Finding Leadville Chapter 11: The Deep Knowing Within

The author walking in Breckenridge

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

-

“Honestly, I just got a feeling it’ll all work out,” I pressed my chest out as I said it, my head throbbing with a slight altitude headache.

I was in a therapy session at the Alma cabin, the wifi unreliable and breaking the tone between the pro and me. My therapist and I were dancing between past and present, naming and noticing what sensations I felt in my body. Making sense of my past. Speaking with kindness to my inner child. Preparing me for a future as I laid out my own red carpet and permitted myself to catwalk toward my north star.

The winter was holding on relentlessly to the side of the mountain that April. Every morning seemed to arrive with fresh snowfall. If the sun happened to show up, it created a landslide of slush and mud to navigate my Subaru through. 

Altitude sickness held on to me with its own white-knuckle grip. Several days into my move and the headaches persisted. My nights consisted of waking up hourly to chug the Liquid IV at my bedside, sometimes refilling it once or twice before sunrise. As a devoted coffee drinker, I shifted to green tea since my beloved drink exacerbated the dehydration issue. I was, in a word, miserable. 

But I knew it would pass. It was an alpine hangover that I needed to tend to, be patient with, and, with plenty of electrolytes, ride out with time. 

My call ended and I flipped open my journal, tea steaming in hand. Well before arriving in Colorado, I’d created a habit of doing what's called Morning Pages. These are three pages of free writing done first thing in the morning to clear the mind, exercise the writing muscles, and access bits of creativity. I got the exercise from Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist's Way (highly recommend for all my writers and artists!) and over the years it’s become a staple as I begin my day. 

“I haven’t a clue really HOW it will work out. But I can trust myself. I just know I can,” I wrote.

My journal held me; it knew my stories, my rationales, my epiphanies. Those pages allow me to explore in a messy way. I can be honest and real, allow the unfolding to take place at whatever pace it needed to. I could write a thought and challenge it immediately. I could write a wish and entertain it or be a calm parent to a child mid-tantrum. I could be petty, fretty, wild, and free. Those pages were – and continue to be – a lifeline for me. I can explore all the parts of me that I otherwise kept hidden or didn't know how to speak about with my parents, friends, or partner.

When I was a senior in college, some friends and I took shrooms. I'd pressed my fingers into the plastic baggy, pulling out the dried plant, and sprinkled it onto a piece of toast. Crunching, teeth working, tastebuds angry from the bitterness, I swallowed them down. 

As soon as I said, “I don’t feel anything,” the room began to glisten. The sun slipped inside the windowpanes to dance on the once white walls, each ray an ice skater in a sparkled rainbow leotard. My mind breathed that afternoon, a set of lungs expanding and contracting. We put our feet into a warm bubble bath and my eyes could feel the warmth and my feet could see their reflection.

At one point, I stood in front of a mirror. There I was, barely 21, ten feet on the ground and a hundred and twenty pounds of flesh, completely unattached from any past part of myself. Standing in front of the looking glass, I watched myself age. 

The skin on my face wrinkled and crevassed. My eyes sunk and the lines surrounding them celebrated years of expression. My hair spun a silver purple as soft threads escaped my ears and feathered the nape of my neck. Transfixed, I remained at that mirror for an unknown amount of time, watching elastic skin and energized eyes shapeshift into a leathered wrinkle face that was home to pupils so deep, so wise. She nodded at me, and I nodded back.  

I’m going to have a long life. The knowing shot through my youth-full veins, pulling my shoulders back, and planting my feet more firmly onto the bathroom tiles. I am here for a good long while. 

Many folks who have consumed mushrooms have spoken about their spiritual connection to the divine, to something greater than themselves. (There is evidence aplenty for how this sacred plant promotes mental healing, so I won't be the one to rehash that here.) I was awash with a brilliancy I had never quite felt before that moment. The message I got, at 21 years old, that there was nothing to cling onto, not even life. It all unfolds as it needs to. I was here, I would grow old, and I would experience everything I needed to in this walkabout on Earth. I could relax into it, allow it to unfold.

This mindset shows me the way, even today as I write this chapter during a Midwest Spring. Looking out onto my Minnesota lawn, I watch as the clovers quiver from droplets of midnight rain, untouched by the sensation of the sun. I can depend on change, as the day will rise and fall; every experience I am meant to have will arrive and depart. I get to trust my part in it all. 

