The Ripening of Your Life: How to Trust the Process and Stop Rushing

Listen to Episode 41: The Ripening of Your Life: How to Trust the Process and Stop Rushing

There is a profound difference between growing and ripening. Growth is often about expansion and effort, but ripening is about settling, trusting, and allowing what you've planted to come to fruition in its own time. In this episode, Blaze invites you to stop rushing your life forward and start enjoying the rich, unfolding reality of where you are right now.

She explores the journey of "finding your place"—from reclaiming a garden after a decade of delay, to building a podcast that aligns with her authentic voice. Blaze challenges the need to control every outcome, sharing how letting go of "efforting" has freed up immense energy and allowed her to feel truly supported by life. If you feel like you're constantly trying to cram yourself into a box that doesn't fit, or if you're anxious about unfinished projects, this conversation is your invitation to relax, trust the process, and let your life ripen.

🌿 In this episode we explore:

• What "ripening" looks like and why it's different from the constant pressure to "grow" or "expand."
• How to stop rushing your projects and trust that they will unfold in their own time.
• The power of aligning with your personal rhythms instead of societal or family expectations.
• Why letting go of “efforting" (doing less, being more) leads to deeper belonging and fulfillment.
• How to reclaim parts of your identity (like gardening or creativity) that you may have put on hold.
• The relief of letting go of the need to control every outcome and trusting that life supports you.
• Why it's okay to have "unfinished" things and not rush to resolve everything immediately.
• How to distinguish between necessary action and unnecessary "efforting" that drains your energy.
• The joy of finding connection points in the small, everyday moments of your life.
• Strategies for settling into the life you are actually living, not the one you think you should be living.

Hello and welcome back. This week I want to talk about what I'm terming "The Ripening" of my life.

What that experience is like for me in the hopes that it helps you connect with the ways in which your life is really rich and fulfilling right now as well.

Over the last few years, I have been on this quest personally to find out where I belong in my life. And I know that's something that we all do throughout our entire lives, is try to figure out, well, who am I?

What's the purpose of me? How am I interacting with people? What am I bringing to the table? What am I making happen? And what benefits because I'm here?

What am I getting out of it? Like how am I feeling about it? Am I constantly putting out energy or am I getting energy back?

And trying to figure out that balance and I think that that pursuit is definitely something that we do our entire lives and it's never always the same.

However, I had this feeling that there's something fundamental about what it is to be me that I really wanted to understand better and to explore.

And in this time of life, particularly in the summer and the richness and the heat of it and living as I am right now, it's apparent to me that I am finding my place and I am understanding myself better and I've worked to create an environment in which I particularly thrive and I relate well to everyone around me.

So lots of things contributed to this process.

And some of it was me trying to figure out, well, what am I bringing to the table? What are the things that I do all the time anyway?

And how can I remove friction points around all of that, so that I get to do the things that make me feel good and that make me feel like me the most, and have them also make a difference to the people in my life that I care about because I don't usually want to do everything in a vacuum.

I do definitely value my time by myself in creation. But I always want to share it with the people that I care about, and I want to produce things that, I don't know, make a difference for other people too. So I thought a lot about that.

I'm like, well, what is it that I have to offer? And how could I potentially get it out there and share it with more people?

And does that mean just me in my own life? Does it mean me in a community? Am I talking about just people on my road or my family? Am I talking about my friends? Or could it be bigger and a larger container than what I had thought before?

And over time some of that distilled into me believing that I will remember, and really that I love recording podcasts. I love being able to share what I learn and share my experiences with other people and that that seems to be a way in which I can connect fairly deeply with a much broader range than I would in my normal day to day life where I tend to be a bit of a hermit and don't go out as much.

So this is a way that I wanted to cultivate, whereas like, well, that's something I enjoy and I can definitely bring storytelling and a lot of me to the table and share that and I'm not afraid to do that.

So I wanted to create that space and that's part of how this podcast was born.

But I also thought about the other things that I like to do and things that I'd been longing to do and felt disconnected and cut off from, that I had either had done to myself or just kind of happened by circumstance.

So I had gardens with my husband in our old house where we used to live. And those were huge. We had, I think, nine different garden hexes. It was a lot of square feet.

It was practically like the size of our house was our garden as well. And we grew a lot of our own food.

And I really learned a lot and enjoyed being outside every day barefoot in the dirt pulling up weeds, doing watering, connecting with just hearing the birds and seeing the bugs and...

Honestly, you know, pulling bugs off of my plants and befriending the local turkeys and just all of this wildlife and I felt so much a part of that space.

And then I realized, you know, when we moved here and we had a young daughter and we moved in with my mother-in-law,

None of that had time or space, and it hadn't even happened yet, and my daughter is now almost 10 years old. Actually, right now she is 10 years old. Scratch that. We've been here for nearly 10 years and I still hadn't created that garden that I had missed.

