As we’ve moved past our July 4th Independence Day in the US, I’m reminded that we’re now into the second half of 2025.

During the first half of this year, I’ve found myself learning how to relax in the flow of life. Through most of my years, I’ve been a planner, goal-setter, and daydreamer about the future. At the beginning of 2025, as I approached my 70th birthday in March, the beginning of my 8th decade, I found myself drawn to books and podcasts that focused on letting go, on trusting life to unfold just as it’s meant to. One of the audio books that resonated with me was The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer. His account of how he learned to surrender to the flow of life and “trust the process”, as I’ve heard at different times, was filled with real-life examples of how this works.

One of the ways I see things flow in life is the “coincidences” or synchronicities that occur — when you’re watching expectantly. Recently this happened when I was reading a book and the author referenced another author and how she so beautifully described Scotland. That comment piqued my interest since I’ve had two trips to Scotland and felt a real sense of being at home — especially given my family’s Scotch-Irish roots. The referenced author was Alice O. Howell who’d been a faculty member at the C. G. Jung Institutes in Los Angelos and Chicago and was recognized as a pioneer in linking psychology with the traditional wisdom of the ages. I’d never heard of her but have been fascinated by Jung’s work since I first heard of him in psychology classes.

I ordered two of her books and have been reading The Dove in the Stone over the past week.

I was amazed to learn of Alice’s spiritual connection with the Isle of Iona on the northwest coast of Scotland in the Inner Hebrides. That’s the place where St. Columba landed in 563 AD and brought Christianity into the country. There he established an Abbey where pilgrims have come –and that included me in September of 2017. I traveled there to attend a week-long retreat entitled, “The Pilgrimage of Life.”

Alice describes making many trips to Iona. I can only understand a little of her vast knowledge of all that is sacred about that place. She notes that the island of Iona is made up of the most ancient rock on earth. What delighted me was she described a hike with her husband across the island, just like I went on in my retreat group to get to the “Bay at the Back of the Ocean.” That area was known for all the rocks along the shoreline.

I can imagine the two of them in that place:

“Now we could sit among them. They have to be the most beautiful rounded, smooth, subtly colored stones in the world. They are about the size of large rolls of bread.” (p. 16, Dove in the Stone)

When our group was there, we were instructed to pick a stone and to sit with it, considering what it was that weighed us down.

I remembered how fearful I’d been three days before when we boarded the ferry in Fionnphort to cross over the sound to Iona. I had a wave of doubt that I was not”good enough” to be part of that international retreat group: not smart enough, sophisticated enough, spiritual enough, well-traveled enough. That doubt had been met by the ‘still small voice of God’ within me saying, “You are enough just as you are.”

Holding the rock in my hand, turning the rough brown stone that was the size of a roll, it came to me that I still hung onto doubt about myself. I sometimes held back when there were things I wanted to share in the retreat group — afraid of sounding foolish, or not being clear, still holding onto fear about being teased about my Southern accent. Now, reading Alice’s book that gets at Jung’s work with ego — I realized I was all tied up in that false, ego-sense of myself, that pride that wouldn’t let me just be.

That day at the bay, we were instructed that after we decided what was weighing us down, to say a prayer of letting it go, and then fling the stone into the ocean, leaving that burden behind.

I stood at the shoreline, feeling the cool breeze off the water and threw that bun-like-rock into the sound, waiting to hear the “Plunk!” and then watched the ripples until they were gone. It felt good to take that first step. When we returned to the Abbey, that first step was challenged. A group from the Iona Community in Glasgow was there taping interviews with pilgrims about what their experience had meant to them. A young man approached me and asked me if I’d be willing to be filmed.

Before the rock was flung into the bay, I would have said I’d rather not; let someone else step up who liked to be in front of the camera. But thinking back to what I wanted to release, that self-consciousness that had weighed me down, I responded, “Sure. I’ll do that.”

That was a first step toward personal freedom, toward letting go of that ego that wants to appear perfect, sure, sophisticated, well-educated; instead, I would choose to be real, to be myself.

Now, reading Alice’s book, hearing her personal accounts of her many trips to the island, I can experience Iona again. I can luxuriate in her descriptions of the pelting rain, and cozy tea times, and purchase of the necessary Wellies. I can relive going through the many gates that kept in sheep and the cows or “Highland coos” that were all shaggy cuteness to me who loves cows.

And did I mention that Alice also describes the tenderness of finding her true love, Walter just four year before — at an advanced age? How lovely to join them as she shares her love of Iona with Walter, as they walk hand-in-hand around the island on his first trip there– like it was for me.

I’m grateful for this flow of life that brought Alice and Walter to me, and gives me a deeper experience of Iona eight years later. What freedom there is in letting go, and flowing in the River of Life.

Best to you in letting go of what weighs you down, in finding more freedom.

Connie