One Sunday afternoon in April a traveller and a podcaster meet and share a drive through the mountains of Vancouver Island. As a result, the podcaster is deeply moved by the message the traveller, and the universe, had for her.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Show Notes

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Hello explorers and welcome to Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor. This is episode 59. Thank you for being here with me today.

I want to remind you that if you’re interested in joining the Unbroken Community, or at least getting on the waitlist there, you can do that at AlexandraAmor.com/community. That’s going to be an interactive twice monthly group call, lots of interaction with me, lots of support, lots of community, as the name implies, and connection with your fellow explorers. And all the details are on that webpage. As I said, AlexandraAmor.com/community.

Second thing. Last week in Episode 58, partway through, I talked about the red, yellow, green light of truth of tuning into or leaning into connecting with our intuition about moving forward, which is going to connect to today’s show, actually. My friend who listens to this episode pointed out to me, she said, “When you’re talking about the red, green, yellow light, are you seeing that visually?” which made me realize, Oh, I didn’t really explain that properly, then.

So when I say I would get a green light in my body, what I mean is, I feel it somewhere inside me. Now I specifically feel that feeling in my solar plexus, that’s the place where I always feel everything. You know how we talk about it, we have a gut feeling, I think that’s where that expression must come from. Because I always feel those things in the area of my solar plexus. Sort of behind my belly button. That part of my body.

When I feel green light feeling it’s there. I don’t see a green light or anything. Same with red, and then yellow. The yellow light’s kind of interesting, because it’s either it’s a little bit binary, you know, it’s a yes or no, very often. And I guess sometimes it feels like a well, you know, maybe maybe not, there’s a bit of hesitation there, it’s less, perhaps less dramatic than a full a no, full stop. So that maybe we could classify that as yellow light.

In your own experience, you might, if you give the traffic light metaphor a try, if you’re practicing it, your experience might be different.

Or maybe it’s more of a knowing than a than a than a physical feeling. Mine has a little bit of physicality to it, it’s a knowing for sure. But it’s there’s also definitely a feeling going on, in like I say in my solar plexus. So I wanted to be clear about that. And clarify. Thank you to my friend for asking that question. I appreciate it.

When I’m recording these episodes, where I it’s just me talking, I’m just staring at the computer screen and talking into the microphone. And it’s easy to get rolling along and forget to explain things as clearly maybe as I should. If someone’s not there to ask questions. It can be easy to just sort of barrel along. So if you ever have a question, same thing, and something like that, where something’s not clear, that I’ve talked about, I hope you’ll submit that and let me know.

You can do that at AlexandraAmor.com/question.

Okay, so on to today’s episode, which I haven’t as I’m recording this, I realize I haven’t got a title for it yet. But that’ll come next.

I wanted to share this for a number of reasons, which will become clearer and I’ll explain more about that as we get to the end of the actual story itself.

A few days ago, I was driving home from visiting my friend, the same friend who asked the question about the traffic light. And it’s a quite a long drive. It’s three hours, I live in pretty remote area. So I was coming along through this area of Vancouver Island, it’s actually quite well known. It’s called Cathedral Grove. And you can stop and park your car. And there’s all these enormous cedar trees. It’s kind of like the redwood forest in California, these just gigantic trees. And there are trails through the trees. And it’s a really popular tourist area in the summer.

The speed limit goes from 80 down to 50. You have to really slow down because there’s people crossing the road. So I was just toodling along, on my way to the last town before I get onto the highway, which is really just a two lane road, to come to my town where I live on the coast. And as I drove through this Cathedral Grove area, there was a young fellow standing on the side of the road, and he had a backpack. He had one of those cardboard signs, when you’re a hitchhiker just sort of a rectangle. And he’d written on there in sharpie, the nickname for the town where I live.

The town is called Ucluelet but the nickname is Ukee. He had this sign that said Ukee.

And then, for a couple of reasons, my brain got involved, and I didn’t pick him up.

