Your music is within, not without
The magic that happens when you change your energy just a little bit
Dearest Kula Diaries readers,
In my last weekly post I left you in the ‘space between’ - a magical place that exists between the moment that you realize you can create anything that you want… and the moment that you start to watch that reality unfold before your eyes. Keep in mind that getting to the place where you can say (and believe it when you say it), “I can create anything that I want to create, even if I don’t know how”, is the most important step - and usually the biggest hurdle because limiting beliefs are very deeply rooted in our psyche. Once you reach that point, however, it’s simply a matter of intentionally directing your focus on what you want to create and not getting ‘stuck’ in the lack of those things if they haven’t appeared yet.
I’m sharing my own personal story through this process because it’s an easy story for me to tell - and because it’s a concrete example of simple steps that are duplicatable (in their own unique way) for any other human. Sure, the reality that you end up creating will decidedly look very different than mine - but the process through which we both create is very similar.
Namely, we start by changing the energy within first… and then we watch as our external life begins to change in response to the internal change. Isn’t it amazing to know how much control you actually have? Here we all were - thinking that we were victims of life - but, really, we just didn’t know that we were unconsciously creating the things that we didn’t really want. It isn’t bad and you didn’t do anything wrong at all - it’s just something that we all do, and the process of becoming whole is what happens when the struggle and answers lead us right back where we started… in our own heart.
In my last post, I described how my life changed after my near-death incident and how I detached myself from the fear of failure and decided to ‘go for it’ (even though I didn’t know what ‘it’ was) with a fierce tenacity. Let me be honest - I was pretty voracious for a change in my life, and once I knew in my heart it was possible (with no actual proof at all), I went after it with a passion. I spent all of my time visualizing a life of adventure and fun… and ‘seeing myself’ as the founder of an outdoor gear company (even though I honestly didn’t even know what gear I’d be selling). Instead of trying to ‘figure out all the answers’ (which seemed very stressful and pointless), I decided that I was going to dedicate time every day to six simple habits, just to see what happened. Every day, I decided to include:
Before I tell you what happened next - let me go back to a very outdoorsy metaphor that I introduced in an earlier post:
You are a satellite beacon, emitting a very strong signal in every moment of every day.
This is a very important concept to understand, because it will help you to understand and to swallow the very very bittersweet pill of, ‘how you got where you didn’t want to be’ (ps… it also is the exactly how you got to where you want to be if you love where you are, so this applies to you too!). We humans, with our brilliantly complex minds, are naturally conditioned to search out danger and to notice and detect problems. It doesn’t take more than .000005 seconds of reading the news or watching the television to know that people like to focus on horrible things. A LOT. They are addicting. We love to focus on everything that is wrong. We’ve been incorrectly trained that if we focus on all the stuff that’s wrong, we will magically fix it. But… remember what I shared in my last AMA? I’ll give you a refresher:
The problem and the solution are not on the same frequency. You cannot be focused on a problem and have access to the solution.
Wait… so, does this mean that when we stare directly at what we don’t want… that we actually create more of what we don’t want?! In a nutshell… yes. Have you ever had one of those days where you woke up late… tripped on a shoe and stubbed your toe… burned your breakfast… lost your keys… ran a stop light… got pulled over by a cop… made it to work… only to discover that you had forgotten your laptop at home and you’re still wearing your pajama bottoms? Ok, maybe not that extreme… but I think you know what I’m talking about. When your energy is chaotic, you just attract more of it into your existence. Similarly, when you focus on what you don’t want… and replay it over and over in your mind and talk to all of your friends about how horrible it is and why you don’t want it… etc… it just gets worse, and here’s the kicker - you just keep getting more of exactly what you don’t want.
It sucks. Hugely. I’ve been there. But it’s also exactly the suffering that you need… the fuel, so to speak, for a catalytic awakening and change in your life. It’s so exciting for me to see people getting a bit fed up with the same problems over and over again… because I know that they must be close to letting go of blaming the outside world indefinitely… and finally asking themselves the most important question of all: What would happen if I looked deep within myself and started there?
Keep in mind: I am not asking you to jump the chasm (like I mentioned in my first AMA). This is about:
We are where we are right now.
