I just got back this week after another formative, beautiful month in Costa Rica. It hasn’t been easy. Leaving one jungle for another, one green and peaceful the other concrete and loud. It’s odd, feeling foreign in the country I’ve called home all my life. Something deep has shifted this year. My orientation to what home is, where I feel most natural. Like a lost puzzle piece that was jammed somewhere wrong, and now found its fit.
You can’t go back, you know now. My guide said to me. A true statement that I hear and feel so often on this journey. This path of deep inner work that is about discovering, peeling, uncovering and learning your truth. What’s always been there, but shaded by stories and shields and habits and fears.
And once you know, once who you really are comes into focus after years of hiding behind dust-shaded lenses, what do you do? What if that new person no longer fits in your current life? What if returning home, to your house or city or habits or job or relationships now feels like a stranger in a strange land?
You can accept the new disconnect, doing your best to smush your puzzle piece back in, passively feebly dully hope that one day you’ll forget the beauty you got a peek into, or you can change your life. The latter can be painful, but I can’t imagine why a moment of pain wouldn’t be worth a lifetime of feeling good.
For me, that’s been realizing I belong in the wild. I’m meant to wake with the sun and fall with the sun. To know when the moon is full and then dance under it, lay in the grass and count the stars that surround it. To meditate with trees and birds and monkeys and flowers as if I am them, and know I am them. To run barefoot through the mud, climb the rocks to waterfalls. I am meant to be surrounded by souls who feel similarly. Who hold hands in gratitude to Mother Earth at meals, who treat every living being with equal compassion and love. Who put others and their mission above themselves. I am meant to live a conscious, awake, heart-centered existence connected to our truth and to help others find the same.
This collective truth that we all share but are asleep to, in our cities, in concrete, stories above Earth. In boardrooms and subways and uncomfortable clothes and shoes and makeup. With processed, harm-sourced food and noise and stress and pressure.
I was there for too long. I didn’t know anything else, many of us don’t. I’ve now seen though, there’s more. And it feels so much better. And more importantly, that we’re meant to follow that. Follow what feels good. That’s the point. Why else would we have this potent guiding system in us? Emotions, these are our teachers. Our energetic connection and directive toward that truth. They tell us where to go and where to not go, who with and who not with. Most of the time we don’t listen. The world is full of chaos and pain and stress as a result of people not listening to this inner guiding system. The innate compass we’ve been gifted with.
So many of us live our lives spending a lot of time on things that don’t feel good…and then they die. That’s the tough reality. That’s the waking up that needs to happen. And it is. More and more people are seeing the power in looking inward through psychedelic medicine, meditation, or otherwise, for seeking more. Seeking the joy, love, peace that is not only possible, it is our core truth and purpose in this life—simply to be, and revel in that being. This absurd, mystifying, magnificent beingness we all share.
“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky” - Siddhārtha Gautama
But let’s get back to where I’m at…as I’m writing all this I’m shaking my head a bit as it compares to my right Now. It’s really easy for me to write and speak about this work. I read all the things, do all the psychedelics, listen to all the teachers. Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Eckhart Tolle, and Abraham Hicks have been my rotating squad lately. I have my morning and evening rituals and meditations. I’m grateful and fortunate I get to think about this daily with the work I do at Field Trip and our mission to empower the world with these experiences.
The words are there, the awareness is there. Of what to do, how to move forward. But feeling it in myself more than just my throat when I speak the words or hands as I type this is sometimes easier said than done.
Growth has always been an obsession. When I see an opportunity for growth, when I witness a bar higher than where I am, I spearhead toward it. I experienced that with exercise and my body, then tech and business, now here we are with self-actualization…3 years ago I had my first guided psychedelic experience, and within 6 months it was: Ok enlightenment here we come!! Since then it’s been deep deep upheaving with transformational discoveries and insights along the way without having much time to integrate. It’s led to many moments sitting with dug-up life dirt that pervaded my senses, weighed heavy on my heart and mind. Painful memories, self-realizations, patterns and habits being brought to the surface with a new clarity and potency, all at once.
I don’t recommend this to everyone, I recommend the work but not necessarily at this speed and depth. This is my path. Quick and dirty…I’m ready to get through my stuff and live my best life. I feel it around the corner, have gotten tastes of it, and know the difficulty in the meantime will be worth it both for myself and others. Because it’s not just for me anymore. What’s become glaringly clear to me through my work at Field Trip is that my mission in life, my purpose for being, is to empower others to find their heart again, to awaken to their truth. I write here as a small piece towards that mission.
So yeah, some days I really don’t feel good. Today’s one of them. I feel plopped back in a city I technically call home, that I used to think was home, that very much no longer feels like home. I feel bubbling questions arising as a result of that. Big questions, life-upheaving questions. Relationship losing and changing, logistics heavy questions. But I also know that whenever I’m in that space, that burn the forest down kinda space, flowers always come. Change is cool and inevitable. Time to roll and dance with it.