Lately, in conversations with friends, they’ve been challenging me, confronting me, exposing me and inviting me to come out from behind my walls. I frustrate them, irritate them, hurt them, avoid them, and just plain drive them crazy with my awkward attempts at setting boundaries. I told someone the other day that I see myself living behind a moat and I’m pretty sure that moat is filled with some amphibians with very sharp teeth. At least that’s what my friends are telling me.

How do I explain I’m not doing this to cause anyone else pain, but instead, I’m doing it to prevent myself from feeling pain? Kind of rough on the people close to me to have them think I’m assuming that letting them get close to me means I’ll have pain in my life.

But it’s not quite that simple.

I’m not afraid they will cause pain, but rather that my recent wounds will be re-opened, not intentionally, but perhaps without knowing it someone may bump into a sore spot, thereby, opening a floodgate of feelings—feelings, mind you, they didn’t cause, but just happened to stir up.

In the past four years, my emotional range opened up fully—which is what, like it or not, intense grief and major life changes do—and I hit notes I hadn’t played since my father died, along with many others I never even knew existed. This opened my heart and made me aware of many levels of human experience. I touched and was touched by other people’s pain at a much deeper level. I could see and know experiences that before I had only imagined.

The raw beauty of it was that prior to my marriage falling apart, my range had been very narrow and small, very contained. Then like a suddenly active volcano, my life and my heart blew open, spilling the contents of my inner most feelings all over the place. It was a mess.

I learned to live in this overheated muddy place, for many, many months, my identity in pieces. The pain allowed me to connect with people, allowed them into my most vulnerable and sacred places. I had no choice. I needed people or I wouldn’t have survived.

I still need people, perhaps now, more than ever. What’s different is that I finally got a break from the pain, and I’ve been enjoying the more neutral feeling of equilibrium. However, I have also become so attached to the absence of pain that I’m now doing whatever I can to avoid it, including not letting people get too close. My range has shrunk down into that narrow place again because it is what I can manage and control. The very thought of being out of control again terrifies me.

All this sounds pretty foolish. The cost is quite obvious when spelled out that way. Without the full range of feelings (no pain=no joy), we miss most of the essence of life, instead spending most of our energy maintaining our comfort zone and protecting our small little world.

I know all of this, and yet…and yet, I hesitate at the doorway of intimacy and human connection and peer in watching people engaged in the dance and wonder if I will ever feel safe moving in that world again. That’s what the sharp knife of grief does…it puts you in a state of post-traumatic confusion and doubt that you will ever be “normal” again.

Life, if nothing else, is about change and growth, and in all likelihood, this state of no pain or numbness, is temporary, a kind of suspended animation or existential limbo, allowing me to travel a great distance from one state of being to another. I trust that one day I will wake up and feel confident again about taking risks in my relationships again. I trust that my friends will be patient with me a little longer, and not see my withholding as a personal rejection, but rather regard me as someone who is on retreat from the world for a time, in order to regroup, refresh and restore my being into a place of wholeness.

In the meantime, I will continue to linger at the doorway, reminding myself that intimacy—like riding a bike—is something you never forget how to do.

How do you like to learn your life lessons? The easy way or the hard way? Didn’t know you had a choice? That’s the beauty of the gift of free will we’re given—we always have a choice.

Welcoming, inviting, allowing, and embracing life lessons is certainly the easier way to go. Running away, ignoring, resisting and fighting the lessons that occur are going to ensure that we’re in for a rough ride.

We hold most of the cards (more on that later) that determine whether our path is one of joy or suffering. Now I’m not knocking suffering. It’s an incredible teacher, but we don’t have to get a degree in it.

The key is to volunteer or sign up for the lessons, rather than make them pursue us. A life lesson that has been avoided is no fun. By the time it has become painful, quite a bit of time has passed, and the intensity of the lesson has built up way beyond our comfort level, such that in order to get our attention, its approach is rather more akin to a two by four or bulldozer rather than a nicely paced challenge.

Far better to meet this thing halfway and invite it in for tea rather than wait until it breaks our door down. Whether we like it or not, these lessons are coming one way or another.

What the Soul needs, the Soul gets. Period. And if necessary, it will use the override button to circumvent whatever dalliance or detour or distraction that has led us astray from our path.

