Valerie Brown was a high powered lawyer. Then she had an experience that changed everything.
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Discussion Questions:
- Valerie Brown describes experiencing a revelation while doing something relatively mundane: watching clouds move. Have you ever had a spiritual experience when you weren’t expecting it?
- How have your spiritual experiences shaped your career direction?
Transcript:
My name is Valerie Brown, and my Meeting is Solebury Monthly Meeting, here in Solebury Pennsylvania or New Hope, Pennsylvania. And my work is as a leadership coach, and I do a lot of writing and speaking, and it’s sort of strange because, even as I’m saying this, I’m still getting used to describing myself in this way. For many years—most of my life, up until about 3 years ago—I had a very high-powered career as an attorney and a lobbyist.
My Spiritual Awakening
The last 3 years has been this becoming. A new career, a new life, and I jokingly call my job title “Chief or Director of Purposeful Life and Work” and that feels about right.
The Process of Transformation
So the leaving of my lawyer job to what I’m doing now is a process. Sort of like the process of Winter becoming Spring. Winter doesn’t immediately turn to Spring. It is a process of becoming.
I became a lawyer before I knew who I was or what I believed, and I became a lawyer essentially for some very crass reasons, primarily to make money and to get out of Brooklyn. I can assure you that Brooklyn was not the swanky place it is today. There weren’t yoga studios and latte shops and all of that. It was very much a place that a person wanted to leave. And so that was my priority.
A Moment That Shifts Things
But I had one of those moments in a person’s life that shifts things. The moment was I was in a really stressful time at work, so like many people I decided I was going to take myself on vacation. I took myself to one of my very favorite places in New Mexico and I climbed to the top of a very big hill and I took off my backpack and laid back against a nurse log.
I was just looking up at the sky, just chilling and as I looked up, I noticed that the clouds were moving. I know what you’re probably thinking, “Duh. Of course clouds move.” But for me, that was a revelation.
A Revelation That Became a Practice
I was so nose to the grindstone, so about work, so about running, so about getting ahead, I was completely alienated from the natural world, which of course meant that I was alienated from myself. That moment of actually noticing how the clouds move was a revelation for me. It changed everything.
Even now today, my spiritual practice every day is to look at clouds. Every day. I find a great sense of the presence of God there in the movement of clouds.
The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.
After leaving a toxic high pressure job in DC she transformed herself into an amazing teacher and spiritual healer. That took courage and wisdom to leave the money and follow her heart. I attended her Quaker Circle worships at Ghost Ranch N Mexico. The peace and love we in see in her video is testimony to her incredible spiritual journey. If you have an opportunity please do yourself a favour and attend her workshops/retreats. Life changing!
Lovely experience and description Valerie! Thank you so much! No doubt you also find the beauty in a blade of grass now. Etty Hillesum, the Dutch Jewess and diarist who was murdered in Auschwitz, was so transformed by her spiritual experience that she was able to see beauty in the midst of the horror of Nazi persecutionin Westerbork Transit camp —even to wonder what had happened to an SS soldier in his early life that had made him able to beat up one of her fellow Jews —even to feel a sense of sorrow that he had been reduced to such a state! The diaries are an amazing portrayal of the growth of Etty’s spritual life. (Etty lived only streets away from Anne Frank’s secret annexe in Prinzengracht and was murdered just as Anne Frank began her more famous diary. The New York actress Susan Stein has made it her life’s work to perform her own one woman play based entirely on words taken from the diaries. See http://www.ettyplay.org)