As told by Tim Shields, co-created with Step Sinatra.
What happens when two veritable strangers embark on a roadtrip with no intention except to remain open?
THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME
When Step approached Tim Shields to write an article about his travel excursions, he knew that no explanation could convey the experience like the experience itself. The terms? That there would be no expectations or plans, and that it would truly be a trip into The Unknown – with Spirit taking the lead.
Discover how their adventure unfolded below.
Prologue.
A UNION OF THE UNKNOWN
“If you encounter any resistance, flow with it,” Step Sinatra texted me when I landed at France’s Bordeaux International Airport. “Follow the path of least resistance.” The time on my watch read 3:33pm.
After traveling from Lisbon, Portugal, I was instructed to take the TGV train south to Bayonne, where I was then to secure a taxi and take it to a small town coastal town north of Biarritz called Anglet. It was there I would find him at a small beach bar called Le Paillote Bleue.
No, this is not the start of a spy thriller. Instead, it’s a story about two men, strangers actually, taking a road trip across the French Pyrenees. It’s also a story about how a journey disguised itself—then revealed itself—as a creative process.
Seeing as you’re an astute reader, I congratulate you on asking the obvious question: Why?
The first answer is that we shared an interest in a liberated way of being—one that was based on the freedom to create our lives according to our own rules. The second is that we wanted to see if we could turn our mutual interest into a collaboration. Essentially, it was a platonic blind date for two people who shared a similar vision about the internal power of gratitude and intention to construct our external reality.
***
I was originally supposed to meet Step (short for Stephen, no relation to Frank) somewhere on the coast in Portugal, but the combination of “a hunch” and driving rains sweeping across central Europe had us meeting in Anglet, a famous surfing haunt on France’s southern Atlantic coast.
What I would soon learn is that Step Sinatra is a moving target. What I would also learn is that by most definitions, he could be labeled eccentric, but the more I came to know him, the more I realized that eccentricity is nothing more than an outsider’s perspective of an unknown way of being. Regardless of perspective, what is irrefutable is that he falls outside the bell curve of the normal, predictable life. I suppose I do as well, which is why I agreed to take a road trip with a total stranger, to an unknown destination, within an unknown time frame, with unknown results. It was an unorthodox way to meet someone to discuss a project, but not much about Step is orthodox.
***
A flight, a bus, a train, and a taxi ride later, with the Atlantic Ocean in view, a pilsner awaited me. With shoulder length hair, European flair, a scruffy beard, and standing about 6’2”, Step had a rugged, weathered air of leisure and success about him, as if he had spent time surfing the beaches of Malibu, California, or summering in Nantucket, Massachusetts. We clinked our beers to adventure, good fortune, and the unknown, then walked towards the ocean.
Out on the water, with the steely concentration of praying mantises, surfers lay in wait for transcendent waves, while on the beach sun worshippers surrendered to the waning strength of the sun—some in meditation, others in dance, and still others in joy and gratitude. With the strata of beach grass and sand in the foreground, and the ocean’s horizon receding into a flaming-scarlet sky in the background, I could not help but be moved into wonder and awe by this beautiful, unpredictable circumstance we call existence.
With all the distractions of life momentarily removed, and nothing to focus on but the waves rolling, barreling, and lapping to shore, those of us on the beach who bore witness to nature’s majesty had no choice but to be present to life’s unfolding. Since the beginning of time, for students of the mind and those interested in mastering the self, this has been the great challenge—in a world full of distractions and illusions constantly competing for our attention—to train the mind to stay in the present moment.
“Do you wanna try some Qigong?” Step asked, pulling me out of my reverie. “I do this every day. It’s all about harnessing the energy of nature, which is what my documentary Heal For Free is all about.”
Externally confident and internally self-conscious, I set about following his lead. After a Qigong session and returning to the restaurant for some olives and cheese, we headed back to our lodging where it took me nearly no time to fall into a deep, travel-weary sleep.
