Cover

Introduction

How Practical Spirituality Found Me

One day when I was about seventeen years old, my father and I were making cheese sandwiches in his San Francisco kitchen when some-how the subject of Mom came up. I can remember standing in front of the refrigerator looking for mayonnaise as Dad sighed and said, “Oh, honey, if only your mom would learn what she needs to learn, her eyes would be healed.”

My world tilted.

My parents had come to San Francisco in 1970, a married Jewish couple from New York with a one-year-old baby girl, me. Whether it was that their young marriage was no match for the San Francisco counterculture or that California water sprouted seeds of difference already present inside them, they divorced within a few years.

After the divorce, each of my parents found happiness in their own way. Mom came out as a lesbian and, with her partner, built a family that is still vibrant today. Dad discovered meditation and eventually founded a spiritual community that also continues to thrive. During that time, my mother was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that was supposed to make her blind by the time I turned eight. Rather than receiving the diagnosis as a death knell, Mom took ownership of her health.

“Healed?!” I attacked. “An eye disease she's had her whole life would magically disappear? That's like saying it's a woman's fault if she gets raped.” I didn't tell him that two friends of mine had been date-raped in the last year.

Dad sighed, and his voice slowed to an even pace. “It's not a matter of fault, Staci. It's about karma. About bringing things into balance.”

“So Mom was a shitty person in a past life? I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. It's victim blaming.” I gripped the mayo, but ferocious rage kept me frozen in place.

Dad uncrossed his arms and shifted positions. “Well, that time you prayed for your Mom in that healing service, I think that helped her.”

I was immediately transported back to the summer of my fifteenth birthday when my father invited me on a trip to Europe with his spiritual community. “It's not just any trip,” he said. “We're going to pray for peace.” Outside, I agreed to the terms, but on the inside, my teenage self thought, Great, I'll shop while they pray.

I greeted my father's spiritual community in Amsterdam with skepticism. I didn't understand people who wanted to spend, no kidding, fifteen minutes sitting in a car visualizing light spreading through every orifice of the vehicle. I didn't appreciate a conversation with a man whose eyes were closed because he was looking at me through his psychic vision. I certainly didn't respond well to some-one rushing toward me saying, “I see you wearing a white robe with a round talisman around your neck; it's from a past life, maybe Native American.”

But then things started happening. On the way into Stonehenge, I fell, tore my pants, and bloodied my knee. I suffered teenage angst while Hilda Charlton, my father's spiritual teacher, gathered the group in a circle to hold hands and magnify the healing energy out to the world. Yet later that afternoon, when I went to clean my knee, there was nothing—no blood, no scab—though my pants were still torn.

Days later, while traveling on a private tour bus, I fell asleep and dreamed a whisper, “Change.” Just then, something hit my head and woke me up. It was an American silver dollar. The only person who had walked by swore he'd done nothing. Because first, it was unlikely he could get a silver dollar in the middle of England, second, he didn't know about my dream, and third, he was known to be cheap, I believed him.

Toward the end of the trip, we stayed at a church called Briarwood where there was a laying-on-of-hands service. I wanted a healing for my mom so much, I was willing to stretch beyond my culturally Jewish identity to participate.

Mom's impending blindness cast a shadow over my childhood. When Mom and I ventured out in the world together, I needed to be her eyes. At age five, before I could read, it was up to me to match the alphabet letters Mom made with her fingers so we could find the correct bus home. Mom couldn't see the name of the bus from the sidewalk. At eleven, I walked up and down my Noe Valley neighborhood on 24th Street, leading a blindfolded teacher clicking a white cane against the pavement so I'd learn how to guide my mom after she went blind. At fourteen, I visited the LightHouse for the Blind and put on a mask that simulated the entirety of my mother's vision through two pinprick holes. Immediately, a shroud of darkness turned my sole source of light into a piercing glare, as if some-one were shining a flashlight directly onto my pupils. The handrail became my lifeboat, cool steel holding the only hopeful point in navigating a step forward.

Later that afternoon, my arms wrapped around my still-clenched stomach, I stared into my mother's golden eyes and whispered, “I can't believe that's what you see.” We sobbed into each other's shoulders. That was the only time we ever cried about her eyes together.

