At the age of 40, I have a magical dream of swimming with a pod of gray whales in the ocean depths. I am a whale—and we are all playing, breaching the water, and then using our uniquely identifying flukes to dive deeper into the ocean depths. The gray whales are brilliant, warm winter colors: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and golden. The feeling of the dream is one of playful awe and deep surrender; I have a new and profound sense of being protected by—and belonging with—these colossal beings. I experience an incomprehensible and wondrous reverence that nature could shape and produce these gentle giants and, in turn, shape me. Previous to my whale dream, I had been running from my feelings, and the notion of surrendering to anything was foreign to me. My tenacity had allowed me to persevere through and finish an Ironman—an endurance race that involves a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run—even though I couldn’t train due to illness. My steadfastness, though, was not always positive; I was often neither vulnerable nor open in my relationships nor was I able to achieve a deeper, loving connection with my boyfriend.

The dream, however, set me on a journey toward great spiritual growth. I began to let go of my brittle, defensive sense of self as superwoman and warrior king. Before the journey, I confused surrender with defeat and submission, with acquiescing to my parents' wishes. Rebelling against surrender only kept me connected to their wishes. My superwoman persona was a false one, however, it forced me to constantly super-perform. In my whale dream, I surrendered to a deeper faith in myself and others. Everything flowed.

Surrender has nothing to do with hoisting a white flag. In fact, rather than carrying a connotation of defeat, surrender enables a liberation and expansion of the self by lowering defensive barriers. In successful surrender, acceptance occurs and one transcends the conditions that evoked the surrender. Successful surrender is joyous in spirit. By contrast, submission is a defensive mutant of surrender, a giving up of agency and responsibility. Dr. D.W. Winnicott, a pediatrician and psychoanalyst, in “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” writes about the yearning for surrender of the false self. Surrender, a yielding of the false self, is a movement towards growth, as compared to submission, which involves resistance. Surrender involves the discovery of one’s identity and wholeness, and a unity with other living beings. The result stands in contrast to submission, in which one feels a puppet to another and one’s sense of identity is squashed.

The dream marked the beginning of a transition in which I surrender, embrace, and play with the immense beauty of my emotions, symbolized by the gray whales. My dream set me on a spiritual path to heal and readdress old relationships in which I had insisted on love and acceptance when there was little. I learned to find the beauty in these limited relationships by empowering myself to more deeply love. By learning to let go, my world became more spacious, nourishing, and fun.

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My whale dream was an omen for my encounter, more than a decade later, with a wild, 50-foot-long, adult, pregnant, migratory gray whale whom I immediately named Molly. My paddle surfing instructor, a professional nature photographer, took me out for my first experience paddle board surfing in 2012 in Laguna Beach, California. While still on the beach he showed me two cameras he used—one of which was an underwater video camera.

That day several whale sightseeing boats passed us. The passengers on the boat gasped with delight and we were all thrilled to see the gray’s heart-shaped puffy blows at the surface of the water. We paddled far from the shore to visit a group of playful seals that dived through the Pacific Ocean. My instructor captured on his underwater camera the seals darting through the water to dive deep. I gained confidence with paddling on my surfboard and felt connected to marine life around me. Although the ocean surface was very still, like a smooth sheet of glass, a legion of life appeared beneath the surface.

A magnificent gray whale, who I later learned weighed approximately 40 tons—but moved with the grace of a hummingbird—suddenly spyhopped, not once but twice, first about 15 feet away from me, and then again 30 feet away while I stood on my paddle surf board without creating a single ripple or whimper. Spyhopping occurs when a whale vertically pokes its head out of the water for a better look at activity near the water’s surface. The whale had patches of light-gray barnacles on its side. In no time, our eyes met. I felt a great power emanate from her body. She was greeting me.

With her vertical half-rise out of the water, Molly’s upper body filled my entire field of vision—and I surrendered to the magical moment and remained motionless. But when our eyes gravitated toward each other, she not only evoked the divine and sublime within me, but challenged me to reevaluate my perception of intelligent conscious life. There was a glimmer of light in her walnut-sized brown eye—and I felt an immediate connection between us. Her wise, soulful eye held and contained me, like none other, for what felt like an eternity—but was, in reality, just 20 seconds. Whales have the ability to dramatically move their eyes in, out, and all around. Molly’s eye was far larger than the whale eyes I had seen in photographs. Her left eye seemed to be expressing my unexplored thoughts and actions; she was beckoning me to go deeper with them.

What an affirming surprise to find that my Molly uses unifocal vision just like me. This affinity stands in contrast to my childhood, where I felt defective as I was shamed for being born legally blind in my right eye due to a post lenticular cataract. Now, I felt a kinship with Molly, despite my visual impairment. As opposed to most humans who use bifocal vision, Molly and I use unifocal vision. Under Molly’s monocular vision and recognition, I felt seen, known and understood on a primordial and colossal level. Molly’s loving gaze welcomed me into a rich world of infinite, emotional spaciousness. Through my expansive moment with Molly, I glimpse the breadth of the world. It feels so clear that I was blinded, but now I see.

