THE RED BLOCK
Unless the eye catch fire,
the god will not be seen.
Unless the tongue catch fire,
the god will not be named
Unless the heart catch fire,
the god will not be loved;
Unless the mind catch fire,
the god will not be known.
Where the Wasteland Ends
Right after I tattooed my intention to communicate my soul’s truth onto the back of my neck, I experienced writer’s block. Severe writer’s block. The type that strips you of passion and purpose and perspective every time you sit down in front of the computer. I tried and tried to write the book I had been contracted to write — a peppy, go-get-’em spiritual self-help book about how to be a Redvolutionary — only to be hit a few forced pages later with a tidal wave of sadness and a sinking intuition that I wasn’t writing what my soul wanted me to write.
While I recognized that my struggles to write this book were a reflection of, and a catalyst for, my spiritual growth, trying to write my soul’s truth professionally (and on a legally bound deadline) was like living in a divine pressure cooker. As my friend, author Robert Rabbin, told me during this tormenting time, “The writing womb is intense enough, but the soul’s writing room is, well, it’s just a killer. It kills everything that is not true and authentic. It’s a kind of spiritual ordeal, a cleansing and purification ritual that cares only for the deep-down bedrock truth.” The infuriating thing was, I didn’t know what my “deep-down bedrock truth” was. I didn’t know what my soul wanted to express.
SURRENDER THIS
As weeks went by and the block cemented, I became desperate. My mind went on overdrive, my body became reactive, and not surprisingly, I stopped hearing my Lady. Thankfully, my Lady ushered in Emily, my intuitive friend and soul whisperer, for backup. Emily told me I couldn’t control the spiritual process that the writer’s block represented, or even mentally understand it, but I could allow it to happen. I could, you know, surrender.
I am aware of you circling,
constantly,
asking me with your immense Presence
when I will surrender.
When will I clear my runway
and
let
You
Touch
Down?
Even if you believe in the importance of spiritual surrender, you can’t make yourself surrender. In fact, our egos will do just about anything and everything not to surrender to the Divine. And, it doesn’t help that old-school stories of surrender make many of us hesitate before folding ourselves before Divinity: if we surrender, some Big Daddy God will start ordering us around (what can appear to have happened to several biblical characters and some Western mystics), or we will be unable to function and turn into a puddle of babbling bliss (what can appear to have happened to several surrendered saints from the East), or some external beings or aliens will “take over” and make us communicate their beliefs and spiritual paradigms (what can appear to have happened to several New Agers).
Bottom line: We’ve mostly been taught about surrender from divine masculine, spirit-based, or even “false light” perspectives — surrendering our self to some transcendent god or state or entity. But what if surrender means something different from divine feminine and soul-based perspectives? As Sue Monk Kidd wrote in Dance of the Dissident Daughter, “In some ways spiritual development for women, perhaps unlike that for men, is not about surrendering self so much as coming to self.”1
Surrender was a nagging mystery during my writer’s block, and after months in the Red Tent, I felt like I had already let go of so much. And this book was a project I knew, based on the results of my first book, that I could make successful by doing it my way. Emily suggested I have a funeral for my old ways of writing and even put to rest my overly earnest desires for this book to “help” others and serve the divine.
(Gulp)
The Red Tent transformed into a funeral pyre (in a pressure cooker). Eventually, it got to such a heated point that I wasn’t sure what was left to burn.
Oh wait … there was something left …
Red.
I began to wonder if I was too attached to the whole Red gig. Was I unconsciously clinging to Red like a spiritual security blanket? Were my Red rose–colored glasses preventing me from accessing an even truer reality? According to many spiritual beliefs, relying upon a certain lens or label or color for the Divine impedes us instead of evolves us. And I’m here to grow, damn it.
While I knew I wasn’t supposed to let go of my Lady, I decided that I did need to let go of Her Redness. I wasn’t shoving Red to a dark corner because I thought Red was “bad” or spiritually “wrong” (as I had repeatedly done throughout my life), nor was this like my Red night of the soul, where it felt like an external Source temporarily cut me off. Nope, now I was consciously and respectfully letting go of Red. I was grateful for everything I had received from Red, but it was time to move on. Going Redless was not just a lofty spiritual move; it directly affected me on the ground level since my entire career and future book were based on Red. I asked myself:
Through a carefully crafted physical and energetic ritual, I let go of Red. I let go of the Redvolution movement. I let go of being a Redvolutionary. I let go of writing books about Red, talking about Red, teaching Red. I let go of my Red lingo and symbols and research and visions and story, and although I kept the lessons, I let go of my Red mystical experiences. I drained my Lady of all color and wiped the spiritual slate totally clean, so I could (I hope) “see” what She wanted me to see … and write … and become. Letting go of this mysterious cosmic color that had been with me, in one form or another, my entire life was the oddest, most necessary, and most desertlike experience of my life.