And I wondered why that was and why I let life get so much in the way.

And I thought, well, how can I claim some of that back and be more of that person? Because when I thought of myself,

You know, you have a self-concept of yourself. And I think of myself as this person who is creative, has a business, enjoys walking, likes nature, and in my head I was like, I'm this gardener person, like I love taking care of plants and I love connecting with wildlife. And then I looked at the actual lived experience of my life here and I'm like, well,

You are talking to the ravens and crows, and you're noticing that there's a fox and you have names for all the little animals in the yard...

For skunk family that comes by and the possum family and the raccoons, but I'm not really out there on a day-to-day basis the way that I used to be.

And part of me got so sad about that and went, "Okay, well, it's time to shift it and make a change."

If you go back and visit the springtime episodes, I really talked about that particular process and some of the reasoning behind why I held off and a lot of it was to do with intergenerational relationships and realizing that I live with more than just one person and trying to accommodate what I felt everyone could bear or what they would manage.

And me just wanting something for myself and feeling like maybe I wasn't ever going to be able to have that.

And over the course of time, as I've started to get over myself in a way and say it's okay if there's conflict, it's okay if it doesn't go perfect, but I need in order to be me to start making this garden.

I did make it happen. So that was a really huge part of this year and a huge part of me feeling as full and ripe and happy as I do right now in this moment knowing, oh my gosh, I made my garden!

And I was able to share it in ways that I hadn't even anticipated by making like another little mini-garden next to it for my daughter and helping her learn the concepts of how to plant some things.

Learning entirely new plants. Like this year, it's all different things that I had never tried in my other garden, because the garden I chose to do this year is all perennials and I wanted it to be an herbal tea garden.

Because again, I thought about, well, who am I really? And what's the actual circumstances that I'm living in? And I live in a place where we don't get a ton of water all the time. We like kind of flood out in the winter and early spring and then it dries up in the summer.

I thought, "Well, I need plants that can survive that, particularly after the first year when you're done watering them in and they can just come back and survive." But I also thought, "Well, what am I really needing in my life and that I do anyway?" I love tea. I just really do, and I love smelling rosemary and just adding herbs and spices to all of my cooking.

Why not be growing that? And not worry about tomatoes and potatoes and all of these water-hungry huge things like monsters that we used to grow at our old house because I don't have the space, the time, the capacity for that, but I do have time for a garden that I can go out and smell and touch and nourish and weed that turns into delicious drinks and little accents on every meal. That felt perfect.

So I was so excited to be able to start to create that.

A lot of this process of me figuring out where I wanted to be didn't unfold all in one big go. So beginning the podcast started last year. Like really I had the dream of it much before I started recording it, and the first episodes went live in November of last year, so we're not even a year in.

But I had had a podcast several years before, the Self-compassion and Self-Awareness podcast, and it really taught me so much about the topics that I'm always talking about anyway. So if you ever visit any of those old episodes,

They're not recorded as well. But it's me talking authentically about my life, just spontaneously about what's going on and whatever I happen to be thinking about. And I had no direction whatsoever with that podcast. And yet when I went back and revisited it and listened to a lot of them, I'm like, man, I've been talking about the same things about seasonal awareness and going with the flow and being this person that I actually already am for years.

And it really informed the business that I now have and the course that I've made and everything that I freakin love about my business and the way that I work with people now.

And it didn't happen overnight. And it happened sometimes frustratingly slowly and sometimes amazingly fast, just in these little fits and spurts, but all of it moving naturally, particularly as I would ease up and stop trying to direct it to be something structured around the way I thought other people would tell me to do things.

Mmm, yes. So, so much, I think, about finding the place that you belong and feeling like you really fit in your life is about recognizing how often you're trying to cram yourself into the structure or the flow that society dictates or you've picked up from somewhere or the way your partner or your family or your parents did it or your kids tell you to do it or your teachers or whatever.

That has its place, but we don't need to adopt it to every single aspect of our lives.

I think the more that we recognize the structure that matches us naturally and start to see what that is. Like what is your personal rhythm and your personal flow?

What are the topics that really bring you to life and how do you like to interpret that and share that with other people?

Maybe you're amazing at building things and working with your hands and you have a process and a rhythm of showing up and doing that and producing things that isn't necessarily on the timeline of you know, a Fortune 500 company, but it's really hugely effective in your life, in your circles and with your people.

I think recognizing that that is worth celebrating and it just is what it is and we don't have to fight against it, allows us to just appreciate ourselves so much more, to be able to go, "Oh, okay, well, this is how it works for me," and I'm not going to be able to comfortably keep cramming myself into a box and showing up the way that I thought I had to.

Maybe if I try showing up the way I actually kind of already am anyway and stop judging it, things might go better.

