Hi Jodie! I’m afraid this will be lengthy. I enjoy your writing but must respectfully disagree with the archangels on this point:

When you are naturally gifted in something, it is easy for you. It requires little effort on your part, and mostly, you enjoy doing it.

I am a naturally gifted writer (throwing a sentence together is about as easy for me as breathing) and it requires very little effort. AND I enjoy doing it.

The problem is that writing comes so easily to me that I don’t trust my own voice. I used to be a writing coach, and my slogan was “Everyone has a writing voice. Everyone’s voice is true.”

I had absolutely no idea, none of my mentors in my MFA program in creative writing had any idea, and none of my whipsmart fellow writers had any idea, that my writing was anything less than the true expression of my heart.

That was over 20 years ago. I didn’t realize that I was trying to make myself be this writer whose image was stuck in my brain: That is, published.

I’ve never tried channeling but I’ve done 2-way prayer, where you ask God a question and then write what God speaks to and through you. The stuff I got was loving and sometimes profound, but I couldn’t trust it. I became aware that it was all stuff I was writing to myself. The whole process was just too seamless. There were never any surprises or burning bushes or (if I may) angelic appearances that made me quake in my socks.

It was actually boring. Not that excitement means much per se, but if entities outside our 3D world do speak to us, wouldn’t they, at minimum, be confusing at least some of the time?

A better word might be confounding. I hope (now that I’m back to writing again) to be confounded, stymied, staggered, and flabbergasted by the process. Otherwise isn’t writing kind of like smiling at yourself in the mirror?