***
The writer Saul Bellows once said, “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
At some point in the early hours of the morning, the subconscious roused me from my slumber to record a message. Discombobulated, but ever aware of the muse’s fickle nature, I scrambled with urgency for the notebook beside my pillow. As quickly as I could write, in the darkness of the coastal night I scribbled three messages in nearly indecipherable handwriting, the second of which, had I adhered to several days later, would have spared me great anxiety and frustration:
Just as a plant is in a direct energetic relationship with the sun, so too are we blooms of consciousness living in matter.
To travel as such is to remain open, and being open means receiving information from beyond the visible light spectrum—information that exists as frequency and manifests as synchronicities, serendipities, feelings, or instincts in one’s gut.
The successful traveler is like the Tao; he/she follows the path of least resistance.
When I shared this with Step the following morning, he told me he called these synchrondicities (synchronicity + serendipity). Just like ancient mariners used the stars to find destinations, Step used synchrondicities as spiritual cues to find his way.
Step 1.
TRUST
“Beyond all else, you have to trust in your body’s innate power to heal. No matter what you’re dealing with, you have to trust its intelligence. Just because your doctor tells you one thing doesn’t mean you have to listen. If your body’s instincts are sending you a message, you need to tune in to it. You need to trust that voice.”
This is not necessarily something you might expect to hear from an ex-Wall Street trader, although maybe it is—especially if five years of constant EMF radiation poisoning from the earliest models of cellphones, plus a stress-filled 24-hour lifestyle, nearly took your life. Instead you might expect this more from a Napa wine maker, which is what Step did after he walked away from Wall Street, the second excessive lifestyle choice that nearly took his life.
“When I was lying there in the hospital bed—literally a few breaths from death—a thought popped into my head. ‘If I’m powerful enough to create my worst nightmare, couldn’t I also create my wildest dreams?’”
***
In a moment of synchrondipity the evening before my arrival, Step walked into a hotel in Anglet to inquire about two rooms. Once there, he pulled out his wooden pendulum (not a euphemism) to decipher whether the hotel was a good fit. Above an open palm, he held the pendulum on a string. If the pendulum moved in a circle to the right, green light. If it moved to the left, time to move on.
As it turns out, the woman who worked at the hotel used the same method to make decisions, thus Step befriended Sandrine, an attractive woman in her early 40s. Unbeknownst to Step at the time, the following day she would skip her plans to go surfing and instead serve as both our chauffeur and guide. This included showing us around Bayonne, waiting for us as we rented a car in Saint Jean-da-Luz, taking us to empty beaches in between, and escorting us around the seaside town where we would meet locals, savor stinky cheeses, and sample several glasses of local wines.
“Are you ready to step into the unknown?” Step asked as we slurped briny Atlantic oysters harvested earlier that day. My acquiescence heralded the start of the adventure.
With the evening’s revelries coming to a close, as the light fell from the sky and storm clouds began to surround our position, we still lacked lodging. This was quite common for Step as reservations were something he paid little mind to.
This presented us with a choice; stay in Saint Jean-da-Luz, where he had stayed a few days prior, or head towards a small unknown village 30 minutes into the countryside. After a long day of travel, I was more than ready to spend the night by the sea. Nonetheless, we said goodbye to Sandrine and headed east in our small European rental.
“I feel like some classic rock—maybe some Hendrix? What do you think?” Step said as we reached the last traffic circle at the edge of town.
I put on Little Wing and settled into my seat, grumpily suspecting it was going to be a long night. While Step was trusting we would find lodging that exceeded the seaside hotel I wanted to stay at, I imagined after endlessly trying to find adequate lodging, we’d eventually settle in a French version of a Super 8 Motel. Not more than three songs later, however, a driveway caught Step’s eye and an aggressive U-turn found us pulling into L’Auberge Basque, a Relais & Château rated hotel.
After negotiating a €300 suite down to €200, around 9:45pm we checked into a top-floor, two-room suite with a common living area. No sooner had we brought our bags into the hotel than the rain began to fall. In the following 36 hours, as we meandered across the Basque region of France, the equivalent of two months of rain would fall.
Once we settled in, we toasted over artisanal French IPAs and talked about what we had written that morning in our respective creation journals. Although I had my own version of a gratitude/intention journal, which had been a part of my daily practice since October 2010, Step called his version The G.I.F.T. (Interestingly enough, Step adopted his practice at the same time.)
