Acts of Surrender 12: Time to Move On

If I've learned anything on this journey, it's how rapidly and radically things can shift from one moment to the next. For me, this seems even truer around birthday time, as I write about in this excerpt from Acts of Surrender, my memoir-in-progress.

It was Monday, the morning after my birthday. Adam was lying in the recliner in his office, his eyes closed.

"I need to commit to being gone from here," I said.

He opened his eyes. I sensed a distance.

"Why?" His tone wasn't a shocked "I want you to stay" why. It was more an "I know something's going on because something's also going on with me, too" why.

"If I don't commit to leaving this house, nothing's going to break open for me. I don't really know any more than that."

That wasn't true. I did know more. I'd been feeling unsettled since driving back from San Diego the previous afternoon and had felt the shudders of some alarmingly revealing aha's moving through me during the night. I got dressed first thing, thinking I'd leave early to go write, but then launched into a cleaning frenzy to avoid it. If the notes I'd jotted down upon waking were any indication, the writing would be deep...and deeply disturbing.

Adam nodded. "I need to be alone now, too," he said. He looked up at me. "This will probably pass, but right now I need to keep my distance from you. If I don't, I'll want to claw your head off."

This time, I nodded. We both needed space. I left.

I didn't know where to go. I didn't want to go to our usual Starbucks, not because I thought he he might show up. I didn't want to be anywhere near people. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to be seen by anyone.

I sat for a time in the car at Los Trancos Canyon View Park, writing and watching the misty rain dribble onto my windshield. I opened the window for a while, inhaling the moisture-awakened sage. But I couldn't write with the rain coming in, so I shut the window. When the car got steamy and I got hungry, I drove to the nearby Pavilions supermarket for lunch, and then down to Starbucks.

Adam wasn't there.


When I came home from speaking at the Body Mind Spirit Expo in San Diego on Saturday night, Adam and I shared our day's experiences. His, involving his brother, had played out far more dramatically than mine. It was all about ways he had been deceiving himself, he said.

Given how parallel our journeys have been, it was natural for me to examine the day just passed for some analogous epiphany. The only similarity I could find related to detachment. Adam described how he'd moved through his revelatory experiences without emotional charge. I shared how surprisingly detached I'd been — around book sales, around interactions, around my talk. For the first time ever, I'd stood up to give a presentation with zero preparation, zero anxiety and zero concern about how I would be received. It went beyond lack of concern. Frankly, I didn't care. For a long-time people-pleaser, that was an earth-quaking shift.

As it turned out, it was probably the best talk I'd ever given and, possibly, the most fun.

As I was packing up the booth the next day. I thought back to all the people who had been so clearly inspired by me over the course of the weekend. In the past, that would have brought me great satisfaction. In the past, I would have described my passion as inspiring others to awaken to theirs. Suddenly, I didn't care about that, either.

I wasn't sorry that words I had spoken might help change lives. But I no longer saw that as my passion. It wasn't even my job. What people got or didn't get from my words — spoken or written — was irrelevant. I wasn't here to teach. I wasn't even here to inspire. I was here to be.

For me.

I was here to live my joy, independent of anyone else. I was here to live my passion, independent of anyone else. Again, I was here to be.

If people chose to find parallels in their own lives and alter their worlds accordingly, they were free to do so. It didn't matter to me one way or another. The only changes that could matter in my world would be the changes I would make to my world, inner and outer. Everything around me would shift to reflect that. How could it not when, as I wrote the other day, there's nothing outside me — from the local to the global — that isn't a reflection of what's going on inside me.

While I'd already been living some version of that, this latest aha! took it to an even deeper level.

I used to say in classes and workshops that I wasn't there to teach but to remind. Now I see that it's not even my job to remind. It's my job to be.

No one else matters in that process.

And if they are somehow relevant, they will find their way not because of what I write or say and not because of how I work with them, but because I'm on my right path.

No wonder my interest in teaching and coaching has waned.

