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Surrender to Timing

January 2021

At the start of 2021, the first group of participants who signed up for the online Clear Channel Course began to work their way through the 10-week program, and are soon to commence the fourth week of the course. This week is on the topic of answers, including the different intuitive modalities through which answers can be received, such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience (or in other words, seeing, hearing, and feeling answers through your intuition). 

Not Time to Know

One issue when it comes to receiving answers is timing. You can have the strongest intuitive ability in the world but if it’s not the right time to know something, then an answer is unlikely to come through straight away. It can feel frustrating when that happens. With the benefit of hindsight, however, people often acknowledge that it was a good thing that they didn’t get an immediate answer. For example, I had a friend who wanted to know if she should buy a particular property to live in, and her intuition wasn’t giving her an answer, even though it was normally quite strong. By the time it became clear that it would be a good place to call home, the price had dropped by thousands of dollars because no one had yet wanted to buy it … if the answer had come through earlier, she wouldn’t have been able to purchase the same property at such an affordable price. 

Despite understanding that the time might not be right to know something, I’ve personally struggled with the experience of waiting for an answer longer than I’d like. It’s kind of similar to telling a child that a delicious cake is being baked in an oven. Even if you say that it must be left in there for another 30 minutes, many children (perhaps adults too!) would be tempted to open that oven a little earlier if given half the chance, especially when it already smells great and looks okay based on what you can see through the clear glass oven door. 

Not Time to Write

It’s not just intuitive answers that we sometimes need to wait for, for our own good. This issue of timing is relevant when it comes to other things too. A relationship, for instance, can’t always be rushed even if both people feel that they want to become closer. There’s a fine balance between patiently taking it slow in order to give each other enough personal space, while also not waiting too long and missing a special opportunity … not leaving the cake to burn in the oven, so to speak. 

This also applies to creative projects. The first book I worked on was a project that I co-authored with my sister. Titled Hell at the Office: How to Manage Workplace Politics, it had nothing to do with intuition and yet everything to do with intuition. One day I received what felt like a soft inner whisper, an intuitive instruction to commence a writing project with my sister. She was to choose the topic, and we would work on it together and self-publish it within a strict timeframe. The start date was clear and the end date was clear. My sister chose the topic of workplace politics which did not particularly interest me, but I ended up enjoying the process of working on it and slowly bringing it to completion. As the end date approached, my sister asked, why rush it? Why not spend longer on it and write the book really well? Add more content? Do more research? Polish it more? I answered that we should finish on time because the same guidance that initiated the project was also instructing us to stop. There was always going to be more room for improvement, additions, and further polishing. But it was no longer time to write once it got past that end date that we were instructed to finish by. We had to move on to other things. 

The book was published on Amazon in 2014. Neither of us told many people about it, and our marketing efforts were pretty much zero, so not many copies sold. Yet, the project itself had been worthwhile simply because it showed us that something like this could be done – a mere idea could lead to a fully-formed, completed book. It can be daunting during the process of trying to write a book – so much work goes into it and no one can be truly sure (even the writer) that the project will ever be completed or see the light of day. When Hell at the Office was published, my sister and I now had the experience of completing a book and the confidence of knowing that it could be done again.  

Later on, as I was writing another book, several things happened which made me feel, at a certain point, that it was no longer time to write. On this occasion, it was harder to accept because the book hadn’t yet been fully written. It was half-baked. It’s easier to stop after something’s finished, even if it’s not edited or polished as much as it could be. To stop writing when a project is nowhere near finished is more difficult. It seemed as though all my efforts up to that point, all those years of writing, had been a total waste.  

If you’ve read the preface to Channel: How to be a Clear Channel for Inspiration by Listening, Enjoying, and Trusting Your Intuition, then you’ll know that the book I was writing eventually morphed into a different one – into Channel itself! Many sections for the first book were incorporated into the new one, as they were relevant despite the fact that the new book was on a different topic. So that earlier writing did save time. More recently, I used more sections from that old half-written manuscript to include in my new book, You Crazy Vegan: Coming Out as a Vegan Intuitive.

Not Time to Publish

I finished writing Channel by March 2018. The expectation was that it would be published soon afterwards, but it took almost another year before it was actually released. As much as I wanted to rush that book out into the world in 2018, it seemed that it was just not the right time to publish. 