And, so, this is where we meet - at a path less travelled by most, because it is easier to blame everything outside of you. It really is. It’s easier to say that that the world out there is to blame for everything - because it means that we don’t have to look into a place that we are a little bit afraid to see. It is really challenging to look deep within at some of the wounds that we are hiding from ourselves. Healing needs to happen in places that we wish we had forgotten about a long time ago - but as that begins to happen, we become whole and we start to remember who we are. We start to shed the belief that we won’t ‘amount to anything anyways’ - and we begin to believe that all that cliché stuff about ‘anything being possible’ might actually be true.
Lest I digress too far: you are a satellite beacon. You are sending one signal out into the universe at all times, and that signal simply says:
What you focus on, is what you find - and what you focus on, grows. Imagine then, if you will, that you’ve been focused on what you didn’t want for most of your life (like I did). What happens when somebody who has spent nearly 30+ years focused on what they didn’t want in life… suddenly does an about face pivot and begins to focus on what they do want to create?
Magic, friends. Magic is what begins to happen in that person’s life. And it is what happened in my life - and I hope that my story can help you believe that it is entirely possible for you too.
After my near death incident, and after I decided to start doing ‘6 tiny things’ every single day, my life continued to shift and change dramatically. If you will recall, my near death experience happened in January of 2017, and I started doing these little habits almost immediately after that incident (prior to leaving my job as a railroad police officer). So there’s an important story that I haven’t told yet.
One night, as I was climbing into bed after work at 2am, a voice popped into my head and very clearly said, “Go play your violin on the summit of a mountain.” At the time I was still very early in my journey of self-discovery… but this idea felt like it came from ‘nowhere and somewhere' all at once. I felt so inspired and I was overwhelmed by the idea - I was sure that this was my ticket out of my job at the police department. “This is it!!!”, I exclaimed internally. I did what any other person would have done at that exact moment in their life: I logged into CraigsList and I posted an ad for myself as an ‘adventure elopement violinist’:
I went to bed that night nearly 100% convinced that I was going to wake up the next day to an inbox full of requests for my adventure violin services. I remember my head hitting the pillow… eyes fluttering closed as I felt deeply content about exactly where I was at that moment. I knew… I just knew that something amazing was going to happen. The next day, I excitedly opened my phone expecting to see hundreds of messages… and… crickets. Not one message. In fact, I only ever received one message from somebody as a result of that ad. Ironically enough, it was a local musician who asked me to ‘lay down a track’ for $20. After googling this particular artist, I discovered videos of him performing music on train tracks while trains passed in both directions… and given that I was still a railroad police officer, I felt like this might not be the right avenue for my music.
It would have been easy to just give up and feel disappointed by the lack of anything, but I genuinely didn’t. I had no idea how this ‘violin on a summit’ factored into anything… but I was excited to see, and the idea felt good. I continued to dedicate my days to changing my own energy from within - focusing all of my attention on things that felt good, and resisting the temptation to slip back into my addiction of complaining about the things that were wrong.
One day, while doing some research for my hiking Facebook group, I found some extra copies of Andrew Skurka’s The Ultimate Hiker’s Gear Guide on my bookshelf, and I ‘randomly’ decided to give away a copy of the book. At the time, I had an Instagram following of approximately 150 people (I always joke that 10 of these people were probably my mom following me under different accounts), but nevertheless, I decided to giveaway this book in a, “major contest” on my Instagram account. Only one person entered the contest, and her name was Rose. Little did I know at that time that Rose was a pianist… who had a dream of playing her piano in the wilderness.
For those of you who know the ending to this story, you know that Rose is the pianist who ultimately would become one half of The Musical Mountaineers. Somehow, the universe had conspired to bring us together. Somehow, my ‘glass seed’ of playing my violin on the summit of a mountain had started to bloom. Somehow the internal change within my heart had led me to something that, had I still been stuck in complaining mode spending my time talking about how crappy my job was, would have absolutely never happened. Let me repeat that: if I hadn’t changed my energy from within, I would have never even received the impulse to host the giveaway… and never would have met Rose.
And so, on September 1, 2017, just a few months after I left my job as a railroad police officer, Rose and I carried a keyboard and a violin into the heart of the mountains. Just as the sun peeked above the horizon, we started to play. When I think about my near-fatal car accident, I always think about the moment before it happened, and the moment after it happened – a mere breath in between the two moments in time, when everything in my life changed. It is the same with our first musical mountaineering experience – there was the moment when I wrapped my fingers gently around the neck of the violin and allowed my bow to hover above the strings… there is a space in the middle, as if the entire universe was holding its breath to see what happened… and then there is the moment when the first note I ever played in the mountains drifted into the air. While I would clearly not like to repeat the car accident, and I voluntarily chose to repeat the wilderness concerts many times, in both circumstances – the result was the same: my life was saved.
