Episode 9 – Wendy’s “Enchanted Path”

Hi, everybody, welcome to another episode of Spiritual Cake, the podcast where we talk about anything and everything that has to do with that next level of humanity we call spirituality. My name is Clint Hufft. And with me is Wendy Dahl, Wendy..

Wendy  0:19

Hello.

Clint  0:20

I’m sorry, that’s gonna go on my answering machine. Just the Wendy Dahl Hello. That’s great. Okay, if you’re listening to us for the very first time, I just want to explain the kind of the lay of the land. Neither Wendy or I, neither nor neither Wendy nor I are ordained clergy. We don’t run a church. We don’t have a congregation. We don’t have masters of divinity. We are two people that are very curious and open to the level of spirituality and as it relates to this thing called a human being. And so we’ve had a number of excellent discussions.

Wendy before we hit the record button, you brought up something that I think is fascinating, and it’s called the enchanted path. Okay, dive right in.

Wendy  1:05

So, you know, as an adult, you look back on your life and you think, how did I even get here? How am I in this position? And I do that when I’m being grateful. And being grateful and having gratitude is a big part of who I am. And to recognize the things that have come before to bring me to this place. And so I refer to that, particularly when I’m speaking from stages about the enchanted path.

And so my particular enchanted path goes in many different directions, but it all leads to one thing, and that’s where I am today. And so this is how the enchanted path works. And I’m just going to use the timeline of my work path.

So I get hired right out of high school to work in house ad agency for a large corporation that’s in the expansion phase. And it has five different presidents in the six years that I’m there. I’m doing all kinds of work that 19 year old, 18 year old wouldn’t even fathom that they’re doing.  I was doing it.

From there, married a DJ, got into weddings, worked with a top wedding planner, had no idea she was the top wedding planner, just started working with her. I was with her for a few years and then I started my own business and then my business skyrocketed.

From there, I got into customer experience, which is the formulation of creating happiness, which moved me into this area and podcasts and then we spoke on the last episode of what happened with this position that came up with health clinics. They’re also in the same expansion phase where it pulls in my skill set from working back when I was 19. And also my skill set from being an event planner into that one job or the job that I have now.

And so then that’s just one line that you can follow the same thing can follow in relationships, the same thing can follow in pretty much every aspect of your life. But going through each one I remember thinking too much Myself, okay, this is fun, or this is hard, or this is a challenge, and then not realizing the full value of it until I got to the next step. And then I turned around and I looked and I thought, Oh my gosh, without that I couldn’t have been doing this. And without all of the things that have led me to here, I wouldn’t be the right person to open that next door and say let’s do what’s next.

That is what the enchanted path is. It’s essentially an assimilation of everything that’s happened to you up to a certain point or up to today to make you who you are.

Clint  4:36

Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I’ve used different language, but I like the same concept of one thing leads to the next which leads to the next. For example, meeting my wife. I met my wife on an airplane. And this isn’t necessarily in the spiritual plane, I guess. Well, it does bring me spiritual happiness.

In the wedding industry, I’ve spoken to a lot of people And they all agree that if one little tiny thing was different in their history, they never would have met. And that’s certainly true for me in terms of meeting my wife on an airplane.

I think back and at the moment when a particular thing happens or does not happen, and I want to say there’s regret, or there’s grief, or whatever it is this frustration in regards to that thing that did or did not happen. But it’s like you said, I love the analogy of when you stop and take a look back at your history, that you can see the thread that connects opportunities and education. Education in terms of personal education or whatever it is, that leads you to where you are today.

The thing that’s kind of tricky, I think for a lot of people though, is if they are frustrated because they had a different path in mind. Which reminds me of that John Lennon, quote, Of Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.

I like the idea of the enchanted path. Because even though enchanted, some people may have negative connotations to that specific word, whether it could be a spiritual path, or it could be a divine path or whatever word you want to attach to it. The important thing is that we’re talking about the same concept of, of how one thing leads to another leads to another and you can see why you got here today, and what you bring with you in terms of a treasure chest of experience? Does that make sense?

