The Journey
Or, How to Change Your Life
This all began a year ago, in meditation. As these things tend to do. The process of dismantling - I mean, changing - your life doesn’t start with a bang. It may seem that way in the moment, in those jarring timeframes when you make the decision to quit your job or leave the country or break up with your boyfriend. But the decisions themselves simply serve as markers on your path, as checkpoints. The real change has already been long underway, appearing as whispers in the subconscious, as desires that pop up seemingly out of nowhere.
I was meditating on a cold night in New York last December when one of those desires revealed themselves to me. “I want to spend three months in Portugal.” Except that I had a job. An apartment. A life in New York that would surely fall apart were I to stop holding it all together. So I did what any good control freak would do: Write a potential plan of how I could possibly spend three months in Portugal while maintaining my current life. I had it all thought out, down to the exact amount of money I would need to save, a timeline of finding a subletter for my apartment, and a target date for arriving there. I looked at my notes and thought, “Yeah right,” before trying to promptly dismiss the idea. I was about to head to Lisbon for New Years, anyways. I was hoping that trip would quell some of these “Eat Pray Love” ideas that were running around in my subconscious, and set me straight for another year of working hard in New York.
Though something odd happened in Lisbon around New Years. Two odd things, actually. For one, I had written my annual intentions. But instead of dutifully plotting out my goals and paths for achieving them, I had simply written one line: “Be open, surrender to the flow, release, trust, expand into presence.” My plan for 2023 was to… not have a plan?
The second odd occurrence happened while I was laying in the sun on the balcony. I had slipped into meditation and all was still in the world. I felt fully embodied in a single ray of sunlight, the moment simply expanding around me. And in that singular point of existence, I realized I felt a presence above me. Maybe even watching me. A feeling of warmth, familiarity… maybe even love? I didn’t want to move for fear of disturbing whatever was above me. When I did finally open my eyes, I almost expected someone I knew to be there on the balcony with me.
Except there was no one but myself.
I then immediately remembered an image I had experienced of myself while deep in meditation three months prior – an image of me, laying in a ray of sunlight with my eyes closed, tinted in gold, reveling in warmth.
I was back in Portugal by June. Turns out I didn’t need a plan for saving money or quitting my job; the company went under in March and I received three months of severance. The same night we decided to shut down the company, I had met a bartender who was looking for a sublet in Williamsburg. One thing led to another and suddenly I was putting my belongings into boxes and boarding a plane. Nothing in my master plan had come to fruition, except for one thing: I was moving to Portugal for three months. The intention I had written at the start of the year had morphed into a mantra, “The only plan is to have no plan.”
The summer in Portugal was a period of reconciliation and reconnection. I began in June devoid of feeling. I asked myself what it was that I wanted - what was I looking for - and I couldn’t answer. An expanse of my life had just opened up, and all I could do was cry. I felt crushed under the weight of not knowing.
But I found something there, while laying on the floor, or lamenting on the balcony (always the balcony!), or dutifully writing my worst thoughts down on the page every morning to be sorted and sifted through. I began to find Her. Maybe it was my heart, maybe God, maybe future me, maybe all of these are the same. But something arose out of the stillness that followed the hours of writing in my journal, or evenings spent silently staring into the setting sun until my vision blurred. That same ephemeral presence, that same stillness.
Something else began popping up in my words and in my meditations: I wanted to go to Asia. More specifically, Thailand and Indonesia. This seemed about as far fetched as the notion of going to Portugal did six months earlier. What about my career, my relationship, my life in New York? How was I possibly going to pull off continuing this journey east? And I wanted to go alone?! Yeah, right.
Every Sunday we would drive to the beaches of Costa da Caparica and spend long afternoons basking on the coast. It became ritualistic: wake up, breakfast, plunge into the Atlantic. Meditate on the sand, run back into the ocean, repeat the process until the weight of the week is properly cleansed away. On one such Sunday I was floating in the ocean like usual, feeling the roll of the ocean, the warmth of the late July sun. It was one of those moments when everything seems to fall away, condensed down into a singular moment of Being. And there, cradled in the gentle pulsating waves of the Atlantic, I felt - viscerally - a sense of connectedness. I was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. I was the ocean, I was the sun, I was not bound to space nor to time. I was one moment, endlessly expanding. The feeling probably only lasted for a few seconds, but it felt like a break in the space-time continuum. And it embodied the same uncanny sensations I had experienced on the balcony six months earlier.
Lo and behold, through a synchronous series of events, I had been working at a wine bar all summer. The pay I was due to receive was the exact amount needed to cover the flights. With two weeks left on my Portuguese visa, I booked a flight to Bangkok and a return ticket out of Jakarta. I was going to Asia. And - get this - I was landing in Bangkok with no plan beyond where I was sleeping for my first two nights in the country. “The only plan is to have no plan.”
I've been asked the same question in various ways since I’ve returned from my travels. Mainly along the lines of, “But how did you do it? How did you know where to go? What to do? Who to meet?” And every time I kind of shrug and respond along the lines of, “I don’t know, things just kind of happened.”
Except I do know.
It didn’t hit me until I stepped off of the plane in Bangkok. I suddenly, almost like an afterthought, realized that I was alone on the other side of the world, in a country I had never visited and where I knew absolutely no one. No one was expecting me. No one was going to tell me what to do. My only plan was to eventually make my way to Indonesia, to surf (another thing that had kept popping up in my meditations - apparently I want to spend five hours a day surfing). That realization was one of the greatest feelings I have experienced in this life. Like a new grid was rendering. Like it was time to put into practice this sense of inner guidance that had come to envelope my quiet moments. It was just me and myself - me and my Self - embarking upon two months of new terrain.
Towards the end of my journey, on one of my last days in Lombok, I was again floating in the ocean. Except now the ocean was warm, I was fresh off a surf session, and people were waiting for me on the beach.
How to describe the ineffable…
I was floating in the Indian Ocean, absorbing into the waves and the sunlight until suddenly… I was in the Atlantic. It was October, but it was also July. I was in Indonesia and I was in Portugal and I was in my apartment in New York City. The world was but a shimmering plane and I was floating above all of it, enraptured in the extension of a single moment, constantly expanding - this was not the first nor the last, the end nor the beginning, I was here and I was there. And it was then that I Knew.
I set off on a journey to find myself without knowing what I was looking for. Because there is nothing to find - no destination, no endgame, no medal of completion. Because - I had been there all along. The journey is merely the unraveling of the present moment. The “answers” to questions we so often seek - do I quit my job, do I break up with my boyfriend, do I move - are already within us. We already know. We have always known.
So, how do you change your life? You do nothing. You listen.
This probably sounds hypocritical of me to say after I just spent the last year slingshotting myself around the world. Yet, that is the path that I led myself on. The moment you give up resisting and allow yourself to float, to be held in buoyancy and cradled in the pulsing current of this life - is the moment you allow yourself the space to speak, and the quiet with which to listen. There are no specific circumstances necessary for this to happen. It all starts within you. Because all of it is you. Every teacher, every place, every moment is simply a reflection of yourself. To embark upon change - and to make the necessary decisions - requires only that you know yourself. Except you already know. You have always known.
Thank you to every teacher and guide I have crossed paths with this year who has assisted in coaxing me to this very spot I am in right now, on my computer typing this. Thank you to all of you who have been reading Foundations since its inception. I am excited to embark upon a new chapter with this publication, to share more stories and lessons I have collected over this past year’s journey through four continents, and beyond. Since it is all happening now, anyways.
Images on my mind
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