During my first years of being in private practice as a psychologist and without being conscious of the process, I had regularly been stashing away a good bit of money. Some less than conscious part of my being had been preparing the way for me to walk out of my life into the not-knowing with some cushion. I was able to leave with enough resources to be adrift for a considerable chunk of time.

It took close to six months to prepare for my departure. Those months were filled with closing a full-time practice; buying a stripped commercial van, transforming it into a turtle-like womb-shell in which I could always be at home; saying my good-byes to spouse, lover, friends and family; winnowing my possessions down to what I would carry with me into my new life. During that transitioning time, I began to understand that an essential part of the journey I was embarking upon involved having no plan, goal or direction to which I could commit myself.

For the whole of my life before that time I’d always been heading somewhere particular, always accomplishing or achieving something that felt important. This journey called me to be unfettered by those usual commitments. I was excited and eager to begin living in the not-knowing-anything place. I had no fear, no anxiety about the lack of structure ahead. Rather, I itched and ached for the openness that had never been a part of my ordinary life.

In the earliest days of driving cross-country, I handled the challenging transition into having nothing-whatever-to-do with a kind of obsessive busyness in the van when I wasn’t driving. There were endless things to fuss with in preparing or cleaning up from my meals and refining the organization of my little space. Gradually, and particularly once I got to warmer geographies, the fussing and busyness calmed. I relaxed and began to luxuriate in a gentle, flowing kind of drift.

Over the next 20 months while I lived in and traveled the western coast in my little van, I found comfort in the amazing stillness and peace of the not-knowing place. A lot of old, unfinished inner material could and would surface in that empty space. Some of that was quite intense. Some of it was painful and taxing. But always there was time and open space in which to practice just being with it all. I wrote in my journal and walked and rode my bicycle and crocheted things. I hung out on beaches. I watched the sky and the sea. After some three months of keeping mostly to myself I began meeting new people. Exploring, I began discovering how the me that I was becoming would relate to other beings.

I wandered into trying different kinds of work for brief periods of time. Then after those 20 months, I was prompted to move indoors and for a while, to try a job as the health educator in a radical health care collective. Nothing about any of this shift felt like it was the new where-I-was-going. Rather, it felt like part of the adventure of being a passenger on a mystery ride. I was interested, amused and somewhat surprised by where I was being taken.

After less than a year, though, I had managed to recreate for my self much of what I had separated from when I’d left my New York life. The deadening super-achieving, over-committed, over-involved habits had resurfaced. The forms they took were different. Still, the body/belly messages grew increasingly clamorous. I needed to disengage, to go back to the drawing board. There was more inner work to be done, more need for uncommitted time and space in which to continue the unraveling of what inside of me still drove these damaging habits. With a good deal of struggle (see Feeling Confused for this tale) I was able to find my way out of these newer entanglements. Again, I went eagerly into the uncluttered spaciousness of not-knowing.

At first there was great relief. The not-knowing space felt comforting, welcoming and peaceful. I began to examine the troublesome habits, to uncover some of the woundedness out of which they were again rising. But, fairly shortly, everything shifted. Feelings of uneasiness, worry and fearfulness began to swirl in me. I worried that I would never again be fit for anything but a life adrift in not-knowing, that I would only be able to hold my self centered in my new ways of being when I was alone and unconnected to work of any sort. The prospect was frightening to contemplate. Yet, I had no clues, no direction, vision, or clear messages from Spirit/my inmost self.

In my discomfort and anxiety with the not-knowing, I began trying to figure things out. My mind convinced me that no new direction could or would emerge until I had used up all of the money stash that had been my stake for this new life. There was over $11,000 (a lot of money in late 1976) still left after three years. I chose to split the stash with my sister who, at that time was making a significant career change, going back to school for a new degree.

It was odd to be acting on a decision that came from my head – from thinking and figuring – after having felt so completely (and willingly) led by Spirit/intuition/deep self for so long. Not surprisingly (at least in retrospect) that decision, in very short order, hurled me into more rather than less anxiety and confusion. I felt desperate, disoriented, in and out of feeling frantic, up against the wire. In the middle of fearfulness, I became totally preoccupied with making the now-smaller-stash of money last as long as possible.

I began taking odd (in both senses of the word) jobs. I joined a woman I knew in her housecleaning business. At least there was no danger of becoming enmeshed in super-achieving there. Then I worked weekend evenings as the doorperson-cum-bouncer at a local women’s bar. Most of the Santa Barbara women in the then new wave of feminists-coming-out-as-lesbians went there regularly to hang out and dance. It was more like a community house than a bar. And, many of these delightful women were my close friends. The job turned out to offer me a way to be there and (comfortably) a little removed at the same time.

In the midst of the uneasiness, I became involved in a relationship that challenged every bit of the self I thought I was at the time. My partner’s workaholism (80+ hours a week) underscored and exaggerated the discomfort and worry that continued to plague me. Rather than staying with my agitation and going deeper with it, I became more and more busily, co-dependently enmeshed in taking up the slack left by my partner’s overworking. From the moment my figuring-it-out self had taken the reins, my slide into chaos and despair kept accelerating.