There were several delays that seemed beyond my control. For example, the person who was going to help me understand and work out the distribution and publication side of things was in a different location, and our meetings were sometimes cancelled due to confusion around time zones. In addition to that, although the intention was originally to self-publish, I was advised to enter a Publishizer contest in August 2018 – not necessarily to find a publisher, but because it might be good for publicity. I ended up being offered a contract by a publisher who found out about my book during the contest. After signing the contract, I had to accept that the release date for Channel would be delayed even further. The book was finally made available in early 2019, and it felt like it was worth the wait. I enjoyed working with the publisher, and just the act of entering the Publishizer contest was rewarding in its own way, as it was a big step outside my comfort zone.

For my latest book, You Crazy Vegan, I already had the benefit of knowing that a publisher was interested before I’d completed it, so my assumption was that the journey from book completion to publication would not take as long as it did for Channel. I was wrong.

It took a couple of months for Channel to be released after the publishing contract was formally signed. For You Crazy Vegan, that wait time has doubled and yet it is still not ready for publication. I forgot that Channel had been pretty much ready to go by the time the publisher accepted it, as I’d already prepared it for self-publication. When You Crazy Vegan was submitted, some things had to be done from scratch – the layout, design, cover, proofreading – in a way that I have less control over in regard to the time it takes. I didn’t realise this process could take so long after submitting a competed manuscript. 

I’d love to figuratively take the cake out of the oven and offer it to people asap, but the adult bakers are saying it needs more time. It’s another case of having to surrender and accept the timing of things as they currently are. 

Surrender to Timing

To go back to the topic of the online course, I first wrote about my intention to create a course on intuition in late April 2020. It was written as a draft for my next monthly update, and my dad died unexpectedly a week later. I was encouraged to continue with my plans and work on the course as a way to keep my mind preoccupied. What I felt in my grief was that I was not able to create a course at that time, no more than I could jump in the air and magically fly to the moon. My brain was not on board and my fingers didn’t want to type, nor did my voice want to speak any lessons. I had the emotional equivalent of gastro and I needed to purge and process what had happened. Creating a course is not what you do when you’ve got emotional gastro. 

Later in the year I felt ready to start the course, but just as with other projects mentioned previously, it would appear that the timing was still not right to work on it for a number of reasons. Only quite recently, following a series of setbacks including glitches on the website, loud unexpected noises on the first day of recording the audio lessons (construction work in the morning, birds screeching outside my window in the afternoon, yelling and music coming from neighbours in the evening – during my no-complaining challenge, no less!), it occurred to me to just surrender this issue of timing. Stop rushing it, and stop trying to control the outcome. I’ve written about surrender a lot but I don’t always remember to practice it. On the same day, I went from saying “Oh God” after being interrupted for the umpteenth time while recording, due to random sudden crashing noises from outside, to thinking, “Ohhh … God!”; as in, maybe that’s the answer? Just surrender this whole thing to God, to the universe, to something bigger than me. 

After surrendering the project, things have become a fair bit smoother. And there have been some positives due to the delay with content creation. For example, it occurred to me that the first few people who signed up for the course might want to take part in a small group discussion each week as they work through the lessons, as well as go through some short meditations and other guided practices together. That possibility hadn’t occurred to me before. Last year, I did consider hosting one or two Q&A sessions at some stage, but these small interactive group sessions have been more fun than I suspect a normal Q&A call would be, and it’s been the most enjoyable aspect of the course for me so far. Plus, after getting feedback from someone that my first couple of audio recordings were a little too fast to keep up with, I was reminded to slow down while talking. I was happy to re-record those first two lessons at a more relaxed pace. If I had finished the course content by the time I initially wanted to, then I would have had 11 super-speedy audio recordings to deal with by the time I received that feedback!

At the time of writing this, I anticipate that most if not all of the course content will be uploaded by late March. And it just so happens that the month afterwards, April, is when it’s anticipated that You Crazy Vegan will be released, according to my publisher. If the timing for either or both of these things turns out to be longer (or shorter!) than what I currently expect, so be it :)

Is there anything you’d love to finish more quickly? Or an answer that you want but your intuition isn’t yet giving you? Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise that things are taking longer than expected. Let the cake be baked. 


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