Why Divine Inspiration Is Essential to Your Success

For the last year, I have come to a place in my life where I no longer want to do anything without divinely inspired guidance.

Wait, what?!

If you’ve ever read anything I’ve written, posted, or commented anywhere, you may be shocked by this bold statement. You probably have a sense of where I stand on divinity. Long story short, I do not believe in a god that is outside of us. No disconnected being planning and inserting its will over us to teach us something, much less to punish or reward us.

I am a very firm believer in the law of attraction, basically that we are the gods we seek. We are the divine, and all of the power of the universe is within us. Anything that comes into our lives, we have attracted, because we have either directly or indirectly (ignorantly) attracted it. That’s the very short version. I am keenly aware of the so very many questions and complexities involved in order for us to try to grasp it all. But that is for another essay, or a book, or a few books.

So, what does all of this have to do with divine inspiration?

This Sucks!

I’m a writer. I’m also a teacher, a guide, a coach, a mother, a helper, a do gooder – you name it. I like to be out helping people, listening to their worries and troubles, and helping them find peace and joy from places of pain and suffering. I like to see people find their way to strength when they feel weak, and to pride when they feel shame.

Especially women.

But most of the work I’ve done has been driven by pure instinct. The words come naturally, and I am naturally attracted to people seeking advice or guidance, as I believe they are naturally attracted to me. This, I am confident, is one of my callings in life.

But last year, as I was shifting my entire life from living on pure survival instincts to living a meaningful and wholehearted life driven by thriving instincts, I became entirely unmoored. I lost all sense of who I was, where I was going, what I was doing. I was a survivor for 40 years. How was I now supposed to focus on enjoying life and growing?

I always knew my why.

I’ve always really wanted to inspire as many people as possible. I’ve always wanted to help people to see how awesome they are.

But the rest just started to feel like chaos.

I was up late nights working on content I didn’t care about. I was forcing myself to do work that didn’t feel meaningful to me. I was getting frustrated and feeling like it would never happen!

Funny now that I look back and see how far I’ve come in just over a year. But oh how I struggled. Why wasn’t it all happening rapid pace? Why did I feel so damn busy and hard working all the time just to still feel unfulfilled? I was writing, after all. Wasn’t that what it was supposed to be all about?

Actually, no. That’s not what it was supposed to be all about. It was, and is, supposed to be all about having fun. Fun. I wanted to be enjoying the journey, showing myself and anyone watching that this could be delicious.

So why wasn’t it delicious?

Because I was acting from a place of desperation instead of inspiration.

The Myth of Hard Work

The message kept hitting me over and over: slow down, rest, meditate – it’s not about hard work. It’s about inspired work.

I first heard about this concept, that success is not about hard work, from Abraham Hicks, who hit my radar a couple years ago. You cannot possibly receive the divine inspiration you need, the message from the powerful source of universal energy inside of you, if you are keeping yourself so busy that you can’t even stop to open your hands, your arms, your heart, your mind.

We’re so busy being busy that we can’t get the real work done, the real work of figuring out our real passions, our callings, our dreams. Most of us don’t even dare to dream anymore!

It made sense to me, this idea that we needed to slow down to receive, that we needed to be still to hear. But I, like everyone else I know, was too well trained for that. How could I slow down?

I needed to prove my worth through productivity, through house cleaning and cooking and children raising and grocery shopping and making money.

In the global society we live in today our inherent value is directly connected to our productivity.

Poor people are lazy losers and rich people are hard working winners.

That’s the accepted philosophy.

If we accept that, then sitting still become lazy; you’re not producing. Logic then says that you deserve to be poor. You certainly don’t hold any value as a person.

And yet, over these two years that I have been paying closer attention to these concepts, the more obviously they stand out as pure unadulterated bullshit.

Bullshit.

Some of the hardest working people I know are working class, have very little money, and certainly cannot be categorized as lazy.

Some of the richest people I know of spend most of their time lounging, traveling, relaxing, having fun. But we would never call them lazy!

This is a myth of epic proportions that we have been tricked into believing and continuing through our own actions and the way we raise our children.

Hard works pays off.

Bullshit.

For many, many people, it doesn’t.

The Secret to Divine Inspiration

The reality? The true universal law?

Rich people are rich because they believe they deserve to be rich. Rich people who are born rich continue to believe they deserve their status their whole lives. Rich people who acquire wealth in their lifetimes work in a very different way from most people to gain their wealth.

