Everyone Was a Reflection (October 2016)
Asheville, NC was easily becoming my favorite place to escape to. I’m glad it’s only 3 hours away from where I live in Charlotte. Asheville had so much art and so much spirituality, it seemed like the perfect environment for me to forget about someone. . .if only that person weren’t also free-spirited and artsy.
I went to Asheville in search of spiritual guidance or some sort of help in my situation, but I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for. I decided to book my stay in a hostel called “Bon-Paul and Sharky’s Hostel” in West Asheville. I had stayed in one other hostel before back when I was still with Ryan when we visited Charleston for our 6 month anniversary, and I loved the concept and the environment of hostels and how you could meet travelers from all over the world.
While I was in Asheville the first day, I felt so unhappy. Everywhere I looked, there was something that reminded me of SW. I broke down when I heard The Beatles playing in one of the stores and had to go back to the hostel crying. It was a long walk, and I was even being stalked. A drunk man was chasing me down the road at night, so it became a long run actually. I was scared, sad, and lost. I called my friend Margarita and when she picked up the phone, I was panting.
She asked me what was wrong, and I told her that I was just chased by a drunk man in Asheville who was following me, but I’d lost him. I said that I was alone and that I just needed to hear a friend’s voice. She drove an hour from Greenville, SC on a night before she had a test to come and meet me for tea at my favorite place in Asheville, Dobra Tea. That’s what I call a true friend.
That night, she listened to me cry over my broken heart as we sat on floor pillows behind a beaded curtain. I’m glad the lighting was dim. I showed her the proof that SW was already seeing someone else, and she asked me why I couldn’t just block him. I did already block him, but I couldn’t help but keep looking at it. I was heavily fixated on what I was missing. The only way I could stop seeing the things that he posted was if I had him block me, but he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t talk to me at all. Wouldn’t listen to me, and I felt like he wanted me to keep seeing what he was posting because he knew I’d be looking and wanted to hurt me more.
I stepped down to a level of petty that I’d never reached before, and started commenting mean things on all of his photos so that he WOULD want to block me. I think the final straw was when I had commented on the photo of the painting of the moth he made for me when we first met “This would look so much better if it were on fire.”
Blocked.
The deal was done, and now I could breathe a little better, only now I was catching my breath from laughing with my friend about how ridiculous my comments were. We left Dobra Tea satisfied that I wouldn’t be tortured by my own addiction anymore, and then headed to the comedy club to catch the last hour or two of the show. I realized that a lot of comedians were really depressed themselves and used laughter as a way to make other people feel better about themselves which also made them feel better about themselves.
She drove us back to my hostel and as we sat in the car, all I could think about was how thankful I was to have her come out to spend time with me while I was so down.
“Thank you so much, Margarita. It felt good to laugh again. You are a really great friend. I love you so much!” I hugged her.
“Anytime, Kiana. I know you would do the same for me if you had to. Sleep well. I’ve got a test in a few hours!” She hugged me back.
I walked back up the stairs to my room where there were 3 sets of bunkbeds. Mine was a mixed dorm, and all of the beds were taken in the room by sound-asleep men except for one bed on the top bunk. That was where I was supposed to sleep, but barely did. My stomach was hurting so much. It was agonizing.
I stayed awake browsing options on my phone for spiritual healers and therapists, and I came across something interesting that I’d never tried before. Reiki.
I’d heard of reiki before, but I didn’t know exactly what it was or how it worked. I thought maybe it was some sort of massage or something, but I found out what it was when I went there the next afternoon. Now I couldn’t sleep because I was excited to be healed.
I went downstairs at about 4 AM to draw a picture or do anything to take my mind off of things. I already knew who I was going to dream about if I slept, and I wanted to prevent that from happening. Around 5 AM, a girl wearing a backpack and glasses came yawning downstairs. She was a little startled to see me sitting there on the couch with my eyes wide open and awake.
“Oh! Hello! I didn’t think anyone else would be awake right now! What’s your name? I’m Yrla.” She said.
I introduced myself, and she could see that my face was puffy and I still had tears on my cheeks. She said that there was a place I could go to meditate called the “Mountain Light Sanctuary” where there was complete silence on and tranquility on the top of a mountain. She said she would go there when she was sad too, but if I didn’t have time for that, we could just go grab some coffee next door.
I accepted her offer of kindness and followed her to the coffeeshop next door called “Odd’s Café”. I found out later that it was quite an appropriate name, since I didn’t think that I’d meet so many influential and wise women there.
Yrla told me the story of herself and her travels. She was originally from Germany, but then she attended a University in Scotland where she met her boyfriend from Canada. She was now studying abroad in the United States so that she could be closer to him and so that they could travel together. She’d been an English teacher in Indonesia already, and she was still only 23. She was proof to me that long distance relationships could work if you had the right people in them, and that you could find so many opportunities to travel even if you don’t know what you’re doing in life yet. She said it only mattered that you knew where you were going or at least where you wanted to go.
