Enjoy your Adventure: How Conscious Expression Transforms Experience into Expansion

I was alone in Peru when the message arrived. After a week in the jungle outside Iquitos—ceremony, silence, heat, the slow unlearning that happens when the familiar is stripped away—I finally had access to the internet again. One of the first things I did was message my friend Sage Rose. It was because of her encouragement that I had taken the trip in the first place. Though she wasn’t there physically, she had been very present in spirit throughout the journey. I told her I had given Mother Aya her regards during my second ceremony.

She replied simply: “Enjoy your adventure 🙂”

At the time, it felt casual. Kind. Supportive. I carried on with my travels, returned home, and resumed ordinary life. A letter from Sage had arrived while I was away. I wrote back. I texted. There was no response. A few days later, something nudged me to check the comments under her most recent post. That was where I learned she had left her body only the day after her last message.

In the weeks that followed, those three words echoed in me with a gravity I hadn’t heard before. Enjoy your adventure. Not as encouragement. Not as cheer. As instruction. As blessing. As responsibility.

Grief has a way of clarifying questions you didn’t know you were asking. Mine wasn’t why did this happen? It was how am I participating in what happens to me? I began to notice that enjoyment, or its absence, had little to do with circumstances themselves. It had everything to do with how I met them—how I responded, how I expressed what moved through me.

That realization didn’t arrive as a philosophy. It arrived as a demand. Life continued to present challenge, beauty, loss, synchronicity, confusion. What changed was my relationship to my own agency within it. Somewhere between the jungle and the aftermath, I began to see that enjoyment was not something I waited for. It was something I practiced.

The Question Beneath Enjoyment

For a long time, I assumed enjoyment followed from the right conditions. If life aligned—if relationships stabilized, work felt meaningful, the body cooperated—then enjoyment would naturally arise. When it didn’t, I treated its absence as evidence that something was wrong or unfinished.

But experience kept interrupting that story.

Enjoyment would surface during grief. A quiet sense of rightness would appear while nothing external had improved. Just as often, favorable circumstances would leave me feeling constricted or dull. Over time, the pattern became impossible to ignore. The question beneath enjoyment revealed itself. It wasn’t what is happening to me? It was how am I relating to what is happening?

Circumstances arrive largely outside our control. Our relationship to them does not. And yet, most of us are rarely taught to recognize that relationship as something active or creative. We move through life reacting, coping, adapting—often without noticing that we are constantly shaping our experience through expression.

Expression as the Hinge

Over time, I began to notice three movements repeating themselves in my life: what I encountered, how I responded, and what shifted as a result. I came to understand these as experience, expression, and expansion.

Experience is what we are given. We are born into bodies, families, cultures, and histories we did not choose. We inherit patterns—personal, ancestral, collective. Much of this arrives before language or consent. Experience belongs largely to what has already taken shape.

Expression is how we meet what we are given. It is the present-moment act of translation, where inner life becomes visible through speech, action, silence, creativity, restraint, and attention. Expression is always happening now. Even withdrawal expresses something. Even avoidance speaks.

Expansion is what follows. It is what opens—or narrows—as a result of how experience has been expressed. Some expressions widen our sense of self and possibility. Others contract it. Over time, these patterns shape the trajectory of a life.

Because I come from a background rooted in performance and embodied expression, expression itself was never foreign to me. What was less clear was its role as the hinge between what has been and what is becoming. I had always expressed—but not always consciously.

Expression was the place where I consistently felt my agency most clearly. I could not choose what arrived, but I could choose how I embodied my response to it.

There is a cost to unconscious expression. When responses are driven by habit, fear, or residue from the past, experience tends to repeat itself. Familiar patterns return wearing new costumes. What felt like bad luck, I began to realize, was often unexamined continuity.

Conscious expression is not always comfortable. It may require risk, honesty, restraint, or change. But suppressed expression carries a cost as well. What is not expressed does not disappear; it accumulates. Over time, the gap between inner truth and outer behavior widens, and enjoyment drains away.

I saw how easily survival can be mistaken for strength, especially when a life no longer fits. Endurance without alignment is a slow erosion. Expression is the mechanism through which alignment is restored.

Love clarified this further. For much of my life, love was something I felt rather than something I practiced. Over time, I came to see that love lived most reliably in expression, not sentiment. It took shape in how I listened, how I told the truth, how I held boundaries, and how I stayed present when disengagement would have been easier.

Enjoyment followed the same logic. Over time, I found it harder and harder to avoid the sense that enjoyment was not something that simply happened to me. It was something I participated in.

This is where the idea of choice can sound harsh. It risks moralizing enjoyment as a virtue to be earned. That has never been my meaning. Choice here refers to agency over expression. We cannot choose every experience. But we can choose how we meet it.

When expression aligned with inner truth, enjoyment returned quietly. Not as reward, but as resonance—the felt sense of being inside one’s life rather than watching it pass. Enjoyment began to function as a signal for me. When it was present, something felt aligned. When it faded, it often pointed toward fracture.

Expansion followed naturally. Not because I chased it, but because something integrated. Energy once bound up in resistance or pretense was released. Capacity widened. The same circumstances began to yield different meanings.

An Invitation

I don’t offer this as doctrine or prescription. It is simply a way of paying attention—one that has helped me remain in relationship with my life when certainty is unavailable.

For some, this kind of reflection unfolds privately. For others, it’s helped by conversation. When exploration feels easier in dialogue, I offer spiritual counseling as a space to reflect, articulate, and integrate what’s emerging—without prescription or hierarchy. However the inquiry continues, the adventure remains your own.

The adventure is already underway. Experience continues to arrive. Expansion continues to unfold. Between them, expression quietly determines how inhabited that movement feels.

I still don’t fully understand the weight of the words Sage offered me. I doubt I ever will. What I know is that they continue to guide me—not as reassurance, but as invitation.

The adventure does not wait for readiness. It does not pause for clarity. It simply unfolds. How we choose to meet it remains, always, in our hands.