When you pray to God and he answers your prayer, you might not like what he has to tell you. I realized that a few weeks ago and am living through the repercussions of that still. But I do know that when God speaks to you, you better listen.
It wasn’t a big booming voice in the sky. It wasn’t like the biblical stories I’d heard growing up Catholic, it wasn’t a single “AHA” moment. It was a string of events between me and people I met, people who I now know were the shining light he put in my path.
This hearkens back to my post about running in the Bastogne. It was an unreal experience for me, and now looking back I realize it was my best form of prayer. I was running in a beautiful nature setting, trusting in Something and letting faith guide me. It was meditative, and it was transformative. I didn’t realize it at the time, but God was showing me something about myself I didn’t even know.
The key moment of that half marathon honor run was when I dropped to my knees right on that battlefield and thanked every soul who came before me for that sacrifice. Tears ran down my face as I thought of each soldier who would never come home, sons and husbands and fathers who gave everything. Yes some gave their lives, but some gave something more intangible. They gave the rest of their lives to that experience, to relive it, to remember it.
Months later I’m at a meditation retreat outside of Tucson, Arizona. It was at Miraval resort, a place devoted to helping people with self-development, exploration of your true potential, that kind of thing. My meditation teacher, Jill Wener was doing a Tapping session with me, also known as the Emotional Freedom Technique. I didn’t really know much about it but watched a quick video and had no idea how tapping parts of my body was supposed to help me, but I was willing to give it a try.
I walked into it feeling very raw and emotional, which is unusual for me. Through a series of meeting other teachers at the resort, journaling, and thinking back to some intense conversations with friends, I met with Jill and let her know that I was on the verge of tears and I didn’t know why. I am not one to be emotional, EVER. My key traits tend to be logic, discipline, hard work, results, progress…. vulnerability? Heck no.
Yet here is Jill, open to helping me answer some question. I don’t even know what to ask anymore so I have to pick something. I guess I’ll go with “Should I get an MBA or should I do a fellowship in Integrative Medicine?” Pros and cons to both, and a very logical thing to discuss, or so I thought.
So we begin the tapping . She poses my pro/con list back to me as if it was my consciousness talking to me. It was weird hearing my thoughts being spoken aloud by someone else in a non-judgmental way. Looking back on it, it feels like she was a mirror to my snarl of thoughts, showing me how to unravel it.
The concept of intuition comes up. I tell her about how I followed my intuition in Bastogne and it led me to an amazing experience beyond words. I feel tears welling up again. She asked a simple question “Why did that make you cry?”
I hadn’t thought of really, really why. Now with me sitting here after a few days of working on personal development and feeling like I hadn’t developed at all, this question pushed me into a sudden realization. Running and remembering made me cry because of that sacrifice. Because I have the highest respect for that sacrifice. I hold it in such high regard because I haven’t made that sacrifice. I feel like I’ve come up short in being as noble as those soldiers were. Yes I served in the military but my destiny was not to give my life on the battlefield. My service lies elsewhere and I’m still working on that, however…. I got emotional because I realized I hadn’t given My all to the people I love the most.
I have been holding fast to the idea of putting down roots, making this final decision, using logic all the time though my husband hasn’t been happy. He’s been saying why and I haven’t been listening. The truth is that it scares me to act on emotion. To do away with logic and trust that God will take me where I need to go. To have faith in my husband, to put his happiness really, really first. Even if his happiness does not make logical sense, the fact is that he is unhappy. I love my husband with everything I have but I have not put his happiness first. I haven’t let myself be that vulnerable. I built my fortress around concrete ideas of why he should just get used to my ideas being better. Of course I did everything I could to build a beautiful palace for him in this fortress we built. To him though, it’s still a prison. This place.
For the first time, I realized the problem was ME. When I follow my intuition, take a leap of faith, trust in God, that is how I get to my own true self, my own true happiness and my own true purpose. I don’t need to fear emotion, I should embrace it. That is when I felt the most alive, the most raw, when I let my walls down and allow myself to feel to the depths of my soul. I realized I don’t do this anymore. I need to do this at home. Be open. Be vulnerable to blind faith. It scares me.
So there in that session, taking slow deep breaths to recollect myself as this realization hit me, it felt so completely Right. It all was laid out before me and I saw how God was telling me this through my experiences and all the people who had pushed and spoke to me in a way that I would finally Hear. But I only had to look within to see it all along, to ask myself just one layer deeper than I thought I had- that one question “Why did that make me cry?” Because it reflected on ME.
In the weeks since that moment I have had up days and down days. I won’t lie- for me, crying is a completely exhausting thing. I left the session reeling and slowly felt my basic self quickly return. Anger. I don’t want to feel the uncomfortable truth- getting fucking pissed off is a much more comfortable place to be.
My head can be a foul mouthed place to be, just know that IT WAS ALL CAPS AND IT WAS LOUD AND I WAS SUPER DUPER MAD AND PISSED OFF AND OH YOU BET EVERY OTHER WORD WAS A SWEAR WORD AND I AM CENSORING MY REAL MIND FOR YOU DEAR READER. JUST KNOW THAT RIGHT NOW THERE’S A TON OF 4 LETTER WORDS SCREAMING BETWEEN THE LINES HERE, GOT IT?
The real kicker is though.. when God speaks to you, you better listen. Even if you don’t like what he has to say. Seeing that mirror of your snarled thoughts clear up and feel like you’ve dived too far deep in a vast ocean of denial and have to come screaming up for air. This ocean I’d been sailing looked pretty good until now. Now I realize what’s beneath the surface and where this ship is meant to sail, where the current has been trying to take me. So I gotta pull up my anchor and follow the stars, trust the winds, and wave goodbye to the safe harbor we have come to know. Wherever that takes us, I give to God.
The Inspired Dr.Mom 