20. One-Way Ticket: Using Travel as the Creative Process For How You Want To Live Your Life

Sunset in Anglet, France.

Prologue. A Union of the Unknown

“If you encounter any resistance, flow with it,” Step Sinatra texted me when I landed at France’s Bordeaux International Airport. “Follow the path of least resistance.” The time on my watch read 3:33pm.

After traveling from Lisbon, Portugal, I was instructed to take the TGV train south to Bayonne, where I was then to secure a taxi and take it to a small town coastal town north of Biarritz called Anglet. It was there I would find him at a small beach bar called Le Paillote Bleue.

No, this is not the start of a spy thriller. Instead, it’s a story about two men, strangers actually, taking a road trip across the French Pyrenees. It’s also a story about how a journey disguised itself—then revealed itself—as a creative process.

Seeing as you’re an astute reader, I congratulate you on asking the obvious question: Why?

The first answer is that we shared an interest in a liberated way of being—one that was based on the freedom to create our lives according to our own rules. The second is that we wanted to see if we could turn our mutual interest into a collaboration. Essentially, it was a platonic blind date for two people who shared a similar vision about the internal power of gratitude and intention to construct our external reality.

***

I was originally supposed to meet Step (short for Stephen, no relation to Frank) somewhere on the coast in Portugal, but the combination of “a hunch” and driving rains sweeping across central Europe had us meeting in Anglet, a famous surfing haunt on France’s southern Atlantic coast.

What I would soon learn is that Step Sinatra is a moving target. What I would also learn is that by most definitions, he could be labeled eccentric, but the more I came to know him, the more I realized that eccentricity is nothing more than an outsider’s perspective of an unknown way of being. Regardless of perspective, what is irrefutable is that he falls outside the bell curve of the normal, predictable life. I suppose I do as well, which is why I agreed to take a road trip with a total stranger, to an unknown destination, within an unknown time frame, with unknown results. It was an unorthodox way to meet someone to discuss a project, but not much about Step is orthodox.

***

A flight, a bus, a train, and a taxi ride later, with the Atlantic Ocean in view, a pilsner awaited me. With shoulder length hair, European flair, a scruffy beard, and standing about 6’2”, Step had a rugged, weathered air of leisure and success about him, as if he had spent time surfing the beaches of Malibu, California, or summering in Nantucket, Massachusetts. We clinked our beers to adventure, good fortune, and the unknown, then walked towards the ocean.

Out on the water, with the steely concentration of praying mantises, surfers lay in wait for transcendent waves, while on the beach sun worshippers surrendered to the waning strength of the sun—some in meditation, others in dance, and still others in joy and gratitude. With the strata of beach grass and sand in the foreground, and the ocean’s horizon receding into a flaming-scarlet sky in the background, I could not help but be moved into wonder and awe by this beautiful, unpredictable circumstance we call existence.

With all the distractions of life momentarily removed, and nothing to focus on but the waves rolling, barreling, and lapping to shore, those of us on the beach who bore witness to nature’s majesty had no choice but to be present to life’s unfolding. Since the beginning of time, for students of the mind and those interested in mastering the self, this has been the great challenge—in a world full of distractions and illusions constantly competing for our attention—to train the mind to stay in the present moment.

“Do you wanna try some Qigong?” Step asked, pulling me out of my reverie. “I do this every day. It’s all about harnessing the energy of nature, which is what my documentary Heal For Free is all about.”

Externally confident and internally self-conscious, I set about following his lead. After a Qigong session and returning to the restaurant for some olives and cheese, we headed back to our lodging where it took me nearly no time to fall into a deep, travel-weary sleep.

***

The writer Saul Bellows once said, “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”

At some point in the early hours of the morning, the subconscious roused me from my slumber to record a message. Discombobulated, but ever aware of the muse’s fickle nature, I scrambled with urgency for the notebook beside my pillow. As quickly as I could write, in the darkness of the coastal night I scribbled three messages in nearly indecipherable handwriting, the second of which, had I adhered to several days later, would have spared me great anxiety and frustration:

1. Just as a plant is in a direct energetic relationship with the sun, so too are we blooms of consciousness living in matter.

2. To travel as such is to remain open, and being open means receiving information from beyond the visible light spectrum—information that exists as frequency and manifests as synchronicities, serendipities, feelings, or instincts in one’s gut.

3. The successful traveler is like the Tao; he/she follows the path of least resistance.

When I shared this with Step the following morning, he told me he called these synchrondicities (synchronicity + serendipity). Just like ancient mariners used the stars to find destinations, Step used synchrondicities as spiritual cues to find his way.

STEP 1. TRUST

“Beyond all else, you have to trust in your body’s innate power to heal. No matter what you’re dealing with, you have to trust its intelligence. Just because your doctor tells you one thing doesn’t mean you have to listen. If your body’s instincts are sending you a message, you need to tune in to it. You need to trust that voice.”

This is not necessarily something you might expect to hear from an ex-Wall Street trader, although maybe it is—especially if five years of constant EMF radiation poisoning from the earliest models of cellphones, plus a stress-filled 24-hour lifestyle, nearly took your life. Instead you might expect this more from a Napa wine maker, which is what Step did after he walked away from Wall Street, the second excessive lifestyle choice that nearly took his life. 

“When I was lying there in the hospital bed—literally a few breaths from death—a thought popped into my head. ‘If I’m powerful enough to create my worst nightmare, couldn’t I also create my wildest dreams?’”

***

In a moment of synchrondipity the evening before my arrival, Step walked into a hotel in Anglet to inquire about two rooms. Once there, he pulled out his wooden pendulum (not a euphemism) to decipher whether the hotel was a good fit. Above an open palm, he held the pendulum on a string. If the pendulum moved in a circle to the right, green light. If it moved to the left, time to move on.

As it turns out, the woman who worked at the hotel used the same method to make decisions, thus Step befriended Sandrine, an attractive woman in her early 40s. Unbeknownst to Step at the time, the following day she would skip her plans to go surfing and instead serve as both our chauffeur and guide. This included showing us around Bayonne, waiting for us as we rented a car in Saint Jean-da-Luz, taking us to empty beaches in between, and escorting us around the seaside town where we would meet locals, savor stinky cheeses, and sample several glasses of local wines.

“Are you ready to step into the unknown?” Step asked as we slurped briny Atlantic oysters harvested earlier that day. My acquiescence heralded the start of the adventure.

With the evening’s revelries coming to a close, as the light fell from the sky and storm clouds began to surround our position, we still lacked lodging. This was quite common for Step as reservations were something he paid little mind to.

This presented us with a choice; stay in Saint Jean-da-Luz, where he had stayed a few days prior, or head towards a small unknown village 30 minutes into the countryside. After a long day of travel, I was more than ready to spend the night by the sea. Nonetheless, we said goodbye to Sandrine and headed east in our small European rental.

“I feel like some classic rock—maybe some Hendrix? What do you think?” Step said as we reached the last traffic circle at the edge of town.

I put on Little Wing and settled into my seat, grumpily suspecting it was going to be a long night. While Step was trusting we would find lodging that exceeded the seaside hotel I wanted to stay at, I imagined after endlessly trying to find adequate lodging, we’d eventually settle in a French version of a Super 8 Motel. Not more than three songs later, however, a driveway caught Step’s eye and an aggressive U-turn found us pulling into L’Auberge Basque, a Relais & Château rated hotel.

After negotiating a €300 suite down to €200, around 9:45pm we checked into a top-floor, two-room suite with a common living area. No sooner had we brought our bags into the hotel than the rain began to fall. In the following 36 hours, as we meandered across the Basque region of France, the equivalent of two months of rain would fall.

Once we settled in, we toasted over artisanal French IPAs and talked about what we had written that morning in our respective creation journals. Although I had my own version of a gratitude/intention journal, which had been a part of my daily practice since October 2010, Step called his version The G.I.F.T. (Interestingly enough, Step adopted his practice at the same time.)

“How were the best companies built?” he said. “They made complex processes simple, easy, and quick. The G.I.F.T. is a fast, easy tool to intentionally create your day while staying mindful of how you want to live your life.”

Like my own practice, The G.I.F.T was a daily written exercise that consisted of at least five things you’re grateful for and five things you intend to create. What differentiated The G.I.F.T from my practice was the addition of feeling (intending how you wanted to feel that day) and thinking (what you wanted your thoughts to be filled with all day). Each day’s exercise ended with gratitude to the Creator—or whoever or whatever the source of the energy is that’s running the show.

Step 2. FAITH

After waking up, packing up, and hitting the road, we headed east and made our way through the French countryside into the foothills of the Pyrenees. Having no idea where we were headed, we first stopped in a tiny village called Espellette. While a few aimless tourists wandered about in the rain, for the most part, the majority of the homes and businesses in the red and white Bavarian-esque village were shuttered.

Following his intuition, a few hours later we found ourselves in Lourdes, the world’s third-most important Catholic pilgrimage site after Rome and the Holy Land. Throughout 1859, it’s purported that the Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to a peasant girl (later canonized by the Catholic Church) named Bernadette Soubirous.

The town, which hosts more than 6 million visitors a year, was overrun with the devoted. It also happened that the throngs of devotees coincided with a parade that played host to military members from across the European Union. The surroundings, the location on the river, the grandiosity of The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, and the misting rain added a mythic, mystical feel that commanded the reverence and humility of everyone who walked before the church’s towering gothic spires.

