Release what has served you. Create from what you've been given. Remember your true north. And choose.
Over the past several days, Spirit has been teaching me something.
Not in one enormous revelation.
Not in one meditation where everything suddenly became clear.
It has come piece by piece.
A flower bed.
A bag of rocks.
Three grains of rice.
A golden path.
An ancient compass.
A hot-air balloon.
Mountains stretching across an enormous landscape.
And finally, two sentences from Wisdom (one of my primary spiritual guides, who has been with me for as far back as I can remember. I honestly don't know whether Wisdom is his actual name; when I was little, I simply called him Wisdom, long before I understood that he was one of my guides) that caused me to question something much bigger:
“People understand what they're taught to understand.”
And:
“It's always a choice.”
I have been sitting with those words because they challenge something we don't always talk about in spiritual spaces:
How much of what we believe about spirituality have we actually experienced as truth—and how much have we simply been taught to believe is true?
I don't think Spirit is asking me to throw away everything I've learned.
I think Spirit is teaching me to remain curious.
And perhaps even more importantly, I am beginning to understand that these teachings aren't being given to me simply so I can sit with them.
Spirit is my teacher.
But perhaps part of being the student is eventually becoming willing to carry the teaching into the world.
The progression began with rocks.
In meditation, I found myself as an Inuit woman sitting in a circle of women on the ice. Each of us carried a bag filled with rocks.
But we didn't simply throw the rocks away.
One by one, we lifted them.
We blessed them.
We thanked them.
We appreciated them.
And only then did they disappear.
The message was simple but profound:
Not everything we are ready to release was a mistake.
Some things protected us.
Some patterns helped us survive.
Some identities carried us through chapters we could not have navigated without them.
Some experiences taught us.
Something can become too heavy to continue carrying without ever having been wrong for us to carry in the first place.
Maybe healing doesn't always require saying:
This was bad. I need to get rid of it.
Sometimes healing might sound more like:
Thank you.
Thank you for how you served me.
Thank you for what you taught me.
Thank you for getting me here.
I don't need to carry you anymore.
And then we put down the rock.
The next day, the teaching changed.
I found myself sitting in a circle with Jesus and a group of men.
Jesus placed three grains of rice on a large stone and instructed each of us to create an entire bowl of rice from those three grains.
Immediately, I became nervous.
What if I can't do it?
And before I could even say the words, I received the answer:
There would be no judgment.
Something shifted.
I relaxed.
And I created the bowl.
Everyone did.
Soon there were bowls of rice surrounding those original three grains.
But the three grains were still there.
Source had not been depleted by what we created.
There was enough.
There had always been enough.
And suddenly I understood something about creation.
Spirit doesn't always hand us the finished bowl.
Sometimes Spirit gives us three grains of rice.
An idea.
An image.
A sentence.
A symbol.
A nudge.
A moment of knowing.
And then perhaps Spirit says:
Now show me what you can create.
That realization has become deeply personal for me because I think this is exactly what Spirit has been doing with me.
I receive something.
Then I write about it.
I turn it around.
I question it.
I work with it.
Sometimes it becomes a tool. Sometimes a meditation. Sometimes something I share with a client. Sometimes a teaching.
And now I am realizing that perhaps the creation is part of the lesson.
Receiving the three grains isn't the end.
Making the bowl matters too.
Then Came the Compass
The following day, Spirit gave me something else.
An ancient compass.
I could move its dial anywhere I wanted.
I could turn it.
Manipulate it.
Point it in another direction.
But every single time I let go, it snapped immediately back to:
Due north.
Again.
Due north.
Again.
Due north.
I could move the compass.
But I couldn't change north.
That distinction has stayed with me:
What I can make myself do is not necessarily the same thing as what is true for me.
I have free will.
I can choose another direction.
I can follow someone else's expectations.
I can convince myself that I should want something.
I can force myself onto a path because someone else says it is the right one.
I can even temporarily make my inner compass point somewhere else.
But somewhere inside me, north remains north.
Maybe spiritual discernment isn't always about asking someone else where we should go.
Maybe it is about becoming quiet enough to recognize the direction that already exists within us.
A compass doesn't give us the entire map.
It doesn't tell us every turn.
It doesn't tell us how long the journey will take.
It doesn't promise there won't be mountains.
It simply says:
This is north.
And sometimes that is enough.
And Then Spirit Showed Me the Mountains
Several days later, I sat down on my meditation pillow and immediately found myself somewhere else.
There was a golden staircase leading upward into what appeared to be a hot-air balloon.
I climbed the stairs and entered.
The balloon began carrying me across an extraordinary landscape.
Below me were mountains.
Huge mountains.
Small mountains.
Rolling mountains.
Mountains everywhere.
A pristine river wound between them.
And then I noticed eagles flying beneath me.
That stopped me.
I have always associated the eagle with higher perspective—the ability to rise above an experience and see the larger picture.
But this time I wasn't seeing through the eyes of the eagle.
I was above the eagle.
Then Wisdom appeared beside me.
And he told me what I was looking at.
Every mountain below represented mountains I had traversed lifetime after lifetime after lifetime.
Suddenly, I wasn't looking at scenery.
I was looking at the journey.
From the bottom, one mountain can consume our entire field of vision.
We cannot see what lies beyond it.
We don't know how difficult the climb will be.
