Last year I got a clear message from God, or the universe, or whatever you want to call it, that I needed to do a 9-month dating diet. And so that’s what I did.
For 9 months I didn’t engage with women romantically. Not only that, I even paused some friendships where the energy was flirty. I set aside time for spiritual practice, meditation, journaling, and spending time in nature.
I began to write daily letters to the sacred feminine all while grieving the breakdown of my last relationship.
Slowly, as the grief faded and COVID got worse, something strange started happening to me.
The ambition I used to rely on was nowhere to be found. My long term visions seemed almost meaningless. The more I let go of the future, the more I relaxed.
I still had moments of clarity from time to time. The clouds would part and I would see where I needed to go or do next.
Sometimes these bursts of insight would be clear and full, like knowing I needed to have a certain conversation with my father or that I needed to reach out to an old teacher to clean up a relationship. But sometimes I’d just get a direction, a word, or even just an energy I needed to explore.
I felt it each time I chose a new city to travel to and each time I looked for a new potential client to connect with. But even though these nudges felt magical, I often found myself frustrated. For years I’d been the guy with the five-year plan, the quarterly business focus, and the big hairy audacious goals.
Now I felt like I was drifting from one insight to the next. Except each insight felt different. Because they each invited me into a deeper faith and trust in life, god, and the universe.
It took me a while to realize it, but I was learning to feel, choose, and see from another part of myself. I was being asked to trust this connection to the divine, to the mystical nature of reality, and to my own intuition.
In the past, my life was mostly run by my ego - my desire to prove something to the world - and slowly I was letting that go. I was learning to follow the divine even though the divine had been breadcrumbing me all year.
What they never tell you about faith and a life of deep spiritual practice is just how little you’ll know as you step deeper into the fire of it. They never tell you that as the path unfolds, it becomes less and less about knowing where you’ll be in five years and more about your faith that there is a path, that you are being guided, and that there is art for you to express.
So for now I’ll just keep looking for the next breadcrumb and when I find it, I’ll just take it as it comes.
