Now before you assume this is another post about positive thinking – stop. Usually, we spend a great deal of time building the case and gathering evidence for the things we are afraid might happen. One can attempt by the force of their will to think differently but until the source or trigger underneath the fear is dismantled, I’m going to surmise that most of us will face those core fears again in one form or another.

So, consider this, there are cues our personality gives us to unearth what’s underneath our fears. Anger, fear’s close friend, is almost always a sign of unhealed pain. Anger is just an easier reach. When we become willing to look at what we are carrying instead of throwing our anger at the most convenient target, something begins to shift. I call this dropping the rock. A term borrowed from a little book by Nicole Johnson entitled Dropping the Rock, The Freedom to Choose Love over Judgment that recounts the moment in the old story where a crowd ready to stone a woman for her mistakes (aka sins) is asked to look at their own first, “Let those among you without sin cast the first stone”, and one by one, they open their hands and let the stones fall. When we drop our rocks we don’t lose anything, no, instead our hands are empty and available for something else.

That something else is Oneness. The spiritual principle that we all start out the same and then the Universe individuates itself in billions of different ways. Every person, from those we care deeply for, to those we disdain come from the same source.

Now I want to be careful here, Oneness isn’t just a fancy word for empathy. Empathy is a beautiful stop along the road, but Oneness is a much bigger place for us to reside. Oneness asks us to recognize ourselves in everyone, not just the people we love and like. Super easy when everything is copasetic, the real heavy lifting is when relationships are strained, or a conversation seems hopelessly divided, or you’re dealing with someone whose world view is vastly different from yours.

Researcher Brene’ Brown offers a hard truth when she writes about how people opt out of difficult conversations because they are afraid of being wrong or not belonging once they say the hard thing. Most of us choose comfort first, stepping over what’s right in front of us, under the guise of getting along. And every time we do that it costs us the thing everyone really wants, connection.

Certainty is another comfort zone we place ourselves in. When we are certain about something it’s hard to listen to anything else. Fear loves certainty – it gives fear a tool to shrink us down and lock us in place. But here’s the good news: awareness is curative. The moment we notice fear trying to paint us into a corner, we have started taking our power back. When we are angry or shut down by certainty, well these can be cues that there is something that wants to be healed.

So how do we stay open when everything in us wants to shut down? We risk being seen. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We have the courage to show up honestly and authentically. Vulnerability is the willingness to be real and say things like, I don’t know, I was wrong, or I’m afraid, and I’m staying anyway.

I’ll be honest — I’ve had to practice every bit of this myself lately. There have been decisions I’d have made differently, conversations that didn’t land the way I hoped, moments where staying open felt almost too much. I’ve dropped my rock and picked it back up more than once this month. What I’ve learned is that the way back — every single time — is forgiveness. Forgiving myself first and then forgiving whoever else is standing in the story with me.

The path toward Oneness is narrow. There isn’t room on it for the judgments, the resentments, the fear we’re used to hauling around. They’re just too much weight for us to carry with us.

This is why real collaboration is never just a management technique — it’s a spiritual practice. It means slowing down enough to actually listen, releasing the need to have the answer, and trusting that something wiser can show up within the space of honest and vulnerable connections. Holmes wrote that when we change our attitude, we stop limiting the flow and let it move through us more freely. What could have been a loss becomes an opening. What we stay closed to, we lose access to.

If you take one thing from this: the next time you feel that flare of anger, or that tightening of fear, try treating it as information instead of an instruction. Ask what it’s protecting. Ask what it would take to open your hand. And if forgiveness is the word that keeps surfacing, for someone else, or for yourself, trust that. It’s usually the shortest road back to the connection you were longing for all along.

A closing note: the poem “Instructions Before Visiting Earth” by James McCrae came up in conversation with friends this week, and it’s worth seeking out on its own — a gentle reminder that we’re only visiting here, and that the point was never to get it perfect.

And if you are like me, when I look out at what is happening in our world, well divine alignment seems pretty rare right now. The world seems fragile, many institutions are fractured, relationships seem strained. And many of us hold things tightly, because we care. It’s that deep care for our world that can limit our long view and skew our perspective.

So let me ask you something. What are you carrying right now?

Like literally – what is heavy on your heart? What is the thing you try to put down and keep picking back up? The situation, the person, the injustice, the wound that finds its way back into your hands no matter how many times you set it aside? Pause for a moment and sit with it.

The Rock

I came across a small book in my library this week — Dropping the Rock by Nicole Johnson. Johnson draws on a familiar story in the New Testament: a woman is brought before Jesus by a crowd that has already decided her fate. They arrive with rocks in their hands and judgment in their hearts, absolutely certain that this woman needs to be punished.

(I’ll confess — the feminist in me kept asking, what about the other person? But that’s my truth with a small ‘t’ showing up.)

Jesus doesn’t argue with the crowd or try to convince them. He doesn’t even defend the woman directly. He simply bends down and writes something in the dirt — we’ll never know what — and then looks up and says:

“Let those among you who have no sin cast the first stone.”

One by one, beginning with the oldest, they drop their rocks and walk away.

And then Jesus turns to the woman: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.” Since I see sin as a mistake, I like to interpret that to mean: go and live from love, not fear.

Now, if you’re an activist at heart, this story might feel unsatisfying. I understand that. My point isn’t that we walk away from injustice. It’s that we drop the rock we carry alongside the things we care so deeply about. Because that rock represents our personal judgments, righteous indignation and resentments (our small t truths) and are protecting the capital T truths. Often our rocks obscure the bigger picture.

What the Rock Is Made Of

The author meenadchi writes something that really hits home: “Toxic anger is not anger. It is, in truth, a graveyard of grief.”

A graveyard of grief. The anger we can’t put down — the kind that shows up as resentment and self-righteous indignation — is what happens when grief has had no place to land. When loss goes unexpressed. When hurt gets swallowed so many times it hardens into something we can throw.

This is important because while you can drop your “rocks” you’re likely to just pick it up again if what it represents isn’t acknowledged and healed. So before you put it down, get curious about what it’s made of. Underneath almost every stone you’ll find something tender: a boundary that was crossed, a love that feels threatened, a grief that you didn’t allow yourself to feel.

In metaphysics, anger isn’t the problem, it’s the signal — an inner alarm pointing toward something beneath it that is calling for your attention. The question is never do I have a right to be angry? The question is: what truth is this anger protecting?

There’s a moment on the Camino de Santiago — the ancient pilgrimage route across northern Spain — called the Cruz de Ferro, the Iron Cross. It sits about two-thirds of the way along the journey, and by tradition, pilgrims carry a stone from home and leave it there at the foot of the cross. A ritual of releasing the burden they’ve been carrying. What strikes me about that tradition is the timing: you need the first two-thirds of the walk to truly know what you’re dropping. The rock you leave behind has meaning because you’ve carried it long enough to understand its weight.

What You Pick Up

Dropping the rock doesn’t leave you empty-handed. It leaves you free.

There’s a young man named Sam Obisanya in the series Ted Lasso — and if you don’t know the show, don’t worry – this will make sense. Sam is a Nigerian soccer player who discovers that his team’s jersey sponsor is owned by a company that has been destroying the environment in his home country and bribing government officials to look the other way. His father is heartbroken. And Sam realizes he can no longer wear their name across his chest.

Sam had every reason to pick up a rock. Righteous fury would have been justifiable. But instead, before the next match, he stood quietly in the locker room and told his teammates about his dilemma, that he couldn’t be in integrity with himself and keep wearing the sponsor’s name. Then he took a small piece of black tape and covered the logo.

That’s it. One quiet, costly act of integrity. Sam didn’t try to convince the team of anything – he just wanted them to understand why he needed to do it.

