Excerpts from Outrageous Openness

The stories in this new book are adapted from two years of writing as the SF Spiritual Examiner .  Because of my long history as an astrologer, I initially assumed the columns might be about how to best navigate current and upcoming planetary cycles.  But, over time I realized I mostly adored discussing how to “align with the Divine”,  independent of life’s endless fluctuations.

I know without doubt that a Force of Love exists that can guide, help and interact with each of us in the most intimate and practical way no matter what the conditions.

If only we know how to invite It in.

My overriding passion for inviting and dancing with this Force eventually gave birth to this book.

By the time I began the Examiner column in 2009, I had spent 25 years giving nearly 30,000 readings to people from all over the world.  I saw that even though each situation was unique, the questions in most hearts were similar.  “How do I stop worrying?  How can I know that things will work out?  How can I feel safe?”  And often, “Why do I feel so alone?”   Though there are ways to look at an astrology chart or tarot cards to foretell cycles of relative ease or challenge, I felt that particular information itself could never begin to address people’s deepest needs and longings.

So I began to weave into sessions what had transformed my own life, the principles of Divine Order and Source gleaned from reading Francis Scovel Shinn, a metaphysician from the 1940′s.  Divine Order says that the perfect solution to any problem is already selected if you allow yourself to be guided; Divine Source says there is a natural Universal Abundance that knows how to meet every need.   Harmonizing with this Force of Love–call it the Shakti, God, Goddess, One Mind, whatever you will–is the golden key to everything.

If a state of radical openness, acceptance, and attention is held.

Some of my long-time callers were actually people with years of spiritual practice of one kind of another, yet they often felt confusion, fear or worry.  Even if they meditated, chanted or practiced yoga, they didn’t always have practical tools for aligning with the Divine every day.

Others had either grown up in doctrinaire religions that left them spiritually alienated or were just confirmed cynics on the whole topic.  But I found that sometimes even the most ironic or skeptical people could use the techniques in this book and witness surprising miracles in the most seemingly mundane areas of life.

Anyone can learn how to move with these Divine principles.  Eventually the individual ego’s drive to ‘make things happen’ falls away, replaced with a relaxed, trusting openness to answers as they spontaneously arise.  These tools are truly accessible to anyone, and grow markedly stronger with practice.  Synchronicities and magic unfold with more and more frequency, strengthening one’s innate trust in the process.

One only needs to be willing to be

Outrageously

Open.

Curious about OUTRAGEOUS OPENNESS?

Well first,  here’s the Table of Contents.  What the heck.  The book is adapted from columns originally printed on examiner.com so some of the titles might look familiar.  But everything is edited and changed quite a bit from those days.  And each chapter contains four or five subheadings that I’m leaving out here or it would be the world’s absolutely longest T of C.

1. R U My Mother?

2. Shopping with God

3.  When You Know the One, Anything Can Come

4.  Follow the Inner Lead

5.  Giving it All Up

6. Be What You Seek

7.  The Holiday Emergency Survival Kit

8.  When in Doubt, Clean

9.  Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear

10.  Own Your Power (or Someone Else Will)

11. Romantic Kismet

12. Mundane Miracles and other Mysteries

13. Contestants Must Be Present to Win

14.The Higher Octave

15. Be Who You Are, Really

16. Be What the World Needs

And here’s a sample story.  This one is contained in Chapter Two,  Shopping with God.  I’ll try to put one up a week until the official launch mid-June.  There are about 75 stories included in all, each very different.

TRYING TO FUNCTION (WITHOUT GOD)

Learning to surrender to a very sophisticated Deity has been the single most important lesson of my life.
Shirley MacLaine

Lose your inhibition, follow your intuition, free your inner soul, and break away from tradition…
Black Eyed Peas

When I was in ninth grade my friends and I played a certain game for months on end. No matter what someone said we just added the words “during sex.”  Such as, “She loves to eat anchovy pizza (during sex).”  Or, “He always forgets to do his math homework (during sex).”  For whatever reason, this never failed to send us into gales of hysteria.