So when the opportunity came at Briarwood Church for me to pray for my mother's eyes to heal, even though I didn't know how to pray and I was concerned about the wrath of my Jewish ancestors, I agreed. I sat on the wooden pew next to my father, silently asking God to help my mother's eyes heal. Gradually, long-held grief that had never found an exit emerged from my heart as a tidal wave of tears. Pleading sobs shook my body into an instinctual rhythm, back and forth, back and forth, while spontaneous words tumbled from my mouth, “Give it to me, God. Please, I'll take it. Give it to me.” These words reverberated through me, uniting into a mantra that carried me to the pulpit. As the minister's palms touched my head, a swirling heat encircled my forehead and eyes. Afterward, I ran shaking from the church, opened raw.

Two years later, standing next to Dad in our San Francisco kitchen, remembering Briarwood stopped my righteous indignation short and tightened my throat into a painful ache. “Why? Why do you think that helped her eyes?”

Dad reasoned, “Well, she's never gone blind.”

It was my turn to sigh. I closed the refrigerator door. “Look, Dad. I don't know if what I did mattered or not. Mom has done a million things to help herself heal over the years. For me, that's not the point. It was a really powerful experience. And the rest, I just don't know.”

This conversation with my father crystallized both my hunger to engage in the mystical world, to believe in a spirituality that mattered, and my fury with how our human need to understand might cage the mystery and perhaps cause unintended harm. In the face of my mother's potential blindness, finding peace would come through embracing the dark inside the unknown.

As I grew up, my spiritual hunger and skepticism became a paradox that fueled questioning. Throughout college, I practiced meditation and visited psychics, reading books by Thich Nhat Hanh and Starhawk. Meanwhile, people around me were dealing with childhood pain, chronic illness, car accidents, and intimate violations, including sexual abuse. I needed a spirituality that facilitated healing without guilt, judgment, or shame. Something to help me face the fear and discomfort in everyday life that also kept me from burying my head in the sand. Most of all, I needed something that didn't locate spirituality or healing as a distant God or outcome but taught me how to sustain myself from inside. The urge to answer the call coming from my tingling hands and to remember healing from within propelled me to seek a spiritual path beyond blame and certainty.

In 1994, my journey began in earnest after I married my college sweetheart, Alex, and quit law school. Within a week of leaving law school, Alex and I moved to Half Moon Bay, California, and wandered into Oneisha Healing Tools, a store offering products and classes to help people develop consciousness. The moment I met Meenakshi Kramvik and discovered that she and the other healing practitioner owner, Maggi Quinlan, were each enrolled in the very two master's programs I was deciding between, my world tilted once again. Only this time, rather than feeling torn asunder, clarity arrived with synchronicity rooting itself as a guiding force in my life.

I spent the next five years studying earth-based spirituality in a healing apprenticeship at Oneisha while earning a master's degree in women's spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. During that time, I birthed two children and realized how conscious pregnancy initiates transformation and surrender. Apprenticing at Oneisha showed me how to support people, follow energy, and create sacred space. Mothering challenged me to find a balance between service and sacrifice. Sustaining a meaningful relationship with Alex taught me how to hold intimate partnership. Daily life had become my spiritual training ground.

In 1997, I began seeing individual clients, focusing on personal development, energy work, and guided visualization. I also continued my studies, beginning four years of training in non-ordinary states of consciousness with Jyoti, Russell Park, and Darlene Hunter in what is now the Center for Sacred Studies. In 2002, I started co-facilitating different groups: I cocreated Sacred Dance, an evening of freestyle, intuitive body movement to realize dance as a spiritual practice; I assisted Maitri Breathwork, a transformative experience developed by Jyoti and Russell Park; and I offered holistic childbirth preparation by cofounding Birthing Intuition, becoming a certified birth doula in the process. Today, I continue to draw strength and practices from my eclectic training, though I'm not connected with any specific line of healing beyond a school within the Center for Sacred Studies and some fantastic mentors.

Over the years, most of my clients arrived with minimal experience in earth-based and women's spirituality. To meet them where they were, I needed to find words and ways to close the gap between Western thought, earth-based teachings, and feminine wisdom. Practical Spirituality became a bridge to help people enter into a relationship with the unknown inside themselves and daily life. Gradually, eight teachers of personal and spiritual exploration have emerged as a way to study Practical Spirituality: fear, awareness, choice, body, intuition, energy, intention, and surrender. These teachers aren't human, but they are dynamic doorways for awakening consciousness. It's through interacting with these teachers in your daily life that you can practice navigating energy and facilitate your own spiritual connection.

