The Calling Before the Calling

Egypt Codes: Part One

This post begins the Egypt Codes: reflections and transmissions from a pilgrimage that profoundly shifted my understanding of consciousness, history, and my own soul. These stories unfold the way they happened, as the deeper teachings, awakenings, and shifts in consciousness began revealing themselves throughout the journey.

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Earlier that spring, something quiet but undeniable began stirring in me.

At the time, I didn’t realize it was the beginning of a conversation between my soul and a place that had been waiting for me for thousands of years.

I’ve always loved travel. In my twenties, it looked like Vegas weekends with my girlfriends, last-minute flights booked at brunch, partying in new cities, and that intoxicating feeling of freedom that came from leaving “real life” behind for a few days.

But over the past few years, travel has been shifting into something else entirely.

Sacred sites. Retreats. Pyramids and jungles and places where the earth seems to hum with memory, wisdom, and connection to something far older than we can easily explain.

Alongside that shift, another realization began quietly forming in me. I didn’t just want to visit these places. I wanted to bring people to them. I could feel a deep pull to lead journeys where the location itself becomes part of the initiation; where people don’t just travel somewhere beautiful, but they learn, discover, and grow while they’re there. I wanted people to come along for a trip that was an activation, transmission, or remembrance. 

At the time, I didn’t know that Egypt was already calling.

One day that spring, I was driving up to Sedona to visit one of my best friends, Leandra. It was one of those classic Arizona days: bright blue sky, a few scattered clouds, cool enough to feel fresh but warm enough to roll the windows down.

Somewhere along that drive, the download hit.

It wasn’t a gentle rising of an idea. It was more like a lightning bolt. “You and Leandra need to go on a trip together. Not a vacation - a pilgrimage. A life-changing journey.”

My whole body was covered head to toe in goosebumps (or God-bumps as I like to call them).

By the time I pulled into her driveway I knew exactly what I was going to say. I walked into her house, hugged her and her dog, looked her straight in the eye, and said, “We need to go on a pilgrimage together.”

She didn’t hesitate. She felt it too. There wasn’t any debate or analysis. Just an immediate, almost amused kind of certainty.

Yes.

That day we went hiking on West Fork Trail. Like the wanderers we are, we didn’t make it very far down the main path before veering off toward the creek with our picnic in hand. We settled onto some rocks by the water and did what we always do: talked about life, intuition, the mysteries of the universe, and whatever else felt alive in the moment.

Those conversations with Leandra have a way of opening strange and beautiful doorways. It’s that liminal space where big ideas slip out before you realize what you’re saying.

At one point I found myself telling her a story I had heard years earlier from one of my sound healing teachers, Three Trees.

He once traveled to Egypt and somehow managed to get his instruments into the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. At the time, instruments weren’t allowed inside, so he cut his didgeridoo into three pieces, hid the sections in his backpack, paid the guards to look the other way, and reassembled it once he was inside.

He told me that he stood there in the chamber, wearing white ceremony clothes, and played a full sound journey. According to him, it was one of the most profound experiences of his life.

As I told Leandra this story, I noticed something strange happening in my body. It felt less like talking about an interesting place and more like remembering somewhere I had been before.

I remember saying to her, almost absentmindedly, “Can you imagine how incredible that must have been?”

At the time, I didn’t realize that something in me was already responding to a place I hadn’t yet seen.

A few hours later, after we got back to her house, we remembered that we had wanted to check when Veda Austin would be in Sedona for her book tour. She was giving a talk literally across the street from Leandra’s home, so I pulled up her website and clicked on the events page, expecting to see a normal speaking schedule. Instead, staring back at me was something completely different.

A two-week sacred pilgrimage to Egypt in November.

I looked at Leandra and half laughed. “Wait… are we going to Egypt?”

We curled up on the couch and started reading the itinerary out loud. Day by day, temple by temple. Neither of us could pronounce half the names and we didn’t know what most of the places were.

But both of us had goosebumps. My goosebumps from the drive up had goosebumps. 

It felt less like reading about a future trip and more like recognizing a story our souls already knew. Then we reached the final line of the itinerary. My throat tightened in a mixture of disbelief and utter awe.

I looked at her and said, “You’re never going to believe what the last day is. A private two-hour vocal toning ceremony inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.”

The same chamber I had been talking about only hours earlier. The same story I had just told by the creek.

We sat there staring at each other in complete shock.

