Stay With Yourself — Module 4
What Emerges When You Stay
Module Four is the moment the workshop expands
from personal return into relational reality.
This is where you feel the architecture open.
This is where the deeper story begins.
This is Module Four of Stay With Yourself, part of the Becoming Real workshop series.
At the end of the module, paid subscribers will find additional resources: a guided journaling exercise, a link to next week’s Zoom call, and an audio recording of me reading this module aloud.
What Emerges When You Stay
Today, as we step into Module Four, I want you to imagine that you are entering a room inside yourself — a room you may have glimpsed before, but perhaps never took the time to look around and truly see what’s here.
Everything we’ve done so far has prepared us for this.
A bell. A whisper. A hand to the heart.
A companion arriving in the quiet.
A simple prayer: I want to come home now.
These are the doorways. Small, reliable openings into that space, that room inside yourself, where you meet yourself. A room that opens around you the moment you enter.
Staying with yourself is not retreat from your life.
It’s a re-habitation of your own interior.
The beginning of living from the inside-out.
In the profoundest sense, it’s what we mean when we talk about centering.
And Module Four is about what emerges then.
When you return to yourself
and stay.
You may have thought that “staying” meant stillness, passivity, hiding or simply not leaving.
But staying with yourself is something else.
It’s a new way of imagining what you are - and how you interact with the world around you. It reveals interior spaces that you didn’t know existed and conversations with parts of yourself that you didn’t know were possible.
So, this is spiritual practice, yes — but it’s also something more immediate. It shifts your vantage point. It moves you from the spinning edge of experience, which is where we go when we feel anxious or overwhelmed. It moves you back to the still point at the center of yourself which is where the deeper story begins to appear around you.
It’s an environment.
This is not magical thinking. It’s not turn off the TV, put your hands over your ears and shout OM as loud as you can until the real world goes away. It’s not ‘The Secret’ which falsely promised you could have everything you want. This is a different kind of magic. The real, fully-incarnated, feet on the ground practice the great mystics practiced.
I want to tell you how I learned this — not from books, but from experience.
After 15 years as a magazine editor listening to women’s stories, in a weekly interview - women who had been through life-challenging illness and life-altering tragedy and come out thriving.
During that time, I was assigned to write a weekly column about miracles. Real-life divine interventions. I read 10,000 hand-written accounts.
Since then, I’ve spent every moment teaching what I learned from the angels (and those women) to groups and clients in my Spiritual Direction practice.
It was during that time when the vivid dreams began — All of them changed me. Some of them, changed the course of my life.
Like this one, which changed the way that I see.
And that changed the way that I live.
The Dream of Walking Through Walls
I dreamed that I walked out of the house where I grew up - not through the door but straight through the living room wall into the alleyway, and from there, straight into the exterior wall of the house next door.
Not like a ghost. I was like wind. Soft and silent, I moved through the whole neighborhood, from one house to another. I disturbed no one. I wasn’t there to converse with the inhabitants or deliver a message. I was there to notice, to feel and sense the mood and emotional temperature of each dwelling.
Each home felt different. Each had its own atmosphere, its own weather. And that weather shaped how the people who lived there... lived.
Oh, I see, I realized. Each house is a world of its own, with its own emotional color and weather. It’s own mood. And that mood tells a story. And people live inside these stories — the same way we live inside our rooms.
As the dream ended, I floated upward to a bird’s eye view. I could see that our neighborhood was just one of many. And each neighborhood was a cluster of ‘dream houses’, all different, each with its own story resting inside.
Take a moment here to look at this image with me.
Imagine yourself flowing from house to house, right through the walls. See yourself walking from one end of the block to the next.
Do this to practice story fluency - the ability to move from one mood to another, one story to another. As you will see, this ability changes the way you experience reality.
These ‘dream houses’ rhymed with what I was discovering in my client work.
Every person I worked with lived inside of a different atmosphere — a personal diorama of meaning, color, logic, and emotion.
I still remember the day I talked with two clients, back to back, who inhabited completely different inner worlds. I remember them, vividly, because they were my VERY first clients.
The first, a woman, lived in a bright, emerald woodland
— with moss everywhere, it was mythic and innocent, inhabited by gentle creatures who whispered secrets in her ears. To her, the world felt sensual, sensory. She felt herself a part of a lush and living landscape, in conversation with the land and its creatures.The second, a man, lived inside a silent, luminous crystalline world
— stark, blue-grey, alien, exquisitely beautiful. As if from another planet, where resources were scarce and life was a daily struggle. To him, the world was a rocky terrain and he was carving his life into its hard surfaces.
