This is an IG story selfie that I love, even if the book is backwards ;) I took it holding my first official copy on my birthday. Can you feel the joy? I can!

It’s been just over a week since my book launch for Forty Mornings. I have to admit, I’ve carried my first official copy in my handbag ever since opening the package. I even videoed the book reveal on my Instagram profile to commemorate. And last Friday morning, while frequenting my local breakfast spot, the server who knows me and my order well, tried buy my copy off me. But I held fast and referred her to the amazon page. It did give me the idea to carry copies to share. It’s been surreal and amazing the past week. But the truth is, while on one hand I’m over the moon that this first book of mine is published. I’ve been feeling a little like, “I wrote a book, now what?”

It’s not that I don’t know next steps. I do. I’m planning a live event in Portland, Oregon on May 4th called Divine Fusion Live. You can check it out here. I inadvertently picked May 4th, as in, “May the 4th be with you.” Which is so appropriate but not planned, well, consciously. I know I’ll be creating an online course of the same title this summer. A few weeks back, I had dinner with my friend and videographer. While noshing on tagliatelle and sipping Chardonnay at the rooftop restaurant, we discussed angels, lighting, equipment, and just what it would take to create this web course. And then Glow, I’m finishing that up.

So, it’s not a what’s next that I’m referring to so much as it’s a what now.

I remember a few years back at the Wanderlust LA listening to Elizabeth Gilbert and Rob Bell discuss how much of what we create isn’t about the end product, but what we’ve created within ourself to bring the creation to life. I have never really understood what that meant truly until seeing the image of me above. You see, the past decade, while it’s been filled with many beautiful, loving, and joyful moments. It’s equally been filled with doubt, fear, pain, loss, and uncertainty. I didn’t know how all the life changes I was nudged to make would turn out. I didn’t know that all would be okay, eventually.

It’s only now I can truly look in the mirror and say that I love the reflection. And I’m not talking about physically. I’m talking about knowing the courage it took for me to truly look at myself and the life I had created and realize just how lost I was. I didn’t even know myself, only that wisdom I wield now is gleaned after the journey home to my soul. As a teen, I used to always end the poetry I wrote with the following line, “I’m here in the present, disconnecting my soul.”

I never stopped to really think about what it was I was saying. How does one disconnect soul? Let alone wonder what the soul was as it was abstract and nothing my mind could wrap around.

The truth is, you don’t disconnect. But you can turn away, you can dial down the nudges of soul, what I term your link to your higher self, and move in the opposite direction meant for you. You’re never off your path as you’re your path, but you can veer far from your true North.

I’ve always wanted to write. I share about the book I wrote at age 7ish in Forty Mornings. I wrote poetry in my teens and twenties. I went to school to become a Pharmacist but that’s really my healer self in disguise. I then had the nudge to write a book about angels while working on the Oncology unit one January day in 2009. I finally sat down to write in September of 2009 after seeing the names of two characters I thought up hours prior reflected in the pilot episode of The Vampire Diaries as the names of the dead parents of a main character. That small but profound coincidence set me on this path to where I am today.

Forty Mornings is all about the moment you stop to truly begin to connect with what your soul has been trying to tell you all along. It’s about building a relationship, one that once fostered will continue to guide you. 

So, when I ask myself, “What now?” I’m really asking, “Who am I now?” I have moved beyond the author of Forty Mornings, I’m somewhere in-between Divine Fusion and Glow. But those outward expressions and creations aren’t me so much as what I’m creating/finalizing within myself as I bring them to the light to share with others. It can take time for transformation to settle if we’re so used to standing in our own way.

Eckhart Tolle says, “If you get the inside right, the outside falls into place.”  I’ve connected back in and come home to my soul. From there it’s fusing my divine self with my living self and that, well, that’s how we glow.

A month or so ago I stayed up late watching a documentary about Gobekli Tepe. It chronicled the discovery of around 20 circular structures that held a total of 200 pillars near Sanliurfa, Turkey dating 10,000 BC. It’s the oldest ceremonial structure found to date. There are more unanswered questions than understanding about this place, however, I watched the documentary transfixed. The part about the sun symbol with wings piqued my interest. This symbol is well-known with the goddess Isis, it’s considered the soul/divinity, and is commonly seen in religious pictures as a halo or circle of light surrounding the head. A few paintings shown in the documentary depicted that the halo was not just for celestial beings, but for people like Jesus. The glow was the indication that the person had transcended their earthly form and fused with an enlightened state.

Enlightenment sounds so pretentious but I believe it’s quite simple. We’re equally the truth of our atoms, cells, and physical bodies just as much as we’re the space between our atoms, the love we know through feeling, and the inspiration that abounds inciting creativity and wonder in each of us. Enlightenment is knowing we’re beyond the body but able to bring that higher self down to Earth and live a divine earthly life.

A living spirit. That’s my, “What now?” Have you asked yourself about yours?