For Us, Not to Us

The Angels are inviting us to meet Life with something other than resistance. Like acceptance. Or neutrality. Or curiosity.

And … the Angels and I know that meeting Life with something other than resistance can be a “big ask.” There are plenty of things in the world — and in our own individual lives — that are definitely not what we’d choose.

That’s why the Angels and I consider meeting Life with something other than resistance “a practice.” And it’s THE practice that we’re being asked to consciously engage with right now. For many of us, this IS the leading edge.

The Angels are encouraging me to share the following story as an example of WHY we’re being encouraged to meet Life with less and less resistance.

The Book Cover

I’m knee deep in getting my book ready for publication. And, as part of the process, I purchased a deluxe publishing package from the folks who are going to be printing my book. One of the things included in that package is designing the book’s cover.

The folks at this company have a pretty lengthy questionnaire that they ask authors to complete. And they asked some really good questions in preparation for designing the cover, including which colors I like and which book covers I appreciate and why.

And … then I received their first attempt at a cover.

Let’s just say that it was the opposite of what I’d asked for. They used exactly the colors I said I did NOT want. They used exactly the opposite style from the covers I said I liked. You get the picture.

I immediately went into WTF?! … and stayed there for two or three days.

And WTF?! just so happens to be another name for our old friend Resistance.

What If Everything Really Was Unfolding Perfectly?

After wallowing in my WTF?! for a bit (and it really wasn’t nearly as bad as it would have been 3 or 4 years ago!!), I heard what my beloved Paul kept saying.

I’d say something like, “I’m not a professional designer. I’m a writer and an editor. I need a designer to do this for me. I’m not a designer.”

And to that, Paul would say, “Yes, you are.”

For a while, I’d argue, “No, I’m not.”

But then, with Paul’s help, I began to notice how much experience I actually have with graphic design. I was, as you might remember, a magazine editor for 30+ years. I even took a class in magazine design at Parsons in New York City (one of the best design schools in the country) back in the ’80s. It was taught by one of the most highly respected magazine designers at the time. So, for decades, I’ve been immersed in the world of professional graphic design, including working with top-notch magazine art directors.

I also designed the initial Angel Cards myself. (They actually started out as Facebook posts!) And while I did hire an amazing designer to bring my initial design for the Angel Cards to the next level, we worked very closely together to co-create the final look.

Then I took the template we had co-created, and I designed every single Angel Card that’s going inside the book (all 63 of them).

In other words, I have LOADS of experience doing actual design work. Which kinda does make me a designer.

Through the gift of this WTF?! experience, I got to see myself differently and really appreciate myself in a new way.

And … I also realized that the folks who work at the printing company (the ones who designed the WTF?! book cover) probably have WAY, WAY less experience than I do. That company may hire people right out of college, or with three or four years of experience.

Rather than going into the “wrongness” of that, I found myself feeling great compassion for their designers. I found my heart opening…

In other words, I released all that resistance. And then I went ahead and started designing my own book cover!

Feeling My Way Forward

Now, a couple weeks later, I can look back at the book-cover-design journey and clearly see:

NO ONE else could have designed the cover for my book. I had to go on that journey myself.

And guess what? It was extremely fun to feel my way forward with the cover design.

I do have to admit that the first book cover I designed was excellent …

… as a magazine cover!

It totally looked like a magazine. But it did not look like a book.

Oops. So, I started over…

And then I played with all kinds of images, as I lived in the question: What feels like a YES?

I tried images of clouds. Forest paths. Butterflies. Lanterns.

They were all close. But they just didn’t feel MAGICAL enough.

And then I found a type of abstract image that felt truly delicious. And I tried lots of different possibilities that were more like that, until I came upon the one that felt like a “hell yes!”

Meanwhile, I was also playing with the words on the cover — both how they looked and what they said.

I kept Feeling My Way Forward … feeling into the words and images and their placement … until the whole thing felt 100% harmonious within me.

And now: I LOVE the cover design!

Looking back, I also love that the Angels made it SUPER OBVIOUS that I was to design the cover myself.

The only “problem” was my resistance. As soon as I dropped that resistance (including the story of how “wrong” it was for those other people to design such an awful cover), I thoroughly enjoyed this leg of the journey.

So, from the “do as I say, not as I always remember to do” files:

How about if you and I skip over the freaking-out / resistance part next time? Because, as it turns out, that’s actually not necessary.

We CAN meet Life with any number of energies that are not resistance.

I could have seen that book cover design and felt curiosity, as in: “Huh. I wonder why the Angels brought me this.”

Or … I could have noticed right away that I had gone into resistance, and then I could have done something about it. I could have soothed myself, comforted myself, Been Love for myself.

Once I felt more centered and harmonious inside, I could have chosen to engage my curiosity. That might have saved me a few days of rolling around in the yuck!

Because, really, at the end of the day, this is ALL about living in Trust: Trust that the Divine and the Angels adore us, and that Life always is happening for us, not to us.

And … sometimes … that means we get hilariously bad book cover designs, as a gentle nudge from the Angels to see and appreciate and Love ourselves even more.

(with appreciation for the photo by Hester Qiang via Unsplash)