As we made our way down the promenade away from the church, Step said, “Once you’re really sick, it’s not like getting back in shape. It’s much harder to recover your health. But there is an energy and an intelligence beyond us, and when we connect to it, it has the power to heal. Consciousness is energy, so healing is all about learning to raise our consciousness to interact with the greater levels of energy and information that exist all around us. Faith is believing in that energy or intelligence’s ability to heal us. It’s also trusting the process—trusting that there is a lesson the soul needs to learn in your sickness, after all, the universe knows more than we do.”

After Lourdes, a long day of travel found us in a small village in the Pyrenees called Saint-Savin, but seeing as they had limited lodging, we ascended further up the mountain to another small town called Arcizans-Avant. After some deliberation, we found a humble mountain lodge, told the receptionist we’d be back after dinner, and made our way to Pays La Bistro, the only restaurant open in the village. Exhausted, we had the establishment to ourselves.

In addition to being over-tired, Step was in the midst of a ‘honey hole,’ a term I deemed for his Winnie the Pooh-like addiction to honey, which might find him polishing off an entire jar in one sitting. As the honey interacted with his body’s chemistry, he commanded the kitchen and asked the chef to throw together something original for him. Between the sugar high, being exhausted, and I imagine feeling as if he needed to entertain me, he was bouncing around like Tigger, which included taking the owner’s guitar out into the rain. Towards the end of dinner, we finally began discussing business, but it was quickly interrupted by our hotel attendant bringing us our forgotten key. We would need it as the hotel would soon be locking its doors for the evening.

By the time we returned to our hotel around 10pm, I was exhausted, aggravated, and desperate to crawl into bed. I found myself thinking, Who is this guy and how am I going to work with him? Before we parted ways, however, he offered a humble apology.

“I’m really sorry for the way I behaved tonight. I hope you know that’s not me.”

In that moment of vulnerability, I thought—Oh, I know who this guy is. He’s someone who’s desperately trying to overcome himself, to master his emotions and compulsions, and when he falls from grace, there’s no one more disappointed in him than himself.

It was in that story that I recognized myself, and in seeing myself in Step, I developed a new-found compassion for him. This reconfiguration of our commingled energy would alter the course of the trip, moving us from being strangers to becoming friends. 

Step 3. RISK

I’m not sure what time it was when the banging on my door began, but it was before 7:00am.

“Wake up! We’ve got some work to do!”

I was in the midst of such a deep slumber, I thought perhaps I was dreaming.

In a short walk, we were standing beside a reservoir. From within thinly veiled cotton-swab clouds, the towering snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees made their presence known.  Beneath them, stone houses and the stables they belonged to were scattered amongst the backdrop of a majestic verdant valley, while livestock dotted the alpine pastures.

“Take your shoes and socks off. I’m going to teach you some of the things that Heal For Free is all about—breathing, returning to nature, getting the body involved, and perhaps most important, grounding. You’re gonna be surprised—there’s actually reasons for all the crazy stuff I do.”

This too was true about Step—he did what appeared to be a lot of “crazy” things, but this was simply because he was a biohacker of 20+ years who had experimented with countless diets, supplements, therapies, and technologies to heal the body that had nearly given up on him. Despite all his experiments, he still considered nature his most powerful healing ally. I followed Step’s lead, took off my shoes and socks, and slipped my feet into the cold, wet morning grass.

“I believe nature has a remedy for everything, but you have to be become your own healer. You have to tap into that inner source and empower yourself to become that creator,” he said.

“The more in tune we are with nature, the more it communicates with us. Just watch—as we do Qigong, as we breathe more and get more into the flow—you’re going to start noticing subtle changes in your thoughts. Maybe the colors will seem slightly different too, or maybe you’ll notice nature interacting with us in different ways.”

Whether it was a suggestion or a result of becoming more present, in a few breaths I noticed, not far from my feet, two minuscule mushrooms huddled and shimmering in a soft breeze, their slight stature hidden amongst dewy blades of grass. Shortly afterwards, two birds started darting between us, while above us a Golden Eagle began performing large, lazy loops around our position.

Later that morning, when I came down to the lobby after a shower, Step had honey smeared across his nose.

“What gives, man? What’s with the honey?” I asked trying not to break out in laughter.

“Oh man, I wear breathing strips at night so I can get the most amount of oxygen possible, but when I pulled it off this morning, my skin came with it. It hurts like a mother f’er, but raw honey is great for healing cuts and wounds.”

I laughed at first, but later when he later recounted how things as such shouldn’t happen—like how he recently went skiing for the first time in 12 years, and in simply bending down to tighten his boots he mysteriously cracked three ribs—I once again had a whole new level of compassion and respect for how far he’d come since nearly dying.

***

It would become our longest day of travel yet, and because we were still a few weeks short of high season, several of the towns we planned on staying in were still boarded up. I was obnoxiously grouchy and ready to sleep anywhere, but Step pushed us onward due to a tip from my friend and mentor who told us not to miss Montségur. Having already relayed this to Step, he insisted we needed to go there, and so against my will, at 8:00pm in the cold and rain, we began climbing the narrow, winding mountain roads. It was unclear if we would encounter snow, or if anything would even be open in the alpine villages beyond.

I was on a one-way ticket to Europe, and both of us had been traveling for days before we met up, so the need for rest overtook me. In mind I thought, he doesn’t listen to me and doesn’t respect my wishes. I can’t work with this guy. This is never going to work.

The next morning, it was I who was the one who apologized for my silent but strong protest. What I was most upset about, however, was not that I was exhausted and needed rest, while he kept pushing us on. It was that I lost control of my emotions and couldn’t get myself back to a good place, even after something occurred that neither of us could have expected—we climbed high enough up the mountain that we were above the weather, making us privy to dramatic alpine meadows, sweeping vistas, and the sun setting over the Pyrenees.

After passing through several small towns that lacked lodging, around 10pm we finally landed in Bélesta, a tiny village founded in 1298. I hadn’t even noticed that the establishment was called Palais Cathare, nor had I put together the fact that the following morning we were headed to Château de Montségur, the last Cathar stronghold. Every day little synchrondicities as such appeared, all of which seemed to point to a greater hand at play.

The hard-charging type of travel we were doing required us to move closer to our edge, to surrender control, and move into the unknown. As I brushed up against my edge, what I realized was that much like love itself, the less of a grip you have upon it, the more it can breathe—and the more it can breathe, the healthier that love is—because let’s face it—the breath is life. The breath is the intersection of our humanity and divinity, or matter and consciousness.

“Risk is to go against what everyone is telling you. It’s the willingness to look like a fool while believing in yourself, and this is one of the things Wall Street taught me to develop. It’s having the courage, trust, and faith to step outside the box. For you and me, the risk is to trust in this way of living—to trust that we can consciously and intentionally create our future by gaining control over our thoughts,” he said before calling it a night.

I wasn’t ready to listen that evening, but I heard the message the next day.

Step 4. CONNECTION

While waiting for Step the following morning, I cleaned out the car. This included lemon peels and avocado rinds, date seeds, chunks of raw turmeric, pieces of rice cakes, and among other things, husks of garlic and aloe—the former of which he would eat raw in the car, the latter of which he would tear open with his teeth to ravage the gelatinous interior.

“Turmeric is good for almost everything, but it’s especially good as a second chakra booster. And aloe, well beyond sunburns, it’s has enzymes in it that are great for the stomach and intestines. And of course, lemon alkalinizes the body…” It was not out of character for him to unleash his encyclopedic knowledge of such things.

“You can see every doctor and take every pill,” he continued, “but you won’t really heal until you make a conscious connection with your Source. Otherwise, you won’t develop the cellular intelligence to harmonize the information within you that wants to self-regulate and heal you. That means you won’t heal unless you connect with yourself, the Earth, and the higher intelligence—or whatever the energy is that created us. All around us is a unified field of energy that you can consciously connect to. It’s the field that governs the laws of nature, and nature has a cure for everything.”

A short drive from our hotel found us at the base of a vertical mountain, upon which was Château de Montségur, the ruins of the last Cathar stronghold. The Cathars, a medieval sect of Gnostics, believed our divine spark could be liberated by gnosis, spiritual knowledge acquired through the direct experience of God. The Cathars were also associated with the Knights Templar, which led to speculation that they possessed the Holy Grail. It is said the Cathars worked themselves into ecstatic, religious states, which then enabled them to perform miracles. The Papacy, however, believed this was heresy.

In 1243, at the command of Pope Innocent  III, 10,000 members of the Albigensian Crusade surrounded Château de Montségur, which was being held by approximately 100 Cathar soldiers. Due to the castle’s natural defenses, the crusaders could not breach the walls, so for ten months surrounded the mountain, cutting off the Cathar’s food and water supply.

Approaching starvation and rife with disease, in March 1244, the Cathars surrendered, whereby they were presented with a choice; renounce their faith or suffer the consequences of heretics. In the ultimate act of defiance, approximately 220 Cathars refused to denounce their faith and were burned alive at the stake. In the days prior to the fortress’s fall, however, a few Cathars managed to escape, and as the legend goes, escaped with esoteric knowledge and a secret treasure, which some believe was the Holy Grail.

***

From the car to the top of the mountain was about a one-kilometer walk. The higher we climbed, the greater views we gained of the rolling hills, mountain meadows, and noble valleys carved out by glaciers over time. Below us, the livestock began to look like a colony of ants going about their intuitive business of order. In the whisper of the wind, I imagined hearing the secrets of the ages and the mysteries of time. The only other audible sounds were birds chirping and the clambering of sheep’s bells rising from the valley floor, the totality of which created a lulling, meditative effect.