His Nigerian teammates immediately followed. And Sam told the rest of the team he didn’t expect them to join him. And then the least likely person on that team stood up and asked Sam to throw him the tape. We’re a team, he said. We all wear the same kit (uniform).

Nobody threw a rock. They picked up a piece of tape. And one by one, love drew love forward — not because Sam demanded it, but because he demonstrated it. He revealed a truth. And that truth became action. And later, at a press conference, Sam spoke with clarity and publicly called on the Nigerian government to end decades of environmental destruction.

His coach walked him back to the locker room afterward and said the only thing that needed to be said: “Doing the right thing is never the wrong thing.” A pure Ted Lasso moment.

Author Ernest Holmes expresses that same wisdom this way: “Does the thing I wish to do express more life, more happiness, more peace to myself, and at the same time, harm no one? If it does, it is right.”

Sam’s tape harmed no one. It revealed everything.

The Invitation

The fire in you is not the problem. Anger is not a character defect. It is energy — creative, powerful, sacred energy — and it is yours to direct. What matters is what you do with it once you know what it’s really made of.

Dropping the rock is not an action to make yourself smaller or pretend nothing’s wrong. We drop the rock to separate the truth you’re carrying from the weapon you might be tempted to make of it. If you can, pause and ask yourself: is this a truth that needs revealing, or my own woundedness I’m getting ready to throw?

Because the world doesn’t need more stones. It needs people with open hands and clear eyes, willing to do the next right thing.

I am a revealer of truth, and that truth becomes action.

That’s the demonstration. That is the activism.

His answer: “Nothing more nor less than the negative use of faith. Faith misplaced.”

If fear is just faith misplaced, then both must come from the same elements, yes?

Most of us move through life treating fear and faith as opposites. But Holmes is saying fear and faith are made of the same stuff, the same energy. Fear is just the misdirection of that energy. When we are truly afraid of something, we are exercising tremendous faith — faith that the worst will happen. We have faith in the version of a possible future where everything falls apart. We are, in fact, believing in an outcome we don’t even want.

And here is the good news hidden inside that: you are not faithless. The energy of faith is fully alive in you right now. It just needs you to turn it around.

That turning — from fear back toward faith — is what I want to explore here.

First, We Stay

The not so bad news: this is not a quick fix. When we find ourselves afraid, everything in us wants to flee, freeze, or fight. That’s a very natural response. But many wisdom traditions ask us to do something else, they ask us to turn toward the fear instead.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön describes a practice that sounds simple but is not always easy. When restlessness comes — stay with it. When the mind begins to spin and run off — stay with it. When fear rises up and every cell in your body says I cannot sit with this one more second — stay anyway. Because it is in the staying that we find that fear is not going to annihilate us. We can be in its full presence and remain completely whole. It is, in the end, just energy.

The author Gerald May goes one step further, inviting us to welcome fear as a friend; to see fear as something that sharpens our senses, wakes us up, and makes us fully present. Approached that way, fear stops being a warning and becomes a messenger: pay attention. Something here matters. Something true is trying to come forward.

So before you flee, freeze, or fight, try staying — and getting curious. Ask yourself:

What part of me feels threatened right now? What am I afraid of losing? What truth have I been stepping over instead of walking through?

When we’re willing to stay and be curious, fear stops shutting us down. It becomes a beacon, lighting the way toward greater wholeness. Joseph Campbell said it best: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” The very thing we most want to avoid is standing guard over the very thing we need most.

One Step at a Time

So how do we actually turn misplaced faith back around? Not all at once. Not by force. One step at a time.

A labyrinth is one of the oldest tools for exactly this practice — and it holds the whole teaching inside its design.

Many people confuse a labyrinth with a maze, but they are entirely different things. A maze is built to trick you: dead ends, wrong turns, choices designed to get you lost. A labyrinth has only one path. That single path leads all the way to the center, and then the same path leads you all the way back out. There are no wrong turns. There are no dead ends. As long as you stay on the path, you cannot get lost.

But here’s the thing about that path: it winds. It doesn’t take you straight to the center. It curves, and it doubles back — and just when you feel like you’re almost there, the path turns you away, swings you back out toward the edge, farther from the center than you were a moment before.

And that’s exactly where fear speaks up. You’re going the wrong way. You’ve lost it. Turn back.

That voice is just misplaced faith. It’s faith in getting lost, faith that a winding path must be a wrong one.

And reclaiming your faith is as simple — and as radical — as continuing to walk. Trusting that the path knows where it’s going, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Taking one step, and then one more. As you keep walking, something remarkable happens: the voice gets quieter. And quieter still. Not because you defeated it, not because you ran from it — but because you just kept walking, an act of faith, one step at a time.

In the end, that is all spiritual practice is meant to do: keep you present while you move forward, trusting the path before you.

The Practice

This week, bring one fear with you. You don’t have to solve it or be rid of it. Just stay present with it long enough to ask what it’s actually trying to tell you. Let your curiosity be stronger than your instinct to run.

And if the path winds — if progress feels slower than you’d like, if you seem to be moving away from the very thing you’re walking toward — trust the path anyway. Keep going. The center is there, waiting for you to arrive.

I draw upon my faith, and fear dissolves.

…one step at a time.

My purpose was clear: to experience a closer walk with God, a deep dive into that most essential relationship where everything begins and where everything ends.

What I didn’t know is that I would have to give up everything that stood in the way of that most essential relationship. All the walls that I have built over a lifetime to protect my tender heart, every brick that I put in place to defend that interior castle where God and I are one have begun to loosen.

Let me tell you, I did not expect this, and yet I’m certain something in me has called it forward.

My mind knows at the core of my being, I need no protection. And yet my heart quivers in fear, afraid to let go, afraid of the feelings buried deep so long ago, when I believed I was separate, when I believed that I was alone, when I believed I was unloved. I know this isn’t true yet my ego keeps stacking up “evidence” to its reality.

I find myself just a little over a month from beginning my walk at some level unwilling. Unwilling to let go, unwilling to stand unprotected, unwilling to let my guard down for fear that I will be annihilated.

They’re all lining up to be dissolved… mother issues, security issues, trust issues… old friends whom I thought had departed long ago, competing for my attention like hungry baby birds, mouths open wide “feed me”.

I want to ignore them, to hide, to defend myself against this deep discomfort; but that’s not how this works… this business of healing and revealing requires love and attention.

And the only thing that satiates it is self-love and surrender.

“Get ready, my soul, I’m diving in.” ~Daniel Nahmod~

When someone lashes out at you, they’re not showing you their power. They’re showing you their pain. And if you can see it that way — really see it — you won’t take the insult personally. You’ll see it as a flare from a heart that is struggling to stay afloat.

A flare from a heart struggling to stay afloat. Sit with what a flare actually is. We send one up when we’re in trouble or when we need help. So what if the sharp word or sudden eruption is exactly that — a flare? Pain in disguise, dressed up as power; perhaps because we haven’t the courage to address it directly.

I’ve been exploring what it means to transmute fear into faith. Not to pray it away, or pretend it isn’t there — that’s a spiritual bypass. Transmutation is changing the nature of one thing into another. Fear isn’t just something to suffer through; it can be instructive. It can be the signal that something in us wants to be known, to be brought into the light. And anger is often fear’s loudest messenger.

The lamp of the mind

The 19th-century orator Robert Ingersoll said, “Anger blows out the lamp of the mind.” I’d add one thing to that: anger blows out the lamp not only in the person who’s angry, but in the person who feels that anger aimed at them. Two minds go dark at once.

Speaking love to anger isn’t about fixing or changing the other person. It’s like forgiveness — it’s generally understood that forgiveness is for the forgiver, not the forgiven. Speaking love to strong emotion is for you. It’s how you keep your own lamp lit when someone else’s has gone out.

