You Came Here to Remember

When most people come home from Hawaiʻi, they come home with stories.

Stories about the beaches. The sunsets. The food. The drinks. Maybe a sunburn.

I came home with stories too, but those aren’t the ones that stayed with me.

What stayed with me were the conversations.

And strangely enough, most of those conversations weren’t with people.

They happened while I was standing in the wind. Looking at trees. Smelling flowers. Walking through the ocean. Feeling the heat of the sun against my skin and the sand moving underneath my feet.

It felt like Oʻahu itself was talking to me.

Not literally. I wasn’t hearing a voice booming from the sky. It was subtler than that. It was the kind of communication I experience when I’m completely present and something suddenly makes sense. An idea arrives. A connection forms. A piece of the puzzle clicks into place.

I call those aha moments.

But even that description doesn’t quite capture what happened in Hawaiʻi, because I don’t think I was actually learning anything new.

I was remembering.

That distinction became the thread running through everything I experienced there.

I wasn’t being asked, Who do you want to become?

I wasn’t being asked, What are you supposed to accomplish?

I wasn’t even being asked, What’s the next step in your spiritual journey?

The question underneath everything was much simpler:

What have you forgotten?

Not only as Chris.

As a human being.

I Arrived Exhausted From Trying to Be Myself

To understand why that message affected me so deeply, you have to understand how I arrived there.

I had been on Oʻahu for two weeks working a military exercise. I still work with the military as an instructor, and on the very first day I found myself sitting in a room with more than fifty men and only a handful of other women.

Almost immediately, I got into my head.

I had spent years developing parts of myself that didn’t necessarily fit comfortably into those environments. My spirituality had become more visible. I had become more comfortable with my femininity. I had become more willing to talk openly about intuition, energy, emotion and all of these other parts of myself that I had once kept very separate from my military identity.

So sitting in that room, I started asking myself:

How do I authentically be me here?

How do I remain the woman I have become without shutting down the parts of myself that might make people uncomfortable?

It sounded like a beautiful question.

And in many ways, it was.

But I turned it into a test.

For two weeks, I watched myself.

Was I being authentic?

Was I becoming too quiet?

Was I falling back into military Chris?

Was I performing?

Was I allowing enough of myself to be seen?

Was I doing this correctly?

What began as self-awareness slowly became self-monitoring.

And by the end of those two weeks, I was smoked.

I was exhausted physically, mentally and emotionally. I didn’t want to talk to anyone anymore. I didn’t particularly want to socialize. I wasn’t desperate to leave Hawaiʻi, but I was over the experience I had been having there.

And underneath the exhaustion was something even more uncomfortable.

I felt like I had failed.

I couldn’t even clearly articulate what I thought I had failed at.

Being authentic enough?

Being spiritually evolved enough?

Being brave enough?

I had somehow convinced myself that there had been a right way to move through those two weeks, and I wasn’t sure I had done it.

That was the emotional state I was in when the work ended.

Fortunately, my husband had encouraged me to stay for a couple of extra days.

I had only been to Hawaiʻi once before, and that trip had also been for military work. I had been to Hawaiʻi without ever really experiencing Hawaiʻi.

So I stayed.

And I decided that for those last few days, I wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

I was going to connect.

What Makes a Place Spiritual?

One of the things I love to do when I travel is connect with the place itself.

I want to understand its history. I want to understand what mattered to the people who lived there. I want to visit the places that carry meaning.

But when I talk about spiritual places, I don’t necessarily mean religious places.

Spirituality, for me, is much larger than religion.

It can include history.

Nature.

Culture.

Beauty.

Energy.

The things people loved and feared and protected.

The relationship between human beings and the land beneath them.

Everywhere I’ve traveled has felt different to me. Places have their own emotional and energetic character. Some feel heavy. Some feel expansive. Some feel playful. Some feel almost completely closed.

And I’ve learned that I don’t need a guidebook to tell me whether somewhere is spiritual.

For me, a spiritual site is somewhere I can become completely present.

Physically there.

Mentally there.

Emotionally there.

Open enough to experience whatever the place has to offer without demanding that it give me something extraordinary.

That last part is important.

Because I’ve made that mistake before.

I’ve traveled to famous spiritual sites expecting something to happen.

I’ve attended expensive retreats and classes expecting a catalyst.

I’ve walked into places with enormous reputations thinking, Okay, I’m here. Give me the spiritual experience.

And expectation can destroy presence.

You’re no longer experiencing what is happening.

You’re comparing it to what you hoped would happen.