“How were the best companies built?” he said. “They made complex processes simple, easy, and quick. The G.I.F.T. is a fast, easy tool to intentionally create your day while staying mindful of how you want to live your life.”
Like my own practice, The G.I.F.T was a daily written exercise that consisted of at least five things you’re grateful for and five things you intend to create. What differentiated The G.I.F.T from my practice was the addition of feeling (intending how you wanted to feel that day) and thinking (what you wanted your thoughts to be filled with all day). Each day’s exercise ended with gratitude to the Creator—or whoever or whatever the source of the energy is that’s running the show.
Step 2.
FAITH
After waking up, packing up, and hitting the road, we headed east and made our way through the French countryside into the foothills of the Pyrenees. Having no idea where we were headed, we first stopped in a tiny village called Espellette. While a few aimless tourists wandered about in the rain, for the most part, the majority of the homes and businesses in the red and white Bavarian-esque village were shuttered.
Following his intuition, a few hours later we found ourselves in Lourdes, the world’s third-most important Catholic pilgrimage site after Rome and the Holy Land. Throughout 1859, it’s purported that the Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to a peasant girl (later canonized by the Catholic Church) named Bernadette Soubirous.
The town, which hosts more than 6 million visitors a year, was overrun with the devoted. It also happened that the throngs of devotees coincided with a parade that played host to military members from across the European Union. The surroundings, the location on the river, the grandiosity of The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, and the misting rain added a mythic, mystical feel that commanded the reverence and humility of everyone who walked before the church’s towering gothic spires.
As we made our way down the promenade away from the church, Step said, “Once you’re really sick, it’s not like getting back in shape. It’s much harder to recover your health. But there is an energy and an intelligence beyond us, and when we connect to it, it has the power to heal. Consciousness is energy, so healing is all about learning to raise our consciousness to interact with the greater levels of energy and information that exist all around us. Faith is believing in that energy or intelligence’s ability to heal us. It’s also trusting the process—trusting that there is a lesson the soul needs to learn in your sickness, after all, the universe knows more than we do.”
After Lourdes, a long day of travel found us in a small village in the Pyrenees called Saint-Savin, but seeing as they had limited lodging, we ascended further up the mountain to another small town called Arcizans-Avant. After some deliberation, we found a humble mountain lodge, told the receptionist we’d be back after dinner, and made our way to Pays La Bistro, the only restaurant open in the village. Exhausted, we had the establishment to ourselves.
In addition to being over-tired, Step was in the midst of a ‘honey hole,’ a term I deemed for his Winnie the Pooh-like addiction to honey, which might find him polishing off an entire jar in one sitting. As the honey interacted with his body’s chemistry, he commanded the kitchen and asked the chef to throw together something original for him. Between the sugar high, being exhausted, and I imagine feeling as if he needed to entertain me, he was bouncing around like Tigger, which included taking the owner’s guitar out into the rain. Towards the end of dinner, we finally began discussing business, but it was quickly interrupted by our hotel attendant bringing us our forgotten key. We would need it as the hotel would soon be locking its doors for the evening.
By the time we returned to our hotel around 10pm, I was exhausted, aggravated, and desperate to crawl into bed. I found myself thinking, Who is this guy and how am I going to work with him? Before we parted ways, however, he offered a humble apology.
“I’m really sorry for the way I behaved tonight. I hope you know that’s not me.”
In that moment of vulnerability, I thought—Oh, I know who this guy is. He’s someone who’s desperately trying to overcome himself, to master his emotions and compulsions, and when he falls from grace, there’s no one more disappointed in him than himself.
It was in that story that I recognized myself, and in seeing myself in Step, I developed a new-found compassion for him. This reconfiguration of our comingled energy would alter the course of the trip, moving us from being strangers to becoming friends.
Step 3.
RISK
I’m not sure what time it was when the banging on my door began, but it was before 7:00am.
“Wake up! We’ve got some work to do!”
I was in the midst of such a deep slumber, I thought perhaps I was dreaming.
