In Right Relationship: The Path to the Highest Expression of You 8/22/26

So this week, I had this question pop into my head: What is the path to the highest expression of you? And what kept coming through for me was this idea of being in “right relationship” to yourself. What does that mean, you ask? Well, if you really start looking at the places where we give up our power, so much of it has to do with believing that something outside of us has to give us permission, or give us something we need, before we can actually be free. So, when we are not in right relationship we tend to give our power to an authority and then blame the authority for having the power, when sometimes the really interesting thing to look at is that we may never have needed to give it away in the first place. And it’s not our fault; we are absolutely conditioned to do this. From the beginning, society is telling us to trust authority and fit in, but there’s also something very natural underneath it. We come into the world needing our parents for everything. They feed us, keep us alive, make the decisions, and ideally create this container of safety around us. So we grow and develop in a reality where someone else is supposed to know what to do, and then at some mysterious point we switch over into being the authority of our own lives. There’s this transition that happens, this individuation, where you start becoming a self outside of the family unit and outside of all the programs you were raised in. But before you have the awareness to recognize any of that, you’re mostly just playing out patterns. You recreate the dynamics you know, and then you recreate them again, and eventually you get frustrated because you keep bumping into the same issues. That frustration can actually be the doorway. You start going, Wait, what is happening here? Why do I keep ending up here? And once you have that awareness, you can make a different choice. That’s where I think the higher expression starts to come in, because instead of automatically responding from the program, you begin responding from that inner knowing, whatever language you want to use for it. You begin relating to yourself from the inside out.

I keep seeing this ocean vessel when I think about it, because where you are in your life right now is an accumulation of choices, beliefs, reactions and ways of relating to whatever has happened along the way. If you keep playing out the same patterns, the ship basically keeps going in the same direction. But when you change the way you relate to the conditions that come up in your life, you turn the bow of the ship slightly. It might be such a small adjustment that at first you wouldn't even know anything had changed. But if you keep going at that angle, you eventually end up somewhere completely different. That’s why the micro-choices matter so much. It’s not necessarily about whether one choice is objectively the “right” choice. It’s about where the choice is coming from. Is this motivated by fear, or is it motivated by your heart, your creativity, your larger vision for your life? Fear is always trying to get you to the next thing that feels safe. The problem is that the thing that feels safe in this exact second might be taking you straight toward the storm that’s coming tomorrow. Whereas when you’re listening deeply, taking in the information, listening to your intuition and allowing that inner guidance to have a voice, you have a much better chance of actually staying on a course that’s better for you in the long run. And this is tricky because fear can be incredibly convincing. You can think you’re making a heart-based decision when really you’re pushing something away because it’s uncomfortable. So if your impulse is I need to get away from this thing immediately, sometimes it’s worth asking whether the invitation is actually to leave or whether you’re being asked to change the way you relate to it. Maybe the work is to walk into the same space differently, from a place of sovereignty rather than fear. Relationships are a really good example of this because another person can hurt your feelings or fail to do the thing you wish they would do, and suddenly your wellbeing is completely dependent on them changing. Obviously there are situations where leaving is exactly the right thing to do, but sometimes the higher expression is leaving, sometimes it’s staying, sometimes it’s speaking up, sometimes it’s creating a boundary, and sometimes it’s realizing that you can be okay even if this person never becomes the version of them you first had in mind. The action itself isn’t the whole story. The question is whether you can stay in relationship with yourself while doing it.

