When I think I know what to expect from someone’s heart or mind or soul, I’m a fool.

Anything my mind perceives about what can and cannot be healed is limited perception at best.

Some I’ve initially imagined might be traumatized beyond repair have then revealed an inner tenacity, capacity, willingness, and availability to healing grace, that thankfully leaves my projection in the dust.

Some I’ve perceived as holding a maturity of integrated realization and depth of self-awareness have then revealed a surprising vulnerability to dangerous fragmentation, delusion, and projection.

Perhaps there’s no such thing as “traumatized beyond repair…”?

And, perhaps in our humanness, we are all inherently vulnerable to fragmentation? And the most honest and useful response to this vulnerability is to remain humble in our compassion.

Following a serious bout of meningitis as a child I was told that the neurological damage remaining in my lower body might keep me from ever bearing children, and yet thirty years later I birthed both of my babies safely and naturally at home.

Psychological wounds and trauma I had once imagined might never truly heal within me, have lifted from my body and soul like birds lifting effortlessly into flight!

Other life disappointments and hurts I would have thought relatively easy to resolve have instead lingered with surprising persistence, arising repeatedly for deeper resolution.

Potentially re-traumatizing triggers such as needing to take one of my children to the E.R., can find me surprisingly centered, calm, and still, while other relatively benign incidents can send me reeling into a cortisol storm.

All the work we do on ourselves, all our fervent prayers, all the help we receive, all the self-reflection and meditation, and still, here we are—left with the human tenderness of our growing edges, our vulnerability and neuroses, our blatant limitations.

Bless us! Bless our hearts!

Such a wild, alchemical soup of personal psychology, genetics, multi-generational, ancestral, and cultural imprints, collective trauma, karma, biochemistry, astrology, weather, etc…

Individual and collective healing, awakening, and evolution are mysterious aspects of life, belonging mostly to the realms of Grace, beyond the clutch of conceptual understanding.

How humbling for our sweet, little minds that so dearly want to understand, to know, and to be in control.

How sobering it is to realize that we can’t choose healing or awakening for anyone else, no matter how much we might wish to see them healed or awakened. (No matter how much it might make our lives more comfortable if they were to heal or wake up! 😉)

How presumptuous of us to imagine we could know what someone else’s highest soul path might look like. (Man, have I learned this one the hard way!)

We can indeed choose healing and awakening for ourselves, again and again, but isn’t it true that our choosing is always in surrender and collaboration with mysterious grace?

Perhaps one of the reasons why prayer is so extraordinarily powerful is this way it invites our minds into direct and surrendered collaboration with what’s beyond our minds…

My teacher Gangaji says that the most we can do to summon awakening is to make ourselves a target for Grace. And the best way to make ourselves a target for Grace? Is to become perfectly still, to not move even an inch!

Ah! Just to write those words carries the mysterious transmission of what simultaneously annihilates and liberates. This that is always and already awake, in love, and free, beyond the mind’s capacity to capture it!

Thank God for our beloved elders, teachers, healers, mentors, friends, and children generously leading the way, leaving luminous breadcrumbs, offering skillful support, patience, encouragement, presence, and mirroring…

What an incomparable blessing to have living, breathing examples of true humans in our lives, transmitting surrender, humility, love, and impeccability…

Here’s to the stunning truth of how anything’s possible when it comes to healing.

Here’s to the humbling reality of how uncontrollable life and healing truly is.

Here’s to the radical inclusivity of what Love includes!

Here’s to the miracle of forgiveness and the promise of evolution.

Here’s to the Grace of awakening, available to us in every moment, if only we are still enough to be an irresistible target.

When my mind is still, humbled and listening, bowing prostrate at the gateway of God’s heart, this is its truest position and expression.

💖