The source of suffering.
When I was seven I used to hypnotize my friends and lead them through guided meditations.
No one ever taught me to do that. I just somehow knew.
When I was eight I learned Transcendental Meditation.
When I was nine I declared that I had accepted god into my heart and got baptized at my request. No one gave me the idea. I had already been baptized as an infant, but I wanted to do it again; to confirm my vow to live as love of my own agency.
(I would later explore converting to at least three other religions on my journey of spiritual discovery, all before the age of 30)
I had my first Vedic astrology reading later that same year.
The only books I read up until I was in junior high were from the Chicken Soup for the Soul series by Jack Canfield.
I have been searching for god and the divine and fascinated by the great mystery of life for as long as I can remember.
Reflecting on my life thus far, it’s become clear to me that almost all of my suffering has come from two factors:
Assuming everyone else was like me, and
Investing time and energy into things that pull me away from my relationship with the divine (most notably, outsourcing my authority to others).
Assuming everyone else was like me
Cultivating curiosity and learning just how vast the variety of human expressions are has been both a huge source of frustration for me, and a huge relief.
There are times I wish people saw what I saw. It would be so much easier! Things would be infinitely more efficient!
And my own wisdom and brilliance has expanded tenfold as a direct result of that not being the case.
Because people see what they see, not what I see. And their perspective enriches and enhances mine.
I rediscovered my own curiosity as a grown adult, not because I was inspired to, but because I had had so many challenges by allowing myself to be guided by my own assumptions about how people were and what they needed that I had no other choice but to try something different for a change.
In that vein, learning to be curious, and being willing to be awe-struck and humbled by how much richer life is because we are each unique and have our own unique set of needs and desires and callings has saved my life.
Investing time and energy into things that pull me away from my relationship with the divine (most notably, outsourcing my authority to others)
The story of The Alchemist is fairly simple:
We go searching for god. As seekers, we embark on a journey. And that journey leads us home; right back to where we started.
It’s sort of like a cosmic joke.
Like, hello, it was here all along?! Seriously?!
Seriously.
A personal growth journey is not about going out and finding your authority, your intuition, or knowing elsewhere. While experiences do help strip away the layers, and self-discovery does not happen in a vacuum, a lot of time, money, and energy can be saved in the simple act of reflecting on what made you unique and extraordinary as a child, and reclaiming those forgotten parts of yourself which are already there.
I personally don’t like to call this inner child work or focusing on “your little one” mostly because I don’t really subscribe to time being linear and it’s easy to get lost in immaturity and lack of personal responsibility if you try to transport yourself back to your childhood. It’s mostly a really effective way to keep retraumatizing yourself. And it can become addictive.
Also, I experience it differently: this work is calling forth a forgotten part of you into the present, not traveling back to it (there is no such thing as traveling back; there is only now — and by the way this understanding is essential to healing work of all kinds).
I know for me it took letting others see me in my vulnerability in order to remember. It also took letting them love me in my forgotten places so that I could learn how to do that, too.
I am forever grateful to those who have served me in this way, and endlessly honored to get to serve others in this way, too.
It’s time for all of us to come home.
That’s me in the pink tank top (with culottes I sewed myself!) when I was nine years old, at Disneyland (with my older sister and stepmom)