I sat in the back row of the car cuddled up with my son. It was a 12 hour drive and we were more than 6 hours into the trip. We were headed to North Carolina for the Body, Mind, Spirit Expo. I had been at the expo as a reader the year before, but this year I was a speaker at it. When I had agreed to be a speaker I knew that I would be speaking on Surrendering. I also trusted that the speech would come to me when it was ready to be spoken through me.
Almost all of the content that comes from me is actually coming THROUGH me. With each day, I understand how to allow this to happen more and more deeply. It is a process of understanding that the universe is working through me. I don’t need to be in control and I don’t need to understand where my life is going, I simply need to trust implicitly in the universe and that what is meant to happen for me in this human experience will happen if I am able to allow it to. If I don’t hold on, if I don’t try to control, if I don’t try to steer the ship it will go exactly where it is meant to be. Having said that, I was 2 days away from speaking on stage and the speech had still not fully landed. I knew the core of the content but didn’t have a sense of how it would be presented. So, I sat in the back of the car holding my son's hand and looking out the window as the trees, houses and fields passed by quickly. I felt the humanness in me boiling up. I felt the desire to control and know what I was going to say. I felt the urge to steer the ship.
I placed my earpods in, closed my eyes, and started a podcast listening for the flow of the speaker, hoping that it would help me understand the flow that would come from me. I listened to the podcast for over an hour and felt anxiety in my body rising with every passing moment. Rather than finding peace in the speech, I began to find anxiety. My mind began to race, my body began to feel uncomfortable and I found myself shifting in my seat. My hands felt clammy and my heart rate increased. I opened up the notes section on my phone and started writing. It was far from smooth. It was choppy and awkward. I jumped between topics and found myself frustrated. When I became fully annoyed with myself, I placed the phone down and went back to looking out the window.
Why was I so annoyed? Why was I so far outside of flow? The trees whipped by and the sky became intense shades of pink and purple and orange as the sun began to set. As my body began to return to a state of peace the lesson landed so deeply in me that it felt like being struck by lightning. Why was I listening to someone else to find my own flow? The way the universe works through me is unique to me. Looking at the way that the universe works through someone else can’t and won’t help me. I went immediately back to the first year of my Druid program with the Green Mountain Druid Order. When we were asked to pick a form of art to work with, my form was so clear, storytelling. Storytelling is one of the most intense ways that the universe works through me. The speaker that I was listening to in the podcast was doing a speech and that just isn’t my way of doing things, my way is storytelling. As I relaxed into myself and my unique way of showing up in the world the speech came easily and freely to me. I tell stories and people get the choice to apply the story to themselves or not.
