At age 13, I had my first breakup, and my fears and codependent patterns had already hatched. My parents’ version of therapy was putting me into a Shambhala Training program, where I was supposed to meditate for three days. I would go on for another decade of breakups and a strong aversion to meditation.
At age 31, I finally hit the rock bottom that woke me up, making me ready to listen and align with my spiritual path. Between tears and sleep, I sat. In those moments, between the thoughts, fear, heartbreak and emotions, I would get glimpses of something I’d never seen or felt before. A flash of peace – or at least neutrality. A warm blanket enveloping me and an energy that could only be explained as pure love. White lights flashed behind my eyelids, and the center between my eyes felt magnetic. Sometimes I would sit for hours. Sometimes just minutes. Rushes of shivers and goosebumps rose up and through my body. Heat in my hands. I had no idea what was going on. Everything scared me, but I was desperate, so I kept sitting. Every day.
After living my entire life with the belief that I was alone in the world, I became willing to reach for something higher, something beyond the physical realm, and accept that it lived within me and all around me. I became willing to witness my thoughts and to stop putting faith in all of the fearful perceptions I had created. I was ready to choose love instead. I developed an intellectual understanding that only love was real and that fear was an illusion, but since I still believed in the nightmares, I chose love, figuring I would have nothing to lose. The experience of this shift in perception was the miracle. I knew I could lose no more than I already had, but I had no idea how much I was about to gain.
When I sat, I could surrender all the fears, my stories, my situation, my relationships, my past, to the healing force that I was opening my mind and heart for the first time in my life, to transmute it all back to love.
The loud, disruptive, vicious voice began to quiet and something new began to come through. A calm, knowing, confident voice that was ancient and familiar, and had all of the answers began to permeate my meditations and my days. Not only did it have the answers, but the energy was the love and connection I had been searching for outside of myself my entire life. This voice became my primary relationship and I quickly witnessed my external world transform before my eyes.
As my happiness blossomed from within and poured out of me into everything I did and everyone I came into contact with, I was healing and everyone around me was healing. I would wake up in the middle of the night with sweat drenching only my heart center. I began to wake early, before sunrise, with an energy and exuberance I never thought possible. My level of compassion and empathy heightened exponentially, and they poured out to the world and its people and animals and all living things. My relationships healed; my work expanded in extraordinary ways, with my clients growing faster than I thought possible; and my body was healed of all physical ailments.
Meditation cracked me open to my own self-healing capacity and my path of self-knowledge. Remembering who we really are is our purpose and the journey we came here for. Within the non-physical realm where I could connect, I began learning about who I really was – I saw that everyone in my life was love, and the entire planet was love. The idea of separation dissolved and I felt oneness, where all duality released. I came home.
As I began shedding a skin so old it felt like I’d held onto it for eons, the voice within me grew in strength and passion with an urgency behind it. During meditation I received guidance to write pages from a voice I didn’t recognize, one of loving authority, truth and wisdom. I knew it wasn’t me writing – this was bigger than me, and it was guiding me to all of my next right actions.
Meditation is no longer a passive practice where we isolate ourselves from society and go to a hilltop to sit for days, weeks or years; meditation is the most powerful vehicle for taking action in the world. Action backed with love carries more strength than millions acting from a place of fear.
The time is now. We must all take responsibility to discover our truth and bring the beauty of it out into the world. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.