And then, magic found a way to happen despite all that I was doing to get in the way of the process. Those were the early days of non-monogamy as the path of political correctness in the Southern California lesbian community. (That was the 1970’s version of what has recently resurfaced re-incarnated as “polyamory.”) Several women in the Santa Barbara community had begun exploring this path. A few were getting painfully tangled in the emotional messes it could easily provoke. My past life as both a feminist psychotherapist and a woman who had lived bisexually in an open marriage was by now fairly well known in the community. Several weekends in a row, some of the distressed women and their caring friends came over to me as I sat at the door of the bar reading and being the doorperson/bouncer. In many variations, they asked and implored and cajoled me to consider doing some counseling or psychotherapy again. They all felt I would be the perfect person to be a resource to our community in the middle of this upheaval.

I felt sympathy and concern for the women involved. I remembered what hard work it had been to stay sane, compassionate and honest in the midst of the open relationship through which I had lived. Still, at first, I couldn’t begin to fathom putting the therapist hat on again. The whole idea made me feel vaguely nauseated. The women persisted and pressed. Someone (I no longer remember who it was) asked me to think about under what circumstances I might possibly be open to doing the work, even for just a brief while.

So, one day as on hands and knees I scrubbed someone’s tiled kitchen floor, I actually began to think about what I would need to do to make it possible to do therapy again, even if only for a little while. I thought about all the things that had made me need to stop doing the work.

I remembered the claustrophobic feeling of being confined for so many hours a day to an office – even though it was beautiful, comfortable and in my own home. I remembered how it had felt: clients came brought, worked on and left their pains in the air and walls of that room. By the time I stopped seeing people there, it had felt as though the layers of pain absorbed into those walls were thick and suffocating.

I remembered the 50-minute hour that I (with great professional chagrin) had so much trouble sticking to. It had been frustrating for me to interrupt people in the middle of their process because “that’s all our time for today.” Of course, what that line really meant was that there was someone else in the waiting room ready for their appointment with me.

I remembered how much I was left hanging – feeling just as unfinished as my clients were feeling once they were interrupted by the clock. I remembered how that lack of completion left me mulling over and over what had gone on in each client’s life. I remembered how, because of this lack of closure, I often felt as though I was engaged in living not only my own but seventeen other lives simultaneously.

I remembered how locked into the work I felt. Once I began working with someone, I was committed to go the distance with them; a distance that I would have little say about despite its impact on my life. And, I remembered all the paperwork and billing and keeping track of accounts receivable that ate up so much of my non-client time.

As I remembered, I thought about the blessings of my California life. The healing nourishment of hours spent at the beaches, in the mountains, in green and open spaces; the joys of timelessness, of being more off the clock than on it. Of the specialness of a life that allowed me to hang out with a friend until we were organically ready to end a conversation, not having tight schedules aborting our time together. The blessedness of having room and freedom to move anytime in any direction that Spirit/my deep self led me.

Out of that hands-and-knees reverie, came a seedling of possibility. If I could meet the people I might work with outdoors or in their own spaces. If we could meet each time as if it were just this once we were going to work together. If we could sit or walk and work together in that meeting just as long as was needed for the person to come to some closure about the issues we were addressing. If I could, as a one-time consultant to each person, help them – as part of their coming to closure – design a plan of how to go forward with their own work on the problem(s) they’d brought to our time together. If people could complete the time by paying for the actual amount of time they’d used as we finished. Then, I could make the space inside of me to try doing the work of a therapist again. If it didn’t work for me, if I needed to stop, I wouldn’t have made commitments I couldn’t keep.

From that seedling grew the idea of a practice I called Catalyst: a practice that worked in exactly those ways. It was a practice that began with serving the women who had entreated me to come back to doing counseling/therapy. And it was one that then lasted many more years in the one-time-at-a-time form, even though people could always call back the very next week if they needed/wanted another one-time.

This new (to me at least) way of doing therapy/consultation was Spirit’s gift to me. It was born out of the willingness (all the trying-to-figure-it-out notwithstanding) to live in the middle of a long season of not-knowing; a willingness to see not-knowing as a valuable part of the growing cycle in which much could be germinating in the knowing-of-self. Not-knowing times seemed to be a kind of neutral or idling gear through which we must pass every time we prepare for a major shifting of our inner/outer gears.

Over the years the shape of my practice/work has continued to transform as I’ve transformed. It’s refashioned itself into some amalgam of Catalyst and my returning willingness to be committed to ongoing availability to the people who use me as their consultant. Having learned to use sage and prayer to cleanse my space, I feel freer to see people in my own space. Still, I often do house calls or outdoor sessions when people would prefer that. And, I now do a lot of my work by phone with people who live at some distance from Ojai.

These two long cycles of not-knowing taught me trust, patience and the importance of keeping my figuring-it-out hands off the controls when other (these days much less major) cycles of not-knowing arrive. I practice talking compassionately and reassuringly to the sometimes disquieted or antsy parts of me who may feel upset or challenged with the not-knowing. It usually works quite well. And, I continue to be amazed at what comes into being at the far sides of even the most interminable seeming seasons of not-knowing.

In our crazy out-of-balance culture, we often feel compelled to rush ourselves to come up with answers before we’ve let ourselves live into the questions. We feel pushed to make any decision rather than risk the criticism we fear for quietly waiting for a direction to emerge organically from our inner-knowing places. I think here of the abusive demeaning salvos like “passive,” “not being proactive,” “wishy-washy,” “indecisive” thrown at us when we choose to hang out and wait on our own inner timing.

Claiming not-knowing times as honorable, empowering seasons of germinating and inner preparing seems essential to living more compassionately with ourselves and other beings.

Consider talking lovingly, gently and reassuringly to the parts of you who are fearful of not-knowing times, of not-having-all-the-answers-right-now.,

P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!

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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.

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