How to live a surrendered, intuitive life

Happy Sunday, Soothers. If you're reading this, you're officially on the Substack version of the Sunday Soother! Hooray! I made this change for a couple of reasons:

1. Mailchimp, where I was before, blows and gets more expensive by the year but actually is a nightmare platform from a user perspective.

2. I think you can more easily share and get exposure on Substack. I seem to have stagnated in growth around the Sunday Soother over the last couple of years and I'm hoping this discoverability might help me gain a wider audience for my messages and teachings.

3. We have a comment section!!! As somebody who is obsessed with community and who came of age blogging in the aughts (please read a NYT article here about a blogging house I used to live in in my 20s, yes we were insufferable), I remember a time when Comment Sections Were Good, and I hope to nurture and cultivate that in Sunday Soother post comments!

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Today, to celebrate this move, I'm going to kick off a new series: How to live a surrendered, intuitive and aligned life.

I know that many of you desire to release control and fear, trust the unfolding of your life, feel more deeply into your intuition, and follow the flow of what comes your way knowing it's all working out for your greatest good. But this can, reasonably so, be very hard and challenging.

First off, today's world doesn't make it simple to trust the unfolding of our lives. We have all been dominated into smithereens by colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and white supremacy, all systems that operate on right and wrong, black and white, punishment and reward, hierarchy and control, scarcity and not-enoughness, shame and fear. We have also been separated, cleaved, from our natural world and natural belonging, and gaslit into not trusting ourselves and our intuition, especially those of us that identify as women.

Reclaiming and relearning this process is a difficult path, and also sometimes an isolating one, that requires a lot of courage, because it goes against the grain of how we've been raised and how most of the current world operates.

Secondly, the concept of alignment, surrender, being intuitive, etc., is not easy to express in words and not necessarily easy to teach cognizantly and clearly, as it's more a knowing state, an embodied state, a way of being you feel into, rather than an intellectual, rational undertaking.

That said: I am going to do my damndest to try to break it into a doable, step-by-step process in this series.

Over the past five or six years, I have really been experimenting with leaning into alignment, surrender and intuition in my life. And I think, much due of course to my privilege, and some due to my willingness, I have succeeded in some aspects and learned a few things worth considering. It has been this process that has led me to quit a corporate career at age 40 and create my heart-led, soul-centered business, move to nature, decouple my identity and self-worth from my status (in money, in life choices, and traditional success), lean deeply into spirituality and trust, reconnect and learn from the natural world, and simply, at the end of the day, really be able to trust that even through many challenges and ups and downs and fear and obstacles, that there is a flow of life I am being invited into, and to be willing to step into that current.

In the next several weeks, I am going to go over 8 or so steps I have documented in my own unfolding that will help you surrender control, step into alignment, and learn to re-connect with your intuition. With each post, I am going to give a small assignment for you to take out and try in the real world, so you can almost think of this series as a mini-class I am teaching. I'm also, in each essay, going to include real-world examples from my own life or that of students, clients or others to help ground the concepts and make them more understandable and applicable.

And there will be bonuses! If you comment with the results of your assignment each week on each Substack post, I will take everybody who has commented every week at the end and put you into a raffle to win a free coaching call with me. (We love a gold star and prizes as motivation around here.)

Today, to kick us off, I invite us into the first step of this whole process:

Stepping into the belief that life wants to flow through you, to be expressed through you, and all you need to do is allow it. To shift your perspective to one of life wanting to live THROUGH you, not that you are in dominating control to the force of life. And, the most difficult part: to trust all of this.

This is not simply about the concept that we are not in control (because, while I do absolutely believe we do have free will, we are not in control, more on this contradiction later in the series); to me, it's a perspective shift that there is some sort of energy, some sort of higher force, that wishes to be expressed and lived through us, and that each of us is not here to dominate, master, control, manipulate, subvert that energy, but to co-partner with it, to step into its invitation, to listen to its clues and songs and offerings, to follow and trust its lead, and that the more we listen to and accept its invitations, the more we will be guided and supported.

I don't believe you have to be spiritual to believe, learn from and eventually step into this perspective shift (though I'm not gonna lie; it helps). You can also simply think of this energy as your higher self, your authentic self, your highest intrinsic values, your intuition or gut knowing, wanting to be expressed and lived through you.

