My AMMAzing Travels

Ya know somethings you just can’t plan for.🤷🏻‍♀️ If you would have asked me a few years ago if I would dedicate my extra spending money to traveling around the US (and really the world) just to sit in the same room as a Saint from India…I would have told you exactly what I told a friend back then. “I mean, I see myself making it a habit of going once a year or something.” ☝🏻

My friend laughed at me and said, “Yeah we’ll see.” For she saw in me something that I hadn’t even acknowledged within myself. That’s the beautiful thing about relationships ya know, they reflect to us all the things we wish we could see, hhahah and all the things we avoid looking at. 🙈🤦🏻‍♀️ A mirror simply reflects. It’s unbiased. My relationship with this Saint from India is exactly the same.

I planned to see this woman called Amma – her nickname “The Hugging Saint” – a few times this summer. Yet after each city I attended I’d come home, beyond blissed out and sleep deprived, and after a night or two of sleep, I felt the call to go back. So I would hop on a plane and go. Each time thinking that it would be enough. But it’s never enough! Why? 

It’s never enough because who is tired of true, compassionate love? Who is tired of being seen right through? Like in the way you’ve been dying your whole life for someone to look at you, but at the same time you’re beyond terrified of being seen that way? To show someone your beautiful potential alongside your ugliness, handing it over “Ugh…here ya go.” 😫🥴 Taking off your mask and allowing yourself to be totally exposed and undefended, and for that someone to pull you into their arms and hold you anyway!! Come on, that’s not some ordinary human love. For this someone to wipe your tears. To kiss your cheek. To whisper comforting words. To make you laugh with just a facial expression when you’ve made a mistake. Who is ever tired of feeling for a split second that you are the very center of the entire Universe? 

Not me. 

In my five cities in five weeks with Amma I road an incredible rollercoaster. Like a teeter totter rocking back and forth between mind-blowing transcendental moments of awakening, and hitting rock bottom with some incredibly embarrassing, regretful, shameful, guilt-ridden, sad, heart-heavy stuff. (This was no vacation😆) And yet the little glimpses of TRUTH, those revelations when I saw everything SO clearly, although far less in number, still outweigh all the human consciousness “shit.” Which only proves to me how valuable this time is for me to sit in her presence.  Even though smaller in number, the revelations make the wild ride worth it.  

All in all…I leave Amma’s yearning to go right back, hahah but I don’t think my digestion can take anymore chocolate cake and chai. 😆

Love is such a miraculously beautiful thing…it always invites us – hahahah and in moments shoves us – towards opening in the places we didn’t even know we were closed. To trust where we are afraid. It turns on a light in the most darkened corners of our minds and hearts. Love inspires us to go beyond what rationality tells us is possible. Love holds the entirety of who we are in this moment without judgement. Love calls us into our own strength. It reminds us that we are capable when we doubt. Love cleanses our hurts with both tenderness and wisdom. The ups and down, the highs the lows, the mistakes, the blessings…Love has a way of making it all perfect in the end, and every step of the way worthwhile.  

I can’t help but tear up as I write this, cause real true love, beyond the egoic lens we all look through, is the substance, the fabric, the matter that makes everything else MATTER.