The paper soft bark climbs in light tan colored camouflage patterns to the blue above.  The sky is tickled by the feather like leaves of the tree canopies.  Every so often, a wild flash of white sporadically passes from one canopy to the next; one of the wild yellow crested cockatoo that call these trees home.  There are black birds that never fail to make me laugh.  They sit on branches just overhead and emit a call that sounds nothing like a bird call but instead like a really fat cat that is complaining about an empty food dish.  I have nicknamed them Garfield birds after the cartoon character as a result.  The soil is moist underfoot.  I walk in the ancestral magic of this foreign land not as a trespasser, but as a guest.  Despite the welcome, I am not of the land enough to feel relaxed.  Every so often my presence startles one of the nearby wallabies and sends them hopping away.  The time gap between hops and the heaviness of them on the hollow of the ground sounds much more ominous than a sound that one would expect to originate from the adorable creatures that create it.  To someone like me, who belongs to the Rockies of the Western United States, the sound triggers trepidation.  We do not have any creatures that hop like that in the land that I am from, so instead it sounds like enormous single footsteps through the bush.  The only creature that kind of ‘footstep’ could originate from is a Big Foot or some other creature that we all secretly believe exists and fear encountering.   

 There is a grating intensity to Australia.  The land and the people share it.  There is nothing soft about it.  It hits me the second I land here.  It is the kind of energy you would expect to belong to a renegade, no rules kind of environment.   Alas, Australia is constricted by rules and regulations.  It feels more German in that people are preoccupied with keeping each other under control in terms of right and wrong, allowed and disallowed.  In general as a people, Australians are not conflict averse in the slightest.  It is difficult to stay out of trouble when you come from another place and are not up to speed on what the rules and regulations actually are… No one fears to angrily inform you on what they are.  In general, softness is the practice that the people of Australia need to implement the most.  

 Ironically my trip here this time started on that note.  It turns out that we didn’t procure the correct type of visa for this trip.  I’ve become big enough that like any celebrity, I will be made an example of if anything is not exactly as it should be.  As a result, I had the worst experience of my international career upon arrival.  After a 15 hour flight, I was separated from the rest of the team and I was taken to a white jail like room with a window looking out at a collection of officers all debating what to do with me and making phone calls and reviewing security tapes.  For hours, I was interrogated, cross-examined, threatened and then shamed for not knowing better in my position as a ‘leader of something that is so much bigger than myself’.  I came so close to not being let into the country, sent back to the US and being banned for years from re-entering, it is actually mind blowing that someone made the final call to let me in.  It is so strange to experience the contrast that comes with fame.  On the one hand some people and some places give you special treatment and special welcome.  On the other hand, some people and places love to punish you as an example.  Being treated like a criminal for hours upon arrival was a bad way to start the trip.  It was a genuinely traumatizing experience, not just for me but for the members of the team who traveled with me.  It was one of those defining moments where you have no option but to move up to a different level.  I can no longer travel to any part of the world without involvement from immigrations agents and special invitations.  I so hate this aspect of the society we have created.  After that experience, I completely get the fear that the Mexican immigrants in the United States live with every day.  It is a fear that no one should ever have to live with.  

Our trip began in Melbourne with a synchronization workshop.  The Dominant negative vibration of Melbourne is: “I don’t fit in”.  The people of Melbourne share this feeling that they don’t fit in anywhere.  There is a resignation to the idea that ‘no one will ever really get me’.  When a person can’t fit in no matter what they do, they have no other option but to build an identity around their difference.  They become identified with what makes them different and embrace their ‘specialness’ in an almost condescending way.  But that is a coping mechanism to hide the pain of feeling like a unicorn in a world of horses.  Everyone really wants to belong.  Everyone wants to be understood.  

This vibration is the most interesting to watch in the overflowing hipster community in Melbourne.  From the outside, because the hipster community is so very large in Melbourne, it would seem that to be a hipster is to fit in there.  But people who are considered to be hipster, usually become hipster because they don’t fit in and are so different.  So it does not seem to matter that they have created a society in which they do fit in.  They seem to be the same and they seem to belong if you are looking upon them from the outside.  But on the inside, even when they prefer the same things, they don’t feel they fit in with each other.  It is a city full of ‘solo artists’ in life.

The dominant positive vibration of Melbourne is: Alternative.  Like so many cities, the dominant positive vibration of a place comes from the dominant negative vibration of the place.  The fact that no one feels they really fit in makes them less bound by tradition and less bound by social norm.  The people of the city have the energy of looking for other options.  Even when they follow rules and regulations they seem to find every loophole or way to conform to the rules but get away with what they want to get away with.  This is super healthy because it is a direct form of expansion.  The energy of alternative is the energy of forward movement even when energy meets with a roadblock.  