To help you with this perspective shift, let me offer you three metaphors that have helped me step more into this shift of surrender, trust, alignment in my life:

The river: This is a common example when we talk about living a life that flows: we think of a river. When we're living a life that is not in this flow or alignment, we can think of it as frantically paddling in a canoe upstream against a current. Things feel heavy, exhausting. We're putting in a ton of effort but not making much progress, or as much as we think we "should" be making. No matter how hard we're trying, we don't seem to get where we think we should be going. We think in this scenario that only if we put in more effort, then we'll be rewarded with an outcome or a destination, and that more effort is the only way.

Now, in the river example, when we switch around our canoe downstream to float along with the natural current of the water, it doesn't mean that there are no challenges, no obstacles, no difficulty. The river will still take us through stretches of whitewater or dark forest, and we never know what's quite around the next bend. We must follow the path, the current, the pace of the river, though, we do have paddles that at times can help speed us up, slow us down, or navigate rougher patches. Overall, there's more of an ease to this way. We don't have to paddle quite as hard. We are supported by the natural current of the river. There is an invitation to trust where the river is taking us. And yes, while the river will take us through dark and rocky stretches, it will show us some of the most glorious, beautiful moments of our lives, moments we could have never predicted.

The loving parent: Another way to consider surrender is to think of this life force that desires to be expressed through us, whether it's your intuition/higher self, or the universe, as a loving parent who has a perspective that we, as the kiddo, cannot quite see or understand. I'm not a parent, but from what I get, a lot of the time you are obviously trying to do the best by your kid: get them to sleep. To eat nourishing foods. To give them education, delight and love. And often times, they might fight you on these concepts because of course, they are learning, especially as toddlers, boundaries and individual self-expression, but also because they just cannot see or comprehend the full picture of what you are trying to do for them and why it makes sense.

You can think of the concept of surrender in this example a bit like this: Your parents have said you need to go to bed tonight at an earlier than usual bedtime, maybe extra early. You're mad, you're annoyed, you want to fight against this, you think they're being unfair, bedtime is already too early as it is, you want to party all night. But the next morning, the reason for the early bedtime was revealed: They are waking you up extra early to take you on a trip with your best friend to Disneyland (or, insert whatever would have felt amazing as a kid).

So in this metaphor, you may be railing against something that has happened in your life (a layoff, a breakup, a painful experience, something that "shouldn't have" happened), but it simply may be life's best way of clearing a path to be able to give you something better than you could have imagined.

The red thread: A lot of times when I'm explaining this approach and perspective to clients, the best way I can describe the way I try to live my life is that of following the "red thread" — aka the "invisible string" as Taylor Swift (recent questionable dating choices aside) describes it in her beautiful song. There is, in my life, a thread, something that tugs me along; something that offers me next steps and invitations and gentle clues, only so that I can see just a few steps ahead but not really beyond. This thread alerts me to its presence and invitation in a variety of ways: through synchronicities and coincidences; through things that spark my curiosity; through the right resource or right person stepping into my life just at the moment I am ready to receive them. My only assignment? To pay attention to when the red thread is sparking and showing itself, and trust it enough to follow its clues.

Consider this poem, The Way It Is, by William Stafford:

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

So, that wraps us up for the first lesson in living a more, intuitive, aligned life: simply beginning to believe that there is a wise, aligned life force that wants to live through us, be expressed through us, that is natural to and exists for each of us, and our only job is to listen for the clues, the invitations, and step forward and accept them, even when we are scared (probably especially when we are scared; more on this later in the series).

For your assignment, I have two options:

First, simply share any reactions, questions or thoughts to this concept in the comments. I'm happy to clarify any of this or answer questions as they arise.

Second: Draw a Tarot card, asking the question: What will unfold for me when I truly step into surrender and alignment? Then, share the card you pull in the comments. Don't have a Tarot deck? No problem. You can try out an online draw at this sitecom/daily/tarot (scroll down a bit to the Draw a Tarot card section.) Ask the question first, then click to draw. Not into Tarot? I'd still encourage you to give it a shot. Part of living an intuitive, aligned and surrendered life is being willing to be open to transformation, invitations, and new experiences to see what they might have to offer you.

To access the comments, simply click on the title of this essay or the comment icon, it will take you to a browser window in Substack, and you can scroll down to the bottom to comment.

In next week's essay, we'll discuss learning how to discern the seeds of desire that lay within you, and trusting that they are meant for you, and I'm gonna throw some Aristotle philosophy in there for funsies. Future installments will also include understanding signs and synchronicities (we're all gonna pick a sign together!), how to create space in your life to pay more attention, and lots more.

See you in the comments!