Coming Home Meditation Tomorrow 9am EST ~ Right Timing
Come join us for a community talk and meditation tomorrow morning on Zoom
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Dear Friends,
I’ve been thinking about life’s timing and readiness. I’m sure you can recall a time when you wanted something to happen—a project, a relationship, an opportunity—and when it didn’t, you might have been upset or even devastated. Maybe later you realized upon reflection that it couldn’t have happened at that time, or that something else needed to happen first, or some part of you needed to become the person who could really handle that project, relationship or opportunity. It seems like timing is something that mainly makes sense in retrospect; when we have more of the picture.
Maybe it’s also that we’ve lost touch with the parts of ourselves that are naturally attuned to the right timing of things.
I have been thinking about this in relation to my work and writing. A brief personal story: I’ve wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember. In 4th and 5th grade, we did an annual project at school called Young Authors. We would write and illustrate a book and then bind it using cardboard covers, contact paper, and simple stitches or hole punches and rings. I loved the process and also the finished project. There was something so satisfying in holding the bound story in my hands after a lot of hard work. I’ve longed for that experience again as an adult.
The closest I’ve come since was in 2003 when I ghost-wrote a book for my boss in advertising. That book was called Buzz Marketing: Harness the Power of Influence and Create Demand. I learned a lot in the process of writing and researching that book and it felt inevitable that I would soon be publishing my own books. The problem was…I didn’t want to write business books…at least, not that kind.
A few years after that book was published, I abandoned my career in advertising and embarked on a mystical journey that took me very far afield…or rather, corrected course! My life was turned upside down (or right side up) and 15 years later I am beginning to understand what it was all for, what it was all about. During those years I wrote profusely in journals and sometimes publicly. Some of you know my essays on Medium or have enjoyed my work here. What you’ve seen is about 1% of what I’ve actually written.
I have, over the last ten years, started at least six books. I’ve written maybe hundreds of thousands of words. These attempts include:
A spiritual memoir of awakening called The Gospel of I Am, relaying the details of my relationship with a mystical guide in NYC in the 2010s
A Baby In the Temple, a book about motherhood as a spiritual path, started when my daughter was born
Tenacious Magic, a channeled memoir of the writer, Katherine Mansfield, about her last months of life at the commune of George Gurdjieff
A spiritual allegory called House of the Spirit Moon about a woman’s shadow work
How To Be a Woman in the Workplace about bringing the feminine dimension to work
A Woman Unto Herself, a book of poetry about womanhood, the feminine, love, and mysticism
That none of them has been published has been hard. Looking back each one was interrupted for good reason, though at the time I couldn’t see it. I poured my heart and soul into each attempt and felt the loss when I put it aside.
For a long time, I felt doomed. I felt like I was fighting some kind of self-imposed limitation or a tough-love karma. I almost gave up. I spent a lot of time trying to make peace with it all. It felt unfair as I watched friends publish books with relative ease (not proud of these feelings). I read countless mediocre, but successful, books and wondered what I was doing wrong. Eventually, I healed the part of me that needed to write a book to somehow establish “legitimacy” and wanted the recognition or fame or financial security it might bring—I eliminated the impulse to write for external validation. That I kept writing at all was an act of resilience and desperation, until it began to feel like practice, like what my soul simply needs to do regardless.
Yes, that was a turning point. I let go of being in control of the process. I surrendered but didn’t give up. I truly feel I have a book (or more) in me. I believe ALL the work I’ve done to date has a home in that book—either literally as a piece, or as part of the writing that got me to where I am now as a writer. I hold that book with reverence and curiosity right now. And I hope to begin work compiling and editing it this spring. What I am starting to feel, too, is that I wasn’t ready to write the book that is mine to write until now. I needed to see more. I needed more of the picture. I needed to mature and integrate in ways that I couldn’t have imagined even five or ten years ago. I needed to heal parts of me that were blocking the process. AM I READY? We shall see…I am completely surrendered to the process. With determination and humility…and gratitude.
I bet many of you can identify with this experience. Perhaps there is something you’ve felt as your destiny that hasn’t yet manifested here on this plane. Perhaps there’s something you’ve wanted with all your heart, that isn’t yet yours. I wish for all of us the wisdom of patience and the trusting of right timing.