Wendy  6:38

It makes perfect sense. And I’d like to address the negative aspects, like you said, how sometimes your path will have glitches. And sometimes they’re epic failures. And sometimes they’re things that you think, how am I even going to get through this?

So for me, obviously, when I got married, I did not have any intention of getting divorced. In fact, I work very hard to keep my marriage going even at the end, where we were in counseling and doing all the things that couples try to do to salvage the relationship. And so for me, that was a great failure, particularly on the spiritual side of things, because when you’re Mormon, you don’t get divorced. You are married for time and all eternity. And so it was going against everything that was in me.

However, there was also that part of me that that existed where it is, men are that they might have joy. And I was not joyful. And so going through that divorce, and living through all of the challenges that I faced, not only with having a dad not in the home, but also within my religious community and the social community. I was a wedding planner getting a divorce. It’s just, you don’t speak about things like that, especially back then. I mean, we didn’t even mention that we were mothers, or we couldn’t tell our clients that we are mothers it. I’m so grateful today that moms can do that where they can say I’m a stay at home mom, I work out of my house. And I have this business and I’m proud of women for taking that step.

However, we’ll get back to the challenge part. Without those challenges without all of those counseling sessions where I was learning how to communicate better, and learning how to be in a better relationship and how to be my best for my next person that I’m with. I’m in a great relationship now. We’ve been together a year and a half, probably getting married sometime soon. And I think it’s fantastic because he was also in counseling, and had his own challenges in his previous marriage. But as we come together, all of the challenges and how we’ve overcome them have built such a great foundation for this relationship, right? I actually feel in a better position on all levels for this particular relationship than I did in my first marriage.

Clint  9:08

When I marry couples that are getting married for the second or third time, there’s a gravity to that decision. And I explained this to the couples. Because, when the ceremony begins, there’s an intimate moment between just the three of us. And I say to them, the decision that you’re making now is based on a lot of life experience, and the decision isn’t made lightly. You’ve decided, knowing what you don’t want. You’ve decided what you want and what you need in in a marriage and in a marriage partner, that brings what we’re about to do a tremendous amount of gravity and depth and credibility to your decision to do this.

And I think what you’re talking about is exactly the same. There’s a saying of “knowledge is when you learn from your own mistakes and wisdom is when you learn from other people’s mistakes”. So I knew that I wanted to be married when I was in high school, In fact, on my graduation day, well, you’re done with high school, you’re going out into the world, what do you want to be? And I said married, because I had this vision of what a marriage would be in regards to all the different things that you hope a marriage will be. But I also knew that I wasn’t ready.

And then I went into the nightclub business for 15 years. And definitely, that was not the right time to get married. And so when I got out the other side of it, I was 44. And never been married, when I got on the plane, and there was my wife, and I knew that I was ready.

But you mentioned counseling. I had been through counseling with a bunch of relationships prior to meeting my wife, and that education, because that’s really what it is, education, learning how to process and how to fight fairly and, listen to the other person and all that kind of stuff.  I needed all of that. And fortunately, my wife had been through a lot of that as well. And so we brought that combined language, that combined openness to the process to our relationship. I know for a fact that if I had met my wife when I was in my 20s, we still wouldn’t be together today. We needed all of that life, that enchanted path, if you will, that brought us to each other at the right time and the right moment.

Wendy  11:21

Absolutely, and it adapts nicely into our spiritual side as well. When I think back along my timeline of spirituality, where as a child I was raised in and I believed everything because my parents presented it to me to where when I was 18, and making the decision on my own and then going through raising my children in that spiritual community and then being pretty much ostracized from the community and recovering from that and, really learning what my relationship with God was on an individual basis versus the community basis. And then rebuilding the community side. It all has come to where I am now where I feel like I am in the right place for the right reasons with the right people. And I don’t know that I would have reached it here. I don’t know that I would have enjoyed this moment so fully if I hadn’t have gone through all of those trials to get here.

Clint  12:24

Oh, absolutely. I think that a lot of what we consider to be pleasure is just the absence of pain. And so you go through things that are uncomfortable.

