I Am (eBook)

Chapter 1

The “Aha” moment:
It’s bigger than I thought!

When I was thirty-nine, I found myself in a tsunami of chaos that followed my decision to live honestly and authentically in every respect. My marriage was falling apart, all other major relationships were either in crisis or disappearing, and I was facing the realization that I have no idea how I will be supporting myself and my children.

Prior to this personal cataclysm, I was living a rather comfortable lifestyle. My husband made a generous income. My children attended elite private schools, and we owned a house in a great neighborhood. I was making some money as a professional artist and was recognized for my talent and skill. But as it happens, the spiritual calling I felt since childhood—but managed to keep in the shadows—intensified to such a degree that I could no longer ignore it. The time was inconvenient, to say the least. I knew that, if I were to live authentically, I would have to face my biggest fears, and it would cost me the security of the life I was accustomed to. And that is exactly what happened.

As scary as it was, I welcomed change in all areas of my life, but there was one issue that truly stumped me. It is very commonplace, especially for parents that spend years putting their careers on the back burner while raising their children: I had no idea how I was going to make the money I now needed. No idea how I was going to make ends meet. To anyone who was concerned for me, I said, “I’ve got this.” In truth, I knew I had never created a life in which I was able to personally generate serious income. I was aware that money followed a certain pattern in my life. No matter what I tried, no matter the talent or the opportunities or even my hard work, in the end, it was never enough. I had no idea how to solve this puzzle, much less in a fairly short period. I needed a real breakthrough around creating my own money.

It may be worth mentioning that by this point in my life, I was pretty much a self-help black belt. I could question a belief like nobody else. I could re-center myself faster than I could make a cup of coffee. I could clearly see that all thoughts are just thoughts. I trusted my intuition implicitly. I had practiced this stuff all my life with some pretty impressive results. In this pivotal moment of change, I decided that I would take everything I know about how the universe works and figure out this money-thing. As I had done so many times before when facing challenges, I picked up my journal and went straight to my ritual of writing and inquiry, excited to arrive at a solution.

No matter how much I tried to focus on working out my problem, however, my attention kept drifting to a phone conversation I just had with an old friend a couple of days before. She was a successful businesswoman, and she had just gotten divorced for the second time and was using an online dating service. As we were catching up, she described to me a curious constellation of men with whom she was now involved. One guy was from Canada, and another was from her home state. As we talked, something revelatory started occurring to me. The men that my friend “found” sounded more and more like the characters that she was involved with around her first divorce, ten years earlier.

At the time of her first divorce, she found herself part of a complicated love triangle involving an older and a younger man. The older gentleman brought a kind of a fatherly comfort to her, but with him, she had a non-existent sex life. Without breaking it off with the first guy, my friend started an affair with a younger man who was torn between her and some other woman of interest. This time, almost the same set up: there was an older guy with money but not much sex appeal, and a younger, hot guy who was, at the time, dating two other women with whom my friend reported she was in competition with. Even though all these relationships were fairly new, the patterns that were developing were—almost to a “T”—replicas of the relationships she had in her twenties. Except, the first time around, the people she was involved with were all in her immediate circle. This time, however, all the connections were through online dating sites. Selecting from an unlimited pool of new candidates, she managed to pick eerily similar people, sight unseen. She was describing her relationships as new, but the repetition was hard to ignore.

What made my friend’s case interesting to ponder is that she and I were on opposite sides of the spectrum when it came to our approach and understanding of how life worked. Apart from being longtime friends, there was little we shared in our views of how the human experience is shaped. She was a self-proclaimed atheist, very skeptical and pragmatic and wouldn’t be caught dead trying to, say, question a limiting belief, or look inside herself for the cause of her problems. I, on the other hand, thought very differently. I had faith, believed in the fact that there was a spiritual solution for every problem, and was learning how to be a conscious creator of my life. But here I was, realizing that most of my consciously creative efforts had nothing matching the force and precision of what my friend created completely unconsciously and effortlessly. I thought, “If I could identify what was creating my friend’s reality without her conscious participation, I might know where to look to change my reality around money.”

I began my inquiry by looking at every choice my friend made and asking what thoughts and beliefs could be driving her decisions. I thought that by comparing our two life situations I could glean insight into why it was so hard for me to create the resources necessary to be self-sustaining and independent. At that time, I assumed that if you change your thoughts, your life would change as well. After all, in some way, I did see proof of this. My friend made no connection between her thoughts and how her life was playing out. It seemed logical to me that in her unconsciousness, she would be recreating the same pattern and somehow getting into relationships that presented her with familiar challenges. If she were to change her thoughts about love and relationships, I imagined her situation would surely reflect that change. At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was very conscious of my thinking and beliefs around money and was working on them actively but could affect no significant change in how my reality worked. I had success but only in managing my experience of reality. The reality itself remained immutable.

There had to be something informing our realities, and it was hiding in plain sight. Neither her unconsciousness nor my consciousness could see it—much less affect it in any way.

Next thing that I thought about is how our respective realities were repeating themselves. In every iteration of a new cycle, both my friend and I seemed to choose the exact same components out of an infinite supply of possibilities. Things that repeated for each one of us were simply a reality we woke up to every day. It reminded me of an old adage that says, “Wherever you go, there you are.” It’s a wise observation, pointing to the fact that our personal realities seem to follow each one of us no matter where we go in our lives.

But I was puzzled. If something is “reality,” wouldn’t it be the same for everyone, like the weather or the fact that every human being has a heart, for example? But our realities were vastly different from one another. There were things that always showed up for me in my reality, which never showed up in her reality, and vice versa. For example, wherever my friend went, she always found amazing opportunities to create money. She was always “at the right place, at the right time.” Money was easy for her. Love, on the other hand, was not. She struggled to connect with people, and when she did, the relationships were toxic or abusive. In contrast to her, I struggled with money, but love was something that came readily to me. It was easy for me to connect with people. The types of men my friend dated simply didn’t exist in my experience. Whatever was shaping our experiences was unique to each one of us.

Both she and I tried to improve and change our lives to the best of our understanding and abilities. Each of our individual realities contained something we didn’t like. In spite of our efforts, we each kept connecting to the same kind of people and circumstances. There was struggle built into our respective realities, but the realities themselves seemed to reconstitute without struggle at all. Something much more powerful than our conscious wishes and intentions was at play. A creative, intelligent force from inside each one of us seemed to be operating with the precision and accuracy of a surgeon. If we could know what this force is and understand how it is creating our reality, could we direct it to create anything we want?

It then occurred to me that if this was a creative force, it had to have a point of origin, a creator. But what kind of creator would create a reality that they didn’t like or didn’t want? “Unless,” I thought, “the reality that exists, however it is, is exactly what the creator wants!” I felt that familiar feeling, when you intuitively know that a hunch or an idea is true. I decided to abandon my old path and travel down this unexplored terrain that would lead to the breakthrough I’d been looking for.

My old path of exploration was based on an understanding that I was separate from the reality I was living in. A reality that was independent and outside me. I believed...