Untamed

Key Two: Be Still and Know

Several years ago, very early one morning, I found myself unable to sleep again. It was 3:00 A.M., and I was wild-eyed, shaky, flailing, grasping for answers like a drowning woman desperate for air. I had just typed these words into my Google search window:

What should I do if my husband is a cheater but also an amazing dad?

I stared at that question and thought: Well. I have hit some sort of new rock bottom. I’ve just asked the internet to make the most important and personal decision of my life. Why do I trust everyone else on Earth more than I trust myself? WHERE THE HELL IS MY SELF? When did I lose touch with her?

I clicked on article after article anyway. Distressingly, everyone thought I should do something different. The religious experts insisted that a good Christian would stay. Feminists argued that a strong woman would leave. Parenting articles preached that a good mother thinks only of what is best for her children. All of those differing opinions meant that I quite literally could not please everyone. That was a relief. When a woman finally learns that pleasing the world is impossible, she becomes free to learn how to please herself.

I looked at all of those contradictory opinions and thought: If there is, in fact, an objective right or wrong way to handle this, why do all of these people have such different ideas about what a person should do? I had an epiphany: It must be that should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad—they’re not wild. They’re not real. They’re just culturally constructed, artificial, ever-changing cages created to maintain institutions. It struck me that in every family, culture, or religion, ideas of right and wrong are the hot cattle prods, the barking sheepdogs that keep the masses in the herd. They are the bars that keep us caged.

I decided that if I kept doing the “right” thing, I would spend my life following someone else’s directions instead of my own. I didn’t want to live my life without living my life. I wanted to make my own decision as a free woman, from my soul, not my training. But the problem was, I didn’t know how.

A few weeks later, I opened a card from a friend that said, in bold, capital, thick black lettering:

BE STILL AND KNOW.

I’d read that verse many times before, but it struck me freshly this time. It didn’t say “Poll your friends and know” or “Read books by experts and know” or “Scour the internet and know.” It suggested a different approach to knowing: Just. Stop.

StopMovingStopTalkingStopSearchingStopPanickingStopFlailing.

If you just stop doing, you’ll start knowing.

This seemed like magical nonsense, but desperate women take desperate measures. I decided to experiment. After the kids left for school, I shut myself in my closet, sat down on a towel, closed my eyes, and did nothing but breathe. At first, each ten-minute session felt ten hours long. I checked my phone every few moments, planned my grocery lists, and mentally redecorated my living room. The only things I seemed to “know” on that floor were that I was hungry and itchy and suddenly desperate to fold laundry and reorganize my pantry. I was an input junkie thrown into detox. I was tempted to quit every second, but I was stern with myself: Ten minutes a day is not too long to spend finding yourself, Glennon. For God’s sake, you spend eighty minutes a day finding your keys.

After a few weeks, like a gymnast who is able to stretch deeper after each training, I began to feel myself dropping lower during each closet session. Eventually I sank deep enough to find a new level inside me that I’d never known existed. This place is underneath; low, deep, quiet, still. There are no voices there, not even my own. All I can hear down there is my breath. It was as though I’d been drowning and in my panic I had been gasping for air, calling for rescue, and flailing on the surface. But what I really needed to do to save myself was let myself sink. It struck me that this is why we say to people, “Calm down.” Because beneath the noise of the pounding, swirling surf is a place where all is quiet and clear.

Since the chaos stills in this deep, I could sense something there I was not able to sense on the surface. It was like that silent chamber in Denmark—one of the quietest places in the world—where people can actually hear and feel their own blood circulating. There, in the deep, I could sense something circulating inside me. It was a Knowing.

I can know things down at this level that I can’t on the chaotic surface. Down here, when I pose a question about my life—in words or abstract images—I sense a nudge. The nudge guides me toward the next precise thing, and then, when I silently acknowledge the nudge—it fills me. The Knowing feels like warm liquid gold filling my veins and solidifying just enough to make me feel steady, certain.

What I learned (even though I am afraid to say it) is that God lives in this deepness inside me. When I recognize God’s presence and guidance, God celebrates by flooding me with warm liquid gold.

Every day, I returned to the closet, sat down on the floor littered with T-shirts and jeans, and I practiced sinking. The Knowing would meet me in the deep and nudge me toward the next right thing, one thing at a time. That was how I began to know what to do next. That was how I began to walk through my life more clearly, solid and steady.