"Walk the earth naked, clothed only in your truth," I wrote all those years ago in Penetanguishene, and it's a motto I've tried to live by ever since. I now realize that those words said nothing about jumping up and down to make sure the world saw my nakedness. It was about living nakedly. Period.

I have to wonder whether I'll even want to write anymore the moment I fully integrate that. If I do, what and how I write are bound to change. Meantime, I'm no longer sure that it's appropriate to call myself a writer. "Writer" suggests an outward focus, that I'm writing for others. Am I?

One of my Monday-morning jottings spoke to that. I'd been thinking back to one of the things I'd said in my talk, about the importance of writing for no one else but ourselves. If I said it to in my talk, I knew I was also saying it for me.

But wasn't I already doing that?

Then another aha.

"I still care about what people think about me and about my words. I'm not writing for myself enough."

Bingo! I heard.

That means I'm not living for myself enough, either. That means I have to write my words and live my life independent of what it might mean for anyone else. Not partly independent, which I've done. But fully independent, which I've not.

I also realized that all the places I haven't been independent are all the places I've attracted emotional dependence from others — from my daughter and her mother, from students and clients, from some friends. They're all the places I'm still needy and codependent.

I wrote the other day that I was now largely independent and empowered, that neediness and codependence had largely receded from my life.

What bullshit! If I'm looking for my version of the self-deception Adam experienced on Saturday with his brother, this is it.

All I have to do is look at my daughter's neediness: clearly my own. All I have to do is look at her mom's neediness: clearly my own. All I have to do is look at client neediness: clearly my own.

The same is true of codependence.

For all I've let go, they're still too front-and-center in my life.

Monday morning, I saw threads of my marriage in my relationship with Adam, and I was horrorstruck. The parallel isn't exact and the dysfunction is nowhere near as pronounced, but I see a clingy, dependent neediness in myself in relation to Adam that's neither independent nor empowered. That well may be what was making Adam want to claw my head off. If so, I wouldn't blame him.

I know Adam well enough to know that he will own whatever else is going on from his side.

Meantime, I must fully own what's going on from mine.

Meantime, I must look in the mirror more honestly than I've ever dared and see all the places where I still crave attention, love and approval. I must subject every word, thought and action to rigorous examination and root out all the ones that diminish me by denying my innate worth and intrinsic value. I must be fearless and unsparing within myself and in relation to others. I must recognize that every authentic action taken in my highest good must be in the highest good of all, however it looks on the surface. It must be because there's no such thing as isolated or conflicting highest goods. We're either all connected in an energy grid of oneness or we're not. If we are, my highest good can only be yours, even if it sometimes doesn't feel that way from a personality-mind perspective.

My earliest experience of that insight came in February 2005. It was President's Day weekend and I was lying in the bathtub of a Howard Johnson Express in Albuquerque. My thirty-month road odyssey had barely begun and I was wracked with parental guilt at having left Sedona in the wake of the collapse of my marriage, because it had also meant leaving my daughter, then five, behind. At the same time, all inner guidance had insisted that I "get the hell out of Dodge," that Sedona was not a healthy place for me to be.

I don't remember what initiated this particular pity party. Perhaps Guinevere had called in tears, triggered by another row between her mom and new stepdad. Or perhaps I was just lonely. All I know is that as I lay there, eyes closed in the dark bathroom, I felt the presence of Guinevere's higher self.

"Don't worry about me," she said. "I'm fine."

I started to cry.

"You do what you have to do," she continued. "Whatever it is will be the best thing for me, too."

Ironically, Guinevere's higher self had known that it was time to move on from Sedona even before Aalia told me that election night that she would be leaving me. When I'd returned home earlier that evening, I'd found Doreen Virtue's Magical Mermaid and Dolphin Deck deck on my desk, where Guinevere had been using it to practice her writing. In clear view on a yellow notepad, scratched out in her preschool scrawl, were the words "Time to Move On," as copied directly from the mermaid card of the same name.