So I’ve learned to arrive differently.

I go.

I become quiet.

I pay attention.

And sometimes something happens.

Sometimes nothing happens.

Both are okay.

My only goal during those final days on Oʻahu was to be open.

I didn’t realize how desperately I needed exactly that.

The First Lesson Wasn’t a Lesson

One of the first places I visited was Makapuʻu on the eastern side of Oʻahu.

I climbed out onto the rocks and stood looking across the ocean.

And immediately, the elements became impossible to ignore.

The wind was hitting me from multiple directions.

The waves were crashing below.

The rocks beneath me were hot.

The sun was beating down.

Earth.

Air.

Fire.

Water.

I was standing in the middle of all four of them.

Nothing about it was particularly gentle.

The wind was powerful enough that you had to respect it. The ocean was loud. The sun was hot. The rocks were hard beneath me.

And somehow, in the middle of all of that intensity, I felt completely balanced.

Then I noticed something else.

The exhaustion was gone.

That almost panicked feeling I’d been carrying—that I had somehow failed myself during the previous two weeks—had disappeared.

It felt as though the wind had picked it up and carried it away.

I wasn’t standing there trying to be authentic.

I wasn’t trying to be military Chris.

I wasn’t trying to be spiritual Chris.

I wasn’t trying to understand what lesson I was supposed to take home.

I was simply there.

And for the first time in weeks, that was enough.

We Spend So Much of Life Trying to Get Somewhere

We are taught to accumulate.

Information.

Credentials.

Money.

Experience.

Achievements.

Even spirituality can become something we accumulate.

Another certification.

Another retreat.

Another healing modality.

Another book.

Another level.

Another insight.

Another rung on the ladder.

We’re constantly trying to move forward.

And there is nothing inherently wrong with movement. Growth is part of life.

But standing on those rocks, something about that constant need to move forward suddenly seemed exhausting.

I wasn’t being asked to receive another message.

I wasn’t being asked to understand the history of the place.

I wasn’t being asked to evolve.

I was being asked to be. Period.

That sounds almost ridiculously simple.

But when was the last time you allowed yourself to do that?

Not meditate because you want to regulate your nervous system.

Not sit outside because you’re grounding.

Not take a walk because you need exercise.

Not journal because you’re trying to understand a pattern.

Not rest because you need to become more productive tomorrow.

Just be.

No outcome.

No achievement.

No spiritual meaning required.

Just this moment.

Standing there, I realized how rarely I was actually doing that.

Sometimes the Wisest Thing We Can Do Is Stop Trying

That became the first real message Hawaiʻi gave me.

Sometimes the wisest thing we can do is stop trying.

Stop.

Take a breath.

Look around.

Feel where you are.

Because the moment we become completely consumed with achieving something, our attention moves somewhere else.

If I’m worrying about who I need to become, I’m living in the future.

If I’m obsessing over how I behaved yesterday, I’m living in the past.

Neither one is happening now.

And that realization completely reframed the previous two weeks for me.

My desire to be authentic wasn’t wrong.

But I had become so focused on achieving authenticity that I had pulled myself out of the experience.

I wasn’t actually present in the room with the people around me.

Part of me was constantly standing outside myself with a clipboard.

How are we doing?

Was that authentic?

Was that fear?

Was that an old pattern?

Did we pass?

I had turned being myself into another performance.

And there is something almost comical about that now.

I was trying so hard not to perform that I created a new performance around not performing.

Standing between the wind, water, sun and earth, there was nothing to measure.

No correction.

No mistake.

No pass or fail.

I was there exactly as I was.

And in that moment, it was perfect.

Be Here

I stayed in that energy for a while.

I listened to the waves.

I felt the wind.

I let the sun hit my skin.

I stopped demanding that the moment become anything more than itself.

And something in me reset.

By the time I returned to the hotel that evening, I felt different.

I felt adventurous again.

Curious.

Excited.

I had started that day almost out of obligation.

I had paid to stay in Hawaiʻi for a few extra days, so I felt like I needed to do something with them.

I had my list.

I had places to visit.

I had spiritual work to do.

By the end of the day, that feeling was gone.

Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be these tiny invitations.

People selling leis.

People dancing.

My feet in the sand.

The movement of the water.

The landscape.

The message underneath all of it was the same:

Be here.

Not:

Figure this out.

Not:

Become better.

Not:

Find the message.

Just:

Be here.

The Trees That Felt Like Grandparents

The next morning I went to Waimea Valley.

I had read about its cultural and historical significance, and I knew there was a waterfall at the end of the walk.

