When I was in Japan, I lost something and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Sometimes when things feel difficult the best thing to do is just to give up– surrender, stop trying to fix it, respond to it or control it. Just be with it and accept that sometimes it really never gets better. I got there and strangely, something changed.
For several decades I’ve had the persistent sense that there is something more significant that I am supposed to be doing at any moment. It ate at me over the years, like someone else was hovering over me checking my work.
By the time I went to Japan I had reached a number of goals and pursued a lot of dreams that probably look great from the outside but I was restless.
Being in Japan was harder than I ever thought because my work situation caught me in a web of drama that reminded me of how it felt to be undergoing childhood emotional abuse on a near daily basis. During the worst of it all, I made a decision. I realized that there were certain things I just wanted to do for myself like publishing my book Freedom Year–and I had to stop caring about how it would be received because I would rather just die here and now than not publish it.
Publishing meant announcing to the world that I tried to be a dominatrix and failed, and that was freaking terrifying. It felt like announcing I am part monster. Honestly, it’s still scary, we don’t live in a world where I feel fully safe to be a sexual or powerful woman.
But some part of me had to be enlisted to keep going. The road of life felt so steep I wanted to give up–in fact I did. The part of me that has gotten me back up over and over again had a requirement: publish ASAP and who fucking cares what happens, or else I don’t feel like getting up ever again. I had to do it and surrender.
I don’t have that restless itch anymore but I still ask my spirit what she wants me to do everyday. For me there is only one rule to survive: trust my intuition no matter what and no matter how small or insignificant each step seems. Listening is mandatory.