CABIN FEVER
Redless months passed …
and, my writer’s block only increased.
In a last-ditch effort, I secluded myself in a rustic cabin in the middle of the woods with no connection to the outside world. About three weeks in, with still no book draft in sight, I caught cabin fever. “Ok, looky here,” I said to my colorless Lady, one rainy morning, sprawled out on the floor with my laptop. “The deadline is right around the corner. How ’bout I just force out a non-Red self-help book and then write whatever the hell it is my soul wants me to write?” A spatula in the kitchen, not that near to the stovetop heating my tea, spontaneously caught fire. I yelped, jumped up, and chucked the flaming utensil under the running faucet. Shaken but determined, I continued my deal-making with the Divine: “Okay, fine. Hmmmm. You keep hitting me over the head (and lighting things on fire) with the fact that ‘my way’ isn’t working and that I need to surrender. So, maybe I’m just supposed to channel this sucker. It sure would be a lot easier.”
I sat back down, crossed my legs, lit some incense, meditated for a half hour, and then proceeded to write what felt like “channeled material.” After about a minute of “channeled writing,” my dog, who had been lying peacefully next to me for hours, threw up … right on my keyboard. Then my Lady spoke:
This is a Relationship, Sera.
Not a one-way street.
You’re not a slave taking dictation.
I Want to Do My Wild Thang with you
Not despite you!
Remember, We’re In This Together!
Months after this incident, I came across wise words of Barbara Marx Hubbard in her book From Ego to Essence, which share a similar realization:
We don’t want to confuse this kind of self-expression with “channeling,” which occurs when people put aside their local self [ego self] and feel an external entity coming through them. If we want to incarnate fully, we cannot have hovering entities telling local selves what to do…. This kind of writing is the next step after so-called channeling. It is the process of the incarnation of deity…. You are not channeling a higher entity. You are the higher entity yourself. You are allowing “the word to become flesh.”2
Allow
My Words
to Become
your Flesh
Allow
your Flesh
to Become
My Words
While I was grateful to hear my (now Redless) Lady again, as I cleaned the dog vomit off my keyboard, my pain, frustration, and confusion reached a boiling point, and I screamed at the top of my lungs (that is what’s great about isolated cabins in the middle of the woods):
“WHAT MORE AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?!!!
I HAVE DONE EVERYTHING I CAN THINK OF TO WRITE THIS BOOK!!!”
As soon as I screamed those words, I realized that’s the problem. I have done everything I can think of. I have let go of everything I can think of. There was nothing else I could do. Wiped out, I collapsed to the ground, sobbing and surrendered. Minutes passed, and then:
You need to Love Me.
I was shocked, not to mention a wee bit offended. So a second wind of sass filled my sails:
“Whaa? Love You? Come on! Give me a Holy freakin’ break! I’ve loved you since I was cosmically conceived! I wanted to be a priest for Christ and Magdalene’s sake! I spent years yawning behind the rigid walls of academia to appropriately study you. I traveled around the world and risked late-night dangerous bus rides through the Himalayas and dealt with all sorts of bizarre nasty physical ailments to explore you. I have participated in countless personal retreats, read way too many books, and done way too many workshops to constantly evolve my awareness of You. I married You! I have created a career around You and written a book and directed a film in order to inspire others to deepen their own unique relationship to You. And then I have let go of my career, my film, my audience, my friends, and my previous life in order to start embodying You. I’m in the Red Tent with You! I have faced, and continue to face, my shadows and deepest fears by committing my life to You. And isn’t it enough that I also love You through loving the handful of people left in my life, the trees, my potty-mouthed parrot, my barfy Chihuahua. Isn’t this loving You? What more do You want from me?”
Everything
I paused, just for a moment, and then began to quickly review all the various ways of relating to the Divine Feminine that I had encountered in my life:
As an external goddess, a passionate belief, an abstract idea, a level of consciousness, a dualistic perspective, an evolutionary force, an academic thesis, an ornate icon, a political statement, a religious ideology, ancient history, an archeological find, an archetype, a myth, a muse, a healing modality, a creative complex, a therapeutic exercise, a mission statement, a mass movement, book-group banter, a feminist mascot, a female body, women’s intuition, the earth, “nature,” an environmental cause, a women’s circle centerpiece, a New Age glamor shot, a Northern Californian catch phrase, a neotantric tease, a sexual supplement, a marketable trend …
My Lady widened Her eyes of fire and blinked. The gold glitter that fluttered off Her eyelids covered a small Caribbean island just south of Florida. She held me in Her Wise Gaze, stopping my brain whirl, igniting my body’s knowing.
