…my first journal I created on the A.I. Forums was titled: “Pursuing the Extraordinary.”  At the time I really felt like what I wanted was a whole scale change in my experience of myself, other people, and the world.  Through Get Real and Be Powerful I always seemed to have this fire inside for deep experiences.  What I learned during those programs and the times in between and since is that deep experiences are all around me all the time and that it was me who was holding those experiences from being felt fully.

Today I took some time and did my favorite activity: staring out a window.  I was at a coffee shop, enjoying my drink and just watching the snowy world outside move passed.  The buses filed with half awake students, crotchety professors, over worked graduate students, and ragged university workers.  Cute girls walking in groups, each clad in form fit leggings, tights, or skinny jeans and each wearing sexy heeled boots or Uggs.  The snow falling in the background completing this scene with the sounds of cafe chatter and Micheal Jackson’s “Heal the World” finalizing the tone of this moment.  My own felt sense of my world in that moment was gratitude, thankfulness.

Since the beginning of the A.I. Journey there continues to be extra-ordinary moments for me.  Ordinary in there common-ness but with an extra ingredient: Feeling.  If there is anything that A.I. philosophies can help with, in my opinion, it is getting to the core of what is holding back the FEEL of the world, of others.  A girl walks past the window.  Braving the wind and cold, her face scrunched and tense, her eyes reveal not simply that she is cold but that she is annoyed.  She is so annoyed.  The depth expressed on her face.  This is not being annoyed about the snow, there is something more.  I FEEL this moment.

I guess what I’m trying to express here is that FEELING is extra ordinary.  We all feel.  And we all exude and receive feeling.  We feel the world.  For the longest time I had lost this FEELING of the world, of others, of myself.  Ever since I have regained these FEELINGS of world, my loneliness, frustration, and powerlessness has all melted away.  It’s not that I do not feel these sometimes, it’s just that they are no longer issues for me.  Fear, anxiety, uncertainty all have their place in my life but are no longer the dominate way of my experience, with women, friends, family, or work.

I accept myself.  It’s really ordinary — life.  But, with me there, like REALLY there, not a day has gone by that I did not FEEL extraordinariness of myself, life, and all manner of relationships.

Joseph Campbell once wrote something like: “If you are on a path, then you are someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.”  And Everett Koop once titled a book: “If you meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him.”

For me, being on an adventure means FEELING this life, my life…

I am the extra in “Extraordinary.” It is a very powerful and connected place, a confident and fulfilled place…one that just over a year ago seemed so desperately impossible.

Thankfulness…