When we reached the external walls of the castle’s remains, without speaking a word, Step and I instinctually retreated to our own ends of the mountain top. Step settled in to practice Qigong and I headed to the opposite corner where I dropped into a meditation—but not before pausing to take note of how the shadows of the clouds seemed to creep on puma’s paws across the contours of the mountain.

From my vantage, the lush hills that rolled into the mountains looked as if they were covered in moss. Following my sight-line up the valley to a much greater altitude, as if viewing a National Geographic episode, I watched in awe as a Griffon Vulture glided effortlessly down the valley. In a focused, almost mechanical precision, it descended the long valley with the steady grace of an approaching Airbus 380 on a windless day. In the silence and stillness, it was hard to imagine anything was amiss in the world.

Once I closed my eyes to meditate, I intentionally chose to feel what I imagined my future to be. According to the quantum model of reality, if I could connect with that feeling, I could attract my future to me—or said another way—observe matter or an event into being. In this meditative state, an unprovoked thought appeared in my mind: In the energy of spirit, all things are possible.

Upon the hallowed grounds of the Cathar stronghold, we spent at least two hours that day in our own respective worlds of quiet and stillness. Afterwards, as we began our descent, Step said, “There’s a lot of fauna here you can live off. That’s a good sign of a high-vibration, high-frequency location.”

On the way down the mountain, we spoke of the indomitable strength of the Cathar’s hearts and minds and discussed how as human beings, we can’t be afraid of the shadow self, for we both agreed it’s in the investigation of the shadow that we bring light to our life.

For me, the shadow was what I called in my book the soul ache, an intangible existential pain that seemed to arise from the void. For Step, the journey into his shadow self was returning his physical body back to health and homeostasis. While both of us performed our own daily practices, routines, and exercises to connect with the light of our own energy—all in the name of not letting the shadow be the dominant force in our life—the main practice we shared (beyond gratitude and intention) was meditation. On both of our accounts, our success required us to ongoingly let go of old, self-limiting stories that no longer served us.

As we left town, not knowing where we would be sleeping that night, Step said, “If it was fig season, we’d be stopping at all these trees.”

“We’d be figgin’ out,” I added.

An hour-and-a-half later we found our night’s accommodations at Château des Ducs de Joyeuse, a stunning 16th Century castle converted to a four-star hotel.

Step 5. INTENTION

In mid-October, seven months prior to meeting Step, I was on a trip from where I was living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to meet a friend in Yosemite National Park. While ascending and descending mountain peaks, in the silence of my heart I was asking whatever was listening to be relieved of a burden, the healing of which would finally occur around the New Year.

While hiking through Yosemite, I asked my friend if he knew of anyone who could help me promote my book. He mentioned a podcaster named Beth Bell. In one conversation, Beth and I hit it off, and shortly afterward I was a guest on her show. A few weeks later, Beth reached out and told me she had a feeling I should meet another guest of hers named Step Sinatra. She thought we were doing similar things and that we should have a conversation.

At the same time, on the other side of the country, Step was at his family’s cabin in Vermont. It was there he suffered a pancreatic attack, the burden of which he would also not be relieved of until the New Year. It was during this time—and for the sake of this story’s Epilogue—we’ll call this the reflection, for it was in the reflection that he finally realized he had to truly change his lifestyle—the lifestyle being one that was all about him, on his own agenda, in his own way, and in his own space and time.

“I just know deep down that the way for me to completely heal is to be of service to others.” he said. “I need to change my lifestyle from one of selfishness to selflessness, so that’s my intention.”

***

After waking up in a 500-year-old castle in the small village of Couiza, then traveling to and spending time in Carcassonne—another walled-off castle and UNESCO World Heritage site once occupied by the Romans—we were on our way towards Sète, a small city on the Mediterranean.

“Everybody thinks they need to live by some prescribed way of being until they see another way,” he said during the course of our journey. “But there’s always an alternative choice—and the big word here is choice. It’s too easy to subscribe to what’s been placed in front of us, whether that’s our environment, our upbringing, our politics, and so on. All that’s irrelevant to our truth. But then the question is, what is the truth? Is it found in our cultural, economic, or religious conditioning? Or is it found in a life dictated by an inner compass—by intuition?

“This is why I like the type of travel we’re doing—because it takes you out of your comfort zone. You can’t actually see the confines of your daily environment for what it is until you’re completely removed from it. You have to get out of the matrix and prove to yourself that you can live by intention and intuition. In addition to sitting on a meditation cushion, travel is another way to get you out of your environment, out of the matrix.”

 “It’s like this,” he continued. “Everyone has a longing for a place they want to go or visit, and when you act on it, travel becomes therapy. It’s an exercise that’s gonna change your life, and most of the time you’re gonna have fun doing it. The thing is, people can’t change in their environment without an enormous amount of discipline, but before the discipline must come the awakening, for it’s in the awakening the intention is born.”

After crisscrossing the French Pyrenees for several days, as we crested a hill on the A9 freeway, we caught our first glimpse of the Mediterranean. In the exact moment, with the turquoise waters coming into view, Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones began to play. Like weary, wayward pilgrims, to see the Mediterranean was as if to gain our first glimpse of the promised land.

***

Sète did not prove to be the right space, place, or pace for Step, so after a brief pitstop in town, he asked me to look up hotels in a nearby town called Mèze. In a moment of synchondicity, I found Hôtel de la Pyramide, a hotel that for some reason didn’t show up on his phone. Sure enough, we found our Shangri-La. It was the vibe we had been looking for all along—mellow, calm, rejuvenating.

After discussing our project over dinner in town, we went back to our respective rooms where I opened my French doors and stepped out on the balcony. Two-fingers above the ocean’s horizon was not only the largest moon I had ever seen, but the largest blood-orange moon I had ever seen. Finally, the deeper stillness I had been searching for the entire trip.

While occasionally being buzzed by bats, the only sounds to be heard were frogs, crickets, a gentle breeze, and the bay’s waves lapping to shore. The intersection of my external environment, along with the gratitude I felt in my internal environment, caused two words to well up within me, the meaning of which I did not yet fully understand: Stay Open.

Having no idea whether we were leaving the next morning or taking a day of rest, I crawled into bed and fell into a deep, restorative sleep.

Step 6. REST

For no reason except that the trip was over (and I had no idea where I was going next), I awoke the following morning in the throes of anxiety. Instead of succumbing to it and allowing the angst to rule me for the entire day, I sat in a 45-minute meditation and moved into the feelings of my future. By the time I was done, I had successfully changed my state of being.

Afterward, I went for a long run followed by breakfast with Step. I was relieved to hear he wanted to take a day of rest to complete what we had started. During breakfast, we had an honest conversation about the challenges and frustrations we had with each other during our road trip, which led to an unexpectedly vulnerable exchange about the challenges each of us faced in our lives.

The discussion included a litany of wounds, how to heal them, how to surrender the stories that held us as prisoners, the roles these stories play in keeping us tethered to our known, predictable lives, and how if we are to evolve as humans and spirits, we have to release those stories. We also talked about how if we could do that for ourselves, we could take the wisdom gained and use it to be of service to others.

“When you live from the space of conscious creation, when you’re connected to the field, anything is possible. At the same time, through the energy of intention, you’re training the field to conform to your mind’s will. We’re conditioned to believe we’re at the whim of happenstance, of cause and effect, but through consciousness creation, we can actually affect the cause,” he said.

As far as I knew, this was not your average conversation between two men on a road trip—especially two men who were essentially strangers up until a few days prior.

After a slow morning, I made my way into the inner harbor of the small town of Mèze and found an outdoor café on the water. It was the first time in days I had any time to slow down, breathe, and reflect—which as a writer is essential to the recalibration of my nervous system. As I often do before I begin writing, I wrote in my gratitude/intention journal, this time adding Step’s feeling and thinking aspects of The G.I.F.T.

Right as I began to glide my pen across the paper, a ladybug—a symbol often associated with luck and living life to the fullest—landed exactly above my computer’s camera. It’s presence above the optical eye seemed to say, “Look at how the week unfolded and look around at where you are. You may not yet be exactly where you want to be in your life, but make no mistake—you’re living your dream and you’re in process. Trust the creative process.”

It was only because of the stillness and my open state of being that I heard the voice. That’s the thing about the human condition—it doesn’t matter who you are, who you aren’t, where you live, or how much money you have or don’t have. The voice only speaks in whispers, and is only heard in the stillness of an open heart. Most importantly, it is only in answering its call that one experiences true happiness.

Across the bay, with distant thunderheads gathering over the Mediterranean, I took a deep breath. As best I could, I stepped into the present moment by engaging my senses in my surroundings. I had just completed a road trip across the Pyrenees and was sitting in a tiny café on the French Mediterranean. I was writing about an unexpected road trip within the greater context of my life, in the even greater context of the mystery of life. To express these thoughts, be this writer, was the dream of my 17-year-old self, and it was only in this pause—the rest—that I realized I was awake in that dream.

Having accomplished it, it was not time to refine and expand it.

Epilogue. Making the Unknown Known

Within the construct of a road trip, two strangers engaged their consciousnesses in a dialogue with the field—known in quantum physics as the invisible realm of energy that unifies everything material. One person’s intention was to find out if he wanted to work with the other on a book project. The other person’s intention was to find the story.

