A Long Road Trip Into The Desert
“God damnit I need an adventure,” I texted my Mom on an especially restless Sunday afternoon.
I love life on the Prairie in Central Montana. It is so serene and peaceful here, you can literally feel the Silence penetrating into your being. But after 4.5 months of stationary living I was ready for a change. I longed for the freedom and open roads of a cross country road trip.
10 days later I found myself behind the wheel headed to Tucson, Arizona.
My first stop was in the elegantly crafted mountain town Bozeman, Montana.
In Bozeman I discovered the ‘Bhagavad Gita’ and how powerfully I could hold space for a friend.
My friend and I decided to meet at the delicious Thai restaurant ‘Sweet Chili Asian Bistro’ (try it if you’re ever in the area).
Sitting across the table from my beautiful friend I could feel her overwhelming frantic and excitable energy. Her energy just felt all over the place. She had come straight to dinner from her fast-paced retail sales job. I had just finished shooting a video and meditating and was feeling very present and still.
We both noticed the dramatic contrast of our inner states and laughed. We talked about how it is difficult but possible to stay calm and centered even in fast moving and busy environments by anchoring into the ‘Self’.
We talked about how if you are deeply anchored enough in the ‘Self’ that being the witness or the Presence to all that is happening becomes the primary reality, and that the play of life is the secondary reality. But often, when we get lost to the mind we get pulled out of the primary reality of the ‘Self’ and we mistakenly regard the ‘play of life’ or the ‘dream of Spirit’ as the primary reality.
We reflected on the fact that when we make the ‘play of life’ our primary reality that we will naturally start believing our thoughts and psychological dramas to be real and soon enough pain and suffering follow.
I distinctly remember when I was sitting across from her and absorbing her frantic energy that my purpose in life became more clear to me.
In that moment, I realized that my purpose is bringing everyone that I interact with closer to their tranquil, calm and spacious ‘Self”. I used to be so overwhelmed by other people’s energy, but in Bozeman, I found myself effortlessly absorbing my friend’s strong energies and guiding her to stillness and peace.
Beyond our lovely conversation and the realizations that we came to, I will mostly just remember my friend’s infectious smile and high-spirited presence.
My body woke me at 5am the next morning, eager to get back on the road. I headed straight for one of my favorite places, Provo, Utah.
I feel so warm and supported in Provo, Utah.
Provo is located at the base of the Wasatch mountains just south of Salt Lake City. In the town you will find a tranquil pace of life and lots of happy people and smiling faces.
Provo has this innate spaciousness and welcoming vibration. Even if I’m just driving through the town I feel this pleasant Silence come over me and I feel like I’m home.
I shot one of my more soothing videos in the Wasatch mountains that rest next to the city. If I had to guess I would say that a lot of genuine and heartfelt prayer takes place in Provo. Connection to the ‘Self’ feels so effortless there.
Being in a place where there is a lot of heartfelt intention to bring about a closer personal relationship to God, really created an ideal energetic environment for me to open up and allow Grace to flood into my being.
Part of me wishes I would have listened to the uneasiness in my Gut the next day as I was leaving and just stayed in Utah, but then I wouldn’t have encountered all the lessons that were to come!
The next day I made it to mystical Rimrock, Arizona.
Awh, the mystical and sacred grounds of Northern Arizona.
The drive from Provo to Rimrock was sublime. The vast canyons and stunning scenery as I traveled south reminded me that anything is possible on this magnificent planet.
Rimrock is located 22 miles from the well known spiritual hub Sedona, Arizona. And suffice it to say the mystical vibrations carry all the way to Rimrock.
I thoroughly enjoyed my Air B&B in a beautiful log cabin and as a bonus I had a great conversation about dealing with disappointment with my host. I recap our conversation in this video.
After a delicious and hearty breakfast at a local diner I was on my way to Tucson, Arizona.
Traffic, confusion and frustration encapsulate my time in southern Arizona.
I don’t put any of this on Southern Arizona mind you. For what ever reason, when I got into Tucson I started relying on my mind rather than my intuition.
Spontaneous and heartfelt adventure was replaced by seeking my enjoyment and satisfaction outside of myself in the way of chasing mental projections. I just kept driving in circles (literally hahaha) I don’t know why that is so funny to me now, but I was literally driving in circles my entire time in Tucson.
I would have had a better time had my phone broken.
I would google something, and go there, be disappointed, google somewhere else, then go there and not enjoy myself and then just sit in my car, tired and frustrated. I refused to just let go of the mind’s obsession with predictability and safety. It is all seriously hilarious to me now that I’m not actually living it.
My time in Tucson was an apt example for how we suffer life when we are living strictly through the thinking mind. I lost presence, stillness and peace and entered into a painful state of consciousness rooted in wanting and not having. I kept wanting an experience, a place or a person to provide me satisfaction. Tucson is the last place I will look for something outside of myself to give me fulfillment. Well, I hope;)
I decided to leave a night early and go back to where it all started 32 years earlier, Kingman, Arizona.
I spent my first 17 years in Kingman, Arizona.
Kingman is a smallish town of 35k people located on the historic Route 66. If you talk to passerby’s and tourists, they will probably tell you there isn’t much to the small highway town.
However, that wasn’t the case for me while spending the day there 15 years after leaving. The town was brimming with feelings of nostalgia and timelessness. My being was pervaded with memories and thoughts of old friends, lovers and enemies.
Driving through the town I grew up in, I observed how much things had changed, how much the town had changed and how much I had changed, but in a deeper sense, I could feel how the underlying fabric of everything had remained unchanged.
And how this underlying and unchanging force that everything is happening in, that everything is evolving and changing in, is the very ‘Self’ that my friend and I had talked about at length in Bozeman, Montana.
I realized on a deeper level how the ‘Self’ is found in all things and all places at all times. The self is timeless, infinite and eternal, never born and never dying.
I simultaneously felt that this town and my time spent there were from another life and that this other life was still in me. The high school jock, the street racing daredevil, the young womanizer and confused ego maniac teenager were all still me.
And the more awakened and conscious ‘I’ was present in that ego maniac teenager. The awakened aspects of me were always there inside of me. They were just going undiscovered.
Even with all of my on going evolution and growth there are parts of me that were born into existence in this town, and these parts will remain with me forever.
When we go through a spiritual awakening we feel reborn. As I was driving by all of the old houses I used to live in I couldn’t believe how simple it all felt.
I was seeing the houses through the same eyes as when I was a child growing up in them, realizing that I am the same ‘Self’ no matter how much more awake to this ‘Self” that I have become.
