Fall 2012

My first trip to India. Also my first experience traveling outside of the US. Man, was I in for a rude awakening.

I had big hopes and dreams for my adventure. At this point, a little over six years into my recovery and healing journey, I was on a quest for enlightenment. I’d been reading about spiritual teachers and mystical yogis, studying the teachings of saints and gurus, and even begun meditating on a semi-regular basis. I remember telling my parents and anybody that would listen about how, if I met my guru, and he said I had to meditate in a cave for 3 years and let rats nibble on my toes, I was going to do it. It was enlightenment or bust for me. I no longer wanted to learn about God, I wanted to learn directly from God.

Holy sh*t was I not ready for what came next.

My journey to India, instead of being the epic sacred pilgrimage I had imagined, turned out to be more of a thirty-day long, on-again off-again panic attack. On three separate occasions I found myself curled up in the fetal position, sobbing, in public. On what was supposed to be my last day, hours before I was supposed to fly home, I fell and dislocated my elbow in a freak boat accident (the boat was on the beach – a story for another time). A missed flight and a day later I finally made it back home, with my arm casted and in a sling.

I was so disappointed in myself. I’d barely lasted a month. After all of the grand fantasies I’d created in my mind leading up to the adventure, India had been anything but the majestic experience I’d envisioned. Deflated and disillusioned, I spent the next two weeks on my parents’ couch nursing my wounded body, mind, and spirit while I watched the entire TV series “Lost.” They were lost. I was lost. It worked out well.

As I rested and healed, I had plenty of time to reflect on my trip. And as I reflected, I began to understand my adventure a little differently. I recognized how each time I was losing my sh*t, someone stepped up out of nowhere and helped me. I realized how synchronistic it was that a friend I made my first week in Northern India happened to be present and able to support me through my accident a month later in Southern India. And then at some point it dawned on me... I’d gotten exactly what I’d asked for.

It turns out, that for this stubborn, rash, impulsive, idealistic, suburban NJ kid, meeting God was going to require getting cracked open something fierce. That in order to really be aligned with the universe, I needed to be forcibly unaligned with my own bullsh*t. But it was also in those moments, when I was distraught, defeated, and broken wide open, that I came to know grace.

While it might not be the most comfortable experience ever, when our lives are blown up or when we’re significantly humbled, we become available to something much bigger than our own personal world, something that’s hard to express or describe. I choose to call it grace. Sometimes I also call it God or a higher power or the universe. Call it what you want, what I can say from my own experience, is that it’s always here and now and available. It always has us in its care. It just usually takes a certain set of circumstances for us to remember.