I like how the introduction makes it sound like healing is something that ends. :) So I'm continuing on my healing journey as I'm learning. It's like living and it's like these new stories. Nipun and Marilyn invited me to share a story with you, and I thought I would share one with you from last autumn. As I recount this, I invite you to join me on this little adventure and to go deeper -- maybe try closing your eyes to see more.

Last September, I have just arrived in Tomales Bay. It's in West Marin, an hour north of San Francisco. This bay is very unusual in that on one side it's developed, meaning that there's a country road, a cozy restaurant, and a historic inn. On the other side, there's only sheer wilderness.

The reason this other side is so wild is that this portion of the national seashore is not just protected, it's only reachable by water. They limit the number of daily kayaks and canoes at deck. It's midweek, so there's no one there except for our small group of four. We launch our kayaks at a boat shack, and we begin to paddle. I find myself facing this sheer wilderness and I'm moving toward it stroke by stroke.

I haven't done anything quite like this since all of my health challenges began over 15 years ago. I'm very aware that this trip is way beyond my comfort zone. It is testing my mind and my body. I begin to wonder, "Am I fit for this? Am I going to slow the group down? Am I going to have to turn back?" I can hear my heart beating inside my ear. At some point on the paddle, a seal pops its head up. Some 10 or 20 minutes later, there's a shadow that glides beneath my kayak and then disappears into the depths, maybe a bat ray.

Over the course of the next hour, we're still paddling and a thick fog begins to roll in. The air begins to cool, the landscape begins to change, and there is this small island that we're passing on the right. Its trees are skeletal. The birds look a little bit lost. I feel an energy in this place, amid right in the middle of the water, that I've not felt before. It makes me keenly aware that we are paddling across a major fault line. This is where the two largest tectonic plates on this planet come together. The longer I paddle, the more I realize I am crossing some major threshold within myself, and I hear that heartbeat in my ear more loudly.

We arrive on the other side. There's a sandy cove against a backdrop of rugged cliffs, and we set up camp there. We are among ferns, coastal live oaks and eelgrass -- native plants that have evolved untouched by humans for thousands of years. As well, there is a resident raccoon. There are multiple bird species and a few elks. They call this primitive camping. There is no bathrooms, no potable water. You pack everything in, you pack everything out. Our group, we share a warm meal, a cup of tea, and we are really just sipping in this wilderness that is both lush and stark. But the real starkness is yet to come.

It begins to get dark and then really dark. It's close to midnight on a moonless night. We are guided by our footsteps, and we feel for where the land ends and the shore begins. I feel cool brushes of salt water. With flashlights, we climb back into our kayaks and then we turn our lights off. We begin to drift. We allow the water to move us, and we begin to catch glimpses of sky as the fog drifts. The stars look like diamonds sparkling against this blackness and some thousand light years away touching us.

Then, we lower our paddles into the water and there's a splash. Out of this darkness, a bluish white light, the bioluminescence emitted from the tiniest of critters that are otherwise invisible. I put my hands down in the water and the glow illuminates even more. I feel like I'm touching the stars.

After paddling for a while, we stop. There is no more movement, which means there are no more waves, and there is no more bioluminescence. In the sky and the sea, they begin to merge into a single blackness in which I am suspended in the center, floating. There is no time. There is no space. There is no body. I cannot see my body. My form is completely dissolved along with the form of my friends, along with the sea and the cliffs, and the coves into the emptiness of this universe.

I feel myself. I experience myself as pure consciousness, observing this pure essence, the light energy that comprises everything. It's one thing to experience this in my contemplative practices, and quite another thing in this three dimensional living reality. I am filled with awe, part freedom like I had never imagined before, and part terror. I wonder if I can relax enough to behold this boundless present moment, if I can trust enough in my aloneness to dissolve fully into this great emptiness.

There are an infinite number of ways I could recount this single experience from last fall. Telling new stories, as I understand it has to do with new perspectives, new observations, new dimensions of ourselves, really allowing ourselves to be recreated. As someone who writes, I feel like my primary role is to listen. As someone mentioned earlier, to deeply listen to others, to myself, to nature, to life events, but mostly to silence, to this great emptiness itself.

When I do that, something surprising often pops up like this story. This was not the story that I probably would've picked if I were just thinking about it. Then it's my secondary role to interpret whatever arises for the moment that's in front of me in a coherent way. As for this story, for this pod, it was resounding for me something that I had learned when I was writing my memoir.