I wasn't just in Colorado to prepare for and run a race. I was there because it was part of my grand unfolding. I followed my bliss, my desires, and the doors began to open, with a steady, well-oiled ease: an opportunity with the Life Time Foundation, the house in Alma, the truck driver and his shovel, Colleen's steady guidance up the road. Once I made the decision to leave for Colorado and surrendered to it, everything began to operate like gears in a Swiss watch.

I'm here for a good long while, I wrote with my mother's hands.

I trust that it will all work out, I underlined.

There is something bigger than me at work here, written as the woman I knew I was becoming.

Breckenridge, CO

The cabin was expansive. Not so much in size, but in how I felt within it. Tall windows brought in morning light and the mountains revealed themselves, as though slipping a lunar nightgown off their shoulders at sunrise.

Over the first few weeks, my routine began to take shape. 

Moving softly through the home so as not to disturb my three roommates, I brewed coffee and grabbed a protein bar as my “first breakfast.” I shook up an Athletic Greens shake as the coffee brewed and sipped it as I lightly stretched my cranky body into being. Once I was ready for caffeine, I poured a mug and, in those earlier days of April, made a fire in the wood stove as the coffee steamed. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I plunked on the well-worn couch, cracked open my notebook, and began writing my three morning pages. 

Meditation has never come easily for me. I am sure many of us can agree. Yet, I tried my best to take every opportunity I could to prepare my mind to meet my body for the challenge of 100 miles. I couldn’t fathom a summer of mountain training without some sort of meditation practice to still my mind, stretching the muscles of focus, and encouraging new neuron pathways to develop which would work in my favor. I didn’t want to just practice mindfulness while my feet were in motion over a winding alpine trail. I wanted to gear up my psyche with mental training well before the miles were run by meditating with my butt on a cushion

Many mornings, this took the form of a guided meditation through my favored app, Insight Timer. Sometimes I selected a 10-20 minute guided session. Other times, a sound bath or binaural beats. This would aid me tremendously in getting through big, chunky mileage during the next few months. Later, during runs, I would listen to similar tracks.

As I sat on the couch in the early hours of the day, the cabin creaked its way to life. Typically emerging first from the bedrooms below the main floor was Tucker. Soft spoken and sweet, he was an arborist in the summer and delivery driver in the winter. He poured coffee to go, smiled a good morning at me, and then, swiping on his boots, he was out the door.

The other two roommates would rise not long after Tucker left. During the winter months, they worked at a local resort. Caroline was an admin and her boyfriend Zach a ski instructor. During the summer months, they navigated job changes, taking on work that both suited the season and their desire to get out on mountain bikes whenever possible. At their side was an overweight Blue Healer who barked at her own shadow. Once they awoke, the air fryer sizzled on and hash browns were tossed into the heat. Eggs and bacon followed. The aromas wafting from the kitchen was usually my cue to get ready for my day.

During the day, after my virtual coaching work was done, I got into the car and rolled a couple thousand feet in altitude down the mountain toward the towns of Breckenridge and Frisco. There, I was able to breath a bit easier. The first few weeks, I did not run. Instead, I hiked, walked, and slowly got accustomed to the thin air. 

This was a helpful starting place for my body. In fact, it was all that my run coach, Greg, had requested of me and realistically all I could do in those first couple weeks. Headphones on, I listened to podcasts, with Rich Roll, Sally McRae, David Roche, Glennon Doyle. I took steps and breaths. Step step. Breath breath. 

As I walked, I watched my breath turn into a foggy puff in front of my face, small clouds of exhaled water meeting the cool blue air of the ski town. Those first few walks taught me to look up and outward, to take notice of and take in my surroundings without worrying about pace or mileage or how my body felt. No analyzing workout data or keeping a certain pace or holding back to maintain my heart rate (That would all come soon in my training). All I needed to do was acclimate, slow and steady. The tough days would arrive.

In a few weeks, I began to sleep better, and I was finally ready to begin training.

Frisco, CO

The summer was filled with space between the moments I got to run. There was a vast playground of trails, and I wanted to see as many of them as I could. The weekends were completely open for me to find a trail, pack up my nutrition, trekking poles, and hydration pack and set out for hours of solo time on my feet.

Running has slowly become more meditative than competitive; I wrote in July. The gentle and rhythmic slap of shoes against dirt, the attention to inhaling and exhaling, and the ways I have to let go of my thoughts. I can be with myself. Like, really BE with myself.

The scrawl in my composition notebook was big, bold, and confident: I’m finding a safe place in my body all over again. 

But, throughout my life, my body had not always felt like a safe place. Sometimes my body didn't even feel like my own.