Entering the Unknown, One Step at a Time

In reaching for this book, some part of you may already be recognizing a need to do something different in your life. Perhaps you've experienced violation in the past and continue to feel surrounded by damaging relationships. You're bored at a job and don't know how to find inspiration. You're aching to feel a baby's chubby thighs grip your hip but haven't conceived, or even met a partner. You're experiencing stomach pain and suspect that you need more than a diagnosis. You're considering divorce. You're committed to growing awareness, but you find New Age spirituality disappointing. You've lost a sense of who you are beyond being a mother. After years of great psychotherapy, you feel stuck and talking is no longer enough.

In all of the above, there's usually a sense that something is off and there's got to be another way. A transition moment regarding relationships, work, finances, parenting, or health is on the horizon. The energy of your own potential is inviting you into the unknown.

If you are someone who gets to pause before making a choice to transform your life, count your blessings. There are many people who don't have such a luxury, who are thrust into the unknown by life's circumstances.

If you are struggling with something like cancer, chronic illness, years of infertility, the sudden loss of a beloved, or financial collapse, you are already immersed in the unknown. Essentially, you're balancing on the razor's edge between survival and extreme jeopardy in an immediately physical, emotional, or perhaps spiritual way. It's true your reality doesn't offer you the same kind of choice as the person who gets to take a big in-breath before deciding to awaken. You know that God laughs when you make plans, you recognize that control is an illusion, and you've been stripped bare. This can feel like a violation, and perhaps you're feeling raw inside this naked truth all the time.

For all those facing challenges from health to money to inexplicable loss, my heart is with you. The truth is, the unknown is waking you up by pulling you into the mystery through what's happening in your daily life. I recognize that hot aching fear might be burning a hole in your stomach. I'm so sorry for your pain, and my words mean nothing. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make your life easier, but I can't. I respect that you might need to get really furious. Shout. Cry. Grieve. I realize this may take awhile.

I don't know why life has dealt you these cards, and I'm not going to try to find answers from the past to make sense of it. Does naming your challenge “karma” really help when you get your fifth migraine in two weeks and your four-year-old wants you to get out of bed and play? If it does, I support you. But if it just makes you feel more helpless and hopeless, then I suggest letting go of the need to know why you arrived at this place. Instead, I invite you to learn how to connect with and navigate through the unknown that surrounds you.

From False Positivity to a Healing Journey

In my experience, Western culture connects happiness with successful achievement. In adulthood, we begin to understand that success isn't always possible. Life is filled with ups and downs, unpredictable and sometimes glorious triumphs, and soul-shattering experiences of pain and loss—all reflecting an undeniable element of unknown mystery.

Many of us turn to spirituality for help in riding the highs and lows of existence. Some people find meaning through attending church, temple, or mosque while others don't feel so safe inside organized religion. I'm someone who—despite an affinity for my Jewish culture—isn't at home in a temple but feels deeply connected to spirituality. For me, the definition of spiritual does not necessitate a belief in God but does include a hunger for meaning: an urge to connect with something bigger than ourselves, which can happen through art, work, dance, prayer, cooking, conversation, meditation, parenting, hugging trees, or practicing gratitude. While traveling with my father as a teenager, I had a spiritual awakening that initiated over fifteen years of training and practice with individuals, groups, and small businesses. But just after discovering spirituality, I bumped into some beliefs that didn't jibe with my life experience, a feeling that has only been confirmed over the years.

For a long time, I've noticed how some spiritual beliefs equate achieving a certain positive outcome with healing. The idea that individuals can learn a particular lesson and free themselves from tangible illnesses. The notion that inner work plus positive thought is the road to manifesting exact dreams. The view that reality is a reflection of thought and so bad things can be avoided by changing thought. I've observed that in our humanness, we're trying to make some deals with the unknown mystery of life who some call God: I'll be spiritual and get to be in control. I'll be spiritual and get what I want from life. I'll be spiritual and safe from pain and hardship.

I'm not saying these beliefs are wrong or bad, just that I consistently encounter people for whom these beliefs aren't working. People still lose jobs. Cancer appears out of nowhere. Chronic illness doesn't end. Meeting a great partner isn't happening. Women have miscarriages or can't conceive babies. People are engaging in many different wellness modalities—physical, emotional, spiritual—but they aren't receiving the healing they want. And often, because people can't control the outcomes of these situations, they end up feeling like they've done something wrong. Some of these beliefs perpetuate this idea so that people feel victimized by the very sources claiming to help them.

