“Erin, I had a huge shift,” she said with both gentleness and intensity in her voice.

“Tell me all about it,” I said.

She went on to tell me that she had gone to dinner and met a man who was docking boats at the water's edge. She chatted with him for a bit and began to realize that he wasn’t from around the area and likely wasn’t being paid to work but was simply working for tips. Later that evening, while sitting at dinner, she watched him sailing his old and battered sailboat across the lake. There was no wind, and he wasn’t making very good time, but the longer she watched him, the more she noticed that he was happy and didn’t care that he wasn’t making good time or that his sailboat was old and battered. He was happy, he was free. He didn’t need to know where he was going, and he wasn’t concerned that there was no wind. He was just enjoying being alive, content, and happy.

She said that she sat watching him, lost in thought for quite some time. The universe was showing her that freedom is what makes people happy. Tears rolled down her cheeks as the realization set in. Freedom was something that she had been working on for more than a year and making beautiful progress with, but she had just found a new layer to the onion, and there is something really magikcal for me about watching people peel back another layer of the onion on their own personal development. There is something magickal for me about watching someone move from understanding in a mind-based place to having that same lesson land deeply in their body, heart, and soul.

We think that things, shiny things specifically, and high-paying jobs will make us happy. But the reality is that we only want the shiny things and the high-paying jobs because we think those things will elicit an emotion that we want to feel. The trick to life is to find a way to feel those emotions regardless of the material things in our reality.