Brené Brown teaches that anger is often a mask for the feelings that are harder to bear — grief, rejection, shame. When we can’t access those feelings, it’s human nature to reach for irritation, disapproval, or a flash of temper. So when anger shows up now — in someone else, or in you — pause and let your curiosity come forward and ask what is actually underneath the strong emotions you are experiencing.

Answering love’s call

I keep thinking of a scene from Ted Lasso. If you’ve never seen it, all you need to know is that it follows an impossibly kind coach with a gift for seeing people beyond their behavior. One of the characters is a very talented young player, Jamie Tartt, whose cruel jokes and arrogance make him easy to write off. Everyone does — except the coach, who keeps questioning instead of judging. Then one afternoon, after a brutal loss, Jamie’s father storms into the locker room and humiliates him in front of the whole team. It’s a car wreck. Nobody knows what to do. And when the father is finally gone, it’s Roy Kent — the gruff veteran, Jamie’s own rival, the last man on earth you’d expect — who walks across the room and simply holds him. And Jamie crumbles.

Roy didn’t know what the outcome would be. He just heard the call and answered it. That, I think, is what all our spiritual practice is preparing us for: the moment when Spirit calls us forward to participate in healing. It’s up to us to respond — we don’t need to know exactly what to do or how it will land — we just say yes to the call of love in the moment.

The master class

Offering compassion when someone else lashes out — that’s the entry-level course. Hard, but doable. The master class is when you’re the one who lashed out. When you can catch your own flare mid-air and are willing to pause and look at your own pain underneath your behavior.

The only place real change happens is within ourselves — that’s where we have agency. So whichever side of the dynamic you find yourself on, there is something to be learned, something asking to be brought to light — some piece of God wanting to be expressed.

Anger is simply energy, and energy can change its form. You wouldn’t argue if I told you water can become ice or steam — same substance, held differently. Anger is like that. What matters is how we hold it, and whether we can steady ourselves and create a holy pause. I wear a small blue bracelet most days that says respond with love. I don’t always remember to glance at it. But I have a far better chance when I do.

I have a family member who is full of passion — and sometimes that passion spills over into strong emotion aimed squarely at me. It took me years to understand that they could pour those feelings out because they felt safe with me. Once I saw it that way, I could speak love to their anger instead of bracing against it. Not long ago, in the heat of one of those phone calls, I simply hung up — I needed space. But I picked the phone back up fifteen minutes later. I hadn’t withdrawn from them — I’d withdrawn from the emotion, from the illusion that we were separate, that they were trying to hurt me. I took the pause I needed so I could come back to them with love.

And a word of caution I’ve learned the hard way: emotion we swallow and turn inward doesn’t simply vanish. All the experts warn us that emotion will find its expression one way or another — and if we won’t move through it consciously, it tends to leak out the seams in unholy ways. So we do the practice. We face our feelings and let the energy move, consciously, toward love.

An invitation, not an enemy

If you know A Course in Miracles, its entire teaching boils down to a single idea: everything we experience is either a call for love or a call to love. Every encounter is an invitation. Sometimes we’re the one doing the inviting, through our own intensity. Sometimes it’s someone else. It is deeply human to want to protect ourselves — to fight, or to flee. But we are not only human. We are also spiritual beings, with everything we need within us to answer Love’s invitation. And sometimes love looks like crossing the room to hold someone. Sometimes it looks like quietly stepping out and creating space.

So I invite you to meet your fear not as an enemy to outrun, but as an invitation. Be courageous. Drop into your heart and trust the very Life that breathes you — the One that longs to express itself as you, as a healing presence, in whatever way is safe for you. Because no one is asking you to stand in harm’s way. The invitation is to listen for the quiet whisper of Spirit on your heart. When love calls you forward, trust that you’ve been prepared and you’re not alone — love will always walk with you when it calls you to act.

First, the mirror we hold up to ourselves — meeting the parts we were taught to hide, the unloved pieces we cast aside so we could fit in. I think of them like passengers in our subconscious: the hidden beliefs that try to covertly run the show.

Then we turned that mirror outward and noticed that the parts of ourselves we don’t own tend to show up in the people around us. What we don’t acknowledge, we project. And we can’t really meet others until we stop meeting our own history in them.

It’s all been mirror work — owning our parts instead of casting them outside of us. And once you get that life is really just a house of mirrors, I wonder where exactly does the word “them” belong?

That’s what I want to explore this week. The line we draw when we drop into “us” and “them” living. And what I want you to consider isn’t that we shouldn’t draw that line, rather consider that there is no real line. It doesn’t exist in the One Infinite Reality. It only exists in our perception.

The first moment of awareness

You may be familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great sacred texts of India. It’s an allegorical story about a man named Arjuna, whose duty it is to protect his province. He’s a warrior, the finest of archers. The conflict is just, and he is readying for battle. He asks his charioteer to drive him out to the battlefield so he can get a good look at what his army is facing.

The charioteer is actually Krishna — God in disguise, following Arjuna’s orders, driving the chariot.

Let’s pause here for a moment, because that image is ancient. I used it in the Coach to Everywhere teaching a few articles back; the Upanishads use it too: the body is the chariot, the senses are the horses, the mind holds the reins, and the Self — capital S — rides within.

Here in our story, the Divine has taken the driver’s seat from the mind. And what happens next changes everything.

As Arjuna looks out across the field, he sees his family. Uncles, cousins, teachers, his own grandfather — all of them there, fighting for the other side. When he realizes the enemy is his kin, something in him breaks down, and he collapses, unable to fight.

I’ve used this allegory before to illustrate oneness. It’s a beautiful tale of awakening — the moment we look at the “other side” and see our family. And I usually stop there, having made my point.

But there’s more to the story. Because while Arjuna is cracked open by the awareness of his kin, there’s a greater lesson beyond this point. He’s only scratched the surface.

Look at what actually stops him: seeing the faces of his kinsmen. He isn’t undone by the war itself — he was ready for this battle five minutes earlier. Arjuna’s heart broke open as he considered fighting his own blood — and that’s exactly where his awareness ended.

I think this is where most of us stop, too. We see our kin, the ones close to us. They live inside our circle, and we see them as real people with lives and histories, people we feel connected to. Our family, our community, our country. And beyond that circle: them. The ones relegated to categories.

So Arjuna’s heart breaks open — and his lesson is just beginning.

Krishna reveals himself as more than a charioteer, and Arjuna asks to see who Krishna really is. He’s given a vision: the entire universe as one Divine form, every living thing part of the One. And in that vision, friend and enemy look the same. Arjuna cannot tell the difference between his kin and the men he was ready to do battle with.

He experiences oneness. He wasn’t deciding to be more inclusive. He was seeing the true nature of being, where there is no “us” and no “them.”

Later, as Arjuna tries to take in everything he’s been shown, Krishna puts it simply: the awakened one sees the Self in all beings, and all beings in the Self.

No sense of otherness

There’s a passage I love — really it’s more of an affirmation — that fits beautifully here:

A sense of the Oneness of all Life so enters my being that there is no sense of otherness. It is here that Mind performs miracles, because there is nothing to hinder the Whole from coming through.

I think it might be Emma Curtis Hopkins, or Ernest Holmes. Regardless, the phrase — no sense of otherness — is what really lands here.

Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say I have overcome my prejudice. It doesn’t say I have worked hard to include people I’d rather exclude. It says something much simpler and much more powerful: the sense of otherness is gone. There’s nothing left to overcome, because there was never anything there.

And notice the second sentence, because that’s the payoff. There is nothing to hinder the Whole from coming through. The sense of otherness is described as an obstruction. The Whole is always trying to come through us; the belief in “them” is what stops it.

Which is the same thing I’ve been circling all along. You’re not broken, you’re obscured — clear the underbrush and wholeness is revealed. You’re not seeing your enemy, you’re seeing your own history — let the projection dissolve and there’s a person there. And now: you’re not divided from anyone. You only believed you were.