***

When we first set out from the Atlantic side of France, we had no idea where we were going, and to a lesser degree, what we were looking for. What we did know was that we were not just tourists, but adventurers—psychonauts willing to venture into the unknown. To be successful required us to follow the whisper, and following the whisper required us to trust in the power of gratitude and intention to create the experiences we wanted to live. Our measure of success would not necessarily be found in a comparative ratio of good vs. bad, but in the perspective that experiences are neutral, and that it’s our consciousness that brings meaning to them. It is in this inquiry, and the lessons derived from the inquiry, that we are led into the deeper labyrinths of the self, for it’s at the core of the self where we discover the essence of our true nature.

To live a life of such conviction is to be in service to the inward journey of the self, not the outward one dictated by others. This service to the self requires trusting in experiential discoveries simply for the sake of gnosis—those kernels of truth that exist beyond the judgements and impositions of family, tribe, society, or anyone else that wants us to conform to a prescribed way of being. Such an experience requires the engagement of the mind (the brain/thinking), the body (the gut/feeling), and the spirit (the heart/listening). In my experience, when we are in such alignment, the body becomes an instrument of consciousness, and in that song, our lives become guided by something greater than the ego or individual will.

***

During my day of rest at the cafe, I thought about how throughout our journey, Step kept reiterating, “Do you still trust the process?” When I observed how this idea played out as we forged a path across France, I saw the unfolding of the process that I leapt into with blind faith.

Without an itinerary, at the start of each day neither of us knew what the day would entail. What I would discover, however, was that each day had its own rhythm, theme, and unfolding. They were:

1. Friday: Trust

2. Saturday: Faith

3. Sunday: Risk

4. Monday: Connection

5. Tuesday: Intention

6. Wednesday: Rest

In studying the order of these words, I saw how the totality of each day’s forward momentum revealed a creative process. What that looked like was first setting out from the Atlantic with the trust that we were being guided, all the while having the faith that what we needed to discover would find us. To perform such an act required a risk, a wager placed on a bet that there was this energy, spirit, or field guiding us—but to be guided, we needed to be connected to that field. When we were connected to it, we could feed it and entrain it to conform to our intentions. Intention was derived from our free will, or the choices we made along the way.

What all of this added up to was that this process was the creation. The journey, guided by our intention, only asked of us to surrender the how of how it all would unfold.

It was in the rest that I had time to reflect on the creation, and in that reflection I found gratitude for what I had created. When you feel gratitude for what is, what you have, and what you’ve created (whether manifested or not yet manifested), you’re in a state of wholeness.

Wholeness is completion, a circle, fullness, but outside of that circle are infinite expanding circles that we are constantly being called to expand into—because there are always greater degrees of wholeness and love to experience. To expand into these experiential spheres is to step over the edges of our self-imposed limitations and into the unlimited possibilities of potential. That desire to know our potential is what it means to dream, and to dream is what it means to be human.

The insight I received in looking at the order of the words that corresponded to each day of our journey was that when you have achieved what you’ve set out to create in your life, it’s once again time to dream. If dreaming is the source of creation, and creation is a never ending circle, then you simply follow that circle in reverse back to its source, starting with the reflection found in stillness.

1. Rest

2. Intention

3. Connection

4. Risk

5. Faith

6. Trust

In the rest and reflection, you have the space to create a new dream, whether that’s health, wealth, love, freedom, and so on. Once you have the dream in mind, you set the intention to live the dream, but in order to manifest the intention, you need to be connected to Source energy. There is risk inherent in moving from the dream of the mind to the first step of the journey, and that first step requires not only a faith that you are being guided by something greater, but also that you have the power to generate in your external reality what once only existed in your mind. That brand of faith requires a trust beyond our limited, human self.

When you really live in that trust, you possess a knowing, and knowing is the ultimate empowerment. Now that you’re back to the beginning of the creative process, it’s time to live the new creation that began in the mind.

And that’s where your next adventure begins.

16. On Surrender, Resilience, and Self-Love

“What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well...”

-       Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

From a distance, the desert is uniform and monotonous. Up close, however, it’s hearty, resilient, and complex. What first made me fall in love with it was that much like life, the more you pay attention to it, the more it unfolds.

***

Whether it was fate, destiny, serendipity, or the product of my own creation, after one of my life’s more uncomfortable seasons, I found myself living at the edge of El Charco del Ingenio, San Miguel de Allende’s high-desert botanical garden. At 65 hectares (160 acres) and an altitude of 1900 meters (6,200 feet), it’s home to more than 100 butterfly species, 156 bird species, and 550 plant species.

How I found myself living there was that shortly after New Year’s Day, my former landlady decided to reclaim the spacious, modern loft she was renting me. With the snow birds from the north flocking in droves to central Mexico’s most artsy town, finding a comfortable place to live, without the added high-season inflation tax, was proving to be all the more challenging. Seeing as my last few months of 2018 were full of turmoil, unrest, and uncertainty, like a beaten-down pugilist, I lacked the fight to go on. When you have no more fight left in you, you have one of two choices; surrender or die. Due to my commitment to self-preservation both as a human and an organism, the latter was not an option.

Down but not out, through grace and good fortune my friend and guardian angel of San Miguel de Allende, Linda Hampton, offered me stay in the casita on her property. While it was a bit outside of town, it wasn’t exactly uncomfortable. I had my own spacious casita, access to her kitchen in a home adorned with art, three dogs to love me unconditionally, and a pool by which to lounge…What I could not have known in my moment of surrender was that my time at Casa del Linda would serve as a safe place to rehabilitate, and that the unexpected gift of the desert would be a propellant for healing and awakening.

***

Originating from the northeast corridor of the United States and having spent the previous 18 years in the Pacific Northwest, I had never experienced the terrain, climate, or energy of a high desert. The desert is a place of extremes where the temperature can swing from -1°C (30°F) before sunrise to 49°C (120°F) in the late afternoon. During the course of a day, as the sun arches from the eastern to western horizon and the corresponding light saunters across the stark, arid landscape, the desert becomes a character in a novel who evolves in unpredictable ways. To add to its mystique, when the summer rains ascend, the desert transforms from an Ansel Adams photograph into a Monet painting. It took me almost no time to realize that the energy the desert provided was an endless fountain of healing and inspiration, and that the more I visited it, the more its elegant, cooperative beauty would unfold before me.

As a writer, the greatest tool I have in my toolbox is the power of observation. Observation is not only what colors a story—it’s not only what reveals the wounds, motivations, or psychology behind a person or character’s actions—it also marks the passage of time. How? Time is the passage of weather, seasons, people, lovers, blossoms and blooms, and the emergence (and thus hibernation) of insects, amphibians, and mammals. It is further marked by the birth of children, the death of loved ones, the upheavals of political events, the revolutions that inspired them, and the social movements that push society forward. To live at the edge of a high desert botanical garden, and to be able to visit it at a whim, gave me the luxury to observe my external life and the passage of time eternal, while juxtaposing it with my internal life, and the passage of time ephemeral.

One day while traversing upon a path, I observed crickets mating, which I found to be steely, focused, and meditative, while on another day I observed butterflies mating, which I viewed as poetic, ecstatic, and majestic. Other days I observed vermillion flycatchers, curved-bill thrashers, and monarch butterflies cutting through the air in sharp angles and dramatic movements, all dancing in the embodied expression of the same energy that created me.

Over the course of three weeks, I watched a steady procession of leafcutter ants (which, in addition to being the largest and most complex animal society on Earth beyond humans, is also the only species beyond humans able to make its own food) go about their business in service of the queen. Like a well-organized army, they were ranked from the grunts, who marched in a line, sometimes carrying things 20 times their weight, to scouts who patrolled the perimeters, to the larger ants who defended their nest from foreign invaders. Observing the tiny creatures, I thought about how all of us are in service to someone or something, and how just as I am a greater intelligence marveling at the simplicity and complexity of this lower life form, so too is there probably a greater intelligence observing humans and thinking the same.

Equally as curious were the survival mechanisms cactuses had adopted to evolve over countless millennia—how many have learned to grow their roots in nutrient-lacking soil and how some, such as the garambullo, the prickly pear, or the barrel cactus, learned to grow from the cracked walls of canyons. Others, like the nopal—a staple of Mexican cuisine and whose varieties are as vast as the North America apple—have grown massive spikes due to their edible (and thus vulnerable) interior. And still others, much like some people, invite you in with their beauty, yet get too close and you receive a prickly, thorny rebuke.

The paradox of the desert is that it is at once harsh, arid, and sunbaked, while at the same time quiet, peaceful, and giving. In its understated, and perhaps under-appreciated way, it is abundant with life. If one were to look upon the desert from high above, you would see one living, breathing organism, and yet if you drilled down from the level of its flora, fauna, and aviary species—all the way down to the level of lichens, bacteria, fungus, and the corpuscle—you’d find hidden treasures and symbiotic relationships as vast as the stars. As an example, when the Spanish conquistadors appeared on the continent in the 16th century, the color red—a symbol of wealth, power, and status—was everywhere. What they soon learned from the Aztecs was the dye that created the color came from a tiny white insect called the cochineal. The cochineal lives on the pads of the prickly pear cactus, and without a trained eye, it would look like nothing more than a white blemish. When dried and crushed, the minuscule, nondescript creature produces a rich, red dye. Behind silver and gold, this dye became the area’s third largest export. By the 16th and 17th century, the result was that the cochineal launched Spain on a path towards becoming a global economic superpower, created a red craze throughout Europe, and went on to revolutionize art history.