The first reason was that I needed to go to the next town, the last town before I came over to the west coast of the island, I needed to run a bunch of errands. And so in just a split second when I saw him and I got that knowing feeling, a green light, we could say, I need to pick this guy up. I thought I can’t do that, because I have these errands to run. And when I’m running the errands in Port Alberni, which is the name of the town, I’m not going to leave a stranger in my car while I do that, and, or make them get out of the car, and then lock the car while I’m in the store.

I also didn’t want him sort of trailing around. My mind did all these calculations in like I say, a nanosecond. So that was the first thing.

The second thing was that I’m a woman travelling alone. And he’s a man. And it’s not the safest thing to do in those circumstances for a woman to pick up a hitchhiker. It’s not something I do. It’s not something I had actually ever done until I moved here to the coast. I won’t go into all the details about why it happens sometimes here on the coast, but it does. But I’ve never picked up someone outside of town, let alone two hours away from where I live.

And my brain also said, you don’t have to be responsible for this guy, just because he’s going to the same place that you are. So all this is racing through my mind. And simultaneously, well, the wiser part of myself just knew not only that I should pick him up, or could pick him up, but that it was meant to be that I would pick him up.

I keep driving. And because of this little battle now that’s going on between my head and my and the wiser parts of myself, I start thinking, “Should I turn around, should I pull a U turn?” I’m looking for spaces on the road where I can do that. Then if I did that, I’d have to do another U turn back where he was. And then another part of me is saying, you’re not responsible for everybody. You don’t have to pick this guy up, just because he’s going where you’re going. And so I just carried on.

And there’s this big hill that you climb, so I’m driving up the hill thinking oh, geez, you know, I really should have picked that guy up. And then yeah, but I couldn’t I have these errands, blah, blah, blah. So around in circles I went. I come to the town Port Alberni and I go and run my errands. And it probably took me, maybe half an hour, maybe 45 minutes. Trying to remember what I did. Yeah, it probably wasn’t any longer than that I had to drive to a few different places, run these errands might have been close to an hour, but I don’t know.

I go to my final stop, I do the errand. I walk back out to my car, I get in my car. And I’m sort of mentally saying to myself, Okay, is there anything else? Sort of checking my list. Is there anything else I need to do now? Or is that it? I talked to myself about it. And I say no, I think that’s it. I think I’ve done everything I needed to do. So I go to put my seatbelt on and start the car up.

So off I go. And sure enough, about five or seven minutes into the drive there he is on the side of the road with his little Ukee sign near a gas station coming towards the outskirts of town. So I pull over and I unlock the doors and he climbs in, puts his stuff in the back seat. And off we go. So right away, I could tell he was just the loveliest guy. He’s traveling around the world.

He’s originally from France. And he’s probably 25 or 27, something like that. And this is something that he’d always he’s always wanted to do. He’s going to take about three years and really trying to a whole bunch of different places. Some places he’s going to work. Here in Canada, he doesn’t have a work visa so he was doing something called I think it’s called work away. It’s an app. And the reason he was coming to Ucluelet was some people had connected with him on the app. And he was coming to help them build a deck or something. In exchange for that, because he didn’t have a work visa, you get room and board basically.

And this is the information that came out. And few other things about how when he was 10 years old, his family, it’s him, his mom and dad. And then him and his three brothers traveled around the world for a year. So that was maybe where the seed got planted about his love for travel. And he shared the other places that he was going to go. And the different countries and the reasons that he was going there.

He told me a little bit about where he’d been so far and the things he’d done and that kind of stuff. And at one point, while he was talking, I had asked him a question he was answering. I silently in my head just said to the universe, okay, you know, this is really fun. And he’s a nice guy. This is really interesting. And I’m really curious about the reason that he’s here. Like, what’s the message here?

