Surrender, Initiation, and Trouble With the Transmission
Did you know that tow trucks need to be blessed by the State of New Jersey to pick up cars on the Turnpike?
I certainly didn’t know this until a few weeks ago. May this bit of information save you a SUV full of trouble if ever your car breaks down while you’re on a solo, multistate road trip.
If you’re not planning on driving across the Garden State any time soon, I hope that the realizations I had during my recent journey are even more helpful.
Buckle up. We’re going to explore the magic of surrender and initiation (and what you can learn while placing a dozen calls to various chapters of the American Automobile Association).
A Trip to Be With Healers and Horses, But First...
At the end of June, I set out to drive from our home in Maryland to the Green Mountains of Vermont. I’m the mom of two small boys, so getting out of town for a weeklong training all by myself for the first time since 2019 was a really big deal.
Everything was awesome until I reached New Jersey.
Now, before you think I am picking on NJ, I should say that it wasn’t the state’s fault. It wasn’t the fault of the Jersey Turnpike either. It was my vehicle’s transmission. It failed somewhere in the northern part of the state.
I was completely stuck, and I needed to use all my resources to navigate my way through the situation. (Thank you cell phone, thank you AAA membership, and thank you to all those techniques that help me regulate my nervous system.)
What followed was a comedy of errors that involved sitting on hold, miscommunication, and misdirection. It involved grumpy tow truck dispatchers, funny people at the rental car agency, and a rather attractive state trooper.
It also involved tears of frustration and confusion and a deep fear that this week that I needed so much would be ruined before it even began.
The next day, I was back on the road, realizing I was writing another chapter of my own healing story.
First, We Surrender. Next, We Are Initiated.
Surrender is the sweet, delirious elder sister of Initiation.
In other words, we need to get deeply comfortable with surrender before we can be initiated into the next stage of the Soul’s Journey.
Those of us who are on a spiritual path, those of us who realize we are here to expand and transform ourselves and the world, know that living is an act of alchemy.
We transmute the base and the basic into the glittering and the magical. We transform the shit into shinola as we move from surviving into a thriving and embrace the in-between.
(Granted, this is a process. It might like look fussing and fuming and having a mini-meltdown full of all the feelings, but the alchemy happens and that sense of indignation and overwhelm passes.)
Women who are called to Embodied Feminine Leadership know how to navigate those difficult moments rather than bypass them. We stay present and we surrender.
I had to completely surrender every step of this journey. I even had to surrender my car, who I lovingly call the Green Goddess, and leave her in New Jersey. At every turn, the forces of nature that insisted that I slow down and let go would not be denied.
Though it was hard to find the comedy in the moment, I now realise that every single hilarious step of the way was intended to get me to the point where I could say. “Okay. Okay. Okay! I get the message!”
The next morning, I woke up in my Holiday Inn bed at 5 AM and pulled a card from my brand new Goddess Kali deck. The card whispered gently to me, helping me steep in the surrender of the day before and showing me that this alchemical madness was all the first stage in what would be a powerful week of initiation.
In the end, I was only an hour and a half late to the barn in Vermont. I was immediately welcomed into a circle of elder wise women who love horses, humanity, and wild laughter. I would spend the next few days in a mind-body-soul initiation. It’s as if my entire being resonates at a new frequency.
It is SO not lost on me that trouble with my car’s transmission opened me up to a huge transmission about surrender, initiation, and alchemy! And I haven’t even begun to tell you the real story of all I learned about compassion, leadership, connection, and power.
We have time. Stories of initiation carry us across lifetimes and grow richer over time.
In the meantime...
This summer (and well beyond) will be spent unpacking, embodying, and sharing all that I learned at this Horse Speak training.
This work is part of my work with my own beautiful horses, as well as my Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy clients.
And, this work is going to be woven through all the Qoya at the Barn classes I offer throughout the summer.