Typically, this avoidance occurs when we listen to the mind instead of to our intuition. The fact that the mind is often referred to affectionately as the drunk money is no accident—if left to its own devices, it behaves in a way that is clearly not sober or sane. In fact, following the path the mind takes is like following a raving lunatic without a map. After exhausting yourself going around in circles and endless dead ends, the only place you’ll end up is either back where you started or even worse, lost.

Better to stop moving and check in with a more reliable source: your intuition. We’ve all been given this incredible internal guidance system, but sadly, most of us don’t trust it enough to cultivate it or learn how to use it. This creates all kinds of problems because listening to our intuition is the only reliable way to hear what our Soul wants. It is an internal system of checks and balances that allows us to sort through the massive quantities of information presented to us at any given time and to discern what to put our attention on. Without that, we are walking around with no sense of direction or purpose, just wandering aimlessly in a state of constant reaction to what we encounter.

In order to significantly reduce suffering in our lives, we have to learn to establish clear boundaries around ourselves to eliminate lots of meaningless stimulation and distractions and then determine from that what our Soul needs for growth and expansion. This is a more proactive way of living, in which we move toward our lessons rather than away from them. It saves a lot of time and trouble and heartache.

I see the mind as a rebellious teenager that constantly tries to find clever ways to get into the driver’s seat of our lives. The only way to deal with it’s juvenile antics is to be firm, direct, and most importantly, consistent when you are reminding it that it’s place is in the backseat or even the passenger seat, but never in the driver’s seat. No, that seat is reserved for the Soul or as some people refer to it, the Higher Self, the part of us that has a map and can see the bigger picture and knows the best route to take us where we need to go.

So take a moment and scan your life right now. Do you have a vague awareness that there are some things that need your attention? Do yourself a favor and address them right now before what is a gentle easy lesson becomes a brutal difficult one.

If you’re in the middle of a painful lesson right now, don’t beat yourself up. We all have blind spots and issues we sweep under the rug. We all have lessons that have required varying degrees of pain before we were willing to learn them. Do what you can to finish the lesson, recover and restore balance into your life again, and then comfort yourself with the idea that this type of thing can be avoided in the future.

Because while life may very well be a game, one thing it’s not is a game of chance. As I said earlier, we hold most of the cards. The rest is influenced by other factors, including, but not limited to, other people’s free will, laws of physicality, past actions and intentions, subconscious scripts, not to mention the Almighty Dealer. However, with that said, we do have a say in how it goes. The first step is acknowledging that fact in the present moment, and then working from there to minimize future suffering and to evolve to a place where some of those other factors can be addressed, thereby increasing our odds not of winning, but rather enjoying the game.

We live in a house of mirrors, the people and circumstances in our lives reflecting and refracting back pieces of ourselves. It is our reactions to these reflections that teach us the most about ourselves: what attracts us, repulses us, makes us angry or sad, open or shut down becomes our unique signature in the language of our experience.

These reflections also show us what we look like in different contexts. Sometimes we like how we show up and what we see, and sometimes we don’t. We resemble so many bits and pieces of broken glass turning in a kaleidoscope of daily interactions—always new, always changing, always becoming.

We are so much more than the sum total of all of the reflections in our lives. The concepts, ideas, projections, assumptions that are thrown at us from the outside world only make up a small, and frankly, quite a messy composite of our identity. It is really nothing more than a mask or persona that we associate ourselves with and wear in the same way we wear items of clothing.

However, when our buttons get pushed, it can feel like much more than that. And nothing pushes our buttons more than someone who reminds us of the parts of ourselves we’d rather forget. The last thing we want to do is spend time with someone who stirs up the ugly uncomfortable shit we thought we’d dealt with already or who shoves the hideous underbelly of our personality right in our face. Ouch! Our reaction is typically to find the quickest route out of there, anything to get away from having to see THAT and be around THAT right now. Sometimes that’s not possible and we need to simply find a way to be with the person who makes us SO uncomfortable.

Being around a person who mirrors some of our deepest, dirtiest, nastiest crap can be excruciating AND it can be the best teaching tool around. Instead of running, try turning right around and seeing what there is to see. If you don’t like what you see, perhaps it’s because it feels a little too close to home or a little too familiar. Therein lies the gift. This person is dishing it out so eloquently so that you can see what it feels like to be on the receiving end of such attitudes and behaviors, so that you can know it so well and so fully, that by the time you catch your breath, you vow to NEVER, EVER act like that toward anyone again.

