Embracing The Unknown: Cultivating a Growth Mindset! What a trip it is, being alive! May this first note in the new Year of the Fire Horse herald fortuitous developments — in our lives, for people and our planet. May we seize the many opportunities to help bend that moral arc toward justice and kindness, compassion and good will — toward ourselves and others, as is possible in our spheres.
If you are short for time, do check out the two videos at the end of the post. Each travels into unknown territory!
I recently had the good fortune to spend a few days with dear women friends. We hiked, feasted, shared deeply, soaked in a luscious hot tub at the edge of the ocean. We also each drew a card from the Animal Medicine deck, and mine was the Black Panther. The teaching was about Embracing the Unknown… quite fortuitously, since I have been pondering some significant unknowns in my life. “Embracing the unknown”, and with it cultivating a growth mindset seems a perfect theme for this post and relatively new year.
The Black Panther medicine includes this enlivening entreaty:
“Oh Midnight Jaguar…
Wash me with your courage.
And steel me with your grace,
So I may know the value of
The void of time and space…
And steel me with your grace,
So I may know the value of
The void of time and space…
Embrace the unknown
and flow with the mystery
that is unfolding in your life.”
When we are able to embrace and open, be curious about, and even positively inclined toward the unknown, rather than resisting, fearing, shoring ourselves up, or bracing against it, this mindset determines how the unknown will unfold and reveal itself in our lives. We set ourselves on a track for what’s now unknown, but is coming our way, to enrich and empower us in unexpected ways. May it be so!
In my life now there are some big unknowns — health issues for some people near and dear to me; some financial changes and challenges; and then of course there is the uncertainly in so many areas in our world. When I am open and curious, ready and willing to see gifts in what the future holds, my day brightens, I relax, and can be present and bring my best to whatever may come.
How does “Embracing the Unknown” land with you? What are ways seek to cultivate a growth mindset? I’d be pleased to hear if any of the “medicine” or message resonates with you.
Wishing you health and wellbeing, unexpected gifts and opportunities for the coming months, for 2026, as spring opens and blossoms in our lives.
Warmly, fondly, open-heartedly,
Jill
Feel free to forward this post, these ideas, widely, so we may grow the circles of connection and awareness, learn and share tools and resources for living our lives well and fully. We’re in this together.
Other relevant posts include:
• The Power of Positivity: The power of positivity is not about being a Pollyanna and denying dark sides, challenges, hard emotions or actions, our own or others’. The quality of our thinking, whether it’s catastrophizing or cultivating compassion, whether it’s planning and obsessing or focusing on gratitude and positive events, or simply Being, these choices determine our quality of life, and so much more…
• Mindset Matters Mightily: Where and how we put our attention, the thoughts we think, how we engage with them…all make a whopping difference… throughout our entire life, both inside and outside. Our thoughts, can, very literally, determine our emotions, our experience of the unknown, of what’s coming our way.
In closing, I invite you to enjoy two heartwarming videos.
A flight of Fancy — aerial animation 6 minutes
The Last Repair Shop This Oscar Nominated Short Doc is well worth the 40 minutes
