Trusting Your Knowing

When I was a kid I talked to trees; the stand of four tall pines outside my bedroom window were my guardians. I called them witches, good ones—I knew they watched over me, protected me, and possessed a knowing that somehow lived in me, too.

I knew that everything was alive–the stairs I climbed, the stones I skipped at the shore, the shells and feathers I collected.

Did you know this, too?

Do you still?

Children know the world through the heart, and as such, know themselves. In our culture, adulthood typically trains us towards the kind of knowledge we accumulate and create through observation and analysis—bodies of knowing such as history and science that are narrative, traceable, cumulative, reason-able, deductive, more or less linear, and “objective.” Such knowledge is of course beautiful; among other things, it helps us discern and explicate the patterns and structure inherent to a cosmology and of ecologies at once bigger than we are and of which we are part.

And yet, the education we overwhelmingly sanction as essential to coming of age in our culture is increasingly bereft of, and even confounded by, ways of knowing that both summon and resist cataloging, tidying, diagnosis, dissection, and “proof.”

Amazingly, the reaches of science—of current quantum physics—and the teachings of ancient mystics are also, for the first time in human history, in agreement, calling into question the nature of much contemporary education and the hierarchies (dualities) it naturalizes.

We now know that the “supernatural” is in fact the basis of all that is: consciousness is the organizing principle and fundamental nature of the Universe; we possess (and are possessed by) a sensory capacity that far exceeds the “five senses”; most of our knowing is unconscious; past, present and future is a delusion as all is happening simultaneously in the quantum field… etc., etc., etc.

In short, trees speak.

Stairs are alive.

Rocks have a knowing.

Our felt sense is often more accurate than perceptions of the mind.

As an academic, I kept this knowing alive via my study and writing of literature, especially poetry, as poems are expert at conveying a knowing that can’t be reduced to “understanding” or “meaning” alone.

Poems tease us into meaning-making just as they refuse tidy explanations. This isn’t because poetry likes to be confusing, but because the poem is born of that magical place within the human experience where our truest knowing (what we feel to be true) summons our innate desire to explain what is just as it renders that effort insufficient. In other words, poetry attests to our own state of being as both human and divine, equally beholden to reason and rapture, a bridge between the mundane and mystery.

Although I loved much about my 25 years in academia, leaving my career as a tenured full professor was crucial to not merely honoring but living into this fertile space and the awareness, aliveness, and Oneness it anchors. I needed to leave the academy in order to be the best teacher—the truest, most authentic human—I can be.

Set free, my fascination has led me inexorably (and surprisingly) to realms of knowing too-often derided by academia but also secretly sought-after: the all-but-lost powers of the “superhuman” ancients in Egypt and Greece, the Gnostic gospels of early Christianity, Kabbalist teachings, mind-blowing study of sacred geometry and biophysics, sound healing and the science of harmonics and frequency, a deep-dive into the Sacred Feminine, including the long history of its demonization, as well as an attendant exploration of the Divine Masculine, and the true nature of Sacred Union (within and without).

Since leaving academia almost one year ago, I’ve pilgrimaged to Egypt, discovered a hunger within for the desert, spent many devotional mornings at the water’s edge in Maine, am preparing to co-host a retreat in Greece, and look forward to a week alone, writing, in Delphi, beneath the gaze of the ancient Oracle, before my first born daughter, Ella, marries this August.

I wouldn’t have predicted this path when preparing to leave the familiar folds of academia (as well as my pension and life-long health insurance) and the security I felt it provided me. What I did know, though, was that I’d exhausted, and felt exhausted by, a work culture that felt increasingly at odds with what I know in my bones to be an education worth fighting for: one that sets us free by bringing us home to who we are—multi-dimensional beings whose mission in this lifetime is to follow the call of our heart’s true longings, even when doing so asks us to let go of what we’ve come to believe keeps us safe.

As we commit to the path of true purpose, of what I think of as full, sacred potential, we’re invited (over and over) to discern the difference between “security” sourced from without, and security sourced from within, from the peace that comes with knowing our true nature and therefore the trustworthiness of our authentic desires.

This is the knowing that speaks to us in the whispers of trees, the rock’s magnetism, and children’s wonder. It’s a knowing that’s ignited by conventional “understanding” just as it reveals its limitations. This knowing lives within each of us, within you; a knowing we start to re-member when we sit in silence, when we stare into a lover’s eyes, when we lie on the earth and search the sky, when we open our hearts to another’s pain, when we cry and laugh with equal abandon.

Let’s reclaim our magic, our mystical-miraculous knowing, together.

We are more powerful—and held—than we tend to believe.

You have so much to give, to create, to receive, to Love.

If you need a sign that you can believe—in yourself, in the nudge, in the Universe, in Life itself—let this be it.

Love,
Kirstin