Emma Curtis Hopkins, the teacher of teachers, built her entire body of work on oneness. The principle is simple: if there is only one Presence and one Power, then “other” does not exist. It’s just a perception.

Ernest Holmes says the same thing: “We cannot exclude anything from a Divine inclusion.”

Caring without the clenching

But Holmes doesn’t let us off the hook, either. He also writes that there’s no use screaming that God is love because it sounds pretty. He goes on to say that we won’t know the everlasting arms are around us until our own arms are around humanity. The mind, he says, should swing between contemplation, prayer, and action. It isn’t enough to think wholeness. We have to walk it out.

So what do we do with a world that is genuinely, painfully divided?

Here’s where the Gita and Arjuna’s lesson begin to come full circle. You see Arjuna’s crisis was never only about realizing his oneness. His crisis was: how do I act when I can’t bear the outcome?

And Krishna’s answer — the heart of the whole text — is this: you have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions. Do what is yours to do. Release your grip on how it turns out.

I recently heard a man describe himself as an “unattached activist”. What he meant was that he could care deeply about the concerns of the world, show up with kindness and generosity, stand for something — and still not be attached to the outcome. Big Aha!

It’s our attachment that turns deep caring into anger. It’s what burns people out. And it’s what makes us start seeing enemies instead of people — you see if I require a result, then anyone standing between me and that result becomes an obstacle. They become them.

Non-attachment isn’t not caring. It’s caring without the clenching. It’s taking the action that’s yours to take and then letting go.

An invitation

Sometime in the next few days, you’ll likely feel a small internal shift as somebody becomes a category instead of a person. It might be someone in traffic. It might be a headline. It might be a family member with opinions opposite your own. You’ll feel the little slot of othering open up, and you’ll begin to drop that person into it.

Don’t scold yourself for it. That’s just more othering, turned inward. Simply notice it, and then ask one question:

What would I experience here, if I had no sense of otherness?

You don’t have to approve of or agree with anyone. You just have to be willing to consider that there’s a whole person there — with a chariot of their own, and passengers of their own, finding their way home the same as you.

And if you keep a journal, here’s a question to carry with you: Where am I still requiring an outcome in order to be at peace?

Because here’s the greater truth to be known. Arjuna fell to the floor of his chariot because love found its edge. And then he was shown a vision where love has no edge at all — where the ones he cherished and the ones he fought where the same.

That’s the vision. Not a world we have to build. A world we have to see.

Maybe you tried it. And if you did, you may have noticed something else about those unloved parts.

They aren't only local to you. The very traits you can't quite face in yourself have a strange way of showing up out there — you know, as your co-worker, your boss, your lover, or your neighbor.

So let’s explore the idea that what we believe about ourselves, about others, and about the world, is what we end up seeing outside of ourselves. It's simple to say and takes a lifetime to live:  All our relationships, at some level, are mirrors. The people in our lives are reflecting back to us what lives inside us .

You might recall the teaching I shared last week from Marcia Sutton and Lloyd Strom. They picture the self as a carriage driven by mind and emotions — and riding in the back seat are our passengers, the unacknowledged or hidden beliefs we carry. Ernest Holmes would call this the subjective mind.  And those very passengers, those hidden aspects of ourselves, get reflected out into our world as the people around us. Essentially, other people show us ourselves. The ones who reflect our light, we adore. And the ones who reflect our hidden, unhealed self, well often those are the folks who can drive us nuts.

Which means the person who most irritates you just may have the most to teach you. This subplot from the Harry Potter story illustrates this beautifully.

The potions master

This week’s story about the man Harry Potter hated.

His name is Severus Snape. He was the potions master at Hogwarts, and from the moment Harry arrives at school, Snape despises him — and the feeling quickly becomes mutual. For seven books, these have a deep disdain for each other.

And here's what makes it a teaching story: what they see in each other is the unloved, ignored, unacknowledged parts of themselves. Neither one is actually seeing the other. Each is looking at his own history, projected onto the other person.

Snape looks at Harry and sees James Potter, the father Harry idolizes but never knew, and it seems also the boy who tormented Snape when they were in school together.  Snape in essence punishes the son for the sins of the father. And Harry looks at Snape and thinks he's seeing pure malice. But what he's actually sensing, unbeknownst to him, is Snape's unhealed past, which mirrors his own.

In Harry's first year at Hogwarts, he becomes absolutely convinced that Snape is trying to kill him. And he has evidence! During a Quidditch match, Harry's broom starts bucking and lurching, trying to throw him off — and there in the stands is Snape, staring at him, muttering under his breath. Case closed.

Except it's exactly backwards. Snape is muttering a *countercurse* — he's realized someone else is trying to hurt Harry. The man Harry is certain wants him dead is, in that very moment, trying to save him.

Harry read malice. The truth was protection.

How many times have we done exactly that? We read someone with total confidence — *I know what they think of me. I know what they meant by that* — and then find out we had it backwards. That's how projection works. It misinforms us. It's the backseat driver shouting wrong directions, and we can act on that bad intelligence for years.

In truth, Harry isn't really reacting to Snape. We find out later who Snape actually is: a neglected boy from an unhappy home, wearing castoff clothes, mocked for being odd, desperate to belong. Sound familiar? Snape is the same boy in the cupboard under the stairs — only he grew up in a way where bitterness won. When Harry looks at him, he's looking at everything he fears in himself. And he cannot stand the sight of it.

I know you get it, so consider this:

“You can't meet a person until you stop meeting your own history in them”

Take that in…. You can't meet a person — really meet them — until you stop meeting your own history in them.

So how does a projection like that finally break? In the story, it breaks the way it usually seems to shift in our lives: by some turn of events, often in what looks like a coincidence or accident. Though what I've come to understand is that it actually happens when we've done the work and made space for an awakening of some kind.

For Harry, it happens in his fifth year, when he gets an unplanned look inside Snape's actual memories. He dives in expecting to confirm everything he believes about his enemy. Instead, he watches his own beloved father — James Potter, the man Harry has built a shrine to in his heart — tormenting a defenseless teenage Snape. Humiliating him in front of a laughing crowd. Behaving, in fact, exactly like the bullies of Harry's own childhood.

And in one terrible minute, two projections shatter at once: the all-bad Snape, and the all-good James. Harry comes out of that memory heartbroken — and more aware than he has ever been. Because that's what happens when we are open enough to consider a new possibility: letting real people be real, instead of casting them in the old play we've been staging since childhood.

The mask is just a mask

The healer and teacher Prentis Hemphill refers to these projections as masks, and suggests our masks are passed down to us — and that when we understand how and why a mask came to be, we can let it go and see ourselves and each other more authentically.

Isn't that beautiful? The mask has a history. It was put together, usually early in life, usually to protect us. And once we understand it, we can consciously choose to let it go.

Now — to be clear. For some of us, the masks we assumed were survival gear, and there were situations where dropping them would have put us in an unsafe place. If that's your story, the mask you wore was necessary; it's a part that protected you, and it deserves honor like every other part. The invitation here isn't recklessness. It's simply to ‘know the mask is a mask’ — so that wearing it or setting it down becomes a choice, rather than an unconscious defense mechanism.

And when you do choose to set it down, watch what happens in the room. Hemphill writes that when we take off our mask, we invite others to do the same. When we feel safe enough to be undefended, it gives everyone else permission. You've likely experienced this. You've been with someone who was genuinely themselves, and felt your own shoulders drop. That is the beauty of this kind of inner work — we serve others when we take care of ourselves.

Now let me take it one level deeper, because this is more than pop psychology. Ernest Holmes taught that we must learn to see through the conditions and effects — to realize that at the center of every person's soul is a Divine being - God as source.

