Brilliant Souls,
I want to tell you about a little game I play, in hopes that you’ll play it with me someday. Or like, maybe now. I must warn you that this game has very real, very contagious and extraordinarily uplifting consequences.
For context, I live in the Bay Area, where all real estate is a precious resource, including the car-sized plots of real estate that we call parking spots.
Here’s where the game begins. I roll around town with an imaginary Spiritual VIP Parking Pass in my car. And it is fully transferable to any vehicle I’m in, even as a passenger.
This means that I operate on the assumption that there will be a parking place for me immediately in front of any venue I’m heading into, whether it’s an office building, a retail shop or a sold-out concert. Rush hour? Doesn’t matter. Metered and restricted? Irrelevant. Only two spaces on the whole block? NBD. I’ve got my pass.
My friends and loved ones find it uncanny just how frequently I roll up on Market Street in San Francisco or in front of the Peet’s on Grand Lake (on Farmer’s Market Day, no less) only to have a perfectly prime parking spot sitting wide open or for someone to be pulling out of an A-1 spot just as I pull up.
(I know they were holding it for me. We’re all in this together, guys.)
Catch this principle: this pass is not just for parking spots. For the past few years I’ve been playfully shifting my entire default worldview into something you might describe as a Spiritual VIP Pass. This pass is worldwide and lifewide. It is born out of a belief system I’ve written a lot about—pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. Pronoia is a worldview that sees every person, place, thing and circumstance as actually conspiring to bless you. Everything collaborating for your highest good, all the time. Even the things that seem super terrible. They are all a setup for our expansion, as individuals or as a human race, says this way of looking at the world.
When I share that this is my worldview, my super-smart, super-skeptical friends often raise a brow. But when I tell about the last 20 years of my life, they start to open to it. When I share how I was a teen Mom from Bakersfield not so long ago, when I share about my two divorces, my past health problems, my kids’ disabilities and troubled teen years and almost losing everything in the Recession and then walk them, from there, into the part of my life story they know: the bon vivant story, the fit-and-flare-dresses-and-
I tell them about the pivot point in my story, which was the point at which I realized who I really am, and what my divine inheritance is: all the creative power, all the energy, all the love.
It was the point at which I stopped looking for love in all the wrong places, as one of my teachers says, and started to sit still and BE love. Because that’s what I am. It’s when I started to practice radical self-acceptance and realized there is actually nothing I have to achieve or accomplish to be worthy of my place in this world, that’s I’m ok and worthy just because I am.
It’s when I stopped trying to make things happen through the sweat of my effort, and got really still and started to receive divine downloads of inspiration, which I could turn easily into things small and large because all things were working together to bring them to life, with the momentum and clarity I’ve developed over my entire life serving as the wind at my back.
I tell them about the bliss and clarity and energy I tap into, every single day, in my quiet sitting time. And prayer. And writing. (Some people call this meditation. I don’t. More on that later.) I tell them about the stack of miracles that I live everyday, and they start to get it.
But then I drop the real bomb: that they also have a Spiritual VIPParking (and also Whole Life) Pass. We all do. It is not something we earn because we’re good, and there’s nothing we can ever do to lose it, not even if we do something terrible or make a bad decision.
Then I give them a few of the guidelines I’ve learned for how to use it:
- Expect it. I don’t take the first parking spot I see open if it’s a country mile from where I’m going, unless I just love the idea of the walk. I pull right up near the front door in expectation and anticipation that my VIP space will be there.
The most common blocker between us and our opportunities, collaborations and just plain old blessings is our own internal resistance to receiving them, especially when they show up and don’t look like what we wanted them to. Especially then. This often requires that we get uncomfortable and do things that spark something like resonance or expansion inside us, but seem crazy to everyone around us. It may also mean we say no to opportunities and partnerships that seem dreamy to others but don’t feel right to us. This is called listening to your inner voice, your Inner Being.
You can always circle back to the outer 40 if you pull up and don’t see an open VIP spot. But if you settle for what someone else says is the right spot for you too soon, you’ll never even give yourself the chance to get the truly right spot that is waiting for you.
- Cultivate Buddhist Detachment from it. About 80% of the time I score something everyone would agree is a A Perfect Spot. Ten percent of the time I what might rate as a Really Good Space. On very rare occasion, I might end up in a Very Very Distant Space, far from the entrance to my destination.
