On
vacation, I traveled alone, on spiritual adventures,
to faraway places like Machu Picchu in Peru and Findhorn
in remote Scotland. On one trip, I white-water rafted
down the Bio Bio River in the Chilean Andes. On another,
I circumnavigated the earth—Philadelphia, Manila,
Sydney, Calcutta, Varanasi, Delhi, Cairo, a bus through
the Sinai desert into Israel, Jerusalem, Rome, then
south to my grandmother’s ancestral village in
the Italian valley of Vesuvius, where I discovered my
link with antiquity as a descendant of the survivors
of Pompeii. I’ve landed in helicopters, float
planes, and ski planes, and, for a time, as a student
pilot, even flew a plane.
The question is: What was I looking
for?
I have always felt as
if I were on some kind of quest, searching out experiences
that would heighten my taste of life. Sometimes I was
conscious of it, sometimes not. But the idea that my
soul had cut some kind of contract on the other side
was always lurking in the shadows of my intent.
The years went by, and instead of
connecting the dots I simply continued to hone my skills
and enhance my reputation as a writer, while inside
feeling increasingly empty—sometimes even miserable—and
not knowing why.
I could earn a good living as a writer,
and I was good at it. But beyond the fleeting rush of
seeing my name in 26-point type on the cover of a magazine,
or people calling to congratulate me on a piece, or
just the gratification of a difficult job done well
under pressure, something essential was missing—a
passion for what I was doing and an inner feeling of
effortlessness and rightness in the world. A part of
me loved (and still loves) the process of understanding
how things happen and why people do the things they
do, and then writing it all down. The ever-shifting
challenges, the diversity of experience— the life
could be vigorous, it sharpened my wits. And for the
longest time, the possibilities seemed limitless.
But somewhere in the course of my
relentless practice at being an impartial journalist,
a trained observer with no agenda, I also got cut off
from the deepest parts of myself and from what I actually
cared about. I couldn’t tell the difference anymore
between what really interested me and what was just
“a good story,” couldn’t manage my
skill in a way that felt meaningful, and everything
in my personal environment just reinforced me to work
harder at the very thing that was causing all the trouble.
There was also a painful aspect to
what I did for a living that finally got to me: invading
people’s lives, persuading them to bare their
souls to me, often in the face of their deepest suffering,
and then turning it into a story for mass consumption.
People trusted me; they talked to me; many told me just
about everything about themselves. Exactly how much
did the public have a right to know? No matter how sensitively
I treated the people I wrote about, no matter how thorough
and humane my stories—and I believe I did, and
I believe they were, and, journalistic restraints aside,
I helped people when I could—the emotional process
was excruciating, and ultimately unfulfilling. To what
extent was I trading on others’ misfortunes? It
kept me up at night.
I took a leave of absence
from my newspaper job, blew my savings, got the family
history on tape, and drove across the country with an
old college friend who was trying out for, and who would
eventually be a three-day champion on, Jeopardy!.
At a Fourth of July picnic near the end of my one year
“off,” I found my mate, Doran Twer, a tall,
dark, handsome communications consultant with a dry
humor, a high I.Q., and an attractive unflappability.
At 35, I was finally ready to venture into someone else’s
strange little world and allow someone to venture into
mine. We got pregnant on our honeymoon, had two sons
in three years, Nathaniel and Aden, and began a life
together.
Marriage and motherhood filled one
of my deepest voids. In crossing the great divide between
living a driven professional life and living in a house
driven by children, I began to learn about surrender,
and about how truly weird people are once you get to
know them. The parenthood part turned out to be a total
crapshoot: Children come out mysteriously formed, and
I realized that anything can happen, no matter what
you do sometimes, because the ultimate defining factor
in any child’s life will always be his or her
own self—a revelation that filled me with relief,
and dread.
As my outward life quieted and narrowed,
meanwhile, inside I was unfolding exponentially—a
process that had been set in motion by Doran. If I hadn’t
met my husband and we hadn’t made our little tribe,
none of what followed would have been possible. At the
crux where I appeared to be leaving the worldly world
behind, I was actually taking a crucial step toward
one day returning to it more deepened, focused, and
at peace with myself than ever before. Marriage and
motherhood plucked me off the grid and held me in suspended
animation between worlds. A lot of my inner work was
done there, while I thought I was standing still.
I didn’t know all this at the
time. I still thought of myself as a stay-at-home mom
who wrote. I wrote unpublished short stories and unpublished
children’s books, tried my hand at screenplays,
drafted my novel, freelanced when the phone rang, wrote
an interview column for an online magazine, taught writing
for a while to college students, and applied for prestigious
writing fellowships that I did not get.
