I went to Sedona looking for something I wasn’t sure I believed in. For years, I had read about its vortexes, places said to hold concentrated spiritual and metaphysical energy. When work brought me to Phoenix, I extended the trip, following a quiet pull that felt older than logic.
Sedona is overwhelming in the gentlest way. The red rocks don’t ask for your attention, they command it. And yet, despite all that grandeur, I felt nothing. No rush of energy. No awakening. Just beauty. I wondered if I was doing it wrong.
Then we arrived at the Amitabha Stupa, the last stop in our guided tour and everything slowed down…….. The signs were subtle: prayer flags moving softly in the wind, twisted juniper trees shaped by time and endurance, Scrub Jays flash blue-gray among the trees, silver flecks in the rock catching the sun only if you were paying attention. The energy here didn’t demand belief. It simply invited presence.
The stupa stood quietly among the rocks, built as a place of peace and prayer, welcoming all faiths. Visitors moved gently: circling, praying, or sitting in silence. People moved differently here. As if the space itself was teaching restraint.
The guide, seasoned by years of encounters with visitors, picked me from the crowd and asked me to place my hand just above the trunk of the twisted, torqued juniper. How did he know about my avid interest, my quiet eagerness to feel the energy? Taken aback, I hesitated: skeptical, curious, yet open enough. When I did it, warmth and tingling moved through my hand, sudden and undeniable.
Was it vortex energy? The universal life force? Or simply my body responding to stillness? I don’t feel the need to name it.
I walked around the Stupa in prayer, turned a prayer wheel, and offered gratitude, for the journey, for the mystery, for not needing answers. Some experiences don’t arrive all at once. They follow you home. They ask to be lived with. That, I think, was the real gift of Sedona.
RidewithTia 