There are moments in life when you decide to do something. And then there are moments when a decision seems to move through you before your mind can catch up.

This was the latter.

We didn’t sign up that day. It was a big investment, and we both needed time to sit with it. But something had already shifted. The possibility had landed in the room, and neither of us could pretend we hadn’t felt it. Egypt had entered our story.

Over the next few weeks the pull only grew stronger. I found myself thinking about it constantly - while driving to class, brushing my teeth, lying in bed at night.

The pyramids. The temples. The King’s Chamber. E-G-Y-P-T.

It didn’t feel like planning a trip anymore. It felt like standing at the edge of something that would change my life.

Eventually I emailed the team hosting the pilgrimage to ask if there were still spots available. There were only a few left. When I told Leandra, we both knew we had reached that moment where a quiet possibility turns into a real decision.

We got on the phone and laughed in that slightly disbelieving way you do when you’re about to leap into something big.

“Are we really doing this?”

The truth was, we had already decided. We put down our deposits. Just like that, we were going to Egypt.

I remember sitting there afterward with this strange mix of awe and pride moving through my body. I’ve said yes to big things before (like leaving corporate to start my own business, getting sober, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in my own growth), but this felt different.

This felt like a tectonic plate shifting somewhere beneath the surface of my life.

Months later, in October, I received a free intuitive reading I had won in a raffle through one of my intuition teachers. During the session the reader said something almost casually. “You made a decision about five months ago that your life has been rearranging itself around.”

At first I assumed she was referring to something else I had invested in that year. But later that night it suddenly clicked. Five months earlier was when I had put down my deposit for Egypt. Of COURSE life was rearranging around that decision.

Saying yes to something that big doesn’t just add a new experience to your life. It reorganizes the entire trajectory.

By the time November arrived I had done all the practical preparation: withdrawing the cash I would need, buying the crossbody purse and water-bottle sling, obsessively planning what to wear in a country I had never been to.

For the first time in my life, I even started packing weeks in advance.

I also did something that has become a personal ritual before every trip - a fresh pedicure. Something about painting my toes always marks the beginning of a journey for me. It’s my quiet way of saying to the universe, alright… here we go.

Boarding the first flight, from Phoenix to London, felt like stepping deeper into something that had already begun long before the plane left the ground. My seatmate turned out to be a woman named Karen, a Londoner who now lives in Scottsdale and owns a store called Bead World. We ended up talking for almost the entire flight.

Angels. Grief. Sisters. Crossing over. The mysterious ways love continues to show up even after death.

She had the kind of gentle radiance that only comes from someone who has really lived. Traveling beside her felt less like a coincidence and more like the universe placing a kind guide on my path.

Somewhere during the flight we passed over what I’m almost certain was the glowing outline of Italy. I remember staring out the window, trying to wrap my mind around what my eyes were seeing.

This is the Earth.

That’s Italy.

And I am actually on my way to Egypt. Eeeeeeeek!!!!

By the time we landed in London, and then finally Cairo, it was the middle of the night. That strange hour when your body has no idea what time it is anymore, especially because we were now 10 hours ahead of home.

Walking through the airport felt surreal. Arabic signs everywhere. Conversations swirling around me in a language I couldn’t understand. The quiet realization that I was very far from anything familiar. But instead of feeling nervous, I felt something closer to childlike wonder.

At one point during the drive from the airport to our hotel, we crossed the Nile. I felt it before I even registered it. I’m driving over the N-I-L-E.

That river has witnessed thousands of years of human history. Empires rising and falling. Civilizations flourishing and disappearing. Prayers, songs, and stories carried along its banks for millennia. And there I was, in a van full of strangers who would soon become something much closer to family, crossing it in the middle of the night.

By the time we arrived at the hotel it was around three-thirty in the morning. Exhausted but wired, we stumbled through unfamiliar hallways and tried to figure out the mysterious light switches in our room. Eventually, we called the front desk who immediately sent a tiny Egyptian man in to help us. With enormous patience he showed us the master switch for the lights.

“Tick on. Tick off,” he kept saying with a smile.

Leandra and I repeated that phrase for the rest of the trip. It was such a small moment, but it felt like an unexpected kind of welcome. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a quiet voice said - you’ve crossed the threshold now.

The pilgrimage had begun.

And in many ways, I was only just starting to understand what I had actually said yes to.

The next morning would be our first full day in Egypt.