Yet, what's the alternative? Wanting to achieve happiness by fulfilling dreams is a normal human endeavor. I don't want to give that up. Do you? At the same time, trying to manipulate reality with control can create challenges. Because when reality doesn't look the way we want, in our humanness we may just bury our head in the sand. Today people are questioning the price we've paid—literally—for losing sight of reality in the search for happiness. Moving through the world in denial hasn't really helped most people. Climate change, shrinking environmental resources, and failing economies reveal ongoing global unrest. Especially now, when reality around us is uncertain, we need everyone here with eyes wide open, strong and ready to face current challenges. We need to grow another level of self-reliance so we can sustain ourselves no matter what.

Beyond Control to a Meaningful Unknown

In my healing practice, I offer a different kind of spirituality. A spirituality that moves underneath positive or negative circumstances to help individuals develop internal resources they can access any time. A spirituality that applauds fiery questioning. A spirituality that cultivates personal truth to grow authenticity. A spirituality that accepts pain alongside joy as an equally important—though not equally comfortable—way of finding balance. A spirituality that forgives mistakes in order to learn. A spirituality that shows people how to trust and have faith even when what they think, believe, or sometimes experience makes no sense. Ultimately, facilitating exploration becomes a doorway for people to awaken consciousness and discover their own spiritual connection.

Developing an authentic spiritual connection begins with letting go of using spirituality to feel safe by maintaining control. This doesn't mean giving up traditions that are meaningful to you. Rather, I'm inviting you to loosen your attachment to practicing spirituality as a way to achieve a certain outcome. The key word here is loosen. Letting go does not have to mean giving up choice or relinquishing goals. But holding on to a desired outcome with a death grip leaves little room to connect with the unknown mystery of life.

Our desire for control rests on a human need to feel secure and to affirm life. The reality is that control is an illusion. Despite iPhones and Google Calendars, there's no way to truly predict what's around the next corner. We may or may not know small things, like what's happening tonight, or big things, like if we will meet a soul mate, survive cancer, or get pregnant. Nobody knows the exact minute of death. Even if the road taken is familiar, something unexpected can always happen. The unknown is a tangible force that permeates daily life.

Not knowing can feel uncomfortable and can lead to many machinations to avoid facing the truth of what it means to really not know. Instead of relying on control and denial to resist feeling vulnerable (and scared) in facing the unknown, you're invited to develop a conscious relationship with the unknown through daily life. From there, letting go becomes a practice of navigating life in partnership with the unknown to generate meaning.

Spirituality as a Way of Life

Drawing from life experience, spiritual teachers, earth-based training, women's spirituality, and fifteen years as an energy practitioner, I connect the practical with the spiritual to help people find a point of balance between reality and the unknown mystery. Practical Spirituality holds that healing is a journey as much as a destination. If you can let go of control—which is really an illusion, after all—and engage in a conscious relationship with the unknown in daily life, along the way you'll cultivate healing no matter what reality appears on the doorstep.

Furthermore, when you take a leap of faith, the unknown does not leave you stranded and alone but instead responds in the context of daily life with synchronistic events that expand learning. On this journey of meaning, daily life becomes the training ground to transform. Sometimes loss and disappointment happens; sometimes dreams materialize. In the process, you grow your own healing gifts—authenticity, inner authority, trust, faith, peace, gratitude—that have the power to sustain you anywhere because they aren't based on achievement; they're rooted inside.

Instead of perceiving the unknown reality as a big hairy monster in the closet inspiring fear, denial, and blame, you can reframe not knowing into something powerful and also beautiful. You can approach the unknown carefully, even strategically, with respect while embracing its vast and infinite potential. You can learn how to not only trust the unknown but also have fun while growing a relationship there. Along the way to making friends with the unknown, you can take a developmental leap that redefines healing from a positive result to a source of balance practiced in the context of daily life. By entering into a relationship, you give up control but learn how to navigate the unknown.

Your journey begins with choosing one area of life to focus on throughout this book. As you move through each chapter with this focus in mind, eight teachers—fear, awareness, choice, body, intuition, energy, intention, and surrender—facilitate your relationship with the unknown. Each chapter also contains questions, practices, and stories to further your learning and help you indentify your unique healing gifts. To illustrate how synchronicity—meaningful events—informs a relationship with the unknown, I invite each teacher to guide and inform me through daily life happenings. I chronicle my experience throughout the book. In this way, I am with you in navigating the unknown.

