When God Gives you a Car Accident

As you may or may not have noticed I’ve been a little quieter these days, less excited about creating and posting the latest, greatest meditation or writing about the increasingly challenging adventures with my growing toddler.

The reality is that I’ve been in a dark, gooey, cocoony sort of place lately where everything that I once knew to be true seems to be crumbling out from underneath me.  It’s like watching the tapestry of who I thought I was unwind: one thread at first and then several and then hundreds.  Between uncertainty about my faith-practices, my fertility and my family’s future, I’m experiencing an all-hands-on-deck, code red kind of identity crisis.

And during this difficult season, instead of showing up authentically, it’s been easier to hide in my cave, pretending that all is well underneath my make-up mask and Vaseline smile (which, to be fair, is probably a wise evolutionary coping mechanism -- animal packs abandon the weird one, you know.  It’s, like, a real thing that we mammals do to each other).  

And what sucks is that I reaaaaaally love to tell you cutesy stories about the silly, inspirational things that my daughter says instead of my dark days in the cocoon.  Light and fluffy and unicorny is better for business, or so they tell me.

So instead of arriving to this painful season, I’ve decided that it’s easier to just pretend that it’s not happening: to keep my headphones on and my music blaring as I shout “what cocoon, you guys?! I have NO IDEA what you’re talking about.”  

Of course, it was in this Disneyland fantasy world that I, not surprisingly, found myself in a car accident: one that was painful enough to sit my ass down and cry out all of the tears that I had been holding in over the last few months.

It’s kind of a relief though, to have permission to say “I am hurting” out loud instead of pretending that I’m not.  

But I have always been a scab-picker, dying to pick those babies off before their time, preferring to just strong-arm the shit out of my healing process, wanting it to unfold in my way and on my terms.  But the emergence of spring plant life reminds me that I live in a universe that just… KNOWS… how to turn scabs into new skin and caterpillars into butterflies and embryos into babies and acorns into trees without my interference.  

I can either let It work to heal and expand me or I can stubbornly cut myself off from Its Intelligently Divine Process.  And so, because, whelp, the “do-it-myself” model got me into a traumatic car accident, I’ve had no other choice than to look upward, eyes full of tears saying “Okay, Partner.  Show me the way.”  And because God respects my free will, She either lets me try to design newer, stronger skin cells on my own (I am exhausted just thinking about that), or I can let go, relax into the process, and let Her do it for me.  

Fighting the natural processes of God’s design has felt like swimming upstream -- way harder than heading straight into the turbulent water, knowing that I am surrounded by a team of angels, full of potential butterfly just waiting to emerge from the messy processes that lie ahead.

Wherever you are, whatever season you are in, I invite you to be still and know that God is good, that every challenge exists as an angel in disguise, spurring us into growth and expansion in a full-on, embodied way.

This week at Yoga Church we come together exactly as we are, perfectly imperfect, in whatever time and season we are in to connect with and trust in the Intelligent Spirit that is always leading us in the direction of our expansion, no matter how painfully beautiful the road may be.