Taking The Holy Risks.
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I learned to swim at age nine from Nick Nicholas after over 20 lessons with other unsuccessful teachers.
I refused to put my face in the water because I knew that was how people drowned. Nick Nicholas, in his bright red swim trunks was different. He told me I didn’t have to put my face in and taught me to swim all the other ways first.
I paddled like a dog, crawled, clutched a kickboard — always with my head high above the water.
Eventually, his patience and the strong chlorine fumes wore me down. I practiced the breathing, face in, face out, stroking and kicking my way down the lane. He cheered for me.
Maybe he was my first love.
Sometimes you take divine risks that you later learn were alarm clocks ringing to awaken you to another way of living. These are sacred risks that jettison you to the next level, the next layer of your evolution.
If we did not take them, we would stay constricted and dissatisfied. These risks sometimes involve letting go of things that matter. Or asking for what we want and knowing that rejection may even be inevitable.
On some days, it’s about allowing people to see us when we are broken or asking for help in a way that feels excruciating.
In some moments, it’s about starting so small that it feels pointless. Here, look at this. Just for today, I will. Please hire me.
When we take that risk, the electric tip of our spine reminds us that we should have done it a long time ago, but of course, we were too terrified. These are the risks that talk to our nervous system, waving their hands around like the sky is tumbling.
They make it feel like the tiger is right there in the room — sleek, orange and frightening.
A holy risk gives you that ‘oh-shit’ flutter in the squishy part of your gut when you enter the dark forest.
You lit the forbidden candle to look upon the God’s face. You sneaked upstairs to find the secret spinning wheel. You stole the golden fleece. A holy risk unfolds the story further.
You can’t go back to the way it was.
Not every risk is holy. There is a different flavor to the stupid risks. There was nothing sacred about driving home from the pub at age 21 after way too many beers. It was a lazy choice.
Maybe the pre-frontal cortex of my brain wasn’t quite developed, or maybe I believed I needed my car in the morning to get to work.
Maybe I didn’t care enough about the other people on the road, trying to get to their homes. I convinced myself that I wouldn’t get pulled over, as if receiving a DWI were the greatest consequence. Sometimes our thinking is only in the short term. I was lucky that nothing irrevocable happened.
But luck is not the kind of holy I’m talking about now.
Stupid risks might teach us a lot if they don’t kill us, but holy risks put the wide cracks into the safety armor. Holy risks put us face-to-face with everything that makes us tremble. We smell the difference. If we listen, our bodies tell us.
If we ask for help, everything in the world conspires to shove us headfirst right into that place we’ve been avoiding.
I will.
I quit.
Hello.
Goodbye.
I forgive you.
I am leaving.
It’s time to begin.
I commit to this.
What is the most holy risk you have ever taken?
Maybe it was when I left the relationship that was never going to work — even though I loved hard, even though I wanted it more than I could breathe, even though it staged the same crimes from my childhood over and over again which felt so right.
Maybe it was when I stuffed my 1990 Toyota Tercel with mixed tapes, cardboard boxes and my dog and caravanned with five close friends to move 1300 miles from Kentucky to the watermelon-colored mountains of New Mexico.
Maybe it was when I stopped letting people step on me and found my No.
Maybe it was when I asked the familiar-faced cashier at the food co-op if she knew anyone looking for a roommate. We lived together in three different houses over the next six years and made each one a home together.
Maybe it was making the choice to attend acupuncture school, diving into the study of a mysterious medicine from China to make my living sticking needles in people to help them heal.
Maybe it was when I traveled to the UK on a whim and stumbled into the hills of Glastonbury, where I first heard the myth of Rhiannon and her birds that sing between the worlds and her magical white faery horse and the ways that our wounds can become wonders.
Maybe it was when I said farewell to my long time friend — tobacco — for good.
Maybe it was when I took the trail marked Difficult and found the cliffs marked Dangerous. Those dangerous cliffs overlooked the whole emerald valley. They gave me hours alone in the woods to write, look and weep, listen to nothing and smell the blessed emptiness.
Maybe it was saying No to radiation treatment against the advice of my aggressive doctor, and banishing the cancer cells in my uterus anyway.
Maybe it was when I taught my first workshop and no one laughed or pointed.
Maybe it’s fighting for deep permanent love and staying even when it’s uncertain and no one gets to be right all the time. Maybe it’s writing because I have to, even if no one else asks me to do it or pays me to do it ever again.
Maybe it’s asking for initiation and getting it. Maybe it’s not having children and loving so many who did not come from me.
Maybe it’s writing the proposal for my first book to go with my agent to the New York publishing houses for sale.
Maybe it’s creating home again and again, finding the corners of the Earth that sing to me where I can teach and learn and then returning to my my loves, my tribe and building a life that requires my full presence.
There is a sacred risk necessary to your life right now, knocking from the inside, incessantly calling you to the threshold of your next expansion.
Do you know its name yet?
*****
Gerri Ravyn Stanfield is an innovative acupuncturist, an inventive author and international educator dedicated to liberating the super powers within each of us. She practices acupuncture in Portland, Oregon with a focus on helping people survive cancer, chronic pain and traumatic experiences. She works with Acupuncturists Without Borders to build world healing exchange programs in Nepal. She uses her background in traditional medicines, neurobiology, psychology, theatre and many forms of creative expression to coax more of the extraordinary into the world through the cracks in Western civilization. Ravyn is an aspiring cultural alchemist, writing to transform the heartbreak of living in our modern world and reveal the gold in what seems worthless. She creates ceremony and ritual art, weaving poetry and music into contemporary offerings of the human imagination. She designs workshops and trainings for emerging leaders and healers in the US, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. You could contact her via her website.
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