From competition to cooperation, in the mirror of the desert I could see the entire spectrum of humanity. Simply by observing the desert, I was learning about my life, and as I did so, in the mirror of nature’s intricate beauty, the learnings of my own journey were being magnified.

***

When you close your eyes and connect into the energy of a place or space, it whispers to you. As the desert is a place full of history, lore, and the transitions of people, plants, and ideas, it has many things to share, but you must become still to hear it.

On my first day in the garden, I sat beneath the shelter of a mesquite tree and did just that—I closed my eyes, let go of all thoughts, and focused on the tingling sensation within and all around me. That sensation is the commingling of the outer and the inner—the energy that inhabits us and the field of energy in which we inhabit. This ubiquitous energy is always present and available to us; most of us just haven’t been trained to put our attention on it. As I sat there beneath that tree, the stillness enveloping me, I heard the desert whisper: How fitting it is that life has delivered you to the edge of the high desert, after all, what speaks more to resilience than that which grows in the desert?

As I continued to focus in on, and connect to, the energy around me, I expanded my own field of energy into the space around my body. In doing so, my focus was no longer on my body, but on the field of energy around it. This is, after all, the energy that holds the universe together, so logic has it that it must possess a greater degree of knowledge, information, and intelligence then I can access on my own.

As I did so, the thought entered my mind, I wire my brain for the mystical. It was peculiar because I did not think this thought, rather, it downloaded to me. Not one to doubt the information, I placed my attention within my head, purposely feeling the unification of both hemispheres of my brain fire and wire in the name of the mystical.

Curious by the information I received, I decided to play with this energy by furthering my inquiry. As I cleared all thought and moved into trance, I asked the question: What energy do I need to tune into? Whether voiced by the desert or my own subconscious, as if an echo bouncing off canyon walls only to return to its source, the answer came back to—self-love.

Dumbstruck by the reply, as soon as the thought entered my consciousness, it multiplied with the rapidity of an algal bloom. Self-love is a subject I have been pondering, working on, asking to know more intimately, and desiring to awaken to. To truly love one’s self is to accept the limitations and shortcomings of our humanity (which in certain areas of my life, I’ve been challenged to come to terms with), while stepping into and embracing the limitlessness of our divinity (which, the acceptance of this responsibility, can also be challenging by its daunting nature).

In that moment, it became my personal understanding that this is what it means to awaken to the I AM—the universal key that unlocks all doors of creation. I AM is the power of the Word merged with the power of Directed Consciousness. It is the unification and alignment of the mind, body, and spirit within the declaration of self. Stated more simply, we become the totality of what we say, think, act, and feel.

No matter your belief, we can all agree upon the limitations of language when it comes to energy and the greater mystery of the universe. As someone whose personal mission statement it is to translate light, frequency, and energy into story so as to lead others to their truth, at least in this moment of my life, my job was simply to walk around the desert, observe the mystery, let it consume me, and articulate it as best I can.

And so it was I came to a deeper understanding that to awaken to the I AM is to know that all possibilities exist as energetic potentials in an immaterial field of information called the quantum field. In the first law of thermodynamics, the total amount of energy in a closed system (in this case, let’s call this closed system the totality of all that is, both visible and invisible, material and immaterial) cannot be created nor destroyed, but it can change from one form to another. To take this one step further, in physics, through the observer effect, simply by observing something we alter it. So the I AM is the ability to alter matter/reality through consciousness simply by observing something into being. Allow me for a moment to boil this down.

If you were to remove all the elements of this complex bouillabaisse, leaving only its liquid broth, the reduction you’d be left with is the creative process. The first step of the creative process is to dream. The second step is to fill in that dream as if it were an image in a coloring book. The third step is to keep revisiting that dream, each time filling in this image more and more until, metaphorically speaking, it transforms from a 2-dimensional idea on a piece of paper into a 3-dimensional hologram. To make the leap from the coloring book to quantum physics, that hologram is the pattern of the dream that already exists (beyond the speed of light and beyond the visible light spectrum) as light and information the field. The more you revisit or observe that dream, or the pattern of the dream, the more you slow it down. As the pattern of light and information slows down below the speed of light, division and polarity occurs, which is where the dream begins to take form as matter, experiences, events, serendipities, or synchronicities. Let’s look at this another way, but before we do, it’s important to remember what Einstein said: “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.”

No matter how novel your flash of brilliance might be, when you come up with an idea, you are connecting with the energy of something that already exists in the field. The more you connect to this idea, as you observe it, circumvent it, and move through it—as you connect with the feelings of what the fruition of this idea might feel like—you begin filling in a mental image of something that already exists as a potential. The more you focus on this potential, the more you bring form to it—and the more you bring form to it, the closer it comes into existence. As an example, imagine looking up into the infinite lattice of the night sky. Then imagine that every star is an atom of potential. The more you focus in on a specific portion of the sky, as you apply your imagination and attention, you begin to cluster the atoms until all the sudden a form appears and you see Orion, Cassiopeia, Leo, Cancer, Taurus, Ursa Major and Minor, and so on and so on.

***

Although invisible to others, for months my internal world felt like dice in a Yahtzee tumbler. The challenge was not necessarily due to a broken heart or that the vulnerabilities I shared might have been exploited. That was simply a catalyst to confront the well-rooted legacy stories of my life.

For months, perhaps a year, a new self had been calling out to me, and yet I—the free-willed human being—resisted it. Resistance, whether found in an engine or the heart, is eventually going to wear down the machinery that evokes the function. If this resistance is found in the heart, the result is likely going to be lot of unnecessary pain. That pain is the result of friction caused by fear—and that brand of fear is the manifestation of our resistance to the soul’s expansion into the new, unformed edges of our being. To push outward into the unknown and often uncomfortable dimensions of the self is what it means to be initiated, and if we are paying attention, every initiation we pass awakens us to I AM.

And so in carefully observing all that the desert was reflecting back to me, I was forced to make a decision; surrender my legacy stories or remain living within the limitations of their confines and contours.

With the fervor and unconscious desperation that the cactus clings to the canyon wall, so too have I clung to my life’s legacy stories. Now it’s important to note here, dear reader, that these stories are not necessarily based in reality. Life is a series of concurrent events. Some are joyful and some are painful, thus we attach to them a corresponding emotion—and emotions carry meaning. The more we revisit these events, the more they become etched in our memories, and the more they become etched in our memories, the greater the stories we attach to them.

When we gain some distance and emotional freedom from the inciting or source incident of our pain, perspective allows us to see its service as one of life’s most important tools for awakening. Through this mirror, I realized my pain was, and has always been, the crack in which the light enters. On one hand, the awakening that commanded my attention was the fact that I was not my stories. On the other hand, the awakening that was calling me from my past to my future was that resilience is having the strength to keep going when you can’t see the road ahead. It also means having the courage to keep pushing up against those stories until—like when we confront the demons of our imagination by looking them square in the eye—the fictitious nature of that which once haunted us is revealed, thus igniting an energetic process of reverse osmosis. In the absence of the void these stories once filled, I was awakening to the I AM.

While sitting beneath that mystical mesquite tree, I felt a deeper trust than I had in a long time. In recognition of the calm within—the result of grace and the pendulum swinging from internal turmoil to a cathedral of peace—I breathed more deeply into the moment. As I released myself further into its gentle embrace, it dawned on me that peace is the alignment of our physicality with our higher-self (or soul) within the paradigm (or physical dimension) of time and space. The deeper I moved into this epiphany, the more it peeled back like the layers of a fresh artichoke waiting to be lathered in liquid butter. Similar to what I expressed in my book, once again—without doing anything but simply living, being, and showing up—an old form that no longer served me was effortlessly molting.

In the absence of that which no longer served me was my naked, liberated soul, eager to undertake the next expansive chapter of my journey, a journey whose design would take me closer to that which I desire to know greater—the source of the mystery—myself. After all, the source energy of the mystery is experiencing itself through my corporeal existence.

***

It is not only the desire, but the intrinsic nature of the soul to experience growth and expansion. These two aspects of life occur via our senses, those visceral portals through which we learn what it means to be human. In this context, life then is not only an awakening, but a remembering of who and what we are—the truth being that we are souls (or consciousness) embodied in a physical vessel, the purpose of which is to poke about the physical world classifying, dissecting, learning, and looking for clues that help us remember the singularity from which we were engendered.

As a form of energy, the power of the soul—which is the individual aspect of the universal consciousness—is that it is has been granted the autonomy to direct its energy. The byproduct of this autonomy is free will, which means that from within the physical form we have the freedom to direct this energy however we choose. The discoveries we make, as a result of the choices we take, can form the path back to eternal, divine love—the highest of all frequencies. Love heals, love forgives, love unites, and love creates oneness and wholeness.

When we are in a state of wholeness, everything we need is already within us. As we awaken to this truth, when we as a collective realize we already have at our fingertips all we need to serve, expand, and uplift the collective—when greed and the stockpiling of resources is eliminated, when we realize we all came from the same source energy—we will finally know peace on Earth. In achieving this degree of peace, the human species will evolve into something greater, and it will move into an an entirely new evolutionary period, the likes of which will seem like the science-fiction of yesteryears. In this new reality, what today might be categorized as a miracle may simply be something we take for granted as the pointed focus of the individual mind in the service of the universal conscious—or said another way—in service of our fellow men, woman, and children of Mother Earth.