I also love thinking about a “symphony of sound” being a good analogy for the “self”, because you can be in resonance with yourself or you can be in disharmony with yourself, and you know the difference by yhe way it feels. Think about beautiful music when everything is coming together and every part is playing off the wisdom of the whole thing. Nobody is over there playing the triangle like, I HAVE DECIDED THIS IS MY SOLO NOW. Everything is in relationship. That’s what I mean by right relationship. There’s a kind of fulfillment that happens when the different parts of you aren’t fighting for their own control but are actually listening to one another, and your expression starts to come from that deeper place. And I think nature shows us this constantly. Flowers blossom from the inside out. Imagine a flower sitting there in its little precursor-to-a-flower state thinking, Well, I would blossom, obviously, but nobody has come by and told me I’m beautiful today. I’m really going to need some external validation before I proceed. Life arises from the root of creation within itself and expresses outward. And we are another creature on the planet. We’re nature too. So maybe it’s figuring out what is already trying to arise from within and removing the filters that are blocking it. What is the innocent essence underneath the conditioning? What wants to express naturally? This also connects to something I heard recently about how we’re basically moving between a primal response and a power response. The primal response is the conditioned part that is looking for safety, scanning the environment and repeating whatever has protected us before. The power response is inside-out. It reminds me of locus of control: am I waiting for the world outside me to arrange itself correctly so that I can finally become myself, or am I allowing my life to blossom from the inside out?

This is also why I love the Abraham Hicks line, “Your present moment is old news, so why give it so much attention?” Because we do tend to give it so much attention. We look around at the current reality and treat it as though it is the final report on who we are and what is possible. But if you’re trying to create something new, why would you build it entirely out of yesterday? We tend to base today on what happened yesterday, and then we base tomorrow on today, and eventually we’ve built this whole reality out of information from the past. The shift is to begin relating to life from the future self, from the vision of what you’re creating. If you want to experience this higher expression of you, then you wake up and charge your field with that intention. You practice holding the vibration of right relationship. You develop enough awareness that you can catch yourself and ask, Wait, where am I right now? Am I coming from my power, or am I coming from the old pattern? That awareness becomes a muscle. Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about this as “training the dog,” which I think is such a useful image because the conditioned mind really is like, Oh! I know this one! We’ve been here before! Follow me! And it takes off down the exact same path it has taken 400 times. The practice is going, No. Sit. You’re not driving the car. My patterns are not in charge. My history happened, but it does not get to control the way I relate to reality today. It doesn’t mean everything immediately becomes rainbows and hummingbirds, although while I was explaining my thoughts on this to a dear friend, a tiny hummingbird landed about ten feet away from her on a telephone wire and the gray sky suddenly turned blue, so that was a synchronicity! The point is that you don’t have to attach all the old baggage to the present experience. You can notice resistance and ask, Why is this coming up? What is it showing me? Is there something here I’m supposed to understand? Could this be preparing me for something I can’t see yet? That is a completely different relationship to reality than Why does this always happen to me?

And this brings me to the concept of Choose Your Own Adventure, because I think that’s really what all of this is. Remember those books where you got to the bottom of the page and suddenly had to decide what happened next? You could open the mysterious door or run into the woods or do whatever deeply questionable decision the book was offering an eight-year-old, but the important part was that you were participating in the story. I think we’re honestly choosing our own adventure all the time. You can wait for those moments when you randomly feel completely connected and alive, or you can start building your life with the intention of being more available to them. Maybe you climb a mountain and get to the top and suddenly take this huge breath and think, Oh my God, what a gift to be alive. Maybe you’re a wakeboarder. Maybe you fish. Maybe you make art or dance or sit beside the ocean or do whatever completely random thing lights you up. Those experiences can happen to you accidentally, but when you’re in right relationship with yourself, they become easier to access because you’re already relating to life from that place. And this does not mean there is no work. You might look at what’s happening and think, I really do not enjoy this particular lesson the universe has apparently selected for me. You can feel resistance. You can be angry. You can decide something needs to change. But you still have somewhere inside yourself to stand. Instead of dropping immediately into Why does this always happen to me? you can say, Okay. This is what’s happening now. What can I do with it? You can use your tools. You can listen. You can learn something. You can change course. You can choose the next page. And maybe that is the path to the highest expression of ourselves by not controlling the ocean, not eliminating the storms, not finally getting the outside world to a perfect arrangement, but learning how to stay in right relationship with ourselves and bloom from the inside. The ship can change direction. The symphony can come back into resonance. The dog can sit in the back seat! Maybe the hummingbird can travel through time. Who knows? But you steer the helm with your inner knowing, and you get to choose your own adventures in this life.