But then, we were fourteen.

Now I find myself in a new version.  Have you noticed how some people will rush to discourage a certain goal?  Or at least let you know how futile, exhausting or expensive your attempt will be before you even start?

So in my revised game I always take their words and add “without God.”

As in, “It’s impossible to find the right job in this economy (without God).”

Or, “You’ll never be able to find parking there (without God).”

I can’t tell you how well this works.

I happened to turn on NPR during a mind-boggling interview with an ‘efficiency expert.’  He had written a book on procrastination with forty-four ‘critical steps’ to be followed in his Act for Success plan.  I was soon giggling so hard I had to pull the car over at the corner of Clay and Divisadero just to be safe.  Even the poor interviewer sounded flummoxed.

He asked, “So you’re telling our listeners they must follow all forty-four steps?”

“Absolutely.  Every single one,” the expert intoned, “in the proper order. Otherwise it will not work.”  And he began to fire off the list again.

My head was spinning like a bad carnival ride.

“Well,” said the interviewer.  “To be honest, that’s all a bit daunting.  Isn’t there a simpler way for people to begin?”

“No.” the expert said gravely.  “As a master, I devised this plan scientifically.  And of course, if people are confused, they should take my seminar.”

Of course.

Wiping away tears of laughter, all I could think was, “Yep.  He’s a master of how to overcome procrastination (without God).”

I remembered how life was indeed a weary road before I let the Divine lead the way.  I ran from one self-styled ‘master’ to the next with my problems.  The combination of a delicate nervous system and a good dose of ADD made my life often derail.

But at some indeterminate point, perhaps more from exhaustion than evolution, I pretty much gave God control.  And though problems still come, solutions usually follow in fresh and novel ways.

The other day I met an interesting writer in a cafe.  We started discussing the book proposal I’d been stuck on.

She offered, “Well, I could help you do it.  These usually take about thirty hours to create and I charge $250 an hour.”

“Wow, are you kidding?”  I gasped, doing some quick calculations.  “That’s over seven thousand dollars!”

“Well, I do have a handy flexible payment plan,” she said.

Then I remembered.

That’s what a book proposal costs (without God).

When I demurred and left, I sat in my car and invoked Divine Order with my full heart:

“If You wish this written, I cannot do this on my own.  You know my limits.  But the perfect route is already selected, so if this is Your Will, fling open the doors. If this is meant to be, please bring the right help..”

Within a month a writer friend of mine in New Mexico serendipitously emailed me one of her own proposals.

“Hey, you popped into my mind tonight,” she wrote. “In case you’re still working on that thing, just use mine like a map.  You’ll finish in no time.”

All separation, every kind of estrangement and alienation is
false. All is One – this is the ultimate solution for every conflict.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Seeing the world as you is a way out of inflated self-importance, or what Buddhists would call self-cherishing.  I’ve learned about this the strangest way, through my life-long arachnophobia, or terror of spiders.  I should call it my slowly-but-steadily-waning-fear of spiders.

For as long as I can remember, spiders always paralyzed me.  If they were bigger than a quarter, forget it; I’d run screaming from the room like a six-year old.  I can’t say the number of times I’ve frantically begged a friend or partner to come airlift one outside.  At least I knew enough to not kill them.

A psychic once suggested that in a prior life I died in a whole vat of them like something out of Indiana Jones.  Charming  image.  And really, who knows?

Some years ago in India I was at a special fire ceremony for Lakshmi, the revered Goddess of beauty and wealth.  At one point, a spider the size of a kumquat scurried over my hand. I gasped and swatted it away.

One of the Hindu priests nearly boxed my ears off.  “What are you doing?” he yelled.  “Mahalakshmi Herself was giving you Her darshan, Her private blessing.  Are you insane?”  Then he turned to another monk and muttered, “I told you we should never let the idiot Americans come to this stuff.”

Well, this got me thinking.

Here I am projecting all my fear on this poor creature, and here She is, the Goddess herself, coming to bless.