That person that pissed you off just became your greatest teacher and offered you up a precious opportunity to evolve and grow that cannot be bought or found in a book, classroom, or personal growth DVD. No, this came through the school of life, right there in the comfort (or in this case discomfort) of your daily life.

Pretty amazing. Everything we need to grow is right there in front of us. Endless invitations to master the human condition given to us as one of the perks of being alive. Imagine that.

But wait, that’s too easy. Beyond these mirrored reflections, who are we really? The answer is really quite simple: we are what is seeing the reflections, we are what is hearing the voice in our heads, we are what is feeling the emotions, we are what is moving the body in its dance with the world.

But who, we ask, is that? Who, indeed, is life’s greatest mystery and life’s greatest gift. It is the motor that drives the whole machine, the constant hum of life force buzzing in the background of our lives. That my friend is who we are; we are part of this whole lovely crazy thing expressing itself like mad across the universe of existence. Everything we see is merely a reflection of that doing its thing in us, through us, around us.

I never make New Year’s resolutions, but this year I decided to break tradition by making one. This year I am resolving to have no more drama in my life. I’ve had enough drama in the past four years to last me for quite some time. I was so immersed in nothing but drama and pain for such a terminally long stretch that I became certain that it would never end. I questioned my sanity, and wondered if perhaps I was becoming a drama addict or that I needed drama to feel alive.

It was only when the noise and the pain and the grieving stopped that I dared to lift my head and notice the blissful quiet that had entered my life. I was distrustful at first, certain that at any moment the dragon would round the corner and burn me again with his nasty flames. But when one day of peace turned into one week and then a month, I realized that the worst was over, and that time, in fact, does heal all wounds. At their worst, my wounds had felt untreatable—they were so large and deep and gaping, I just assumed that I had joined the walking wounded, whose scars are always the first thing you notice about them.

But the wheel of justice turned and my life began to move in a new direction. My days began to have longer and longer stretches of joy and happiness. In fact, I began to feel some part of myself emerging that had been dormant for decades, and the effect was nothing less than rejuvenating.

This is the reason why I’m now absolutely clear that I have no room in my life for drama of any kind. If it can be avoided, it will. If not, I will do whatever I can to bring the situation to a quick resolution. Now, when I even get a whiff of drama heading my way, I will do a 180 degree turn and head in the opposite direction.

Drama, to me, is like a subtle, but extremely toxic and dangerous poison. It stirs up ugly feelings and emotions usually based on half-truths and amped up assumptions. It is destructive and drags all in its path down with it.

The only answer is prevention—not to ever go there in the first place. The remedy in all cases is to take the high road and take the most mature, high integrity action you can think of. Because once you’re in the middle of it, undoing it can be difficult or even downright impossible. Far better to just avoid it in the first place.

One of the things you realize when you’ve stepped off the drama merry-go-round is how immature and adolescent it really is. When you stand back and observe others who are engaged with it, it sounds so much like a bunch of teenagers, that you cannot imagine allowing yourself to narcissistically indulge in that way or regress that far back ever again.

Drama and all that comes with it—wining, complaining, manipulation, deception, impulsive behavior—is a contamination of who we really are. It pollutes our spirit and stresses our being. There are absolutely no benefits other than the feeling that something is happening in our lives. Some people might claim it makes them feel more alive. But they are speaking from within the eye of the storm. The fall out left after the storm subsides can be pretty sobering, making even the most drama-hungry person take stock.

My motto in 2008 is going to be just say no. Because from where I’m sitting right now, the hangover just ain’t worth the high.

Is it possible for you to lose your life but still be walking, talking, breathing, thinking, moving?

Have you ever considered the possibility that during the course of your life that you’ve given bits and pieces of yourself away?

Do you hold all the power in your life? Are you fully seated there, embracing and embodying it without reservation? Or are you holding back?

Do you feel whole and full or do you feel fragmented and scattered?

These are big questions and their significance came to me when a friend of mine boldly exclaimed in the middle of a late night conversation: “I’m taking my life back.” Something in this statement resonated and got me thinking, what would it mean to reclaim our lives and how did we lose it in the first place? How exactly does one give one’s power away?

