THE FUTURE PULL CALL TO JOY FILLED SERVICE
In May, 2013, during a vision quest in Taos, New Mexico, I received a Spirit message: the time had come for me to expand my role beyond being a teacher and embrace serving as a leader. I was surprised because I am comfortable being a teacher. For most of my life I believed that I was born to teach. Leadership has been part of my personal shadow despite teaching in the Leadership program at the Creative Problem Solving Institute NYU for more than twenty years! Yet the Future Pull soul call to step into a leadership role that honored my soul scared me and threatened to interrupt the comfortable life that I had established being a full time residential grandmother for my two growing grandchildren while my daughter worked full time as a doctor. Being present for service to my family felt right. Although I had no plans to return to my teaching and mentoring career, I had published my seventh book, Awaken and enjoyed designing workshops and retreats based on the evolutionary concepts in the book.
Yet the call toward leadership would not go away. The Spirit message was a freeze frame in my mind and the call to leadership returned at the oddest moments. Then I recalled the exact details of the vision quest. Without closing my eyes, I remembered the temperature, the smells of the nearby pine trees, the cold, hard ground that became my bed—even the name of the horse, Gizmo, who delivered me up the mountain.
I did not know at the time that I held a limited perspective of leadership in my mind and it included hard work but did not include joy. Intergenerational family beliefs about leadership caught me off guard. Mostly, I associated leadership with politics and men. The idea of being a healing leader was not in my genes. Even when I wrote and published Befriending Soul in 2013 and Living Future Pull in 2017, the idea that spiritual leadership might be a Future Pull call eluded me.
In November 2017, Lou Ann Daly, founder of OLAD! invited me to co-facilitate a women’s leadership conference called Connection and Community. More than fifty women from all over the world attended. Together we spoke about feminine leadership and the role of the divine feminine and joy. We collaborated and challenged each other in front of the group and trusted each other to be receptive to what happened next. Joy grounded the group process for three days. The after taste from each day was bliss. I appreciated that there was more than enough space for each of us as well as joy.
In January, 2018 I facilitated the Glad Helpers group at the A.R.E. Edgar Cayce Center, in Virginia Beach. We meet every Wednesday from 9:30-11:30 in the third floor meditation room to meditate and pray for healing for people who have requested prayer, all the nations of the world, as well as ourselves. We follow the tradition that Edgar Cayce established in 1931. Everyone in the group is a committed volunteer. Service is part of our community bond. We are a serious group of women and men.
As I meditated about our group, I realized that joy was missing from our commitment. We were all very serious about being channels for blessings and healing. At that moment, I understood that Future Pull was at work on me.
In preparation, I collected several prayers that were joy based as well as some quotations from Edgar Cayce about joy. I also said out loud that if books were written about the Joy of Cooking and the Joy of Sex, why not The Joy of Healing? Being inclusive, I asked the healers in the group to ground themselves in joy before calling out the names of people who had requested healing. People looked surprised. I had broken rank with my traditional role and the outline that we follow. Members smiled. Before the hands on healing part of our meeting, I invited everyone in the room to remember a joyful event of the past week. A few looked like they needed a prompt and I suggested if they were not aware of such an event, to use their imaginations and create one.
During the third week of facilitating the group, I giggled as I understood that my role as a leader and my soul purpose were one. Joy uplifts and part of my soul purpose is to be a carrier of joy, compassion, and light.
Sometimes my role in grounding a Future Pull call manifests over night. Other times, the inner work needs to challenge embedded beliefs. I am grateful to my guides for the inner prompting to spin joy into our meditation and healing circle. I am grateful to Glad Helpers for being receptive and trusting both me and the evolving process. I remain in awe and gratitude as I explore more of the connections between service, joy, and leadership. The after taste of this expansive experience is pure delight and I am excited about becoming a leader who is committed to joy filled service.
