The night before taking the train from Connecticut to New York City for the next leg of my book tour for What’s Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend,I discovered that I was going to be in NYC for six days and that, basically, I wasn’t doing any book tour events the whole time. Unlike the first week of my book tour, when I was triple booked every day with college speaking engagements, book signings and media engagements, my New York schedule was strangely and disappointingly open. In a city of eight million people, I didn’t even have a single bookstore signing scheduled.
Now I’ve been to New York six times since March. I have peeps here. They’ve all been emailing and tweeting and Facebooking about how they can come support me on my book tour. And we didn’t have a single event scheduled. To say that this resulted in a bit of a meltdown is a bit of an understatement. It was more like a dark night of the soul.
I won’t get into the details of why this happened and who dropped which ball, but suffice it to say this was not what I expected. When I imagined the New York leg of my book tour, I was thinking I’d be on the Today Show and I’d speak to college women at NYU for the Ask The Girlfriend Gyno Q&A, and I’d do a book signing at some hip indie bookstore. I didn’t think I’d be sitting around for six days, twiddling my thumbs.
Rallying the Sisterhood
Suffice it to say, I found myself getting pretty swampy. Fortunately for me, I spent my first New York day with Regena Thomashauer at the Pussy Palace, the headquarters for Mama Gena’s School of Womanly Arts. I told Mama Gena the whole story, and next thing I knew, she was mobilizing the sisterhood — sending out an email, calling her media contacts, and reaching out to Dr. Christiane Northrup, a fellow Sister Goddess, OB/GYN, and author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, who wrote the foreword to What’s Up Down There? and has been mentoring me through this journey to help empower women and discover myself in the process.
Mama Gena was all fired up. She grabbed my hand and started marching down the street to the nearest bookstore, where she planned to demand that they put my book in the window and schedule a book signing for me STAT. She was thinking that, between she and Christiane, they would just call the powers-that-be on their speed dial and they’d have my NYC schedule booked up lickety-split.
While she and Christiane spoke, Regena nodded. And nodded some more. And then she hung up the phone and said, “Well, Christiane didn’t say what I expected her to say, but if you’re open to hearing this, I think I can help you.” I agreed to be open.
Less Sperm, More Egg
“Well,” Regena said, “Remember that Christiane is more sorceress than doctor. And remember that she cares about you. But here’s what she said. ‘Venus is in Scorpio, so we’re all in the underworld right now. But that’s not the only thing. Lissa is brilliant at DOING, but she needs to learn how to RECEIVE. Lissa needs to be less sperm, more egg. This is Lissa’s dark night of the soul, and while I might be able to help her, I don’t want to keep her from learning this lesson.’”
Christiane is RIGHT!
When I heard that, something in me just clicked. She’s SO right! When I get stressed out (and even when I’m relaxed), my tendency is to DO. But RECEIVE? Not so much. Sure, I write a lot about asking the Uni-verse for what I need and I believe in Purple Kangaroos, but how many times do I fall back on my natural tendency to effort my way towards what I want? Uh, yeah. That would be me.
So I wrote a letter to Christiane and thanked her for her eggy wisdom.
She wrote back and said, “Of COURSE you are a do-er. There’s NO WAY to get through a surgical residency if you’re not. But then, in order to thrive, we find that what got us to where we are will kill us if we continue!! And you’re coming up on the developmental stage where the doing will really bite you in the ass if you don’t learn to receive.”
And that just grabbed me in the heart. YES! YES! And once again, YES! Bless you, dearest Christiane!
What No Longer Serves Me
DOING has been an adaptive mechanism for me. And at one point in my life, it served me well and allowed me to survive a traumatic education that gave me the gift of being where I am now. But this adaptation no longer serves me, and it’s time for me to let it go.
So I talked to Regena about it and that night, she invited me to join her Inner Circle (60+ women who really go deep into supporting each other and themselves). And it was exactly what the doctor ordered. And guess what the session was about? Yup. You guessed it. Learning to RECEIVE. Bless you, Regena for helping me put Christiane’s lesson into oh-so-flowy, receiving action (uh..inaction).
Within 12 hours, five amazing things flowed my way. And what did I DO to make them happen? Absolutely nothing. I just floated around New York with my eggy energy, and I let the sperm come to me.
And since I decided to stop feeling victimized and start just deriving pleasure from whatever the moment has to offer, I’ve not only been receiving blessing after beautiful blessing, but I’ve been having FUN for the first time on my book tour. Now that’s what I’m talking about.
What about you? Are you so busy DOING that you don’t allow for the RECEIVING? Are you too much sperm and not enough egg? Can you have enough faith in yourself, the Uni-verse, and the process that you can take a deep breath and just surrender?
Egging you and me on,
Lissa Rankin
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Lissa Rankin, MD: Creator of the health and wellness communities LissaRankin.com and OwningPink.com, author of Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself (Hay House, 2013), TEDx speaker, and Health Care Evolutionary. Join her newsletter list for free guidance on healing yourself, and check her out on Twitter and Facebook.
