Powerful questions on the way to Portugal
Discovering how I could host coaching sessions in the midst of this natural beauty during my Innate program was such a gift.
Isn’t it amazing how one kind-hearted soul can ask you one or two powerful questions that can infuse new clarity, energy, and vision into your life during transitional times? For me this was Chris Unger, who I met roughly four years ago when I was living in Seattle. At the time, I was working at Code Fellows, an immersive software development bootcamp, but preparing myself for my next professional move through studies in Corporate Innovation at Stanford.
Chris was working at Northeastern University as a faculty member at the time, but had become a major advocate and ecosystem builder for alternative models of K-12 education that blurred the lines between “the real world” and “the classroom.” He was spending time in Seattle periodically visiting and supporting some of the schools he wanted to showcase in the area. His work eventually led him to create a podcast series to encourage other education administrators and change agents. We would share a coffee or drink when he was in town inspired by each other’s efforts to challenge the status quo, in and out of education.
Fast forward to present day, when I finally had the opportunity to meet Chris on his turf. In August I took a road trip through the Northeast and had planned a stop in Boston. While passing through, we were able to take a walk around a beautiful park close to his house and Chris used his mentoring magic.
As I shared a bit about my confusion related to next steps in my life, he asked me:
Where do you want to be?
Who do you want to be interacting with?
What do you want to be doing?
And then suggested, once you answer those questions, you then can figure out how to build your life around that. He made it all seem so simple. The answers actually came fairly easily, but the belief around whether it was TRULY possible to create a life around those answers was where I was blocked. I wanted to be overseas again, but not yet in one place. I wanted to be around people who had done the foundational “personal work” to heal their past and understand their values and strengths. I wanted to be around people who were committed to making a contribution to society, but from a place of heart and low ego. I wanted to be around people who had exposed themselves to a variety of cultures, and worked to develop international perspectives. And lastly, I wanted to be around people who were creatively building a non-traditional life with an entrepreneurial spirit.
I wanted to be having conversations through 1:1 interactions and in small groups related to philosophy, cultures, community, and consciousness. I wanted space to write, inspire, facilitate, coach, and pursue self-directed study.
What do you do when you finally get to a moment of clarity? To the interwebs, of course! And it was here that a Google search led me to find Innate. A pilot program for 25 people from all over the world to live together on a beautiful family property tucked in the Northern Mountains of Portugal, co-working, co-living, and participating in daily breathwork practices. Connecting to our essence through closeness with nature and breath, while also contributing daily through individual work projects.
Within the first 24 hours of the program I had conversations with a participant who had found “enlightenment” sitting in a dark and silent cave in Guatemala for seven days, a participant who was raised across the African continent and now freelancing in the sustainability field, and another participant who was fiercely pursuing the digital nomad badge of honor and had mastered the art of using Tinder for cross-purposes of dating and language acquisition. If life was about taking one inspired action at a time, I felt I had hit the jackpot.
Throughout the month spent living in this community, I experienced such great levels of conviction about the importance of the people we surround ourselves with when we are in the process of “becoming.” This container proved to be exactly what I needed to believe I could build a more integrated life between my spirituality, my entrepreneurial spirit, my desire to build cross-cultural solutions, my curiosity about community, and my draw to nature. And trust the next inspired decision from there…which will take me to Morocco to explore the intersections between Sufism and Martial Arts here.
What was the last conversation you had where someone asked a question that created powerful insights or have you done that for someone else recently? Who is inspiring you in your current process of “becoming?”
Meandering through the Peneda-Gerês National Park with some of my Innate cohort was definitely one of the peak experiences of this experience.