Honestly, I thought the waterfall was going to be the attraction.

I had my bathing suit with me. I planned to walk through the valley, see the sites and eventually go swimming.

I didn’t even make it through the entrance before something stopped me.

The trees.

These enormous monkeypod trees grew across the landscape, and I had never seen anything quite like them.

Their branches stretched outward in these huge formations above the ground while their root systems spread visibly beneath them.

Above and below.

Expansion and foundation.

They looked almost like giant bonsai trees.

And the feeling I had around them was immediate.

Grandparents.

That’s the word that came to me.

They felt ancient.

Protective.

Like something was watching over the place.

And visually, they carried another message.

What was happening above was reflected below.

The enormous reach of the branches was supported by an equally extraordinary reach beneath the surface.

There was balance.

Expansion without abandoning the roots.

Growth without disconnecting from the foundation.

Again, I wasn’t searching for a message.

I was simply paying attention.

And because I was paying attention, everything seemed to have something to offer.

Wonder Changes What We Can See

I walked through Waimea Valley for hours.

There were reconstructed cultural sites and representations of how people had once lived there, and those were interesting.

But what spoke most strongly to me wasn’t something humans had built.

It was the land itself.

The running water.

The trees.

The plants.

The sense of wildness.

There was something about the place that felt fundamentally different from other places I had visited around the world.

I’d experienced places that felt spiritually heavy before.

Years earlier in Ireland, I’d visited an area where I felt an almost stagnant quality in the land. The best way I could describe it was like water that had stopped flowing.

Something felt stuck.

Waimea didn’t feel stuck at all.

It felt alive.

Wild.

Expansive.

It didn’t feel like human beings had dominated it.

It felt as though the land had allowed human beings to participate in it.

That distinction fascinated me.

The island didn’t feel indifferent to us.

But it also didn’t feel particularly impressed by us.

Humanity wasn’t the greatest power there.

The island was.

It felt almost as though Oʻahu was saying:

You can be here.

But I’m not changing who I am for you.

And after spending two weeks worrying about whether I was changing who I was for everyone else, I couldn’t miss the irony.

The island was modeling the very thing I had been trying so desperately to achieve.

It wasn’t proving its identity.

It wasn’t defending its identity.

It was simply being what it was.

Wild.

Powerful.

Beautiful.

And completely uninterested in passing anyone’s test.

Standing there, another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

Maybe I had spent those two weeks asking the wrong question.

Maybe the question was never:

How do I prove that I’m authentically me?

Maybe the invitation was much simpler.

Can I stop proving long enough to actually experience being alive?

And as I continued deeper into the valley, that question would begin opening into something even larger—about playfulness, forgiveness, change, and why so much of what we think we’ve lost may not be lost at all.

I Had Become So Committed to Becoming That I Wasn’t Being

Walking through Waimea Valley, I started seeing the previous two weeks differently.

My desire to be authentic hadn’t been the problem.

Awareness is useful. I think it’s important to understand ourselves, to recognize our patterns, to notice when we’re responding out of fear or slipping automatically into old versions of ourselves.

But awareness isn’t supposed to become another prison.

And that’s what I had done.

I had become so committed to becoming that I wasn’t being.

Every morning, I walked into those military spaces with part of my attention focused on the experience and another part focused on myself.

Are you being authentic?

Are you performing?

Are you making yourself smaller?

Are you slipping back into an old version of yourself?

Those sound like questions of self-awareness.

But eventually they became questions of pass or fail.

I wasn’t observing myself anymore.

I was grading myself.

And once I recognized that, I could see the absurdity of it.

I had taken something as expansive as authenticity and turned it into another rung on a ladder.

Something else I needed to achieve.

Something else I needed to get right.

There was no freedom in that.

The Hamster Loop of Spiritual Self-Judgment

This is such an interesting spiritual trap because it can look like growth while we’re inside it.

We want to become more conscious.

We want to recognize our triggers.

We want to heal old wounds.

We want to stop repeating patterns that no longer serve us.

All of that can be beautiful work.

But at some point, we can become so focused on monitoring ourselves that we’re running what I call the hamster loop of shenanigans.

Round and round.

Did I heal this?

Did I learn everything I was supposed to learn?

Did I respond correctly?

Was I authentic enough?

Was I available enough for that person?

Did I show up as my highest self?

At some point, you have to ask:

What exactly are we measuring for?

Who is holding the scorecard?

Who decided what percentage of authenticity constitutes passing?

There is a difference between noticing an old pattern and hating yourself for still having one.

