We Were There

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 met up with a friend. Not a close friend, not someone I know deeply, just someone I crossed paths with and thought it would be nice to connect a little more deeply. It was a casual meeting, no expectations, no sense that anything needed to come from it.

And maybe because of that, something unusual did.

At some point I noticed her eyes. They were bright. Not in a dramatic or exaggerated way, just clear and open. There was no sense that she was managing how she was being perceived, no subtle performance running in the background, nothing curated or adjusted. She wasn’t presenting herself in any particular way. She was simply there. Fully present. Not observing life from a distance, not hovering outside of it, but inside it. Participating in it, inseparable from it.

I was there too.

Not in a new way, not in a way that felt unfamiliar, but in the same quiet presence I’ve spent years returning to. There was no internal commentary about how I was coming across, no effort to shape the interaction, no sense of being watched or evaluated. I wasn’t adjusting myself or tracking the moment. There was no performer and no audience.

I was just there with her.

The conversation unfolded naturally. There were moments of silence that didn’t need to be filled, and moments of speaking that didn’t need to be improved. Nothing needed to be added, and nothing needed to be held back. Life was happening, and we were simply in it. Two people sitting together, awake in the same moment.

It struck me how rare that actually is. Not because it’s difficult, but because we so rarely allow it. Most of the time, even in simple conversations, there’s a subtle layer of management. A version of ourselves we’re putting forward, a slight holding back, a shaping, a checking. We don’t even notice it anymore because it feels so normal.

But sitting there without that layer made it obvious how much of our lives are lived through it.

And something else came up for me too. A strange thought, almost childlike.

At the end, when we stood up, embraced, and said goodbye and walked away, I had the feeling that I had missed something. Not in a dramatic sense, but something simple and obvious.

Like I should have done what kids do in moments like that.

Just ask:

Do you want to be friends? Like, really friends?

Which, as an adult, feels almost absurd to say out loud. We don’t speak that way anymore. We let things develop indirectly, casually, without naming them.

But the feeling behind it was real. Because what I recognized in that moment was not just that she was present, but that I was too. And that the combination of those two things created something that felt both simple and rare.

It made me realize how often we settle for relationships and environments where that kind of presence isn’t possible, where something is always slightly withheld, where even when we have cultivated presence, we are rarely met in it.

And without that, something essential is missing.

There is another way of being.

You can actually just arrive.

And when that arrival is met, something else becomes possible.

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. As I walked into the room, I immediately recognized faces that had once held a great deal of influence over my life. These were the people who ran the studios, organized the events, and shaped the culture of the dance world when I first entered it. Seniors. Bosses. The ones who set the tone for everything.

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

For me, dance was never just about dancing.

The studio felt like a sanctuary. A place where people could explore what it meant to be human. A place where connection could deepen, where movement could open something beyond words, beyond ordinary understanding. It felt like there was something sacred happening there, something worth devoting yourself to.

In my naiveté, I assumed everyone else saw it the same way. And more than that, I didn’t just observe that world from a distance. I was fully in it. I worked for these people. I learned from them. I absorbed their language, their systems, their way of moving through the work. I trusted them.

Until I didn’t.

It didn’t take long for the truth to reveal itself, but once it did, it revealed everything at once. The language was still there, the same words about connection and transformation, but underneath it was something much simpler.

Money came first. Everything else second.

And once I saw that clearly, I couldn’t unsee it. What had once felt meaningful started to feel hollow. It was over quickly after that. In a matter of days, I walked away.

Within a couple of years, I opened my own studio, determined to build something that reflected what I had originally believed dance could be.

I left that world behind.

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 wasn’t just a thought or a memory. It was physical. A tightening. A pulling back. A kind of instinctive resistance that I couldn’t override.

These were relationships built on putting on faces for whoever was standing in front of you. You learned to read the room quickly, to adjust, to become whatever version of yourself was most useful in that moment. Charm here. Authority there. Agreement when needed. Performance as a baseline.

And when I was young, I absorbed that.

Not consciously. It happened through proximity. Through repetition. Through wanting to belong in that world.

It took years to move away from it.

But standing there again, surrounded by the same people who hadn’t changed at all, I realized something I hadn’t fully seen before. Some part of me still recognized that pattern. Not just in them, but in myself. A version of me that had learned how to operate that way, and could, if I wasn’t careful, slip back into it.

That was the unsettling part.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t like what I was seeing. It was that it felt familiar. As if that way of being was still stored somewhere in me, waiting for the right conditions to reappear.

The reaction in my body intensified as I stayed. It moved beyond discomfort into something closer to aversion. A clear sense that I did not belong in that way of relating anymore.

And yet, I couldn’t ignore the fact that it had once been mine.

That tension stayed with me as I left.

It stayed with as I slept and as I awoke the next day.

It was just there.

Listening to the Body

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

But after sitting with it for a day, I realized something different. My response was my subconscious saying: don’t get mixed up in that again. And, deeper then that, my subconsious wanted to led me to 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, 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.

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 now 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.

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.