After sitting with these ideas for several days, the answers starting fluttering in, forming a vivid picture. I saw scenes from my life and the lives of people I knew, engaged in numerous encounters throughout our lives—addictive or co-dependent relationships, authoritarian work situations, time spent with energy vampires, being dishonest with ourselves and others—all causing us to fragment: a piece dropped here, another piece given away there, a big chunk taken from us there. From the smallest incident to the largest trauma, we chip away at ourselves, until we are so unbalanced that we’re moving through life out of touch with ourselves and out of sync with the world.

Anytime you betray yourself by giving or doing something you don’t want to, but do it anyway, anytime you lie to yourself in order to please someone else, and anytime you are willing to put yourself in harm’s way on someone’s behalf, you are losing pieces of yourself.

Before I get any further down this road, let me pause here for a moment. Of course, I am not speaking literally here. Our natural state of being is wholeness. Our natural state of relationship with others is oneness. Beyond that, there is no need to speak. However, since we perceive and experience duality and separateness, the experience of soul fragmentation and loss can feel quite real. The purpose of even speaking about it in this way is that framing something in a particular vein can actually activate a major shift in both perception and experience regardless of whether or not it what we’re speaking about is real. What matters is, does it work to promote a state of well-being? If so, then use it.

Soul retrieval has been practiced by shamans for centuries, so there’s obviously something to the idea of gathering up the pieces of your life and reclaiming them.

Take a brief scan of your life. In what areas of your life are you currently giving your power away ? In small ways? In big ways? Then look at the past and look for incidents, events and relationships in which you felt that you lost or gave away some of your power.

Consider your “power” to be your voice or your say in a situation or relationship. Consider how many times you censor or mute that voice or betray your own needs. What do you think this does over time to your state of being? The image that comes to mind is one of erosion. I see a person’s life force being worn down by this type of compromise.

I’m not advocating blatant self-absorption or narcissism here. It can be a beautiful expression of love to give of ourselves to others. No, I’m speaking about the habitual tendency to deny the self and therefore deprive the soul of regular life sustaining nourishment. This is what, over time, leads to depression, illness, and feeling generally put upon by life.

What I’m suggesting here is stopping this pattern of leaking your precious life force all over the place. Go ahead and take your life back piece by ever-loving piece. Find out where you left those precious pieces and grab them up. I think you might be a bit surprised how empowering this little exercise is. You begin to get reacquainted with long forgotten strengths, interests, ideas, dreams, likes and dislikes, quirks, talents, preferences, etc. What does that feel like? I can only describe it in this way: you begin to feel like you again. Besides feeling kind of homey and cozy and familiar and all that, it is also just such an incredible relief. It’s like coming home.

The final miles of my trip ended with a bang. Not to be outdone by Montana, Idaho had a little gift waiting for me in Coeur D’Alene. When I pulled off the exit, the memories of a trip taken over twenty five years ago came flooding back. It was cross-country trip taken with D–my boyfriend at the time and now my ex-husband–to celebrate my newfound freedom after a year devoted to settling my father’s estate.

The two of us had arrived in Coeur D’Alene after dark and pulled the Chevy Luv truck we were driving into the parking lot of a large hotel. Rather than checking in, we climbed into the back of the truck and slept in the makeshift bed we’d rigged back there. Roughing it came easily back then. We were in love and needed very little except each other to keep us comfortable. Finding places to park the truck were part of the adventure. There was barely enough room for the two of us in the small covered truck bed, but I didn’t mind; to me it felt romantic.

What I remember most about that long ago trip was the sight that greeted us the following morning when we emerged from inside the truck. As we rubbed the sleep from our eyes, we looked around us at one of the most beautiful places either of us had ever seen. We had no idea we were near water when we’d pulled up. Now in the light of day, the lake aglow with sunlight and surrounded by a bank of evergreens, we soaked it in without speaking. The surprise of it added to the magical quality of that morning. I remember feeling incredibly blessed with love and freedom and opportunity. Losing my father the year before had carved a hole in my heart, and now this place seemed to be offering me a healing balm.

Over two decades later, this is what I recalled when I drove down the main street to the water’s edge. My life, what it looked like then and how it looked now collided and ultimately completed a kind of circle. I came to this place both pre- and post marriage, each a time of new beginnings–bookends around that twenty-four year period defined (and confined) by vows and commitment.

Now alone, I let the tears come, in honor of who I was and who I was becoming. I let myself feel sadness for the lost innocence and love. My life had come full circle and here I was on a journey to the new and unknown.

