Evolve or get dragged

A personal essay for anyone choosing evolution before it chooses for you.

I’m dropping in from a pretty raw place, and what I’ve realised is this is where I want to stay both in my life and in my work. Everything has felt too refined for quite some time now. Too smooth, too known and too strategic. It’s like I’ve been carefully folding myself and my creativity into a series of perfect little paper squares — not too big, not too small, just right.

What once felt like clarity had begun to feel like a cage, and then I had my second Akashic Records reading and nothing will ever be the same again.

The reading can only be described as a directive from the part of myself I’ve been refusing to embody fully — the Divine Mother herself, Shakti.

What got revealed to me in this reading is I've been maintaining a role that is no longer relevant to the progression of my individual spirit or yours. I’ve been showing up not as an expression of my True Self and what’s alive for me right now, but as who I thought I needed to continue to be because I was helping people and it makes money — a career and business mentor.

I first identified I was in maintenance mode about 18 months ago when I started resisting my own reality. Rather than responding to life and what it was trying to offer me, I was responding to a carefully planned out calendar that had content pillars, lead times and marketing objectives.

The containment I've been feeling isn’t about being inauthentic in some way, it’s about trying to exist and create from a preset when my personal power lives in dynamic response.

are you experiencing the death of a role or identity, too?

If you are, this essay is for you. It’s for us. The ones standing at the edge, yearning for what’s next while simultaneously gripping onto what was.

The last time I experienced this dissonance between what I am and who my current reality required me to be, I was in so much pain I had to leap. Staying the same hurt more than changing and so I left my job and started the podcast. I figured someone would call this 10x award-winning leader with another big, shiny job and in the meantime, I’d bring through something that felt true. I saw it as a tiny window to do what I actually wanted to do not what I should do based on what I’d done before.

No one ever called. A recruiter here and there, sure. But no one called me directly wanting me specifically. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still surprised by this.

What the podcast went on to become was a closed container to explore who we are outside of what we do for a living. Who we are without the big jobs, the titles, the social media followings and the highlight reel. What was the quality of our lives, offline? Every episode ended with the same question — who are you when you’re sitting in your True Self?

They say you teach what you most need to learn and so here I am, eight years later, learning it — and teaching it — again: True Self.

This time around there’s no positioning statement or new title I want to announce to you. Alison Rice the “conscious career and business mentor” has dissolved but there’s nothing replacing it. No shiny tagline. No content pillars.

The strategy is to be me — a meditator, a seer, a gatherer, a partner, a mother, a sister and a friend who has made contact with her True Self and is living her definition of a rich existence.

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Seer: one that sees.

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This Substack and the podcast are now becoming what I’ve always wanted them to be but have been too scared to let them be — outlets for spontaneous bursts of creativity in the direction of the truth and each other vs. marketing channels.

My beautiful service business practice room, serve, is open and you can join anytime here, and my Office Hours are now whatever you need them to be here.

This evolution of my role in the world and how I use the sacred time I get with you on platforms like this might mean I have to make money in other ways, but I’m not focused on that right now. I am inherently safe. My basic needs are met. It’s going to be ok.

Maybe all of this will inspire you to get more true in your own life and work. Maybe it won’t. But at least I’ll know in myself that I responded to the call to evolve. To transcend the title and step into something more unbounded.

It’s blowing me away that I cognised this in 2018, forgot, and am now remembering it again.

“light up the sky so all can see.”

In my reading, I was directed to give it (the truth) ferociously, consistently and without concern for how it performs. I was instructed to start truly using the gifts I’ve been given and to start truly communicating instead of coddling or crafting.

I was likened to a small but powerful thunderstorm that can split a tree in half with a single bolt of lightening. I was told it’s time to start striking. To wield my power with exacting precision and light up the sky so all can see.

I sobbed for most of the reading. She told me I am her and she is me and one day we will be together again but not for some time.

This contact, when we’re ready for it and open to it, can be life-altering. As my sweet friend and teacher Laura affirmed when I called her that night, you are anew. Born again but the eyes can see much more clearly now.

These landings into what feels like a new stratosphere of existing and a claiming of a less restrictive role or identity used to feel quite destabilising and scary but having learnt to “be” with the expansion, the overall feeling right now is gratitude for this graduation.

My sister actually offered me another landing this morning when I shared the full reading with her. She said you’ve always identified as a builder but what you got to realise yourself as in the reading is the creator. Shakti in motion.

in the Vedic worldview, three forces govern all of existence.

1. Creation

2. Maintenance

3. Destruction

Think of these forces as the collective breath of the universe itself. They’re often described as opposites or opposing energies, but that’s not accurate. They’re more like one continuous cycle. Brahma creates, Vishnu maintains (useful, but to a point), Shiva destroys then Brahma creates again.

Every living thing moves through this cycle and no living thing is exempt. The seasons, the cells in our bodies, our careers, our businesses, our relationships… this isn’t some sweet spiritual metaphor, it’s the actual mechanics of reality and once you understand it, your life will never be the same.

Well, that’s been true for me at least.