There is a difference between wanting to grow and believing the person you are today is inadequate.

There is a difference between consciousness and constant correction.

And I think sometimes, particularly for people who have been doing spiritual or personal-development work for a long time, we forget that.

We can turn healing into another performance.

We can turn authenticity into another performance.

We can even turn spirituality into another performance.

And then we’re right back where we started.

I Don’t Need to Prove Anything

One of the simplest realizations I had while walking around Oʻahu was also one of the most freeing.

I don’t need to prove anything.

I don’t need to walk into a room and prove that I’m the spiritual version of myself.

I don’t need to prove that I’ve grown.

I don’t need to prove that I’m authentically me.

I don’t need to demonstrate that I’ve transcended some previous version of myself.

I don’t need to prove that I belong.

And I started noticing how often another phrase was attached to all of this:

I need to.

I need to be authentic.

I need to respond differently.

I need to be more open.

I need to grow.

I need to heal.

I need to figure this out.

I need to…

That phrase became fascinating to me.

Because the moment I say, I need to, I’m usually no longer here.

I’m projecting myself toward some future version of me who has finally accomplished whatever today’s version apparently lacks.

Even when the goal is spiritual, I’m still living somewhere else.

So maybe sometimes the answer to I need to is simply:

I am.

I am here.

That’s enough for this moment.

Every Part of Me Is Allowed to Exist

That realization also changed how I thought about the different versions of myself.

I had spent those two weeks worrying about military Chris coming back.

But what exactly was I afraid of?

That woman isn’t fake.

She isn’t some counterfeit version of me that needs to be eliminated.

She was built through decades of experience.

She knows how to walk confidently into rooms dominated by men.

She knows how to teach.

She knows how to lead.

She knows how to protect herself.

She knows how to read a room.

She knows how to become focused, strong and direct when the environment requires it.

There is also the woman who talks to trees.

The woman who puts her hands in the water and listens.

The woman who meditates.

The woman who talks about souls and reincarnation and energy.

The woman who can become emotional over a flower.

The woman who wants to lie on the ground and listen to the wind.

Why was I trying to decide which one was authentic?

They’re all me.

I don’t have to choose.

I started seeing those different parts of myself like petals on a flower.

Each petal is valid.

Each petal contributes something.

And together they make the whole.

By trying so hard to identify my authentic self, I had stopped looking at the flower.

I was searching for the correct petal.

That was another thing the island seemed to be showing me.

Wholeness doesn’t necessarily have a look.

It doesn’t have a measurement.

It doesn’t have a score.

Nature Wasn’t Taking Itself Seriously

The more I watched the landscape, the more playful everything began to feel.

And I don’t mean weak.

There was nothing weak about the nature on Oʻahu.

The wind could physically move you.

The waves could reshape the shoreline.

The sun could burn you.

The roots of enormous trees pushed through the earth.

Nature was incredibly powerful.

But it wasn’t solemn.

The wind wasn’t judging its strength.

The wave wasn’t counting how many grains of sand it moved.

The flower wasn’t looking at the flower next to it and wondering whether its petals were symmetrical enough.

The landscape wasn’t worrying about whether it had evolved correctly.

Everything was simply moving.

Expanding.

Contracting.

Growing.

Falling.

Blooming.

Changing.

There was something joyful about it.

And I realized how seriously I had been taking myself.

I had treated my days like tests.

I had treated my emotions like score sheets.

I had treated spiritual growth like something I needed to pass.

Meanwhile, everything around me seemed to be saying:

Chill out.

You’re alive.

You’re having an experience.

You are allowed to enjoy it.

What If Growth Could Be Playful?

That idea has stayed with me because we don’t often talk about spiritual growth as play.

We talk about healing.

Shadow work.

Trauma.

Karma.

Lessons.

Purpose.

Evolution.

All of those words carry weight.

And sometimes they should.

Life contains incredibly difficult experiences. There are things we need to take seriously.

But that doesn’t mean we need to take ourselves seriously every second of the journey.

What if I had walked into that military environment with curiosity instead of concern?

What if I had thought:

Okay, let’s see what happens today.

Let’s see which part of me shows up.

Let’s see what I learn.

And then when I caught myself slipping into an old pattern, what if I laughed?

Not dismissively.

Not because the pattern didn’t matter.

But because I didn’t need to turn every human reaction into evidence of spiritual failure.

I could notice it.

Learn from it.

And keep moving.

That would have changed the entire two weeks.

The external circumstances might have been exactly the same.

But my experience of them would have been completely different.

