packing for a future that doesn't exist
you can listen above or read below. whatever you choose, you’re about to go on a trip with me to the past, present, and future. in this story, you’ll experience a first-world-problem that unfolds into spiritual expansion and philosophy, makes sense of the “observer effect” in physics, and as always, lands with some practical tips for you to navigate expectation vs. reality.
it’s my hope that by starting our journey in an ego-dimension, we shift our perspective and find a way through to something beyond ourselves, where love and connection lives and hope remains, even when the world feels much heavier than some mishaps in paradise.
but, let’s start with paradise.
the un-wellness retreat
i traveled to mexico 2 weeks ago to lead 14 psychic mediumship sessions at a fancy wellness retreat. it was mostly a rinse-and-repeat from the same retreat last year. i didn’t stress or worry (i honestly barely had time to pack, let alone worry). the beach is my happy place, and in between sessions, i moonlit as a guest ready to receive restoration and healing. the year before was full of ocean dips, which is always the way back to my soul.
last year was my first time leading sessions at a retreat, and it was beautiful chaos. i was figuring it all out as i went, running on intuition and adrenaline and trust.
so i came back this year prepared, with infrastructure to support. an ops team with a proper scheduling system locked, time to meditate on each person’s intention ahead of time, and my energetic boundaries mapped and clear. i expected expansion in all the places left to grow.
i dared to have high hopes. then the universe humbled me quick.
within hours of arriving to the resort, i had vertigo and confusion so disorienting i was wondering if my first impression to the retreat attendees was me in an ambulance. my intuition said to me “seaweed”, and sure enough the decomposing sargassum let off a toxic gas that smelled like sulfur and triggered a reaction consistent with my exact symptoms. the pristine beach i remembered from last year was buried in the stuff. swimming like a mermaid was quickly ruled out.
i rolled with it, moved my sessions inside, went through my nervous system regulation practices, trusted my body to adjust to a new environment. and only 2 of us seemed to be affected, so the group spirits were high overall. throughout the weekend it felt like thousands of logistical paper cuts, and death by them was looming. it hit harder because it was a stark difference to the ease of last year.
knowing how much energy it would take me to hold 14 speed-dating-esque psychic sessions in 2 days, i treated myself to an extra decompression day alone, paid out of my own pocket. i imagined i’d read in a beach chair, go to the cenote spa for a massage, finally get to enjoy the pool. instead, once all the guests had glided out on their pink cloud of connection and joy, i got smacked with food poisoning. and then when i scraped myself off the bathroom floor, was stranded with an eight-hour flight delay. mercury retrograde was apparently feeling real literal.
the view from sideways
there’s a particular flavor of disappointment that comes after preparation and expectation. it’s different from the kind where you showed up winging it and things go topsy turvy, because at least that story tracks. my recovering control-freak does not like to be off-track.
you know when your brain starts running the highlight reel from last time, measuring the gap between what you packed your expectations in and what you’re standing in now? it could be as simple as you expect your boss’ personality to show up predictably each monday morning.
well, the stinky ocean and the equally stinky bathroom is a humbling place to meet your own projections.
my shift in perspective began once i stopped trying to close the distance between where i was and where i thought i’d be. the distance itself was the suffering. it only existed inside a story about a future i had already written, and i know more than anyone, the future doesn’t like immovable parameters.
the point in the cosmos
there’s a concept i keep coming back to because it bridges the spiritual and the physical in a way that actually settles into my body instead of me floating above it.
john wheeler, the physicist who coined the term black hole, spent decades exploring what he called the participatory universe. his work showed that reality doesn’t exist as a fixed thing out there waiting to be walked through. instead, it organizes itself around the observer. his delayed-choice experiments, first confirmed in a lab the year i was born, demonstrated that a particle’s path wasn’t determined until someone observed it. before observation, it existed as pure potential. the act of looking is what collapsed possibility into form.
wheeler put it plainly: we are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago.
picture it this way. you are standing at a single point in the cosmos. still. and the field around you is in constant motion, shifting, reorganizing, assembling new configurations and timelines in response to your presence and your attention. you are the fixed point. everything else moves.
which means the future i built while packing my suitcase was one configuration in a field of infinite ones. the moment i landed and observed what was actually in front of me, the field collapsed into this. not the vision i carried with me. this one.
