When was the first time you remember being cracked open? Can you recall?
Where you a child or in your teens? Were you in college or are you still waiting for the opportunity to be shaken to your core?
Perhaps it was a tragic event: a loss of someone significant, a devastating illness, a viewing of something horrific, or an experience with racism.
Or maybe it was something eye-opening that changed your worldview: a trip abroad, meeting a person who shifted the course of your life, an energetic experience that you can’t quite describe.
One of the most impactful experiences of cracking open for me was my first trip abroad to Nepal in my early 20s. When asked why I chose to study abroad there, I could never really come up with an answer. “The mountains,” I would say or “the people.”
I didn’t really know why I wanted to go there. All I knew is that I felt pulled to Nepal.
When I first got there, it was as if all my fears were realized. I was as far away from home as I could be. The food was too spicy, I had black boogers constantly from the smog that filled the valley of Kathmandu, and little homeless children were raising babies on the streets and constantly pulling on my clothes for money. It was tragic and horrifying on so many levels.
But Nepal cracked me open entirely. I came, full of ideas about the world, ideas about religion, and about myself. And one by one, these understandings fell away. For one of the first times in my life I was left with a mind that was clear, unbiased, fresh and open to anything.
That experience has informed the rest of my life, completely. I now yearn for these groundless moments of cracking open for self-growth. Opportunities for transformation are rarely comfortable. But what lies on the other side is vast, should we chose to step into to them.
We cannot chose when a diagnosis will come, a loved one will leave us, or if we’ll be the victim of another’s short sidedness. But I do believe we can live on the precipice of our fear, ever encouraging ourselves to step closer and closer to what scares us so we may live in our highest expressions. It is only when we intentionally step into the risks we are capable of that our greatest life manifests.
May we each step into a moment that cracks us open today.