Embracing the Unknown: When the Universe Holds Up a Mirror

I just finished a weeklong Dr. Joe Dispenza event in San Diego called Entangled Soul, and while I learned a lot during the week, one of the hardest things I learned was something I didn't particularly want to know about myself. Somewhere along the way, I had defaulted back into being more judgmental, controlling, critical, and quick to react than I wanted to admit. Ugh. That's a hard pill to swallow, especially when you've been doing the work and believe you've changed.

But maybe that's part of the work. If we never struggle, if we never catch ourselves slipping back into the person we don't want to be, how can we possibly grow? Growth isn't reaching some enlightened place where we never screw up again. Maybe growth is recognizing ourselves sooner when we do and having the courage to admit, Yep, there I am again. Apparently, I needed a rather large reminder of this. About 6'5", actually. I'll call him the Jolly Green Giant.

It was the morning of our first walking meditation of the week, and I was super excited. I woke up early, got ready quietly, and made sure to use my earbuds so I wouldn't wake my daughter, who had come to the event with me. Before heading down to the park, I had tested everything and my earbuds were working perfectly. Once I got there and began the meditation, however, suddenly they weren't. Instead of hearing Dr. Joe through my earbuds, the meditation started playing aloud through my phone speaker.

I immediately asked one of the volunteers if it was okay to use my speaker since I couldn't get my earbuds to work. She told me it was fine because everyone else would have their own earbuds in and wouldn't be disturbed. So I began my meditation. Dr. Joe's voice boomed from my phone, “Eyes closed…” and I started settling in.

Suddenly, a very tall man, probably 6'5", wearing the green color of his assigned group appeared over me. In a loud, stern voice, he said something along the lines of, “You realize your speaker is booming…and everybody can hear it!” I was mortified. I tried to apologize and explain that my earbuds weren't working and that I had asked a volunteer if it was okay, but before I could finish, he interrupted me. “Everybody can hear it…” Then, as he walked away, he called out, “NOT GOOD!”

I wanted to disappear. My excitement about our first walking meditation vanished almost instantly. I was embarrassed, upset, and seriously considering going back to the hotel and doing the meditation by myself. Another volunteer noticed that I was upset and asked if I was okay. Through tears, I just shook my head. She immediately said, “Let's go talk to Lindsey.”

I explained what had happened, and Lindsey took me over to IT to see if we could figure out what was wrong. We tried different earbuds. We turned the phone off and back on. Nothing worked. Eventually, they gave me an MP3 player so I could continue the meditation. Great. Problem solved—or so I thought. About five minutes into the meditation, the MP3 player became glitchy. It kept cutting out and jumping back to the beginning. Now I couldn't even use that.

By this point, nearly 30 minutes had passed, and I finally decided to use my phone speaker again, only much quieter, so I could at least complete some of the meditation. But I was having such a difficult time focusing. I was completely befuddled by the entire turn of events. My earbuds hadn't worked. The replacement earbuds hadn't worked. The MP3 player hadn't worked. I'd been reprimanded by the Jolly Green Giant. I'd cried. I'd been comforted. The walking meditation I had been so excited about seemed to have completely fallen apart.

Eventually, I moved into the lying-down portion of the meditation. I lay there with the sun beaming down on me and the brilliant blue San Diego sky above me, and slowly something began to change. Through the meditation, I was able to move into a place of love, peace, kindness, and compassion. And it was there, staring into that beautiful blue sky, that I suddenly understood what this entire ridiculous morning might have been trying to show me.

I had come face-to-face with myself.

Just the day before, I had been at the pool when a young boy jumped into the water right on top of my daughter. He hurt her arm and splashed us, and I immediately reacted. I reprimanded him. At the time, I felt justified. My daughter had been hurt. I was protecting her. He shouldn't have jumped into a pool on top of another person. But lying there in the meditation, I suddenly wondered: What did I look like to him? Maybe I had been his Jolly Green Giant.

That realization hurt. I began thinking about all the different ways I could have handled that situation. I could have checked on my daughter first. I could have taken a moment before reacting. I could have calmly asked the boy if he realized he'd landed on someone and hurt her. I could have corrected his behavior without making him feel as though he was the problem. I could have brought compassion into the exact same situation and still made it clear that what happened wasn't okay.

And that's when I understood that the lesson wasn't really about whether the boy was wrong or whether the Jolly Green Giant was wrong. The boy shouldn't have jumped on top of my daughter, and my phone speaker probably was disturbing people that morning. The lesson was about how we choose to respond to another human being when something needs to be corrected.

It's incredibly easy to recognize judgment when we're on the receiving end of it. It's much harder to recognize it when we're the ones delivering it. It's easy to describe someone else as abrupt, curt, critical, controlling, or lacking compassion. It's much harder to lie underneath a beautiful blue sky and admit that sometimes, that's me.

And then there was Lindsey. She showed me the other side of the mirror. She didn't tell me I was being ridiculous. She didn't tell me to stop crying or lecture me about my phone. She listened to me. She hugged me. She allowed me to feel what I was feeling, and then she tried to help me find a solution. In the span of one morning, I experienced two completely different ways of responding to another person, and there I was somewhere between them, realizing that I got to decide which one I wanted to become.

I don't want to be the person who needs to control every situation. I don't want criticism or judgment to be my first response. I don't want being “right” to become more important than being kind. Most importantly, I don't want to become so focused on someone's behavior that I forget there is a human being standing in front of me. That little boy at the pool deserved that from me just as much as I needed it that morning.

Will I get it right every time? Of course not. I'll probably catch myself judging again. I'll probably react when I wish I'd responded differently. The old version of me will undoubtedly show up from time to time. But maybe that's what growth actually looks like. It isn't perfection. It's awareness. It's catching ourselves a little sooner, making a different choice the next time, and having enough humility to recognize when the very behavior that bothers us in someone else might be showing us something about ourselves.

But here's where this story gets even weirder.

After the meditation, I went back to our hotel room. Remember those earbuds that absolutely refused to work? The ones we couldn't get working even after going to IT? I decided to try my daughter's earbuds with my phone. They worked. Of course they did. Then I tried my backup headphones. They worked too. Finally, I picked up the original earbuds—the very same earbuds that had started this entire chain of events—and plugged them in.They worked perfectly. Of course they did.And they continued working perfectly for the rest of the week.

So what happened that morning? I don't know. Maybe there was a perfectly reasonable technological explanation. Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was synchronicity. Or maybe the Universe knew that if those damn earbuds had worked the way they were supposed to, I would have gone on my lovely little walking meditation, enjoyed the sunshine, listened to Dr. Joe, and completely missed the lesson I apparently needed to learn.

Instead, everything had to go wrong. My earbuds had to fail. The replacement had to fail. The MP3 player had to glitch. I had to encounter the Jolly Green Giant. I had to cry. I had to experience Lindsey's compassion. I had to lie underneath that blue sky long enough to finally see the connection between the man who had hurt my feelings that morning and the little boy whose feelings I may have hurt the day before.

I went to the park expecting a meditation. Instead, I got a mirror. And perhaps that's part of embracing the unknown. Sometimes we don't get the experience we planned. Sometimes everything seems to go wrong, and our first instinct is to resist it, fix it, control it, or get angry about it. But every once in a while, if we're willing to stop fighting what is happening long enough to become curious about it, we might discover that the interruption is the experience.

I still don't know why those earbuds stopped working that morning. I just know they worked before. They didn't work when I apparently needed to meet the Jolly Green Giant. And they worked afterward.

Coincidence? Maybe. But come on…that's some mystical shit.