Leaving Your "Normal" Life

If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.

— Maya Angelou, Rainbow in the Cloud

I'm going to tell you a story you've never heard before. I'm going to tell you a fairy tale the way it's meant to be told. It's not a story where, in a land far, far away, an evil witch torments you until Prince Charming saves you. It's one that transpires in your own body. One where you perpetually plague yourself, until you wake up to the realization that you're the only one who can liberate yourself through your own true love. In this story, you embrace the best and worst parts of yourself, and in so doing, you transform your obstacles into opportunities to become the woman you know you're born to be.

We come to know our true potential through opening to whatever life offers us — the good, the bad, and the ugly. The mess is the portal to our womanhood. Our bodies know this well. The greatest initiations of our lives, birth and death, are painful, grotesque even — no matter how hard we try to make them otherwise. Who are we to think that everything that transpires between those two milestones should be hunky-dory?

The Chinese character for crisis includes those for both danger and opportunity. We need to acknowledge the truth about our naturally tumultuous womanhood, and, together, weave a larger, more inclusive narrative of empowerment that acknowledges that chaos and destruction are always half of our reality. Birth and death, joy and sorrow, gain and loss, success and failure — these are all partners. You can never have one without the other. It's exhausting to try to get more of the good by pushing away all the bad. Clinging and craving create a game we can never win.

Instead of freezing, fighting, or yearning to be rescued, how can we learn to flow through these natural fluctuations? How can we reunite our smart minds with our even wiser hearts and bodies, so we're not living in a constant state of inner war? How can we learn to trust that disasters are often thresholds to the very miracles we seek? Becoming a Heroine is a choice. It involves being willing to view our lives through a new, more honest and accurate lens. It beckons us to unlearn everything we've ever been taught about what it looks like to be a successful, happy, and powerful woman.

As a devoted spiritual practitioner and closet psychology nerd for two decades and counting, I've noticed two things. First, those practitioners immersed in the spiritual world need to embrace a better understanding of their own psyches. Without psychological health, spiritual practitioners get lost in the weeds of spiritual bypassing, a phrase coined by one of my teachers, John Welwood, in 1984. They seek only to transcend the mess of life and embrace the light, blissful side of reality.

Second, those experts in the psychology field need to expand their view into a larger, spiritual context. If we don't incorporate spirituality, we get stuck analyzing and rehashing old childhood wounds without ever meeting the part of ourselves that never has, and can never be, broken.

Currently, neither approach is whole, and the consequences are grave. As we move forward, we need to understand that cultivating psychological health isn't the end of the road; it's the launching point of the spiritual journey. We need both, in different degrees at different stages of our lives, in order to weather the inner work required to become fully functioning adults and fully realizing spiritual beings.

Welcome to Your Heroine's Journey

This Heroine's Journey merges the spheres of psychology and spirituality into a singular, embodied psycho-spiritual path to psychological wholeness, empowerment, and, ultimately, full spiritual realization. It is not the same as Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey," a singular, central narrative of becoming that is found woven throughout diverse religions, regions, and times (e.g., the stories of Moses, Odysseus, Christ, Gautama the Buddha, and more modern, pop-culture adventures such as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Matrix, and The Wizard of Oz).

The Hero's Journey follows the distinct phases of Departure/Separation, Initiation, and Return and was conceived by Campbell in 1949 with only men in mind. Women, who were primarily housewives at the time, were believed to not need to undergo the journey. The Heroine's Journey, therefore, takes into account a woman's neurobiology as well as her separate cultural history. The goal of the Hero's Journey is individuation. The goal of the Heroine's Journey includes individuation but then transcends it to also include spiritual liberation.

The more gender-specific map of the Heroine's Journey better helps us to understand the unique twists and turns that our initiation into empowered womanhood entails. It ensures that we arrive at our desired destination — living in full alignment with our deepest, truest feminine nature. This map has primarily been hidden from us as women, thus contributing to our sense of disconnection from and confusion about our feminine strengths. When women everywhere have a detailed map to look to, we are less likely to think that we're lost or derailed when embroiled in a struggle. With a unifying perspective about our pathway into empowered womanhood, suddenly what we have previously labeled as "strange," "shameful," and "neurotic" becomes normal, natural, and even necessary for our growth. Elements we once saw as scary and dangerous become the void we all must leap into in order to taste our full potential.

With such a map we discover that the way out doesn't come from targeting and eradicating what's wrong with us. Instead, we learn to recognize that we simply need to be kind and loving to ourselves, no matter what. Even in our darkest moments, we're not off track at all. We're actually exactly where we need to be. When we cultivate embodied wholeness and ultimate freedom through the practices described in this book, we, as goddesses incarnate, can perfume the world with...