Here’s that truth I’ve now committed myself to sharing with you again and again — we are each one expression of the one whole thing. Consciousness broke away from itself to develop a more sophisticated understanding of itself. This means we, and everything else it creates, are vehicles for its expansion.

I am sorry to tell you but we are mere KPIs for this fantastical creator of all things. It’s currently having 8.3 billion experiences of itself through humans alone, and then there’s the animal kingdom and every plant, flower or tree it also created.

Furniture, too. A chair is not “conscious” in the same way we are, but it’s still Consciousness expressing itself.

So when we — this localised version of Consciousness stumbling around in the human suit — evolve and grow, the one whole thing evolves and grows. That is precisely what Consciousness wants. Growth. Newness. It hopes that we will surprise and delight it and when we do, it showers us with support.

Trouble is, most of us are too scared to do anything remotely new, surprising or different because we’ve been conditioned to believe that’s risky and scary and we might fail. So we stay the same. We maintain what is no longer relevant.

This is why capitalism and the conformity it has created is so ludicrous. It is in direct opposition to what Consciousness is desiring for itself through us and that’s why it’s breaking. Destruction has entered the chat.

I am so passionate about sharing this message that I put it on a t-shirt in 2024.

I know it’s really easy to forget that you are a unique channel through which something vast and creative is trying to have an experience that has never existed before and will never exist again, but in order to fulfill this intent you have to be an agent of progressive change in your own life.

Back to the collective breath of the universe — creation, maintenance, destruction. The directive, if there had to be one, is to continuously inhabit creation. Proactive, intentional action in the direction of where you are currently not.

What happens if we ignore this? Prepare to get dragged, because destruction will appear to move you back into creation.

When you labour, scheme, control and contort to keep everything the same even though you’re feeling an undeniable pull to evolve (maintenance mode), you are holding the entire universe back.

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Why do these words kind of hurt?

The thing is, and where it gets softer, is it’s not our fault. We are creatures of maintenance and there is some wisdom in it. Continuity, loyalty and care are not bad things. Maintenance is relevant, but to a point. When maintenance becomes irrelevant, this force enters its shadow which is stagnation. And I think the particular cruelty of our current age is the system most of us are trying to build a happy life within keeps us maintaining long past the point of relevance.

All of us staying the same — trying to control outcomes and achieve particular things — is the collective condition capitalism needs to thrive. It needs millions and millions of good, little students playing by the rules.

We maintain jobs that no longer align with who we have become. We maintain friendships built on who we used to be. We maintain relationships — romantic, professional, familial — that we have privately known for years are complete. Letting any of this dissolve feels terrifying.

Maintenance is seductive because it manufactures stability. It feels responsible and often looks like loyalty. But there is an invisible exhaustion that comes from sustaining something that has already completed itself and you’ll know it as soon as it descends on the self. It’s a flatness. A low-grade loss or lack of life force. A sense of going through motions that no longer add up to meaning.

This dullness is a signal. It’s data to be used in decisions. In many ways it feels like the precursor to the creation phase. A warning. A knock at the door. Hey, it’s time to move.

What most of us do when we start to feel extinguished, is one of two things:

1. We double down on what no longer feels relevant — a vow renewal in a marriage that ended emotionally, energetically, sexually and spiritually years ago. Saying yes to the promotion at the company that’s already taken the last of what we had to give. Maintaining a title or positioning that makes sense to everyone else but makes us feel like we’re dying.

2. We do nothing at all. We take enough action to keep the cogs of life turning but not enough to create friction or change.

And again, we have to witness our innocence here. Change is genuinely frightening most of the time. The unknown is a gaping hole of possibility yes, but it’s also a kind of fragility. We want so desperately to know what comes next but the way this divine play goes is releasing what is familiar before the new or next thing has revealed itself.

Security lies in letting go. I know, make it make sense.

The truth is, if you don’t move through the cycle voluntarily the cycle will move through you. Shiva — the force of dissolution, destruction and transformation — doesn’t wait for our readiness. It comes when creation has been suppressed too long. Something collapses that we weren’t prepared to release and now we must rebuild from rubble instead of from choice.

None of this is about fate. This is, again, the mechanics of the universe.

choose change before change chooses you.

What Vedic philosophy offers us is the understanding that you can choose to be an agent of your own evolution. That you don’t have to wait for destruction to end what has already ended. You can choose creation before Nature forces it.

This does not mean blowing up your life. It means becoming honest with yourself about what has completed, like I am doing here in this entry. It means tolerating the discomfort of the in-between — the liminal space between what was and what is now emerging. It means trusting that the unknown you are afraid of is not emptiness but the next cycle of creation waiting to begin.

The change that is calling you is not random, it’s specific to you just like mine is to me. It’s the next unique expression of Consciousness that can only arrive through this current version of you, living this particular life, at this exact moment in time.

Nature wants that next expression and it has been waiting for you — and me — to agree. The Divine Mother herself told me this and now I’m telling you.

The question is whether you’ll choose to evolve or whether you’ll wait to be dragged. I am choosing evolution and look forward to being my True Self here.

Alison xo

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