I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or read some version of the following email that I recently received (published here with permission):
I am in a loving relationship and engaged. A psychic woman told me very specifically that I will definitely not marry this man, that my confusion is my heart longing to be with my true soulmate and that when I work through my depression I will see this clearly. I asked her if there was anything I could do to change this outcome and she said if I stay with my partner it will always be difficult. I want nothing more to marry my partner but this information has added to my doubts and worries and I can’t get this out of my head. Would the courses help at all or do I need to accept fate?
Oh, boy. How many hundreds of clients and courses members have sought the counsel of psychics and mediums to ask the burning question: Am I with the right person? How many thousands of people hand their authority to others, hoping and praying that someone else will tell them what to do? And yet when the person does tell them what to do, something inside screams or whispers, “No, I don’t want to leave. Please tell me something else.” When I asked this reader for permission to share a portion of her email, here was her response:
I have had my own insight into our future and saw us at our wedding and then in hospital with our first child. And with that vision came this immense and overwhelming feeling of love that I have never experienced before, like my heart was open to loving again.
This heart-opening vision is her truth, not what a so-called psychic is telling her. Inside she has a small voice, a place that refuses to leave despite an entire culture telling her that doubt/confusion/ambivalence/indifference mean don’t. That place of wisdom is her self-trust. That whisper is her heart’s longing. You have the same place, the same wisdom. You may think it’s been pounced out of you by a world that hasn’t valued your voice, but it’s still there, awaiting your attention.
Her email speaks to so many spokes of the wheel of the anxious mind.
Let’s dissect it:
1. Trusting others more than you trust yourself:
We learn early on to hand authority over to people who are bigger and whom we deem wiser. We are told explicitly that “others know better,” and we learn as young people that doctors, parents, teachers, clergy, and older siblings should and can tell us how to choose. What a vastly different planet it would be if we raised our children in a way that preserved their innate self-trust! We would grow up trusting that inner voice and learning to discern between the various voices that parade in the brain. We all have different characters inside of us. When we make contact with them and develop a witness-self, we can choose which ones we listen to and which we bat away.
2. Living God’s Will or My Predetermined Fate:
I wrote an entire blog post on living God’s will, so I will summarize here: I don’t believe God is an all-knowing, authoritarian being that has already charted out your entire life. I don’t believe that there is one path for you, one partner for you, and if you miss the boat, well, you really blew it. I don’t believe that God is vindictive or punishing but, rather, that God is forgiving and understands that we learn through making mistakes. Therefore, either there really are no mistakes, or mistakes are welcomed as opportunities for growth. I don’t believe that there is a predetermined future already laid out for you and that your task as a human being is to somehow, by some divine miracle, read every sign correctly so that you follow your fate.
What a lot of pressure that is! What a depressing way to live one’s life! When we can flip this mindset upside-down and instead understand that we are here to learn and grow, and any path we choose will lead to growth if we claim it as such, we release the weight of “fate” and “God’s will” and instead learn to live by the quiet mysteries of our own inner yeses and nos, the whispers and songs that line the grassy path of this life.
3. “My confusion means I need to leave”:
Again, I’ve written hundreds of articles debunking the damaging belief that doubt or confusion means don’t, so I won’t belabor the point here. Still, every time I read that someone has blatantly received this message, my cells do a little crazy dance inside, shaking their fists at the well-intentioned yet poorly-informed people that guide people away from the opportunity to learn about real love with a loving partner. No wonder our culture is such a mess when it comes to intimate relationships!
So to answer her question: Will my courses help at all? Yes, they all will help in different ways. Trust Yourself will help you learn to look inside for your own source of guidance instead of placing your life at the mercy of others (strangers or otherwise) and help you work through your depression. The Conscious Weddings E-Course or Break Free From Relationship Anxiety will help you shatter the illusions and fantasies you’re carrying about love, including the concept of a “soulmate”, and will teach that “confusion” is a symptom of needing to pour attention into your inner well, not a “sign” that you’re with the wrong person. They will also help you to strengthen the core you of you and discern between the different voices that create the white noise of mental chatter and interfere with your clarity. And Open Your Heart will help you learn the laws and actions that will allow you to name and soften your walls so that you can love the one you’re with.
I don’t live in the world of signs and psychics. I don’t subscribe to a worldview that places trust and inner wisdom outside oneself in the hands of seen and unseen others. I don’t believe in the idea that we must “accept fate”, but that we create our own fate by the choices we make every day. We are the architects of our lives. I’m not saying that external circumstances don’t affect our inner landscape, but ultimately we decide how we respond to the circumstances we encounter. We can either bend our heads in submission when fear threatens to knock us to the ground or do the necessary work required to battle with fear in all of its confusing manifestations. As Mark Whatney says in The Martian, “I guarantee you that at some point, everything’s going to go south on you. And you’re going to say, ‘This is it. This is how I end.’ Now, you can either accept that, or you can get to work.”. If you’re struggling with fear and doubt in a loving relationship, consumed with anxiety that something is missing, it’s time to get to work. This is what it means to be a warrior of the heart.
