Wherever you Roam…There You Will Be.

With an understanding of who I am, my first instinct with any uncomfortable situation is just to run, and this running takes on many forms. This running can look like a spontaneous moment of over independence to hop into the car and drive to the next state over or 5. A sudden move to a new city or country. Closing my emotions off and pushing someone away when it feels like they begin to get too close to seeing me. The inability to stop moving and calling it self care because it’s applauded to engage in over exercising as a way to keep up with overshadowing beauty standards. Sometimes it is an actual literal run, and I call this my biyearly-life-has-built-me-to-this-point run. It feels like a lot of the time it was labeled and masked as adventurous by others, but underneath was the intention of disconnection and self abandonment. If you’re smiling and projecting happiness, you can hide a lot.

When we aren’t mindful of how to find a home in the self and the present moment, we will begin to seek wholeness in others, which only leads to a certain type of disappointment that I’ve expertly dealt with in clouds of numbness. It’s not even always a conscious attempt to keep running from the self, sometimes it’s a form of protection in the only way we know how. For example, when I left SC to move to North Georgia, it’s because I no longer felt safe there. I had an abusive relationship gone wrong and I needed somewhere I could breathe without wondering if my ex was watching or following me. That seemed like the best solution at the time, and it was. I had completed my yoga training in North Georgia so I finally felt like I was moving towards something, but the move didn’t fix everything. I hadn’t done the work on the inside, so naturally I brought with me all the habits and decisions that allowed me to be drawn to those that weren’t encouraging me to shine. I perpetuated allowing others to dim me because I internalized that storyline with how I saw myself. So as the story goes, I was immediately stumbling, only making it a week on the high of new beginnings, and then a couple months later I was back to being in the same type of relationship with the same sense of outward clinging that comes from this inability to be alone, and find comfort in the self.

During this process, I found comfort in embodying life’s dual balance, contradictory to the message of everything being black and white I had received while growing up. I could be both. I could find myself and thrive in the grayness. In that place, I could be. Once I finished the program I made another move, this time to Atlanta, to start over yet again. I now had the tools necessary to reinvent and I have so much gratitude for those that believed in my shine and were there for my rebuilding process when all I had were a couple boxes, an air mattress, and everything to gain. I would now start to root. I would now start to really grow from my stagnant spell of self inflicted suffering and running.

So when the pandemic came and there was quarantine, I’m thankful it wasn’t as much of a mental struggle as it could’ve been. While it was difficult, I found humor in like “wait I gotta do this deep self diving already again?!” Poetically I was left staring at the 4 walls of my room and the 4 walls of my own mind again. And I was in a much better headspace to do it this time. During that summer, I came to really embody the mantra of wherever you go, there you will be. I was comforted at last in enjoying who I had become and who I was becoming. The secret to a healthy understanding of self is that the work never stops. I forgave myself and released shame on what I felt like was entirely too messy of baggage for anyone, including myself, to really accept. I turned it into my super strength of compassion and patience because I practiced those same tools daily to un-dig myself out of my self sabotaging hole.

So to answer who am I? I think that is a question we can approach everyday. There is a generous type of fluidity in everyday being able to wake up and say, now, it is like this. I don’t want to do myself the dis-service of being stuck in some sort of narration of how I believe I should be, or how others remember me, because then that leaves me trapped against the process of my constant mission of self expansion. Where am I going? For this answer I believe it has to tie in with the third question of what do I love, because in every decision if I include my core values of what I love, I will go exactly where I need to. And maybe before I get to answering what is my way, I can ask myself what is in my way?

Our life only unfolds in moments, so to every moment, I encourage you to allow yourself to become the observer and also actively engage so as to not let life pass you by. Time is precious and so is where you put your energy. In each moment, may you bring your joy, your compassion, your empathy, your wisdom, your uniqueness, your active listening, your passion, your ambition, your guilt, your shame, your frustration, your sadness, your anger, your everything. When you expand to bring your whole self, the universe expands with you and meets you there. May you allow the gifts that come with meeting yourself, here.