Over the last 5 years I’ve noticed an interesting pattern that is repeating itself in my life. The pattern involves me wanting or seeking something, only to be faced with obstacles that either make the situation quite difficult, or completely prevent me from getting what I want. It’s a pattern that has been particularly noticeable when I’m seeking help or support outside of myself.

Reaching Out, Turning In

Here are a few examples. Almost every time that I’ve reached out to a helper or healer, like a naturopath, psychotherapist, or bodyworker, there has been some reason why the person couldn’t help me. Sometimes the person was on maternity leave, or had just closed their practice, or was not taking new clients, or stopped seeing clients in English. Other times my finances were so tight that I simply couldn’t afford their fee. Or sometimes I would want to read a book about personal development, only to realize that I couldn’t find it in English or get it delivered to the Czech Republic.

At times it’s almost as if the universe is teasing me – dangling metaphorical “carrots” in front of my face – and then not letting me have them. An example of this is the round-trip flight tickets from Prague to Toronto that my husband and I won in June 2019. We were excited to have an opportunity to visit our friends and family back home, so we tried to book our flight right away. But all sorts of scheduling issues led to us booking the flight for one year later, in June 2020. Well, as you might imagine, a global pandemic got in the way of that plan. We have until June 2021 to use the tickets, so fingers crossed on that!

There was, however, one area of my life where I was receiving consistent support and healing, which was an ecstatic dance class that I’ve been attending for around 2 years. This class is the only place that has been reliably available to me, and it has had a profound impact on my life. But when the pandemic hit, the class got shut down. The teacher got stuck in Switzerland where she was visiting her boyfriend. She ended up marrying her boyfriend and staying in Switzerland. The class briefly opened back up over the summer, with different teachers, but it’s been closed since September due to the lockdown.

Another area where this pattern of obstacles has been particularly noticeable (and annoying) is when I try to attend personal development retreats. It all started in 2015, when I attended Sera Beak’s Soul Fire retreat in Montana. I was staying in Toronto at the time, and my husband and I drove across the border into Buffalo so that I could fly from there. It was a beautiful July day, but for some reason my flight was delayed, and I ended up missing my two connecting flights. When I finally arrived in Montana, I noticed that my husband and I had accidentally switched passports at the Canada/US border – I had his passport and he had mine – which caused several travel issues for both of us. After sending my husband his passport from a tiny FedEx office in the middle of a farmer’s field, I arrived at the retreat hoping to settle in. Sera started us off with a gentle meditation, at which point I started to feel nauseous. I ran to the bathroom and was violently ill. It was a completely unexplainable illness that did not seem to be the stomach flu (no one else at the retreat caught it, despite us sharing rooms, bathrooms, cafeteria, etc.).

Fast forward to 2019, when I attended Sera’s Soul Sanctuary retreat in Asheville. I was very happy to see that my flight wasn’t delayed and that the plane was relatively empty. I stretched out over two seats and got ready for takeoff…but the plane didn’t move. The plane ended up sitting on the tarmac in Prague for 3 hours because of an engine failure, which turned my 8-hour flight into an 11-hour flight, and caused me to miss my two connecting flights. Luckily I had planned to arrive in Asheville a day early, so I still made it to the retreat on time.

The examples don’t stop there. In May 2020 I decided to attend an online retreat, also offered by Sera Beak. I figured nothing could go wrong, given that I wasn’t flying anywhere. But two days before the retreat, I noticed some small bumps on my wrist. I thought I had perhaps touched some poison ivy, so I googled it and found out that there is no poison ivy in the Czech Republic. I attended the retreat, but I spent the whole time suffering through this rash that spread across my whole body. Afterwards I found out that it was strep bacteria, which was a total shock given that I’d spent 2 months in COVID lockdown without contact with other humans (and I was washing my hands like a maniac). Two rounds of antibiotics later, I was finally on the mend. But the rash also meant that I couldn’t attend my dance class, because strep is highly contagious.

