The Psychic Told Me To Start Writing

 

About ten years ago I went to see a psychic. She was recommended by several of my yoga teacher friends. I was in the middle of separating from my partner and I needed someone to tell me something different than the persistently self-defeating thoughts running through my head. When I arrived at her tiny office in a corporate building overlooking the lake, I was surprised to see a very young woman, at least ten years younger than me, with long flowing hair. She was very relaxed, so calm. She looked like she had just returned from an afternoon picking poppies from a field with Dorothy.

She asked me to stand in the doorway while she circled my body with a smoking bundle of sage. When I was sufficiently cleansed, she invited me to sit in a chair across from her desk. I told her a bit about myself, but not too much. That would give her a leg up and I wanted to see if she was the real deal. 

The first thing she said to me, in true random psychic form was, “Your daughter needs to be around horses.” At the time my daughter was not even five; she had not mentioned horses in her short life. But I noted the psychic's instructions and patiently waited for more guidance.

She told me to use malachite to recover from my breakup. She said I should wear a necklace or a ring with that stone. And then she told me that I should be writing. “Writing what?” I asked her. 

“I’m not sure what you should write about, but you should be writing. Start now.”

That weekend my neighbor gave me an old malachite ring to wear and we took our kids to the suburbs to ride ponies. My daughter threw a tantrum about which car seat she wanted on the ride home and seemed completely indifferent to her equine experience. She hasn’t mentioned horses since.

A few weeks later I took my daughter to see my parents in Arizona. I was running my own business, a yoga studio, at the time, constantly on my email, fielding phone calls, figuring out advertising, promotions, taxes, putting out a million little fires.

I needed a break and my parents were glad to entertain their granddaughter while I lazed around. But having nothing to do made me antsy. After I exercised and drank coffee I couldn’t figure out what to do with myself. Without childcare or work, I felt blank.

I went to my mom’s computer to check my email and before long was wandering around the internet looking at different blogs. Within an hour I had created a blog of my own and I was writing. On that vacation, I wrote one blog a day and I’ve continued to write it regularly for almost eleven years. 

The blogs started more as lessons that I could share with my yoga students — thoughts about the symbolism of different postures, analysis of competing with ourselves in yoga….

These more trite life lessons eventually bored me and I found myself diving deeper. I wanted to understand myself more completely and if the lessons that served me served others, then that was a bonus. But I stopped writing for the masses and focused on my own inner musings. I think that’s the treasures started to appear.

That psychic was wrong about horses and right about writing. When I write I become a clear channel. I find my way to buried treasure. My default mind, the one that exists when I am not writing, is like a circus monkey. I throw bananas, juggle oranges and scratch my armpits, all within a few seconds. Linear thinking is not my strong suit.

But when I write, it is as if I am working my way through a maze, slowly, deliberately getting to the endpoint where the truth will be revealed. When I write I am imposing a mental rigor that doesn’t exist when I am in my default thinking. I write every day to find my north star, to understand what is real and true in the messy room that is my mind. 

I don’t always know what I will write about. Most often I don’t. I start with what I am thinking about in the moment, and then I wander. It is as if I am walking a shell-covered beach. I see lots of beautiful shells. I also see some garbage. But at the end of the walk, I find that perfect shell, that impeccable sun-bleached sand dollar without a chip or a crack that I can take home and put on my windowsill.

When I look at the sand dollar later, it will remind me of that walk, what I saw, what I thought about, what I learned. At the end of each writing, there is that takeaway, the perfect sand dollar — a lesson, the sense of knowing something that I didn’t know or understand about myself before writing. 

That psychic suggested that I write but I did not understand back then that writing would be my compass, the tool that would help me navigate from confusion to clarity.

When I write, it is as if I am coaching my subconscious into trying harder to understand or uncover what I actually know. For me writing is not necessarily a way to learn something new, it’s more about unearthing what’s already there, those jewels of wisdom that are clanking around with the clutter. 

I am so glad that I listened to that psychic.