*It’s my birthday in 2 days, so I decided to do a retrospective on everything important I’ve learned. Here’s what I wrote.
I’ve been the invisible weird kid, rebel, performer,
model, writer, artist, business journalist, teacher, facilitator,
philanthropist, author, event organizer, hobby farmer,
shy revolutionary, and spiritual and emotional alchemist.
I’ve had the dream house, the car, the cottage, the marriage,
the cool jobs, the status, the acclaim,
and traded all of it for the unknown when my spirit asked me to.
I have loved and lost, and loved and lost and
had to let go of everything to begin from scratch
again and again, and I’ve learned
that it’s about who you become in the process,
not about holding onto what feels safe or known.
I’ve spent weeks at retreats in silent meditation,
sitting with my own demons,
until I could see they were only illusions.
Once my body dissolved into countless pulsing stars,
appearing and disappearing and
I had first-hand experience of my own fleeting impermanence.
Another time, my ego fell silent;
I looked around and felt deep love for everyone
without needing anything, because I was everything.
I’ve travelled to 30 countries, with the intention
to understand myself and the human experience.
The first was a backpacking trip around Australia for a year,
where I learned that possibilities are like doorways,
and as long as you trust yourself and your path they just
keep showing up and inviting you to walk through.
That journey began when I felt jaded and lost after my third year of University.
I quit to go to Australia with my then-boyfriend for a year
with the $8,000 I had left of my student loan.
My friends told me I was making the biggest mistake of my life.
But my spirit whispered “go”, so I went.
I ended up publishing my first three articles as a result (one paid $1,500),
And became a finalist for the CBC literary writing competition.
It taught me to dare to believe in myself.
I went back and finished university and
won the top magazine writing award for a graduating student.
On my last day of school,
I applied for an international internship and
bought a 2-month bus pass across Canada.
In the last week, my canoe was sucked into a log jam on the Yukon River
and I was stranded on an island for 11 hours without food or water.
It was there I first tasted a deeper connection of peace and power in my spirit.
It whispered to my heart, asking me to listen and follow.
It was trying to teach me to sing, stay present and trust Life in the face of fear.
A few months later I was on a plane to my internship,
where I lived and worked in a South African township for three months.
I became close friends with a great leader, a high school principal,
who taught me that life is a game of how many people you can inspire.
(In part, because of him, six years later I served food to village men
on a tiny island along the Mekong River in Laos,
as they toiled to build a kindergarten school for their children
with money I raised by organizing an indie music festival.)
At the beginning of that trip to South Africa,
I came a month early to spend New Year’s
with my Kiwi boyfriend of one year.
When he decided, at the last minute, not to come,
I learned that you can still enjoy the beauty of life when your heart is broken.
I booked myself on a one-month overland camping safari
through Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe,
and rang in my New Year watching the sunrise
from the top of a desert sand dune I climbed before dawn in my bare feet.
On that same trip, I learned to trust strangers in a foreign land,
when I jumped out of a truck in Zimbabwe
cracked a bone in my ankle and had to be carried around for a week after.
A couple years later, I was employed as a senior editor
at Financial Post Business magazine.
(A job I wasn’t originally hired for, but I won over the editor
with my guts and worth ethic, at which point he gave me an $18,000 raise.)
I became a workaholic, putting in 10-hour days for weeks and months.
One weekend, I flew to Vancouver
to write a feature article about a rising company’s CEO.
I noticed the sun had caused a rash to form on my face.
Over the following months, my joints and muscles
swelled until I could barely walk.
I lived with excruciating pain.
But I was such a workaholic, I kept going to the office
with wrist splints on both arms (my joints were so swollen I could barely type)
and sunglasses, because I had a never-ending migraine.
I then learned my body was attacking itself with a lupus-like autoimmune disorder
That the doctors said could not be healed.
I gave my editor notice of resignation,
(but he refused to accept it, insisting on a leave of absence instead),
and I bought a one-way ticket to Thailand.
I’d always wanted to backpack through Asia,
and I’d always wanted to write a travel memoir
(inspired by the works of Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Bruce Chatwin and more).
So I decided I would rather die pursuing my dreams than
crying myself to sleep each night in my parents’ basement.
(My one-year live-in relationship had just ended as
part of this “perfect storm” and, since we had split the rent,
I couldn’t to afford to carry the apartment.
He had decided he didn’t actually believe in love,
that it was a survival mechanism for the species—
he was very into nihilism and Nietzsche at the time.)
The doctors told me not to go, because my immune system was shot,
And because my body was now reacting to UV rays
(including sunlight and fluorescent lights) as a kind of toxin.
