Currency of Friends

One of my closest spiritual soul sisters finally came up to Yorkshire for a visit.

I gathered my whole family around for dinner so everyone could meet each other properly, because they’ve all been hearing about one another for twenty years. Twenty years of stories, finally sitting at the same table.

Santosh came up specifically to work with my granddaughter Sienna’s little hip, and she was very pleased with her progress. But it turned out she had her own friends up here too, women she hadn’t seen in ages, and she treated them while she was here as well. Her visit rippled out further than just me.

She’s a classically trained cranio-sacral osteopath, and she has saved me many, many times over the years. We first met at the Mind Body Spirit Festival in London, where she became a client of mine, and somewhere along the way we just started exchanging. Healing each other. We’ve travelled together since. We’ve worked deeply together, for years.

But having her here this weekend was honestly like having a high spiritual master teacher living with me for four days. She is so pure. Everything she said was God infused wisdom. It felt like being handed reminders of the highest points of being, of everything, over and over, in the smallest ordinary moments, the kind of reminders you don’t get to keep close on a normal day to day. To have them for four days straight was such a gift.

She talked to me about surrender. Surrendering to the will of God, so that we ask God to use us as He sees fit, to create light for others, in the smallest way and the biggest way, as we walk. To walk with kindness and compassion in whatever we do, free from ego.

Now, “surrendering to the will of God” can sound like He’s out there somewhere, separate from us, external. But that’s not how I hear it. I hear our Father as God, as my creator, protector, and advisor. It’s Co-Creation. She talked about the “I AM,” which so many masters teach, and how it misses the point! It isn’t I AM. It’s Co-Creation. We are One. Collective. Think collective.

All of this landed on me even more deeply than the treatments did, if I’m honest. It showed me, again, how important it is to actually connect with my best friends, not just carry them in my heart from a distance. I recently saw Flaminia in Italy and Barbara in France. I was lucky enough to spend the winter with Leisa, who is back in Australia. And now to have Santosh here, in my own home, working on my granddaughter, meeting my family, introducing me to her friends, felt like a privilege I don’t want to take for granted again.

She gave me a treatment too. And then gifted me a shirodhara treatment, warm oil poured slowly over the third eye for a full hour, with a head, neck, shoulder and face massage woven through it. And to be blessed with an authentic Ayurvedic centre on my doorstep. Well. An hour from my doorstep. Close enough.

I have so many close friendships with extraordinary women. Women I rarely actually connect with. Why? Because of life, I suppose. That’s the honest answer. But it’s something I’ve been actively changing this year.

And here is the part I keep coming back to. Currency only has value while it’s moving. The moment it stops circulating, it’s just paper sitting in a drawer. Friendship works the same way. It isn’t something you bank and hold onto, proud of how many years it’s lasted. It’s something you keep exchanging, treatment for treatment, presence for presence, wisdom for wisdom, or it stops being wealth at all.

Santosh and I didn’t stay close for twenty years because we never stopped exchanging. And what struck me most about her visit is that it didn’t stop with me. She brought her own currency with her, and spent it on friends of hers up here too, women she hadn’t seen in far too long. That’s what real currency does. It doesn’t stay locked between two people. It moves through a whole community, the smallest way to the biggest way, exactly like the surrender she spoke of.

So the wealth of a friendship was never what we built up over the years. It’s what we’re still willing to exchange today. I have so much of that wealth sitting quietly around me, in women I love and rarely see. This year, I’ve started spending it. And I’ll also become a regular at the Green Ayurveda center in Wetherby, I highly recommend it.  So Santosh’s kindness impacted their business too!

It’s made me look at other parts of my life the same way. What else would I like to redesign, or build again from scratch. Because we are our own architects. Nobody else is going to draw these plans for us. For me flow is important. How am I going to co-create that with God’s intention?

I’m asking different questions now.