the part I don't often read out there

Meeting your own light is not always beautiful.

The day was so hot I could feel the sweat gathering on my forehead. A clear blue sky, the desert sand reflecting the light made my face squint. I had gone off from the group to find a bathroom, and I was walking back alone, fast, trying to catch up. Most of them were already close to the temple entrance.

And then, what felt something like out of nowhere, something stopped me completely. As if someone had put their arm across my chest. My body stopped, my legs couldn’t hold my weight anymore, and I dropped to my knees.

I started crying, sobbing… the way you cry when you are deeply sad or discouraged. It was a weird feeling, as if I had been cheating myself my whole life and had just figured that out.

You know when someone tells you that you hurt them, and maybe you never intended to, but you feel so bad about yourself? That’s the best way I can describe my feelings. It was a mix of feeling sorry, feeling shame, together with an aha moment…

A dear friend from the group saw me kneeling and came back. She wasn’t super far; she was also a little behind the whole group. She thought I had fallen. I couldn’t really speak. There were no words to explain what was happening. All I managed to say was that I was fine, I hadn’t fallen.

In a weird way, it felt so good to be seen like that. I was feeling broken, confused, guilty, and weak… She wasn’t judging me.

She just witnessed me. Then she extended her hand, without making any of it wrong. She was being something for me that I had probably never allowed myself to be. I felt it was ok to just be, and that I didn’t need to know better in that moment.

I had always been this person seen as the strong one, the one who has her shit together, the one who makes things happen, so being the confused, weak, and broken one felt like liberation.

The “out of nowhere” had actually been building.

That trip was beyond anything I had ever experienced. My presence in my own body, my thoughts, my emotions… it put me in touch with myself in ways I had never known. Every temple felt like uncovering a being that had been buried under all my goals and to-do lists.

I felt a power I didn’t know I had.

I knew things I had never been told, only to have them confirmed by the tour guide. I saw life from a perspective I didn’t know existed, and for a reason I didn’t understand, that perspective seemed more like reality than the whole life I was living.

Then I came home.

My father was at my house with my daughter and my partner at the time. They had prepared a welcome dinner for me, and I feel shame even saying this, but I couldn’t appreciate it. I was filled with anger, frustration… I was so upset with life. I felt a rejection toward everything and everyone around me.

At the dinner table, my mind was full of judgment. How can they live this life and think it’s normal? And then judging myself for judging them. I had just had this beautiful encounter with god, with life, with pure love back in Egypt, and here I was, with the people I love the most, judging that they should be and think differently than they are.

It felt so far from God, even further away than my previous version before this trip.

It showed up everywhere.

My first day back at work, I was so far outside of myself that I couldn’t turn on my computer. I had forgotten all my passwords, and I had forgotten where I’d written them down. It took me weeks to be able to interact with the world again, and that interaction never got to be what it was before. My sense of self dissolved. Why this, why that… the questions overflowed into every relationship in my life.

Maybe you’ve had a version of this for yourself. The minute you met your own light, and it was so bright it blinded you to the beauty of life. It doesn’t stay that way, but for a while, it can take everything.

Until that moment, I had been living my own version of spiritual awakening through meditation, yoga, breathwork, rituals, studying, reading, learning from teachers I admired.

Spirituality was a beautiful path of meeting myself and learning to manifest the life I wanted, because I had discovered I was a creator and could choose my own experiences.

Until that moment, it had felt more like a honeymoon… all romance, all possibility.

I was living by understandings I was learning, entertaining my mind with the possibilities.

But meeting my power the way I did on that trip turned my life upside down.

And this is the part I don’t often read out there. The path keeps evolving, but it isn’t always beautiful.

It brings shame, guilt, selfishness to the surface, and I have to face it. I am still learning that if I truly want to experience my light more, I need to be ok with my ugliness too.

Once you see your light, you can’t unsee it.

Maybe you’ve had your version of experiencing your light. Maybe, just like me, it didn’t get translated into external changes right away, but I know it keeps giving you hints.

You sense there is more… more that wants to be lived, not just felt.

For me, it meant I couldn’t keep limiting myself working for someone else. Part of my own transformation was going on a quest to build a business that would feed the quality of life I wanted to experience.

Having my spiritual life over here and my work over there felt like a lie to myself. Maybe for some people work is just work, and that’s fine.

Not for me. Maybe not for you.

Life is showing me that my business is also part of my spirituality, my path to evolution.

My business keeps healing me and helping me see where I can’t sustain my light yet.

There’s a tool Phil and I made for exactly this. It’s called the Harmony Map.

We built it years ago in Costa Rica, back when we were trying to answer one question. How do you build a business that works on the inside as well as the outside?

It looks at your relationship to yourself, and to the business, and to the divine, whatever you understand that to be. Nine energies sit across those three. About twelve minutes to take it.

The one you want to see is your lowest. That’s your breakthrough frequency, the place you feel the most resistance and have the most room to grow.

Take the Harmony Map

With love,
Carolina