She had to catch the bus to go back to school, so our conversation was cut short, but I managed to snap a quick photo of her to commemorate our brief meeting. When I took the photo of her, my camera caught the eye of a woman sitting a couple seats down from us.
“Wow. I haven’t seen a camera that did that in ages. Polaroids are coming back, huh? I’ve always had a different level of appreciation for film, and it makes me happy to see film coming back” She said.
I picked up my lavender latte and moved to a seat across from hers. I introduced myself to her, and she introduced herself to me as “Amy Kosh, life coach, photographer, and part-time yoga instructor.”
I knew that this woman was going to be worth talking to. She told me about her work, how she was loving what she was doing, and that a lot of men took forever to mature. She said that sometimes it took forever to find someone you want to spend the rest of your life with, that she still hadn’t found hers even in her 40s, and that her mom just found hers at 80 years old. Most importantly, we need to be careful who we feed our energy to because some people won’t bother to repay us. She referred to it as asking “What part of me is being fed by these people needing me?”
She told me that she wished me luck in my endeavor to find an answer, and then let me pick out my favorite business cards of hers to keep. One was a photography business card, and the other was a life-coach business card which had a quote by Kurt Vonnegut reading “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” Amy reminded me to have “an unstoppable life” before we parted.
I was on a roll with meeting these women with important messages. When I went back to the hostel, it was 10 AM. I decided to book my Reiki appointment which the office happened to be literally right across the street, and then I met a girl named Mia who I could tell was half Asian and half white like me. She wore a funky-patterned shirt, and I knew she probably had something I needed to know. I could sense it.
We started talking to each other and sharing what we liked to do when we came to Asheville, why we were there that time, and where we were from. She shared that she came from a town called Mobile, Alabama. I’d driven through Alabama before and had seen the signs for Mobile when driving back from Panama City Beach before, but I’d still never been to Mobile. I imagined it to be swampy for some reason. She told me that I was welcome to come join her in her stroll through downtown, but first we got more coffee at Odd’s Café. What were the odds?
Mia and I went to my favorite book store, and she took me to hers. We went through art galleries, she bought us some Indian food, and I bought us ice cream. As she was driving us back to the hostel for me to make it in time for my reiki appointment, she shared that she had taken a road trip in her Honda Civic from Alabama to the Pacific northwest coast. She couch-surfed along the way and spent three months and $3,000 traveling. Her work back home was as a bartender at a 1920′s themed bar called the Haberdasher, and at the time of her travels, she had just gotten into a new relationship with a guy named Jesse. She considered not going on the trip, but knew that she would regret staying back and doing the same thing instead of pursuing something that was a once-in-a-lifetime deal that she’d been planning and saving up for. She didn’t let a guy hold her back from doing what she wanted, and they’re still together because they trust each other so much. If she didn’t go on the trip, she probably never would have realized that she wanted to move to Portland, Oregon, and that’s where she just moved a couple days ago as I’m typing this on March 29th, 2017.
She really inspired me to start traveling by myself more often and to do as much traveling as I could independently without anyone stopping me because if it’s meant to be and those people are truly important, they won’t stop you, they’ll motivate you and meet you at the finish line.
Around 3 PM it was time for my first ever reiki session with a woman named Chris. She first interviewed me and had me fill out a chart depicting the areas I felt the most pain in, had me describe the circumstances which lead me to coming in the first place, what I’d hope to accomplish in the session, and what I felt comfortable with her using. I was willing and open to trying anything to feel better, so I let her use any aromatherapy, stones, or spirit guides she thought necessary.
I had to lay down on a small bed as she placed an eye pillow on top of my eyelids. She would scan my body with her hands, and I could feel the heat coming from them. She’d stop and press gently in the areas where she could feel needed the most healing. I needed the most healing in my throat, my ears, and my abdomen. During this time, I was in a trance and seeing all sorts of colors. When she called upon my spirit guides, I could see the outline of a feminine and colorful force of energy offering her hand to me. I immediately thought of my Aunt Karen.
The session lasted maybe 2 hours. I never knew what to think of anything like that, but I could now say from first-hand experience that I knew it was real. I felt surges of energy coming through me which sent shivers down my spine. And when it was done, I felt so hungry even though I’d eaten just before showing up. She said that after the experience, I would start becoming more receptive and much more aware of the things going on around me. She said most importantly that I would find that everyone was a reflection of me in some way, and that there was something to be learned from everyone. She said I needed to work on getting my strength back because I had given so much of my power to other people, and that’s why my abdomen was hurting. My abdomen was where my ego was located, and I apparently had no self-esteem left. My throat hurt because I had no voice. My ears hurt because I felt like I was never being heard.
Since that particular visit to Asheville, I feel like I’ve received way more guidance and hope than I ever could have wished for. I had not one, but five mentors during that trip who really inspired me and helped me all in their own unique conversations. Not one lesson was the same, but I’ve made it a mission to find a way that I could inspire others and share my stories to people that might need healing like I did myself that day.