Afterwards, I found an adorable little motel with a large cozy room decorated like a mountain cabin. On the main drag, I stopped in a wine bar and ordered some local wine and a cheese plate with three different cheeses, fresh bread, figs and dates, and a generous helping of hummus. It seemed a perfectly light and fitting meal for my last night on the road.

The next morning, I said goodbye and thank you to Idaho and before long, entered the state of Washington. As I drove, I was struck by the barren flatness of eastern Washington, the landscape, not at all what I expected, but as I soon discovered, set me up to be nicely awed by the last leg of my trip. Halfway across the state, the terrain shifted dramatically and the mountains simply appeared out of nowhere. One minute they weren’t there and the next, they were, popping out as I rounded a long curve in the road.

It was soon clear that I’d managed to save the best part of the trip for last. Nothing so far compared with the beauty of the Cascades. A bit of ironic perfection, I thought, to realize after traveling almost 3,000 miles, that my destination was in fact the only place I wanted to be.

This took some time to sink in.

As I counted down the last miles, the gorgeous scenery, my constant companion now, I thought about what it took to get here — the love of my friends, my courage and my unwavering trust in the universe to take care of me.

Finally my time on I-90 ended and I came face to face with the Seattle skyline. There it was at last…my new home, beaming and proud in the sunlight. I’d made it….me and my stuff and my car…all in one piece.

This journey had ended, and the real one would be begin, but this time, I had no idea what the destination would ultimately be.

I turned north onto I-5, in no hurry to find out.

Montana was a purging experience for me. The complacency of the first two-thirds of the trip ended abruptly as I approached Billings and was broadsided by a sudden wave of intense grief. I had held myself together for almost four days, but almost running out of gas must have popped the cork on my feelings. They came on like a flash flood, quick and fast and deep; I surrendered and finally let myself feel the loss, the vast, open, empty space surrounding me, a metaphor. My soul emptied out so that I could feel the pain, the loss, and the separation.

It lasted close to an hour, hitting me in waves as I drove. I questioned the wisdom of continuing to drive, thinking perhaps I should pull over. But being behind the wheel was grounding for me. I think I was actually afraid that if I stopped, I might not be willing or able to get back in the car again (that’s the hard part about this kind of grief–it feels as though you’ve sunk into an endless deep pit of quick-sand never again to emerge).

So I plodded on, letting the waterworks flow unhindered, tissues wadded up in my right hand, dabbing my eyes so I could see and blowing my nose so I could breath. Finally, the shuddering and heaving slowed, and bit by bit, my breathing returned to normal.

It was getting late, I was exhausted and ready to find a place to stay. Life had other ideas. After stopping at a half dozen acceptable-looking places with no vacancy, I got back on the road, my stomach growling (it had been hours since I had last eaten) as the sky darkened.

Before I started on this trip, I had imagined the issue of not being able to find a place to stay might come up. Up until now, I’d always had plenty of choices. Not in Montana, I heard myself say out loud. I could almost hear Montana answer me back, “Sorry, honey, it’s not time to rest just yet. “

I wanted to shout back, “Wasn’t almost running out of gas and sobbing my guts out enough? Don’t I deserve a rest?”

No reply. Just silence. I could feel the fear rising up again as I continued driving with no clue what my options might be on the road ahead. Perhaps I’d have to drive all night, something I’d done before in my life, but not alone.

Images of what could happen began to play across my mind’s eye. I could break down. I could run out of gas. I could be ambushed by a psychopath. I pushed them away, started some deep breathing and turned on the radio. I found an oldies station; songs of infidelity and heartbreak and some rockabilly accompanied my late night drive through the Rockies.

Out my right window, I noticed some strange lights in the sky. Inside of a large bank of billowy clouds there was a violent lightening storm happening. The clouds looked almost black against the brilliant bolts of white and orange fireworks exploding within them. It was quite stunning to behold. I felt a kindred spirit with those clouds as they mirrored my own internal storms.

At around 11:30 pm., I saw a sign for a town called Big Timber. There was a sign that said lodging. I was hopeful as I pulled into the Super 8 parking lot, and relieved when the woman behind the desk smiled and said she had a room. I told her of my difficulty finding a room, and she said that it had been like that for weeks. Some work on an oil refinery nearby or something like that.

