Divine Discontent: Learning to Live by Your Own Lights

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. . . . Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted."
-PAUL JOHANNES TILUCH

When we practice switching on the "spiritual electricity" that Julia Cameron speaks of in her wonderful book, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path To Inner Creativity, what should we expect?

More energy and inspiration, amazing and delightful coincidences, and the ability to accomplish goals with grace?

Yes, certainly. That has, at least, been my experience.

But one thing you might not expect-one thing that might throw you is how dissatisfied you may feel when the Power is not present, when you are in the dark and left to your own devices because you forgot to turn the switch on.

I have learned that asking is the only way to activate spiritual electricity. It is always there for me, but I always have to ask for it.

The dissatisfaction you can feel when the switch is off manifests itself in different ways. Suddenly you don't like any room in your house.

Decorating mistakes from past lives haunt you. Your clothes don't fit or look right on you anymore. You're bored with the meals you're cooking.

You're sick of opening the front hall closet and covering your head. But worse, that expansive, even giddy hopefulness that came from starting to integrate gratitude into your life gives way to restless discontent.

You begin to think that the Simple Abundance path might work for some women, but it's not right for you. Hold on. As the English historian Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood points out, "Discontent and disorder [are] signs of energy and hope, not of despair."

What is going on is part of the process.

I call it Divine Discontent.

It is the grit in the oyster before the pearl.

This creative second chance is when we come into our own.

When we finally claim our own lives and wrestle our futures from fate.

When we learn how to spin straw into gold.

When we realize gratefully that we can live by our own lights if we access the Power.

Ask for it. Claim it. Today.