"Wherever You Go, There You Are"

I've spent a couple decades thinking about this. 🙂 My husband and I have moved to a new city approximately every five years in our twenty years of being adults together. When we graduated high school, we dreamed of another country that we could move to where people valued things that were important in life in contrast to the emptiness we felt around us in the Florida city we spent our high school years in. In this fantasy place, people would value family and relationships. You wouldn't have to sell your life away at a 9 - 5 job so that you could live. There had to be another way. And we were determined to find it.

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When we were fantasizing and concocting another move, a friend's mom said, "Wherever you go, there you are." The audacity! The naivite! Of course not! Places were different! This seemed like a great way to do nothing in your life and just take whatever life throws at you.

Well, we did move. To Minneapolis. (Ha not exactly some foreign country) And you know what? It was different. Very different. And I began to change immediately. Minneapolis was in many ways the stark opposite of the (stupid 🙂) city we were living in in Florida. There was culture. Hipster fashion was in full swing, and people were wearing funny hats and biking everywhere. There was music. There were people who thought differently. There was art. There were young people.

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Living in Minneapolis totally changed me.

Five years later we moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and this place drastically changed me. A massive healing and transformation has taken place in this place where people were so genuinely kind that I didn't even know how to be that kind. This is the foreign country we were dreaming of where people value fun and relaxation and smiles and nature and relationships.

Have I brought "my issues" with me everywhere I went? Yes. We run programs. Our minds run in cycles. But each place is drastically different from the next. Here in Asheville, you can start driving south and immediately experience a difference when you leave our surrounding towns. The accents change. As soon as you hit that South Carolina border bam. Now you're in a different world. I've taken many road trips, and this is true everywhere I've gone. As soon as you leave Chicago, it's different.

We live in relationship to our environment. We become who we're with. Places hold an energy. Humans become that energy. We feed our energy to a place and change it. It's a loop. What came first, the chicken, or the egg? Did the place's energy come first and people become the energy of that place?

It's said that Asheville is an energy vortex. The same thing is said about Sedona. People believe there are certain places in the world that hold a strong spiritual frequency.

We live in relationship to our environment. We always have. And I can think of no faster way to change yourself and your whole entire life than moving to a new place.

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