This is a weird analogy: when I was a kid, we had a cat. The name of the cat was Calico, because it was a calico cat. And my grandmother had just a gift for naming things. And so it’s a Calico cat, it’s called Calico. So I digress. Anyway, we also had a garden and there was a carrot, and the cat would rub against the stem of the carrot every single day. I don’t know why. But it was just a thing that cats do, and would rub against it. And we’re thinking she’s just destroying that carrot, that poor carrot, she’s rubbing against it. And the Carrot Top is like this, frayed thing. When we pulled that carrot out of the ground, it was the biggest fattest carrot I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Because of the cat’s stimulation of the carrot, it was recovering constantly, which allowed the carrot itself to grow and flourish.

When I think that there’s a certain amount of that just in general, on all the different planes of humanity, whether it be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. Not conflict necessarily, but obstacles or irritations or whatever it is. And there’s all different kinds of analogies and all different kinds of professions. We need the struggles for the outcome to be better and more refined. Does that make sense?

Wendy  14:03

Perfect sense. Yes.

Clint  14:05

Thank you for, for listening to my carrot analogy. I’ve never told that story before.

Wendy  14:11

It was cute. And just for the record you named your cat Calico. Well, I named my cat kitty.

Clint  14:18

Oh, there you go. There you go. Following that same thread, we had a dog And my grandmother named it Spike. I think it’s because it’s the first name that came into her head. And so there we go. That’s it.

I think also, though, that we’ve been talking through most of the episodes about a level of discernment, where we were given minds, we were given intellect by the Divine. We were created to think about things and try to figure things out. And with that in mind, when we talk about the enchanted path, there’s a lot of different ways to interpret it. And I think it’s okay to begin from an emotional experience because that’s Just kind of the way we’re wired, we have an emotional experience to whatever happens.

But then our intellect is supposed to kick in because we were born with that, we’re supposed to use that. And it’s okay to analyze what we like about an experience and what we don’t like about an experience. Because I think if you try to stuff something down, I think psychology over the years has proven that if you try to repress a memory, that it’s going to surface in really ugly ways. And so when we do an analysis of what we’ve been through on our enchanted path, that it’s okay to acknowledge where the struggles were, how we felt about it, look at it with our eyes wide open and accept it as like a friend and be able to say, the gift you gave me was, whatever I learned from that, or the path, the next thing that came along, after that, does that make sense?

Wendy

It makes perfect sense.

Clint

You can see it if you look back on your life and listener, as you’re contemplating how you got to where you are now, the things that serves you the most, whether they were challenges or whether they were good times, whatever it was.

Wendy

And I think that is, I call it magic and it’s also a gift. And it’s really the good stuff of what got you to where you are now. And it also gives you perspective on if you’re not where you want to be. Now, how can you change that? Because I look back at a lot of the things that happened in my life, you know, the the decision to get divorced, the decision to start my own business. There were decisions all along the way that I was making. It wasn’t like I was just reacting to life. I was shaping my life.

Clint

Oh, man, that’s a really powerful thing. And that takes a certain amount of awareness to think about how am I going to shape my life as opposed to just kind of being what do they call that? You want to? It’s, I don’t know, there’s something about you don’t want to be reactive. You want to be proactive. I think that’s what it is. Yeah, but it takes a certain amount of imagination, if you will, intelligent imagination to say, Okay, what’s really going to be the best for me? Not What do I want? But what’s going to be the best for me moving forward? So the enlightened path, I think, correct me if I’m wrong because it’s your gig, but for the best outcome, you want to include an enlightened path that looks forward along the path as well. Does that make sense?

Wendy  17:27

It does. And I’ll tell you, one of my good friends said to me once and it has always stuck with me and she said this or better. And that’s where you look at your life and you think, okay, where I am right now is great. I would like it to be just this great or better. That way, you’re always looking at the opportunity of Okay, well, if I’m here right now, how can I make this even better? And sometimes, you know, it gets back to what happened in the last episode where I talked about how how I change the way I pray. I was praying for miracles instead of praying for the ordinary. And all of a sudden, the better shows up in an even better way than you could have ever even imagined for yourself.