I slept like a baby and the next morning, once I got a look at Big Timber in the daylight I decided to take my time and wander around. I ordered my first real latte in days and browsed for a couple of gifts in some shops. Then spying a real mechanic at the end of the block, brought my car in to have them go over it to make sure it was road worthy. A couple of sweet guys gave me a quart of oil, checked the air in my tires, and refilled my windshield washer fluid. I handed them a nice tip, which they gratefully accepted.

I knew then, at the start of my fifth day, that I had passed the test of driving through Montana; the rest of my trip through the state passed uneventfully. All that was left was a tiny part of northern Idaho and crossing the state of Washington. Then I’d be home free…

To be continued…

The deeper I enter into my spiritual life, the more I encounter the psychological issues that keep me in bondage. When I frame my emotions, thoughts, beliefs and experiences through the lens of my core wounds and the key relationships in my life, I allow myself to navigate into the shadow aspects of my life, without which there would be no hope for happiness or freedom.

My core wound (as is many people’s) is connected with issues of neglect, abandonment, and feelings of overall unworthiness. When I brush up against any of these issues in my day-to-day life, they inevitably trigger very old ingrained reactions. The driving force of my life and my capabilities as a communicator were all defined by my need for first, understanding and second, attention. That’s right, attention. Had I not been ignored and neglected by self-absorbed, overwhelmed parents, I would never had the need to become articulate and self-sufficient, and filled with an unquenchable thirst to understand the deeper meaning of life.

The irony at middle-age is to realize that for years, I’ve continued to attract people into my life that maintained this pattern of neglect and indifference, to further agitate my feelings of being unnoticed and unseen until it has nearly driven me mad, but it’s also pushed me to develop my communication skills even further, to build a life around those skills so that my human need to be heard was finally met.

Beneath the surface of this need for attention has always been the greater need for meaning. My passion for this has defined my life since I was fifteen and even now, at forty-six, shows no sign of waning. These two drives when partnered could have manifested into incredible opportunity for me to step into a role of leadership. Luckily for me, my need for attention is not fed by crowds and adoration and admiration. Quite the contrary. Some other force, more subtle and less defined is tempering this type of overly visible and overly public display. No, it is much more anchored in my personal relationships. There is the dilemma, but also the opening.

Getting to know yourself and your core psychological issues and how they’ve shaped your life is the foundation upon which any real spiritual growth is built. The two simply cannot be separated. They are intertwined and dependent on each other as lungs are to drawing a breath.

That’s not to say that you should get caught up in analyzing them every spare moment, but rather getting acquainted with them, observing them, seeing when you have strong feelings or thoughts or reactions to something, watching for the triggers that come up. As you get to know yourself, this won’t seem so strange or overwhelming; it will become second nature, and part of your daily experience. Over time, you will actually begin to notice that you are evolving and growing and stretching in ways you never conceived possible. The more you are willing to invite these unconscious parts of yourself to the surface to be explored, the more insights will come, and instead of feeling as though you’re living in a small world defined by your past, you will begin to experience a world that transcends all boxes; the possibilities that once seem limited will, from this perspective, seem endless.

An evolving life is an exciting life. Growth means movement and movement means growth. Something as simple as deciding to pay attention to yourself can change everything. It opens unseen doors that you never even knew existed. Your ability to comprehend even the most complex situations begins to expand. Your capacity to accomplish what before seemed to take huge amounts of effort, now seems to move into a rhythm of effortlessness. What becomes apparent is that our entire struggle has been caused by our unconsciousness, and we alone can change it.

The second day into my trip was when the real test of my stamina and trust began. I woke up in terrible pain…the aftermath of days of packing and lifting boxes. My whole body ached and felt beaten up. Many doses of Advil throughout the day didn’t even touch it. It was something I simply had to live with. On top of that, my car was so jam-packed with stuff, the driver’s seat was stuck for the duration of the trip in an upright position, causing my neck to spasm every hundred miles. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t adjust it even a little. Instead, I got creative and removed the headrest, propping a series of different items behind my neck…pillows, jackets, bags of clothes, until finally settling on a bath towel, which when wedged, seemed to give my neck some much-needed relief.

