Tonight we have our Comfort Zone Retreats integration Zoom, and I am so excited I can hardly stand it.
I cannot wait to see all the ladies again.
I think it’s so incredibly thoughtful that they do this for us—that they don’t just send us home after this massive, beautiful, life-changing experience and say, “Okay, good luck integrating back into society!” They actually bring us back together. We get to see each other again. We get to talk about what has changed, what has stayed with us, what has surprised us, and what it feels like to return to our regular lives after experiencing something that felt anything but regular.
And I’m really curious to hear what everyone says.
Because for me, things are drastically different.
The funny thing is, I’m not sure anyone could necessarily point to exactly what changed by looking at me.
Sure, maybe my smile is bigger. I definitely have more energy. There is a lightness in my body that wasn’t there before. I feel like I’m walking through the world differently.
But the biggest changes aren’t things you can see. They’re in me.
My heart feels full. Warm. Eager.
There is this feisty little fire inside of me that is absolutely, ridiculously in love with being alive.
It’s like my soul came back from Sedona saying:
Okay. Let’s fucking go.
I’m excited about what’s next, but I’m also not trying to force “next” anymore. I’m living day by day, taking things as they come, paying attention, and seeing what reveals itself.
I’m here to receive.
And funny enough, earlier today I was driving around thinking, I wonder if anything is going to come through for me to write about today.
Then I got the reminder about our Zoom tonight.
There it was.
At first, the reminder felt a little bittersweet because I realized this might be the last time all of these women are together in one place—even if that “place” is a bunch of little squares on a screen.
And that made me sad.
But then I flipped it.
Because look at what I do get.
I get to see these women again.
Women I spent days with. Women I climbed with, breathed with, cried with, laughed with, ate with, screamed with, healed beside, and held.
We saw each other struggle. We heard each other’s stories. We witnessed each other doing hard things.
And without even consciously trying, we were constantly sending love toward one another. There was so much love circulating through that group that sometimes it felt like we had stepped into our own little vortex inside the vortex of Sedona.
And now I get to meet them again.
Not exactly the same women I met in Sedona, either.
I get to meet the women they became when they went home.
That is so cool to me.
I get to see them outside of the red rocks and the retreat schedule and the yoga mats and the mountains. I get to see them back in their real lives, carrying whatever pieces of Sedona came home with them.
And somehow, I think that might bring us even closer.
Because I love a connection.
But luvva reconnection.
Maybe reconnection means so much to me because I know what it feels like not to have it.
When I went to Montana Academy, we didn’t have all of this technology. There was no Instagram group chat waiting for us. There was no Zoom reunion. There wasn’t even Facebook yet.
I think I had a Nokia before I left. Like, we were basically communicating by carrier pigeon.
And when we left, we just…left.
We had gone through this incredibly intense chapter of our lives together, and then everyone scattered back into the world.
No reunion. No integration call. No organized check-in.
No easy way to say, Hey, remember when we went through that thing together? How are you now? Who did you become?
Eventually Facebook came along, and honestly, one of the reasons I was so excited about it was realizing, Oh my God, I bet people from Montana are on here.
And they were.
Suddenly these people who had existed mostly in my memories were grown adults with lives and families and jobs and stories.
And now, all these years later, one of those people, Peter, is coming from Louisiana to Charleston while working on bringing his transportation business here. I haven’t spoken to him in probably twenty-five years.
Twenty-five years!
And now I get to see him all grown up.
We’re all grown up and shit.
How wild is that?
Maybe that’s why tonight feels bigger than just a Zoom call.
It reminds me that the people who witness us during transformational chapters of our lives hold a very specific piece of our history.
They knew that version of us. They were there.
And there is something sacred about getting to meet again later and saying:
Look at us now.
Connection says, I see you.
Reconnection says, I still see you.
Maybe even: I see who you’ve become.
So yes, there is a little sadness in knowing tonight might be the last time this exact Sedona group is all together.
But mostly?
I’m grateful as hell that there is a tonight at all.
Because endings don’t always have to mean disappearing from one another’s lives.
Sometimes the experience ends, but the connection doesn’t.
Sometimes you leave the vortex and realize you brought pieces of it home in each other.
And sometimes the universe circles people back around twenty-five years later just to remind you:
Real connection can survive a lot of distance.
So tonight at 5:00, I’ll be there.
Probably smiling too big. Probably talking too much. Definitely excited.
Ready to see my ladies. Ready to hear who they’ve become since Sedona. Ready to reconnect.
Because I love a connection.
But baby—
Luvva reconnection.
