Finding Your People

Last week I had two experiences that could not have been more different.

One reminded me what it feels like to be fully present with another human being.
The other reminded me what it feels like to lose yourself entirely.

The contrast between them revealed something important about the long path of becoming yourself.

Bright Eyes

Earlier in the week I was sitting with a friend. Nothing special was happening. No grand event, no important conversation. Just two people sitting together and talking.

At some point I noticed her eyes.

They were bright and alive. Not in an exaggerated way. Just clear. Open. There was no performance in them, no sense that she was shaping herself to fit the moment or managing the impression she was making.

She was simply there.

Fully present.

And in that moment I realized something else: I was there too.

Nothing snagging the interaction. No internal editing. No sense of trying to land somewhere clever or impressive. My heart was open and whatever happened was simply happening.

Two people sitting together, bright and awake in the same moment.

It felt rare.

Not rare because people are incapable of this, but rare because we spend so much of our lives doing the opposite.

We adjust ourselves.
We perform slightly different versions of who we think we should be.
We hold parts of ourselves back in order to fit smoothly into the environment.

And after enough years of doing that, we begin to think that this is simply what being human means.

But the experience with my friend reminded me that there is another way to be in the world.

You can actually just arrive.

A Different Room

A day later I went to a dance event.

It was the first time I had seen many of the people there in nearly twenty years.

When I first entered the dance world, these were the people in charge. Seniors. Bosses. The people who ran the studios, organized the events, and shaped the industry.

And I arrived in that world as an immature and idealistic young person.

For me, dance was never just about dancing.

The dance studio felt like church (in all the positive ways).

It was a place where people could explore what it meant to be human. A place where connection could deepen. Where movement could open doors to things that sit just beyond ordinary understanding. Something sacred lived there.

Or at least I thought it did.

In my naiveté, I assumed everyone else saw it that way too.

But it didn’t take long for the truth to reveal itself.

For many of the people running that world, dance was simply a vehicle for something else. They talked the talk (that had snared me), but it was only a show.

Money came first.
Everything else second.

And once I saw that clearly, it was over in a matter of days. I quit and walked away. I opened my own dance studios soon after to avoid “that crowd.”

Or at least I thought I had.

The Baggage We Carry

Walking into that event last week made something very clear to me.

I was still carrying a lot.

As I spoke with people I had not seen in two decades, something inside my body reacted immediately. It was almost physical.

These were relationships built on putting on faces for whoever was standing in front of you. You learned to read the room, to become whatever version of yourself was most useful in that moment.

And when I was young, I absorbed that.

It took years to shed it.

But as I stood there again among those same people (who hadn’t changed a bit), I realized that some part of me still feared it. Almost as if interacting with them might allow that old way of being to leak back into me.

As if I might once again become some grotesque mask version of myself.

When I finally left the event, I felt dirty.

My repulsion was intense enough that it showed up physically. That it showed up in gnarled images in my writing and “art” that I used to process my experience.

Listening to the Body

For a while I wondered whether that reaction meant something was wrong with me. Like all of my spiritual worked was an illusion.

But after sitting with it for a day or two, I realized something different.

My reaction was warranted.

It was my subconscious saying: don’t get mixed up in that again.

But there was another part of the experience that was equally important.

I had to feel it.

All of it.

The resentment.
The fear.
The disgust.
The old memories.

Those feelings needed to move through my body rather than remain trapped somewhere inside it.

And when they did, something surprising happened.

The weight lifted.

It felt as though I released them.

Or maybe more accurately, I released my relationship to them.

The feeling afterward was light. Almost airy.

As if something that had been sitting in the background for years had finally dissolved.

The Real Work

And this brings me back to the moment with my friend.

Two people sitting together. Bright eyes. Spirits alive. Nothing to manage.

That is not just a pleasant moment. It is the result of a long process.

The real work of practices like sound meditation is not simply relaxation or stress relief.

It is learning to hear yourself clearly enough that you know who you are when you walk into a room.

When you can hear yourself, you stop performing.

You stop shaping yourself to fit the environment.

You stop dimming certain parts of who you are in order to move smoothly through the world.

And when you stop dimming, something remarkable happens.

You begin to see the people who are also willing to be bright.

Your people become visible.

A Different Kind of Clarity

For a long time I believed that you could not truly be yourself all the time.

Life seemed to require too many adjustments, too many compromises.

But I am beginning to believe something different.

When your path aligns with your actions, things begin to organize themselves in a very natural way.

This doesn’t mean we stop growing or improving as human beings.

But improvement does not come from forcing ourselves into new shapes. It comes from a quiet feeling in the background, a sense that something wants to change.

We hold that feeling gently.

And over time it permeates our lives.

Finding Your People

The world is full of rooms.

Some will make you feel smaller.
Some will make you perform.
Some will ask you to put on masks you thought you had already discarded.

And occasionally you will find a room where two people can simply sit together with bright eyes and open hearts.

When that happens, pay attention.

You may have found your people.