We don't know whether we can reach the top.
But from above?
The mountain becomes part of a landscape.
And I wonder how many things that feel enormous from inside a human life look completely different from the perspective of the soul.
Eventually, the mountains became fewer.
Then the balloon passed through what felt like a barrier—a veil.
On the other side were more mountains.
But not many.
I knew immediately that I had not traversed those mountains yet.
And Wisdom confirmed it.
Then he said:
“But look how few there are left.”
Naturally, I asked the question.
Does that mean this can be my final lifetime on Earth?
I expected some version of yes or no.
Instead, Wisdom chuckled.
And said:
“It's always a choice.”
What If We Have Misunderstood the Journey?
That answer challenged something I had believed for a very long time.
I had understood karma almost like unfinished homework.
If we didn't finish it, we came back.
If there were lessons left, we returned.
If something remained unresolved, Earth was where we had to work through it.
But Wisdom offered a different possibility.
Earth may be an extraordinary place for working through karma precisely because it is difficult.
But that doesn't necessarily mean we are sentenced to return.
There is still choice.
Even beyond the veil.
And then came the sentence I cannot stop thinking about:
“People understand what they're taught to understand.”
How much of spirituality do we believe because we have experienced it?
And how much do we believe because someone taught it to us?
Maybe our teachers were taught by their teachers, who were taught by theirs.
Maybe some of those teachings contain tremendous wisdom.
And maybe we are still allowed to ask questions.
We can honor a teaching without surrendering our discernment to it.
We can say:
This has helped me.
This has given me language.
This has carried me this far.
And I am still willing to listen if Spirit shows me something more.
Perhaps spiritual growth isn't about becoming increasingly obedient to a set of spiritual rules.
Perhaps it is about becoming increasingly conscious.
Increasingly discerning.
Increasingly responsible for what we choose.
Increasingly able to recognize our own true north.
The Thread Running Through All of It
When I step back, I can see that these meditations were not separate teachings at all.
They were building upon one another.
Bless the rock.
I don't have to hate what I have outgrown.
Create the bowl.
I don't have to wait until Spirit hands me everything I need.
Trust the compass.
I don't need the entire map before taking the next step.
Look at the mountains from above.
The thing that feels enormous from where I stand today may be one small piece of a much larger journey.
Remember that I have choice.
I am not simply being dragged through a spiritual curriculum.
I am participating.
Choosing.
Creating.
Learning.
Experiencing.
Becoming.
And perhaps that is why the flower bed kept appearing throughout these meditations too.
At first, I instinctively stepped out of it.
Then I finally thought:
Screw it. I'm standing here.
Maybe there was wisdom in that moment too.
Stop stepping out of the place where you are growing.
Stand where you are planted.
See what grows.
Spirit Is My Teacher—But the Teaching Cannot End With Me
This may be the piece I understand most clearly now.
I believe Spirit is my teacher.
But I don't think I am being taught simply for my own benefit.
If Spirit places three grains of rice in my hand and I only admire them, the teaching stops there.
Maybe my responsibility is to make the bowl.
To take the image, the message, the experience or the understanding and create something nourishing from it.
Not because I possess the truth.
I don't.
These meditations don't prove how reincarnation works. They don't establish universal rules about karma, souls or what exists beyond the veil.
They are what I have been shown.
And I can share them that way:
Not as doctrine.
Not as something anyone else must believe.
But as an invitation to wonder.
What if?
What if we are more sovereign than we have understood?
What if Spirit doesn't want blind obedience from us?
What if questioning isn't a failure of faith but part of discernment?
What if the things we release don't need to be condemned first?
What if there is enough Source for all of us to create?
What if we don't need the entire map?
What if our true north is already within us?
What if some of the mountains we curse from below are experiences our souls understand differently from above?
And what if being human—painful, messy, breathtaking, heartbreaking, ridiculous, beautiful human—is not a punishment at all?
What if it is a privilege?
At the end of that final meditation, I looked across the landscape.
There were so many mountains behind me.
There were still a few ahead.
But beyond them, the landscape was green.
Lush.
Alive.
That image has stayed with me because nothing about it felt like an ending.
It felt like possibility.
Maybe spiritual growth isn't about becoming good enough to finally graduate.
Maybe it isn't about earning our way out of Earth.
Maybe we aren't paying off some cosmic debt until we finally become worthy of freedom.
Maybe we are already participants in our own becoming.
We can bless what brought us here and put it down.
We can take the few grains placed in our hands and create something nourishing.
We can stop demanding the entire map and learn to recognize our true north.
And when another mountain rises in front of us, perhaps instead of immediately asking:
“Why am I being made to climb this?”
we can become curious enough to ask:
“What am I choosing to experience, create, learn or remember here?”
I don't know that the goal is ever to reach a place where there are no more mountains.
Maybe that isn't the point.
Maybe the deeper remembering is that we were never powerless before them.
We are climbing.
We are creating.
We are choosing.
We are learning.
And every once in a while, Spirit may lift us high enough above the eagles to remind us that the mountain we thought was the whole story—
was only ever part of the landscape.
Spirit may be the teacher.
But perhaps what we do with the teaching is part of why we were given it.
With light, curiosity, and the courage to keep asking what if,
Theri
Visionary Light Journey
Spirit may show us the way. The choice to walk it is always ours.
