mirrors...

Two years ago this month I was in Peaceful Valley with Tom Crum for a workshop called Journey to Center. I was in the dining hall one night with his daughter, Ali, and she asked me a question that has stayed with me ever since.

Does a place make you happy, or can you live anywhere and be happy? I have always thought that happiness is an inside job, and I also wonder how much place has to do with affecting that feeling within.

After recently moving to Santa Fe I've come to realize that place really does affect how I feel because here I've been feeling so much more energetically. Energies are heightened for me here. I feel them so much more intensely, and I feel so many different ones. Last night, however, was the strangest experience for me yet.

I had been texting a friend of mine who apparently had fallen asleep in between texting. (Yes, it was that exciting...) When I rolled over to go to sleep, I felt his energy wash over me, and then I saw him in his life at his home over the past weekend as if I were watching a movie. Now, what was even more interesting about it is that I wasn't watching what he had done or said; I was watching how he felt. Now, I've had some very out there experiences. I used to work with a shaman in Steamboat Springs where strange happenings were normal. However, this "movie" was the wildest ride of my life yet. I was able to watch it totally detached which was really something because his feelings were discordant with his words and actions. That would've bothered me before. Last night it was just an observance.

I learned that I could see how he really felt and notice how different it was from his words, and love him anyway. None of the dissonance took away from how much he means to me. It was a pure unconditional loving experience. I didn't care how unauthentic the movie portrayed him to be. I could see his feelings and understand why his words didn't match.

Playing human is not the easiest thing to do. We're given roles to play from the git-go. We're told how to act and what to say to be polite. Appearances are so much more important in this society than being real. Money matters more than happiness. We're taught to work hard and play less, and in the meantime, we lose ourselves. We lose what's really important to us. And, what's the most important to me is being authentic. I still find myself hiding out. I still find myself not as open as I'd like to be. I still find myself grasping at how to show up in the world. I still see my own struggles, my own lies I tell myself, and my own inability to be completely vulnerable.

I just give myself another opportunity to be authentic, to be vulnerable, to be open. I just keep giving myself chance after chance after chance. Maybe one day I'll do it better,or maybe I won't, but for right now I know that I'm being given a vision to see how it plays out in another's life, and it's such a gift to see how he's mirroring parts of me in my direction, and I can love me anyway.