You must expect the “best” spot to even be in position to score it. But the Pro Tip here is to both pull up to the front row spot and have no emotional attachment to whether or not you get the front row spot on any given day. In other words: don’t get upset if you don’t get it, and always still show up with time to spare, just in case. More importantly don’t get stuck on the expectation of it, circling the lot ad infinitum when you could just go grab a space a few rows out. There’s almost no parking lot that takes more than 5 or 10 minutes to traverse, anyway.
Catch this principle: What seasoned Spiritual VIP Parking (and Life) Pass Holders know is this: whatever spot you get isthe VIP spot. If it’s not the closest spot, it might be that parking way out allows you to avoid some sort of accident or nasty experience. You don’t know what inconvenience or drama you’ve been saved from. The far-out spot might not be the quickest way to get to the critical pitch meeting, but it allows you to have a meditative walk that relaxes your mind just enough that you get a wild bolt of the exact inspired idea you needed to win the account.
Or maybe, like my friend Michelle, on the parking shuttle to get back to your Very Distant Spot, you meet the man you marry and, later, start a family with.
When you don’t get the first row/so-called VIP opportunity you were expecting, don’t keep circling and whatever you do, don’t stop expecting VIP treatment. You might find it in the outer rows.
- Own it: use your benefits. I’ve stopped being shy about claiming my VIP Status. I own it. I appreciate it. The older I get, the clearer I am that life is supposed to be good for us, joyful and fun for us, among other things. Savoring and reveling in the little and big, beautiful moments of our everyday lives is part of how to do that.
When I see people moaning and stressing entirely out on Facebook, I can’t help but think: “Hey. You have a phone, a laptop and Internet service. You have a Facebook account. Don’t you know that makes you part of the global wealthy elite??? Disseminate some light, dammit.”
I love the double-entendre of the word appreciate. What we appreciate (meaning savor or delight in), appreciates (meaning grows, in our awareness of it and also in frequency). Appreciate your physical body regularly, and I defy you not to notice more and more how good you feel. Call it a mental placebo effect if you want. The reason we call them placebos is that they actually create a perceived difference.
So why not look back over your life and delight in all the synchronicities? All the times help really was on the way? All the unearned favors you received, and miracles that lined up for you? Things were not perfect then, and are likely not perfect now. Literally, c’est la vie. But why nottune yourself in to how really good they are?
- Share it. The only reason I don’t make Spiritual VIP t-shirts is that I’d have to make 7.6 billion of them, one for every person on the planet, and I just don’t have storage space for that (yet).
Everyone has one of these Spiritual VIP Passes. It’s basically the same thing as the universal law of expansion and wellbeing, and the “law” of pronoia.
But is something we can stop ourselves from taking advantage of. If you’re fortunate enough to be reading this and you don’t feel like you have a VIP Pass, perhaps you just forgot to pick it up at the desk or someone told you, as a kid, that you didn’t qualify unless you did X or achieved Y. This is a toxic lie, that you are anything but completely and totally ok, exactly as you are, and it’s pervasive.
It creates something Tara Brach calls the trance of unworthiness, and it’s why we so often pinch ourselves off from receiving the ideas, opportunities and even love we have coming to us by grasping tightly to our limitations, idolizing our struggles and telling ourselves stories of fear, scarcity, grievance and rage. Very much more on this to come. . .
Here’s a prompt for writing or reflection:
If you had a Whole Life Spiritual VIP Pass what would you use it for?
What would you use it to get access to? What experiences, skills and opportunities would you use it to obtain?
What would you use it to get out of? What limitations and troubles would you use it to get resolved?
And finally: are you sure you don’t actually have a Whole Life SpiritualVIP Pass? It doesn’t necessarily mean that every single thing always goes exactly the way you want. But it could mean that everything, in the long run, can work together for your ultimate highest good. It might mean that sometimes when a door closes, it’s because you’re being steered in a direction that will serve your eventual expansion, in the long run.
What one piece of evidence (e.g., a grace you lived through, a miracle or blessing you received unexpectedly, a time everything worked out when it looked like it might not) suggests that you might already possess a Whole Life Spiritual VIP Pass?
Head up + heart out,
TNN
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