SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW
By acknowledging my inner monster kid and giving myself permission to let my freak flag fly, I reawakened maybe the most essential part of my truest self. When I began my spiritual journey in my twenties, I never would have guessed that this would be the key that unlocked the door to the life I had so long felt called to live. Although I grew up going to a loving church with God is Love emblazoned on our Sunday School wall, I also grew up with a fearful mother who believed that there was One Right Way to do everything—especially religion.
By the time I was a teenager, the difference between those two messages made me feel totally split. On the one hand, I trusted that Love just loved everyone. On the other hand, it seemed like I had to do all the right things to earn love—especially my mother’s.
Although I had experienced the healing power of Love over and over again in my young life, I walked away from organized religion before I turned 20. I thought I would figure out my own way to love both myself and other people. That didn’t go so well. By my mid-twenties, I felt utterly loveless. Religion hadn’t worked, but neither had anything else I had tried. Something had to give.
The word that kept surfacing in my thoughts was “spirituality.” What that meant to me was something more essential than religion. Something true that I could live from the inside out, instead of something moralistic dictated to me from the outside in.
I had grown up reading that heaven was within me—a place of pure peace, true good, and deep love. I also grew up believing that heaven was someplace we had to work hard to get to by being perfect. It seemed to me that the difference between those two heavens felt a lot like the difference between spirituality and religion. One felt like Love calling me back home. The other felt like fear trying to convince me that only by following its rules would I ever deserve the love I desired.
In 1987, when I was 25 years old, I came back to Los Angeles to be near my dying father. He and I had never had as much time together as I had wanted after he had married the woman who only somewhat jokingly called herself my wicked stepmother. Now, true to her snarky nickname, Coral made easy access to him almost impossible.
I was immensely grateful to be near him, but it wasn’t always easy. I had returned to a hometown I hated in order to be near the person I loved most in the world, yet I was being kept away from him by someone who saw me, his own daughter, as a threat. On top of that, I was utterly unsure of who I was or what I wanted to do with my life.
The only lifeline I had was my desire to explore this new concept of spirituality.
One day during this time of intense confusion, I went for a hike in the hills above Los Angeles with my dear friends Bonnie and Diana and their friend Candace. I had never met Candace, but I had been hearing about how spiritual and intuitive she was. That description intrigued me. This was the late 1980s. People didn’t throw those words around like they do now. There wasn’t a yoga studio on every corner and a meditation workshop every weekend. The Internet didn’t offer instant access to information about every spiritual tradition under the sun. Even the word “spirituality” felt foreign, which is why I had been really looking forward to our hike.
Candace seemed perfectly normal. The only thing about her that struck me were her piercingly blue eyes. But when we stopped in a beautiful field to take a break, Candace suddenly reached over, picked up my palm, and looked at it intently. Back then, however desperate I felt to find some comfort for my ontological angst, cynicism was my go-to response for most things that made me uncomfortable. The fact that I wasn’t wisecracking as she gazed at my hand for what felt like an inordinately long time was a minor miracle. I realized how much I wanted her, needed her, to tell me something that would give me a sense of direction.
Eventually she began to speak. I don’t remember anything she said except the one thing that I apparently needed to hear: “You have the ability to balance the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, and the spiritual. Most people don’t have that. Right now what you are most neglecting is the spiritual.”
Although my smart-aleck mind wanted to have a field day by judging her pronouncement as way too woo-woo, she had in fact put words to the void in my life. She not only had validated the emptiness I felt, but she had also given me the impetus to embrace a holistic idea of myself I had intuited but never had the courage to fully claim. I have never seen Candace since that afternoon, but I look back on that hike as the beginning of my spiritual journey.
After meeting Candace, I set my intention to find some kind of spiritual practice that could help me discover a measure of peace and wholeness. I just didn’t know where to start. And let’s face it, there are lots of other distractions when you’re in your late twenties. I got caught up in most of them, but the calling just got louder and louder.
Gradually, my intense need for a lifeline reached a roaring crescendo. Doctors discovered my dad had Parkinson’s. They put him on L-DOPA, and for a few years his quality of life improved. Then my stepmother died after a long battle with cancer. He was at once devastated and relieved; her illness had been immensely difficult and stressful on him. Soon, however, it was discovered he had cancer, too.