the thing about damn expectations
expectations are a form of time travel, and not usually the useful kind. you take a feeling from the past, wrap it in desire, and project the whole bundle into a moment that hasn’t been born yet. you show up and wonder why the room doesn’t match the hologram. nostalgia does the same thing facing the other direction. it pulls you into a warmth that’s real, but the person who lived it dissolved into who you are now a long time ago.
i loved last year’s retreat. but when i’m honest about it, i was also scrambling. the magic of a first time novelty glossed over the rough edges. this year i had built something sturdier underneath me, and i almost missed it because i was measuring the surface of now against the surface of then.
what i actually did
i stopped comparing. i know that sounds clean but it wasn’t. it was a conscious, repeated, slightly annoying decision i had to make over and over while nauseous, to stop referencing an experience that no longer existed as the benchmark for the one i was in.
i came back to my breath and my body. not as a practice, as a survival mechanism. my brain wanted to prosecute the trip. mercury in retrograde was doing exactly what it was meant to. this retrograde was in pisces, governing intuition and the unconscious and spiritual closure. it was dissolving old templates about how things are supposed to unfold. every disruption was a hand pulling me out of a story and back into the room.
my body was holding something quieter. underneath the vertigo and the frustration, there was a steadiness i hadn’t felt before. a groundedness that had nothing to do with the setting. it showed up as new friends who showed up with imodium, a new friend gave 30-minute check-ins with a plan to make sure i was hydrating. who spoke in “here’s how we can get through this” instead of “you will get through this”. and the wonderful friend who curated the whole experience, who took the brunt of the paper cuts, even with missed connections all around us in the cancun airport, her and i’s connection took off.
i stayed present. when everything went sideways my instinct was to fix, to force, to narrate my way out of the discomfort, to bring people into my discomfort. staying meant not doing any of that. staying meant being inside the mess long enough to notice what was growing in it.
and at one point during the retreat, it rained. and we danced in it. not because we’d arrived at some graceful spiritual resolution, but because my body wanted to move and the rain was warm and the sand was soft, and i had a new friend who equally loves EDM, and another who wanted to throw her breast milk into the fire as an offering, and the lightning was providing the most epic show, and we were all giggling.
and i stopped waiting for the version of the trip that was going to make sense.
the women
oh my god, the women. any of my illusions of suffering were a disservice to being fully present to my absolute favorite part of life. the people.
our sessions were some of the most potent i’ve ever led, and i think that had as much to do with who was in the space as it did with my gifts as a psychic medium.
these women arrived carrying things. you could see it in the way they held their shoulders on the first day, the careful way they shared, the slight hesitation before they spoke. some came with questions they’d been circling for months. some came not knowing what they needed and hoping the jungle and the ocean and the distance from their regular life would shake it loose.
and then over the course of 3 days, something happened that can never fully be explained no matter how many retreats i experience. this is where i say “you kinda just had to be there”, but i will do my best to paint the picture.
it’s not one breakthrough moment. it’s whatever the opposite of “death by a thousand paper cuts” is? awakening by a thousand page turns? i just know it’s felt as subtle, and it’s more real because its presence is accumulating. it is tension held long enough to soften on its own.
it’s the moment someone says the thing they didn’t plan to say and the air gets very still and everyone in it changes shape a little.
it’s connection, which sounds like a word that’s lost its weight until you watch a woman who walked in guarded walk out soft. until you see a skeptic become a believer. you see someone’s face after they’ve been truly heard, maybe for the first time in a long time. the shift is in the eyes first. then the jaw. then the way they sit.
by the closing circle these were not the same women. and the things they shared about what had moved in them during our time together held precious in my heart cavity. i don’t have a tidy explanation for how this works but i hope your takeaway is something like presence, time, willingness, the alchemy of a small group of humans choosing honesty over performance, curiosity. that’s the closest i can get.
and the hardest parts of the experience have already become a great story.
if you felt something reading this
i run an intimate virtual intuition practice circle where we meet weekly-ish. we work with how to move through hard things, energetic boundaries, ancestral healing, messages from the body, and the unglamorous discipline of staying present when your whole system wants to bolt. there’s one spot left in the spring session, and there won’t be another one until fall.
you are standing at a point in the cosmos right now. the field is moving around you. whatever picture you packed for the future might dissolve the second you arrive in it, and what assembles in its place might be something your planning mind never could have built.
with love and electrolytes. stay curious,
christina
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