My final example just happened last week. I’d set aside 4 days in my busy schedule to do a silent retreat at my friend’s apartment outside of Prague. The apartment was empty, so she informed me that the heat was turned down and it would be cold in there. I arrived (after lugging all of my food, blankets, pillow, clothing, etc. up two flights of stairs) to find that the heat wasn’t just turned down – it wasn’t working at all. After two days of people trying to fix it, the heat still wouldn’t work. So I had to do the retreat at home. Interestingly, when I woke up at home the next morning, the heat suddenly wasn’t working in my apartment either. (More on this synchronicity in a moment!)

Even my spiritual teachers have been “disappearing.” I mentioned my dance teacher moving away. In addition to this, my primary teacher of sacred sexuality, Shakti Malan, passed away rather suddenly and unexpectedly in 2017. And recently, my closest mentor on the path of soulwork, Sera Beak, decided to take some time away from teaching, writing, and leading retreats. I’m left with no consistent spiritual teacher, mentor, or guide in any area of my life.

Learning to Trust the Flow

What do all of these examples mean?

Trust me, I’ve been trying to answer this question for years.

The commonality that I see across all of this, is that these situations involve me looking outside of myself for answers. I want someone else to heal me, fix me, help me, make me better. I want other people to give me transformative experiences that shift my life. Over the last 5 years, the universe has been peeling back layer after layer of this illusion, until it is just me, here, laid bare, to realize that the answers are within me.

Of course, support and guidance from professionals and spiritual teachers is often useful and necessary. I’ve had profoundly transformative experiences based on various teachings and retreats, and these were some of the most important experiences of my life. But sometimes we rely on external resources a little too much, and we forget about our own sovereignty.

When I say that “all of the answers are within me,” I don’t mean that I can access all of the answers right now. Sometimes obstacles get in the way of my goals because I’m simply not meant to know the answer yet. This process is teaching me how to trust the natural, emergent, organic unfolding of Life itself. Instead of pushing my wants and needs onto the universe, I’m learning to trust that things are happening in their own perfect timing, even when that timing doesn’t make sense to me.

For example, when I was ill during the 2015 retreat, the weakness that I experienced in my body and mind actually put me into an altered state of consciousness that dismantled my ego and helped me be more open to transformation (kind of like participating in a vision quest). Last week, when I was forced to do my silent retreat at home with my husband, I learned about how to claim my own sovereign spiritual space within my home, and how to create the sacred in the mundane. I was frustrated at first, especially given that I’d spent the last 4 months of lockdown living, eating, and working in what amounts to one open-concept room in my apartment. And now the universe expected me to do a retreat here, too? I was exasperated…but after some reflection I was able to appreciate the deep learning that took place from doing the retreat at home.

I also explored the synchronicity of the furnace breaking in both of my retreat spaces. For the skeptics out there, I’ll first mention that there was no obvious, logical reason why both furnaces would break within 24 hours of each other. The weather hadn’t suddenly gotten colder, and both furnaces had been working just fine up until that point. After some reflection, I realized that this synchronicity was related to several bodily symptoms that I’ve been having, such as my own internal heating system being “broken” (due to peri-menopausal hot flashes). The broken furnaces were also linked to one of my intentions for the retreat, which was to stoke my creative lifeforce energy – my inner fire – which has been feeling cold after months of isolation and lockdown. (In 2021 I’m publishing an academic article on the science of synchronicity and mind-matter connections, so stay tuned for that!) 

In other cases, I don’t quite understand the obstacles that pop up for me, and perhaps I never will. With my Canadian flight tickets, I’m trying to trust that I will end up in Canada at the exact right time, for reasons that I am unaware of right now. When I experience other flight delays, I wonder if perhaps my empty seat on a connecting flight allowed a passenger who was on standby to take my seat and get home in time to say good-bye to a dying parent.

We exist in an interconnected web, and sometimes what looks like an obstacle is actually a blessing (for us or for someone else who we might never meet).

We Can’t Bypass the Now

I’ve also realized that this pattern of “obstacles” began when I moved to Prague, two weeks after the 2015 retreat in Montana. I now see that my decision to move across the world was the beginning of a long process of peeling back the layers of my identity. When I moved, I sold almost everything I owned, and I left behind my family, my friends, and my work. I let go of an old way of life and jumped into the unknown. The pattern of obstacles that has followed has been a continuing, deepening process of letting go of external sources and turning inward toward my true self. Every time I seek outside of myself, I am guided (some might say, forced) to turn inward.