My seasoned instructor was wonderstruck by Molly’s monumental half-vertical rising and towering over me at such an intimate distance. Only 40 feet to the side of Molly and me, he only captured on his camera Molly’s footprint in the ocean as she used her massive fluke to dive deeper down into the ocean depth away from me. A whale’s footprint is the disturbed water it leaves near the surface of the ocean when the whale flicks its fluke with a downward stroke. With one push of her tremendous fluke, Molly left eight-foot-wide footprints in the ocean water. I felt Molly was saying to me: “When you are big and you know it, you don’t have to make a splash or have fangs. I don’t have to play it; I am it.” Molly was embracing and nurturing with a loving sweetness. In no time Molly conveyed to me a new way to listen, feel, and understand without using words. Even if words could reach to perpetuity, they could never capture the vastness of my feelings for her.

My emotions resonate with the symbolism of whales as representing containment and resurrection in the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Jonah lived within the belly of the whale for three days before he came forth. Just as Jonah was given a second birth and resurrected, I felt reborn and resurrected by Molly to be inspired and have faith to go deeper within to rekindle my creativity.

As I moved emotionally forward and inward in order to surrender to write a memoir, the symbol of Molly taught me to insulate my creative energies more conservatively and efficiently. Whales have an ancient knowledge of how to use the creative force of breath to conserve oxygen under water by decreasing blood flow to areas of their body where it’s nonessential. Thinking about my Molly, an ancient symbol for creation, showed me the magnificence and power of my own creativity. I learned not to keep myself small but to embrace my vulnerabilities and shine to find my authentic voice. My inner corrective emotional experience bookended by my whale dream and my encounter with Molly marked more than a decade of inner spiritual growth. As a result of being ill, I awakened to my true self and divinity. (Divinity concerns transcendence from the material world that is ephemeral and based on illusion to the spiritual world based on grace and salvation.) My experience with Molly marked a culmination of more than a decade of spiritual growth to free me from submission through rebellion and taught me how to become vulnerable through surrender. Molly’s message was that I no longer had to be warrior king and could surrender to my emotions in order to heal. From late December to January, Molly was on her journey, along with other pregnant grays, migrating from the Arctic seas along the Pacific coast to calve their babies in the warm lagoons of Baja, Mexico. These gray whales have the longest known migration of any mammals, traveling 12,000 miles round trip every year between the cold feeding waters of the Arctic seas and the shallow protective warm waters of the lagoons of Mexico. Through her own mammoth journey to give birth, Molly was inviting and inspiring me to give birth to my deeper creativity and spirituality.

My instructor commented about how lucky I was, as gray whales are not known to spyhop humans, much less at such a close distance, during their migration south. Gray whales are known to more commonly spyhop after they birth their calves in the warm water of Mexico. I knew this event had nothing to do with luck; it was as if this divine creature and I were old soul mates who knew each other many life times, millions of years ago, and together we had led pods of other whales through portals in the ocean. She was again greeting me—and I her.

People with whom I relive this mystical experience often ask me if I was scared. I was too awe-inspired to be scared—and, from deep within, I knew I had beckoned Molly forth that day and we were again merged as one. She was a massive and wild animal who could easily bring me intentional or accidental harm by simply neglecting her body’s orientation to mine. Instead, Molly not only exercised great care to not startle or dislodge me from my paddle surf board but lent herself to be attuned and meet me. Molly, in an instant, exemplified how to be in a harmonious relationship. This pageantry of gentle and accepting attunement in such a dramatic and forceful three-dimensional scale is the experience every baby needs. Molly understood and kept a respectful distance from me to not overwhelm me, but she chose to come close enough to meet me. In “Beautiful Whale,” pioneering whale biologist Dr. Roger Payne refers to the “10-foot barrier” where it simply feels too uncomfortable and terrifying to be within this intimate space with a whale. Molly had a mindfulness to respect this 10-foot barrier and my personal space by spyhopping at a distance of 15 feet to allow me to feel safe enough in our encounter.

Functioning as my spirit guide, Molly taught me about how to handle vulnerability in the way she spyhopped. Gray whales were hunted almost to the point of extinction in both the 1700s and early 1900s and have an excellent cultural memory that reflects that history, as exemplified by their efforts to overturn boats when attacked. Despite this long history of being hunted by man, Molly still was open during her pregnancy—and thus her vulnerability—and could still determine whom to trust and from whom to recoil. To me, Molly symbolizes living life as a spiritual adventure: Letting go of agendas and expectations and being open to the thoughts of others in order to enlarge yourself. This experience also enabled me to awaken from my emotional deprivation, brought on by non-attunement to recognize my mystical mother. By beckoning and letting Molly come into me, as I had not let others, I let go of my old world of criticism and disappointment and internalized a more nurturing, embracing one. By admitting my loss on the most profound level of not having been introduced into a loving, accepting world, I was able to take in and connect with a massively attuned being. It felt as if I were home, a place where I am whole, floating on my paddle surf board next to an inquisitive, gentle whale whose calm, wise left eye looked into and contained me. And, in Molly’s recognition, I felt a clearer, fresher state of being and a greater sense of completeness.

It was an honor very few humans will experience—to have had contact with a whale in such an intimate way, in her natural habitat, and on her terms. By visualizing this day and imagining riding on Molly’s back with her heart-shaped puffy blows spraying me in my face while we breach the water’s surface, I settle myself from the chatter in my mind to calm and center myself. Molly is my reassuring blanket that the world is an embracing one.