In a short walk, we were standing beside a reservoir. From within thinly veiled cotton-swab clouds, the towering snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees made their presence known. Beneath them, stone houses and the stables they belonged to were scattered amongst the backdrop of a majestic verdant valley, while livestock dotted the alpine pastures.
“Take your shoes and socks off. I’m going to teach you some of the things that Heal For Free is all about—breathing, returning to nature, getting the body involved, and perhaps most important, Grounding. You’re gonna be surprised—there’s actually reasons for all the crazy stuff I do.”
This too was true about Step—he did what appeared to be a lot of “crazy” things, but this was simply because he was a biohacker of 20+ years who had experimented with countless diets, supplements, therapies, and technologies to heal the body that had nearly given up on him. Despite all his experiments, he still considered nature his most powerful healing ally. I followed Step’s lead, took off my shoes and socks, and slipped my feet into the cold, wet morning grass.
“I believe nature has a remedy for everything, but you have to be become your own healer. You have to tap into that inner source and empower yourself to become that creator,” he said.
“The more in tune we are with nature, the more it communicates with us. Just watch—as we do Qigong, as we breathe more and get more into the flow—you’re going to start noticing subtle changes in your thoughts. Maybe the colors will seem slightly different too, or maybe you’ll notice nature interacting with us in different ways.”
Whether it was a suggestion or a result of becoming more present, in a few breaths I noticed, not far from my feet, two minuscule mushrooms huddled and shimmering in a soft breeze, their slight stature hidden amongst dewy blades of grass. Shortly afterwards, two birds started darting between us, while above us a Golden Eagle began performing large, lazy loops around our position.
Later that morning, when I came down to the lobby after a shower, Step had honey smeared across his nose.
“What gives, man? What’s with the honey?” I asked trying not to break out in laughter.
“Oh man, I wear breathing strips at night so I can get the most amount of oxygen possible, but when I pulled it off this morning, my skin came with it. It hurts like a mother f’er, but raw honey is great for healing cuts and wounds.”
I laughed at first, but later when he later recounted how things as such shouldn’t happen—like how he recently went skiing for the first time in 12 years, and in simply bending down to tighten his boots he mysteriously cracked three ribs—I once again had a whole new level of compassion and respect for how far he’d come since nearly dying.
It would become our longest day of travel yet, and because we were still a few weeks short of high season, several of the towns we planned on staying in were still boarded up. I was obnoxiously grouchy and ready to sleep anywhere, but Step pushed us onward due to a tip from my friend and mentor who told us not to miss Montségur. Having already relayed this to Step, he insisted we needed to go there, and so against my will, at 8:00pm in the cold and rain, we began climbing the narrow, winding mountain roads. It was unclear if we would encounter snow, or if anything would even be open in the alpine villages beyond.
I was on a one-way ticket to Europe, and both of us had been traveling for days before we met up, so the need for rest overtook me. In mind I thought, he doesn’t listen to me and doesn’t respect my wishes. I can’t work with this guy. This is never going to work.
The next morning, it was I who was the one who apologized for my silent but strong protest. What I was most upset about, however, was not that I was exhausted and needed rest, while he kept pushing us on. It was that I lost control of my emotions and couldn’t get myself back to a good place, even after something occurred that neither of us could have expected—we climbed high enough up the mountain that we were above the weather, making us privy to dramatic alpine meadows, sweeping vistas, and the sun setting over the Pyrenees.
After passing through several small towns that lacked lodging, around 10pm we finally landed in Bélesta, a tiny village founded in 1298. I hadn’t even noticed that the establishment was called Palais Cathare, nor had I put together the fact that the following morning we were headed to Château de Montségur, the last Cathar stronghold. Every day little synchrondicities as such appeared, all of which seemed to point to a greater hand at play.
The hard-charging type of travel we were doing required us to move closer to our edge, to surrender control, and move into the unknown. As I brushed up against my edge, what I realized was that much like love itself, the less of a grip you have upon it, the more it can breathe—and the more it can breathe, the healthier that love is—because let’s face it—the breath is life. The breath is the intersection of our humanity and divinity, or matter and consciousness.