In this historical evolutionary moment of becoming, like the pylon and the pier, you are being called to surrender that which no longer serves you so as to awaken to your greatest potential. This means having the courage to share the gifts with which you’ve been bestowed, and that means standing in the expression of your own truth, not in opposition—which is the device of many religions and politics—but in an addition to the whole. This will require you to be responsible for your own healing, which requires you to move beyond survival into creation.

As more and more people become responsible for their own healing, because consciousness is a wave, at some point we will reach critical mass, and the change we desire will come with increased frequency.

Then, much like the tillandsia, an airplant I observed that grows on the underside of some trees found in El Charco del Ingenio, perhaps human beings as a collective can evolve from the parasitic mindset that has grasped our species for many millennia, to an epiphytic mindset, after all—the epiphyte does not take from its host, but rather it lives in harmony with, and contributes to, the whole of its ecosystem.

Do you need help editing/writing your book? Or do you simply need a writing coach/accountability partner? And of course I’d be remiss by saying if you like the ideas in this piece, then you will like the ideas in my book. Check out the book trailer now.

13. On Becoming Conscious (or) The Pylon and the Pier

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, so instead of treating it like a regular workday, I decided to take off on a long run. My intention was to begin running into a new future, to run my way out of the subterranean hole I had fallen into, the likes of which I had not known since my mother passed away and my house burned down.

As I ran along the narrow sidewalks of Ancha de San Antonio, I turned left towards Parque Jaurez, ran up the north side of the park, and began running the stairs near the Paseo del Chorro. While ascending the stairs, a peculiar, unexpected thought popped into my mind: “Good things are about to happen to me.”

Now before I proceed, Dear Reader, if you are going to trust me as your narrator, I feel I have to admit something to you. Before I had time to fully register the thought, “Good things are about to happen to me,” meaning before the thought had time to register, assimilate, and/or entrain with my body—before the thought had the time to create a corresponding neural network for its existence, and ultimately it’s manifestation—like a bartender at closing, I threw that thought out on its ass and shut it down as quickly as possible.

The extermination of such a thought was an all too familiar act of fear, contraction, and limitedness, albeit an unconscious one. Nonetheless, in the same way malware affects the function and effectiveness of a computer, for a large portion of my life these unconscious programs have been running in the background of my awareness. There is a silver lining, however. I am happy to report that as soon as I shut that thought down, a moment of self-awareness occurred. I simply observed my thought. By observing the thought, I was able to bring forth from the darkness of the unconscious the light of a new awareness. What does that mean?

New awareness is expanded consciousness, so to combat the negative voice that so rudely interrupted my future, I consciously began repeating in my mind over and over, “Good things are about to happen. Good things are about to happen.” In repeating this mantra only a few times, like the moment when grinding gears on a bike finally shift into gear, the energy of the consciousness that produced the thought, “Good things are about to happen to me,” clicked into my being. In that moment, I allowed myself to feel the energy of my future—and I can tell you it was as refreshing as it was titillating.

In that elevated, expansive state, I transcended an old form, an old pattern of the person who fell into darkness. Like any training or practice, while I would need to continue working on embodying this energy every day, every time I made the effort to embody it, I was pushing tinfoil. This self-awareness (or awakening) was a tear in the seam of an old form and pattern I have clung to for most of my life. Why? Because to a certain degree it’s safer to live in the known—a somewhat linear, predictable path that doesn’t require me to stretch outside of my comfort zone.  

To bring the light of consciousness to the dark corners of the unconscious was a moment of triumph for mind over matter, because it was not actually my consciousness that shut down the thought of “Good things are about to happen me.” It was the old habits, old forms, old patterns, and old wounds—unconscious programs that exist in the body as feelings, reactions, and emotional triggers. The summation of these repeated patterns causes the body to function as the unconscious mind. Perhaps at this moment you are thinking, If I stepped out of the paradigm of the known and stepped into the paradigm of the unknown, what could happen? The answer is infinite possibilities of rich, abundant, experiences in love, career, family, connectedness, and so on. Perhaps you would agree we could call this the fruition of our dreams.

According to the quantum model, if I step out of my resting or baseline state of being (the known) to embody and/or become the energy of my future (the unknown), then I am casting an electromagnetic signature into the quantum field, an infinite field of information that exists outside of time and space where all possibilities exist as energy and frequency. Therefore, when you become the frequency of your future self, a self which already exists in the field, as you connect with the energy of your future self, you pull possibilities towards you. This is, as Dr. Joe Dispenza says, how you become a vortex to your future. It’s also the truth of who and what we really are; consciousness animating matter.

And so as I embodied the thought of my future (that is to say, who I was becoming and who I could become), because thought is energy, that thought expanded the energy and frequency of my future into my body. This is the process whereby we heal. It’s also the process whereby we create, but are they not one in the same?

What all of this adds up to is that if we are to evolve as human beings, we need to surrender the old, limited ideas and aspects of ourselves that no longer serve us. This is the power of consciousness becoming awakened. It is what enables us to be energetic snakes and butterflies in human flesh. To not become aware of the unconscious programs that run our life is to live as a diminished potential of our highest self-expression.

The unique aspect of humanity that gives us domain over all other animals on the Earth is the power to become awakened. This power is our divinity—that greater aspect of humanity that calls us to be something more, that calls us as consciousness to evolve through the physical experiences of our senses. To say this more simply, the mind can train the body to be its servant. This servitude arises through heart and brain coherence, the unification of which turns the body into an instrument of higher consciousness. Like the snake, it’s this ascension into higher states of consciousness that allows us to molt old parts of ourselves, and like the butterfly, what allows us to transform from one state to another. As we do this over and over, it is not the physical that is ultimately molting and transforming, it is the internal—it is the individual aspect of consciousness in service to the transformation of the universal consciousness. Let’s look at this in a slightly more down-to-Earth way.

For a moment, let’s think of the old self as the remaining pieces of a decrepit pier whose utility has passed. Piece by piece, while time has dismantled the pattern of what was once a pier, a single pylon stands obstinate, clinging to what it understands to be its nature and form. Rather than surrender to the tides, it becomes an immovable force by which nature, in this case water, must circumvent it. This remaining pylon of the pier clings to the idea of itself as a pier because it is a safer, more known way to exist in the world. But if we want to evolve as individuals, or even continue existing as a species, it’s time to let go of the limited constructs that no longer serve us.

We only need to turn on the television to see that the outdated constructs of the old world are falling away around us. It’s important to remember, however, that our global external reality is nothing more than a reflection of our individual internal reality. The old is falling away so something new can be born, but birth is not an easy process.

What is being born is the awakening of a new planetary consciousness, but global awakening begins within each individual. In this moment of history, all of us are being called to surrender old ways, old patterns, and antiquated concepts of being so as to step into the new consciousness that is being birthed. I not only see this happening in my own life, but I feel it…and still the internal battle rages within as I cling to old ideas of self. I cling to the last standing structures, the last patterns, the last remaining vestiges that represent my old, limited ways of being. It is not an easy process, but a necessary one.

If we are to let go of these old forms, we must first ask of ourselves: If I am not the pylon and no longer the pier, then who am I? Who will I be if I step out of the patterns and prison of my own making and thinking?

The answer is I will become freedom itself, and within the limitless energy of freedom, I am free to create any life or reality I desire.

Like to read? Check out this list of some of my my favorite books.

Like to listen? Check out this narrated excerpt from Chapter 9 of my book. It features music from my book’s soundtrack. This song, People Zoo, also from the soundtrack, is why I named my blog People Zoo.

11. Big Love, Big Wounds, Big Change, and Big Gratitude

“The good news is you love very deeply,” said my friend Linda over a glass of Brunello. “The bad news is, you love very deeply.”

It certainly wasn’t how I imagined my life in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico would turn out. Then again, life rarely does. After 15 months of a long distance relationship, I moved south of the border for love. While I was still three hours away from where she lived in Mexico City, at least it was better than 2,300 miles away from my home in Seattle, Washington. Before the first month was out, however, the relationship imploded, leaving me exiled in a foreign country and grieving over an imagined future that would never be.  “Big love reveals big wounds,” my friend Beth Bell says.

The thing with relationships is that they are about a shared frequency, time, and place during the evolution of our soul’s journey. Very often we begin in the same frequency as our lover, but sometimes the soul’s journey moves one or both into a different frequency; not necessarily higher or lower, just different. I had to accept that the greater aspect of our soul’s intersection was to put each of us on a new soul path and journey. As Dr. Joe Dispenza says, “When you remove the emotional charge from a painful experience, it becomes wisdom.”

When the relationship ended I fell into a deep hole, a hole from which it was hard to see the light. As a result, I stopped doing the things that were loving to me; writing, exercising, creating, meditating, being social, and so on. The thing is, when you fall into these holes, from your subterranean vantage point, you can’t see what’s around you—and if you can’t see what’s around you, then you forget how much there is to be grateful for.   

One recent evening on a walk through my beautiful, adopted Mexican town, I experienced a vivid moment of clarity. I realized that long before the relationship ended, my life had been shifting—and all along I had been desperately resisting it. Whether I liked it or not, the tectonic plates of my life were recalibrating beneath my feet, rearranging and restructuring the intersection of my internal and external world. As a result, I was desperately holding my life in a vice grip, and it was desperately struggling to breath. It finally took the dismantling of this relationship to realize I was in one of my life’s greatest initiations. When you’re in these spaces of initiation, what I am learning is that it’s not so much about embracing change as it is allowing it.

I am a work in progress.