Her life felt soft and flowing. It felt warmer. His life felt hard-edged. It felt cooler. But how could this be? I asked myself. They both lived in THIS world. The same world that you and I live in. In fact, they were husband and wife! They lived in the same house. Raised the same children. Ate the same food for dinner every day.
How could it be that they perceived the same world so differently?
There are many ways we could go here - we could theorize about how perception is formed by experience, trauma, attachment style, neurodiversity, ancestry.
I want to work in a way that honors all of this: a bio/neuro/trauma-sensitive POV that is wide and deep enough to hold it all.
Here’s what matters most:
You are a story moving through the space of your own incarnation - in your own way and style. However you are, is blessed.
You be you.
The more clients I worked with, the more story worlds I encountered.
These ‘worlds’ were not fantasies or past lives. They were atmospheres that we carry around us. Personal fields that dictated how each person perceived and interacted with the world.
By entering a person’s world through our conversation in a session, I could sense how they experienced their life - and that gave me clues and symbols— a code language I could use to help them untangle what was stuck and liberate what was trying to move.
Because every client I work with has their own landscape, surrounded by landscapes of other unique stories, we must draw our healing work from their story.
For the empath who feels herself sponging up care-taking tasks that don’t belong to her, we practice moving the ‘sponging’ outside of her body into containers, colored balls - one for each family member. When the balls are full of other people’s demands for her time and attention, we practice gently but firmly, passing the balls back into their hands. This is not mine, she repeats. This belongs to you. I caught it for you in this beautiful ball. Now I give it back to your care with love.
For the client who works as a set designer, we practice taking down the set of her current situation and using the raw materials to build a better one.
For the overwhelmed working mother of three, we practice melting down the prison bars of responsibility and refashioning them into surfboards of freedom.
I came to understand that we are all in conversation with reality. A reciprocal exchange between what lives inside us and what lives outside.
This became the foundation of my work. It proved itself countless times. And, like every stage of my own learning, it was followed by new insight and new layers of story awareness.
During this same period, the walls between this world and another one began to thin. Something strange and luminous began happening to me
Images from my dreams began to cross into daylight. Once again, this opening was foreshadowed by a dream.
Two black cats
I dreamed that my son and I were driving. Each in our own car - toward the college where he would now live. In the dream, I suddenly became SO HUNGRY - and pulled my car into a rest stop as he drove on ahead.
As I climbed from the car, two black cats began to walk with me. One at my ankles. One slightly elevated, padded along a concrete wall to my left. We are the books you will write now, they telegraphed in magical dream language.
The next day, I had the unusual thought: Go to Barnes and Noble — at the mall. I’d learned to follow these promptings when I could. When I arrived at the bookstore I
meandered through the stacks until suddenly, I found myself standing before a display of bookends. Shaped like black cats.
Reader, here I want to stop and underline two important things:
I followed that prompting and
when I encountered the bookends, I purchased them.
I acted on the guidance.
If I’d ignored the intuitive nudge or walked past that display it would still have registered - but as a much smaller blip of intuition.
By taking action on the ‘coincidence’ I CROSSED THE VEIL. I reached into the dream-side of reality and pulled something real into my world, and into my home.
And even today, more than 10 years later, if you ever take a Zoom class with me, you’ve seen those bookends on the cabinet behind me.
The more I acknowledged these small arrivals, the more came. I began to see and sometimes taste light around certain people. I began to sense emotions and patterns by scent. (Oh, this person had an alcoholic parent. Or, I sense that this person has fallen out of love with their partner.)
Some of this was the 10,000 hour rule - repeated experience makes us more sensitive to patterns. But I was also hearing whispers: Slow down. Turn down this road. Help that person. And I was beginning to trust it.
Once, walking by a stranger, I felt my hands activate, heat pulsing through my palms. I was shy then (I still am) and so rather than approach her, I stood nearby and offered a prayer: May this light flow to their own guides and be used for the highest good.
Synchronicities clustered with mathematical precision. I’d dream of red berries and, out walking, red berries would scatter the ground. When I followed them, I was led to more dream images. A fallen tree. A new path.
