Cancelling an Offering: An Invitation to Go Deeper Within

In my last post, A New Way of Creating: From Pressure to Presence, I wrote about experimenting with lightness while creating a new offering — an Authentic Relating mini course. About a month later, I cancelled it.

Sharing this experience feels vulnerable. There’s a voice whispering: “People will think you failed. They won’t trust your offerings anymore. Better stay quiet.” I take a deep breath and invite warm tenderness to meet that doubtful voice.

Hiding is no longer an option. Welcoming my fears and doubts, and staying with them until I glimpse what lies beneath, is part of my path. What matters most to me is integrity: that my feelings, thoughts, words, and actions are aligned, rather than bent by imagined expectations or judgments.

The experiment of creating with ease

My intention was simple: to see what happens when I create with ease, trusting what wants to emerge. At first, it worked beautifully. The course structure revealed itself one sunny morning, light and playful. I imagined participants laughing, dropping into presence together. The flyer came together effortlessly.

I discovered that I could trust my own words and design, without always coordinating with a team. That felt empowering. I love co-creating, but sometimes self-trust is enough.

Urgency as a sign of misalignment

Still, something else was moving in me. I launched the course very late — only a month in advance — with a sense of urgency that pushed me forward, even though it made little sense rationally.

Looking back, I wonder where this urge came from. I longed to show up again, to hold an insightful space where people could connect and learn. As a fully engaged mom of a toddler, I missed my work-related self. But there was more.

The urgency felt like a deal with the universe: “Either it works on my terms — or not at all.” There is something childish in this attitude, a kind of posturing — making myself big and strong to cover the tender child in me, afraid of receiving a “no” from the people she invited to her birthday party.

It is tender to recognize that this wounded child was sitting at my decision-making table. Shame shows up. And as something expands in my belly while I write this, I notice that I was not fully owning the outcome of the process.

Creating from trust, fully owning outcomes

A project — an offering like a course — can grow from deep resonance with the ground, the roots, the inner core, and the field of people and earth. Trust in the universe allows ideas to move into words and actions naturally. The creator is present in service, surrendered to unfolding events. She does what needs to be done, takes full responsibility for the outcomes, and acts from spaciousness.

(I write this knowing what deep alignment, ownership, and surrender feel like, as I have experienced them in the creation of programs like the Vision Quests I’ve held.)

This is different from seizing a moment of inspiration but then pushing the project urgently into the only mold available. Urgency shrinks spaciousness.

I take with me that urgency is something to track. Whenever I feel I must act NOW, I ask: What is really driving me? Am I still connected to the source of this idea, or is ego, fear, or an old wound leading the way?

Cancelling with integrity

I had set a clear minimum number of participants, and when it wasn’t reached, I cancelled. It felt right. A part of me was relieved. Shame shows up. Admitting, as a group facilitator, that sometimes I don’t have the spaciousness to hold groups — even though I deeply want to, is not easy.

I take this cancellation as an invitation to tend the source, to restore, to embody my calling in small daily ways, and to do what is important but not urgent. To ask: “Can I be a dancing river here, in this moment?”

The course will return, in another form and at another time. For now, this pause is part of the path.