“Risk is to go against what everyone is telling you. It’s the willingness to look like a fool while believing in yourself, and this is one of the things Wall Street taught me to develop. It’s having the courage, trust, and faith to step outside the box. For you and me, the risk is to trust in this way of living—to trust that we can consciously and intentionally create our future by gaining control over our thoughts,” he said before calling it a night.
I wasn’t ready to listen that evening, but I heard the message the next day.
Step 4.
CONNECTION
While waiting for Step the following morning, I cleaned out the car. This included lemon peels and avocado rinds, date seeds, chunks of raw turmeric, pieces of rice cakes, and among other things, husks of garlic and aloe—the former of which he would eat raw in the car, the latter of which he would tear open with his teeth to ravage the gelatinous interior.
“Turmeric is good for almost everything, but it’s especially good as a second chakra booster. And aloe, well beyond sunburns, it’s has enzymes in it that are great for the stomach and intestines. And of course, lemon alkalinizes the body…” It was not out of character for him to unleash his encyclopedic knowledge of such things.
“You can see every doctor and take every pill,” he continued, “but you won’t really heal until you make a conscious connection with your Source. Otherwise, you won’t develop the cellular intelligence to harmonize the information within you that wants to self-regulate and heal you. That means you won’t heal unless you connect with yourself, the Earth, and the higher intelligence—or whatever the energy is that created us. All around us is a unified field of energy that you can consciously connect to. It’s the field that governs the laws of nature, and nature has a cure for everything.”
A short drive from our hotel found us at the base of a vertical mountain, upon which was Château de Montségur, the ruins of the last Cathar stronghold. The Cathars, a medieval sect of Gnostics, believed our divine spark could be liberated by gnosis, spiritual knowledge acquired through the direct experience of God. The Cathars were also associated with the Knights Templar, which led to speculation that they possessed the Holy Grail. It is said the Cathars worked themselves into ecstatic, religious states, which then enabled them to perform miracles. The Papacy, however, believed this was heresy.
In 1243, at the command of Pope Innocent III, 10,000 members of the Albigensian Crusade surrounded Château de Montségur, which was being held by approximately 100 Cathar soldiers. Due to the castle’s natural defenses, the crusaders could not breach the walls, so for ten months surrounded the mountain, cutting off the Cathar’s food and water supply.
Approaching starvation and rife with disease, in March 1244, the Cathars surrendered, whereby they were presented with a choice; renounce their faith or suffer the consequences of heretics. In the ultimate act of defiance, approximately 220 Cathars refused to denounce their faith and were burned alive at the stake. In the days prior to the fortress’s fall, however, a few Cathars managed to escape, and as the legend goes, escaped with esoteric knowledge and a secret treasure, which some believe was the Holy Grail.
***
From the car to the top of the mountain was about a one-kilometer walk. The higher we climbed, the greater views we gained of the rolling hills, mountain meadows, and noble valleys carved out by glaciers over time. Below us, the livestock began to look like a colony of ants going about their intuitive business of order. In the whisper of the wind, I imagined hearing the secrets of the ages and the mysteries of time. The only other audible sounds were birds chirping and the clambering of sheep’s bells rising from the valley floor, the totality of which created a lulling, meditative effect.
When we reached the external walls of the castle’s remains, without speaking a word, Step and I instinctually retreated to our own ends of the mountain top. Step settled in to practice Qigong and I headed to the opposite corner where I dropped into a meditation—but not before pausing to take note of how the shadows of the clouds seemed to creep on puma’s paws across the contours of the mountain.
From my vantage, the lush hills that rolled into the mountains looked as if they were covered in moss. Following my sight-line up the valley to a much greater altitude, as if viewing a National Geographic episode, I watched in awe as a Griffon Vulture glided effortlessly down the valley. In a focused, almost mechanical precision, it descended the long valley with the steady grace of an approaching Airbus 380 on a windless day. In the silence and stillness, it was hard to imagine anything was amiss in the world.
Once I closed my eyes to meditate, I intentionally chose to feel what I imagined my future to be. According to the quantum model of reality, if I could connect with that feeling, I could attract my future to me—or said another way—observe matter or an event into being. In this meditative state, an unprovoked thought appeared in my mind: In the energy of spirit, all things are possible.
