When I posted my first blog on OwningPink.com back in April of 2009, I set an intention and wrote it, in magic marker, on my office wall. I wrote “I want Owning Pink to invite people to know that they are loved, safe, and nurtured.”

My intention for the site has changed over time, because it quickly became clear to me that Owning Pink wasn’t just in service to those in need of healing; it was also in service to those who serve those in need of healing. Owning Pink is a community of healers and visionaries committed to easing the suffering of others - and in doing so, healing ourselves, achieving bliss, watching magic happen, and healing the whole freakin' world.

From the get-go, my intention was that Owning Pink would help people nurture their physical health, their mental health, their creative health, their spiritual health, their financial health, their sexual health, their interpersonal health, their environmental health, and the health of their authentic self. The website was divided into these ten categories, which morphed into the “Whole Health Cairn” that I teach to my one-on-one clients, in my workshops, and in my recent TEDx talk.

As Owning Pink grew, I attracted hundreds of visionaries and healers who wanted to blog for Owning Pink in their respective categories.  Some consider themselves spiritual leaders. Some are artists and authors. Some are doctors and life coaches and massage therapists. Some are sexperts.  Some are business coaches and motivational speakers. Some teach us how to be empowered with our finances. Some are psychologists.

All are healers, in service to the same thing.

As I was trying to figure out how we all interconnect, I sat down with my sketch pad and I drew this:

As visionaries, we may feel like we’re out on a bicycle spoke in our own little category. We may think that a spiritual leader and a financial advisor have nothing in common, that a sexuality teacher and a career coach couldn’t be related, that a doctor and a creativity teacher couldn’t possibly be in service to the same thing.

But we’d be dead wrong.

Because at the center of our service lies something universal that unites us all.

I am in service to it.  Martha Beck is in service to it. Sheila Kelley is in service to it. Mama Gena is in service to it. My friends Danielle LaPorte, Kris Carr, Bernie Siegel, Amy Ahlers, Nicole Daedone, Barbara Stanny, Christiane Northrup, Mike Robbins, Steve Sisgold, Judith Orloff, Christine Arylo, Tricia Barrett, Sera Beak, Brian Johnson, Jonathon Fields, Debbie Rosas, and SARK are all in service to it.

But what is IT?

I was sitting on the floor of Mike Robbin’s office drawing this visual with my finger on the floor while fumbling through explaining this concept to SARK. I kept drawing the circle in the center, saying “We’re all in service to this thing… you know, this thing in the middle, this…” (I kept drawing the circle.)

Then, as I drew the circle one more time, SARK’s roommate piped up, “It’s Oprah! We’re all in service to Oprah.”

We busted out laughing, and I thought, “Yup. We’re getting close. Whatever Oprah is in service to, it’s that.”

Over time, I have asked more people. I sat around a table and described this idea to a FemmeMind group that included Gabrielle Bernstein, Kristine Carlson, Christine Arylo, Amy Ahlers, and Shiloh Sophia McCloud (who are also in service to this thingie in the middle, whatever we want to call it.) As I drew my visual on a sheet of scrap paper, they began passing it around, transforming it from a clunky bicycle wheel into a web, in which we are all interconnected with each other. 

We brainstormed what to call the thing in the middle. The self-actualized human? Personal liberation? Empowerment?

Someone said, “We’re all in service to Source.”

Bingo. That’s the closest answer yet.

In her awesome, must-read new book Finding Your Way In A Wild New World, Martha Beck calls us “way-finders,” “menders,” and “The Team.” Martha Beck, Amy Ahlers, and I all did an awesome telejam yesterday about how to change the world. (Just enter your email address here and you can listen to us!)

Traits of Team members (excerpted from Martha Beck's Finding Your Way In A Wild New World):

• A sense of having a specific mission or purpose involving a major transformation in human experience, but being unable to articulate what this change might be.
• A strong sense that the mission, whatever it is, is getting closer in time.
• A compulsion to master certain fields, skills, or professions, not only for career advancement, but in preparation for this half-understood personal mission.
• High levels of empathy; a sense of feeling what others feel.
• An urgent desire to lessen or prevent suffering for humans, animals, or even plants.
• Loneliness stemming from a sense of difference, despite generally high levels of social activity. One woman summed up this feeling perfectly when she said, “Everybody likes me, but nobody’s like me.”

Martha Beck noticed other traits The Team exhibited (usually not all in the same person but present to some degree.)

• High creativity; passion for music, poetry, performance, or visual arts.
• An intense love of animals, sometimes a desire to communicate with them.
• Difficult early life, often with a history of abuse or childhood trauma.
• Intense connection to certain types of natural environment, such as the ocean, mountains, or forest.
• Resistance to orthodox religiosity, paradoxically accompanied by a strong sense of either spiritual purpose or spiritual yearning.
• Love of plants and gardening, to the point of feeling empty or depressed without the chance to be among green things and/or help them grow.
• Very high emotional sensitivity, often leading to predilections for anxiety, addictions, or eating disorders.
• Sense of intense connection with certain cultures, languages, or geographic regions.
• Disability, often brain-centered (dyslexia, retardation, autism) in oneself or a loved one. Fascination with people who have intellectual disabilities or mental illness.
• Apparently gregarious personality contrasting with deep need for periods of solitude; a sense of being drained by social contact and withdrawing to “power up” again.
• Persistent or recurring physical illness, often severe, with symptoms that fluctuate inexplicably.
• Daydreams (or night dreams) about healing damaged people, creatures, or places.

You! You! You!

If you read that list (like I did) thinking “Check, check, check,” you’re definitely one of us visionary healer mender way-finders on The Team in service to this thing-a-ma-bobbie in the middle.

And the world needs you. NOW! As Martha wrote, “If enough people start mending their true nature in the incredibly interconnected world we’re creating, the cumulative effect really could begin healing the true nature of, well, everything.”

Does This Describe You?

Are you in service to this thingie in the middle? Do you have the heart and soul of a healer? Are you leaning into your calling, instead of shying away from it?

If the answer is yes (you know it is!), enter your email address here and listen to Martha Beck, Amy Ahlers and I talk about Martha's new book Finding Your Way In A Wild New World,  jam about how to change the world, and discuss the four things visionaries must do to realize their visions. 

In service to all beings and all that is,

Lissa

Lissa Rankin, MD: Founder of OwningPink.com, Pink Medicine Revolutionary, motivational speaker, and author of What’s Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist If She Was Your Best Friend and Encaustic Art: The Complete Guide To Creating Fine Art With Wax.