A year later, I found myself in the middle of a work meeting, sitting at a long conference table. We were discussing an important decision that had to be made, and the team was looking to me for leadership. I felt uncertain. I was about to fall back into my old way of knowing: looking outward for acceptance, permission, and consensus. But when I glanced over and caught sight of the door to the supply closet, I remembered my new way of knowing.

I wondered if the team would mind if I excused myself to spend a few minutes in that closet. Instead, I took a deep breath, and, with eyes wide open, I turned inward and tried to sink right there at the table. It worked. I sensed the nudge, and as soon as I acknowledged it, I was filled with warm liquid gold. I rose back to the surface, smiled, and said, “I know what to do.” I calmly and assuredly told the others the thing I wanted us to do. The panic in the room settled. Everyone breathed and seemed instantly relaxed and steady. We moved on.

God came out of the closet, and now I can take God anywhere.

I now take orders only from my own Knowing. Whether I’m presented with a work, personal, or family decision—a monumental or tiny decision—whenever uncertainty rises, I sink. I sink beneath the swirling surf of words, fear, expectations, conditioning, and advice—and feel for the Knowing. I sink a hundred times a day. I have to, because the Knowing never reveals a five-year plan. It feels to me like a loving, playful guide, like the reason it will only reveal the next right thing is that it wants me to come back again and again, because it wants to do life together. After many years, I’m developing a relationship with this Knowing: We are learning to trust each other.

When I talk like this, my wife raises her eyebrow and asks, “Aren’t you just talking to yourself down there?” Maybe. If what I’ve found in the deep is just my self—if what I’ve learned is not how to commune with God but how to commune with myself—if who I have learned to trust is not God but myself—and if, for the rest of my life, no matter how lost I get, I know exactly where and how to find myself again—well, then. That is certainly enough of a miracle for me.

Why do we worry about what to call the Knowing, instead of sharing with each other how to call the Knowing? I know many people who have found this level inside them and live solely by it. Some call the Knowing God or wisdom or intuition or source or deepest self. I have a friend with some serious God issues, and she calls it Sebastian. A God by any other name is an equal miracle and relief. It doesn’t matter what we call our Knowing. What matters—if we want to live our singular shooting star of a life—is that we call it.

I have learned that if I want to rise, I have to sink first. I have to search for and depend upon the voice of inner wisdom instead of voices of outer approval. This saves me from living someone else’s life. It also saves me a hell of a lot of time and energy. I just do the next thing the Knowing guides me toward, one thing at a time. I don’t ask permission first, which is just such a grown-up way to live. The best part is this: The Knowing is beyond and beneath language, so I have no language to use to translate it to anyone. Since it doesn’t use words to explain itself to me, I quit using words to explain myself to the world. This is the most revolutionary thing a woman can do: the next precise thing, one thing at a time, without asking permission or offering explanation. This way of life is thrilling.

I understand now that no one else in the world knows what I should do. The experts don’t know, the ministers, the therapists, the magazines, the authors, my parents, my friends, they don’t know. Not even the folks who love me the most. Because no one has ever lived or will ever live this life I am attempting to live, with my gifts and challenges and past and people. Every life is an unprecedented experiment. This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been. There is no map. We are all pioneers.

I’ve got this second key tattooed on my wrist:

Be Still

It’s my daily reminder that, if I am willing to sit in the stillness with myself, I always know what to do. That the answers are never out there. They are as close as my breath and as steady as my heartbeat. All I have to do is stop flailing, sink below the surface, and feel for the nudge and the gold. Then I have to trust it, no matter how illogical or scary the next right thing seems. Because the more consistently, bravely, and precisely I follow the inner Knowing, the more precise and beautiful my outer life becomes. The more I live by my own Knowing, the more my life becomes my own and the less afraid I become. I trust that the Knowing will go with me wherever I go, nudging me toward the next thing, one thing at a time, guiding me all the way home. HOW TO KNOW:

Moment of uncertainty arises.

Breathe, turn inward, sink.

Feel around for the Knowing.

Do the next thing it nudges you toward.

Let it stand. (Don’t explain.)

Repeat forever.

(For the rest of your life: Continue to shorten the gap between the Knowing and the doing.)