Vignette

by Clare Dimond

BSH: Before Steve Hardison. This won’t mean much to anyone who hasn’t heard of Steve Hardison. Anyone who does know him will know exactly what I am experiencing right now.

He is The Ultimate Coach. I have travelled for eighteen hours—Marlborough to Heathrow to Los Angeles to Phoenix—to meet him today for two hours. I will meet him today. The fee and the travel costs are more than I earn from my yoga classes in a year. ‘How on earth do I make sure I make it worthwhile?’ I asked him. He said: ‘Just BE here.’

So, I guess that is what I will do. I don’t know if right now, at this minute, I am in the calm before the storm, or the storm before the calm. Either way, I know everything will look very different by noon today.

ASH: After Steve Hardison. I spent two hours with Steve Hardison, and I have absolutely no idea how to describe it. I wrote everything that was in my head as soon as I got to the airport, but in reading it again I realize that it doesn’t even slightly sum up what happened or why I feel so different.

We talked about mind and thoughts and how we can only experience the world through what we think of it. I can never experience it in any other way than through ‘Clare,’ but I can expand the perspective that is Clare.

He put his hands around my neck (after asking permission) and throttled me and invited me to do the same to him. He looked me straight in the eyes from one foot away and told me who he was in a way that was terrifying in its intensity. I was blown away by his certain knowledge.

He hugged me many times. He said he loved me many times.

He leaped around the room, pulling open drawers and cupboards to show me things to illustrate what he was saying. I am continually having revelations as to how everything he said and showed me was a metaphor for something else. Out of the blue, he talked about how to love someone fully. I asked him what he saw that I am not seeing. He said it is like I am wearing a baseball cap (I gave him one as a souvenir from London) that has a stick stuck to it, with a carrot dangling on a string. The carrot is just out of my reach. I can never get it until I realize that I have the carrot already. I just need to take the hat off and eat the carrot. Eat a carrot every day.

I love that the acronym for ‘After Steve Hardison’ spells ASH. It makes me think of a phoenix rising out of the ashes of non-commitments, of measly words that go nowhere, of wanting without valuing, of pretending to be less, of seeing others as less in any way.

I still have no idea what happened other than I spent two hours with the most alive, dynamic, peaceful, committed, in-love human being I have ever met. I feel a deeper sense of calm and more excitement than I have ever felt. I have everything I need and anything I want to create is there. It is who I am. How I show up. My words. That’s it.