Choosing Your Inner Theme or Daily Life Focus

In order to avoid becoming lost in the unknown, you'll focus on one area as you move through the eight chapter teachers. Usually, there's at least one part of life that seems especially challenging. It can look like something negative or positive.

To identify a focus, contemplate unresolved issues in your life. You're looking for what feels most challenging because either you're not getting what you want or you may be about to get it all. You might also consider what you're really attached to. Ask yourself: What would I most like to control? Finally, fears around a life issue can be a helpful indicator of unfinished business.

Some daily life areas include:

Body: health, body image, sexuality, fertility, pregnancy and childbirth
Relationships: life partnership or marriage, friendship, parenting, siblings
Career: vision, work-life balance, productivity, commitment
Finances: self-sustainability, prosperity
Creativity: inspiration, flow, experience, expression (art, dance, voice, writing, music, crafts)

If emphasizing one area of life doesn't resonate, you can focus on a life theme. Usually, this is an overarching pattern that expresses itself throughout your life. For example, I spoke with a woman today who is considering focusing on fertility, not the physical, getting-pregnant fertility but how to awaken potential. If you're experiencing a transitional moment, a life theme may be regarding a particular aspect of development. A sixty-one-year-old woman will focus on herself as an emerging sage to help her embody her next stage of life. Other options could include letting go of a dream or shifting fear to discover your life's purpose.

Whether you focus on a specific outer issue in daily life or an underlying inner theme is your decision. As you grow a conscious relationship, the unknown will eventually inform all areas of your life. My teacher Jyoti has always said, “Inside, outside, same side.”

Throughout the book, I'll include exercises to help guide your thought process as you acclimate to working with these new teachers. You may want to take notes about these exercises in a journal or computer document so you can look back later and see your growth.

EXERCISE: Contemplate what you hope to learn through this book. If you are facing a transitional moment, what qualities might help you transform? What could give you strength today?

Intention 101

Once you've identified a daily life issue, pattern, or developmental focus to help guide you through the unknown, the next step is to turn it into an intention. Because intention is a central teacher in this book, we'll study it in depth later. For now, we can start with a few basics. I see an intention as something—usually a word or sentence—that helps you locate where you are in relation to where you'd like to be.

How is an intention different than an affirmation? The language can look similar but the main difference lies in how one holds an intention. I see affirmations as more outcome based (“I am abundant,” “My migraines are healed,” “I am powerful.”). An intention helps you hold the present moment, the unknown, and a possible future.

As I write this, a dear friend of mine is waiting for pathology results after removing a cancerous tumor. Shira Shaiman is the mother of two young boys, a three-year-old and a ten-week-old. In the twenty years I've known her, she's been vigilant about physical, emotional, and spiritual self-care, exemplifying conscious living. She even cowrote a book on nutrition. If Shira can get cancer, anyone can. We're all holding an intention that her pathology results will come back clear. When we spoke recently, Shira named cancer as a journey through the unknown. She considers cancer to be an opportunity to embody her fullest self. So while Shira's holding an intention to be cancer-free, she's deeply awake in the present moment and the reality of the unknown.

Though Shira is an inspiration, there's nothing noble about how she's holding cancer. She told me, “I feel like I'm walking on a tight-rope. I need to be smart here.” Damn right. It does Shira no good to hang on to a cancer-free ending for dear life, even though it would be understandable. The high stakes require skillful navigation through the unknown. Now more than ever, Shira needs strong inner authority to guide her through this experience. She also needs help.

By maintaining a vise-grip on what a happy reality looks like, we create a narrow margin for response. When the pieces fall into place, hallelujah, life is beautiful. But what happens if reality doesn't match our picture? Myopic vision can take out our eyes—crush us with despair or blind us with denial—and create victimhood in the process. As a practical woman, I'd rather widen my scope of perception to respond to reality with eyes open. As a mystical woman, I've learned that widening my scope involves loosening and letting go of a specific hold on reality. When I do, the unknown often opens a door of possibility in the context of daily life.

Working with an intention is similar to approaching guided visualization. In guided visualization, you enter an inner world that can come alive to begin a conversation of meaning inside yourself. An intention can take on a life of its own too, except the conversation isn't happening just inside. An intention is a conversation between you on the inside and daily life on the outside. Imagine yourself holding an intention (I'm growing strong). That's your half of the conversation. Now see that intention going out into your daily life. What happens in your daily life is the other half of the conversation. Got it?