I spent a lot of time with my dad during his last years. Along with sharing meals and holidays and short excursions, three afternoons a week I drove up to his pink house perched above Sunset Boulevard and we worked on our book about his life and his lifelong passion for art. Watching my beloved father slowly die, I felt desperate for something to soothe my battered soul.
One rainy Saturday afternoon, I was stuck in my little apartment and my stress seemed to bounce right off the walls. I decided to draw a bath and soak while reading something I hoped would calm me. Although I was doing everything I could to try to stay centered, sometimes I just felt like it was all falling apart. I heard myself plead, almost desperately, “Please tell me where to start.”
I got my answer. I heard back loud and clear: Start with what you know.
I went to my bookshelf and pulled out my old Sunday School books, got into the bath, and read: “To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings.” Aaaaahhhh! I leaned back into the warm water as I let those words reach deep into my heart, feeling, for the first time in over a decade, a deep peace wash over me. I felt hope and healing and promise. I felt Love. In that moment I reconnected with my fundamental belief that no matter what seems to be happening, there is something larger than all of us. That something larger I knew, I felt, I trusted, was Love.
Over the next few weeks, I read and read and read. The more I read, the more I really loved what I was reading—except for one major problem. I couldn’t get past the word for that something larger: “God.” Every time I read “God,” I bumped smack up against some judgmental, authoritarian, moralistic patriarch who was ready and waiting to tell me all the ways I was a bad person. Although that wasn’t what I fundamentally believed, that’s how I felt.
Then I read something else that shifted everything. I read that the word for “God” and the word for “good” were exactly the same word in many languages. So I decided to just substitute “Good” for “God.” Every time I read “God,” I thought “Good.” Good is Love. Good is All-in-all. Good is my Higher Power. Good is omnipotent.
Did I believe that? Did I believe that Good is everything, all powerful, everyone? Yes, with my whole heart. Even now, I use whatever word for that larger good that feels true in the moment: Source, Spirit, Life, Truth, Love, Mind, or God. They are all Good.
We are all born believing in that greater good, which manifests when we are babies as loving and trusting our own and everyone else’s goodness. As we grow up and begin to listen to the world more than we listen to our own hearts, however, that natural expectation of good begins to seem less and less real. Without that foundational love-based belief, we build our lives on the quicksand of fear. This inevitably entraps us in lack. Lack of money or love or intelligence or happiness or health. From that place of scarcity, nothing is ever enough. Eventually we settle for “not so bad.” Not enough and not so bad are a far, far cry from the bedrock of Love we once trusted.
When we lose the natural expectation of good, we begin to believe that evil is more powerful than good. We have clouded over the beautiful reality of good by viewing our lives through the warped looking glass of fear.
In my twenties, I was very active in the anti-nuclear movement. Over time, I became so scared that the whole world was going to be blown up that it practically paralyzed me with fear. One day I revealed my fears to my older brother Barrett, who shared something with such kindness that I heard it deeply and never forgot it.
“Do you know what Gandhi believed?” he asked me. “All the violence in the world, all the Hitlers and Holocausts, will never have the power to outweigh the simple daily acts of good.” When he said that, I felt the truth behind his words. In that moment, I literally felt the millions of daily expressions of kindness happening even as we sat there in that diner booth together. In my mind’s eye I saw all the helping hands and hugs and sympathetic ears. I knew in my heart that Gandhi and my brother were right: The hundreds of thousands of those moments of goodness every day could never be nuked into oblivion.
When we delve beneath our tendency to cling to fear and let Love slide off of us, we recognize that, despite our temptation to rubberneck our way through the world transfixed by every terrible thing we watch on the news, our hearts never stop expecting good. We just have to remember to listen to our hearts instead of our heads.
That can feel so hard sometimes. We often end up arguing more stridently for limitation and lack than we do for deservability and self-worth. As if that weren’t enough, we give that denigrating attitude a virtuous name. We call it humility. We’ve got that rhyme all wrong. Humility is not unworthiness or lack of deservability.
When I found this passage in A Course in Miracles, it shone off the page and into my heart: “You are the light of the world . . . This is merely a statement of the truth about yourself. It is the opposite of a statement of pride, of arrogance, or of self-deception . . . It refers to you as you were created by God. True humility requires that you accept this idea because it is God’s Voice which tells you it is true. This is a beginning step in accepting your real function on earth.”
