No one makes his or her journey toward personal awakening in complete awareness and knowing. Yet we seek to know so badly. We yearn to understand – to see just enough of our next steps and where they will take us, so that we can feel safe.

But the Journey is not meant to be safe. Breakthrough implies breaking. Rising implies loss of ground.

And so when you most grasp and grapple for all that is safe, you might very well find that the loving (if frustrating) forces in your life inevitably bring you face-to-face: with those defining moments that make you bow your head and mutter, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” And Spirit responds, “That’s okay.”

The Call to Adventure from Spirit may not always feel like Grace. There can be enormous confusion and suffering on the path to your inner truth, because it requires open-eyed faith, which is really about trusting yourself enough to believe in what you Know, even when all your outward senses contradict that Knowing.

Faith requires you to have your own experience of Supreme Being and trusting that you can tell the difference. Faith requires moving toward the stirrings of Spirit when every other part of you shouts Run away! Run Away! Because as numinous, blissful and rewarding as spiritual growth can be… our getting there can often be messy.

I don’t think enough voices out there in the spiritual field honor that messiness. And so seekers can find it difficult to feel permission, respect and acceptance of the times when awakening is hard. When choosing heart over head is frightening. When the stirrings of Soul just don’t make sense…

And when things don’t make sense… stories reveal truths better than facts can…

Sinking Ships In an Unknowable Sea

Let us imagine for a moment that Spirit – the Divinity that infuses All – is an ocean. And you… me… all of us – we are ships at sea.

We know that on the surface those ocean waters will at times be stormy, other times peaceful. Yet do we not still pray for the calm seas and curse the storms? Do we not ask the massive power around us to bend to our will and desire?

These are human urgings for safety, yet we have already forsaken the Ground. We have embarked on our adventure. And while no one drop of water can sink a ship, the force of an ocean can. It is natural to question the Journey when you really understand that…

So what do you do? There’s no clear direction, no sign of land. The storms will come. And you are here, in this little ship. If you do not find your faith… if you do not surrender to your own knowing and where the heart leads you… then you will remain on the surface of the sea, rocked upon the very waters you seek – never knowing that from the perspective of loving Spirit, sinking your ship is a very good first step.

When we are rocked by the immense sea of Spirit it can be easy to forget that immersion and submersion into Spirit is why we’re navigating these waters in the first place! We search for some safe way down, some comforting way in… but how does one safely and suddenly breathe the ocean when we’ve only known how to breathe air?

In the face of such questions, I leave you with this: We all came from the sea. We hold in our DNA the wisdom for how to breathe those waters. We also come from Spirit. What if sinking ships in an unknowable sea is a good first step indeed… to reminding you that you’ve traversed this sea before… 😉