As these layers of external guidance are slowly being peeled away, I’m realizing that I can often invoke what I’m looking for within myself. Yes, my soulwork with Sera Beak has been profound and important. But it was also important for her to step away, so that I avoid using her as a crutch, and so that I learn how to access my soul on my own terms. Similarly, while I love dancing in community with others, I’ve realized that I can evoke the feelings from dance class on my own, simply by turning up some good music and dancing around my apartment. It isn’t the same, of course, but I needed to learn that I am capable of accessing my soulbody from within, without external help.

Personal development and spirituality are important, but we need to make sure that we don’t succumb to a form of spiritual bypassing that has us always seeking outside of ourselves for the answers, or trying to push our own agenda. This is a form of emotional and personal avoidance, where we engage in personal development as a way to avoid ourselves. Even my move to Prague included an element of bypassing, because some part of me thought that by moving away and starting over, I would figure everything out. I thought the answers existed in some other place, some other job, some other way of life. Similarly, my insistence on doing a silent retreat away from home last week was an attempt to escape some aspects of my life at home. But what I’ve realized is that, as Jon Kabat-Zinn says, wherever I go, there I am. I cannot avoid myself, no matter where I live, where I work, or what teacher I seek.

Many of us avoid being in the Now, because right now feels difficult and we have no answers. But many of the world’s wisdom traditions teach us that the Now is actually the most sacred place. The simplicity of the present moment is enlightenment. Even when we don’t know the answers and even when things feel excruciatingly difficult.

Seeing reality as it is means acknowledging that life is made up of a series of “present moments” that come into consciousness and then fade away, over and over again (for more on this idea, see this article about the Buddhist teachings of Abhidharma). Sometimes, when I get frustrated about not knowing the answers, I place my hand on my heart and remind myself that it’s ok not to know. It’s ok to simply be in the Now, in this moment of unfolding, which will pass and lead to a new moment, again and again.

I’ve spent the last 5 years in this sort of limbo place, in the unknown, where answers do not reveal themselves readily. I’ve been looking for something “out there” to give me the answers. But sometimes we need to lean into ourselves, taking time away from external influences, in order to come face-to-face with the true nature of our being. This can be very uncomfortable, and it requires us to trust that we are developing at our own pace.

There is no magical goal or destination. Your journey, your process, your Now, is the point.

This emphasis on process is important. In Western cultures we often use binary logic, which is a form of logic that sees things in black or white. A person, situation, or event is either good or bad. Right or wrong. You either have the answer or you don’t. Eastern cultures often use more subtle forms of logic. For example, the Buddhist logic of Catuṣkoṭi allows four options instead of the binary two. According to Catuṣkoṭi, something can be: 1) Right; 2) Not Right; 3) Not Not Right; or 4) Both Right and Not Right. I liken this to one of my favorite passages by Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Language, ideas, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.

Trusting your (and others’) natural unfolding process, before jumping to binary yes/no conclusions, is related to what I referred to as downstream effort in my TEDxUNYP talk. In other words, instead of resisting obstacles, I try to approach life in a more subtle, nuanced way that involves traveling downstream, with the current of the water, or with the flow of life. This is not easy, and it requires huge amounts of patience. To be honest, I fail at it most of the time. But it means that I do my best not to force things to happen. Instead, I try to allow events to unfold with their own timing. I try to trust this natural timing with regard to my career, my relationships, and my personal development.

I believe that this trusting of downstream effort is one of the greatest and most important spiritual practices and purposes of my life.

The next time you bump up against an obstacle, I encourage you to check in with yourself about exactly what it is that you’re seeking. Might some of the answers already exist within you? If not, can you release the situation and trust that the answers will come when they are meant to come? Can you allow yourself to travel downstream, with the flow of life, instead of going upstream, against the current? Can you allow your resistance and binary thinking to melt into a gentle not-knowing, an acceptance of your Now, as imperfect as it might be?

Thumbnail photo by Chaney Zimmerman on Unsplash