One of my deepest desires in exploring spirituality had been to find my “real function on earth.” Like most people in their twenties, I had been trying everything to discover who I was meant to be and what I was here to do in the world. But the more I tried to “be” something—I went to graduate school to get advanced degrees, I took prestigious jobs in glamorous fields—the further and further away I felt from myself. When I read that passage in A Course in Miracles, however, everything shifted. All I had to do, I realized, was to learn how to shine my light. Everything else would follow.
From that moment on, my spiritual practice became the mainstay of my life. I never wavered in getting up an hour or two early every morning to pray, read, and journal. I began each day with my childhood prayer connecting me to my Divine Source: Be glad, give thanks, rejoice. I came to think of God as the Sun—and all of us as God’s rays here to shine. I loved that metaphor, because the sun and its rays aren’t two separate things. The sun isn’t the sun if it doesn’t have its rays to spread its warmth and light, while those rays just naturally emanate that warmth and light of the sun. In other words, the sun and its rays are one.
The rays don’t have to try to shine their light. They don’t wonder what to do to shine better or more brightly. They don’t worry that they don’t have what it takes to shine. They don’t quibble with one another—Gosh, you get to shine on the Hollywood sign, while I’m stuck over here trying to break through all these clouds above the North Pole. They aren’t competitive or jealous: How come you get to shine on Benedict Cumberbatch and I got stuck with this disgusting dumpster? They most certainly don’t say, I really don’t deserve to be a ray. Maybe you should pick someone else. I’m not light enough, bright enough, or warm enough.
False humility would have us believe we’re not good enough or we need to do something more to be good enough. None of us has to do anything more or better or righter to be any more connected than we already are to our Source. We are all rays and we are all here to shine. It’s what we do naturally.
There was only one problem in my dedicated spiritual practice. Although I understood these beautiful ideas in my head, they were so much harder to believe in my heart. It seemed far easier to listen to my false self convince me that there was something I had to do, or do better, in order to shine. Fear often clouded my light. The good news was—my light didn’t go anywhere. I caught glimpses of my light when I was traveling or spending time with my dogs or doing creative work. But it wasn’t until I began practicing joy that I truly began to shine. Then, as I began to hear the voice of my true self, I heard something else I had tried to tune out for decades. Something I needed to remember if I was ever going to be able to show up in the world as I longed to do.
I have always felt the calling of Spirit. Even as a little girl, when I first read about the lives of monks who lived and prayed and studied—and trained dogs or grew vegetables—in monasteries, my whole being ached to be one of them.
On a trip to Portugal when I was in my early thirties, I stayed in a historic inn that had once been a monastery. My room had been a monk’s cell. Every morning when I got up to write in my spiritual journal, I sat in the deep stone window seat that looked over the gardens. I could feel the indentation created by all the monks who had sat there and prayed for hundreds of years before me. It was powerful.
However . . . I was not male, nor did I belong to (or wish to belong to) any kind of religious order. Logically, wanting to be a monk made absolutely no sense. So I never did anything about this deep monastic longing for spiritual community and connection. I just continued along my isolated spiritual path.
After I began my joy practice, however, I realized that I could no longer ignore my desire for spiritual connection and community. Although I felt scared to share my mystical metaphysical approach to life and love with others, I also knew that I could not really live my practice of joy if I did not step out of my spiritual closet. But that felt terrifying. I was afraid of being judged, mocked, and ridiculed for my outside-the-box spiritual beliefs. Yet I had no other choice.
Most of us are terrified to let ourselves be seen naked and vulnerable and true. We would much rather hide than show our hearts to one another. To begin to write and live myself whole, I realized that I had to be willing to share both the heart of my spiritual seeking and the heart that has screwed up over and over again. I had to be willing to let other people see not only the bone-headed, reprehensible, irresponsible, questionable, and sometimes even mean things I have done, but also all the spiritual hopes and aspirations I have always held. Because if I don’t tell the truth, I can’t live it.
To do this, I had to open my heart in a brand-new way—I needed a spiritual community. I just didn’t know where to start looking for it. I had tried traditional churches, but I always felt a far greater connection to the Divine when I hiked in nature with my dogs. I looked into seminaries and grad schools, but they all seemed too academic and far too expensive.
