Every meaningful relationship begins with a conversation.
When we first meet someone, the conversation is simple.
Who are you?
Where have you been?
What do you love?
What matters to you?
And then, if we continue showing up, something changes.
Weeks become months. Months become years.
Trust grows.
We stop explaining quite so much.
The conversations become more intimate, more honest, sometimes more playful. Eventually we can pick up the phone after months apart and begin somewhere in the middle-
You will never believe what happened.
No introduction necessary.
We know one another well enough to simply begin.
And after many years, the conversation changes again.
Now we can look backward as well as forward.
We remember who we were.
We have witnessed one another through joy, heartbreak, reinvention, ordinary Tuesdays, extraordinary adventures, mistakes, beginnings, and endings.
We have watched each other become.
And perhaps, because of that history, we sometimes hold a particulary precious kind of vision for one another:
the ability to see someone not only for who they have been, but for the essence of who they are - and for who they are becoming.
To recognize the beauty of their spirit: their goodness,tenderness,devotion,gifts,and capacity to love, contribute, expand, and change - even when they cannot yet see all of it for themselves.
To hold a faithful vision of the whole person,including the vunerable parts they may have learned to hide and the qualities the world may not always recognize or reward.
To be seen this fully-not only for our history, but for our essence and possibility-is a kind of homecoming.
There is a quiet force of nature within each of us. When we allow the whole self to step forward without apology-vunerability and all-and begin to embody both who we are and who we are becoming , our truth becomes something the world can feel.
Our relationships can become more open and honest because we are no longer asking others to discover a self we have not yet allowed ourselves to reveal.
What if we learned to hold that same loving vision for ourselves?
Building a conversation with your Inner Genie begins just as simply.
Who am I now?
What do I want?
What matters to me?
At first, the answers may come quickly.
Or perhaps they don't come at all.
That's all right.
Because this isn't one conversation.
It is a relationship.
As we return, the questions can become deeper.
Why does this keep happening?
What am I afraid to let go of?
What have I stopped allowing myself to want?
What would I choose if I weren't trying to satisify everyone else's idea of who I should be?
And eventually,perhaps the conversation becomes less about finding answers and more about recognizing ourselves:
Where we have been.
What we have survived.
What we have loved.
What we have learned.
What we are ready to release.
And who we are becoming.
Your Inner Genie doesn't need to hand you a perfect answer.
Perhaps its first invitation is simply to help you become more deeply aquainted with the person whose life you have been living all along:
You.
And over time, something beautiful can happen.
The voice that once seemed difficult to hear becomes familiar.
The conversation becomes easier to enter.
Trust grows.
And like an old friend with whom we can begin somewhere in the middle, perhaps one day we simply arrive and say:
All right. Here's what's happening...
And the conversation continues.