Now that her mom's relationship has ended and we all find ourselves in the same geographic orbit, I've sensed Aalia trying to recreate some version of the old mother-father-daughter trio. In fact, I realized this morning that I've yet to spend alone time with Guinevere since we all arrived in southern California — me from New Mexico, they from Arizona. The only time it wasn't a threesome, it was a five-some, with my former father-in-law and his wife.

I've been complicit in this. I still enjoy Aalia's company and we've always talked easily. And that's fine. What isn't fine is that I'm being tempted back into my old husband/helper/enabler role. I'm also allowing this dynamic to get in the way of quality one-on-one time with my daughter. If I'm honest, I have to admit that I'm doing it partly to avoid being more emotionally and authentically engaged with Guinevere and partly to avoid having to be more fully in my power with her mom.

It's not that I've acted like a spineless wuss. I've taken many empowered stands over the years, including vis-à-vis Aalia. But there remain disempowering situations that I've refused to see, refused to act on or refused to be upfront about. That has to stop.

The time for fear has passed. The time for courage is gone. The time for fearlessness is here.

It's now time to create my life, whatever the fallout or consequences — for myself or anyone else.

I don't yet know what that means. I do know that any tendency toward codependent neediness is guaranteed to distort or destroy that path.

On the morning of my birthday, I had a dream that I was leaving an Oneg Shabbat (Sabbath eve) gathering that I'd led for many years.

"I'm stepping down," I told my followers. "In three weeks, on the twenty-fourth, I will pass leadership of this group to Sam. At that time, I will announce what I'll be doing next."

Three weeks from my birthday is the twenty-fourth. In those weeks, I commit to the path I outlined here earlier: stripping from my life anything that I can identify as personally disempowering, demeaning, diminishing and devaluing, along with anything else from the past that no longer fits the more authentic me I choose to be. Then, I can give the old over to God (Sam, from the Hebrew Shmuel, means "name of God") and truly move forward with my rebirth.

Meantime, I've already taken some action.

• I "fired" a client who was chronically unable to honor her commitments (even as I own all the ways I enabled her behavior), and I did it even though I don't, in this moment, have the money for her refund.

• My talk on writing at the Conscious Life Expo in L.A. on October 16 will be my last of that nature and in that sort of venue. As I texted Adam before leaving San Diego, somewhat presciently, "Feeling somewhat done with the Voice of the Muse energy. The book will remain a great tool for those who now are where I was. But I'm not sure what my relationship with it will become. Time to move on. I don't know what that even means."


The other day, I told my friend Joan that if a windfall were to suddenly show up, I would continue to stay on at Adam's (assuming that it worked for him). The only difference would be that I would feel able to contribute financially in a more meaningful way.

In this moment, regardless of the state of the "authentic relationship" I described here the other day, I know it's once again time to move on — even as I have no idea where I'll go or whether the material resources will show up for me to take this next step.

Just as I had to empower myself to leave my mother behind in Montreal when she had cancer, just as I had to empower myself to leave Guinevere behind in Sedona when her mom left me, and just as I had to commit to leaving Albuquerque without knowing what was next, I must now empower myself to take this next right step...unconditionally.

In keeping with message of my Oneg Shabbat dream, I told Adam on Monday that I would leave on the twenty-fourth. Barring any changes in the three-week lifetime ahead, I will.

I doubt that Adam and I are "done"...though if we are, I'm detached enough to be okay with that. What I suspect is that we're each experiencing a further refining and redefining of how we relate — to each other and to the world.

Whether we live together or not, whether we speak again after the twenty-fourth or not, I'm grateful for this time with him — for what he's taught me and for what I've seen of myself through him.

The journey continues.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Journey Beyond Faith, my memoir-in-progress. Please share as you feel called to. But please, also, include a link back to this post.

Previous excerpts:
• April 28
• July 30
• August 25
• September 1
• September 9
• September 10
• September 12
• September 24
• September 27
• September 29
• October 1


• "Time to Move On" image Doreen Virtue's Magical Mermaid and Dolphin Deck