What’s a Sparkstrom, Anyway?

What do spark and strom add up to? Feeling alive.

Spark is a person's essence. Origin point. That unaltered inner place you can unwind yourself to and feel safe and whole and, well, deeply like you. Other names for it might be authentic self, true self, Self with a capital S, life force, soul, inner light, spirit, and loads more. You probably have a favorite. Mine is spark.

Strom is a stream or current, just like life—in motion and always flowing. Unless its dried up I guess, but let's not go there.

For years, I couldn't feel life's stream, which is a glossy way of saying that I didn't feel alive. I kept trying, but I was standing on the banks and couldn't find a way in. If you try and can't enough times, you can end up feeling like a failure. A failure at living, which as you can imagine, is pretty depressing.

Standing there on the bank, separate from life, I used to think about life, how to live it, and the meaning or reason for it. What I needed was to feel my body standing on the bank. Feeling sensations and emotions wasn't always easy, but I slowly worked through pain I didn't even know I was carrying around. It didn't all disappear—just enough though to clear a path to that spark inside me. My spark. The place where I feel safe and whole and deeply like me.

You know what happened next? Life was flowing along like it always had been, except I was in it. Spectacularly experiencing it.

Spark on.