Life Transition Self-Care: 5 Ways to Fill Your Cup

I remember the moment like it was yesterday, even though it happened a decade ago.

I was sitting with a client who was in the midst of a complex life transition. She’d landed in the middle of midlife, feeling lost, confused and disoriented.

At one point she looked up and said, “If you could take my hand, lead me down the hallway, open a door and say, ‘Here’s your new life,’ then I would willingly walk through that door.”

Of course I didn’t possess that kind of magic, but I certainly understood my client’s longing and have felt it myself too.

Haven’t we all wished for that magic at one time or another? Hasn’t some part of us asked: How can I make this next passage of my life easier?

Like my client, the experience of life transition, especially during the midlife years, tends to be disconcerting. As Brene Brown explains…

“People may call what happens at midlife ‘a crisis,’ but it’s not. It’s an unraveling—a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you’re ‘supposed’ to live.”

The welcome news is that you do have some influence on how you unravel. And while you may not be able to make a quick trip through it, there are ways to tend and care for yourself a little differently when you’re dealing with life transitions.

In fact, you can begin by deepening your self-care approaches to meet the moments of transition.

The kind of life transition I’m talking about often begins when something ends in your life.

Most likely, that ending will involve some sort of relationship or role or life structure. Or maybe a change or shake-up in your world view.

Sometimes the ending will be shocking, perhaps an unexpected death or job loss. And other times, you’ll know it’s coming, like when you reach a milestone birthday or the kids leave home or you retire.

Some life transitions unravel when nothing appears to be changing externally in your own life.

Life might look fine on the outside but on the inside, not so much. It may be challenging to decipher why your inner compass seems to be going through some crazy gyrations. You may feel directionless, longing for something you can’t quite name or touch.

Furthermore, we’re currently living in uncertain times. The world around us appears unpredictable. And the actions we see being taken, which we have little control over, confirm this. All of which leads us right back into transition. When everything seems off balance and we don’t know what’s going to happen our sense of inner security is compromised. If fact, you might feel unsteady and even hypervigilant.

Finally, you can also enter into this type of transition when another anticipated life transition doesn’t work out. For instance, let’s say you expected to achieve something by a certain age, maybe a particular career or buying a house or being married. But when that anticipated event doesn’t happen, the sense of loss can run as deep as any other kind of transition, leaving you with unresolved ambiguous grief, where circumstances lack a clear conclusion or closure.

Endings almost always bring some experience of loss and grief, making life transition self-care more important than ever.

In fact, this familiar sequence happens to almost all of us at some point:

• Life transition begins when something ends, either clearly or ambiguously
• We’re called to process the ending, no matter how hard that may be
• We enter a foggy in-between place, wrapped in a blanket of ambiguity and uncertainty

There are many names for this in-between place of transition.

Recently I learned a new one: The Unbounded Space. It was described to me this way…

Imagine you’re on a ship and you’ve sailed away from the shore. You’ve gotten far enough away from solid ground that you can no longer see where you started. In other words, you’re in the middle of the ocean and you can’t see where you’ve come from. Neither can you see (yet) where you’re going to.

I quite like the sound of the unbounded space, perhaps because there is a sense that your ship is moving towards something, even though you can’t make it out just yet.

In this unbounded space of transition, your self-care needs might be very different.

I call it the self-care of being with. The unbounded space doesn’t support racing ahead to do something. Unraveling in the unbounded space usually asks us to pause rather than rush forward, even if you might want to. But that ship you’re on? It’s only going to go as fast as it’s going to go.

The self-care of pausing and being with is often about slowing down and savoring…

• stillness, quiet, peace
• letting your senses lead
• daydreaming, imagining, reflecting
• belonging, connection, interdependence
• nurturing a spiritual or contemplative practice
• nature, beauty, place, landscape
• just simply being with yourself

So this is a time to take as much space as possible to comfort yourself and love yourself up, perhaps in ways you haven’t considered before. It’s a space to tend to your deeper needs by paying attention to the following five things.