Until one afternoon in 2012, feeling particularly freaked out about all the changes I had been making while trying to show up to my own life, I drew a bath in the middle of the afternoon. I reached for a spiritual magazine that a friend had given me. That’s when an ad for an interfaith/interspiritual seminary caught my eye.
I knew that interfaith honors and acknowledges all religious traditions, but I’d never heard of interspirituality. When I read that interspirituality embraces and integrates all spiritual paths, including nature, animals, poetry, joy, laughter, ritual, and so much more, I felt like I had come home. That’s how I’d always moved through the world. To study to become a minister of this integral approach, which encompasses both service and individual experience as it relates to our planet as a whole, felt like a dream come true.
I have felt interspiritual my whole life. I had just been trying to wildflower in the disturbed soil between traditional religion and a more holistic spirituality all by myself.
I found out that this was a mostly online program and that the cost was reasonable, so I applied—and was accepted. I was elated!
The first tradition we studied in seminary was Hinduism. Hinduism believes that all spiritual paths lead to the same goal, and that to claim salvation as the monopoly of one belies the whole nature of the Universe. When I read this quote by Ramakrishna, I almost cried: “As a mother, in nursing her sick children, gives rice and curry to one, and sago arrowroot to another, and bread and butter to a third, so the Lord has laid out different paths for different people suitable for their natures.”
Up to that point in my spiritual life, I had never quite been able to shake my fear of deviating from my mother’s One Right Way. Now I was reading what I had always known in my heart—there are many paths to All Good. During that first year, I was overjoyed by the beauty, hope, and connection I saw through the diverse religious and spiritual paths we studied. I loved what I was learning—and all the ways it made sense. Toward the end of my first year, however, I hit the roadblock of a huge realization: Although I had really been enjoying my studies, I hadn’t created any kind of community. I had come to seminary with the dream of connecting through my own heart to the hearts of others, but my heart had remained closed.
Knowing that I wasn’t experiencing the program in the way that I needed to, I dropped out of seminary just two weeks before the required final intensive. My dean thought I was crazy, but I knew what I had to do. I had to get off some superficial superhighway to spirituality and recommit to the interspiritual beauty of my heart-based back roads. I couldn’t create community if I didn’t know where to find my own heart. To do that, I had to reconnect with joy. Once I did, I re-enrolled.
It’s no coincidence that I rejoined seminary just as I began to create my daily practice of joy. From the very first day with my new classmates, I knew I had found my spiritual heart tribe. Although I was studying the same things I had already learned all over again, I experienced everything in a completely different way this time. For the next two years, my heart was cracked open over and over again by my fellow seminarians, who showed up to every class, every experience, and every interaction with such immense love, humility, and kindness that they illumined the path I knew I wanted to take: the Path of Love.
Sometimes the hardest thing to do on the Way of Being Lost is to lose your idea of what you’re supposed to be doing there. In my first go at my first year, I had never gotten out of my own head. When I re-entered seminary, instead of using my brain to memorize facts the way I had the first time, I learned to feel the concepts in my heart. To see from our hearts is to connect with one another’s spirits.
I felt so embraced by my new classmates that, for the first time in my life, I was willing to begin sharing my spiritual beliefs with others. Along with everything else my mother asked me to hide, she taught me never to talk about religion. Religion, she believed, was something private and sacred that you didn’t talk about in public. So I never did.
When I grew up and came out, the condemnation of the LBGTQ community by almost every major religion made me feel like there was no place I could be honest and still be a part of a mainstream religion. The few times I risked sharing my spiritual journey with others, I often felt lonelier than when I kept my practice to myself. To risk sharing what was most precious to me and to feel judged or misunderstood felt devastating.
Eventually I came to realize that having been a spiritual outsider for all those years had actually been a gift. It had given me both a compassionate perspective and an inner strength that has kept me going in the darkest times of my life.
When I discovered interspirituality, I realized that there were a lot more people like me than I had ever imagined. Finding my heart tribe taught me the healing power of loving acceptance and support. They helped me come out of my spiritual closet in the most healing and hopeful ways.
Then I just kept coming out . . .