What if She is a disowned part of Me?

I prayed intensely to be healed of my fear.

I was in bed one night ready to turn out the light when suddenly I saw a golf-ball-sized spider on the wall.

Panic, sweat, pounding pulse.

Then I thought, “Hey, why not just talk to her?”

“Look,” I started, haltingly.  “I’m delighted to have you visit, and even come so auspiciously into my bedroom.” I took a long deep breath, trying to calm down. “So just let me promise from the get-go, in case you’re worried about this all yourself, I won’t  hurt you. I finally know who You are.”  I gazed at her with as much affection as I could muster for something that had filled
my nightmares forever.

Then I continued, “But let me be honest, you really, really scare me. And you know, I actually wonder right now if you might be a bit scared too?”  This idea actually calmed me down considerably.

I took another breath. “So I’ll tell you what, my adorable Goddess.  It’s a big room.  How about if you take the ceiling, I’ll take the bed.  You just stay up there, my darling multi-legged Love, and we’ll share a beautiful night.”

Perhaps it was chance, perhaps not.  But at the exact moment I finished, she began to race up the wall and slip into a dark corner of the ceiling.  She tucked in her legs and became a nebulous shadow I could barely see

I bid her a good night and peacefully fell asleep.

In the morning she was gone.

Later that day I received an email from my friend Erin.  On a whim, she had sent me a column she had just written…on arachnophobia.

She said it came from fear of one’s own power.I mean, really.  Is anyone ever out there but our Self?

A heart does not choose.          Colette

But it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for.         Billy Joel

Perhaps because of retro-fifties moldy tomes that still hang around like The Rules, I get plentiful calls from women fearful about relationships.   Even ones who are otherwise strong and capable, of any sexual orientation, still ask stuff like, “Did I say too much?”  “Should I have been more coy?” or “Why didn’t I play it cooler?”

But the forces of karma need no manipulation.  After all these readings to all kinds of people, I know one thing for sure:  if you’re destined to be with someone, nothing can stop it.   You won’t need to rope, trick or drug them into loving you.  Those books that leave women terrified of just being themselves are somehow both tragic and hilarious at once.

A psychic teacher of mine used to say, “Karma is like a train. When it pulls up, it’s almost impossible not to get on.  And, for that matter, not to stay on until the last stop.  For better or worse.”

Here’s my proof.

A guy named Eli called to say he had reunited with his ex, Elsa.  Beside himself with delight, he wanted me to look at their charts for potential wedding dates.   Suddenly, I remembered our initial reading the year before.

“Whoa, wait a minute!”  I yelled.  “Wasn’t she the crazy chick who threw out all your clothes? You’d called me from your bathrobe, remember?”

Eli laughed as he reminded me that they had a huge blowout one night and he left the next morning for a business trip.  While he was gone, Elsa, an Aries-artist-with-Leo-moon-total-Kali-incarnation if there ever was one, was still enraged.

So she took all his clothes, shoes, hats, even his precious vintage motorcycle jacket, and sold the whole lot at Crossroads Trading.   (No Goodwill donations for this firecracker.  She was gonna make some bucks off the deal to boot).

Then she took the money and moved out.

He went to his IT job in sweats and flip-flops for a week until he could get new threads.

Yet now they were reunited and planning to wed.

“You know,” he confessed, “she’s a creative genius.  And yes, she’s a complete and total maniac.  But she’s my maniac.  I’d be bored to death with anyone else.”

He recently wrote to say the union remains “blissfully tempestuous.”
And what more could you want if you choose to marry Kali, the Hindu Goddess of Death and Rebirth?

That’s just how karma is.  When something is right, prior lifetimes carve patterns of energetic familiarity and recognition.  A template forged in the fires of the past clicks back in.  People just fit.

Yiddish has a good word for this resonance, bashert.  Meant to be.

So you can relax and be yourself.

If it’s bashert, no need to behave ‘properly’.  You’re not auditioning for a Broadway play.

And if it’s not…well, you’ve probably just been saved a whole lot of trouble.