When I was starting out then, I was very intent on writing a new story. I wanted to change my story from despair to hope, from disease to health, from helpless patient to empowered healer, from isolation to community -- the classic hero's journey. But something began to happen organically during the process of writing. Writing the same experience again, and again, and again. It's like washing dishes or weeding or doing the same thing. But each time, if we're aware, we're a slightly different person than the time before.

At some point I realized how many times I had written about the same exact experience, but as very different stories and how they were all true. A while later, I began to realize how I was all of those stories, but I was also at my essence, none of them. I was no story. I was empty.

So it was like that moment of reckoning between me and the great emptiness in the middle of this wilderness. There was both tremendous freedom and some terror. I like definitions, I like form, I like stories. But gradually and gradually, as I began to relax into this state of freedom more and more, I didn't want to leave this state. There was just such simplicity. There was nothing to get entangled with. No narrative arc, no drama. The words, the thoughts, emotions and sensations, they all began to feel so loud, so busy, so relative and somewhat arbitrary.

To finish writing a book from a state of no story was a very interesting experiment. But my teachers often reminded me that this is the dance of the Oneness. The no story that contains the story of movement and duality. This is the age old practice. If I had eyes and ears to perceive them, the silence, the stillness and the emptiness, they're still there within, between the words and thoughts -- holding them, shaping them, defining them, and giving rise to them.

I began to see that words and stories are a way in which life can play and create with itself, through me, through all of us. Like when I emerged from that blackness that night, I felt myself as the past, shaped by these ancient ferns around me, merged with them, as well as my ancestors shaping how I experienced that present moment, their information woven into my genes and my genetic expression. I felt my future self merged with the potential of the dormant oaks and a deep sense of a different future -- me had I not been there now. Knowing how, just as the wilderness had been in front of me when we arrived, it would be behind me as we return. It was the same with everything else, past and future, the same just viewed from a different perspective.

With my stories, I can see a third role, which is to use the relative and transient dimensions of my life in a very free flowing way -- to create conflict and suspense, to neutralize that conflict, to connect with others, and ultimately really to play, and to observe how many ways I can play or that life can play with itself. So my stories and yours, we can really give this great emptiness a rich texture, dimensionality and shape, and to give life a story unto itself.

When I was reflecting on just the name of this pod, the New Story Pod, new is really speaking to that, right? New is something that has only recently come into existence. And so, each of you are bringing something new into existence from your unique observations and experiences, and having others read your stories can in turn change them and make them new again. This is a beautiful version of manifesting or realizing, or co-creating form from formless, visible from the invisible. In the tradition that I grew up in, we call it bringing heaven to earth.

Writing stories I have often experienced firsthand and also observed that we can sometimes fall into a very seriousness of purpose. Maybe we're trying to discover what lies in the crypts of our subconscious; or trying to expand our seeing of the invisible webs of life; or trying to understand experiences. Somehow to put it in writing can feel scary to our self-protective minds. The seriousness can also cause the heart to contract. And sometimes I feel this contraction. If I feel it, if I hear the words, "should or shouldn't," running through my mind, I will pause, connect to my heart, and also connect to the emptiness.

I happen to have this stethoscope very handy. So sometimes I will just listen to my heart, and if you don't, I invite you just to place your hands over your heart. Our hearts are actually designed to empty and fill at the same time, receiving and sending lifeblood with every pulse. If the heart does not empty, it cannot fill. If the heart holds onto attachments such as "I want this story" or "I like being full", it cannot send. It is the same with the energetic heart, the strongest electromagnetic field in the body. It flows in this pattern of a torus, like a big donut, sending and receiving, transforming energy with everything that it touches.

I sometimes wonder, what would it be like if we changed the phrase from "my heart is full" to "my heart is empty"? The stories that life might fill into that space are often much braver and much bolder than my small self would dare to share.

As with this kayak story, they can often surprise us because this was not what I would've picked. What would it be like if we trained ourselves to slow down, so that we can perceive the emptiness and the silence between our thoughts and the words? What would it be like if we could smile or laugh at our seriousness of purpose when we write? To open the heart is like the stories that we tell. There are an infinite number of ways to go about the same essential experience.

I wanted to close with this. A couple of months ago, we had a gifted musician, sound healer and ceremonial guide named Madhu Anziani on Awakin Calls. He closed our call with a song. In the chorus, he sings: "Pulse, dissolve, pulse, dissolve -- that's the life of the universe. Could you be so in love that you are willing to dissolve. Every moment to be recreated, just to be recreated? That's the life of the universe."

To me, that also seems to be the life of the new story, which has no end. Thank you.