PREFACE to my ever-unfolding journey walking the way of The Rose.
It’s time to tell you my story of finding God.
I’ve been wresting with myself for over a year to share this part of my story. Fighting and fighting it. Hushing the whisper inside of me to the point that it’s screaming at me now to be set free. The thing about this spiritual journey is that if you walk the path long enough, it becomes very familiar to the individual. Similarities in one’s waves of death, life, and rebirth play out.
At one point, when the ego can’t go forward anymore, when it is too tired carrying on the way it has been, it must take a knee and surrender. I write this to you as I unshackle the chains from what I’m having to let unfold so that I can find my salvation in my own journey.
Welcome to my surrendering.
If you’re reading this, there is nothing in me that questions that you haven’t stumbled on this blog post by accident. You’re here because, in you, there is a need for this story to be told. In the depth of all the fighting you’re learning—or in the midst of already surrendering. To not feel alone. To know there are others who have felt this complex emotional torment within a very new world.
In that, I will express the deepest love and compassion to you, as surrendering to the inner knowing is possibly the hardest and most courageous thing one can do. I see you.
What brought on my need to express possibly one of my most intimate stories about myself came about yesterday. Last night, my bestie and I went to a mini night retreat called The Heart’s Calling. Your typical Vancouver retreat—though not to take away, in the same breath, a very gorgeous, intimate women’s circle. Tea, deep conversations, sound bath, yoga, creative expression, journaling, all wrapped in four luscious hours.
Richelle, my bestie, who we both met working as flight attendants, was very much called to go to this retreat. Oddly enough, what came up wasn’t anything during the retreat but instead, at 4 a.m. the morning after.
If you know me on a more personal level, you will know this story in great detail. Though if you don’t, you most likely don’t know the tale.
One that I will, over the course of not one post but many, share. My story, my teachings, my insights, hurdles, tears, suffering, joy, heartfelt love, and desires on:
How I found God—or I guess better yet, how He found me.
A quick note on 'God being seen as masculine for me: I know this can be very triggering, as it was for me my whole life, up until recently.
Please, if the word “God” in the masculine is uncomfortable in your body or emotions, feel free to replace it with Universe, Spirit, Source, Creator, or whichever connection to Spirit feels most aligned. For I did this for all of my spiritual journey leading up to this writing and found a lot of peace in doing so.
You may also replace it with Goddess to allow the feminine energy to feel more welcomed. (Though as this story delves into finding where the feminine energy is welcomed in spirituality, especially in a more biblical sense, I found it hard to do so.)
Everyone’s connection to Spirit, God, or Universe is extremely personal, and one story is only a droplet in the sea of conscious understanding.
My hope is that you find what you need in my very personal story on spirituality to help support and guide you along your journey. And in the same breath, if it doesn’t resonate, that is completely okay. I don’t expect everything I write to land with everyone, and it’s not supposed to. If it did, then we all would be the same human, living the same human experience. Which honestly, that sounds boring as hell to me. In this crazy, expansive, creative, unique world we live in, I’ve found that it is in our differences that we find our similarities.
I have also felt great suffering in myself resisting what I will be writing. As it goes against a lot of my teachings as a healer that I once was. Hence the inner turmoil that I have felt for years about spirituality and writing on it. In truth, I had stopped writing because I was angry that this had become part of my story—finding “God.”
A story that, when I shared with others, had been told was “amazing” and that they wished they could have a story about finding “God” as well. In their bewilderment and awestruck faces, I felt nothing but alone and singled out—the farthest thing from lucky. I didn’t want to become one of those preachy people where “their God was the only God.”
I hated preachy spiritualists, more geared towards Catholics and Christians. Truly, I had (and honestly, at times still very much in the present, still have) the worst time receiving any teachings that they tried/try sharing with me.
Even writing this, I realize the anger that I am still working through. It’s a journey. With this knowledge, I hope you give me as much compassion as I am trying to have on myself to not sound like one of those preachy, Godly know-it-all people. As nature is ever-changing, so am I—and so is my spiritual/healing practice.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, it’s 4 a.m., and I’m awake because I can hear my five-gallon little fish tank’s filter water loudly pouring into the tank in the quiet of my garden suite. Yes, I really should have filled and cleaned it the day before. Though being “on top of it” lately hasn’t been my forte.
Wide-eyed and awake in my bed, and after precariously placing a leaf to catch the water in the tank to silence the loud dribbling, I came to the aha I’ve been needing to sit and write as of late, and avoiding for almost a year and a half.
How I found God after my career with Air Transat as a flight attendant ended in 2023. How my last gift from working as a flight attendant was my round trip to Ireland and back.
I’ve always had a huge love for Ireland, though now, with finding possibly the deepest spiritual connection to Source, my love for Ireland is on a level that feels like I will always be indebted to the Emerald Isle.
I still remember the ground agent, Peter (or was it Patrick?), on my last operating flight to Dublin telling me that “Ireland was waiting for me to come back.” How little did I know how that simple invitation would break me open into a million pieces—from the numb shell I had become, to be found again in God’s love, and to finally begin to piece myself into a whole new masterpiece.
Not quite the old me, not quite the new version I was expecting, but an ever-evolving, budding, blooming, and expanding rose.
This is the story I will be sharing with you…
X Emma