BoomerGirl Diary

Two months before I turned 35, my boyfriend of several years dumped me for a bleached-blonde, 20-something law student. Keep in mind that this was about the same time the single woman/asteroid study came out. You know the one I’m talking about? The one that publicly revealed that women over 30 have roughly the same odds of getting married as they do of being sideswiped by an asteroid.

After several days of lying in bed and staring at my ceiling fan, I finally came to the conclusion that I had two choices. I could either slit my veins in a warm bath or sign up for a month-long work-study program at Esalen, the self-improvement mecca in California. Knowing how my roommate at that time despised messes, I opted for Esalen.

On the second night there, I met a handsome former surfer named Stan who convinced me to spend the evening with him listening to the Pacific Ocean crashing against the Big Sur cliffs. We accidentally fell asleep in one of the massage rooms at the hot springs, huddled together to stay warm. Not that it worked. April winds off the Pacific can be ferocious, and even with our combined body heat, we practically froze to death. Come to think of it, it would certainly have solved my messy suicide problem.

If Stan hadn’t been so cute and I hadn’t been so desperate to get over the jerk who tossed me aside like some used bag of Doritos, I probably would have excused myself and gone back to my insulated sleeping bag. But I stayed until the next morning when “the dawn’s early light” revealed that there was a space heater next to the mat where we lay the whole time. A space heater that we could have turned on and used to keep warm!!

In a nutshell, that’s what this column is going to be about. There’s a space heater or rather an energy force that’s right inside us and most of us haven’t bothered to turn it on. Instead, we lay here freezing, unhappy, and believing there’s nothing we can do about our sad, desperate lives. Most of us are totally oblivious to the fact that the space heater even exists. We think of life as a random crapshoot and believe we don’t have a lot of control over what happens. C’est la vie.

Those of us who do know about the space heater (ie, the internal energy source that could totally heat us up, make us happy, and give us meaningful lives) don’t understand how it works. Oh sure, we’ve heard rumors that praying turns it on, that good works keeps it going, but nobody seems to know for sure. This religion tells us to tithe. That one suggests meditation. The next one convinces us to give up our earthly belongings and trek to the Himalayas. So which is it? Is God really that vague and mysterious? And why does the spiritual force only work sometimes. God at best is finicky and fickle, certainly nothing you can bank on.

Or is he? What I’d like to suggest is that God — or what I like to call spiritual energy — is 100-percent reliable. It works every time like a math principle or Newton’s 2nd Law of Physics. Two plus two always equals four. Blue and yellow mixed together always make green. Balls dropped off roofs always fall. Thoughts and consciousness always create matter.

When a kindergartner bails off the monkey bars, the principle of gravity works even though he has no clue what gravity is or even how to pronounce it. Likewise, spiritual principles are at work in your life whether you understand them, can pronounce them, or even want them.

If you take a standard 8 1/2-by-11-inch piece of paper and drop it from shoulder level, it will fall to the ground. But if you take that same piece of paper and fold it just right, you can sail it all the way across your average Burger King.

The paper still weighs the same. It’s still the same color, the same texture. But by applying the principles of velocity, force, and lift, you make what we used to be an “impossible thing” possible.

Seven-hundred-thousand pound planes now fly through the air, not because we changed the law of gravity, but because Wilbur and Orville Wright learned higher laws that transcend it.

You can transcend anything if you come to understand and apply spiritual principles.

In this column, you’ll discover that the world operates according to universal spiritual principles that, like gravity, influence your life at every moment. And here’s the kicker. These spiritual principles are more profound than physical laws and affect your life whether you’re aware of their existence or not.

By becoming aware of these laws and utilizing them in your favor, you can fling wide the doors of creativity, love, and joy.

Any light bulb with a working filament and an electric current has the potential to light up a room. It doesn’t matter whether that light bulb is big or small, round or square, yellow or white. It doesn’t matter where it’s been or how it was used in the past. If a light is plugged to its source, it’s going to dispense light.

Through the conscious and deliberate approach to spirituality that I’m going to present in this column, you’ll learn how to stay plugged in to your source and how to dramatically improve every area of your life.

The other thing you’re going to find in this column is confessions from my own spiritual journey. I’d like to say that I figured out how this all works and that it has been smooth sailing ever since. But I’d be lying, competing with George Bush for biggest whopper of the 21st century.

I’ll be discussing the spiritual books I’ve been reading and hopefully inspiring you to take your own spiritual journey. To my way of thinking, it’s the only journey worth taking.

Good luck, my fellow spiritual princesses. Until we meet again….