Instead of an exam, it could have been an experiment.

Instead of worrying about whether I was becoming the right person, I could have been curious about the person who was already there.

Hoʻoponopono: What If I Stopped Judging the Woman I Had Been?

At some point while walking through the valley, another idea surfaced.

Hoʻoponopono.

I had known the practice for years, although I hadn’t spent much time thinking about its Hawaiian origins.

The version I had learned uses four simple phrases:

I love you.

I’m sorry.

Forgive me.

Thank you.

I had always thought of it primarily as a practice of forgiveness and release.

But in that moment, what struck me was the balance inside it.

It wasn’t about winning.

It wasn’t about proving who was right.

It wasn’t about pretending that pain never happened.

It wasn’t even necessarily about excusing anyone.

It was about releasing what no longer needed to be carried.

And suddenly I didn’t picture someone else.

I pictured myself.

I pictured the woman who had spent the previous two weeks sitting in those military spaces, monitoring herself and trying desperately to get authenticity right.

The woman I had been criticizing.

The woman I thought had failed.

In my mind, I surrounded her with golden light.

And I said:

I love you.

I’m sorry.

Forgive me.

Thank you.

And then I let the image dissolve.

That was such a different response from what I’d been doing.

I wasn’t fixing her.

I wasn’t telling her how she should have behaved.

I wasn’t trying to erase her.

I was loving her.

Thanking her.

And releasing the judgment I had attached to her.

Maybe that’s what forgiveness sometimes needs to look like when we turn it toward ourselves.

We Carry So Much More Than We Need

I started thinking about all of the things we put into our metaphorical rucksacks.

Old mistakes.

Embarrassment.

Resentment.

Regret.

The need to prove ourselves.

The need to become better.

The need to make sense of everything.

The need to demonstrate that we’ve healed.

Every I need to can become another rock in the bag.

And then we wonder why we’re exhausted.

Release doesn’t mean an experience didn’t matter.

It doesn’t mean someone didn’t hurt us.

It doesn’t mean we didn’t make a mistake.

It doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences or boundaries.

It means we stop insisting that carrying the emotional weight forever is the only way to honor what happened.

There was something about the land in Hawaiʻi that made this idea feel especially powerful to me.

Because it didn’t feel as though the land was constantly fighting its own past.

It felt present.

Open.

Wild.

Available.

And that eventually brought me to another, much more complicated question.

What Does It Mean to Preserve Something?

Everywhere I went in Hawaiʻi, there were reminders of history.

Colonization.

Changes to Hawaiian culture.

Traditions that had been suppressed or transformed.

Language, religion and relationships with the land that people have worked to protect and recover.

And I want to be very clear: there is enormous value in preserving culture, history, language and the stories of people whose traditions have been threatened or suppressed.

But as I walked through these historical spaces, another question started forming for me.

What exactly does preservation mean in a universe where everything changes?

Because nothing remains frozen.

People change.

Cultures change.

Countries change.

Religions change.

Families change.

Our bodies change.

Even the land changes.

We often respond to that by looking backward.

I wish things were the way they used to be.

I wish my children were little again.

I wish I still looked the way I did at twenty.

I wish our community was like it used to be.

I wish we could go back.

But we can’t.

And perhaps we’re not supposed to.

That doesn’t mean we abandon the past.

Maybe it means we need a different relationship with it.

Change Doesn’t Erase What Came Before

One of the images that brought this together for me was a flower.

I saw these beautiful tropical flowers growing in tiers.

One blossom would emerge, and then the plant would continue growing.

Another would appear.

Then another.

The flower didn’t stop because it had created something beautiful.

It kept moving.

And the new growth didn’t invalidate what came before.

It depended on it.

Even when an older petal eventually fell away, it had existed.

It had been part of the whole.

And that gave me a way of thinking about change that I hadn’t considered before.

Change doesn’t erase the petals that came before.

Maybe this is true of us individually.

Maybe it’s true of cultures.

Maybe it’s true of humanity itself.

What we create becomes part of what comes next.

A way of understanding the world.

A relationship with nature.

A healing practice.

A prayer.

A story.

A piece of wisdom.

A way of loving.

These things can change form without becoming meaningless.

And if that’s true, then perhaps what we call spiritual discovery isn’t always discovery at all.

What If We Aren’t Learning?

I’ve called myself a consummate student for years.

I love learning.

I love studying religion and spirituality.

I love exploring meditation, energy work, reincarnation, history, consciousness and the ways different cultures have tried to understand what it means to be human.

But standing among all of this history and nature, even the phrase learning something new started to feel incomplete.

Because how much of what we’re discovering is actually new?

Meditation isn’t new.

Energy healing isn’t new.

Mindfulness isn’t new.

Working with the elements isn’t new.

Connection with the land isn’t new.

Human beings have been exploring these things for thousands of years.

Different cultures have created their own language around them. Practices have evolved. Some disappeared from common use. Some were suppressed. Some survived.

But the human search underneath them remained.

Who am I?

What am I?

Why am I here?

How am I connected to everything around me?

What happens when I die?

How should I live while I’m here?

These aren’t new questions.

Maybe we’re not always learning something humanity has never known.

Maybe we’re remembering.

Remembering a petal that was created before.

Remembering a relationship with the earth.

Remembering a way of healing.

Remembering that we are part of something rather than standing above it.

Remembering knowledge that earlier generations left available to us.

And if that is true, then the past doesn’t have to be recreated exactly as it was.

We don’t have to freeze it.

We don’t have to become our ancestors.

We can receive what they created and allow another blossom to grow from it.

That thought would become the foundation for the final and most powerful message I received in Hawaiʻi.

Because on my last morning, standing with my feet in the ocean, I began watching the waves.

And for the first time, I wasn’t thinking about what the island had given me.

I started thinking about what all of us leave behind.

Not monuments.

Not accomplishments.

Ripples.

The Ripples Were Everywhere

On my final morning in Hawaiʻi, I went down to the water one last time.

I was flying home that day, and after everything I had experienced over those few days, I wanted to spend a little time with the island before I left.

Not looking for anything.

Not trying to squeeze one more spiritual lesson out of the trip.

Just being there.

I walked into the water while the tide was low. There were surfers farther out, a handful of people scattered along the beach, and I opened myself into a simple meditation.

I asked Archangel Michael to surround me in golden light and allow only messages for my highest good to enter.

I connected above.

Below.

Within.

Then I connected with the elements again.

Earth.

Air.

Fire.

Water.

The same elements that had greeted me at Makapuʻu at the beginning of this experience.

I felt the breeze against my body.

The heat of the sun.

The water moving across my feet.

The sand shifting underneath my toes.

And I asked one question:

Is there anything else I need to take with me?

Nothing dramatic happened.

No booming voice.

No giant revelation.

I just started noticing the water.

And specifically, I noticed the ripples.

The Wave Disappears. Its Influence Doesn’t.

The waves weren’t breaking along one perfect line.

They were forming in different places across the water.

Surfers were spread out over a large area, waiting for different breaks.

One wave moved this way.

Another formed somewhere else.

They overlapped and moved toward the shore in these beautiful patterns.

Then I looked down.

The same movement was being reflected in the sand underneath my feet.

The water moved across it and left tiny ridges behind.

Ripples in the water.

Ripples in the sand.

A wave would arrive, change something and disappear.

But the evidence of its movement remained.

And suddenly, the entire trip started coming together for me.

I thought about the people who had lived on those islands long before me.

I thought about generations of human beings who had been born there, lived there, loved there, struggled there, raised families there and eventually died there.

Most of their names I will never know.

They didn’t leave giant monuments announcing that they had existed.

But that didn’t mean they left nothing.

They left ripples.

Something had been created through the relationship between those people and that land.

And whether you understand that spiritually, culturally, psychologically or simply as the cumulative influence of generations of human beings, the idea was the same.

The moment passes.

The influence doesn’t necessarily disappear with it.

The wave might disappear, but the influence of the wave does not.

What If Our Ancestors Were Creating Something for Us?

Standing there, I started thinking differently about ancestors.

I’ve always believed our lives have purpose. I believe we plan these lives for a specific purpose—one that is both personal and higher.

But what if some of that purpose is much quieter than we imagine?

We tend to think purpose needs to look like accomplishment.

Build something.

Lead something.

Write something.

Change something.

Become known for something.

But what if part of our purpose is simply to contribute to something larger than ourselves?

What if generations of people are creating pathways that later generations will walk?

Not necessarily intentionally.

Not because they know our names.

But because everything they learn, create and embody becomes part of what humanity has available next.

A way of healing.

A relationship with nature.

A prayer.

A story.

A way of navigating.

A way of raising children.

A way of understanding death.

A way of living in community.

Each generation adds something.

And perhaps that is why some ancient ideas can feel strangely familiar when we encounter them.

Someone created the pathway before us.

Someone left the ripple.

We Don’t Have to Recreate the Past to Receive It

This helped resolve something I had been thinking about throughout my time on Oʻahu.