Upon the hallowed grounds of the Cathar stronghold, we spent at least two hours that day in our own respective worlds of quiet and stillness. Afterwards, as we began our descent, Step said, “There’s a lot of fauna here you can live off. That’s a good sign of a high-vibration, high-frequency location.”
On the way down the mountain, we spoke of the indominable strength of the Cathar’s hearts and minds and discussed how as human beings, we can’t be afraid of the shadow self, for we both agreed it’s in the investigation of the shadow that we bring light to our life.
For me, the shadow was what I called in my book the soul ache, an intangible existential pain that seemed to arise from the void. For Step, the journey into his shadow self was returning his physical body back to health and homeostasis. While both of us performed our own daily practices, routines, and exercises to connect with the light of our own energy—all in the name of not letting the shadow be the dominant force in our life—the main practice we shared (beyond gratitude and intention) was meditation. On both of our accounts, our success required us to ongoingly let go of old, self-limiting stories that no longer served us.
As we left town, not knowing where we would be sleeping that night, Step said, “If it was fig season, we’d be stopping at all these trees.”
“We’d be figgin’ out,” I added.
An hour-and-a-half later we found our night’s accommodations at Château des Ducs de Joyeuse, a stunning 16th Century castle converted to a four-star hotel.
Step 5.
INTENTION
In mid-October, seven months prior to meeting Step, I was on a trip from where I was living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to meet a friend in Yosemite National Park. While ascending and descending mountain peaks, in the silence of my heart I was asking whatever was listening to be relieved of a burden, the healing of which would finally occur around the New Year.
While hiking through Yosemite, I asked my friend if he knew of anyone who could help me promote my book. He mentioned a podcaster named Beth Bell. In one conversation, Beth and I hit it off, and shortly afterward I was a guest on her show. A few weeks later, Beth reached out and told me she had a feeling I should meet another guest of hers named Step Sinatra. She thought we were doing similar things and that we should have a conversation.
At the same time, on the other side of the country, Step was at his family’s cabin in Vermont. It was there he suffered a pancreatic attack, the burden of which he would also not be relieved of until the New Year. It was during this time—and for the sake of this story’s Epilogue—we’ll call this the reflection, for it was in the reflection that he finally realized he had to truly change his lifestyle—the lifestyle being one that was all about him, on his own agenda, in his own way, and in his own space and time.
“I just know deep down that the way for me to completely heal is to be of service to others.” he said. “I need to change my lifestyle from one of selfishness to selflessness, so that’s my intention.”
***
After waking up in a 500-year-old castle in the small village of Couiza, then traveling to and spending time in Carcassonne—another walled-off castle and UNESCO World Heritage site once occupied by the Romans—we were on our way towards Sète, a small city on the Mediterranean.
“Everybody thinks they need to live by some prescribed way of being until they see another way,” he said during the course of our journey. “But there’s always an alternative choice—and the big word here is choice. It’s too easy to subscribe to what’s been placed in front of us, whether that’s our environment, our upbringing, our politics, and so on. All that’s irrelevant to our truth. But then the question is, what is the truth? Is it found in our cultural, economic, or religious conditioning? Or is it found in a life dictated by an inner compass—by intuition?
“This is why I like the type of travel we’re doing—because it takes you out of your comfort zone. You can’t actually see the confines of your daily environment for what it is until you’re completely removed from it. You have to get out of the matrix and prove to yourself that you can live by intention and intuition. In addition to sitting on a meditation cushion, travel is another way to get you out of your environment, out of the matrix.”
“It’s like this,” he continued. “Everyone has a longing for a place they want to go or visit, and when you act on it, travel becomes therapy. It’s an exercise that’s gonna change your life, and most of the time you’re gonna have fun doing it. The thing is, people can’t change in their environment without an enormous amount of discipline, but before the discipline must come the awakening, for it’s in the awakening the intention is born.”
After crisscrossing the French Pyrenees for several days, as we crested a hill on the A9 freeway, we caught our first glimpse of the Mediterranean. In the exact moment, with the turquoise waters coming into view, Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones began to play. Like weary, wayward pilgrims, to see the Mediterranean was as if to gain our first glimpse of the promised land.
