Go With the Flow

Gilbert Williams - Kindred Spirits

"Go with the flow "

How many times do we hear this on the spiritual journey? "You're in resistance if you aren't going with the flow," they say.

I want to yell back, "No, bitch, some of us are salmon and were made to swim up stream against the current!!!"

Would it surprise you for me to tell you that I have been a chronic quitter? In the past, I have started things and very rarely complete it. There are a multitude of reasons why I never finished things. It no longer interested me, it was too difficult, I couldn't do it as well as I wanted to, I meant to come back to it but never did, it was too stressful, etc.

The spiritual journey and following the guidance I am given has been the single most difficult thing I have ever done and, no matter how much I want to quit and give up, I never do. I'm like the Energizer Bunny. I keep going and going and going no matter how many times I feel I can't possibly break anymore or shed another tear or go a single step further. Somehow, I always do.

All along the way I have had people trying to tell me to "go with the flow" but that isn't what I feel my guidance has ever told me to do. Floating, I can do for a short time, but I can't let the current take me too far away from the direction I was headed.

"Be like water" Bruce says. But water can sometimes be a tsunami that helps you dismantle your life as you know it so that you can rebuild with a new foundation. Water can be a flood and make you feel like you are drowning. Water isn't always sweet and gentle. It can smash you into the rocks and send you over a high fall so that all that you thought you were falls away.

Multnomah Falls, Oregon - 1918

Sometimes water can give you reprieve when it is a placid pond or lake. Better hope that water doesn't have brain eating amoeba or toxic blue-green algae. lol

Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand - Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord (1848)

I come from a different perspective than most in the spiritual community. I follow the guidance I am given, but there is a lot of brain work that goes into figuring out what is actually going on because I know this thing we call "life" is also a game. How will I know if I am choosing the tunnel of love or the tunnel of certain death? I was given guidance to move away in a new direction, and yet something has felt off about that. It isn't that I can't move away from #3, it is that my previous guidance and what I FEEL my heart is telling me, "Don't be a quitter, Alice. Don't give up so easily." If this journey is all about ending destructive patterns, quitting is surely one of those for me.

It is all a lot more complicated than I feel comfortable going in too deeply right now, but the bottom line is that the spirit whose energy has been guiding me, I started to recognize inside the one I was walking away from. I felt sick inside thinking that I was walking away from who I have been searching for these past 9 years. I found me on the journey, but I have been searching for him too. The promise of coming together with him is what drove me and kept me moving forward.

I have put in a lot of effort and work in this direction. It has been difficult. It has been painful. It has felt like an impossible task, and yet my heart whispers, "Don't be a quitter this time. He is worth holding on to."

The salmon gets bruised and battered swimming up stream to their spawning grounds to start the cycle of life all over again. They either get to their point of destination or they die trying. That is me.... swimming up stream with everything that I have got. Sometimes I have to linger by a rock near shore to rest,  but I just keep swimming.

I do still maintain that I have to stay open to the possibilities. If this person is unable or unwilling to show up for me soon, I am open to welcoming other opportunities should they come my way.  Should the new person they were trying to guide me to happen to show up with an offer before the other one takes any real action, I will go in the new direction. I love him, but I have waited long enough and I need to keep swimming up stream.

I believe in magic.

I believe in miracles and that anything is possible.

I believe dreams do come true.

Going with the flow is great for those who are guided to go that direction, but that isn't my path or what I was made for.