What happened next?
At the time that The Musical Mountaineers started, I honestly didn’t have a clue that I’d be starting a gear company in less than a year. Remember, I had left my job and told my co-workers that I was pursuing a career, ‘in the outdoor industry’. At the time that I started Musical Mountaineering, I was actively testing gear for Backpacker Magazine, coordinating my outdoor-focused Facebook group, planning two overnight backpacking workshops, and preparing to go to a coaching training retreat. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t still fearful that I had made a mistake - but I believed in my heart that I was on the right path… and I knew that I needed to just keep taking tiny steps to see where they were leading me. Kula Cloth had not yet entered the picture - and I didn’t know it yet (but do see it now), that The Musical Mountaineers would ultimately bring about both significant internal healing, the energetic frequency that I would need to surmount all of my own fears about starting a business, and, most importantly, a lifelong friendship with Rose.
The space between - a place to simply be.
We started this post in the magical space between, and that’s how we will end it today. The space between is a sacred space - because it is the space where we exist in our truest form. It is a moment in time where all of life is suspended. Our stories of ‘who we are’ do not exist in that place. We cease to be our past… we cease to be our future… we just simply are. We are the conscious awareness - connected to life, connected to all things, and an important part of it all. The ‘answers’ that we spend our lives looking for are not written in a book, they are not even written in this post - they are hidden in the spaces between the noise… the gaps between thoughts… the place where you can sit quietly and wait for the little tug or inspiration or the idea to come from a place that you can’t describe, but one that you are sure is real.
During one of our Musical Mountaineers performances a few years ago, we had the opportunity to film with Eric Johnson from KOMO 4 news in Seattle. He hiked with us into the backcountry to interview us and to watch a concert so that he could experience it for himself, and he said something so profound as he listened to our music. He said, “Don’t take this the wrong way… but the the silence that exists in the moment after you stop playing your music is just as beautiful as the music itself.”
Eric was articulating something that most people will spend their entire lives covering with noise. We drown out the answers with being busy and ‘needing to figure it out’ - and we rarely take the time to stop and listen and to allow our signal to be heard… and to receive the answers that are trying to arrive. When you change your energy, you also change the frequency on which you are able to receive ideas and inspiration and impulses - and the ‘random’ things that you are suddenly inspired to do… are the little breadcrumbs leading you on your path, even if you don’t know where they are going at first.
So, your ‘homework’ this week, should you choose to accept it is very simple:
Sit in the space between. Find some time to sit and listen. Look through the list of 6 tiny habits that I shared above and see if you can pick one thing per day - one unexpectedly fun thing per day - to do. Shift your energy a little bit and see what happens. Don’t look for anything new or expect anything to arrive… just be open. Listen to the space between notes, the silence between words, the vastness between breaths. See if you can notice when your mind starts to wander and then come back to your breathing… and if any ideas arrive (particularly those that might seem a little bit inspired or fun) … don’t talk yourself out of them. They don’t need to be ‘realistic’ or ‘make sense’ - if they feel good, trust it. Be open and see what happens and be OK with simply being, and allowing that to be enough.
Friends, it is an absolute joy to share these words with you and it is true gift to know that we are all on this same spinning orb together in an infinite cosmos. What a wild world we exist within - and what a fun, strange life we get to live. I am so glad that all of you are in it too.
As always, please never hesitate to reach out to me directly at anastasia@kulacloth.com… and you can submit an AMA question to be answered in my weekly AMA with AMA column through e-mail or anonymously using this form.
I am sending you all so much love, friends…. I’m sharing one of my poems below called, ‘The Space Between’. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being here - it means more to me than I could ever write.
Love,
Anastasia
The Space Between
Sometimes I think
That I'm caught between
Knowing which parts
Of this life are a dream
But here in this space
I just need to feel
Right here and right now
To remember what's real
My love, my heart
The breath that sustains
When you tear away the story
These are what remain
No needing, no yearning
To make me complete
I see the abundance of life
Rise up to meet
Me, exactly where I am
No part of me wrong
In this mystery of life
I know I belong.
Omg the Craigslist ad ❤️❤️❤️❤️