Releasing Expectations Through Traveling
Learning to trust what is instead of focusing on what ‘should’ be.
Have you ever arrived to a place and immediately felt disappointed because it ‘should’ be different? The expectation the mind had built up doesn’t match the reality of the arrived to moment and the crash of disappointment that comes through that?
I have spent much of my life seeking what my mind thinks life should look like. Without stopping to look around at what is, I’d hit the ground running to try to make that vision a reality. Then, when I realized that what I thought I wanted actually wasn’t feeling successful, I’d pull the rug out and do it all over again somewhere else.
The past 7 years have been about cultivating home from within so that no matter where life calls me, I can arrive with curious eyes open to the present moment instead of desperate eyes seeking for an illusion of fulfillment.
Life has sent me out into the world, away from my stable, spacious, simple and beautiful life in Peru and back into movement in the US, this is very much a trial and error process.
The mind wants to believe that everything should be in perfect, beautiful, sweet harmony always. That each place I arrive to should feel wonderful, peaceful, quiet and still. But this is not the reality of the world we live in. This illusion of separateness that we are a part of is filled with duality. And being a creature that is here for extremes, this is the only way I learn.
There seems to be this calibration to cultivate alignment. Oscillating back and forth between environments that are deeply resonating and ones that are more dissonant with presence and awareness.
There’s an invitation to trust in where spirit moves me, be there and notice what I feel. Trust that I will be in each place for just the right amount of time to learn what I need to learn through the experience. That if I leave before I know what I’ve learned, I’ll end up in an environment that presents the same lesson wearing a different outfit until I get the message.
There’s a difference between leaving a place with the lesson and experience of it integrated into our being and running away. Sometimes what I am called to see is what is out of whack; what is misaligned with nature. Not to try to fix it or walk in guns blazing to tear it down, but simply to investigate and start to fine tune my own perception and awareness. Where is this outer experience mirrored by my inner reality? This is the school of life.
When we are studying something new, we don’t immediately start treating people or trying to change the systems. We spend time focusing and building the foundation. This is what I feel like I’m doing through the moving in and out of different environments and groups of life forms; I’m investigating the different expressions of life and how they all exist within me.
5 years ago this month I was called to Joshua Tree. In this trip was the first time I received the message ‘you have to let go of all the stories you tell yourself.’ Spirit invited me to sell all of my things except what fit into my car and drive to Denver. Without finding a job or a place to live, I was invited to just go and see what happens.
At the time I had a job lined up in LA, a lease signed on an apartment and boyfriend I was moving to be closer to. After getting this message, I quit the job, gave up the lease on the apartment, broke up with the boyfriend and moved to Denver. I didn’t completely follow instructions, I got a job working at a steakhouse and signed a lease on a new apartment with all of my furniture and belongings in tow.
4 days after arriving to a new city, as I was walking to work on my first day, the Governor shut everything down for COVID lockdown part 1. I fell to my knees, “I’M LISTENING!” I calle out to spirit.
Shortly after I met Human Design and Ayahuasca and since then, life has been a series of movements and invitations as I unwind and alchemize the stories I’ve told myself throughout lifetimes. And now, 5 years later, I’m back in the place this message first came.
I’ve sold all my things except what fits in my car, and I’m going where I’m guided one experience at a time. It doesn’t always need to be one big leap when we get these calls, it can be a gradual unwinding and process of alignment to what our Soul’s Paths are. Little by little, we learn.
Who knows where this journey is headed, but I do know I’m here for it.