couple, will prove an extensive process, hard and disorientating. Your work life continues frantically as national head of a busy corporate communication team in a skyscraper of a global professional services firm. Married when you started; not when you left 3.5 years later! Horror hours, horror demands, 90 hour weeks often, occasionally down to 60 hours. You get by with the great team you assemble, enduring the assault of deadline after deadline. Late nights and sleeping on the floor for 10-minute grabs at 4 am – you call it doing a “Winston Churchill”. He had a way with naps, apparently. Shove on more lipstick, drink black coffee, and press on.
You will soon resign from this oppressive corporate role and after a terrifyingly quiet start, successfully set up your own company, We’re With You. Once again, you will quickly be in a volcano of work and deadlines, with seven staff and a $1.5 million annual income. Days of momentum will be filled with output and stress, with major corporate banks, utilities, and insurance companies as demanding and focused clients for seven years. Now, the forging of the core of your own leadership framework and philosophy begins in a practical way.
Your work/life balance will be tested. Again and again. You know the world of fast deadlines, but now the company is yours and there is no one else there to share the burden or stress. The aloneness, no partner or business partner, gives you compassion later on for the sense of isolation a CEO can experience.
You will go through many more challenging times in the next two decades, including a serious head-on car crash, loss of pivotal business accounts in a fiasco of internal politics, finding yourself after several great loves learning to settle in a new marriage, belonging to disparate social tribes, and riding the waves of cashflow worries in a small business. Yes, it is a journey full of highs and lows. You learn your depths, your weaknesses, and that your potential is high and vibrant!
Career Number Two appears.
Towards the end of your big corporate job, you watch a top-notch presentation company lead a multi-million dollar tender rehearsal, badly, and realize, “I can do that! And better!” And here is birthed the decision, from frustration, to start your own method of presentation work, morphing that deep encounter work into a leadership development experience, and this lands you in a few years pioneering your way experimentally from presentation training into leadership coaching.
A wise teacher said to you, “Just because you can do something, you don’t have to keep doing that.” There is a pivotal moment coming for you around age 42 when you realize: yes, stop. Just Stop. Focus. Centre on your deep spirit. What gives you the most joy and flow?
So you will stop production work, offload staff, choose the intimate relational work of coaching and people development that is building naturally for you. You will choose the less adrenal work, opening up space in your life. This is a brilliant decision. And a total transformation of how you spend your days.
Your coaching business has thrived for over 20 years now, grown by word of mouth, with long-term clients around the world leaning into your expertise in the journey of leadership.
It is a next stage you can’t even imagine at age 35. And there is more coming!
Celebrate this magnificent journey.
Here is another pivotal moment I want to share with you in this letter, younger Virginia.
This “aha” has just happened this week, in this very reflective process of deciding to write this letter to you.
Driving down the Clyde Mountain from Braidwood just outside Canberra, as I have so many times over the past 24 years, arcing into the curves and sway of her beauty, I realized that I first came to this mountain with my first husband in the late 1980s! After our marriage ended, I bought rural forest land on the far south coast and so began the regular drives down and up the Clyde – in pea-soup fogs and mists, in tumultuous thunderstorms, on beautiful balmy summer nights, in high winds and pouring rain alone at midnight. I learned to love the mountain drive, with its precious spotty gum forest and burrawang cycad undergrowth and sea glimpses.
Last year the forest was burnt badly all down the mountain, but the resilient bush is regenerating. The cycle of life goes on, from ash and cinder to new growth and rebirth. There was devastation but now there is renewing. I want you to see the metaphor. Just as periods in your life will bring immense heat and challenge, you will keep regenerating. The trees lining the pilgrimage trail down the Clyde are a reminder of the sacred journey of transformation.
You and I have been curving down the bends of the sacred mountain for a long time now, and it has been magnificent. It awakened your love of nature. Every drive amongst such lovely forest has been a spiritual journey of renewal. And now you live somewhere just like that –rejuvenating, lush, calm, nurturing.
You understand transformation.
You will deepen along the way, learning to relax into the unknown.
Though fires of transformation will be fierce in your life, you will find gold!
Though you are a born teacher, your clients will also teach you. As your people development consultancy business, Your World Within, grows over 20 years, you will become an expert in perceiving themes and creating material to help business and private clients navigate change. You will work with what you know: communication practices, energy and time balancing, mistrust and poor culture, overload and exhaustion, overwhelm and anxiety, resistance to change. You will become strong and clear yet tender in your teaching style, to penetrate like a sword to help wake people up to what they want to see, learn, transform.
