God is Not a Man

In the beginning of the journey to finding my voice, I was asked to do something that felt impossible, even dangerous.

I was asked to surrender.

I remember returning from London to the States, landing in a studio apartment in Seattle. I was 28. Something was happening to me. I was having a mystic opening but couldn’t put it into words. I was reading everyone’s minds, channeling spirit, even speaking to trees. I thought I was losing my mind. Predictions about mankind’s future hit me every day. They were painfully scary (and would manifest decades later).

I’d come from being a journalist in London, focusing on facts and figures, to being bombarded by THIS, this woo woo nonsense.

I did not want any of it. I wanted my old jet-setting European life back! I didn’t want to be a mystic. A visual kept popping into my mind of what I would become if I succumbed to this call to be a psychic — a woman with a Marlboro red dangling from her tar-stained lips, in a trailer in a trailer park, tall neck Budweiser bottles on the counter, a screeching kid with a poopy diaper in a crib, some redneck client wanting me to read her future banging at the metal door.

But it was worse than that.

In real life, 18 years of Catholic schooling in conservative Missouri had left me with serious spiritual trauma. I couldn’t go into a church without getting dizzy and almost passing out.

This surrender to “spirit” felt like I was being forced into becoming a rightwing Christian nutjob, a born-again fanatic, with a white male god with a long beard. My feminist self felt terrified of surrendering in a patriarchial world, and rightfully so.

I’d yell at the universe: God is not a man!

Worse still, I thought surrendering would mean I’d have to be a “good woman” and marry somebody and act nice and respectable.

F*$ck that. F@#ck all of it.

I fought tooth and nail. (And looking back, I love that about myself. My spit and vigor.) Even though I DID start reading tarot for people out of a bookstore to relieve some of the pressure of suddenly being so psychic, in the foreground I followed my ego relentlessly, taking jobs in journalism that failed spectacularly. I went back to London, got an incredible job with a high-end newspaper, only to have my psychic opening intensify to the point I couldn’t work. (Deep down, I didn’t want to regurgitate trauma for the masses as a reporter, but I wouldn’t admit that to myself. Not yet.)

Wow did I resist.

Eckhart Tolle has a saying: opposing what already is amounts to a kind of insanity, and life stops fighting you the moment you stop fighting it.

It got to the point where I was hit with “thoracic outlet syndrome” and my arms gave out from typing so much as a journalist, because yes, I went back to newspaper work AGAIN, even after the London “failure.”

Unable to work, I was truly and finally forced to surrender.

On my back on the hardwood, the only position that didn’t hurt, I sobbed toward the ceiling: “Can I still be a writer if I can’t use my arms to write?” I wasn’t just talking about journalism. I’d quietly started writing fiction.

On that floor, counting and recounting the cracks in the ceiling, I wrote a short story in my mind, first paragraph repeated over and over, added a second paragraph, a third, repeating it again and again, until it was 10 pages long. The story was about the time I skydived in Missouri. It was called, “I Learned to Fly.” It would become the last chapter of my first novel.

What followed were months of learning to surrender. What did surrender mean? It meant I no longer led my life by my will, but instead tried my hardest to listen to higher truth. It meant that I no longer sought external validation and only sought aligned corroboration. At the time, I had no words for any of it. I just knew I couldn’t keep doing it my way.

Rumi wrote that you have to let go of who you are to become who you might be. I didn’t understand that sentence until years after I’d lived it.

What I would find out over time, surrender meant that my quirkiest, most feral, wildest self could come out to play. My fear of being a Stepford wife disappeared and in its place came visions of people as these beautiful wildly unique creatures — like plants in a rainforest, some are rubber trees, others are ferns, some are water hyacinths! We’re not supposed to be all alike!

The call to spirit meant the call to being my crazy unique self, and to understanding how idiosyncratic all souls really are (not just human ones).

That surrender led me to the richest chapters of my life — novel writing, visual art, living deep in nature. The call was an opening to my true colors.

These days I work out of a yurt studio in the Oregon woods. It’s been a journey of surrendering to the Divine Feminine, the intuitive, sensitive, receptive, nurturing side of me that I gave up as a girl because I thought strength meant beating men at their own game.

The life I was so afraid of became the thing that is deeply feeding my soul.

In the decades since, I’ve watched this same fight play out in almost every woman I coach. One client was terrified to write her deepest truth, her beliefs beyond her relationship to men, beyond her relationship to mainstream life, beyond her career. I promised her for now she was just sharing her work with me, as a witness. Over time, by owning these truths and surrendering to her core values, her life and career transformed in ways she could’ve never imagined.

If you’re resisting surrender, you’re not alone. But a wild life lives on the other side, and it looks nothing like what you fear.

I promise.