After all this configuring and adjusting and enduring the aches and pains, it was then that I came upon one of the worst stretches of my trip. Foolishly, not planning an alternative route, I ended up crawling through over two hours of bumper to bumper construction traffic on the stretch of I-90 that curls around and through Chicago. If I was feeling tense prior to this, during and afterward, I hit a wall of exhaustion that threatened to ground my trip to a halt. An explosion of mental, physical, and emotional pain hit me all at once as I got on the other side of this trip through stop and go purgatory. It was right then and there that I questioned my decision to travel alone, without a navigator by my side to direct me away from this kind of suffering.

The metaphor was not at all lost on me.

Yes, solitude and quiet and aloneness can be good. But there are times when simply having someone help you get through a tough spot can be good also. And this was one of those times.

For the first time since leaving Hoboken, I admitted the obvious: I was handicapped by being alone. And because I was alone, there was:

no one to drive;
no one to navigate;
no one to massage my shoulders or feet;
no one to share meals with.

There was nothing to be done about that, but accept it. The only thing that got me through this existential crisis were a couple of CDs of a lecture given by life coach Cheryl Roberts, given to me by my younger sister. Robert’s inspirational words carried me past belching trucks, endless cops with lights flashing, angry drivers, and erratic dips and bumps and turns in the road. She reminded me that in our darkness there are gifts; and that instead of changing the parts of ourselves we don’t like or that we hide from others, we are better off facing them and seeing how they serve us and what gifts they carry with them. Loving our shadows, and embracing them and integrating them into who we are allows for tremendous healing and acceptance of ourselves. Our pain and challenges carry gifts with them.

On that lonely, painful day of driving, I began to get a glimpse of the possibility that my feelings of loss were quickly translating into gifts of strength. I recognized that just because I was in transit, it did not mean that I was running away or escaping the parts of myself I didn’t like. Instead, I had so stripped down my life to such a bare minimum, those shadows were beginning to emerge transformed. I was embracing myself along with the changes I had initiated.

The past was unraveling behind me; the future was unfurling in front of me: one known, the other a mystery. The whole damn thing stretching my capacity to the max! To think I wasn’t even halfway there yet!

To be continued…

My pilgrimage across the country began with the quiet hope that all would go according to plan, that there would be no surprises or unexpected turn of events, bad weather, car problems, accidents, or negative encounters with human beings. I knew I was asking a lot considering it would be a solo cross country trip done in a six year old car weighed down by hundreds of pounds of belongings. But deep inside my being, I trusted the universe to take care of me. And thankfully, it did–it took care of me, and much, much more. Spiritually, it gave me the ride of my life.

The first indication that this was not going to be an “ordinary” trip was on the first day when there seemed to be a prevalence of messages talking about God. The first was on the back of a tractor-trailer truck and read, “Do it God’s Way”. Instead of just some random message, it felt as though I was getting a directive or instructions for my trip. I thought okay, probably good advice. Then, later on that same day, this time on the front of a pick-up truck (don’t know why these messages seemed to frequently appear on trucks), it said, “Smile, God Loves You.” Okay, I thought, maybe that means I really am going to be okay

Several hours into the drive, I got tired of listening to the CDs I brought, so I thought I’d try the radio. We’ve all had this experience on road trips when trying the radio, there is usually at least one Christian station broadcasting out heavy messages about salvation and redemption in the middle of nowhere. Well, when I turned on the radio, I landed smack dab in the middle of a program called, The Faith Connection, in which the minister was talking about something he called temporal faith and accusing his listeners’ need for miracles as doubt seeking evidence. He was practically shouting, “Don’t try to figure God out! Trust! Stop trying to be God!”

Trust. This one word really became the theme of my trip. I had put myself in a situation that absolutely required that I not only trust in myself, but also trust in something greater than myself. This would be tested again and again, the further west I went.

I think it was somewhere south of Toledo, when I stopped for my first night, that I realized on one level, I was truly homeless and the trip was requiring that I be totally present and in the moment at all times–my safety and well being depended on it. I didn’t know what was around the corner; I didn’t know what would happen in the next five minutes. Of course no one does, it’s just that when we’re anchored by our daily routines, it appears as if we do know. I couldn’t afford that type of thinking. I had to be very conscious of my surroundings at all times; I had to focus on what I was doing; I was, after all, spending 8 – 10 hours a day behind the wheel of a vehicle averaging 70 miles per hour.

As I became aware of this, my intuition became my best friend and ally, and from the beginning of the trip to the end, it never let me down.

To be continued…