Cross-Floor Journey
It happened during a meditation…
I was following a guided visualization by one of my favorite spiritual leaders, and it was one of those practices where you close your eyes, settle in, and let the imagery take you somewhere you can’t quite reach with your busy, logical mind. The setup was simple enough: imagine a building. You live on the ground floor. The higher floors hold something worth climbing toward. Start climbing.
So I did.
But when I got to the first landing, something interesting happened. The stairwell didn’t continue. To keep going up, I had to step off onto the floor I’d just reached, walk the entire length of the building, and find the next stairwell on the other side.
I remember thinking: “am I doing this wrong? Why do I always seem to fumble with these things? I must have had too much coffee this morning. Why is Mingo licking my hand right now while I'm trying to meditate?”
But the more I sat with it, the more I realized I wasn’t doing anything wrong at all. I was being shown something.
You can’t skip floors. You can’t teleport. Each level requires you to actually enter it, walk around in it, inhabit it. Only then are you ready to go higher.
What the building taught me
In the visualization, the building had seven floors. The idea is that Spirit — higher self, the Universe, whatever you want to call it — would come down to the 5th floor and meet you there.
Gabrielle Bernstein is one of the teachers I learn from. What’s that? You haven’t heard of her? Holy shit, Batman… where have you been? Well, be sure to check out her website and her podcast. Okay, back to it… in the meditation, she uses a version of this building metaphor beautifully. In her version, you ascend to meet your spirit guides at the fifth floor. Gabrielle holds full credit for the foundation I was working from that day. What happened next, though? That came through me during the meditation. And it changed the way I understand how growth actually works.
The cross-floor walk.
The fact that you have to exit each stairwell, cross the entire floor, and enter the next one on the other side isn’t an inconvenience. It’s the whole point. You don’t get to pass through a floor — you have to be present on it. You have to walk it. You have to let it show you what it has for you. Stop by the water cooler and shoot the shit with others. I imagine a floor of office cubicles, each containing a task. You stop at each one, move along, and work your way to the stairwell on the other side finally.
What I’m getting at is that spiritual growth is not just vertical. It’s horizontal too.
A quick walk through each floor
Floor 1 is Recognition. You become aware that there are levels above you. Something cracks open — a book, a conversation, a moment of real pain — and you realize there’s more going on here than you previously understood. You can’t just nod at this floor and keep moving. You have to actually look around. What does life feel like now that you know there’s a ceiling above you? What are you seeing that you weren’t seeing before?
Floor 2 is Foundation. You start the practices. Meditation, journaling, maybe prayer, maybe affirmations — you’re learning the language. You’re meeting other people on this floor, people who speak the same vocabulary, and for the first time it doesn’t feel strange. Let yourself be a beginner here. You need every square foot of this floor.
Floor 3 is Integration. This is where it starts to feel real. The practices are changing you. You catch yourself reacting differently than you used to. You notice synchronicities — little moments where life seems to be winking at you. Old patterns start to loosen. You find yourself thinking: holy shit, this actually works. Walk this floor slowly. It’s trying to give you something permanent.
Floor 4 is Preparation. You can almost feel the next level. Something in you is clearing out — old resistance, old stories, old fears about what growth will cost you. This floor asks you to consciously make room. Are you open? Are you willing? Have you let go of what you carried up from the ground floor?
Floor 5 is Communion. Earned arrival. You get here not by moving fast but by moving fully. The guides — or the Universe, or your highest self, however you name it — are waiting here because you proved you were serious. Not by being perfect. By being present.
The room that kept changing
When I finally reached the fifth floor in that meditation, the space kept morphing. It started as the bedroom in the old house I live in — a 220-year-old Charleston home where I’ve done so much of my growth work over the past year and a half. Then it became the Colorado mountains where I’ve hiked and thought and exhaled. Then it became some kind of urban penthouse, a future I’m moving toward. Then it dissolved into something that didn’t have a shape at all — just warmth. Just presence.
I reflected on how many times I’d sat in that room and cried. How many times I’d been held by something I couldn’t see. How I’d been launched onto this path about 17 months ago — not willingly, not gracefully, but launched nonetheless — and how grateful I was for it now.
The room kept changing because I was on the right floor. That’s what fifth-floor consciousness feels like: it doesn’t follow the rules of the floors below it. Time gets fluid. Space gets flexible. Identity becomes less rigid. You stop being the person who is climbing and start being the person who has arrived somewhere worth arriving.
If it had felt completely solid and normal, I’d have known I hadn’t actually gotten there.
Why this matters beyond meditation
Here’s where this becomes more than a meditation experience.
Most of us, when we decide to grow — really decide, not just flirt with the idea — have this impulse to get to the good part fast. We want the results without the residency. We want the perspective without the process. We want to meet our guides on the fifth floor without having walked the second, third, and fourth.
I get it. I’ve done it. I’ve tried to sprint past floors I wasn’t ready to leave yet, and paid the price every time — because whatever I skipped always found me again, just further down the road, just harder to address, just more embedded.
You don’t get to skip floors.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand: you wouldn’t want to. Because every floor has something specific for you. Floor 3 has the exact realization you need before you’re ready for Floor 4. Floor 4 has the clearing that makes Floor 5 possible. The horizontal walk isn’t the obstacle. The horizontal walk is the curriculum.
Whatever level you’re on right now — that’s the right floor. The work isn’t to get off of it as fast as possible. The work is to walk it all the way across. To let it show you what it has.
The next stairwell is on the other side. It’ll be there when you’ve earned it.
Which floor are you on right now?
If you’re reading this, you’re already in the building. You’re already climbing. Don’t rush it. Don’t judge where you are relative to where you think you should be.
Walk your floor. Notice what it has for you. And when you get to the other side — when you find that next stairwell — you’ll know exactly why it took you as long as it did. That’s it, nothing else.
And I’m right here with you. Walking it together. Sending you hugs.
Cheers,
Your Pal, Kev
DO THE THING
Which floor are you on right now? For yourself… name the floor you’re on right now. Not the one you wish you were on. The actual one.
Identify one thing this floor is clearly trying to teach you that you've been resisting.
Then… journal or day dream about these two things for 10 minutes and see what comes of it in your mind.
Next? Release your grip. Stop looking for the other stairwell for a moment…
Walk your floor this week — all the way to the other side. Nothing else, just walk it.