Returning from My Five Year Sabbatical

Posted by Michael Skye on Feb 12, 2015 in Miscellaneous

Finally I feel READY. After an epic 5-year globe-trotting sabbatical, I am finally ready to return to the core of my calling and my life’s work, my iStands, this time with a sense of ease and a more aligned, less heroic business plan. I’m grateful for all of my experiences on my journey and all the beautiful people I met, many of whom took me in as one of their own… there are too many to name! I was blessed with the opportunity to lead 2 transformational safaris in Africa; dance Tango in Australia and Argentina, and samba in Brazil; facilitate transformational workshops on 4 continents; swim with elephants in Thailand and a whale in Panama; attend an Ayahuasca ceremony in Brazil and a sweat lodge in California; learn to speak new languages; write (and nearly finish) 3 books and 1 facilitator manual; invest in 2 young African entrepreneurs; celebrate Carnival in Brazil, Song Kran in Thailand and a wedding in Turkey; start an Internet center at a secondary school in rural Uganda; romance very different and beautiful women from many cultures; eat grasshoppers, scorpions and kangaroo; sleep in a Maasai manyatta, a pine bark teepee, an indigenous jungle village in Panama, an African convent and on a sidewalk in Bangkok; fight backyard MMA in Santiago; explore fascinating cities such as Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Brussels, Buenos Aires and Berlin; explore traveling through Gifting and living for 3 years with no cell phone; explore my own hidden shame and experience many cultural taboos; kite surf in australia, wind surf in France, sail in in San Francisco and The Netherlands, and jet ski in The Nile and The Persian Gulf; live, break bread and travel with great friends and allies around the world… these were the kinds of things I’d sacrificed for years to get my work off the ground. I’m SO grateful for the wild journey, the deep learnings and the many connections… and now it’s time to get back to doing what I’m here to do. But this time with far less sacrifice… the whole world is my home now.