It has been a week since I set off on my Brave Magic weekend with Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert.
For a week, I have been working hard to articulate what happened. Working through my notes to create some kind of real and true testimony of my experience. Working on saying [[out loud]] how I was affected, changed, transformed, and completely re-calibrated in a matter of days.
How does a person even relay that kind of message? A bulleted list of takeaways? That seems to crude to the enormity of experience. However, relaying that message is something I know I need to do––if only to re-engage those parts of myself when the magic seems lost, as it certainly will at some point in the future.
My adventure started off rough.
My bag broke. My sunglasses broke. The line for the rental car was nearly an hour, with a labored and terribly irritating fight breaking out between the man in front of me and the desk clerk (it was nearly worthy of a viral video situation). It took a thousand years.
And to top it off, the universe put a person in the world next to me who I hadn’t seen in almost a decade. An important person who changed the course of my life, who changed my very DNA. It was paralyzing. And, as I sat silently watching him board a plane to Chicago, I couldn’t help but think my brave magic weekend was going to be nothing more than a series of universal roadblocks, when all I wanted was for it to be a catalyst of coming into a new place of being with myself.
Of letting go. Of solitude. Of creation. Of clarity.
And grasping it tight like a motherfucker.
I felt dooooomed.
But once I started driving into the Redwoods of California, slowly, things started shifting. I arrived in Santa Cruz a bit earlier than I thought, so I took a drive to the ocean, just to peek. Water, as always, calms. And then as I unpacked my suitcase in my little cottage Airbnb and got ready to head to 1440 Multiversity for the retreat––I felt my anxiety lifting off my shoulders, light as air, allowing the space I needed to take in what was surely going to be one of the most important weekends of my life.
In the opening session with Liz and Cheryl, Liz said:
“The ceiling above you when you walked in, will be the floor you walk out on.”
She may not have been more goddamn right about anything in her life.
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more on brave magic coming soon
xo
In The Way 
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