I began to interpret these encounters the way I’d interpret a dream image - or symbols in film.
My waking experience had always crossed into dreaming.
This was different. Now, dreaming was crossing into waking.
I have a name for this now: Illuminated Experience. Moments when the material and the imaginal merge. It feels magical, even a little spooky. But when it happens often enough, we get used to it.
We are changed by it. We glimpse our real place - in the space between visible and invisible worlds. In a sense, we are that veil.
We realize we are always dreaming. Eyes open or closed, we dwell in rooms that are both fully material and fully symbolic. We walk through their walls as easily as I moved from dream house to dream house.
Life is a dream and we are the dreamer.
But most of us don’t notice the architecture that holds it all.
When I saw this - that the walls between stories are porous, that dream weaves into waking through myth and mystery, film and history - I knew I was seeing into the architecture of reality.
But how would I ever explain it?
I’ve wrestled this question for years.
And then, writing this essay, I remembered the Carousel.
The Carousel
It was 1964 and I was barely 8 years old when my father took me to the New York World’s Fair. And the wonder of this encounter lingers with me still. Just 20 minutes drive from our home there was this strange, otherworldly place. With surging crowds, ice cream, and an enormous silver globe taller than a building!
But the most amazing thing of all was about to unfold — The Carousel of Progress.
We entered a theater, and as the lights went down, I felt a giggling burst of excitement. Then, the show began. An old-fashioned kitchen scene with robots that looked like people! They told a little story. The curtains closed and — to my amazement — we, the audience, began to move.
What was this? Was it … safe? I looked at my father and saw his smile. He was enjoying the strange feeling of the wooden floor moving below our seats, carrying us around to another stage. Another kitchen, this one more modern. Another little story.
When it ended, the floor moved again!
We moved to another kitchen. Then, another.
Traveling from decade to decade, world to world.
Only decades later (today, researching this post) did I learn the mechanism:
We were rotating around a circular core of six stages -
being moved from one story stage to another.
No wonder this memory returned to me today.
It’s a near perfect illustration of how life actually works.
We think that we are solid and the reality around us is fixed. In truth, we are much more fluid than we know. Our consciousness capable of traveling from reality to reality - from one story house to another. Like the audience members at the World’s Fair, we can flow from story to story. We do it all the time.
We dive into a book and emerge changed. We watch a film and when it’s over, we blink back to ‘reality’.
There are other ways we exit our own story and later, return. Romance sweeps us off our feet and we abandon all reason. A calamity strikes a friend and we rush to help— discarding our own schedule, our own responsibilities for a time. A loved one dies and we leave this world, sliding into grief.
Observing this, we come to understand: some structures are fixed. Some rotate. Some walls dissolve when you put your hand through them.
Staying with yourself reveals two truths at once: You are like wind, capable of flowing through worlds. AND you have an anchor point, a home base you always return to.
When you stay with yourself, You are the axis.
The center of your own life.
This may be the most important teaching of Module Four: Without the anchor point of the axis, you are pulled into other worlds. With the axis, the worlds move around you.
Every mystic tradition, every movement practice, every science, has its own version of this truth: The yogi anchoring awareness in the belly center. The ballerina fixing her gaze on a single point during turns. The astronomer who calculates movement from a fixed star.
Every tradition knows: There is a center within all things. A starting point from which everything moves. An ending point to which everything returns.
You are that point.
So am I.
And so is everyone and everything else.
The subtle, simple truth:
Going out and coming back in
Staying with yourself doesn’t mean static imprisonment.
It means you go out and you come back in.
We have been practicing it with the bell (reminder to return), the hand to the heart (remembrance of who you are, where you are), the breath (going out and always, coming in).
Staying is how you return to the starting point.
How you become the axis
— the witness at the center of your own rotating rooms.
Not dissociation. This is embodiment at depth.
This is incarnational magic.
Now... breathe with me. Come to the center. Rest there a moment. Inhaling, exhaling. Feel yourself arrive. From that root, we are going to expand outward.
Next week, we are going to place you into the world, nested at the center of all of the stories you inhabit.
But right now, I want to bring you home and get you into conversation with the mood of your own ‘dream house’ — your own atmospheric environment.
Paid subscribers: Below you’ll find this week’s practice exercise and the audio recording of me reading Module 4, plus access to our live Zoom session (it’s next Sunday).