What happened and that magic wasn’t like you see in the movies where there’s a big booming voice like in Field of Dreams, where there’s a voice that says you need to do this thing, you need to pick up this hitchhiker. I didn’t have any visions or anything. It was just a really strong, like I say, knowing I needed to pick this guy up and bring him with me to our town.

I was really kind of excited as we drove along and curious, like I say really nice feeling of curiosity and enjoyment. His English was impeccable. I was so embarrassed. English is the only language I speak and here he was, he grew up speaking French and then he was speaking English impeccably, like I say. I think there were two words he couldn’t think of; one was hail. He described it as like snow, but little hard balls. And then there was one other phrase, oh, it was a sailing phrase. To get to North America, he had sailed from Italy to the Caribbean with a guy, same sort of thing, a work exchange thing. No sailing experience, by the way, and he just did this.

So, I had posed my question to the universe. And if nothing had happened, if it was just a nice journey with this young fellow, that would have been fine, too. But we’re partway along the drive for maybe, I don’t know, 45 minutes in. I could really tell that it based on the stories that he was sharing, and his attitude and the experiences that he was talking about, that there was just this deep trust in him of the universe that he would be, and I don’t know, if he would use that phrase of life, maybe he might say, I don’t know that he could just go along, and everything would work out.

I asked him if he had had any difficult experiences. And he did describe a couple, specifically with the captain of the ship that he had sailed over from Italy on. So it wasn’t a naive attitude that he had or a Pollyanna ish about it. He was very grounded. And intelligent, I could tell well educated, but also just really felt I could just feel him resting in the trust that he had in life, and that it would guide him and lead him and show him the way.

I reflected back and said, “Gee, it really seems like you trust that things will work out. Here you are all by yourself, traveling all around the world.” And I guess the reason that that question came up for me was because of where I had seen him the first time by the side of the road.

He had explained at some point in our conversation that he had got a ride earlier. He had come all the way from Victoria. I think he said I was his seventh vehicle that had been in that day. And so that really struck me; the unpredictability of that really struck me and how much trust you have to have that things will work out. It’s about five and a half or six hour drive if you just drive straight through from Victoria to where I picked him up. And so that’s a long way.

Anyway, so what was I saying? So he had a ride from another part of the island, and that person said that they would take him all the way through to Port Alberni, which is the town where I picked him up. But he knew they were going to come up to this Cathedral Grove area that I talked about with the big trees. And he really wanted to see that. It is really spectacular. He didn’t want to just pass it by. So he said to the guy that he was with, could you drop me there? Because I’d like to explore and they guy said of course. So that’s where they stopped, and he dropped this fellow off.

What struck me about that was that here this fellow was in a vehicle that would take him much further, but he let it go. Because he wanted or he felt compelled or interested to go to Cathedral Grove and have this little walk around. It was something that interested him and felt good to him. There was a good feeling about that. So he did it.

And then that another car would pick them up after that, and he would get all the way to where he needed to go. So the question that I asked him was about that was about trusting the way things are unfolding. He went on to explain. And as Sydney Banks always says it wasn’t the words that were really intriguing to me. He did talk about not having expectations. And that when you don’t have really strong expectations about things, things do just tend to unfold in a nice way.

The feeling just was that he really trusted that he would be okay. He embarked on this big adventure. And he talked about how every day, every moment. I don’t remember the exact words, but just about trusting what was happening and letting things unfold.

And like I say, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t ever think there are challenges in life. He certainly did. And he had had some. But the sense I got was how deeply relaxed and grounded he was in his home, in the world, and in the universe, and he knew that it would take care of him. It makes me emotional, actually, as I say that, as I connect with that feeling.

When that happened, when he said that, it was it was like somebody rang a bell in my head. It was like ding, ding, ding. This is why this guy is here. So I’ll talk about that a little bit more now, about my reflections about this experience, and what I think or what it meant to me.

And then I’m going to ask at the end of the show for you to share anything, any experiences like this that you’ve had, if you have something that really reflected back to you how we can trust the world and the universe, I guess the universe is maybe a better way to say that. So, reflections, a couple of things were going on for me.