Other than surveying the city for an energy diagnosis, we could not do much sight seeing in Melbourne because the tour schedule was so tight.  We left the day after the workshop for Sydney.  The day we flew to Sydney was one of the best days I’ve had in years.  The flight from Melbourne to Sydney was exquisite.  The ocean was striking turquoise.  The clouds looked painted.  We drove an hour outside of Sydney, laughing almost the whole way, to an area of Pittwater Bay that is only accessible by boat.  We could not believe how beautiful this place was.  I made the team try Pavlova (my favorite dessert in the world, which is the national dessert of both new Zealand and Australia).  We took water taxis with all of our groceries, luggage and equipment into the bay to the ocean front youth hostel we rented for the Completion Process training.  The place was so beautiful that it was actually painful.  A wild paradise.  The entire community of Pittwater Bay was like its own world.  That night, we played jazz music and I cooked for the team.  We burnt a wood fire and cuddled on the couch to watch an episode of my favorite TV show right now, Chef’s Table. 

The training was awesome.  I loved it.  Between the magic of the place and the magic of the work of the Completion Process itself it just felt epic.  And the relationships developed there were super deep.  I love these trainings so much because the connection we all form with one another is similar to one you would form with a group of people you were stranded with on an island.  It creates a deep familiarity and a camaraderie that is only understood by other people who were there too.  I postponed leaving Pittwater Bay for as long as I possibly could before coming to downtown Sydney to visit my Australian Publisher and hosting the 3 day Mirror event.  

The place we stayed at in Sydney was like Fort Knox, the kind of apartment complex where if you didn’t have the key, you couldn’t get in the front door and then you couldn’t get up the elevator (which also required the key to match the specific floor the apartment was on) and then you couldn’t get into the apartment itself.  Dominant energies in cities don’t usually change.  Sydney is no exception.  Abrasion is still the dominant negative vibration of the city.  And Gregariousness is still the dominant positive vibration of the city.  I wrote a more in depth synopsis of this energy diagnosis of Sydney in the blog I wrote last time I was here.

  
We went to my favorite musical, The Book Of Mormon, one night for entertainment sake.  I saw it in London as well.  Just like the first time I saw it, I was the loudest person in the audience.  I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.  When you grew up in the Mormon culture, the musical is leagues better than it is for the average viewer.  And it is already hysterical.  I also took a Sydney harbor cruise to see the sites with all the other Asian tourists and hear some history of the place.  Other than that, it was down to business.

The Mirror event was really good.  The attendees seemed to love it and on the last day I closed out the workshop with so much energy I was bouncing off the walls.  We have removed the meet and greet from my events for a long time now because my security team is the one who gets to decide in each city if it can be done based on the level of security threat.  This was the first event in a long time where they decided it was a go ahead.  So I got to hug and take pictures with the attendees again.  

 
When I touch someone, I get an even more intense download of energy and information from them.  To have the people standing in front of me who are suffering or who have suffered and for whom I have been a beacon of light in their darkest times awakens a part of my soul.  When I hold them in my arms, I can feel their need for me to exist as a guide, as someone who sees them and as a promise that something better exists. I can convey that thing they need from me with touch and by looking into their eyes.  I was one of them.  I am one of them.  And as such, I feel like I represent them in the world at large as a leader who is leading the movement into a better life and all the things we all so desperately need, especially emotionally.  It fills me full of a sense of mission that makes all opposition seem weak in comparison.  It is a mission worth dying for.  There is no life for me outside of this.  All else offers emptiness in comparison.
   I am ready to go home.  This trip has reminded me that I am living the exact life I want to live in terms of purpose.  It has strengthened my purpose.  It has allowed me to connect with even more incredible people than I already know.  It has allowed me to have contact with people whom I am connected to through my work, that I would never meet if I did not come to their area of the globe.  It has allowed me to touch the unique magic of the Australian bush.  In perfect irony, as I end this visit, a kookaburra is actually literally sitting in a gum tree, just like is described in the famous Australian ditty.  His fat, downy body and his large kingfisher shaped head is dappled by soft light.  He seems genuinely calm and happy, as if he has no concerns in the world.  It is one of the most stereotypical Australian sights you can see.  When the kookaburra sings, it sounds like laughter.  Between its chill demeanor and the way it seems to laugh through the world, all I can think is I hope that people one day, whether they are Australian or not, will learn to travel through the world like a kookaburra.