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.

Sisterhood Revisited

My sister Amy and I are both writers. She’s a real writer. She got her MFA in Creative Writing. She writes amazing stories and has skills I only fantasize about. I write a blog that started as a promotion for my business but turned into something more personal and revelatory. We both write all the time.

Until recently, we never talked about the fact that we both write. We were raised in a family of three girls, twins, and a younger one less than two years later. In our house there was never enough attention for any of us so we hoarded our individuality, keeping our secret skills and passions away from each other for fear that they would be taken over by one of the other sisters.

It is only in hindsight that I can see how gripping so tightly to our individual, very separate identities kept us from really knowing each other on a deeper level. It’s been a gift to get to know my sisters for who they are in adulthood. Now that we are no longer doing backflips for attention, we can simply become ourselves.

I am one of the twins, the eldest by thirteen minutes. Recently my younger writer sister Amy and I collaborated on a video project for our mother who was turning eighty. As the younger sister, Amy has the curse of not being taken as seriously. I have no idea what it feels like to be in Amy’s role, but I do know that as the slightly eldest, I was often in the position of ignoring Amy’s ideas simply because she was the youngest and I was the oldest.

It was Amy’s idea to get birthday messages from people spanning my mother’s long life history. When she shared her plan with me I immediately loved it. I asked her how I could help and she was totally open to doing it together. That was the first step.

We started early, in October, for her January birthday. Amy was in charge of sleuthing out long-lost friends and contacting them. It was my job to piece together the clips and make them into a video for Mom.

During those three months working together Amy and I, who live in different cities and different time zones, talked several times a day. We FaceTimed and screen shared. We sent files back and forth multiple times. At one point my computer crashed and we had to start from scratch. Amy had to contact several people to resend their video clips and I had to borrow a computer to complete the project. In the end, there were over eighty-five individual birthday messages in a nearly hour-long extended birthday message for our mother. Our collaboration was a major success.

In the process of doing this video project, Amy and I learned that we work really well together. We had so much fun bantering in the way only sisters can. And we fell naturally into our roles using our specific strengths together toward a common goal.

In the process of creating this video project, Amy and I began to talk about our writing. We both write on Medium and a few other platforms and, though we’d each been doing it for years, we had never discussed it. We had never even read each other’s writing. 

We write very different things. Amy is wildly funny and creative. I am more contemplative and proccess-y. And, we are both write like the other sometimes. We started reading each other’s writing, then praising each other’s writing, then talking about how to support and promote each other’s writing. 

Had we been teenagers, we might have been talking about forming a girl band or a funny t-shirt business. We were so psyched, so pumped to be doing this thing writing thing together. We’ve continued to talk every day, sometimes multiple times. We’ve crossed over from the way we used to be. We no longer guard our specialness like when we were kids.

We didn’t see each other when we were younger. We couldn’t see each other’s strengths as assets. We saw them as threats to our own success in being recognized in our attention-deprived universe. As our individual universes have expanded, we’ve all found a place to call home. We’ve each found ways to be who we are and not feel threatened by the others.

What we missed when we were young was the opportunity to unite our strengths and create something bigger, better, and more beautiful. We never did form the girl band (even though we created wicked harmonies in our kitchen with wooden spoons). We never created a cottage industry during summer breaks from college. We could have. I was business-minded, Amy is amazingly creative, and Katherine can network like nobody’s business. We would have been a raging success at anything we poured our collective strengths into.

We missed out then, but my experience with Amy recently gave me a taste of what’s possible. Sisters are a unique species. There is deep love but often intense competition leaning into disdain. When sister energy is channeled in harmony, something beautiful emerges. When it moves in opposition to another sister’s energy, it becomes discordant, unpleasant, even unbearable.

After all of these years going against each other, fighting to be known for our individual specialness, we found an experience where we channeled our strengths into the same jet stream and created sister magic. 

We talked about it recently, how the video project opened up this opportunity to share something and not see it as competing for attention. It feels good, to have this kind of sisterhood where we support one another, egg each other on, and celebrate each other. It’s true what they say, “sisterhood is powerful.” The road to get there might be long, or rocky, or circuitous, but once you’re there you can feel the shift. It feels powerful.

My sister Amy and talk about doing another project together, some kind of writing. We don’t know what it will look like yet. It doesn’t really matter. It just feels good to working together, in harmony.

Facial Blindness and Group Nudity

Last week I got a phone call on Wednesday letting me know that I'd made it off of the waitlist for a weekend writing retreat that started the following Friday. I had tried to register for the retreat in May but sadly it was full. Because I had no notice to plan for my trip, I didn't have time to get worried or nervous or anxious. After scrambling to cash in miles and get a last minute rental car, I packed my bag and flew to San Jose and drove three hours to the beautiful Santa Lucia mountains.

The retreat was held at the Esalen Institute, a stunning retreat center nestled in the mountains of Big Sur, Northern California. Esalen is home of the human potential movement and some of the most splendid hot springs (Esalen people call them "healing waters") I've ever experienced.

During the retreat, I had the opportunity to take a writing workshop with Heather Sellers, the author of a memoir titled, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know. Heather has a neurological disorder called prosopagnosia, also more commonly known as facial blindness.

In addition to being a really talented writer, Heather has a magnetic personality. Her teaching style-- a combination of modern dance and spoken word-- is profoundly entertaining and educational. I learned more in two hours with Heather Sellers than I learned in a whole year of a University of Washington writing program.

One of the things Heather talked about was being open in our writing-- she invited us to throw away the planning of it.  She shared what she's learned from living with facial blindness; she lives every minute of every day living in the unknown. While she'll meet you and see your face, she has no ability to remember it one minute later or ten years in the future. As I sat, riveted by this amazing woman, I thought how much strength and creativity she has cultivated through this experience of living in the unknown.

In between workshops, I had small breaks to enjoy the healing waters of Esalen. On their website, they state that nudity in the baths is "not mandatory" but those words alone let me know that nudity is standard, even expected. I am a painfully modest person so I was naturally nervous about group nudity. I thought, as I walked down to the baths the very first time how it would be great if everyone, including me, had facial blindness.

Personal writing can feel a lot like nudity. It's vulnerable and exposing, potentially embarrassing. During the different workshops, I found myself only wanting to share my writing that was less revealing. Some things I wrote felt too personal to share with people I had just met hours before. But, as I listened to people read their work that was very intimate and exposing, I didn't have any judgment or criticism about their work. I felt grateful and humbled to be able to share what they created.

I did make myself step into the unknown of group nudity. I went to the baths several times, nude. And each time I was okay. Just like in the writing workshops, I felt no judgment, no criticism towards any of the nude bodies at the baths. And of course, none of the other people cared that I was nude. Everyone was equally revealed, equally exposed, and it was beautiful and it was healing.