The Story: 

About a year ago, during a five-hour meditation ceremony, I had an experience that stayed with me. It was only during our last Soul Journey cohort that I finally felt ready to paint it.

There’s a meditation I love where we rise up through the realms to meet our higher self and let her hold us.

Getting there is a climb, and there’s this beautiful build up. I’ve done it so many times. So I was getting ready for my higher self to scoop me and my inner child up, ready to let go and be completely held...

And then my higher self decided to drop me.

I was so confused. She had never done that to me before.

Why now?

Down, down, down I fell, all the way to the bottom of the ocean.

Now here’s the thing.

The ocean scares me.

I love the water, I’m not afraid to go in, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve noticed more fear around it. At night I will not go where I can’t stand. I won’t even dip my head under. I don’t like it when I can’t see the bottom.

It’s the unknown.

So there I was, at the bottom of the place I fear most, and my higher self said to me,

“You’re going to stay there in the dark depths and you’re going to find something. Keep swimming until you find that thing, whatever it is.”

And somehow, I felt okay with that.

I wandered along the ocean floor for a while... and then I found a gem.

The gem represents desire. We find the gem, we hold it up to God, and we say, THIS IS WHAT I WANT.

We let it become a magnet, a prayer, a manifestation.

Unapologetically.

Maybe we’ll get it, maybe we won’t, but we still lift it up and say, Hashem, this is my desire. This is what I pray for.

That’s where it all starts, isn’t it?

Knowing what we actually want in this world.

If you feel fear, then you’re in a good place.

It means you’re stepping out of what’s comfortable and going into the shadows where the gem is hiding.

There is ALWAYS a gem there.

In every challenge there’s something waiting for us, a lesson that brings us deeper into ourselves and closer to our purpose in this lifetime.

These are questions I ask myself, and now I want to ask them to you...

Where in your life are you afraid to show up, to go where you feel like you can’t stand?

If you found the gem down there in your own shadows and held it up to the light, what would you see?

What would you ask for?

And even further, would you give yourself permission to desire it?