I’m at the beach writing this in my journal right now, visiting with one of my best friends on our yearly day trip. The weather is perfect—a blanket of clouds mitigating the heat of the late September sun, a slight breeze cooling the air just so… I love listening to the roar of the ocean, love watching the waves crash and recede only to do it all over again.
I needed this.
God, I needed this.
We’re at a new beach farther along the point than our usual haunt. It’s a fishing beach, so it’s more secluded here—technically, at least. The shoreline is peppered with white stakes holding fishing lines, and nearby, families are lounging on blankets or beach chairs. I watch a chocolate lab play in the surf a quarter mile away—I’m pretty sure he’s trying to catch the waves with his mouth—and people are tanning or reading or napping, children shaping sandcastles with their hands.
It’s peaceful here. I’ve needed this peace.
The past several days, I haven’t felt much of that at all.
I’m experiencing another consciousness shift. I’ve been on this journey long enough to recognize it—long enough to identify the ego tantrums my old self was throwing and the pain codes rising to the surface no matter how I tried to stuff them back down.
Long enough not to pay them much attention but to instead observe, surrender, and let myself move through it.
Rage. Disappointment. Frustration. Injustice. Unfairness. Grief.
It was all there, waiting to be recognized and felt so that its energy could be released.
And boy, did I feel it.
Healing always comes in waves, like this ocean tide. Deeper and deeper I go into myself, and at the same time, I’m expanding in my awareness and connection to all that is.
I’ve experienced this expansion before—dozens of times. This is the hallmark of our evolution, after all. But this is the first time I’m purposefully meeting it from love rather than self-punishment. And it’s only now I can clearly see how the very spaces meant for healing sometimes perpetuate the wound within us.
The spiritual community can be so damaging to the soul. I’ve begun to realize this over the past few years as I continued to turn inwards, to recognize myself as the empowered creator of my lived reality. Just like anything taken to the extreme, it can become self-punishment and spiritual abuse, and you can convince yourself that you deserve pain or struggle or that you’re doing something wrong and that’s why shitty things happen.
“But I’m doing everything right!” you try to bargain with the Universe. “I’m leading from my heart; I’m trusting my intuition. How can everything go so wrong?”
It doesn’t make sense. And so you gaslight yourself to try to make it make sense—maybe if you just tried another technique or a new framework or learned another spiritual concept or took another medicine journey… Maybe then it wouldn’t feel like such a struggle. Maybe then surrender wouldn’t feel so much like defeat.
Maybe then you’ll understand yourself and your place in this world, and isn’t that what we crave most as humans?
To know where we stand.
To know where we belong.
But it’s here…
In moments like this—at rest before the vast stretch of ocean that mirrors the sky so you can’t tell where one ends and one begins—that you start to find the answers.
They were never outside of you, anyway.
There’s a saying that goes, “Tell me who you think of when you’re standing before the ocean, and I’ll show you who you love.”
It’s true. Because even in this split-second thought—this brief moment of vulnerability before the raw power of one of nature’s greatest wonders—you’re deeply connected to yourself. And so you’re deeply connected to your heart without ego, without reservation, without question.
The ocean might have secrets of its own, but you can’t keep secrets from it.
It knows you more intimately than you even know yourself.
A pelican dips into the waves. A seagull climbs towards the sun.
And I stand at the shoreline of the infinite, nestled between ocean and sky and close my eyes.
Who do I love?
Everyone. Everyone. Everyone.
