The rain pelted against the windows as I leaned back on the pillows in bed.  I didn't feel like getting up. My excuse was that I had a cold, but the real  reason was that something was terribly wrong.

"You have no reason to be unhappy," I said to myself sternly. "True," I
responded. I was blessed with a loving new husband, healthy children, and a
company that had been brought back from the dead. So what was this sadness?
I pushed a little further. This disquietude had a voice; I wondered if I
dared listen.

The internal dialogue continued with the thought that I'd been trying to
avoid hearing: "You had to have things your way, and now you've messed up
your life."

What the voice was referring to was that I had been impulsive falling in
love too quickly after my divorce. I wanted my life to go back to normal, to
put the scary, lonely times behind me. I wanted to pick up the pieces of my
life as if nothing had happened. It dawned on me that the whole scenario had
been about what I'd needed. I paused for a moment to think about the man I
loved. "He loves me with his whole heart, and he's a good man," I thought.
He came into my life when my company was a shambles after the divorce, and
he rescued me-and Stillpoint-from the brink of disaster. I felt I owed him
everything.

I took a breath. "Yes, I owed him everything," I thought. As I continued my
internal dialogue, I realized I had assumed that, by marrying Errol, I would
no longer need to face my deepest fears. Loving him was my escape from
having to look at the parts of me that I didn't like or understand. With
lead in my heart, I realized that what I had succeeded in doing was to give
away my self-determination. I had traded security for learning how to take
care of myself. I hadn't been true to myself-I'd been true only to my need
to be loved at any cost. I knew that I'd missed the opportunity because I'd
been so afraid and unprepared to take care of myself.

Errol was my knight in shining armor, and I was the damsel in distress." But
my personal distress wasn't fixed as easily as that of my formerly ailing
company. I felt I'd betrayed myself. I'd taken the path of least resistance
and never put my courage on the line to become strong on my own. Now I was
stuck in the same old constrictive dynamic where my every thought and action
felt controlled. I needed to grow up and be a woman. I hadn't realized how
desperate I felt about our relationship until I put it together this
morning.

"What should I do?" I asked out loud. What I heard was that we needed to
trust that our love for each other would bear the weight of being honest
about our feelings. We needed to stop enabling each other emotionally and
start seeing each other with all our imperfections and sharp edges. We
needed the emotional distance to develop a new way of being together. Now I
understood what my being rescued meant. The question was: what could I do
about it? I felt honor-bound to remain the "damsel" Errol had married.

It was fine to think these things, but there was no way I was up to doing
anything about it. I wondered what God thought of me and of this situation.
"He's probably totally disgusted with me!" I thought. Deep down, I realized
that this was the true source of my pain. As women, we need to learn to care
for ourselves and to take our needs seriously so that we can shift the focus
of our relationships. We don't have to push away those we love, but we do
need to assume control of our own destiny. Loved ones, especially
well-meaning husbands, want to control our lives in order to keep us from
harm. But we must all venture into the world and stumble around finding our
own songs, our own words, and our own creative expressions. I'd been
sheltered my entire life. I'd never had an opportunity to discover the
borders of my personality. The more I thought about my dilemma, the more I
realized I needed to ask God for help. I was facing a hurdle too high to
jump alone and too fearsome to even consider without help.

"This is an impossible situation," I thought. With a deep sigh I turned off
my thinking and stared out the window. Babe, our audacious tawny-colored
cat, leaped up on the bed, knocking down a small book from the nearby stack.
It fell into my lap. As I picked up the book I saw that it was a collection
of stories about an East Indian spiritual teacher named Sathya Sai Baba. I
didn't remember being given the book. I tried to remember where I'd heard
that name before. Then I recalled that my friend and former Stillpoint
business partner had sent me some sacred ash that this teacher manifested
for healing and spiritual help.

I opened the book and began to read the stories of people's miraculous and
life-shifting experiences in the presence of this Master. I felt strangely
familiar with this teacher, even though I'd never laid eyes on him, and
generally I was suspicious of Gurus. I read voraciously. As I came to the
last story, I felt a strange sensation in the pit of my stomach, as if I'd
stumbled onto something so profound I couldn't quite get wrapped around it
emotionally.

The phone rang. I tried to ignore it. Reluctantly, I got out of bed and
moved to the telephone on my desk. My 83-year-old mother, who lived a
half-hour away from me in a neighboring town, was on the other end of the
line. After reassuring me that everything was fine, she said. "I was just
sitting here when I got this overwhelming urge to call you and tell you,
'God knows, God Knows!' Does that mean anything to you?" she asked. She was
saying that God had told her to call me and tell me that he knows my grief,
that he heard me.