***
Sète did not prove to be the right space, place, or pace for Step, so after a brief pit stop in town, he asked me to look up hotels in a nearby town called Mèze. In a moment of synchondicity, I found Hôtel de la Pyramide, a hotel that for some reason didn’t show up on his phone. Sure enough, we found our Shangri-La. It was the vibe we had been looking for all along—mellow, calm, rejuvenating.
After discussing our project over dinner in town, we went back to our respective rooms where I opened my French doors and stepped out on the balcony. Two-fingers above the ocean’s horizon was not only the largest moon I had ever seen, but the largest blood-orange moon I had ever seen. Finally, the deeper stillness I had been searching for the entire trip.
While occasionally being buzzed by bats, the only sounds to be heard were frogs, crickets, a gentle breeze, and the bay’s waves lapping to shore. The intersection of my external environment, along with the gratitude I felt in my internal environment, caused two words to well up within me, the meaning of which I did not yet fully understand: Stay Open.
Having no idea whether we were leaving the next morning or taking a day of rest, I crawled into bed and fell into a deep, restorative sleep.
Step 6.
REST
For no reason except that the trip was over (and I had no idea where I was going next), I awoke the following morning in the throes of anxiety. Instead of succumbing to it and allowing the angst to rule me for the entire day, I sat in a 45-minute meditation and moved into the feelings of my future. By the time I was done, I had successfully changed my state of being.
Afterward, I went for a long run followed by breakfast with Step. I was relieved to hear he wanted to take a day of rest to complete what we had started. During breakfast, we had an honest conversation about the challenges and frustrations we had with each other during our road trip, which led to an unexpectedly vulnerable exchange about the challenges each of us faced in our lives.
The discussion included a litany of wounds, how to heal them, how to surrender the stories that held us as prisoners, the roles these stories play in keeping us tethered to our known, predictable lives, and how if we are to evolve as humans and spirits, we have to release those stories. We also talked about how if we could do that for ourselves, we could take the wisdom gained and use it to be of service to others.
“When you live from the space of conscious creation, when you’re connected to the field, anything is possible. At the same time, through the energy of intention, you’re training the field to conform to your mind’s will. We’re conditioned to believe we’re at the whim of happenstance, of cause and effect, but through consciousness creation, we can actually affect the cause,” he said.
As far as I knew, this was not your average conversation between two men on a road trip—especially two men who were essentially strangers up until a few days prior.
After a slow morning, I made my way into the inner harbor of the small town of Mèze and found an outdoor café on the water. It was the first time in days I had any time to slow down, breathe, and reflect—which as a writer is essential to the recalibration of my nervous system. As I often do before I begin writing, I wrote in my gratitude/intention journal, this time adding Step’s feeling and thinking aspects of The G.I.F.T.
Right as I began to glide my pen across the paper, a ladybug—a symbol often associated with luck and living life to the fullest—landed exactly above my computer’s camera. It’s presence above the optical eye seemed to say, “Look at how the week unfolded and look around at where you are. You may not yet be exactly where you want to be in your life, but make no mistake—you’re living your dream and you’re in process. Trust the creative process.”
It was only because of the stillness and my open state of being that I heard the voice. That’s the thing about the human condition—it doesn’t matter who you are, who you aren’t, where you live, or how much money you have or don’t have. The voice only speaks in whispers, and is only heard in the stillness of an open heart. Most importantly, it is only in answering its call that one experiences true happiness.
Across the bay, with distant thunderheads gathering over the Mediterranean, I took a deep breath. As best I could, I stepped into the present moment by engaging my senses in my surroundings. I had just completed a road trip across the Pyrenees and was sitting in a tiny café on the French Mediterranean. I was writing about an unexpected road trip within the greater context of my life, in the even greater context of the mystery of life. To express these thoughts, be this writer, was the dream of my 17-year-old self, and it was only in this pause—the rest—that I realized I was awake in that dream.
Having accomplished it, it was not time to refine and expand it.
Epilogue.
