Have you ever felt a sudden restriction in your life, a door quietly closing on the way things used to move?

Before I took the leap to Thailand, I was trying to understand what came next. I loved teaching in Brooklyn, but I no longer fit the shape yoga had started to take. Beyond the studios where I still had real relationships, it wasn't the path of awakening I had trained in. It was bodies serviced quickly, class after class, with no room to actually connect with who was in front of me.

I watched a practice that was once offered as refuge get sold as a gimmick. Somewhere in that shift, I had fallen out of alignment and seriously began to consider hanging up my teaching role indefinitely.

But that was only part of what was happening.

While I sat inside that reality, something else in me was shifting too, deeper than my yogic path, suddenly and completely. I woke up one day with what felt like zero connection to anything around me. The world I knew was foreign.

What was I doing here? Is this who I am? And what even is that?

I looked at the spiritual tools I'd collected, the sacred objects passed to me as reward for years of service and dedication, and still I questioned whether I was authentic enough to carry them.

So when the job offer appeared, I took it. Nothing else made sense. An island in Southeast Asia, teaching what I love. That was the only logic left.

The world was falling out from underneath my feet. But my training held. Years of holding practice through difficulty, the support of my teacher and my community, all of it meant I knew enough to keep going, to keep using the tools I'd spent so long building. The disconnect was real. But so was the structure underneath it.

Soon after I settled into my new life in Thailand, I opened an astrology book that began to help me make sense of what I had been experiencing. I began to understand that the pressure I had been feeling wasn't necessarily random. Saturn gave me a language for the dissolution I was already living through.

Saturn is one of the most important planets in our chart. It speaks to structure: the foundations we have built, the systems we rely upon, and the ways those structures shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Its transits ask us to examine whether the structures we've created are still capable of supporting who we are becoming. It is a slow process that we can either resist or lean into. I chose to lean in.

In my own journey, I was being asked to let go of everything I knew to be me, but not necessarily to abandon it altogether. Everything, including my direction in life, felt muddled. The work was not to immediately figure out what came next. It was to continue showing up to what supported me spiritually and energetically while getting very comfortable with the discomfort of not really knowing exactly what the plan was,  and accepting that it might not be revealed for a few more years.

This was the prerequisite for building a new foundation: closer to who I was becoming, further from who I had been. That past life of my journey is something I hold dear, even as I was asked to release it structurally, to lay the ground for whoever I was becoming next.

And on the lighter side, Jupiter gave me the gift of doing this inner work in one of the most exquisite landscapes I had ever witnessed. It was a huge blessing to have the beauty of nature holding me in the midst of my greatest surrender. So far.

I'm sharing this today for a few reasons. The first is that I feel it is incredibly helpful to consider our relationship to the planets as we move through life. Of course, there are a multitude of reasons why anything can happen at any time. But getting to know the archetypal energy of the planets can bring great relief.

Sometimes a framework gives us a key that unlocks something we couldn't previously see. Once we recognize the pattern, we can't not see it or consider our experience from that point forward. And this is where I feel astrology can become more than prediction. It can become orientation.

The second reason I'm sharing this is to honor the part of ourselves that is deep in process behind the curtain of the main stage of our everyday life. It can be very easy to become hypercritical of ourselves: moving too slowly, comparing our success to others, needing to show up more online, needing to accomplish more, needing to have the next thing figured out. Our minds can press hard on the pressure points of our insecurities and worthlessness. If we get caught in this downward mantric spiral, it can be incredibly destructive.

But what if you're not failing? What if you're in a process?

There are times in our lives when something needs to be dismantled before something new can be built. The fact that you don't know what comes next does not necessarily mean you're doing something wrong. Sometimes the work is simply to remain present with what is still supporting you while allowing what no longer fits to fall away.

Knowing that we are in a particular process is a path towards acceptance and grace. Understanding the logistics of that inner process and how to navigate it is where empowerment comes in. This doesn't mean we simply surrender and wait. It means we learn how to participate in the process consciously.

Yoga and meditation are where we synthesize and embody so that the knowledge doesn't just remain a concept in our heads. Slowly, our lived experience turns to wisdom. And that wisdom can become of great benefit to the world around us.

So if you're in a season where the old structure no longer seems to fit, before you decide that you've lost your way, consider asking a different question:

What if something is being cleared so that a more truthful foundation can be built?

You may not need to know exactly what comes next. You may simply need to learn how to stay with yourself while it unfolds.

This is ultimately the kind of work I love doing with people: learning to recognize the deeper process underneath what is happening on the surface, and developing the tools to move through it consciously.

Sending love from the fruit farm,

Amanda