Stollen With a Kiss, Elizabeth Gilbert #emergingwomenconference2013

by Tracee Sioux

There was an invocation and a calling forth of the Divine Feminine at the first annual Emerging Women Conference held in Boulder this month. The A-list agenda carried the full range of feminine essences from the Earthy Maternal Mama vibe of Gaia, the fierce force of Kali, the sensual kiss of Aphrodite, the vulnerability of Persephone peppered with the business savvy and entrepreneurial BadAssery of the modern woman. A revolutionary love was called forth that will no doubt have a ripple effect and change the world.

The perception-shifting line up of world changers included Brene´ Brown, Sera Beak, Elizabeth Gilbert, Eve Ensler, Alanis Morrisette, Tami Simon, Tara Mohr, Christine Kane and the music of my new favorite artist, Katie Gray.

My intention, set during a community-creating Power Circle exercise at the beginning of the conference, was to keep my heart open and stay present to this amazing opportunity.

By the time I got to Elizabeth Gilbert my heart was so cracked open by Brene´ Brown and Sera Beak, I could feel my Soul moving the furniture around and reorganizing her selfness. Old paradigms were tossed out to make room for new illuminating concepts and ideas that had just been conceived in some of the most influential and brilliant spiritual thinkers and do-ers of our time.

As a writer and artist and paradigm-shifter myself, one of my favorite talks was by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love.

When Elizabeth Gilbert talks about creativity I get such intense goose bumps that I can feel the hair on my legs grow. Liz, as she prefers to be called, shined a bright light on a creative phenomenon that has stumped many a writer, artist, inventor, thinker and every other person who has had a great idea that they didn’t get around to.

How did another person “steal” my idea? 

You know that moment when you walk into a book store and you see the novel you’ve been playing around with in your head for a decade . . . but never got around to writing. Or when you go into the baby aisle and you see that, in fact, someone else has created the precise nipple that you had known needed to be on the market back when your seven year old was a baby.

Ideas want to be manifest. They are always floating around looking for the most open place to land. They are looking for someone who is willing to take them. It’s as if they are going from person to person asking, “Are you my mother?” 

If you don’t manifest them, because you got busy or didn’t find the resources or were distracted with other things, they go find another mother. It’s not personal. The idea will only stay with you so long before it will go in search of another mother, someone who will bring them into the world. 

Liz related how she had gone through three book ideas, only to find that someone else manifested them before she could bring them into form. The most hair-raising phenomenon was a story she related about an impossible “duplicate” novel about a spinster going to the Amazon, which she had researched and intended to write before her Brazilian lover was randomly deported. She tucked the book away into a box when she left the country and began to work on her sequel to Eat Pray Love, Committed.

When her life settled she went back to her book and it was dead. The idea held no spark for her. It was a lifeless shell of what was once magic. Around that time she met Ann Patchett at a conference where the two shared a quick spontaneous kiss. After which a sweet, old-fashioned literary friendship developed. Then came the day when Ann Patchett shared her latest novel with Liz and the two of them were shocked and baffled that “the honorable Ann Patchett,” was writing exactly the same novel that Liz had put away in the box when she abandoned it to write Committed. While the two had never discussed that novel, and in fact Liz had discussed it with very few people, they deducted that the idea had hopped from Liz to Ann in their brief kiss the first time they met.

The idea jumped from one writer to another—from one conduit, who didn’t birth the idea—to another open conduit who might.

Liz knew her audience. This was a room full of highly-motivated, brilliant and high-achieving women. These women were open to the great ideas and any idea would be wise to land on one of them, because the odds are good that these women will find the resources to manifest an idea they have been gifted with.

Yet. These were also ambitious women, where there is potential for envy born of a misunderstanding about the ownership of ideas.

I could have been angry at Ann Patchett for “stealing” my idea, Liz says. I could have been really upset that the Universe had given me ideas for THREE books that someone else had already written. 

But, I insist on living in an abundant Universe, in which there are plenty of great ideas. I was following the trail of the Universe and I knew that in all of these book ideas, lay MY book, The Signature of All Things. 

I went back to where the trail was hot. And I got another book idea that had components of all of these book ideas, which were seeds for my next novel.  

An Idea’s purpose is to be made manifest, to be born into the world. It’s not personal, Liz says.

When that exquisite feeling of inspiration comes and asks you to be it’s mother, and if you dare to say yes, you must commit to giving birth to it. If you don’t, don’t be upset when someone else does. There is an abundance of ideas and when one leaves you, another, if you make space for it to land, will come ask you to be its mother, explained Liz.

You have not heard the last of the Emerging Women Conference. This was such a heart open experience for the women who attended, organized and presented at this conference that I know it opened a Vortex in the Universe, where a little more of the Feminine Divine filtered into our planet. The Sacred Mother of Inspiration washed those present with more brilliant ideas than we presently know we were gifted with. They will manifest, rolling like ripples, across the globe, being birthed into form over the next year or three.

If this sounds like a joy-gasm to you, to borrow a term from my friend Mary Michael Justice, then you should watch out for next year’s Emerging Women Conference, slated for New York City.

Goddess willing, I will be there, soaking in a radical, revolutionary and healing love, which our planet so desperately needs, and plucking brilliant ideas from the ether.

(These are not direct quotes, but paraphrases, as I was sitting in the second row awe-struck with a vibrating Soul who was giving her a standing ovation for the duration of her speech and thus could not take direct quote notes.)

Tracee Sioux is a Law of Attraction Coach, at www.traceesioux.com  She is the author of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories. Contact her at traceesioux@gmail.com.