I have been in this space of the unknown countless times in my life, in fact, I even wrote a book about being in the unknown. Theoretically you’d think I would feel comfortable in this space, but I’d be lying if I said I did. To jump into the unknown, to do the deep work of the soul is to find yourself in an endless labyrinth where you are not only called upon to make decisions, but to trust that those decisions are in alignment with your highest self.

Our external life is always going to shake us up, this is after all what life is all about—to rattle us out of our slumber. But it’s how we meet these external shakeups from an internal perspective that determines the duration and degree of our disorientation and discomfort. Personally speaking, I am in one of the greatest unknowns in my life, and I am so wide open and so far out in the unknown that there’s nothing left to shelter me—not a tree nor a toadstool. I’m on a lifeboat in the center of a vast ocean of the unknown, and the only thing I have to protect myself is a LifeVest made of surrender and trust.

When you’re in these spaces, it seems like a time of action—to start rowing, planning, plotting, or reading the stars for direction—but instead I believe it’s a time to go inward and be still. It is a time to take the remaining disparate pieces of what you knew as your former life and begin to shape matter and our external experience through consciousness and intention. It’s also a time to look closely at why these shakeups happened, because when we’re paying attention, shakeups lead to awakenings.

Part of what I have awakened to is the fact that for most of my life I’ve been holding on to dormant pains from the past. Like an old t-shirt you can’t throw away, for reasons you can’t name, this pain had become incredibly familiar and comfortable, and yet I know I have outgrown it and that it’s not really who I am. I’ve been so wrapped up in this pain—what I call in my book a soul ache—that I haven’t actually been able to see what I have before me, who I have become, and how I’m living the dream of my 17-year-old self. That dream was a dream dedicated to the pursuit of art and the freedom of my soul’s expression. It was a dream where I was free to roam the world, meet fascinating people, have experiences that caused my soul to grow, expand, and evolve, and to be able to express those experiences so that hopefully others would be able to see their own lives in the reflection of my own.

While by no means is my life perfect, in most regards I have managed to create the life I’ve always wanted to live. I’ve managed to express in a book what I’ve been trying to articulate since I was 17 years old, a journey that took more than 20 years. It was only through the experiences provided by time and space that I would have enough life experience to paint a picture in words of the intangible thoughts, feelings, and emotions of my soul’s journey.

***

Surrounded by a rim of mountains, the spires of grandiose gothic churches, calles lined with colorful facades, and rickety cobblestone streets, I live a life of freedom in one of the most beautiful cities in Mexico. I am constantly surrounded by and meeting interesting artists, creatives, and masters of energy and consciousness from all over the world. But most importantly, I am free to create the life I want to live, and this is one of the most important things I’ve forgotten during my current iteration and initiation of self.

Know that I don’t say this to be braggadocios, dear reader. In fact, the truth is I am giving myself a pep talk, and in doing so, I hope to be giving you one as well (if you are in a similar space). If you are going through an initiation in your life—and if some days you find yourself wondering how much longer you can last in this initiation, as well as dreaming of how much easier it would be to go back to the old, familiar self—I want to encourage you to look around you with awakened eyes at the abundance of blessings that surround you. Know that the pain and discomfort you are experiencing now will in fact become one of your greatest teachers and gifts in the future.

I also want to say that if you too are suspended in the anxiety of the unknown and living in a state of resistance, identify what you are resisting, release the resistance, and allow for the new to come forth. We are, after all, energy organized as matter, and we exist in an infinite field of energy, energy that calls us to become more coherent energy, for it’s that coherence that brings us closer to the truth of who we are as wholeness and oneness. It is the nature of energy to flow, so be the conduit for whatever this new thing is within you that is trying to be born. And remember, this is the time and space when we are called on the most to create, surrender, and trust. When you experience a great loss in your life, no matter what it is, our natural inclination is to lament the loss and close our hearts, but instead, as the poet Dylan Thomas said, “Do not go gently into that good night…Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

I think the best way to do that is through gratitude, so I am going to call on you to do the same. For the next 21 days I am going to practice gratitude. Why? Because gratitude is one of the highest frequencies, frequency alters matter, and our physical existence is made of matter. You can practice gratitude however you feel fit, but one of the structural elements of my book, and a practice I have used since 2010, is to write down five things you are grateful for and five things you want to create.  

If you too are carrying around pain from the past, I will also ask you to leave it by the side of the road. It may be comfortable, and you may have some nostalgic feelings towards it, but it’s no longer you. It is only in surrendering this part of yourself that you can allow a new aspect or dimension within you to be birthed.

Finally, I want to leave you with one of my favorite poems by the mystic, poet, paleontologist, geologist, philosopher, and French Jesuit priests, Teilhard de Chardin. It’s about being suspended in the unknown and the value of patience and trust.

Should you decide to take up this practice, feel free to comment below or drop me a line throughout your journey of gratitude. Thank you for reading and grace, love, and blessings to you.

Have you check out the book trailer to A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment?

10. Creativity, Flow, and a Book Deal in 21 Days

It’s hard sometimes to shut off the analytical mind—the mind that wants to control, predict, and forecast outcomes. This mind certainly has its time and place, but not when you want to be in a creative space, for creativity is about flow, openness, expansion, and trusting the information and ideas that arrive in our minds. When we are in this state, it’s like our minds are radio antennas, picking up frequencies and information that exist behind the visible light spectrum. This is the state of being from which creativity arises and unfolds.

For nearly eight months last year I was in that flow space. If you read my earlier blogs, you know it culminated by living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for two-and-a-half months to finish my book. Then I came back to Seattle and contracted…and contracted some more…and even more until the point where when I was alone in my own company, I was almost unbearable to myself. I was in such a state of contraction and discontent, I was blind to my future.

 At the beginning of 2018, I made a decision to get clear, which included quitting alcohol, coffee, and sugar for a minimum of 21 days. I remembered doing another 21-day cleanse about seven years prior, and I remembered how clear and creative I felt at the end of the second week. The Being Experiment was born out of the clarity of these 21 days in January, and the idea downloaded to me right at the end of that second week. What also occurred at the same time was that although I knew not what it was, I could finally feel my future moving towards me—so much so in fact that I wrote on my desk calendar on January 31st, “Finalize book deal.” While I didn’t know what that meant, I wrote it on there anyway.

Today, January 31st, marks the 21st day of the cleanse. When I woke up this morning and performed my morning meditation practice, which in turn changed my state of being towards the day into one of excitement, I said to myself before leaving the house: Anything can happen today. Today is going to be a great day. Even though I said this, I was unattached to any outcome, and since I picked the word “peaceful” that morning in The Being Experiment, I knew even if nothing else happened, I would be at peace at the end of the day.

Like any normal morning, I made my way to a coffee shop to write. On this day, I happened to choose KEXP, Seattle’s independent radio station. (If you are a music fan and don’t know about KEXP, this is one of the best independent radio stations in the United States and it streams all over the world.)

At first it seemed like any other day, however, when I opened my laptop I received a message from an internationally renowned New York Times bestselling author and lecturer. He told me he had received my name from a publishing house and asked if I would be interested in working with him. I was in complete shock. This great unknown showed up, or materialized, completely out of nowhere.

Of course I thought it was a joke, because it was so absurd that not only had I said something great would happen today, but I had also written on my desk calendar, “Finalize book deal.” While this communication with this author was the opening salvo of a negotiation, none the less it was a start towards finalizing a book deal. Not only was this occurrence seemingly preposterous, it was exactly what I had been focusing on creating during my 21 days of cleansing and meditation; a client from whom I can learn, a client to whom I can offer value, someone who has a big message for the world, someone who values me, and the freedom to work from anywhere I want.

As I said in the previous blog, in getting quiet, focused, and still, I have changed my internal state from fear and worry to joy and trust. Nothing changed in my external world, but I managed to change my internal state of being. It’s my belief that what we see and experience is just a sliver of a greater mystery that revolves around our consciousness and who we are being—and that our external reality is simply a projection of our internal reality.

In A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment, this is one of Thomas’s main discoveries—that the universe is not cold and lifeless, but loving and interactive, and that it responds to who we are being.

 This was originally written on January 31st, 2017 and edited on September 26, 2018

9. The Being Experiment

At turn of the new year, I was not feeling my best self. After a month of holiday parties and gluttony, I decided I needed to completely change my internal world, and so I cut sugar (for 21 days), alcohol (28 days), and caffeine (34 days) out of my diet. Harder than cutting out wine, whiskey, and/or the occasional beer was removing sugar from my diet. With the removal of these elements from my diet, however, towards the end of the second week I began to think and feel remarkably clear. Like a clear channel or frequency, it was as if information and creative ideas were flowing into my mind unobstructed.  

In addition to changing my diet, I also began meditating twice a day. One night in meditation during the end of the second week, the idea came to me to write down a bunch of words on a piece of paper that had highly elevated emotional quotients, throw them into a bowl, choose one every day, and try to embody that energy. The idea seemed to complement my attempt to create a new baseline of feeling good within my internal environment.  

When I told my 20-year-old nephew Jack, who is a musician and scored the soundtrack of my book trailer (not to mention has created an incredible unreleased soundtrack to my book) expressed an interest in the exercise, I decided I needed to think it through so I could more properly formalize it. And so that Saturday I went to a coffee shop and created The Being Experiment.

The next day I found myself thinking, what the hell—I’m gonna send this out to friends and see if anyone is into it. Comprised of 13 – 70 years olds, I wrote an email to about 50 friends. This ‘beta’ group of people resided in eight countries on four continents, and in the email, I included the following message:

What Is The Being Experiment?

