by Alan McAllister, CCHt PhD-phys
This spring I took a long cross-country trip with my daughter, which introduced me to the joys of GPS navigation. I’ve always been a map person, give me a destination and a decent road atlas and I enjoy plotting a route. It might be the fastest, or the most scenic, or a mix. When I plunge into a city’s freeway system I like to look it over beforehand, so I’m not figuring out which lane to be in, half a mile before an interchange, in heavy traffic. I like to know where I’m headed, where I am now, and what the alternate routes are, so if something comes up I have a context in which to make informed choices.
Driving with GPS was a new experience. Punch in the destination, and it decides how to get there. It also only shows the road you’re on and how far to the next intersection/turn/interchange. So driving in places I’d never been before, we might know where our destination was, and in a sense where we were, but not the relationship between the two. There was no way to know if the GPS really had an optimal route, or what, if any, alternate choices might be available. I found this really bothered me, brought up old helpless, lost feelings. My daughter, however, seemed fine with the process. She was OK knowing that she was on course, even is she didn’t know what state we were in at the moment.
What it came to was that she trusts her GPS and I want the option of double checking it. I figure its only as good as the software and who knows what bugs there are there? Perhaps I’ve done too much programming myself. So I got to practice some letting go, and in spite of a few minor glitches, and some bad temper, the GPS did guide us home safe and sound.
Scroll forward a couple of weeks. I’m doing readings at a fair. When I read I have what I think of as a need to know agreement with spirit. If you need to know it, I’ll receive the information. So there are times when I look at something and I get a blank. I once had a reading with a river journey motif and my client wanted to know what was around the next bend. I looked, but got nothing. Spirit was saying, don’t worry about it, focus on where you’re at now. So at this fair I had several readings that where a variation on this. I could see/feel clearly where the client was being guided to go next (either externally or internally), and that they would have clarity when they got there, but not any details of what the content of that clarity was.
Thinking about this I realized there are times when life is like a treasure hunt. You are guided in a certain direction, or to a place, or person. When you get there you find the next clue, which points you to a new destination. Sometimes if you know where you are going three steps out, you might skip one, to save time, or to avoid something challenging. But then when you get those three steps out, you won’t be the same, you will have missed something (possibly important) along the way. Often times it is the process of getting to where you are going that gives you the answer. This is especially true of internal journeys. Going into fear, grief, or anger almost always yields a benefit or lesson. Only by going there do you uncover it experientially, so you have the full knowing of it, not just the idea. That process is critical for your journey.
So often Spirit says: be here now, pay attention to the process, trust me and I’ll show you the way as you go along. Something like a GPS eh? Unlike the GPS I’m at least trying to trust Spirit, though its not always easy. Often I do want a map, the bigger picture, knowledge of where I’m going long term. I believe that Spirit knows all the options and context, but the mind that had such an issue with the GPS is still learning to trust this: still learning to listen to my heart, my spiritual GPS.
This is so important, because unlike a physical GPS where we punch in our destination, spiritually we don’t really know it ahead of time. Often we only know when we’ve gotten to where we are going because we feel it. I can read a general direction for you, but only in the moment, feeling into it with your own heart will you know when you are really on track, and when you have arrived. So spiritually we have to learn to navigate with the GPS of our heart, and to do that we often have to let go of the mind’s discomfort with partial information. We slowly learn that we will know what we need to know, when we need to know it, not in mind, but in the heart.
Driving home after this fair I experienced being present with my driving, but loosing the mental map completely. On roads I have driven many times, deep in conversation, completely conscious of the immediate road conditions, I realized that I had no idea where we were along that road. I had surrendered my larger context thinking, and was following the road home.
I’m probably not going to run out and buy a new GPS for my car, but I am going to practice using my spiritual GPS, trusting Spirit to keep it properly updated, and learning how to tell when I’m on track or have arrived at a point on the treasure map. And we do that by practicing, taking time to ask our heart how it feels and listen to what is there.
with gratitude to my daughter for a useful, if frustrating lesson 🙂
(© 5/2010)
