There ain’t no mountain high enough to keep you from you.  

I am a student of change. From when I can remember, I wanted to try new things, reaching out for different toys, different music, the colors that no one else liked. I was bored when things stayed the same.  But I was young; part of me  just wanted to fit into a world where mediocrity is valued and being different is judged harshly. By watering down my dreams to suit the environment I thought I wanted to live in, I even managed to succeed for while.

We can do that, you know. We’re well honed machines when it comes to cutting off parts of ourselves to fit our round soul-pegs into square holes. We’ll stay in bad relationships, toxic friendships, too-big houses, boring jobs, and oversized shopping malls just to try to forget all that we know, really know, deep down inside about ourselves.

Almost thirty years ago, I rode the Philadelphia subway into work on Market Street every day from Upper Darby. My job was solving group health billing disputes for an insurance company. I was 24, fresh out of business school and already found myself in a way-less-than-happy marriage, pale from not sleeping, anorexic from not eating, desperate from not understanding what I was doing wrong when everyone was telling me what I was doing was right, as the train chugged mercilessly down to 17th Street to that hell hole of a cubicle.

One day, after doing this for, I don’t know, six months, I looked around at the people on that train and I thought to myself, if this is it, if this is all I can expect, I want to die right now. There’s absolutely no reason to go on. 

I was overloaded with guilt and pain and stress about it all, because I really did just want to do the right thing, and because getting out of it all would be a dog fight, and because as a harmony junkie, I didn’t want to cause problems. After all, it was an OK company.  And he was a nice enough guy. But it felt like somehow, I had gotten myself into someone else’s life and it wouldn’t take long before I had starved myself long enough to disappear completely.

My round peg of a soul was showing the first signs of becoming a real pain in the ass.

Fast Forward.

I, causing a sizable amount of pain to myself and others, extracted myself from that life and pitched myself forward into a new one. A new job led me to a new partner who gave me the permission to do what I couldn’t seem to allow: just be whoever I was. What a concept.

That took a few years to get my brain around. Around 25 or so.

But now, after trying and working and shedding skins and trying again and changing countries and learning languages and starting over (numerous times), here I am, with the same partner, in a house on a hill in Italy that we bought and restored and run as an inn, learning to do, correct that, learning to excel at the things I love, which are writing and pottery, in no particular order.

I look back on that girl on the train and embrace her. I let her cry it out and show me how awful it is when you’ve made decisions that don’t fit with who you really are. I make sure she understands it won’t always be that way, because as much as she can’t believe it, she’s a fighter. A fighter whose round peg soul will prevail.

And now…

I can see, almost immediately, when someone is living out of tune with who she really is. I want to share the hard work of becoming aligned with one’s true nature.

How to manifest change, how to accept the consequences, and how to grow into ways of thinking and being that were unimaginable before.

How to simplify your needs.

How to clear your table, figuratively and emotionally.

How to give yourself the emotional and spiritual space to allow your soul to expand. A safe place where your vulnerability is treasured. A warm space where you can stretch and cry and laugh.

How to stop being a harmony junkie. Once and for all.

All our souls want to do is be – as they are. They don’t want fancy, or big, or expensive. They want joy, time, contentment.  If we can find a way to give ourselves the things that we know to be the food of the soul, then it’s a foregone conclusion that we’ll live meaningful lives. It’s not easy. It’s hard, in fact.  There are mountain ranges of anxiety and fear, control issues and pain, avoidance and worry that seem impossible to scale.

But the work of the soul is step by step. One small balancing act after the other.  I’ll say it again, because it bears repeating…  

There ain’t no mountain high enough to keep you from you.