Welcome
I got an invite to a little get together someone I knew but hadn't seen in a while was having. From time to time he got a bunch of guys together for what he calls Conscious Conversations. This one ended up being special. It had been awhile since the last talk and he had just moved into a new apartment. The event was a potluck and the food brought was delicious. I'm usually steady to the confines of a vegan diet, but chose to break for bacon wrapped crispy cheese potatoes and bear sausage, amongst a few other things. I could feel my testosterone levels rise as I was eating. After a little socialization, and once we were done filling our stomachs, we made a circle out of chairs and prepared to get Socratic. The topic of the night was going to be “What does the idea of your inner garden mean to you?” I had already been going deep into and developing ideas around this concept over the last two years, it connected many of the subjects I was studying and matched perfectly the job I began working as an actual gardener. I started to see the world through this lens. Tonight was my first time coming out to one of these events. I had probably been invited 10 times prior but never carved the time out to make it(my loss). The man that was hosting used to live with my brother and I hadn't seen him in nearly two years. He became a yoga instructor after getting out of prison and introduced me to the topic around 7 years ago. I forgot about the little that I learned entirely until I started to experience some body pains and was forced to re-discover the necessity of stretching. The deeper aspects of what I believed was just going to be getting pain free and flexible ended up opening me up to an entirely different world, leading me down a journey of self-discovery. I had just finished going through my own teacher training, a 200 hour Kundalini course, since we had seen each other last. It felt weird that our reconnection was encompassed by a topic that had grown so close to my heart. Fairly excited about the theme, I was ready to hear what this idea meant for everyone else. The man I ended up seated next to, someone I had never met, asked for my name. I gave it to him, along with a side comment that many people seemed to remember it as Sean/Shawn. I joked how I was okay with this because it fed into a hyper-spiritual alter ego I had been developing, which coincided with my interests in Eastern culture, as-well as the initial of my last name (Sean/Shawn T. - Shanti, Sanskrit for 'peace'.) He laughed and fired back at me that his name actually was Shawn. I asked what the first letter of his last name was, taken by surprise, and he kept chuckling as he informed me that it was the letter T.