We are our own worst enemies, you will teach.
Learning to become our own best friends, you will add.
I struggled with this for so long. Why the lack of confidence? Systemic sexism? Being raised to doubt myself? Inner voices of fear? Self-limitation is insidious. Cultural. Ancestral.
I have learnt that hesitating to believe in yourself is the biggest hurdle to overcome. So back yourself, be your greatest love and cheerleader.
From suffering comes wisdom.
From experience comes insight. Finding your authentic path will take courage and getting out of your way. That is how it is for each of us. Get out of your head. Let life reveal itself to your spirit and heart. Let knowledge and experience combine into wisdom.
I have always been a spiritual person and have found the corporate world full of spiritual people on their journey. I have learnt that my capacity to talk about the visible and invisible dimensions of life, to stay with human vulnerability, and to share others’ journeys must come from the heart, the authentic and courageous self. When people feel my authenticity, it inspires them to trust their authentic self.
Follow your unique path.
Know that you will have an unusual path, my dear. Don’t hold back your creative spirit. You have a natural intelligent talent. Trust that you are enough. Many times you will question what other folk would even consider success to be. Loving your work in the world? Being passionate about learning (for you and your clients)? Persisting through many challenges? Believing in yourself is the longest test and the deepest gold you will find. There is a third career cooking in a crucible right now. It blends everything into another path you will travel -with eyes wide open, blending your past into a new future.
Do you remember stumbling over these words in your first job in publishing, working on a reprint of E.J. Banfield’s book, Confessions of a Beachcomber, quoting Henry David Thoreau (a favourite of yours and Banfield’s!):
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears.” – EJ Banfield, Confessions of a Beachcomber
What great advice! I promise you’ll have lived this by the time you get to my age.
Would you ever have thought that you, a somatically trained, body-oriented dance-therapy-informed coach, would work fully online in the corporate world with global clients?
Trust you are a powerful change-agent because you are different.
Your empathy, your sensitive observing eye, and rapport arise from your colourful life experience. Your power with words, naming and making meaning for others on their learning journey will grow. Your willingness for intimacy and connection means people will trust you as they pour their lives out for reflection in sessions. These are not SOFT people skills! They are hard skills – the true heart of what makes for rich living, for humanly talented leaders, who risk vulnerability.
Embodiment is your gift – using attunement and presence, meditation and centering, breath and impulse, movement and flow. You will integrate this skilfully from dance movement therapy, mindfulness practices, and other modalities of training, making a unique teaching style that integrates emotional, spiritual, and social intelligence. Your difference will become vital to leaders you coach and train.
You will spend years learning how to manage energy and time in the fast flow and stress of deadlines and long hours. You will remind yourself and your clients to return to the centre, to tend the body, to calm the busy mind, to integrate the heart, mind, feelings, and to live well in the body to create a healthy flow in life and career.
Your creativity is your power.
You use words with artistry and potency. You dance with verve. You have a poetic style, an eye for beauty. Express it fully! Family, friends, and clients will see this. Clients will quote back to you YOUR quotes that touch them. There will be discussions with coachees based on your spoken and written words and ideas. Keep being inventive and outspoken.
“Leadership is simultaneously an art, a philosophy, a practice, and a learning experience.” – Virginia York
When you’re 36 and in the United States, you will buy a copy of the famous Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke, and it will inspire you to back your own creative way in the years ahead. This exquisite poet still takes my breath away and inspires me as I write back to you, to give you glimpses of your learning ahead.
Here is the gold from the crucible of our life together, in every age younger Virginia:
As within, so without. Stay true to your uniqueness, your vitality, your passion. The poetry of your life will spring forth in your career. Learn to be your own best friend. Back yourself and your intense, passionate, creative, brilliant, sparkling, insightful way. It’s your journey, all yours. There is more coming.
Rilke can end this letter now for us both. Please go out into the years ahead with this insight; trust in your inner knowing for your life. You will learn well, radiate and activate much in the world, in the days to come. It is going to be magnificent.
“You are looking outward and above all else, that you must not do now. Nobody can advise you and help you, no one. There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write … Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth … It is always my wish that you might find enough patience within yourself to endure, and enough innocence to have faith … Believe me, life is right in all cases.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet