Happy people were here
*trying to explain the unexplainable
Dear Kula Diaries,
Sometimes, there are things that you just can’t explain, now matter how many times you try. Sometimes, there are, indeed, things that are simply… unexplainable.
A few weeks ago, a friend reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested in volunteering to be a ‘sitter’ for her intuitive development group. She explained that this was a group of professional and semi-professional intuitive readers and mediums who gathered together each week to do ‘readings’. In order to do their practice readings, they took turns inviting random guests to attend — and my friend asked me if I wanted to be one of these guests. She quickly explained to me that there was nothing that I needed to ‘do’ on the call. Rather, I would simply sit in a meditation… and the intuitives would go through their own personal process of doing a ‘reading’ on me… and then, they’d share what they received. Then, I’d have the opportunity to share my observations and either validate or not validate what they had said.
Recently, I’ve been a part of an intuitive development group as well — although, not with the intention of it becoming a profession. Rather, my group is more focused on how to pick up the subtle cues within our own hearts… and to learn how to trust and listen to intuition from our higher selves. The group itself is a very sacred space, and I won’t share too much about it, except that it has been a deeply powerful and much needed bright spot in my life.
On the day of my own intuitive reading, I felt upset and distracted. Something had happened in my personal life which had left me feeling confused and jumbled. I wondered to myself if this energy would be obvious to the intuitive readers on the call.
When I signed into the call, I was immediately greeted by a friendly group of women. They asked me to leave my camera on, so that I was visible, and we quickly settled into a meditation. It was the end of the day for me, and I was sitting in the small inventory office at Kula HQ. All of my employees had left the office, and Aaron and I were staying late so that we could meet up with friends in the evening after work. As I settled into the chair, I started to feel ease begin to creep through my body. I focused on my breathing, and I noticed my thoughts — whisking through my consciousness like leaves on a breeze. I tried my best to let them go.
After about 20 minutes, the group reconvened in the Zoom room, and the women turned their cameras back on. Then, one by one, they started telling me what they had experienced during the reading. Keep in mind that none of these women knew who I was… they had no idea that I am an entrepreneur and founder of an outdoor gear company… and I did not share anything personal with them at all prior to the reading. The only person who did know me, was my friend who invited me — but, she didn’t know a lot of specific details about my family history or current personal life.
Almost immediately, as I listened to the women, I found myself smiling inside — the first woman said, “I felt a sense of fire… like a burning ambition.” I knew that they had pretty much pegged me right off the bat. Another woman hit the nail on the head as she said, “But you seem reactive today… maybe distracted? But it doesn’t feel like it’s normal for you.” The most entertaining moment of the reading was when one of the intuitives told me that she felt like I had a ‘restriction’ around pizza… “… it’s like I see a pizza cutter hitting a wall,” she said curiously. At first, I thought she was suggesting some type of dietary restriction around pizza, and then as the realization hit me, I laughed: Of course, pizza day! As I’ve shared many times before, Pizza Day is a weekly religious holiday in our house… and, ironically, I was feeling a little stressed out about the possibility of having to shift around pizza day that weekend. Me… restrictive about pizza? Ummmm… yes.
Other than a single Tarot reading from a friend, I’ve never had any other type of reading in my life before — this was my first time having a reading from mediums, and I was hugely unprepared for the emotion that I’d experience as these women started to talk.
I wasn’t able to capture everything that they said, but on a day in my life when I was feeling like a frazzled failure, these women shared with me, what I can only describe, as the most supportive message from the universe that I’ve ever heard. In a way that I can barely fathom, it felt like every single message was exactly what I needed to hear in that exact moment.
I was completely caught off guard when one of the women told me that a female energy on my mom’s side was present — she said that the woman was offering words of support and love for me and that she was holding a white, long-stemmed carnation. “Does the smell of fresh cut flowers mean anything to you?”, the medium asked me, “Because I just kept getting the overwhelming smell of freshly cut flowers.”
Nothing came to mind, but I made a note to ask my mom later — maybe it would mean something to her.
The final medium looked at me gently and said, “A male energy on your mom’s side arrived… and I got the feeling that he had a personality that was larger than life. I saw a military uniform on him — I think it’s air force, because I see him around planes. He referred to a problem with his colon… and he kept referencing the number four as being an important number to him.”
Almost immediately, I felt my eyes start to burn with tears: my grandfather (my mom’s dad), was a Navigator on a B-52 in the Airforce. He had half of his colon removed and almost died as a result of it when I was young. He had the biggest personality of anybody that I knew — he used to dance into the kitchen shouting, “I’m 200lbs of dancing stromboli!” . My grandfather and grandmother had four children — two boys and two girls.
The woman looked at me again, “He’s really proud of you. He just kept saying how proud of you he was and how you are doing such a great job.”
I tried to hold back my tears, but I couldn’t. I sat in the little Kula HQ inventory room, listening to the words — and, very weirdly, I felt them coming from my grandfather. I can’t possibly describe this with a typed essay, because it didn’t feel like it came from words — it was just something I felt in my heart. It was the oddest experience. It was if, in that moment, there was no shadow of a doubt that this was coming from a true, beautiful and infinite space of love that, inexplicably connects all that ever has been, and all that ever will be.
The lady looked down at her notes and said one last thing, “Does an Easter reference mean anything to you? He kept mentioning Easter.”
I shook my head — I couldn’t think of anything that had to do with Easter.
A few days later, completely out of the blue, I got a text from my mom with a link to a Google drive — apparently, my cousin had spontaneously been working on digitizing my grandparents’ photo collection, and she wanted me to see the photos.
I clicked on the link, and opened up the first album.
I gasped.
The entire album was a series of polaroid photos of my grandparents and my family. My grandmother’s faded handwriting appeared on the bottom of each polaroid. Her familiar handwriting was etched into my heart, having received hundreds of letters from her over the course of my life.
The bottom of each polaroid said the same thing: Easter Sunday, ‘81.
A few years ago, I had the chance to attend an Abraham Hicks Workshop in Bellevue, Washington. If you aren’t familiar with Abraham Hicks, I’ll try my best to explain it without it sounding too strange (it sounds a lot weirder than it is): Abraham is a ‘collective energy’ that is channeled by a woman named Esther Hicks. When you attend one of these seminars, Esther Hicks appears on stage… then she closes her eyes and enters a soft, meditative state, and then she allows herself to be a communication vessel for the energy of Abraham — this all knowing, all-loving energy of infinite intelligence.
You can say what you want about the woo-woo-ness of Abraham, but I can tell you from my own personal experience, that the workshop was nothing short of absolutely remarkable. I cried through the entire thing, and I can’t explain why. I wasn’t sad — I just found myself continuously weeping, and I couldn’t stop. I felt so much overwhelming love during those few hours that, honestly, I don’t think I could keep it bottled in — so it came out in the form of tears. It was a really tremendous workshop, and I think about it a lot to this day. Abraham’s work has impacted the lives of millions of people around the world.
At one point in the workshop, Abraham was telling a story about a time when Esther and Jerry (her husband) were looking for a place to build their home — they were looking at a collection of properties in Texas, and they were wandering around on the land. Jerry suddenly stopped in a spot on the vacant land and was overwhelmed by a distinct feeling, “Can you feel that? It feels like happy people were here”, he told Esther.
Many years later, they had built their home on the property, and they were sitting in their office one day, when Jerry had a sudden realization: he got out the map of the property and began to wonder about that spot on the property from so many years ago. As he looked at the map, he quickly realized that the office where they were sitting was in the exact spot where he had felt the ‘happy people’ many years before. He asked Esther if she could contact Abraham to ask about it, and Esther went into her meditative state before Jerry asked, “Abraham, is this the spot where I felt the happy people?”. Abraham simply responded, “Yes it is — but YOU were the happy people.”
When Abraham told that story at the workshop many years ago, I was deeply moved by it — this big, existential notion that past, present and future are — somehow — all happening at the same time. I can’t explain this metaphysically or with science — but I do know that the only moment that ever actually exists is the moment right now — the past only ever occurs as a memory in the present… and the future never arrives, because it’s only ever now. Time, as Eckhart Tolle often writes, is an illusion. Yes, it has practical purposes for living in our world, but it can also hide us from the truth of the infiniteness that exists in every single moment.
As I looked at the polaroid photos from my grandparent’s photo collection… all of them with Easter Sunday, ‘81 written on them — that is what I felt. On that day with the medium, I had been gifted a memory of something that had both happened… and not happened yet — a point in time from many years ago… and a point in time that would soon be realized. As I tried to comprehend the uncomprehend-able, I distilled it down to this: There is infinite love that exists in all moments, and it is here to support us in ways that we cannot possibly understand. What I took from that intuitive reading was not some weird, ‘visit from the dead’, but rather — a deep connection to the love that I have shared, and will always share with the people who mean the most to me. There is a fabric of love that connects all moments and all things and all of it exists in every moment. From a place of pure love, there is no past or future — there is only right now… which means that the moments in time that those photos were taken… and a lifetime of feeling the pureness of my grandfather’s love are not separate from an unexpected moment of me looking back at photos from Easter in 1981. It’s all right now. It’s all a part of everything — and we miss it in our longing to be somewhere else.
I called my mom after the reading — and I tried to stifle my sobs as I recalled to her the experience. I was very close to my grandparents, and while I’ve had seemingly mystical ‘visits’ from them before (usually during my meditations), I was completely unprepared for the power of this situation. As I told my mom about the experience, I remembered something that one of the women on the call had said, “Hey mom,” I asked, “Does the smell of cut flowers mean anything to you?”
My mom was quiet on the other end of the phone for a moment.
“I prepped and cut 2,000 roses and carnations today,” she said.
I had completely forgotten that my mom was working at a florist to help them out before Valentine’s Day. She explained that they were prepping for the deluge of orders, and that she had helped to trim and cut over 2,000 flowers — white, long-stemmed carnations included.
Some things can’t be explained, and they don’t need to be. Sure, I could pick something apart and analyze it ad nauseum — but what’s the point? What good does that bring? Maybe some things are just better left unexplainable. Maybe the universe is mysterious because some things were meant to be mysteries — or, maybe, it’s a lot simpler than we think. Maybe it really is just love — and maybe, we’re just not used to feeling it.
My dad, a former government employee with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, used to spend a lot of time attempting to explain ‘nuclear things’ to me. I was the young girl who thought it was completely normal to carry a Geiger Counter around my house and backyard to measure the radiation level in rocks and trees and kitchen appliances. I don’t remember much about nuclear power, and I have no idea how it really works — but I do recall one important thing, which is probably the most important thing of all: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. I don’t know if the energy of love has ever been measured, but maybe it has — and I’m willing to bet that it accounts for the most powerful forces in the universe, particularly the ones we can’t explain. The atoms of love don’t vanish. They are always here, always surrounding us. They are in the people we love… in the things we see… in the lives that we live. Everything that ever has been and everything that ever will be is within us right now — but you don’t need a Hadron particle accelerator to explain it. Just sit quietly. Notice your breathing. See if… even for a moment… you can feel the happy people.
Friends, thank you so much for being here — I hope that you can remember and (most importantly) FEEL and know the infinite love that exists for all of us. It’s easy to lose ourselves in a place of not remembering, but you can always come back — always.
I am wishing you so much love, this week and all weeks. You are loved very much, friends.
P.S. I do have a recording of the ‘Happy People’ segment from the workshop I attended many years ago (I purchased the recording, didn’t bootleg it!). If you’d be interested in listening to it, please let me know and I am happy to share it.
Wow does Mare look like your Mom!
My grandfather worked at Hanford when my Mom was little. She has a memory of folks from the plant coming to the house with a geiger counter and then taking a single shoe of her dad's - there had been some sort of spill/leak at the plant and he clearly stepped in something not good!
This retelling of your experience and subsequent understanding of the constant flow of love we are all surrounded by was wonderful! It is the perfect encapsulation of how my parents made me feel growing up and I continue to feel their love and support daily. I absolutely know that Grandpa and Grandma are proud of you!!