I ripped open the box like a kid tearing through their presents on Christmas morning. As I peeled back the cardboard, I gasped in delight. Running my hand across the cover I felt tears puddle in my eyes.
The book opened with a crack, and that fresh-from-the-printer smell whooshed across my face. I flipped through the table of contents and lingered on the first few paragraphs of the introduction. I knew the words by heart, but seeing it bound hit differently.
By the time I found the acknowledgements, tears were sliding down my cheeks. With my hand pressed against my heart, I read the words out loud:
"Kayla, thank you for believing this book and my message mattered. You have a true gift, and this book would not have been possible without you."
I have edited so many projects over the years for countless people, but holding this book felt like holding one of my own. I memorized the feeling in that exact moment...
The pride of seeing my name in print.
The satisfaction of holding something I'd worked so hard on.
The honor of knowing I had at least a small part in bringing a message into the world I feel so passionately about.
Over a decade ago when I started my first women's group, I used to teach on "following your feel-good breadcrumbs." That message made its way into my own book Wondrous You in the poem "Follow Your Feel-Good."
It basically means that we don't have to have life all figured out. All we ever really need to do is ask ourselves in each moment, what tiny thing would feel good to me right now? When we get back to the basics of what brings us morsels of joy, we end up on a beautifully winding path back into our own heart.
Holding that book that I had helped edit and shape, I was connected to all the other moments big and small when I'd felt the joy and pride of seeing words I'd written in print. All the blog posts, the articles, the books, the online classes...each a little piece of me, each a moment of feeling on purpose.
I did a reading the other day where a client asked about a career decision she was feeling blocked around. Her guides said to her:
"There's no right or wrong. There's no should or shouldn't. There's only desire. What you want is what's right in any given moment. When you stop wanting it, it stops being right for you."
They showed me this beautiful image of a giant sailboat in the water, and the map kept changing based on her desires. They said,
"We're charting the course based on your heart."
They encouraged her to nestle back into her heart space and to give herself permission for the course to change as much and as often as it needs to.
I feel like we all have our own version of that. The shoulds and the obligation energy and the fear and the stickiness. And for me there's something so permission-giving about being brought back into my own heart and desires.
It reminds me to pay attention to ME and to notice what lights me up.
What I know for sure is that my heart sang holding that book. And it leaps each time I do a reading and each time I sit in meditation. It delights when I connect with a friend, and it absolutely explodes when I do a puzzle with Chloe or float in the pool with Brian.
The more we lean into exploring those feelings in our own lives, the more familiar the map will begin to look. Until that moment when we realize we are squarely floating in our own sacred waters.
A mantra I'm trying on this week in this spirit:
"I notice what lights me up. I follow my feel-good breadcrumbs. I trust that the map to my heart is taking shape."