The old fleeting rushes
came and went, but faster than before, as if my system
had built up an immunity to the rewards of my craft.
To round out my existential floundering, and to help
me cope as my father died in inches in a nursing home
two hours away, I took up aikido, a Japanese martial
art, which became, for me, a spiritual practice through
my body. Aikido relies on blending with your attacker’s
energy and redirecting it in such a way that both he
and you are protected from harm. Imagine that, a martial
art in whose highest form the idea is to protect the
attacker.
As my training partners and I took
turns throwing each other, tens of thousands of times,
I learned to not resist attack but to receive it softly,
while at the same time holding my ground; to understand
and absorb another’s point of view, without necessarily
ceding my own. Letting go of resistance changed me emotionally.
Increasingly, I came to accept that death can come at
any moment, and moved beyond that into a liberated space
of infinite possibility.
The most important part of the training
for me has been ukemi—the art of falling.
Forward rolls, backward rolls, break falls, my entirely
extended body slammed down on the mat like a wet sheet
in the wind. The falling changed my perception of the
world around me; it allowed me to experience myself,
energetically, intuitively, as the center of the universe.
Between the giving up of resistance to death, and the
experience of myself as the center of everything, I
came to feel what I can only describe as a powerful
humility.
Along this way, a couple of revelations
broke through. I learned to pay attention to my intuition
and to get into the habit of acting on it immediately,
and I realized that I wasn’t living the life I
really wanted to live and that only I could
live. I’m not saying I knew what that life was,
but it had never occurred to me, before then, to enter
consciously into a process of discovering and creating
it. All those randomly chosen journeys, experiences,
dangerous liaisons—I had been shaping myself unconsciously,
skipping not so merrily along on the surface of my life,
guided, as often as not, by some external idea of who
I was and who I ought to be.
This epiphany filled me with a sense
of promise, and an unexpected appreciation for ambiguity.
But many of those who knew me in my old life, meanwhile,
just grew exasperated with what seemed to them a lack
of ambition and an abandonment of my gifts—I wasn’t
living up to their expectations for my life, on their
timetables.
My soul, meanwhile,
was always talking to me. It would not shut up.
Where’s the passion? Where’s the meaning?
So I sat down and took stock: What was I good
at, other than writing?
I don’t mean that I sat down
one afternoon, “took stock,” and figured
everything out just like that. It dribbled out over
months and years, and only looking back can I see the
inexorable march of invisible shifts that led to here—-writing
this for you now, on a website I could never have imagined
back then. When the next step on my path “came”
to me, I experienced the illusion of it having come
all at once, as if I had been looking through the viewfinder
of an out-of-focus camera and someone suddenly adjusted
the lens wheel, miraculously freeing me from my existential
fugue. A gush is what that moment felt like, but the
reality was more of an ooze: bits and pieces of cobbled
dreams and unbidden insights that came like breath on
my neck from the other side.
Here’s what I realized during
that slow-motion taking of stock: The part of being
a journalist that came most naturally to me, and which
I found most gratifying, was my capacity to connect
with people. I could “get” who they were,
almost instantaneously, by feel; it was as if I had
access to their intuition. This came so naturally that
I hadn’t noticed it as my most obvious gift and
the one most likely to lead me to the others. I also
had the capacity, from as far back as I could remember,
to tell people things about themselves that nobody else
would dare tell them, things that would help them enormously
if only someone would, and save them a lot of time.
Then one Mother’s Day I got
a dog, a black scruffy mutt I named Budo (Japanese for
“ way of the samurai warrior”) and started
going to this dog park, where I made a new friend, and
one day some months later this friend shared insights
about me in a way that galvanized my new thinking about
myself—the official aha! moment.
There was a profession called coaching,
she told me.
All those years, while I was writing articles, she helped
me realize, I had been coaching my subjects; as an editor,
I had coached reporters; as a teacher, I had coached
my students; and as a confidante, I had coached my friends.
Coaching was my intrinsic m.o.!
Very soon thereafter,
I enrolled in the Thomas Leonard Coaching School, and
as I entered the world of life coaching I experienced
that déjà vu feeling of having
been there before. The vortex of my life experience—journalist,
wife, mother, teacher, traveler, martial artist—had
spun me magically to here.
In the past, I wrote—that was
my identity—and everything I did was in service
to that identity. I’m still a writer, but now
I write, and act, in service to something else: helping
people connect to their big spirits and helping big
spirits connect to their greatness. I give to others
what I need for myself—a way of remembering who
I am, who I came in mysteriously formed as, and navigating
life from there. |