So the last several years, decades really, but particularly this one, has been a practice of me showing up as I actually am, noticing where that hits pushback from my family, from community.

And actually more remarkably where it really, really didn't. And that was surprising to me because I thought, wow, if I just give up trying to fulfill all these roles and manage everybody.

Like I thought that was an important part of my existence is managing, managing my kid, managing the household, managing all this stuff.

And I kind of set that down and went, "Okay, I do still have to make phone calls and make sure that repairs get done and that I'm coordinating things."

But if I don't filter it through what I thought management meant and make it hugely stressful. It doesn't have to be hugely stressful, and that blew my mind. So...

This is not to say that I haven't had a lot of very frustrating things happen. Like we had solar panels put in and geothermal maintenance and

roofing and all kinds of, I would say, somewhat disastrous events over the last few years. And some remarkable repairs and awesome things that have happened.

The more I ease up and go, "You know what? They're gonna show up and do what they need to do, and I'm gonna show up and do what I need to do, and I'm not going to try to pretend that me having stress about this is going to make the outcome any different or better."

Has freed up a ton of energy that I was expending that didn't actually make a difference at all.

I don't even know how to convey this more to you. It was amazing to me. I had no idea how much energy I was pouring into being already preemptively upset, stressed out, tight, anxious, and controlling about every situation, phone call, appointment, whatever that I needed to set in advance as though if I didn't feel that way it might go awry.

And I was like, well, what if you just like try to relax your body and relax your idea about this and show up?

It may or may not go great, but you adding all of your stress to it certainly doesn't make that much of a difference in the outcome or might not make any. Learning how to do that has definitely been a curve. I'm not going to say that it's easy, but...

So remarkable because now when I reach out to do something or you know something goes awry like the fire alarms went off, you know, early in the morning this morning because that's always when they decide that they're out of batteries.

And it was scary and it woke us all up and whatever and this is the first time in my life that I've been able to handle something like that and be like, "Oh my god, okay," so we're pulling out batteries and I'm just gonna set it aside and go back to bed.

And we'll get up and we'll manage everything later and not stress out about it and make it be like, "Ah, well, next time I better..." preemptively like get them on a schedule and every six months. Like I just didn't do that didn't have that feeling anymore.

And to me, I think that's really indicative of how much progress I'm making as I settle in the life that I'm actually living.

What is it like to settle into the life that you're actually living? I want to ask that and hear from you. What is it like when you realize, "Hey, this is the life I'm living?"

And it's okay. And it's all right if I'm a hurried person in the morning because that's what works for me and then I'm really quiet in the evenings.

For me, it's feeling like I'm really expansive and quiet in the mornings actually, and I get really into focused work and connecting with people more in the afternoon.

I love connecting with my family in the evening, but then I hit again. It's like this big parabola.

Where in the morning I don't want people and then very late in the evening I don't want people but in the meantime I want them. So I'm able to flow with that now and work with it instead of against it.

I'm able to go, "Oh, the things that I really cared about in my life, I'm nurturing, so I've got my garden and I am out there and I'm using that as a bridge to connect with my daughter more, which is also so important to me." And I'm enjoying creative projects and this year we're funneling more of that energy as we're heading towards the fall into knitting.

And oh my gosh that's been beautiful too, learning how to do crafts with friends of mine that are so skilled at knitting and crocheting and learning that skill from them and realizing I'm still like such a beginner at it.

But the joy of just working with my hands and making time and space for that rather than thinking that that's like a bonus extra. That's the stuff now that I'm like, that is the life that I'm living in.

It's the thing that is important and being able to show up and share all of that stuff through my work with you is important and makes me feel like I have a place and like I belong and like I'm not unimportant.

Being out in my yard and connecting with the wildlife and the plants makes me feel like there's a purpose for me there and I feel like I'm connected and I'm important and all of it really fills back into that feeling like I belong.

And like even when I'm making my morning tea, if I've gone out and I've collected a few leaves from my garden, there's so many little connection points there that it just feels really rich and full and ripe and gorgeous.

So that's what ripening is for me at this time of year.

What does it look like for you? I think it means that you get to enjoy and stay with all the things that are working in your life and all the things that you've already started.

It means not abandoning the parts of your life that you love for new things if they're not truly inspiring or calling to you.

And it means that you do follow your heart and follow things that are calling to you as well. So when you realize something like, "Oh my gosh, I've wanted a garden for a decade and I didn't get one started,"

That you don't beat yourself up about it, you go, "Great, what can I do to help me connect with that in a small way?"

And again, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be in alignment with who you are.

It also means allowing things to be kind of unfinished without rushing to resolve everything as though you get points for finishing fast.

So, so much about me enjoying, like truly relaxing and enjoying my life is not worrying about how much time I have left in the year to complete all my projects.

