Spiritual Awakening Journey: Pt. II - The Opening
Travel I think is my true joy. It serves as an outlet for my yearning and desire to connect with something outside of myself. To see the world again with those bright and shining eyes.
I began traveling internationally when I was 25, right after my father passed away. I decided to go on my first solo trip to China and Thailand. I remember just needing to go, for whatever reason, maybe to connect with my heritage, I don’t know. But intuitively I knew it was what I needed to do. And I think it was my way of coping as well. To move past the pain and move into what brings me wonder, inspiration and joy. Or maybe to just get lost in another world and feel a sense of possibility again. After that first trip I started traveling to Asia every year, visiting almost every country and returning to my favorite places. I would save up all of my vacation days just for that one trip — the time of the year when I felt most alive.
I intuitively decided to again follow what I love: travel and creativity. As a child, I always had a desire to make and build things. Creativity was an outlet. My mother told me that when I was three I would build lego towers and stand back to admire them. I didn’t knock them down, I’d just let them stand for preservation. I was always making something as a child…friendship bracelets, jewelry, origami, knitting, painting, etc. I loved my crafts kits. Creating things was what I loved to do and I just enjoyed getting lost in the process of making something tangible. I undernourished that part of myself in adulthood and I guess I intuitively felt the need to re-explore it.
Two weeks after the separation, I left for a textiles trip to Guatemala to learn traditional backstrap weaving from Mayan womens collectives. It was the first time in a very long time that I gave myself what I needed. What I needed was to get out of my head and go experience the world. To remember what it feels like to be alive and inspired. The trip to Guatemala was my opening. It planted the seeds for me to explore the concepts of cycles, roots, ancestry, shamanism and Mayan culture. It helped me feel, learn and experience something new and different. It was a glimpse of what it felt like to be myself again. Two weeks after that, I went on another trip to Oaxaca to learn floor loom weaving from Zapotec collectives. Through those two experiences, I re-immersed myself into the world. A glimmer of my inner self started to come thru and it liked what it saw. And it wanted more.
I returned to the U.S. after Oaxaca in mid-December, already wanting to fly back. I still was largely suppressing my pain and at the time had only shared the news with a few people. I kept it largely to myself. I felt like I was going through a hurricane storm alone and wondered if I’d make it out alive on the other side. By the time Christmas rolled around I was forced to begin sitting in the reality of my situation. Christmas looked a lot different this year and it was a small affair. It would be the first holiday without my ex. Most of the time I pretended to be happy. I just sat in a chair trying not to cry as I remembered the moment we parted ways. We were both at the house. He was packing up. And I had preemptively booked a massage appointment for that afternoon... At the door of the garage I said goodbye. And in that moment we looked at each other and cried. We hugged and held each other, knowing that what we were doing was the hardest thing but it was also the right thing to do. I got into the car, pulled out of the driveway, looked back at him in the garage, and drove away.
I barely got through the holidays and was already researching coastal towns in Mexico. On December 30th, out of the blue, an acquaintance recommended a metaphysical center that held workshops and classes. I looked it up and it happened to be just 10-minutes from my house. I felt compelled to give it a try. And in the new year I entered my first class on source energy channeling. I had also begun a meditation practice out of sheer desperation because I couldn’t sleep at night. I tried everything but nothing worked. A million thoughts and worries raced through my mind, keeping me up at all hours of the night and into the early mornings. Like a television that just wouldn’t quit. One morning, something called me to just sit in the corner of my bedroom facing a window. I probably managed to sit there for 5 minutes before I gave up. But despite how uncomfortable and hard it was, I just felt like I had to continue trying. It was the only way forward. I never gave up, and little by little I would sit there with greater consistency. Until eventually I had cultivated a regular meditation practice for one hour a morning. This took me about 1.5 months of regular practice. It came naturally to me as if I’ve done it before. In that month, I started opening up and feeling ‘energy’ or ‘universal life force’ moving through my body. I remembered as a child, my father taught me tai chi and he would show me how to feel the chi or ‘fire ball’ of energy between my hands and to move it around. I didn’t know what it was or what it meant but I always felt that energy concentrated in my hands. And then I grew up and forgot about it. Meditation and energy classes helped unearth buried memories of what it felt like to feel that energy move through me. It felt like something started to awaken inside but I had know I idea what it was.