When you first meet someone, how do you generate a conversation? Do you dominate the interaction by talking at someone? Or do you invite a conversation by also listening? Working with an intention requires an exchange between your inner (I'm growing strong) and outer (everyday events) world. Taking up all the airspace with your vision of reality is not a conversation. It's a lecture. If you would like to have a conversation that leads to a relationship with the unknown in daily life, you need to do more than listen. You need to be willing to shift and change in response to the unknown.

Maybe now you can understand why intention receives a full chapter later in this book, toward the deeper end of the unknown. But just because intention is powerful doesn't mean you can't get your feet wet now. In fact, one reason to choose a focus throughout the book is so that by the time you get to the chapter on intention, you'll be well on your way to swimming laps (shhhh, don't tell).

Your Intention

I don't have a prescription for how to craft an intention. This is about finding your way, not mine. But I can offer some hints. Consider the daily life or inner focus you identified in the earlier section. From there, I recommend starting with a one-word intention, which is potent and easier to remember than a sentence. If you feel strongly about a sentence, keep your language open and flexible. Consider a sentence or question that invites a conversation; avoid demanding or lecturing.

Some intentions arrive clearly while others take time to grow. Once you've identified a couple options, try each one on for a while. Notice how it feels inside. The right intention seems to click into place. Because an intention is ultimately a point of stretching, comfort isn't a measure of accuracy. In fact, waves of emotions that surface, like fear, are a sure sign to stay with it for a while. Do not get hung up on perfect phrasing. This is about you calling upon the energy of something. If in doubt, start with one word.

Once the intention seems to settle, start interacting with it. Try imagining your intention sitting in different places in your body like your heart or stomach or solar plexus. Ask your intention where it wants to live. Hold it with awareness. See if you can notice how your intention may be trying to guide you. Become a spiritual detective. Explore, play, and invite magic.

SAMPLE INTENTIONS

HEALTH, DISEASE, OR, CHRONIC ILLNESS: Strength. Healing journey. I invite healing tools into my daily life. Empowerment. Health. Release. Growing choice. Please help me grow amazing healing. Patience. Grace. My intention is to make friends with my body. I'm open to receiving. Regeneration. Creativity. Response-ability. Healing medicine. Compassion.

WORK LIFE OR CAREER: Worthiness. Please show me the work I'm meant to do. Realizing potential. Please help me grow work. Vision. Help me release any blocks to actualizing my career. Soul work. Inspiration. Flourishing career. Creativity. Connectedness. Actualization. Abundance. Flow. Help me identify and embody my career. Cultivate. Thrive. Inner authority.

INNER THEMES: Peacefulness. Fertility. Integration. Intuition. My intention is to develop intuition. Purification. Surrender. Transformation. Gratitude. Please help me grow trust. My intention is to fully inhabit myself. Unconditional love. Help me release any blocks for healing. I'm studying how to receive. Receptivity. Opening. Balance. Courage. Trust. Grace. Wholeness.

Once “Carla,” a participant, announced in a group, “My body grows tumors. So far they haven't been cancerous tumors, but my body still grows them. I know I need to learn how to work with my own energy so I can stop growing tumors.”

I responded, “Carla, I hear that living in a body that grows tumors is scary. If you're called to work with your own energy, I say, right on. If you decide to focus on an intention to stop the tumors, I'm with you. And while you're holding that intention, I encourage you to notice how your intention is already teaching you in this moment. Healing may be stopping the tumors, and healing may be growing another level of relationship with your energy body right this minute. But I can't sit here and tell you that if you do all that, your body will stop growing tumors. I hope. I pray. And I just don't know.”

I can't promise you that you'll end up pain free or rich or able to have a baby from engaging with Practical Spirituality, but I do believe we can all learn to cultivate choice in some way. Your ability to choose may exist within the real limitations of daily life. Choice may come through how you take care of yourself in the face of a challenge—responding as opposed to reacting. In this way, you can hold a simultaneous intention for a specific healing while keeping an eye open to see other ways that healing is already unfolding in your daily life. Ultimately, you can choose to shift your perception in how you engage healing.

Please know you are my heroes.

ENTERING THE UNKNOWN GUIDELINES, YOUR INTEGRATIVE QUESTIONS

Remember times in your life when you chose to make a change and when you felt thrust into a new unknown through life's circumstances. What are some of the differences? Where are you now?
What meaning are you hungry for in your life? What kind of spirituality do you need?
What's your book intention?