These words are a journal entry I wrote last year, when I returned to my beloved Bali home after a long period of touring. A year later now, I find myself in Bali, preparing and feeling full of excitement to open another chapter, to share and take you on another journey on my USA and Europe tour.
I write this from my rustic dream home in Bali. I’ve been on the road now for 4 years, traveling from place to place, each week a new city, and me surrounded by hundreds of new people, teaching what I’m most passionate about – the magic, the healing, the potentials, of our Being.
Something so big inside me, like the gravitational pull of the earth that keeps us here, told me to stop moving for a while. So I did. And here I am. In this fantasy of a place, with two dogs that adopted me, in a rice field, listening to only creatures chirp and watching the rice grow. I’ve got all the things I need to do the things I am here to do – paints, canvas, ukulele, coconuts. And yet I wake up each day wrapped in a blanket of sadness. The blanket contains many, many threads, each a different shade of melancholy, confusion, loneliness, frustration, insecurity.
I watch my thoughts, scattering like paper in the wind, no sheet able to land and rest for even a moment. And my body, on the outside appearing serene, in total unrest.
This feeling is not unfamiliar to me. For 20 years I’ve felt this way on and off (mostly on). I am familiar with the discomfort. But what has changed is how I perceive, and therefore respond to the surge of emotions.
In the past, experiencing even the most subtle forms of these emotions could catapult me into days of deep depression. I would flounder in the confusion, push hard with resistance, and be paralyzed by the immensity of the storm.
Today I feel it. For days I’ve held the weight of the blanket of sadness. But I’m okay with it. I use it. Honor it. Allow it.
What has changed?
In the past, I would tell myself something was wrong, that I shouldn’t be feeling this way. I needed to fix it; get back on track. What’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling so sad, lonely, confused? There is something wrong. I’m fucked up. I hate this… and on and on, this inner dialogue generating more and more threads; each negative thought weaving another section of blanket.
In the past I was fighting against reality, pushing at the situation that presented itself, trying desperately to change it – unknowingly creating more of that which I didn’t want.
Today it’s different. I wake up and I notice the blanket of sadness. I listen to the thoughts that are swirling, spinning the threads, weaving the blanket. I feel the emotions and sensations. I notice when I’m unconsciously fighting my reality. And when I notice, I consciously choose to surrender instead, to drop my swords, shed the should. To allow. And then to inquire instead of fight. Go in, ask questions, find out what’s really going on.
And I ask as though I’m asking a child, curiously and sweetly, genuinely wanting to understand – not with the underlying intention to stop, to fix, to a band-aid.
And there is always an answer that resounds so profoundly with the truth that listening to it alone heals a little or a lot of the unrest.
Just from listening.
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Listening is one of the most powerful tools we have. It heals, transforms, and connects us back to the pure intelligence that everything is made of.
Just listening.
With open, naked ears leading into a curious mind.
I was born into a social structure whose innate architecture taught me that my insides must match its logical and ordered facade.
So when my inner landscape began to express its natural wildness, and this did not align with the unspoken social expectation of how I should be, the outcome was mass internal disorder.
But the truth is that the outer world, which is mostly a mystery to us, actually reflects our inner world perfectly. So when we are expected to harbor an inner world that is orderly like the systems that have been set up around us, and it is actually wild and moving and mysterious and chaotic and all the colours, we unconsciously begin to suppress all the wild mystery. This leads to lost people, disconnected from the outer world, disconnected from their own very mystical nature, dis-eased.
Not at all at ease.
We must therefore begin to listen again.
Start the journey today. Set a timer for 3 minutes. Lie down and go in. Ask questions to your body/mind. Start with the question “what in my life right now am I pushing away/fighting/not allowing? What part of myself am I telling is not okay?”
Remember this is a curious dialogue, like when you meet someone new and you want to know who they are and where they have come from, with genuine receptiveness to the answers.
And the answers that you get – really get them. Fully hear them. Let them speak without calling them right or wrong. Listen without judgment. And all the answers that you receive – receive them into an arena of inner openness, into that part of yourself that can say “well, that is so interesting.” Then thank yourself, first for taking the time to listen, and then for sharing whatever was shared.
Next journal your answers. Without judgment, write down what came. Write what you learned. It’s all about learning. It’s taken me so long to learn. And I say this with awe, with so much love and respect for life. I see now that it had to take this long, so that I could (and continue to) thoroughly learn from each every thread in the weave.