Every person's soul. Not just the pleasant ones. Not just the ones who reflect our light. At the center of the very person we cannot stand — right behind the projection and assumptions we’ve made about them. Holmes says the way we see through our projections is through compassion, the most gentle of all human virtues. And compassion is simply what's left when we allow our projections to dissolve.

To put it plainly, Holmes writes: "Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it." And elsewhere: "If one sees only unloveliness in others, it is because unloveliness is a strong element in himself. The light he throws on others is generated in his own soul and sees them as he chooses to see them."

He's talking about the people around us. When we make peace within ourselves, we stop fighting what we see outside of ourselves. The mirror works in both directions. Grace, it turns out, is also a projection.

Which brings me to the last page of the whole saga. Nineteen years later, Harry is grown, standing on the platform, putting his own son on the train to Hogwarts. And we hear the boy's name: Albus “Severus” Potter. Harry has named his child after the man he most despised — and he tells his son that Severus Snape was probably the bravest man he ever knew.

Now, I won't pretend the story is tidier than it is. Harry never got to make peace with the living man — the true seeing came through Snape's memories, after he was gone. Sometimes that's how it goes for us, too. Sometimes the projection dissolves too late for the relationship. But know this: it is never too late for healing to happen. The forgiveness still frees the one who forgives. If there is someone you could only see truly after they left your life, or left this world — the seeing still counts. The love still lands.

A simple practice

Here's an invitation. It's simple, but not necessarily easy.

Soon enough, someone or some situation is going to get under your skin. Might even be before today ends. When it happens, before the reaction, try this little inquiry, silently:

What is this person or situation showing me about me?

Not "how are they wrong." Just: what part of my experience is from own coach, riding in the passenger seat? You don't have to like the person. You don't even have to have lunch with them. You just have to be willing, for one moment, to stop meeting your own history in them — and consider actually meeting the person you are in the present moment with.

And as you move through your days, notice — without judging — when you're authentically yourself with people, and when you feel the mask go on. Your body will tell you. Notice your jaw, your chest, your breath. Just gather the information.

You may even want to journal about it.  Consider this question: What would my life be like if I was authentically myself in every relationship?

Because here is the greater truth to be known: every person you meet has God at the center of their soul. Every single one. The reflection in front of you was never really showing you an enemy.

It was showing you the way home.

Regardless of what we may think of the author, the Harry Potter story resonates deeply with hundreds of millions of folks around the world. It’s the hero’s journey of coming home to ourself. It’s the story where we root for the underdog to be triumphant, and Harry certainly starts out as the underdog - the boy who lives in the cupboard under the stairs with his aunt’s family, the Dursleys. Now, the Dursleys have one organizing principle that they live by: BE NORMAL. And Harry’s legacy is anything but normal, so they squash his spirit every chance they get.

I highly doubt any of us actually lived in a cupboard under the stairs. But certainly many of us took on messages that some part of us needed to be hidden - being told we were too loud, too sensitive, just too much or not enough. Boys don’t cry, girls don’t get angry. A couple of my favorites: don’t be so dramatic and who do you think you are?

And so many of us learned to put those parts of ourselves away - those parts that were tender or fierce or just plain weird by others’ standards. We learned to disown them so we could fit in.

But the greater truth to be known is there are no bad parts. Not in you, nor in anyone else.

The truth cannot be denied

Consider Harry’s origin story. His parents are killed by an evil wizard, and yet he miraculously survives. He’s left with his muggle family, who desperately want to fit into what they deem normal - but as any consciously evolving person knows, there is no normal. Just before Harry’s eleventh birthday, letters arrive, addressed not just to Harry but to the cupboard under the stairs. Whoever wrote the letters knows exactly where Harry lives. His uncle rips them up, and somehow they keep coming, despite Mr. Dursley’s best effort to deny them. But no matter what they do, the truth of who Harry is cannot be denied.

Here’s the part of the story that makes the point. No matter how hard we try, our true nature cannot be denied. It might be obscured, or hidden, or simply unconscious. In Harry’s story, he had no idea he came from a great wizarding past, or that he was magical and belonged to a whole world he knew nothing about. And nothing changes when Harry finds out he was magical all along. Harry being magical was never in question - only his knowledge of it was.

The spiritual philosopher Ernest Holmes says it succinctly: “Our word does not restore wholeness; it reveals it.”

Holmes isn’t saying we’re broken and need fixing. He’s saying we were never broken, and we only need to reveal our wholeness. But like our hero Harry, we’re taught to disown parts of ourselves - and that’s all the hero’s journey really is: coming home to the more of who we are. Holmes writes that the road to self-discovery calls for clearing away the underbrush. The underbrush is the fear, the ignorance, the old stories that made us feel unworthy or lost or, worse, broken.

We don’t manufacture wholeness. We reveal it. It’s there always and forever, sending letters to us, trying to get our attention, wanting us to scoop up those parts of ourselves we’ve disowned so we can know our authentic wholeness.

The passengers in the coach

How many times have you said something like: part of me wants to, but part of me doesn’t - fill in the blank - or part of me is terrified? We’ve all been there. One part says yes, let’s go for it and the other part says slow down.

There was a time, years ago, when I found myself plateauing. My spiritual practice had transformed my life, but I could sense there was something missing. Then I was introduced to a practice called Fear to Faith, and it shifted everything. It’s a process where we uncover missing pieces of our personal story and reclaim seemingly lost parts of ourselves.

Fear to Faith comes from Marcia Sutton and her teaching partner Lloyd Strom, who developed a body of work that uses New Thought philosophy to help us reveal our true spiritual nature - and the Fear to Faith practice is just a small part of their framework. One of their core teachings is known as the Coach to Everywhere: they picture the self as a coach traveling home. And riding along inside the coach are what they refer to as passengers - false beliefs and hidden fears, along with old survival strategies we pick up along the road, that continue to obscure our wholeness. These passengers, or backseat drivers, misinform us based on those false beliefs and hidden fears when we are unaware of them.

The Fear to Faith practice is actually the process of owning all parts of ourselves, which brings us back to wholeness. As Sutton and Strom teach, it’s the light of the truth that dissolves the false beliefs that have obscured our wholeness - we don’t get rid of anything. When we integrate our hidden or lost parts they are transformed by the light of our understanding.

Holmes teaches that fear and faith are the same energy, and Sutton and Strom use this principle to help us relocate our thinking - to find where fear has crossed our wires and installed passengers of false beliefs and hidden fears. This is how changing your thinking really changes your life.

So once revealed, your hidden critic becomes your fiercest advocate. Your anxious part becomes your discernment. That part of you that learned to withdraw and disappear becomes your gift for listening. Nothing is lost or broken - it’s just misinterpreted. And the greater truth to be known, once revealed, transforms into greater wholeness.

A practice towards wholeness

My invitation is a wonderfully simple one.

This week, you will make decisions. Small ones - what’s for dinner. Maybe big ones - what’s next for your life. When you do, pause and notice the committee - the parts of you that are at odds with your decisions. Notice which parts show up, and what each one is saying. The eager part. The cautious part. The one that sounds exactly like your mother. Notice how each one feels in your body.

And then - this is the practice - instead of picking a side or fighting anything, try acknowledging it all. Silently say: I see you. Consider thanking it for trying to help you cope, or protect you. That’s it. You are not obeying the part; you are honoring it. This is an important distinction. Marcia Sutton often said “awareness is curative.”

Parts that are honored will relax and parts that you continue to attempt to exile will eventually pound on the proverbial cupboard door - waiting for you to honor and integrate them.

Apparently my mind is. It’s the mind that keeps the calendar — the heart really doesn’t care how many days are left.