Clint  18:11

Oh, I like that. Okay, yeah, those two are really intertwined. Aren’t they the enchanted path? And then how you hope for the future? Because in a way that’s an aspect of a prayer, is a hope for the future. Does that make sense?

Wendy  18:29

Well, yes. Because if I didn’t have hope for a better future, I think I would be stuck where I was. And I wouldn’t have decided to do things that grew me as a person that grew me as a mother, as a spiritual person, as a person showing up in relationships with new people. In my business, whatever it was, whatever aspect it was, I would have never chosen to grow. If I didn’t look at things from the perspective of this or better.

Clint  18:58

The other thing that just occurred to me is that The power that words have to evoke emotion. And there are certain words that are going to trigger fear in certain people. Like for instance, I knew a family with kids and the kids were not allowed to see any of the Harry Potter movies. Because the parents were devout Christians, or fundamental Christians, or a type of Christianity that they didn’t want anything that had to do with witches in their children’s lives. Because they thought the witches were connected to the devil, and so on and so on.

And so, me being on the outside, I’m thinking, there’s no threat there. I don’t get that. But, you know, everybody raises their family the way they want to.

But that’s why when we talk about the enchanted path, and now some people will be triggered by the word “enchanted” as if it was not of a true Godly path or whatever they connect to their spirituality.

You said the word magic, that something was magic. And the way I heard it had nothing to do with something that was not Godly or something that was not of a Divine purpose. What I heard was this wonderful delight, that we can’t explain everything on a Divine plane because that’s God. And so it’s okay for us to accept things with joy and wonderment and give it a label like boy that was magical, or that’s enchanted. And it doesn’t mean that we’re going contrary to somebody’s fundamental belief. It just means that we accept the fact that there are things so far beyond us that all we really get to do is enjoy them.

Wendy  20:35

Yes, and for lack of better words, we describe them as enchanted or magic because there isn’t terminology to describe miracles.

Clint  20:46

Well, what I’m saying is that those words actually should be used. If you embrace them, for the wonderment and the joy oy that are contained to the way I feel are contained in those words, that I think you’re actually, in a way, you’re praising God for the wonderment and the gifts that He bestows on us. I’m using He because I don’t know, maybe it’s genderless. I don’t care. But you see what I mean in terms of the words, and how if we want to we can interpret them and allow them to be something positive as opposed to being afraid of a word.

Wendy 21:27

Exactly.

Clint  21:30

Well, there you go. And in this conversation, there have been little things that have come up and I thought, ooh, I want to talk about that? Whoo, I want to talk about that. And so we have a lot of content to look forward to in regards to the Spiritual Cake. So any closing words, Wendy?

Wendy  21:50

I think if you were to stand in the space of gratitude, that creating your enchanted path or seeing it would be a lot easier and simpler than to feel overwhelmed with like, Oh, I have to shape it this way, I have to shape it that way. When you’re grateful, like you said, and acknowledging God’s hand and things, and the miracles in your lives, it truly becomes enchanted. Because you’re seeing that it’s beyond you. And then it’s even better than you thought, even though there were challenges.

Clint  22:26

I agree. And for those of you who are listening, and you’ve had devastating things that happened in your life, and you’re saying, How can we think that there was a blessing in that at all? We’re going to explore that in a future episode, because we certainly don’t want to pretend that what you went through is insignificant, or we’re trying to minimize it or say, just get over it. We’re not saying that at all. What we’re suggesting is that there’s ways to frame it and with empathy and knowing that Wendy and I are, while we may not have met you face to face, our hearts go out to you during your struggles.

And we want to know that, that you have somebody that you can communicate with. And the way you do that is you can go to our website, SpiritualCake.com. And there are ways to reach out to us. And we we really encourage that because we want this to be an open dialogue. And we want to be of service to everybody. And so if you have any suggestions on things you’d like us to discuss, if you have any information that you think we would benefit from, or anything else that you would like to share with us, please do feel not only feel free to do it, but we encourage you to come into a safe place and reach out to us and let us know. You know just what’s on your mind. That’s SpiritualCake.com.

Alright, that’s it for this episode of the Spiritual Cake podcast. This is Clint and on behalf of Wendy, We will see you next time.