They don’t do “hard work.” They do “inspired work.” There’s a big difference. Also, they believe they deserve it. It is, truly, all about beliefs.

Yes, of course, they look like they’re working hard. And yes, of course, it is what anyone would consider hard work: up all night planning or preparing, studying or even actually physically working on their bodies.

But to those people, all of them, the truly wealthy who have acquired wealth in their lifetimes, they are doing inspired work. They work from a place of divinely guided ideas and goals. They understand their calling and spend as much time as possible in a state of “flow,” where the work feels magical and effortless, not grueling and pointless.

Imagine if we flipped our entire system on its head and started telling every single person we encounter that they deserve great wealth and great success. That they deserve it inherently simply because they, like us, are human. In one generation we could change the face of the world. People growing up believing themselves worthy and listening to their own inner guidance system.

This is divine inspiration.

What’s super cool about it is that any one of us can access that divine inspiration. The trick is to slow the hell down.

If you’re religious, pray. Then listen!

If you’re not religious, like me, meditate. Be still. No thoughts. And listen!

It can be so difficult in a world of fast paced instant gratification to just sit and let your own answers come to you from within you, but once you actually do it for the first time, once you hear your inner voice for the first time, you’ll never be the same.

Then go back, again and again, day after day, not seeking answers, just seeking the connection with your own divine inner being, the source of all of your energy, the part of you that connects you to every other human, no, every other energetic being on earth.

Collaboration

And that’s where collaboration comes in. First, you collaborate with yourself. Before you know it, your intuition tells you to sit in a coffee shop, go for a run, go to a conference. Your instincts tell you to pick up this book, listen to this podcast, respond to this email.

You make new friends, you are inspired by new people, you read books and learn information you never would have thought you’d be learning.

It all unfolds beautifully.

I took a circle member of mine to see the Rachel Hollis documentary last night in the theater. Her story inspires me, and I haven’t even read her books! One of the things she said that stood out to me is that she has so many mentors that don’t even know she exists. She’s read their books or listened to their podcasts, watched their YouTube channel or attended their conferences, all out of sheer and genuine curiosity and interest.

That’s divine inspiration, and that’s collaboration.

It is totally true that no woman is an island. We do not live in a vacuum. We need each other, we need community, and we need inspiration. And inspiration cannot be forced. In fact, the more you try to force it, the more it runs away from you.

So no matter what your goal is – to be the best damn stay at home mom there is, to be a New York Times bestselling author, or to be a CEO of your own company – you must take the time each day to receive divine inspiration. Your inner being, the universe, God, whatever you want to call it, always has your back, and will always provide the guidance you seek. But you must sit still.

Writing From a Place of Divine Inspiration

For me, divine inspiration means I have to slow way down. I cannot simply sit and pull words out of thin air. The greatest form of collaboration for me is also the best way for me to slow down to receive (outside of meditation, which I do 15 minutes each morning after yoga). I read. After years of reading “when I can,” or when I’m in my car alone (when the hell does that ever happen?), I have made it a goal of mine to read two books a week, one fiction and one non fiction, both in the realm of what I write about or how I live my life.

So I read a lot of fiction about witches and fairies and magic and wonder, about strong women and motherhood and overcoming and coming of age. And I read a lot of non fiction about self development and self improvement, about law of attraction and creative living.

Each time I pick up my book or listen to an audio book, I am drawing on inspiration. I have new ideas and new words, new ways of thinking and new creative juices flowing. I’m collaborating.

Author Toni Morrison said that all writers are readers and all readers are writers. We can’t help but be influenced by each other.

Take the First Steps and Open up to Divine Inspiration

I refuse to do pretty much anything I don’t feel like doing anymore. I have made my feelings my top priority. I sit and wait for the inspiration to hit me, for the joy in what I’m about to do to strike me, for the energy to burst through me to go for a run, start dinner, take my kids to the park, work on client work. This doesn’t mean that I don’t do things I have to do, it just means that I’ve switched from a perspective of “I have to do this” to “I get to do this.”

I insist now on creating and maintaining my own little world filled with inspiration.

Whatever you want to do, you should be immersing yourself in that world, spend time on the internet, read or listen to books about it, follow people more advanced than you, find friends who have similar goals. Overcome your fear and step out of your comfort zone. The first step is the hardest. Once you take it, you are now on the path to becoming who you want to become. Then keep taking steps.

Just be sure to stay open to your divine inspiration along the way.