I really appreciated that I did that. I do think it was the right thing to do to not pick him up in Cathedral Grove. I think maybe that was just where the seed was planted by the universe. Because it would have been super awkward with me running errands in in the town and I guess maybe I could have dropped him off somewhere and then picked him up later. I don’t know. But if I had done that, we wouldn’t have had such a deep conversation because it’s an hour and a half from where I picked him up to Ukee. So that was really a good amount of time for a really good deep conversation. Whereas if we had only done the shorter run from Cathedral Grove to Port Alberni, it’s only about 15 or 20 minutes and it just wouldn’t have been the same. I trusted the feeling that I got about picking him up.

As a woman traveling alone, of course, there were a dozen reasons why I shouldn’t have picked up a man traveling by himself. What I’m not saying is you should pick up all hitchhikers. That’s not at all what I’m saying. It’s just that in that moment, in that circumstance, I felt a sense of rightness and safety. Or maybe not safety so much but just rightness and clarity about the nudges that I was getting from the universe.

I appreciated that I listened to that. I didn’t ignore it. I stayed calm and I guess passing him by the first time gave me a little bit of time to adjust to the idea because I did think about it a tiny bit when I was running my errands, not a whole ton, but he would pop into my head every once in a while. So I could sort of reconnect with that feeling and, and feel the rightness of it again.

It’s something I think about a lot. I think about it, where to find that feeling of safety. And of course, it will come it does come insightfully and I think gradually over the years, the last few years, it has definitely grown in me that feeling of trust, and safety. But just personally, I tend to have such a, or have had such a strong grip on life, and really being an overachiever and controlling things and feeling a sense of hyper responsibility about everything.

I know where it comes from; it comes from how I was raised. All these things come from somewhere. And this is the way that my mind reacted to a lot of instability, a lot of fear as a child, a lot of not feeling safe, not feeling protected by my family, but the opposite feeling afraid of the people in my home who were supposed to protect me. So it’s something that I explore a lot of the time is how to get from where I am to where this traveler was mentally, spiritually.

I’d love to be more like him. To just put a backpack on and go travel around the world for three years would terrify me, although I’m twice his age, but still, I couldn’t. He was so relaxed, he was just so deeply relaxed. It was amazing. That was the first lesson that trusting of myself trusting of this nudge I felt like I was getting from the universe. Not talking myself out of it, or letting myself feel afraid. And instead, leaning into the good feeling that was there.

So this is very meta, it’s like two layers of the same thing. I trusted myself to pick him up. And then the message that he had was, trust the universe. Trust that you’re going to be okay, that the universe has your back. I nearly laughed out loud when when he started talking about his approach to things and how he trusted what was unfolding because it was just so perfect. Like I say, it was just so meta. This whole experience.

Because I thought, here’s the universe working really hard to get me a message that I am safe, that we are all safe, even when we’re in difficult, challenging circumstances. We are safe. We are more than just our physical bodies, of course. Even when we’re ill, even when we’re in really not great circumstances, we can never be disconnected from the essence of ourselves. And that is the thing that we can trust that is made of the universe. It is that connection to universal wisdom, universal insight, to our well-being. It is so innate.

It’s the fabric that we’re made of, we can never be separated from it.

So this was such a nice reminder about that. And yeah, like I say, it meant so much to me that the universe was working hard to get that message through to me. I don’t take that lightly. I really, really appreciated it on that day. I’m still kind of high from it, it was just really a nice experience.

And so what else have I got to say about that? Well, a couple things.

One is that I belong to a as we’re wrapping up here, I belong to a mastermind group that meets on Tuesday mornings. And last week, one of the ladies in the group mentioned that Michael Singer has said – and I don’t know where and I don’t know when he said this. He’s an author and a spiritual teacher. He wrote The Untethered Soul. And The Surrender Experiment. He surrenders to what’s happening in his life and says yes to everything. It’s been a while since I’ve read it.