In fact, I was so busy doing and working that when it came time to craft this article, I found myself struggling. The harder my mind tried, the less inspired I felt. It wasn’t until I gave up and let go that something came forward. Not necessarily thoughts or ideas, but a feeling of release that gave way to some tenderness that felt like it was hiding out from my busy, conquer-the-world mind.

The Mind’s Job, and Love’s Job

You see, the mind’s job, when we’re on autopilot is to problem-solve and protect us. It’s not wrong — it’s the instinct that keeps us alive. But as I think about this topic of Love, it’s job is not solving problems or strategizing situations.

In fact, when we reach for Love only through our thoughts, we often end up trying to protect the very thing we’re trying to open to. It’s kind of antithetical to be open to love and defended at the same time.

Now, I’m not saying we should reject our thinking mind —thoughts are vital to the co-creative process; our thoughts co-create our reality. But the core truth of new thought philosophy is more than just working with spiritual principles to manifest conditions. Principle held only in the mind remains abstract.

Dual Unity

Ernest Holmes, author of Science of Mind, reminds us that all is Love, and yet all is Principle, [which he refers to as Law]. Love is just Divine Givingness; Law is the way Divine Givingness takes shape. Love is spontaneous; Law is impersonal. Love points the way; Law makes the way possible.

He calls this a dual unity — not duality, but dual unity. Both, working together, hand in hand.

We need both the head and the heart. We can’t abandon the mind for the heart — the path of the spiritual creative is one of integration.

I’m reminded of one of my very favorite passages in the Bible: Mark 12:30

“Love the Lord God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

Fun fact — Mark is quoting Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus was quoting the Torah; this same instruction appears in the Old Testament. Jewish households often affix a small boxlike object called a mezuzah to their doorframe, at the threshold of their homes. Inside it is a tiny scroll, the Shema, which includes this same instruction:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”

At first, this might feel a little preachy. But when you consider that the word Lord is equivalent to the word Law, or Principle in metaphysics, it softens considerably.

As metaphysicians, we aren’t being ordered to love something outside ourselves. We’re being invited to unify our hearts, our souls, our minds, and our strength — our actions — with Love and Law. It’s an instruction toward wholeness: heart and soul and mind and strength, undivided.

Thoughts cut off from feeling — mind cut off from heart — is only half the instrument we’re invited to bring into our experience.

The Bridge

This kind of whole-being love is the bridge between Principle and Condition, between Cause and Effect — a fluidity of movement where mind surrenders into the heart, and thought becomes a felt reality.

This is Christ Consciousness. Christ is not someone’s last name, but the universal pattern of Spirit meeting and imbuing itself into form. Wholeness is the integration of heart and soul, mind and strength.

All June I’ve been taking a deep dive into working with Love as a principle — how Love is inherent to our very makeup as human beings, patiently waiting for us to recognize it within ourselves.

Co-creating a Higher, Deeper Love in the world isn’t solely about demonstrating experiences and things — conditions. It’s about embodiment: the full integration of mind and heart, where Love has some place real to land, moving through us and into the world.

This bridge has to be built within us before it can be built between us.

I participated in an event recently called Sacred Ground. It was a multi-faith event where we explored peace as a practice from several different spiritual and religious traditions. We welcomed peace practices from Buddhism, Judaism, Baha’i, Christianity and New Thought and shared in a ritual that brought us together in prayer, each of us praying in our own way, each inviting peace individually, yet collectively.

A world that works for all — the humanist and the devotee alike — is only possible when Love leads the way.

What Would Love Do?

My invitation to you is to keep this question before you. It’s a familiar one — you’ve likely asked it before — but it’s worth asking again and again, because that’s how we integrate heart and mind:

What would Love do?

I mean, really — what would Love do when you get cut off on the highway? When your plumber charges you twice the estimate? When your lover ignores you, or a family member, coworker, or neighbor upsets you?

Cultivate this question so that it preempts your response and saturates your reactions. What is my Christ Consciousness center calling forward? What would Love do?

Rev. Dr. Alice Reid is the Spiritual Director of Center for Spiritual Living Capistrano Valley, a New Thought community in South Orange County, CA. This reflection is part of a monthlong exploration of Love.

For more content - check out cslcv.org

Quick, quick
Mind your chores
And all the busyness that helps you feel important

Never mind me, the Beloved
Just go about your way
Get to those tasks
Take care of your duties

I will be here, waiting

Waiting for you to remember our love story
Waiting for you to recall the bliss of my whisper upon your heart, my caress along your cheek, my kiss upon your lips.

I’m in no hurry my darling
I will be here, waiting

We are brought up to believe we have to earn it or that it only exists in certain types of relationships. Culturally, we all come by these ideas honestly. It’s in the poetry we’ve read, the movies we’ve watched, the songs we’ve sung along to since forever. Somewhere along the way, we buy into this idea that love is transactional.

But love isn’t a prize you win. It is woven into every fiber of your being.

We just forget.

What Love Actually Is

The poet and author bell hooks offers us some clarity when they write that to truly love, we must learn to mix various ingredients: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Most of us were never taught the full recipe — we have simply been working with an incomplete understanding of what Love is.

Author and founder of Centers for Spiritual Living, Ernest Holmes takes it further. He reminds us that love is not a sentiment. It is not a feeling that comes and goes. He writes that there is “but one ultimate impulsion (e.g. driving force) in the universe. This impulsion is love... It is the pure essence of Divine Givingness.”

The driving force of the Universe is Love. And that force is not coming at us from somewhere out there. It is arising from within us.

Ram Dass brings it home when he writes:

“Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object. It’s just sitting in love, a love that incorporates the chair and the room and permeates everything around. The thinking mind is extinguished in love.”

— Ram Dass, Be Love Now, p. 2

Love is a state of being... it’s just who we are. When we recognize this — when we begin to operate from Love— the small, grasping mind dissolves, and we remember our true nature.

Love Just Waits for Us.

Despite our inability to recognize that the longing we carry — that ache for intimacy, for belonging, for being truly known — is actually our longing for oneness.

Hold up... let me clarify what I mean by oneness. It’s like the Love you’ve been searching for and the Love that created you are the same Love... sit with that a moment.

Think of yourself like a wave in the ocean – the wave is still part of the ocean even when the force of the ocean shapes it into a wave... and that wave has enough power and force to carry things like surfers, but in the end it’s still one with the ocean.

Put in this context, our longing for Love seems a little silly... we are Love already. And best of all, Love doesn’t give up on us. Like the wave on the ocean it knows we are one with it.

Love is patient. It just waits.

It doesn’t withdraw when we can’t receive it. It doesn’t punish us for looking in the wrong places. It simply waits, while Life becomes our way-shower, ushering us back to center where Love patiently waits for us to receive it.

Sometimes that return to center is gentle. Sometimes, not so much. Life softens us, it opens us up— through our joy and through our heartbreak — until we can finally acknowledge what was always present. And when we do, it can feel like we’re letting love in. But what we’re really doing is letting love out.

Many of us spent years superimposing this longing onto relationships, and wanting to belong and be ‘chosen’. We weren’t wrong to want love — we just hadn’t yet landed on our real relationship with Source. As bell hooks reminds us, when we don’t know what love looks like, when we can’t recognize it, respect it, commit to it — we can’t fully give it or receive it.

It’s like holding your breath until you understand that love is what you are, not what you are seeking. Once you know this, you can exhale. And each breath after that becomes easier and freer.

The Treasure Was Always Here

There’s a story I’ve carried for years that captures this perfectly. You may know it.

There was a Persian farmer named Ali Hafed who owned a large, prosperous farm with orchards, grain-fields, and gardens. One day a Buddhist priest visited and spoke of diamonds — that a single mine could grant wealth beyond imagining. Ali Hafed became so consumed by the idea that he sold his farm, left his family with a neighbor, and set off on a lifelong quest to find his fortune.

