The Clearing

On Sabbatical and the Art of Not Filling Space

📢 A quick announcement before my latest musing. I launched a new personal website at steveschlafman.com. It's home to my 1:1 coaching, writing, and ongoing explorations. I'm proud of how it captures who I am and my work in this season of life. I'll be adding to it in the months ahead, so I hope you'll take a look.

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A towering mountain appeared in the distance. As the vision drew me closer, I could see the dense evergreens covering its slope begin to disappear. Not gently fade, but get torn away by tremendous force. Trees uprooted and hurled aside. Wood cracking and splintering. Debris scattered. An entire swath of forest had been leveled. What remained was raw, cleared earth stretching across the mountainside.

I stepped into the clearing, over fallen logs and scattered branches, mounds of churned earth where roots had been torn free. The forest floor was a graveyard of broken wood and earth. The silence was eerie, the void of sound that trails a cataclysmic event, when the world feels fragile and fractured.

I continued walking through the wreckage, stepping carefully around deep gouges in the earth. The scale of destruction felt overwhelming.

Surrounded by the browns and grays of devastation, it seemed impossible that anything could have survived. But there, barely visible against the churned soil, a tiny green shoot was pushing through.

I knelt down, looking closer. Then I saw another. And another. Small shoots of green.

The deeper I inhabited this cleared space teeming with new life, the more it lived within my bones. Spaciousness where there had been overgrowth. Groundedness in the raw earth. The expanse of open sky where dense canopy once blocked the light. These were the qualities I had been searching for in my own life.

For weeks after, the vision I received continued to surface in my mind. I didn't try to analyze it or make sense of it. Something from the depths of my psyche was working on me, showing me what I couldn't yet understand intellectually. The clearing space, the destruction that made room for what wanted to emerge.

I didn't immediately understand what this meant for my actual life. But over the following months, I began to notice how cramped my days felt, how little breathing room existed between Downshift operations, team meetings, and client sessions. The image had planted something. I was longing for space.

A confluence of factors eventually inspired me to walk away from Downshift and take a sabbatical this summer. At first I noticed resistance to clearing space—fear of not making income, fear my coaching clients wouldn't return, fear of losing all the momentum I'd built over many years. When I sat with them, I saw them for what it was—the ego trying to keep me tethered to the comfortable and familiar. Despite these fears, my wife encouraged me to listen to these deeper longings and clear the space for something new to emerge in my life.

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This summer was one of the most expansive periods of my life. I spent my sabbatical in Portugal and back home in upstate New York, immersed in nature. Aside from a very light client load, I didn't do much other than be with my family, journal, meditate, read, walk, eat lots of ice cream, and just be.

I went into sabbatical with no agenda, no outcomes to achieve. Just a commitment to follow the image of the clearing and trust what wanted to emerge.

Two weeks into our stay in Lisbon, I was sitting at a playground watching my girls play when something shifted. I felt completely dropped in—present and aware—in a way I'd only experienced on long meditation retreats. But this wasn't a retreat. I was just watching my daughters play, fully there with them in an ordinary moment.

Several days passed and this sense of presence stayed with me, something that rarely happens. Usually after experiences like this, I'd slip back into my normal mental chatter and patterns within hours or days. But I remained unusually calm and clear throughout our time in Lisbon and it began to expand upon our return home.

At first, the unfamiliarity and intensity of it was unsettling. I kept waiting for it to fade. When it didn't, something deeper settled in, a groundedness I hadn't felt in my life.

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While I'm holding most of this experience sacred and private, there are three shifts I feel ready to share.

The first is that my center of gravity has shifted from work and doing to something I can only call spirit and being. Not in any religious or dogmatic sense, but a felt connection to something larger than my individual self. I feel guided by this deeper wisdom rather than just my ego's plans and fears.

In hindsight, I can see this shift has been developing for over a decade, but stepping away from Downshift was the tipping point that accelerated everything.

The second is that I notice things differently now. I catch my ego's stories as they arise rather than getting swept away by them. I feel emotions more directly without immediately creating narratives about them. I see patterns in myself and others with more clarity. Sometimes this comes with intense physical sensations—like energy coursing through my body before sleep—that I'm still learning to navigate.

I also notice more clearly how I create unnecessary suffering by getting caught up in stories and reactions. Eckhart Tolle calls this “ordinary unconsciousness”—the background static of unease and discontent most of us carry. This summer I realized how much of this I'd been creating without even noticing it. I consider myself pretty self-aware, and was surprised to keep seeing patterns I'd been blind to. Being able to catch these patterns as they arise has brought much more ease and less drama in my life and relationships.

The third is how this shift will reshape my work. The past five years have been dedicated to studying transitions and coaching professionals through evolution. That remains central to my work, but I'm drawn to the foundational qualities of awareness and attention.

Awareness is the world that we inhabit and attention is where we place our energy, our focus. I'm realizing that how we work with these—how present we are and what we focus on—shapes our experience of ourselves and our lives. Our ability to navigate transitions, handle stress, and make good decisions comes back to this essential capacity.

I'll continue working with transitions, but I want to explore these foundational capacities more directly. I feel called to help people develop their ability to observe their own experience so they can make conscious choices about what deserves their attention and what doesn't. This kind of metacognitive awareness becomes especially valuable during challenging moments when we need clarity most.

It feels awkward to put this into words, other than to say this knowing was right under my nose the whole time. I remember as a punk ass kid walking down to the beach across the street from my house and sitting on the pier, staring out into the Atlantic. All the chatter in my head would evaporate, everything would slow down, and I'd sense something profound within myself but couldn't put it into words. That same awareness I spent years seeking through meditation and spiritual practices was already there, waiting to be recognized.

I'm realizing through experience it has always been a part of me. If what I'm discovering is true—that this awareness is our shared and essential nature—then it's also a part of you.

This shift has actually brought me closer to home. I don't plan to leave my family, join a monastery, and become a monk. I used to joke that the acre and a half I live on was where I was most unenlightened. Now I see it as the place where my heart resides, where my most important spiritual work lives.

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At the moment I'm settling into being rather than doing, with the exception of supporting my 1:1 coaching clients and penning an occasional essay. I'm dedicating myself to study, practice, and integration—the dharma, meditation, Hakomi, other wisdom traditions, and my own inner experience. I feel more at ease than I have in years, without the constant need to strive, prove myself, or push toward the next thing. It's a good place to be.

This is where I find myself: in the space after letting go. What began as an image of a forest clearing has become my reality. The trees that were cleared were the endless meetings, the inner pressure to always be creating and building, the not-enoughness that drove me, the shoulds and supposed-tos that had grown dense around my life. They represented the life I thought I should be living—productive, scaling, always becoming more.

Now on the other side, I am experiencing more spaciousness, more trust, more freedom, more ease. This cleared space is a container for whatever wants to emerge next. For the first time, maybe in my life, I don't feel the need to rush in and fill it. It's perfect exactly as it is.

If any of this touches something in you, a longing for spaciousness, an exhaustion with the endless doing, know that you're not alone in it. Thank you for walking with me.