This reflection was written after attending a multi-day, in-person workshop with Erin at Rose Quartz Mediumship. The container described below reflects the incredible energy that Erin infuses into her spaces, both physical and digital, as well as the energy of the people who are drawn to being a part of them. 

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It is such a gift to experience yourself without walls. To look another person in the eyes with all your light and to let theirs radiate right back into you. To experience touch without rigidity or fear, physical intimacy without sexual implications, and emotional vulnerability that doesn't even feel vulnerable because it’s so exquisitely safe. To connect without walls, without judgment, without your mind steering the ship, making sure you look and sound and act in a way that is acceptable and accepted by those around you at all times. True heart connection means you are accepted before you even open your mouth, or even if you never do. You are a perfect light with unique but somehow still identical shadows to every person you encounter. 

Before I slept I was already in a dream. In my half-sleep, Erin told me to lay a riverbed beneath my body to ground me. "Connect your bed to the window with a riverbed of slate and make sure it travels right below you. You'll get amazing sleep." Intuitively it made sense to me — what lies above a riverbed but the river itself? To plant your body above one is to transform yourself into water, into flow, ensuring nothing gets stuck cycling around inside you. To connect your flow to the stars outside your window is to connect to wisdom itself. The riverbed holds you in the earth like a cradle while the water inside you stretches your mind and your heart and your spirit up into the cosmos, which whispers to your sleeping self that everything is perfect and just as it should be. We are all okay.

Time passed all too quickly yesterday, and I didn't make every connection that I wanted to, but I lingered in and loved the ones that I did make. The most powerful medicine of all is human connection. In isolation, we are not ever fully expressed because our true brilliance is triggered in communion, in the complexity of union. Yet so many of our day-to-day interactions are superficially social, an imitation of isolation. Being alone isn't a lonely experience; true loneliness happens in a community without connection. Most people bring their walls with them everywhere they go, even to the places that they don't think they're bringing them: to their parent’s house, to conversations with their spouses and closest friends, to therapy. We take down certain pieces of them for certain people and situations, but how often do we just leave them behind entirely? It's a gift to have that experience. 

Why does it feel so good to have no walls? It's such a simple thing, yet so very difficult at the same time. To have no walls is to have total trust, to feel absolutely safe in your body and with your heart. It's a faintly familiar feeling for all of us. Somewhere locked inside of you there’s a memory of existing this way entirely. We are all born with total trust, after all, no matter what life or whose arms we are born into. And we carry that trust with us for three, four, five, six, however many years it takes for that first major trauma to occur. Up until that moment, we feel safe in the world. Up until that moment, we feel free in our bodies. Up until that moment, we feel generous with our light. Until we're hurt. For some, the whole wall gets built in an instant. For others, it gets built slowly over several years. But by the time we're adolescents, most of us have them all the way up to our noses. It's so common that it almost seems inevitable. But is it? 

I think about that when I think about my own children. Is it possible to raise a human who feels so safe that they never have to wall themselves up? Certainly, if you avoid any major traumas, they have a chance, right? But walls aren't only built from the bricks of trauma. With greater social awareness comes greater social fear, and it is fear that builds walls, whether real or imagined, whether past or present or projected into the future. Most adolescents experience ego fear no matter what kind of childhood they had. It is a stage in human development, one that can take years or even decades to move through. On top of that, every culture in every society throughout every time in history has had its own way of cultivating fear long after adolescence has passed. It's systemic. It's automatic. Fearful people are well-behaved people. Fearful people are well-controlled people. Fearful people are well-programmed people.

Fear has been aborting artists for centuries upon centuries. Of all the incredible art we have gotten out of the last several thousand years, think of all the art we have not gotten. Think of all the paintings that were never painted, all the poems that were never written (or that were written but never shared), all the songs that were sung in silence, all the instruments that were ignored and not ignited... all because of fear. Artists shift perspectives with their art, that's what they do. They peel back the layers of fear and look underneath. They peel back the layers of society and ask, "How does this make you feel?" Their job isn't to create beauty, although they do plenty of that. It's to exhume beauty from the graveyard gardens that entomb our inner children. It's to expose fear. It’s to explore the balance between the two. It's to connect this reality with the intuition and intelligence of the infinite — to ride that riverbed back and forth, bringing all of our inner knowing back into our bodies, cracking open our hearts, and reminding us what it feels like to wear no costume. 

This is the artist’s job — to bare themselves to themselves, to bare humanity to humanity, to beam their light and all their shadows straight into the cores of the curious, reflecting each one of us back to ourselves. Art, like connection, is medicine, because through art we connect. Through art, we awaken and regenerate using every one of our physical and metaphysical senses. But true expression can’t coexist with walls, not really. Not fully. Art’s power comes from its honesty, from its willingness to be naked. And powerful artists are voices for the voiceless, channels of reception and release, messengers of mystery and truth. They are feelers, inviting us to feel free, and mirrors, enticing us to see. Powerful artists are healers, and powerful healers are artists, allowing us to just be, guiding us through this profoundly tricky yet divinely simple human experience. They are river walkers, they are water, they are the way a star reaches down and interlocks its fingers with yours, whispering into your ear: Love will find a way.

Love will find a way. It found its way here last night, nestled into the darkest corners of our mushy interiors. Where it always has been. Where it always will be. At the center of every apple, no matter how bruised or rotten the flesh, is one thing: love. The seeds of love. And when that apple becomes earth, and that earth becomes creature or crystal or brand new budding sprout again, love is the first ingredient. It's the foundation of all life. Nature shows us this every day, and artists seek only to translate this truth, which has always been there, flowing between our inner selves and our higher selves in the current that runs between our pillowcases and the planets above us.