He wandered. He spent everything. He found nothing. And in despair, he threw himself into the sea.

Meanwhile, the man who purchased his farm one day picked up an unusual rock. When the old priest visited again, he immediately recognized it as a diamond. They rushed outside and discovered the diamond mines of Golconda right there on the property.

Ali Hafed had been standing on acres of diamonds all along.

That’s how it is with Love. The love we seek isn’t somewhere else. The journey outward is real — sometimes life requires it, to get us back home to our center. In the end everything we’ve been looking for, we already have. The treasure was never across the sea. It was here. It has always been here.

Often we can’t see our own love but we can absolutely recognize it in others. Ernest Holmes writes in Richer Living: “When we let the love that is within us go out to the God who is in all people and the Divine Presence that is in all things, then we are loving God with all our heart and with all our soul and mind because we are recognizing that the Spirit within us is the same Spirit that we meet in others.”

The Way Forward

For the month of June, we are sitting with the theme of a Higher Deeper Love. And it begins right here — not with doing more, not with becoming more lovable, but with recognizing what is already true.

There are two well-worn pathways to awakening to the Love within you, both of them are effective. We can cultivate it through practice, contemplation, and turning inward. Or we can let life soften us through its challenges until we have no choice but to surrender and allow Love to make itself known. Both paths lead home. Like I said — Love is patient. It simply waits for us to let go of our search for something transactional, something outside of us; It waits until we can just be it.

My invitation to you this week is this: Be the love you seek.

As bell hooks writes so gently: “One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.”

You are not lacking love. You never were. You are simply, beautifully, learning to recognize what you’ve been standing on all along.

Alice Reid is the Spiritual Leader of Center for Spiritual Living Capistrano Valley, a New Thought community in South Orange County, CA. This reflection is drawn from her Sunday talk, June 7, 2026, as part of the monthlong series Higher Deeper Love — Love Leads the Way.

Join us Sundays at 10:30am PT at 3316 Ave. Del Presidente in San Clemente or online at cslcv.org

As part of getting ready, I set an intention at the beginning of the year to go deep into mysticism — particularly the early Christian mystics; it’s been a joy to spend time with the likes of Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart to name a few. The theme that keeps coming up for me is this: they write about God with such tenderness and intimacy that frankly can seem almost taboo in the spiritual & metaphysical tradition I’ve called home for 26 years. They aren’t just working with the Divine. They are in love with it. And reading their devotion stirs something ancient in me.

I want to share something from a book I love called For Lovers of God Everywhere — a collection of poetry and writing from mystics across traditions by Roger Housden. This particular piece is from Saint Paul. I know — I don’t read the Bible much either. But I want to invite you to hear Paul as a mystic musing rather than a cleric posturing. What Paul is writing about is not religion. It’s his experience of loving God.

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

— Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:1–3, 11–13

Paul is saying that all the gifts we cultivate —the knowledge, the intuition, the faith that moves mountains — without love as its essence, is just noise. A clanging cymbal. The passage that stands out for me is: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

He’s not concerned with mastering a principle. He wants to be known — the way you know a person, not a concept. He’s reaching for a relationship with the Divine that is mutual, intimate, second-person. Not God as a power to be worked with, but a presence that turns toward him.

Reading the mystics while simultaneously training prayer practitioners in my community has put me in an interesting place.

In the spiritual tradition I practice and teach, New Thought, rooted in the Science of Mind — we are trained to relate to the Divine from two places. The first person: God expresses as me, I am one with the Source; and the third person: there is only God, the Source of all creation. These are powerful practices. They have healed me in more ways than I can count. I am beyond grateful for all the healing I’ve experienced.

And yet. Reading these mystics, sitting with their longing and their love, I’ve felt a shift and a longing stirring within me.

What I’m longing for is what the philosopher Martin Buber called the I-Thou relationship — the moment the Divine stops being a principle we work with and becomes a presence that looks back. Not an It but a You. Not the Universe or the Infinite but just a loving presence, that loves me in a real way and that I can love back.

It has felt, at times, like a betrayal of my training to want this.

And then I came across this exchange between philosopher Martin Buber and Joseph Campbell at a lecture series Buber was giving at Columbia University that gave me insight.

Campbell challenged Buber over their differing perspectives. Their differences seemed irreconcilable, Buber relating to God as an intimate other (I-Thou) versus the Eastern and New Thought understanding that the Divine is already within you, that you and God are not separate at all (what Campbell calls the I-I). When Campbell asked Buber what Buber meant by God having a hidden face, Buber insisting “we must come out of our exile to find God”, with Campbell countering that “we were never in exile to begin with”.

The idea that came to me was maybe they’re both right — they’re just describing aspects of a larger relationship with self and God. Why can’t the longing for I-Thou just be the lived experience of someone whose I-I practice has gone so deep and become so real that it has opened a hunger that the practice itself created.

In other words — the craving for intimacy with God isn’t a step backward. It may be what happens when you’ve gone far enough forward.

This is where Teresa of Ávila comes in.

I was first drawn to Teresa because she was not only devoted to God — she was, by any modern measure, a bad-ass businesswoman. She founded seventeen convents across 16th century Spain, negotiated with bishops, challenging them through lawyers when needed. But her most enduring work is a book called The Interior Castle, in which she imagines the soul as a crystal castle with many rooms. The spiritual life is the journey inward — from the outer rooms toward the center, where the most intimate encounter with the Divine takes place.

What struck me is this: you never finally arrive. Every room opens onto another. Every threshold leads deeper. And Teresa suggests that it’s not frustrating — it’s actually the point. The Beloved keeps receding not to tease you, but to keep you in love with the journey. To keep you moving. To keep you reaching.

This is what doubt as devotion looks like. You think you’ve arrived — and then something in you asks, is this all there is? That’s not a loss of faith. That is the soul falling so hard for the Divine that it must keep moving toward it, not moving “out there”, but moving inward.

To quote Howard Thurman: “Love loves; this is its nature.”

In other words, God is Love and Love just loves itself. That’s the core of all beingness.

We started this exploration in doubt earlier in the series asking whether doubt was something to be ashamed of. We end here:

Doubt is simply one of the names Love gives itself when it isn’t finished yet.

Emma Curtis Hopkins followed her doubt and opened a new spiritual lineage. Rosa Parks courted her doubt and changed the laws that upheld segregation. Teresa of Ávila let her doubt pull her deeper into the interior castle. And Paul, two thousand years ago, sat with the mystery of not knowing but being fully known and called it the greatest thing.

As I continue to long for a deeper intimacy with the Divine — and count down the days to the Camino — I want to leave you with this: let your questions bubble up. Don’t run from doubt. Court it like a lover. See where it takes you. This is one of the ways Love lures us deeper into the reality that is everything within us and everything around us.

What if the very thing you’ve been doubting is not an obstacle to your faith — but simply the next room in the interior castle?

Alice Reid is the lead minister at CSL Capistrano Valley (www.cslcv.org) and the author of Modern Day Mystic on Substack, where she shares reflections adapted from her Sunday talks. This is the final post in a four-week series on Divine Doubt.

If this resonated, share it with someone who might need it.

I’d like to make the case for the opposite.

Not all doubt is created equal. And the kind worth courting — what I’ve come to call divine doubt — may be one of the most underrated spiritual tools we have.

Before we dig in, I’d like to distinguish different types of doubt.

The first is destructive doubt — the ego’s specialty. Cynicism. Tearing down what exists with little interest in building anything in its place. This is the doubt that keeps us stuck in the complaint or problem without any consideration for something different.

The second is anxious doubt — the type probably most of us are familiar with. This is what happens when we find ourselves faced with something we don’t have a framework for, and our minds begin to spin. Rather than sitting with the discomfort long enough to go deeper, we reach for the nearest familiar thing – we fill in the ‘understanding gap’ with something we know. It’s not cynicism. It’s just fear dressed up as a question.