If everything changes, how do we honor what came before?

How do we preserve wisdom without trying to freeze cultures in time?

I don’t think the answer is to recreate the past exactly as it was.

We can’t.

And I don’t think we’re meant to.

Remembering is different from reenacting.

We can remember the wisdom of people who lived in relationship with the land without pretending we’re living in their century.

We can remember ancient spiritual practices while allowing our understanding of them to continue evolving.

We can honor our ancestors without becoming them.

We can receive what they left and add our own experience.

That is what the flower had shown me.

The next blossom doesn’t erase the first.

It grows from everything that came before it.

And perhaps human consciousness works in much the same way.

We are not starting from nothing.

We’re inheriting an enormous human story.

Some parts are beautiful.

Some are painful.

Some are wise.

Some are destructive.

And our job isn’t necessarily to return to any previous version of humanity.

Our job may be to consciously decide what we carry forward.

The Wayfinders Have Already Marked the Water

Hawaiʻi has a powerful history of wayfinding—of people navigating enormous stretches of ocean using their knowledge of stars, waves, winds and the natural world.

That image stayed with me.

Because perhaps our ancestors are wayfinders too.

Not because they left us a perfect map.

They didn’t.

Our ancestors were human.

They made mistakes.

They caused harm.

They carried fears and prejudices and limitations just as we do.

But they also discovered things.

They found ways through.

They created practices that helped people heal.

They learned how to survive.

They learned how to connect.

They learned how to build community.

They explored consciousness.

They asked questions about life and death and meaning.

They left markers in the water.

And now it’s our turn.

We don’t have to follow every marker.

We don’t have to repeat every choice.

But we also don’t have to pretend we’re navigating an empty ocean.

There are ripples everywhere.

What Ripple Am I Leaving?

Standing in the water that morning, all of that eventually condensed into one very simple question.

What ripple am I going to leave?

Not:

What am I going to accomplish?

Not:

How successful will I become?

Not even:

How spiritually evolved can I become?

What am I leaving in the world simply because I was here?

What do my words leave behind?

What do my actions leave behind?

What does my fear leave behind?

What does my joy leave behind?

What happens when I walk into a room?

What happens when I leave it?

How do people feel after interacting with me?

What do I reinforce through the way I live?

Because we’re leaving something whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Every interaction creates movement.

Every relationship changes us.

Every generation influences the next.

We may never see where those ripples travel.

And maybe we’re not supposed to.

The wave doesn’t need to watch the shoreline forever to know that it touched it.

Purpose May Be Smaller and Bigger Than We Think

I’ve spent a lot of my spiritual life thinking about purpose.

Why are we here?

Why this body?

Why this family?

Why these experiences?

Why these particular gifts and challenges?

I still think those questions matter.

But Hawaiʻi added another dimension to them.

Maybe purpose isn’t only about the individual life.

Maybe we’re participating in something much larger.

A human being may live eighty years.

A ripple can move much farther.

Think about how much of who you are came from people who will never know what they gave you.

A teacher.

A grandparent.

An author.

An artist.

A spiritual teacher who lived hundreds of years ago.

A stranger whose kindness you still remember.

Someone said something once, and you carried it for decades.

Someone treated you a certain way, and it changed the way you later treated someone else.

They may never know.

That’s the ripple.

And suddenly purpose doesn’t have to be so grandiose.

You don’t need millions of followers.

You don’t need your name carved into something.

You don’t need to change the entire world.

You participate in the world every day.

The question is what you’re adding to it.

We Are Creating Blueprints for People We Will Never Meet

That may be one of the most beautiful ideas I brought home with me.

We are creating something for people we will never meet.

Every time we learn how to move through fear differently, we create something.

Every time we interrupt an inherited pattern, we create something.

Every time we learn how to love more openly, forgive more consciously, listen more deeply or stand more fully in who we are, we create something.

Maybe you teach it directly.

Maybe you don’t.

Maybe your children see it.

Maybe a friend feels it.

Maybe someone encounters something you’ve created years from now.

Maybe your contribution is so subtle that nobody ever attaches your name to it.

That doesn’t make it less real.

We are constantly adding strands to the human story.

Blueprints.

Possibilities.

Evidence that another way of being is possible.

Someone else can find that pathway later.

Maybe That’s Why We Remember

This brought me back to the message that had followed me throughout those days.

Remember.

Maybe remembering is how we find the ripples.

We remember ways of being that humanity has practiced before.

We remember our relationship with the earth.

