The One with the Spiritual Awakening in a Food Court

Some say that the Buddha experienced enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. As if one sweet day, as he sat shaded by hundreds of heart-shaped emerald leaves, dappled sunlight touching his soft cheeks, he experienced the long-sought-after ‘a-ha’ moment of life. As if, suddenly, he had it all figured out.

This story makes me think back to a younger version of myself who also, like the Buddha, thought she had it all figured out. Though I wasn’t under a Bodhi tree, I was not too far away from the alleged geographic location of the place where the Buddha sat that day. I was in Kathmandu, Nepal, experiencing what, at the time, I could only deem as a spiritual awakening. I was thirty-one years old, and I thought I’d reached the destination; the castle in the sky; the light…

Oh how much more she had to see, that younger version of me. How little did she know this life was a vast ocean whose unpredictable seas would both crush her and hold her simultaneously, leaving her powerless with only one choice—to let go.

I will go ahead and say it from the heart, 2024 was the hardest year of my life. Her waves crashed down on me with a force untamed. Her current dragged me out to sea without a lifeboat to cling to. All that was left for me was to trust that I would end up where I ought to be going and that the circumstances which led me to that treacherous ocean were not happening to me, but for me.

I lost many things this year, including myself. Grief consumed me like a storm that tore through my soul. Everything I thought I held blew away with the merciless winds, including you, my sweet child. And there I was left, naked as we came, waiting to be reborn.

When I wrote about my former spiritual awakening, I wrote in the language of duality—as if, like the story of the Buddha, our goal in life is to find the light, or as some say, “to achieve enlightenment.” And when we do, we have achieved the thing that humans are meant to achieve in this short stop on our timeless journey of the soul.

I know, now, that this is not the sole purpose of life. And I know this because, this year, I touched the darkness. I went somewhere: the place where stars are born, the place where seeds sleep, the place where pain lives. And I saw it—the non-dual nature of this reality. I saw that light and dark are a unified whole where everything is interconnected and inseparable. Enlightenment is not the destination, it is a train station along the infinite journey of being.

Look around, dear friends. We are living in an adversarial world. Darkness is a station, too. It is in the darkness where we are born and where we die, where transformation takes place, and where the truth of oneness emerges.

After experiencing my own journey into the dark, it took some months for me to muster up the strength to get up and keep going. As the jacarandas bloomed and showered Sydney with purple rainbows, I found reasons to grow. Friends nurtured me like rain. I sought out joy, my old friend, and soaked up wisdom from kind strangers. One of them reminded me that “in every adversity that touches our lives, there is an equal or greater seed of opportunity that will lead us to grow.”

Was the darkness I experienced merely an inevitable part of this beautiful life, watering me to aid my growth?

When I shifted my perspective, I started to wonder… was life happening for me? Was I living out a tragically poetic rendition of a reality, manifested for my own good? As devastating as this year had been, was there an underlying meaning to it all?

It was this pondering that led me to discover the Know Thyself podcast - a podcast dedicated to exploring the profound journey of self-discovery (my favourite subject.) It was a long 9-hour car ride from the Gold Coast to Sydney after a weekend visiting friends and family and receiving some more life lessons that hit me like a baseball to the head (a story for another time.) I decided to listen to an episode featuring Matteo De Stefano, a man known for his knowledge in the fields of personal development, mysticism, and metaphysics.

The episode moved me deeply. He spoke of our journey in this body as if the skin we wear is a waning vessel, offering us the chance to live out our soul’s evolutionary purpose. For some, that might be to create and build, for others it’s perhaps an opportunity to heal generational trauma or learn some of the greatest lessons in this school of life to expand our consciousness and collective wisdom. Interestingly, the words he spoke were familiar to me. As if it was a reminder of something I’d always known. If the purpose of a seed is to grow, is that not our purpose as well? And if seeds grow in the darkness, do we?

I was halfway through the podcast when we stopped for a lunch break at Coffs Harbour’s Park Beach Plaza, an unpretentious beachside shopping centre on the east coast of Australia. I put my pre-historic Samsung S9 into a phone shop to get the speaker fixed and wandered around the centre while I waited. The smell of fried chips lured me to the food court where I was enticed by the local Indian buffet. I ordered the beef vindaloo with rice and chickpeas, took the loaded plate of food to a vacant table, and proceeded to eat my lunch.

It was an ordinary Tuesday in late November. The spices from the vindaloo made my lips tingle and my eyes feel like they were letting off steam. I took a pause and looked around me with the kind of meditative presence one feels when in deep concentration. I looked at all the people simultaneously existing in this somewhat mundane moment of our human existence. I looked at the woman behind the counter of the Indian buffet, the handsome young man standing patiently at the register of the discount store, the family next to me, eating their Kentucky Fried Chicken, the man with the tattoos, sitting alone, scrolling through his phone, and all the other souls wrapped in human skin, on their journeys of growth, with their individual pain and suffering, joy and happiness; their own memoirs, written or spoken, hidden or seen. And then I remembered my own story, irrespective of all the people around me, my unique and timeless journey of the soul. I remembered that I was here to grow and to learn through whatever manifestation this reality presents to me. There was no one script written for all of us. Our stories are our own. Every one of us is on a unique journey, and while we can inspire one another, we can’t alter the course of someone else’s path unless they choose to change it.

In that food court, it was as if the world around me shifted. I felt like Neo in The Matrix, watching everything he thought he knew dissolve before his eyes. And, much like Neo, this felt like the reawakening I never knew I needed.

This year, I’d exerted so much energy trying to change my life. I turned thirty-eight and an invisible pressure loomed over me like morning fog, making me feel as though I had to be more than I was. There were days I longed to pick up my book, Soul Truth, to reconnect with the wisdom that flowed from me all those years ago, but I struggled to do so. Little by little, I’d forgotten the girl who wrote the story. The fog consumed me with its expectations and invisible pressures. I heard their voices—his voice—’You don’t have direction in your life,' ‘No wonder you’re homeless,' 'What if you miss out on the chance to be a mother,' 'Aren’t you a little old to live like that?,’ ‘When will you settle down?’ ‘You’re running away from your problems,' ‘You’re not enough, YOU’RE NOT ENOUGH…’"

And in its suffocating mist, I slowly lost sight of the magnificent beauty of my own unique story—the very reason my soul chose this body as its instrument. I succumbed to the voices. I fell into the illusion of control as if I were a moon with reigns on these cosmic tides. And I had to learn, once again, to love myself enough to release control of the narrative; to let people leave, to let life unfold; to flow. As I wrote in my book, “You must trust that life is the dancer, and you are the dance.”

As much as I admire the thirty-one-year-old version of me for thinking she had it all figured out, I know that my time in the darkness was a grand part of my cosmic play and an opportunity for me to evolve. With hindsight, I must hold tragedy with gratitude and a love deeper than the Mariana Trench. I must remember that everything has meaning. Everything. And perhaps our most profound achievements are not illuminated beneath the Bodhi tree, but hidden in the quietly significant moments, like that day in the food court.