But my spirit whispered “go”.
So I ordered medical-grade sun-protective clothing
from a company in the U.S. and got on that plane.
For seven months I travelled overland, pushing all my limits,
Physical, emotional, spiritual,
traversing jungles by foot, bus, raft and elephant,
Bouncing in the back of dusty trucks for 12+ hours,
Sometimes stopped by men with AK47s, who gruffly checked ID.
Often a tire would blow out, or the engine would die
And it would take hours or days to fix.
That’s when I learned to adopt the Thai saying “Mai pen rai”:
Never mind. Don’t worry.
Along with the core teaching of a Buddhist parable:
Good luck, bad luck, who knows?
One leads to the other and back again.
And at first I thought that meant “don’t love anything too much”
But now I believe it means “love everything with abandon”.
I had planned to travel overland from Thailand to Turkey.
Because. Alliteration.
But by the time I had managed to (somewhat illegally)
navigate my way through Tibet to reach the Nepal border,
My body was sick, and my heart was tired of
passing through countries and people’s lives
without a sense of contribution.
During those seven months of travel,
I studied the roots of happiness intensely.
I asked farmers, sages, backpackers for their insights.
And I spent another 10 years digesting and integrating what I learned
as I wrote and published my travel memoir: “Help Me Asia”.
The most important thing I learned
was that the happiest people I met
lived without a distinct sense of “me or mine”
but rather of “us or ours”.
And I learned this exact same lesson in South Africa
a few years earlier through one of the most
beautiful words in the world:
“ubuntu”: I am because we are.
I also learned that the more you let people see the real you,
and connect with them from that place,
the more you will be transformed by those people.
Each connection you make in life turns you into who you will become.
That trip did not heal my body (that took another 8+ years),
but it connected me even more deeply with my spirit, my inner guidance,
which showed me I could do half the work outside myself
If I did twice the work inside myself.
And that our limits are not what we think they are;
they can be pushed and expanded.
I also learned to feel my feelings—to cry openly when overtaken by the
beauty of yodelling Tibetan nomads in the mountains of Songpan, China.
And I learned that things don’t have value until you give them away
from my monk friend, Choktawee, while we taught novices English in a Thai temple.
(Because he insisted on giving me his few treasured possessions)
Because of him, when I found a perfect quartz egg at the base of Everest
In Tibet, I turned around and gave it to the Tibetan guide—
who called me Pema (lotus: a flower that rises above the mud to bloom).
He said he was in love with my heart.
When I returned, I landed the perfect 3-day/week job as the
editor in chief of a national human resources magazine,
which taught me that getting clear on what you want,
and believing you can have it, can make it so.
I still worked 10-hour days, but only 3 days a week,
and only because I love taking something and making it better.
I completely redesigned and transformed that magazine,
leaving only when my heart called me
to become a college teacher (magazine feature writing).
I had high expectations of my students,
and pushed them to push themselves to their own limits.
Some of them hated me for that, and it was hard.
But when I was fired for secretly getting internships
for my students while the teachers were on strike;
They went to the dean’s office and fought for me—
demanded I be given my job back.
This taught me that when you trust yourself and do the right thing,
the right people will notice, and the right things will happen.
All of this looks and sounds glamorous,
but most of my life journey has been driven by my desire
to put the pieces of myself back together so I can
live my potential as the authentic “me”—
not some imagined idea of what that might be.
My early childhood experiences shattered and disassociated my psyche.
As a result of abuse by both a family member and a trusted church group,
I began my life with no sense of “me” existing and having value as an individual;
so for years I patched together my persona from characters
in the books I read, and the heroes I adopted.
Now, after a lifetime of not feeling safe in my body,
I have reclaimed it, and taught it how to rejoice in its ability to move
and feel connection with other human beings
through the magic of latin dancing.
I’ve gone on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of inner adventures,
sat bravely in the depths of my own darkness,
to let in the Light that longs to illuminate us all.
And then took what I learned to venture into the hidden
emotional worlds of makers, creators, leaders and entrepreneurs,
and walk them back into the blazing power of their own Light.
I’ve come to believe what Mother Teresa said,
that we can change the world person to person,
one person at a time.
And I believe the way to do that effectively and sustainably is from the inside.
That begins with me being a living example of what I want to see in the world,
Because who I choose to be ripples outward like a pebble thrown in a pond.
Even though I’ve done all these things,
I can feel in the deepest whispers of my soul
that I’m just getting started.
The best is yet to come.
Shawn xo