In short, it’s a social experiment and an exercise in mindfulness. If you participate, however, I think you’re going to find it’s a lot more than both.

How It Works

• Formatted in the attached Word Doc are 72 words that represent elevated emotions or expansive states of being.

• Print out these three sheets and cut the words into squares. Next fold the squares in half and throw them in a bowl or a bag (like you would do for charades).

• Put this bowl somewhere where you will see it in the morning.

• Before you leave the house, pick a word from the bowl.

• Your job then is to contemplate, interpret, act, and/or be the embodiment of that word, either for the whole day or at least in one instance.

I went on to say that I suspected participants would find it to be a creative process, because at times it will require a change in their being, habits, and/or energy—and when you change your energy, you change your reality. It’s my belief that like attracts like, so as a result of you embodying the energy of these elevated emotions and states of being, you’re going to pull interesting people, experiences, opportunities, synchronicities, and/or serendipities into your life that are a vibrational match to those elevated emotions.

After I sent out my email, I created a Closed Group on Facebook and invited the 25 or so people who answered the email. I figured it would be interesting for people to share their experiences and be inspired by others. Much to my surprise, by the end of the day there were 160 members, and as of publishing this, there are 680+ members. Today I made the group open to the public. You can join the Facebook group if you like or connect here on Instagram.

I’m also happy to report that The Being Experiment is now trademarked and is being developed with a partner into an app and a physical product. If you’re an app developer and/or a digital designer and would be interested in being involved, drop me a line. Let’s work something out.

Please drop me a line or add a comment below if you've had any interesting experiences as result of The Being Experiment.

Happy creating!

Have you watched my book trailer or explored the excerpts?

8. Architects, Ayahuasca, and Tinfoil

How are architects, ayahuasca, and tinfoil related?

Architects
In my previous blog, Love and the Construction of the Universe, I talked about how I imagine the universe to be constructed. The way I theoretically see it, for every construct there must be a context, for instance, if you were an architect and were tasked to build a structure, you would need to know whether that structure’s purpose was to house a family, businesses, airplanes, assembly lines, and so on. So for the construction of the universe, it must exist in a greater context.

What I proposed (and what many other quantum physicists, leading thinkers, and scientists such as Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dr. Bruce Lipton, and Gregg Braden, among others) would agree upon, was that the construction of this physical world is for conscious to experience physicality. Why? Because consciousness in its purest state is just energy and awareness contained within an infinite field of frequencies. These infinite frequencies are creation itself.

The context of all creation is the unified field, which—according to where we’re at in the infancy and limited understanding of the human experience—is the supreme governing law and structure of all that is...and when I say all that is, I don’t just mean our universe. I mean the multiverse, which are infinite realities that exist beyond space and time.

Ayahuasca
I am going to step out of this space and time (which is to say the flow of the above three paragraphs) for a moment to share something that I think is relevant to this discourse. Last summer, I attended an ayahuasca plant medicine ceremony in a remote, wooded area about 1.5 hours from Mexico City. Before I tell you about it, I feel like I should make a public service announcement (PSA), and that is this:

PSA: My advice to those who haven’t done Ayahuasca and/or are thinking of doing Ayahuasca is this: Do as I say, not as I do. Unless you’re really prepared to go dimensional and explore the most outer/inner reaches of your mind, only drink one cup. (When will I learn this lesson?)

To make a long story short, when the ceremony was ending at 4am, I was just taking off. Another way to say this would be that around 4am, a tear in the seam of my being was just beginning. This tear was separating "Tim Shields" and my ego from my physical existence. In the process I fell into something much greater, much more infinitely expansive, and much more encompassing. And so began one of the most intense and humbling experience of my life. 

During the course of the next ten hours I received a lot of information, in fact it felt as if I was being waterboarded underneath Niagara Falls—only instead of being tortured by water, I was being tortured by an endless stream of information that was more than my mind could handle or process as matter in a physical body. (This included an entire download for my third book. Although I can’t recall all the particulars, I know the story lives in my biology, and under the right conditions, in the right state of what Steven Kotler talks about as flow in this video, I am confident I will be able to access it.*)

Download after download the information flattened me, leaving my quantumly expanded and physically depleted. And when I say depleted, the depletion I speak of is like nothing I have ever experienced. It did not even come close to my Division I college soccer days of double-session, pre-season training at Loyola University in Baltimore’s late-August, 110 degree heat. It could not even begin to compare to the highest fever I’ve ever had. It could not begin to touch my longest stretch of sleeplessness, which included nearly 40 hours of travel to the other side of the world. 

To use a plant medicine such as ayahuasca is to be a spiritual miner, journeying into the deepest recesses of one's inner world. In a sense it is the hero's journey into the darkest caverns of the soul in search of precious, metaphysical jewels to bring back to the physical world. This journey is not always a beautiful one, in fact, I can remember calling out in the void for my deceased parents or someone—anyone—to help me. 

Despite this rigorous odyssey into self, I received many jewels on this journey in the form of downloads. For me, the three most important ones I discovered I will share with you now: 

1. Dimensional experiences, while mystical, are not something far off, removed, and inaccessible to the majority. Instead, they are simply a subtle sidestep to the left or right, and they are born out of choice and awareness.

2. Because the greater aspect of our human existence is consciousness, be careful what you wish for, because you can have anything you want.

3. As previously stated, whatever “It” is that gave rise to the universe, “It” is so much bigger than we can handle as physical matter.

Tinfoil
And now back to our regularly paid programming…I want you to imagine for a moment a flat piece of regularly-sized tinfoil floating freely in space. That piece of tinfoil is the quantum field, the very fabric of reality that exists beyond our senses but is impressionable, pliable, and malleable through the energy of our thoughts, intentions, and awareness—the summation of which is our consciousness.

Now I want you to imagine a wooden block in the shape of a star, but instead of it being a star, I want you to assign meaning to it. That meaning can be whatever you want to do, be, or create while you inhabit your body in this physical reality we call the human experience.

Each time you press this star (which represents your energy and awareness) into this piece of tinfoil, you are creating an impression in the very fabric of reality. The more times you push into this piece of tinfoil with your energy and awareness (which we call intention), the more the tinfoil takes on the form of your intention. Eventually, your thoughts actually take form. We could call this the creative process, and this is a truth many ancient cultures knew. Somehow along the way, however, modernity lost this truth under the dirt, dust, and ash of time, a result of the physical world reorganizing itself. Fortunately, we’re once again beginning to awaken to this unifying law.

So what is my point? The point is this: like tinfoil, the very fabric of reality is malleable and impressionable by our thoughts. What we think and feel over and over—if we keep thinking that thought enough times—eventually that thought begins to take shape in this reality.

Whether you are conscious of it or not, at all times you are creating, therefore the questions you need to ask yourself are this:

• Are you going to be conscious of the impression you are making into the fabric of realty?

• Are you going to be conscious and push into this fabric the impressions of love, compassion, and unity?

• Or you are going to be unconscious and push into this fabric the unconscious program of fear, hate, and division?

Remember, this fabric of reality responds to who you are being.

***

(Have you watched my book trailer or explored the excerpts? If you like this blog, you'll certainly like my book.)

*'Flow' when used to describe an altered state of consciousness is attributed to the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his seminal book, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience".

7. Love and the Construction of the Physical World

On a walk last Friday night I was thinking about the construction and nature of the physical world. The way I theoretically understand it is that there is an energetic reality that exists beyond our physical form (beyond our senses, which are what plug us into this physical dimension). This energetic reality, which is comprised of energy, light, and information, exists beyond the visible light spectrum and is comprised of infinite frequencies.

As far as we know, this energetic reality is endless—without beginning, without end, has always been, and always will be. Science calls this reality the quantum field, the zero point field, or source energy. Religion calls it God. The sweet spot, and perhaps the greatest hope for the future of humanity, is the melding of the two, which is why Dr. Joe Dispenza often says, "Science is the new language of mysticism." 

Of this field, Einstein said, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” This means that the field governs all other laws of both the physical and nonphysical worlds. All information within this field is transmitted through the wave function, including our thoughts. Just as you would see a ripple in a pond when you drop a rock in it, that wave is the way the physical world transfers energy. 

As individual people, we are all a part of, and connected to, this greater field of consciousness. This field is consciousness itself—far bigger and greater than what we can comprehend in the human form or with our limited mind.

If you were to continue to move upward into this field of frequencies—which is to say, into greater levels of consciousness and awareness—there would be no separation, only oneness. It’s only when light moves beneath the speed of light that oneness, separation, and division begin to occur. 

If this model of reality is indeed true, then this is how I see the construction of the physical world:

1. The Field (infinite consciousness/potentials/possibilities)

2. The Question (consciousness becoming self-aware)

3. Language (consciousness giving ideas form, structure, composure)

4. Action (consciousness turning ideas into matter)

5. Result (consciousness constructing the physical world)

So why the construction of the physical world? What’s our purpose here? I believe it is for consciousness to experience itself in the physical form. This requires us to truly live our life—to take risks, to love, to suffer, to experience loss, to transcend our suffering and loss, to get bruised and battered all while experiencing family, joy, unity, transcendence, wholeness, and all there is to experience in this physical form. (I talk more about this in my book.)

Mostly though, I think it’s about learning to love. Learning to love is a surrendering of our stories, because it’s our stories that create distance—I am this and you are that. When the distance created by our stories disappear, there is only oneness, wholeness, and the energy, consciousness, and awareness that unites us.

When will the human species get this lesson?

Seattle, WA 8/17/18