We remember the importance of community.

We remember that our bodies are part of nature rather than separate from it.

We remember practices of prayer, meditation, contemplation and healing.

We remember that human beings have always looked at the stars and wondered why we’re here.

We remember that other people struggled with fear and loss and identity long before we did.

And sometimes we remember parts of ourselves.

Parts we buried.

Parts we judged.

Parts we decided weren’t appropriate for a particular room.

Parts we believed we had outgrown.

Maybe we don’t need to create ourselves from scratch.

Maybe there is already more inside us than we realize.

I Didn’t Need to Become Someone Else

That realization took me all the way back to the room where this experience began.

Fifty-plus men.

A handful of women.

And me sitting there asking:

How do I authentically be myself here?

Looking back, I have so much more compassion for the woman asking that question.

She wasn’t doing anything wrong.

She was trying to integrate parts of herself that had once existed separately.

Military.

Spiritual.

Masculine.

Feminine.

Strong.

Sensitive.

Instructor.

Seeker.

She thought integration meant finding the correct way to combine them.

But maybe integration isn’t arranging ourselves perfectly.

Maybe it’s stopping the war between the parts.

I didn’t need to become a more authentic version of myself.

I needed to stop treating the versions I already contained as competitors.

They are all petals.

They are all part of the flower.

I can allow whichever part is needed to move forward without immediately judging what its appearance means about my spiritual evolution.

That feels much more like freedom.

The Island Didn’t Give Me Answers

When I look back on those few days, I don’t think Hawaiʻi gave me answers.

It gave me better questions.

What happens when I stop trying?

What happens when I allow myself to be?

What am I carrying because I think I need to?

What parts of myself am I still judging?

Can I grow without treating who I am today as inadequate?

Can I honor the past without trying to recreate it?

What wisdom is already available if I become quiet enough to remember it?

And what ripple am I leaving for the people who come after me?

Those aren’t questions I expect to answer once.

They’re questions I expect to live with.

And perhaps that’s what the best spiritual experiences actually do.

They don’t hand us another piece of information to memorize.

They change the questions we’re asking.

The World Is Magical When We’re Present

I think that is ultimately what Hawaiʻi reminded me.

We are much more powerful when we’re here.

Not when we’re mentally replaying yesterday.

Not when we’re constantly reaching toward who we think we should become tomorrow.

Here.

In this conversation.

In this body.

In this moment.

We spend so much time searching for extraordinary spiritual experiences that we can miss the extraordinary experience of actually being alive.

The wind is happening now.

The ocean is happening now.

The person you love is here now.

Your body is breathing now.

The opportunity to affect another human being exists now.

The ripple begins now.

Presence isn’t passive.

It is the point from which we actually participate in our lives.

And maybe that’s why the first message I received on the island and the final message fit together so perfectly.

At the beginning:

Be here.

At the end:

What ripple are you leaving while you’re here?

You Came Here to Remember

Maybe this life isn’t about constantly learning who we are.

Maybe it’s about remembering.

Remembering who we are underneath all the roles we’ve learned to perform.

Remembering that we are part of nature, not separate from it.

Remembering that growth doesn’t require rejecting the person we were yesterday.

Remembering that we can release the past without pretending it didn’t matter.

Remembering that change doesn’t erase what came before.

Remembering that wisdom can travel through generations even when the people who first embodied it are gone.

Remembering that we don’t have to spend every moment trying to become.

Sometimes we’re allowed to simply be.

And while we’re here, we’re creating something.

Through our words.

Through our choices.

Through the way we love.

Through the way we respond to fear.

Through the way we treat ourselves.

Through the way we treat each other.

We are making ripples.

Most of them will never carry our names.

We may never know where they go.

We may never meet the people who eventually feel them.

That’s okay.

The ancestors who walked the land before us didn’t need to know our names for us to benefit from what they created.

The wave doesn’t need recognition for changing the sand.

It simply moves.

It touches something.

And something is different because it was there.

So maybe we don’t need to spend quite so much time worrying about whether we’re doing this human experience correctly.

Maybe we can put down the scorecard.

Maybe we can stop treating every day like another test.

Maybe we can be a little more playful.

A little more curious.

A little more forgiving.

Maybe we can stop asking ourselves every five minutes who we’re supposed to become.

Take a breath.

Feel your feet beneath you.

Look at the world that’s actually here.

And remember:

You are here.

You are part of this.

And your presence is already creating ripples.

The world becomes incredibly magical when we’re present enough to notice it.

Stay grounded.

Stay sovereign.