I ceased my ranty review, took some deep breaths, and felt into my body —
my womb,
my blood,
my heart
My Heart
My HEART
and I began to feel just how much I have not been fully loving Her …
which was followed by a profoundly humbling realization:
I don’t know how.
I know that how I’ve loved my Lady in the past has been genuine. But this direct inner request from my Lady to love Her in an “Everything” kind of way felt totally new and made absolutely no sense to my mind. I remembered something Jungian analyst Nancy-Qualls Corbett said in our interview: “You can’t think love. You can only feel love.” My Lady suddenly serenaded me with Supertramp song lyrics, “Give a little bit, give a little bit of your love to Me.”
I burst out laughing, “Alright, Ladee! Teach me how to love You!”
SOUL DESIRES
A few nights after my Lady’s serenade, feeling more loving and loved, but still unable to write anything that felt “right,” I received the nudge to listen to a recorded teleclass I had downloaded before I went to the cabin. The class was titled “New Feminine Power” and was taught by Katherine Woodward Thomas and Claire Zammit, who spoke about how surrender is the essence of the feminine. They claimed that one important step to being in our full feminine power is to surrender our agenda for our lives, stop trying so hard to force or control things, release what we think we should be doing, and stop setting goals that are from our egos (and spiritualized egos) instead of from our souls.
One of the practices in the teleclass was to write down five things we wanted to experience in our life. Mine were fairly typical: a meaningful career, a loving intimate relationship, abundance, optimal health, and a like-hearted community. Next on the teleclass, Zammit guided us through a lengthy meditation so we could access a wiser part of us — our souls. As Plotkin reminds, “Your soul is transpersonal and other because it is deeper and far more expansive than your conscious mind…. The soul is the sacred realm of our most heartfelt purposes, our unique meanings, and the ultimate significance of our individual lives.”3 In that clear and quiet state, Zammit asked us a few questions, one at a time.
The first question: “What do you want to experience as a soul in this lifetime?” My soul’s instant unfiltered answer:
Love for and from the Divine.
Second question: “What do you want to express as a soul in this lifetime?” My soul’s instant answer:
My Love for the Divine!
Now, this might sound fairly typical for a soul to say. But several members who had taken the previously recorded live teleclass voiced their soul’s answers, which were different from mine and from each other’s. And the more important piece for me to acknowledge was that my soul’s answers were certainly different from my mind’s earlier answers and felt directly related to my writer’s block.
“Whoa!” I elegantly exclaimed to my Lady right after this exercise. “So, apparently, the hotter-than-hot life ‘plan’ this time around is …
to Love You.
After admitting that simple but not so simple Redvelation, I swear the entire Universe broke out in giddy applause (Buddha included). I curtsied. My Lady smiled so wide a nearby blue planet blushed Red.
While finding a partner and experiencing glowing health, abundance, community, and a purposeful career are important desires to recognize and declare, and are more than worthy of working toward, they were not my soul’s deepest desires. Therefore, these things will never truly fulfill me, and some of them might even be “blocked” from me by my soul, if I’m not also doing what my soul most wants to experience and express here.
I intuitively realized that a few nights back, the Divine Diva wasn’t commanding me to love Her. She wasn’t telling me to love Her because She needed my love or because it was more “feminine” or “healthy” or “spiritual” for me to love Her. Nope, my Lady asked me to love Her because that’s what my unique soul most wants to do this time around. And expressing my “Everything” love for Her was my soul’s truest gift to this world and the best, most effective way for me to be of Service on this planet.
Knowing our soul’s desire for this lifetime isn’t so mysterious; it’s often as simple as remembering what we loved to experience and express as children. The fabulous-are-you-freaking-kidding-me-this-is-my-gift-to-offer-the-world thang is often the very thing that makes us most come alive. As Howard Thurman wrote, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”4
Come Alive
Helping us come alive by expressing our distinct soul’s desires is part of the D.F.’s job description. Our soul’s yearnings match Her yearnings for us. And you can bet your sweet ass that She’ll burn away anything and everything that stands in your soul’s way, including that which you mistake as your “soul’s desires.”