Signposts on the Road Less Traveled

By Linda Sechrist

The first inkling that I was traveling the road less traveled came with the acknowledgment of a longing for something I could not name.

It took time—and several changes in my life—to recognize what that longing was. I was longing to feel whole.

When that lightbulb finally went on, I realized the distance between my sense of emptiness and my longing for wholeness was equal to the distance between Boston and Los Angeles.

And I was walking, not driving.

Looking back now, I can see some of the people, places and pieces of wisdom that appeared along the way. They were like road signs, pointing me toward the next piece of the puzzle—like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel left behind, leading me deeper into a story I did not yet understand.

Some of those signs were words.

Some were experiences.

Some seemed to arrive from nowhere.

“You’re not what you do for a living!”

The words came from a disembodied, audible voice that shouted them so clearly that I stopped in my tracks while walking in nature at my favorite place, World’s End.

“I and the Father are one.”—John 10:30

“Your brother is a mirror in which you see the image of yourself for as long as the perception lasts.”—A Course in Miracles, Chapter 7

“You’re a spiritual being having a human experience.”—Wayne Dyer

“Choose to live deliberately.”

Again, the words came from a disembodied, audible voice, this time as I walked out of a yoga class.

Then came another.

“Seek the Truth. Speak the Truth and lead others to the Truth in themselves.”

When those words landed in me on the last day of a workshop, they felt like a bolt of lightning. I had been challenged to identify my purpose in life and was struggling to find an answer. The words came through an experience connected to Kevin McCarthy, author of The On-Purpose Person: Making Your Life Make Sense.

And then there was Bruce Lipton.

During an interview about his book The Honeymoon Effect, he said:

“Our brains act more like receivers.”

He used the analogy of a television or radio receiving a signal. At the time, I heard the words. But their deeper meaning did not reveal itself until later, as I struggled to write the article about our interview.

And then Nisargadatta:

“There is no me. There is no you. There never could be any such entities.”

Each of these encounters seemed to loosen something I had believed for years. They opened cracks in structures I had taken for granted and left me standing in the unfamiliar territory of uncertainty.

I can see now that those moments of uncertainty were not obstacles.

They were openings.

They were places of freedom.

Something in me had been cracked open enough to consider that perhaps there was another way of seeing. Another way of being. Another way of understanding what I had always assumed to be true.

Uncertainty gives us freedom because, in the absence of certainty, something becomes possible. We can look again.

Perhaps that is what happened to me.

I wasn’t expanding my consciousness or raising it to some higher level.

What shifted was my perception—the instrument through which I experienced life.

We are born as wide-open organs of perception. Before the world tells us who we are, there is a vastness to us. We are receptive. Curious. Present.

Then conditioning begins.

Through family, culture, religion, education, experience and the gradual process of becoming somebody, our field of perception narrows. We develop a personality, an identity, a story about who we are—and slowly, the openness with which we arrived becomes more contained.

So perhaps when we speak of expanding or raising consciousness, we are not actually adding anything to consciousness at all.

Perhaps we are simply removing what has obscured it.

Perhaps we are cracking open the containers we have built around ourselves.

We are not becoming more conscious.

We are becoming more available to what has always been here.

The instrument becomes more refined.

More transparent.

More receptive.

Consciousness itself does not change.

Our capacity to receive it, embody it and allow it to move through us is what changes.

And that brings me back to a line from Rumi that has stayed with me:

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

Perhaps the road was never about finding something I was missing.

Perhaps it was about removing what stood in the way of recognizing what had never been missing at all.

Another road sign.

Another piece of the puzzle.

And, perhaps, another breadcrumb leading me home.