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By Edie Weinstein-Moser

You can find enlightenment at any time and in any place. Tonight it zapped me at the Starbucks at the corner of State and Main in Doylestown, PA. There I sprawled in a comfy chair across a low table from my friend Deev (short for Diva, as she told someone to whom I introduced her) as we sipped favorite drinks....coffee for her, chai for me. Deev is a work of art...colorful, inspiration and imagination incarnate. Her new project is gathering creative souls together to help her paint a "1989 dark grey Buick Sky Hawk into an art car, covered with suns & stars & swirls of galaxies! and on both sides, the words "dream" "believe" "achieve" "inspire." Imagine the conversation that branched out from there. We were talking about relationships and she shared a bit of well-meaning, but rather flawed (in my humble opinion) wisdom that came from her mother who told her that your partner is responsible for 90 % of your happiness and unhappiness. I countered with the thought that if you allow someone else to be the source of happiness or unhappiness, then you are always at the mercy of someone else's whims and actions.

Then she asked me what I thought I could count on for certain in my life. I said, only two things....that I was born and that someday I will die. Every person in our lives is on loan to us and every experience passes. Change is the only inevitability. That can be frightening or exhilarating. These days, I'm leaning toward exhilaration.

From there, we meandered into one of the most challenging spiritual lessons I encounter and perhaps the same is true for you. She referred to the concept of emptying out...totally letting go of it all to allow for the new and healthy to enter our lives. The beautifully simple example she gave was of changing the water in her cat's dish. She doesn't just top off the water. She empties the used water out. She doesn't just add new water. She washes the dish. Even then, she takes it a step further by wiping it dry to remove any remaining residue. And from that point, she doesn't just add tap water. For her cat's well-being, she replaces it with distilled water. This entire process may only take a few minutes but it is powerfully symbolic of the care that we can also put into our own clearing process.

In order to fully let go, I know I need to trust implicitly that I can live with the in-between, not knowing, in the meantime, free-fall stage. Terrifying at times, it embodies my spiritual amnesia, because inevitably the answer, the re-fill, the manna-festation (as my friend Kim calls it) arrives even more gloriously than I could have imagined. I forget at times, that all is well and in Divine order. I am there now in my life, as daily, I let go of all I thought I knew to be true. Surrendering over and over, my old beliefs, expectations, understandings, perceptions of the people in my life....just letting be. I would call it a cosmic colonic; a complete and total psycho-spiritual cleanse. Sometimes the cleanse comes in the form of tears that accompanied a painful revelation, as I was driving to meet Deev after work. Sometimes it arrives as a side-splitting laugh at work in recognition of an inside joke shared with a co-worker. Mostly it is there through the process of life...ebb and flow of relationships and interactions. Being willing to give it all up to allow for something even better. Let's make a Divine deal. Door number one or curtain number two? It's anybody's guess. Either way, you win.

Wishing you satori....

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