Not worrying that, "Oh my God, if I don't spend 15 hours today working on my sweater, it's not going to be ready for the fall."

It's me going, "You know, if I have an hour or 20 minutes that I want to doodle with this, that's great." And eventually it will become what it becomes.

One of the thoughts that I had that made me feel really good several years ago was coming up with a list of all the things that were going to happen anyway without any extra effort on my part. And one of them was, I really wish my hair was longer. And I was like, wow, how amazing that my hair will just kind of grow. Like if I just leave it alone and maybe tend to it nicely, like don't let it get too knotted and wash it and stuff, it will grow longer. And I don't have to do anything. So inevitably, I get to have longer hair.

I think about that with my garden as well, where I'm like, "Okay, it's all started out really babyish this year, and I know it won't even reach for maturity for another two years."

So I don't need to rush it and I can't rush it. Part of belonging is just enjoying the process and wondering what happens as it's coming along.

There's such a requirement for trust to allow yourself to have this kind of enjoyment. It's about trusting having enough time and trusting the process of you connecting with the things that you love.

And it's about trusting that not everything in your realm needs your intervention, and needs you to control it, that it actually is wanting to support you, and that as you find that balance, you do feel supported.

That's been remarkable for me, is just recognizing how much I thought I had to control or force things to support me and then when I let go I went, "Oh." It already held me. I was just trying to hold myself up in addition to that. What a relief.

Mmm, I love it. So let me ask you, what in your life is still unfolding right now?

And where can you give something more time and allow more space to enjoy it this week instead of doing more effort?

I want this week to be the Great Un-efforting. It's just showing up and being like, "Woo, this is nice." So I'm sending out that vibe to you and hoping that you're receiving it.

and allowing yourself to bring in all of that enjoyment. This is about you enjoying what you've already created, realizing that by being you and setting up things the way you already have, you have protected your energy and you're not performing or trying to be something other than you are.

And hopefully by now, we're also not over-scheduling too hard and we're not only just, you know, we're finding things, not fixing them, but just kind of tweaking them because it feels good to do so and not because we have to.

When I go out now and I am deciding which plant I'm going to harvest from today.

I don't think of this as me managing it or fixing it. It's not even me trying to make it more beautiful. It's me looking at it almost like this three-dimensional beautiful painting that's in all of the senses and I'm like, well, what flavor and smell and taste do I need today and where is it coming from? And do I want to harvest from the top or the bottom of the plant today?

And what makes that plant feel good, and me even having this back and forth of the plant about what's acceptable to grab and thinking it and feeling like there's this deep connection there.

That's what it looks like for me. And I know it's gonna be something equally as beautiful for you.

Mmm. You don't need to rush your life forward. Some of the most important pieces of it are just quietly... unfolding around you, even at this moment.

Have an awesome week. I really look forward to connecting with you again.

I think next week I'd like to talk about how it feels being in the summer as a sensitive person because we can have these moments of ripeness and I know I have them and then sometimes

I end up feeling overwhelmed anyway, or like there's just too much input, and it makes me feel like I need to be bracing.

So I want to talk about what that experience is like and ways that we can, I want to say, overly protect ourselves. Again, I'm not about all of the efforting right now. Right now it's about kind of relaxing.

But how to make that possible without opening up to just being trampled by the world around us.

Sending you all so much love, and I'll see you next week.

Related Episodes

Series: Trusting the Process and Finding Your Place True belonging comes not from forcing yourself to fit, but from settling into the life that is already unfolding. These episodes explore how to trust your personal rhythms, let go of the need to control outcomes, and find the beauty in the "ripening" phase of life.

• Ep 14: A February Reset — How to Plan Your Year Without Forcing Goals – Why daydreaming and contemplation are essential before taking action, and how to plan without pressure.
• Ep 22: The Urge to Reinvent Yourself in Spring: How to Change Without Burning Out – Why the spring impulse to overhaul your life often backfires and how to change sustainably.
• Ep 10: Wintering — The Power of Rest and Retreat – Why retreating and trusting the "winter" phase is essential before you can sustainably move forward.
• Ep 37: Refinement Over Planning: How to Simplify Your Summer Without Adding More – Why small adjustments beat overhauling your life when you're already tired.
  

🌿 Want help building rhythms that work with your energy instead of fighting it?

The Living in Rhythm Starter Kit offers grounded tools for nervous system support, emotional regulation, burnout recovery, and understanding seasonal energy shifts more sustainably. It's the perfect guide to help you identify your unique flow and trust the process of your own ripening.

Download it here.

🌿 Looking for a deeper, live experience this season?

I'll be hosting an Autumn Equinox gathering on September 23rd — a space to slow down, reflect, and work with the energy of harvest and release in real time. We'll be exploring how to let go of what no longer serves us and prepare for the quiet wisdom of winter.

You can learn more and save your spot here.