Divine Discontent: Learning to Live by Your Own Lights

‘When we practice switching on the ‘spiritual electricity’ that Julia Cameron speaks of in her wonderful book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, what should we expect? More energy and inspiration, amazing and delightful coincidences, and the ability to accomplish goals with grace? Yes, certainly. That has, at least, been my experience.

But one thing you might no expect- one more thing that might throw you- is how dissatisfied you may feel when the Power is not present, when you are in the dark and left to your own devices because you forgot to turn the switch on. I have learned that asking is the only way to activate spiritual electricity. It is always there for me, but I always have to ask for it.

The dissatisfaction you can feel when the switch is off manifests itself in different ways. Suddenly you don’t like any room in your house. Decorating mistakes from past lives haunt you. Your clothes don’t fit or look right on you anymore. You’re bored with the meals you’re cooking. You’re sick of opening the front hall closet and covering your head. But worse, that expansive even giddy hopefulness that came from starting to integrate gratitude into your life gives way to restless disconnect. You begin to think that the Simple Abundance path might work for some women, but it’s not right for you. Hold on. As the English historian Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgewood points out, “Discontent and disorder [are] signs of energy and hope, not despair.”

What is going on is part of the process. I call it Divine Disconnect. It is the grit in the oyster before the pearl. This creative second chance is when we come into our own. When we finally claim our own lives and wrestle our futures from fate. When we learn how to spin straw into gold. When we realize gratefully that we can live by our own lights if we access the Power.

Ask for it. Claim it. Today.’ – Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance A Daybook of Comfort and Joy

My good childhood friend Tiffany and I have spent years having conversations about people.

People in our lives.

People no longer in our lives.

Ourselves, of course.

Just people in general.

We have even conversed about the people at Target and Walmart… and we really do not have a lot of time on our hands, I promise!

We are not gossiping, we are simply trying to figure certain people out…. including ourselves.

Why would they do that? What were they thinking? Why are they the way they are? Really, we have spent our entire adulthood (and childhood) simply trying to figure life out. And all the why’s that come with it.

I remember one time Tiffany told me, sometimes people just have to hit the very bottom, the bottom of bottom, where looking up to see how far you have fallen is the only way you see how far away from yourself you have gone. You can go no lower and finally you find a reason to do better. To be better. To want better.

I’ve always known that Tiffany is right.

She is such an amazing friend. God blessed me when we became friends on that yellow school bus on our way home from our first week of 6th grade in 1988. Or was that 1989? See what children do to your brain?