There are so many reasons things happen when they do and not when they don’t. Perhaps that’s obvious, but living life in alignment with this truth is hard. It’s hard in a culture that conflates material success and fulfillment of dharma. It’s hard in a culture that fetishizes productivity. It’s hard when we’ve been taught by our culture that we don’t have much agency in the world; that the world doesn’t have our back. It’s hard in a culture where creativity is so misunderstood and misused. We are here to heal and to bring sacred world through…each of us has our medicine. Each of us IS medicine. The pure and authentic expression of our gifts at the right time is medicine.
Living “out of time,” or out of alignment with right timing is TRAUMA. We can be aware of this. Whenever we are living in the past (regret, remorse, stewing, stagnation…) or living in the future (anxiety, worry, speculation, obsessive planning/trying to control outcomes…) we are out of relation with the present moment and what is actually happening. AGE is a great example in this culture. Young people are always trying to act older and old people are trying to act younger. Why? Because they are resisting the reality of the age they are; the perceived limitations of that age, trauma. If each of us made an attempt to truly live as our right age, to be aligned with our life’s timing, that would be an epic act of cultural healing. And I don’t say this lightly. This has been a deep and at-times difficult practice for me as a 48-year old woman. I am trying to live as my age, to be my age, and know what that is like. I do this for me, for my daughter, and for a culture that is still disgustingly ageist.
During the pandemic, I listened to the audiobook The Late Bloomer by the marvelous Clarissa Pinkola Estes (author of the classic, Women Who Run With the Wolves, and other books). While I loved the experience—listening to her tell stories and share folk tales about late bloomers across cultures was pure fun—I also walked away feeling a little ambivalent about the concept of a late bloomer. Late for what? Late to what? Late in who’s book. I prefer to think everything has right timing and we can become attuned to that by trusting our bodies, our intuition, our own process, and a higher organizing principles (God, Nature, Cosmos…). The more open we are to the signs, the indications that it’s time to bloom, the more likely we are to bloom at the most ADVANTAGEOUS and natural time!
I would love to welcome in a new way of being with time in creation. I would love to be in community with people and creators who are paying attention to the right timing on things. I want to collaborate with people who are sensitive to the effects of their creation on the field, who are listening to the field, who honor right timing over arbitrary deadlines, financial quarters, reports to shareholders or investors, or an egoistic need to be seen or recognized for the wrong reasons. This doesn’t mean we’re passive or lazy—sometimes right timing is much quicker than you would have liked! It’s truly about tuning in and acting along with the natural rhythm and birthing process of the thing.
Finally, I think about the collective implications here. Sometimes, I feel in myself an urgency to change the culture, to be in the future civilization my heart is yearning for now. I want to be living differently, working differently, loving differently. But when I really look at it through this lens of right timing and trusting the bigger plan, I can accept that perhaps…Collectively we are not yet ready for what’s coming. We aren’t those people yet. We have more maturing to do, more skills to master, more whatever, and we need to trust that without becoming complacent or giving up.
We have to continue to work towards that deep inner knowing with all our might and with hope! We can’t give up. But, we also need to NOT SKIP OVER THIS MOMENT. We need to be where we are fully, feel what needs to be felt, see who is standing with us. Really, really be our age. Perhaps all of this is a practice, a warm up for the main event, or perhaps there never was and never will be a “final product.” Life is a practice. Life is cycles. This is the practicing path.
Tomorrow’s Practice
So, the practice we will do together tomorrow is accepting where we’re at with our projects and plans, with our lives. DEEP acceptance and a tuning into right timing. I think it will look something like this, join if you can:
Share with our community what we most want and what we are waiting for with every ounce of our being. Be witnessed in our desire. Dare to dream. (only if you feel called)
Soothe the places that feel defeated or eager/urgent. Find out what is behind the urgency. Know what is driving us.
Open up a space of possibility. Let go of knowing when and how. Let go of the need to control the process.
Ask for help. Ask for insight. Ask for the next step. Trust the answer.
Relax, find joy, begin to see it all as a practicing path.
A note on payment for Coming Home sessions
Some of you know this, but I haven’t shared it here at The Art of Emergence yet. I really appreciate donations for Coming Home sessions if you feel called to give. Suggested donation is $10-20. Venmo @ElizabethSchuyler-Brown and PayPal is eschuylerbrown@gmail.com. If you are a paid subscriber, you’ve already done your part and I appreciate it!
Join us tomorrow from 9-10:00/10:15am EST
Beautiful reflections, Schuyler!