What Spirit Asks
My experience with Spirit (the name I use to represent a power greater than ourselves) is that, at first, it asks politely for me to shift. When I don’t listen, typically out of fear, it asks a little more forcefully. If I still don’t listen, it pokes, and if I have still refused to listen up to that point, it hits me over the head. 
Being a human being, I know that I have free will. I can make a choice. However, many times over, when Spirit has nudged me in a direction and I haven’t listened, I ended up paying the price. Often for me, it manifests in my body. When I finished graduate school, I had no job lined up, so I accepted a full time position in the business organization that I had left to go to school. My inuition told me that it wasn’t the right choice, and rather than trust, I was afraid of having no money, I said yes. The day after graduation, I got on a plane to spend a week at a dude ranch in Arizona for a vacation, before going back to work.
On the last day of the trip, I was thrown off a horse and ended up severely injuring my back. Not only couldn’t I work, but I was in the worst pain I’d ever experienced in my life, and I wasn’t even allowed out of bed for 2 weeks. The neurologist I saw at that time, who is an extraordinarily spiritual man, said to me, “When you’re lying on your back for the next 2 weeks, the only place you’ll have to look is up, so you might want to ask what it is that you’re doing flat on your back.” I knew in an instant what the answer was…my self-will had run riot. My intuition had told me that it was not the right decision to go back to a business job, yet I didn’t listen. Well, I got the message, Spirit. It just took being flat on my back to get it.
It only recently dawned on me that there’s another spiritual metaphor connected to this story. The horse that I was riding that day was a lead horse – that is, he was typically the horse that was in front when a group of horses went out on the trail. The wrangler I was riding with was breaking in another lead horse, so he told me that I had to work hard to rein in my horse, so he could learn to not be in charge. So there you have it…it was a lesson in not being in charge, and when the horse threw me for trying to control him, I had to end up flat on my back, in pain and in surgery. I’d like to think that that’s the worst example I’ll experience in my life of letting go and letting Spirit take charge.
I knew I was making a major transition 4 1/2 years ago when I picked up my entire life in New York City, got in a car and drove across the country to move to LA. What I didn’t know at the time was that Spirit was going to keep asking me to transition again and again. To say it has been challenging is a huge understatement. But more and more, I’m sitting with my fear, listening to my body, paying attention in my meditation, and asking for guidance. I definitely get scared at times, not to mention impatient, and the only way I can do it is one day at a time (sometimes, it’s one minute at a time).
When I get annoyed or afraid that things aren’t happening quickly enough, or that they’re not going in the direction that I want, I remember something a sponsor said to me years ago, “When you ask HP for something there are 3 possible answers: 1. Yes, you can have it now; 2. Yes, you can have it, but you have to wait, or 3. No, you can’t have it, because I have something better in mind.
For today, I’m willing to trust Spirit, and I pay attention when the messages come through. Rather than acting on my will, I act on Spirit’s will. I’ve always loved that saying…Relax, Spirit is in charge.
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