Life Transition Self-Care: Five Ways to Fill Your Cup

1. Give yourself time to mend and restore in ways that might seem rebellious.

We’ve established that this unbounded space comes on the heels of a loss of some kind, being in the midst of ongoing loss. So the time is right to recognize your deep need to heal from this and give yourself permission to recuperate, whatever that looks like for you. 

Know that your path to recuperation and restoration doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. It’s okay if it veers from common self-care advice. In fact, during times of significant transition, you might struggle with traditional self-care activities like getting enough sleep, eating well and exercising. 

Early on in your journey through the in-between space you might need something entirely different. For instance, during a personal transition last year I discovered that what I needed most in the world was to hang out in my big comfy bed snuggled up to my cat George, streaming absurd TV comedies. While the behavior felt kind of rebellious and mischievous, it lifted my mood in ways I couldn’t have imagined. When I remember it now, it still makes me smile. 

2. Understand your body’s willingness to help you move out of over-thinking.

When you feel stuck in an in-between space you might also be stuck in over-thinking, continually searching for more information and replaying the same questions over and over. 

You’re probably familiar with that inner monologue that catches in the same place, either rehashing the past or rehearsing the future (or both). While your brain is actually trying to protect you, it’s primed to keep you worrying so you can try to control what’s coming. For a lot of women this can look like catastrophizing, or obsessing about worst case scenarios. 

These days we know so much about how our bodies help regulate our nervous systems, making room for our brains to shift out of overdrive. So it’s a good time to literally get out of your head by opening up to the wisdom of your body.

I always encourage my clients to start with the simplest, most basic things, like breathing and movement and stepping outside. But your body is the expert on this, so trust its wisdom and give it the opportunity to help you out here.

3. Listen to the Seeker/Wanderer within you, and her need for freedom and space.

The unbounded space often brings with it a deep yearning, a sense of longing. But it’s usually amorphous and hard to put into words. You don’t quite know what you’re yearning for.

Yet yearning, in and of itself, tends to activate the archetypal Seeker/Wanderer within you. And more than anything, this part of you needs to roam, get lost, explore. This is the way it gathers insights, hunches and ahas.

Now is a good time to do some actual physical wandering if you can:

• take meandering drives on the back roads
• let yourself get lost a little
• stand at the apex of a broad vista
• walk along a wide expanse of beach or meadow
• slow down and linger for a time

Obviously, these options aren’t available to everyone. The next best thing, in my opinion, is to watch movies or read books about Seeker/Wanderers, preferably movies that contain big vistas. 

Seeker characters are usually on a journey for some sort of truth, purpose, or knowledge. Of course, you probably have your own preferred Seeker movies. A few that immediately come to mind for me are: Arrival, Field of Dreams, Contact, Alien, Nomadland, Thelma and Louise, The Matrix. 

4. Drop down into the wisdom of your senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting) to feel revived.

Spending time in-between comes with a desire to attach to something, to come to terms with the attachment that you’ve lost and move toward transforming it in some way. This can be difficult and confusing, because you may feel depleted and numb. But the good news is your senses carry a wisdom about this.

You may not understand why you can’t get enough of the scent of lavender or tomato soup, or why touching a certain something, like your mother’s scarf, brings you close to tears. But you don’t need to understand it. You just need to turn towards it and let your senses take over and attach to it, even if just for a moment.

5. Finally, open up to your creativity’s need to partner with you.

When you’re in the Unbounded Space you may notice a faint stirring, a desire, to put words down on paper. Or your hands seem to be itching to make something, anything. But it doesn’t really make sense to you.

That’s okay. Let yourself love your creative urges, whether they make sense or not. You’ve probably heard this before: anything that opens the conduit to your creative/imaginative self is healing and nurturing.

And as Carl Jung noted:

Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain. 

This is never more true than when you’re in the midst of a life transition.

Probably the hardest part of being in the in-between space of life transition is giving yourself over to it.

Allowing yourself the time to just be here may not be easy. Too often we turn our backs on that. Somewhere along the way we learned that we should be stoic in the midst of loss and life transition, and just get on with it.

But as many wise ones have said: The way out is the way in.

The only trust required is to know that when there is one ending there will be another beginning.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes