Flat Tires, Soulships, and Grocery Store Karaoke

Letting the real me slip out.

I've been participating in the Unconditional Love series through the Light School, an initiative of the Virtual World Society founded by Tom Furness.

We learn to navigate our "soulships," which is the inner life, the self underneath the self, the way pilots learn to navigate the sky.

The goal is simple: help people access what's already in them. Funny enough, I somehow ended up in a series about unconditional love within weeks of meeting Tom.

This tells you something. You don't stumble into the thing you need. You arrive at it. There's a difference.

The series is led by Olivier Maxted and Megan Selby, creators of Pure Love Frequency. Megan sings. Olivier plays didgeridoo and Tibetan bowls.

I've never been able to meditate. But in that first session something changed.

I saw colors, actual kaleidoscopes, shifting and layered, felt multi-dimensional, and I came out the other side wrung out in the best way. Tired for days. The good tired. The kind that means something moved.

My nervous system unclenched. I didn't even know it was that clenched.

Every session since has been a practice in showing up without armor. People from all over the world. We share. We witness each other. No fixing. No performing. Just presence. It's quite brilliant really.

Last week the universe decided to test my unconditional love thesis by giving me two flat tires. Different days. Old me would've stressed about deadlines. Real me just shrugged, said we can pivot, and we did.

Me, Oakley, and Bones just grabbed some food from 7-11, sat on the floor at Les Schwab, and munched on our snacks and talked as the time passed. It was actually pretty perfect.

That evening, Oakley and I stopped at the grocery store. The self-checkout guy we've known for three years was working. He made a joke about the tires.

Before I could stop myself, I launched into a full-volume, zero-apology rendition of "I Will Survive" like I was in some weird musical TV Show. You know the random ones that get thrown in mid-season of your favorite show...

He stared. Oakley stared.

I stared back like, oh, damn. I just sang that out loud!

We all laughed in unison. He became more himself in that moment than he ever had been with us. Same for us with him. It was like, for a minute, the noise just stopped.

I told Megan and Oli the story a few days later, half laughing, half mortified. Megan didn't laugh. She just said: “That was the real you. The playful one. The one without fear.”

Tom asked us to pay attention to the random moments that felt like unconditional love. When I thought about it, this moment flooded my mind. I didn't realize it in the moment. I do now.

When you make love a destination, it disappears. Real love shows up when you stop trying to be the kind of person who (you think) deserves it and just be yourself. Unguarded. Singing in a grocery store at 9PM.

🥂 to the detours. I hope you hear your real laugh soon.