And man, when she said that I resonated so much with it. Because relaxing, this is what I took from what she said, relaxing, means that we trust, we trust that we are held, and that we’re safe, and that it’s okay to not be hypersensitive, like I am, at time at times hypervigilant. We’re safe. And we can relax.

And it’s a paradox too, the more we relax, it feels like the easier things get, because we can respond to those cosmic nudges, and follow our wisdom, our instinct or our intuition much, easily more easily than when our mind is in overdrive. And it’s trying to figure everything out and control everything and make sure everything’s happening in the right way. And all that kind of stuff.

That’s what I’m aiming to learn to do more of. That’s my growing edge. And we all have them all the time. But this is the one that I’m particularly interested in, at this moment. Michael singer said the only practice we need is to relax. And so what Sydney Banks would say, he would use slightly different language, he would talk about following a good feeling. But those two sentences, phrases are pointing to the same thing.

It’s the same thing that that those two men are talking about. They are talking about tapping into Universal Wisdom, and intuition and wellbeing, and all those things that bring a good feeling and which is an important point to make. Throughout this whole thing, this experience with the hitchhiker it was mostly green lights, all along the way. The only time I hesitated, like I say, it was there in Cathedral Grove when I didn’t pick him up.

And yet, at the same time, that that was his own green light in a way it felt that felt like the right thing to do in that moment.

And then the moment changed and it felt like the right thing to do to pick him up the next time I saw him. So, yeah, a little example of following our own wisdom.

And then the final thing I want to say is I just want to reflect back. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this on the show or not; I took Dominique Scaffidi and Grace Kelly’s class at the beginning of the year, we started in January, called Living Miraculously. One of the things that Dominic and Grace suggest is keeping a list somewhere of miracles and synchronicities that happen to us. And the purpose of this is to do exactly what I’m talking about; it is to teach us that the universe is there for us, that it is supporting us and loving us. And we are connected to safety at all times.

That could be anything from some people really feel a sense of that connection when they see certain numbers, let’s say when they happen to look at the clock. And very often it has a certain set of numbers that a digital clock, or here’s a funny example that I wrote down today, actually. In the last 24 hours I’ve seen heard two mentions of a play, based on the SE Hinten book The outsiders. Now, I didn’t know it was a play. Of course, I read the book as a child, because you do and saw the movie then when it came out later, but hadn’t thought about The Outsiders in a million years. And then twice in 24 hours, somebody mentioned that it’s a play.

It’s like little love letters from the universe. They call them synchronicities, which is so perfect. These things that are just little nudges, little winks from the universe saying, Hey, we’re here, and you are loved, and you are cared for, and you are always, always loved and safe. And all those all those good feelings.

I keep them in an app on my phone. And what can happen is then, as we remember to write these things down or make a note of them, is you can go back and look. And suddenly you’ve got a list…right now I’ve it’s only been what January, March, like three and a half months, and I’ve got a list of dozens of these synchronicities. So for me, it’s been a really fun practice noticing that, and then given my desire to really learn about how it feels to connect to that kind of safe feeling that my hitchhiker friend had. This is one way to remind myself, it seems that that exists. So that’s why I do it. And if that sounds like fun to you, it’s something you could try as well.

I think my throat is getting dry. That’s probably enough talking for today, I would really like to hear if you have any reflections on this idea of safety in the universe and feeling confident enough to let things unfold and flow and how that makes you feel. Maybe you’re great at it already. Maybe it’s something that like me you’d like to develop, maybe you think it’s hogwash, and that there’s no way that we should follow that kind of impulse.

Whatever it is, I would love to hear your thoughts and reflections and like I said early earlier at the top of the show, you can send those to AlexandraAmor.com/question.

I think that’s it for today. I hope you are doing well and taking care and I look forward to talking to you again next week. See you then. Bye.

Featured image photo by Ruben Mishchuk on Unsplash

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