Making the Unknown Known
Within the construct of a road trip, two strangers engaged their consciousnesses in a dialogue with the field—known in quantum physics as the invisible realm of energy that unifies everything material. One person’s intention was to find out if he wanted to work with the other on a book project. The other person’s intention was to find the story.
***
When we first set out from the Atlantic side of France, we had no idea where we were going, and to a lesser degree, what we were looking for. What we did know was that we were not just tourists, but adventurers—psychonauts willing to venture into the unknown. To be successful required us to follow the whisper, and following the whisper required us to trust in the power of gratitude and intention to create the experiences we wanted to live. Our measure of success would not necessarily be found in a comparative ratio of good vs. bad, but in the perspective that experiences are neutral, and that it’s our consciousness that brings meaning to them. It is in this inquiry, and the lessons derived from the inquiry, that we are led into the deeper labyrinths of the self, for it’s at the core of the self where we discover the essence of our true nature.
To live a life of such conviction is to be in service to the inward journey of the self, not the outward one dictated by others. This service to the self requires trusting in experiential discoveries simply for the sake of gnosis—those kernels of truth that exist beyond the judgements and impositions of family, tribe, society, or anyone else that wants us to conform to a prescribed way of being. Such an experience requires the engagement of the mind (the brain/thinking), the body (the gut/feeling), and the spirit (the heart/listening). In my experience, when we are in such alignment, the body becomes an instrument of consciousness, and in that song, our lives become guided by something greater than the ego or individual will.
***
During my day of rest at the cafe, I thought about how throughout our journey, Step kept reiterating, “Do you still trust the process?” When I observed how this idea played out as we forged a path across France, I saw the unfolding of the process that I leapt into with blind faith.
Without an itinerary, at the start of each day neither of us knew what the day would entail. What I would discover, however, was that each day had its own rhythm, theme, and unfolding. They were:
Friday: Trust
Saturday: Faith
Sunday: Risk
Monday: Connection
Tuesday: Intention
Wednesday: Rest
In studying the order of these words, I saw how the totality of each day’s forward momentum revealed a creative process. What that looked like was first setting out from the Atlantic with the trust that we were being guided, all the while having the faith that what we needed to discover would find us. To perform such an act required a risk, a wager placed on a bet that there was this energy, spirit, or field guiding us—but to be guided, we needed to be connected to that field. When we were connected to it, we could feed it and entrain it to conform to our intentions. Intention was derived from our free will, or the choices we made along the way.
What all of this added up to was that this process was the creation. The journey, guided by our intention, only asked of us to surrender the how of how it all would unfold.
It was in the rest that I had time to reflect on the creation, and in that reflection I found gratitude for what I had created. When you feel gratitude for what is, what you have, and what you’ve created (whether manifested or not yet manifested), you’re in a state of wholeness.
Wholeness is completion, a circle, fullness, but outside of that circle are infinite expanding circles that we are constantly being called to expand into—because there are always greater degrees of wholeness and love to experience. To expand into these experiential spheres is to step over the edges of our self-imposed limitations and into the unlimited possibilities of potential. That desire to know our potential is what it means to dream, and to dream is what it means to be human.
The insight I received in looking at the order of the words that corresponded to each day of our journey was that when you have achieved what you’ve set out to create in your life, it’s once again time to dream. If dreaming is the source of creation, and creation is a never ending circle, then you simply follow that circle in reverse back to its source, starting with the reflection found in stillness.
Rest
Intention
Connection
Risk
Faith
Trust
In the rest and reflection, you have the space to create a new dream, whether that’s health, wealth, love, freedom, and so on. Once you have the dream in mind, you set the intention to live the dream, but in order to manifest the intention, you need to be connected to Source energy. There is risk inherent in moving from the dream of the mind to the first step of the journey, and that first step requires not only a faith that you are being guided by something greater, but also that you have the power to generate in your external reality what once only existed in your mind. That brand of faith requires a trust beyond our limited, human self.
When you really live in that trust, you possess a knowing, and knowing is the ultimate empowerment. Now that you’re back to the beginning of the creative process, it’s time to live the new creation that began in the mind.
And that’s where your next adventure begins.