The third is divine doubt — where we consciously and honestly begin to sense that something more wants to be revealed. Rather than tearing down or spinning out, we go deeper. We court the question instead of running from it. This kind of doubt leans on our faith and gives us an opportunity to be creative.

Rosa Parks had divine doubt.

What most people don’t know is that her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in December 1955 was not a spontaneous act — well it was, but it wasn’t. Rosa had been working for the local NAACP for over a decade. She was committed to civil rights and nonviolent resistance but was increasingly discouraged by how slowly things were changing. Her doubt had been building for years. She had been doing the interior work long before that fateful day.

The moment was spontaneous. The action was not.

And here’s what made it historic: it wasn’t just one woman’s private conviction. Rosa’s doubt was met by a community that shared it and was ready to act. Together they held a 381-day boycott that changed the laws. Kept to herself, Rosa’s doubt was just suffering. The community support and structure made it viable, actionable, and ultimately transformative.

Divine doubt, it turns out, can have an almost magnetic quality. When you voice the honest question — not from cynicism or anxiety, but from genuine discernment — you often discover you’re not the only one sitting with it.

I know the power of leaning into doubt first hand.

I had only been a licensed minister for about a year when my beloved teacher and mentor of eight years died suddenly. The community was devastated. Three of us on the ministry staff– all licensed at the same time – were faced with question: What is mine to do? Are we enough to carry this community?

We sat with our doubt individually and collectively and leaned into our faith. What came forward was an interim ministry team that held the transitional space more powerfully than any of us could have managed alone. Our doubt and uncertainty turned into creativity – allowing us to transform a moment of tragedy and grief into a foundation for moving forward. The community was holding the same questions we were, and together we rallied.

This is what we miss when we treat doubt as purely private work. Your honest question, offered from a place of genuine discernment, can become the beginning of something no one could build alone. Mystic, theologian and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman put it plainly: “there must be community — not as a nice idea, not as a preference, but as a fundamental intent of life itself”.

A caveat: not everyone will meet your doubt with open arms. Divine doubt doesn’t always get a warm reception. But here’s what I’ve found — if it’s genuinely divine doubt, something eventually rises up to meet it. An opening appears. Support shows up. Or something new comes forward, and community emerges around the question itself.

Either way, the work is the same: do the interior discernment first. Ask yourself honestly — is this destructive, anxious, or divine? Is this the ego protecting itself, or is this something real pressing for expression?

If it’s the latter — court it. Sit with it long enough to understand what it’s asking. And then find one other person willing to sit with it alongside you.

The writer Cole Arthur Riley frames it this way: “To be liberated spiritually is to commune with and seek God without fear of alienation if we do not reach the same conclusions as our neighbor. It is to become spiritual creatives.”

Spiritual creatives. Not spiritual consumers waiting to be told what to believe. Not spiritual performers saying the right things without standing behind what they say is important. People willing to acknowledge their honest doubt — and then build something with it.

That distinction matters. Divine doubt is just the means to a new beginning. And the difference is what you do with your doubt.

Rosa couldn’t change the laws in Montgomery alone. I couldn’t hold that community alone – the times were bigger than the individual and it was community that made the difference. Most of the things worth building require more than one person willing to doubt the way things are.

Invitations for you to consider:

Notice a doubt you’ve been carrying privately. Don’t force it or manufacture it— just ask: is this mine alone, or does it belong to something larger?

Find one person you trust and share your doubt honestly from a place of curiosity, not to fix or solve – just to consider why it’s important and to stop carrying it alone.

And contemplate: where in your life has someone else’s honest doubt helped you? What did it open up?

Alice Reid is the author of Modern Day Mystic on Substack and the lead minister at CSL Capistrano Valley (www.cslcv.org). This is part of a five-week series on Divine Doubt.

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I came home thinking about a friend of mine who recently tore her Achilles tendon. Surgery. Off her feet for months. This woman is fiercely independent, and she’ll tell you herself she has trust issues. And yet people keep remarking on how lightly she’s carrying it. Her answer: awfulizing it won’t make it better. So she’s choosing to see the blessings. She’s leaning into trust.

That’s ordinary mysticism. That’s what it looks like to stay open when life presses in.

This month I’m sitting with Divine Doubt — the idea that questioning isn’t a sign of weakness, but the very thing that might actually deepen our faith.

And today I want to go one step further: what happens when we stop carrying our doubt alone?

Most of us, if we’re honest, can’t look at the world right now and feel a settled sense of certainty about the future. The newsfeed is relentless. There’s real suffering happening. It’s enough to make you question the efficacy of prayer, to wonder whether prayer actually works.

Here’s what I want to say about that moment of uncertainty: it is not a failure of your faith. It’s an invitation. A strange angel at the door.

D.H. Lawrence wrote a poem called Song of a Man Who Has Come Through — a fierce, beautiful piece about surrender and intuition. There’s a moment near the end where he writes:

What is the knocking at the door in the night?

It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.

Admit them, admit them.

The strange angels in Lawrence’s poem represent sudden inspiration and the unexpected spiritual visitation that frightens us precisely because it asks us to change. The poem isn’t about comfort. It’s about the courage to open the door despite our discomfort.

I believe doubt is one of those strange angels. When we admit it — consciously and honestly — it becomes a portal to deeper understanding.

The New Thought tradition exists because one woman admitted her strange angel.

Emma Curtis Hopkins was in the inner circle of early Christian Science — editing Mary Baker Eddy’s flagship journal at the height of the movement’s influence. She believed in the healing work. And then she started reading other mystics and other traditions, asking whether Mary’s revelation was truly unique to her or whether it was one expression of something much more ancient.

Mary saw this as betrayal. In 1885, she fired Emma.

What happened next is history. Emma went on to become the teacher of teachers — training Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded Unity as well as one of the founders of Divine Science. She also trained one young man who would later write The Science of Mind and found Religious Science: Ernest Holmes. The philosophy that underlies Centers for Spiritual Living, the community I serve, is the result of Emma’s willingness to follow her doubt instead of burying it.

The doubt didn’t destroy the work. It expanded it beyond anything the original container could have held.

But here’s what happens when we don’t admit the strange angels: the doubts don’t disappear. They go underground. They settle into the subjective mind and quietly undermine the very beliefs we’re trying to build. Going along to get along feels easier, but it’s a trap — the ego’s way of trading spiritual growth for the comfort of belonging.

You know the story of the emperor with no clothes. One person finally said the true thing — the thing everyone already knew but no one would say, despite thinking it — and it woke everyone up.

A few years ago I was at a strategic planning retreat for an international nonprofit. Big ideas, bold energy, flip charts full of vision. As we were wrapping up, I noticed something no one was saying: how are we actually going to do any of this?

I almost didn’t ask. The room had such a great vibe, I didn’t want to dampen it. But I asked anyway.

The room got quiet. Then people started nodding. Because everyone had been thinking it. Nobody had said it. We left with an accountability team, real structure, actual roles and responsibilities. The organization moved from a startup with great intentions to one genuinely having impact. Leadership became more collaborative. The work got more focused.

All of that happened because one person voiced the question that was already in the room. It could have been anyone, all it took was a little courage.

I’m not asking you to perform uncertainty or manufacture doubt. That’s just the ego being contrary for sport. I’m talking about divine doubt — the honest, conscious question that makes you look deeper and think new thoughts.

What I am asking is simpler and harder: stop pretending.

It’s okay to be uncertain. You don’t have to arrive with all the answers. You don’t have to pretend you have faith you don’t feel. When you find safe space in a community that does that — where they let their shared uncertainty breathe — something shifts, people wake up, as if all they needed was the permission of your doubt to participate fully.

This week: When you hear something you immediately disagree with, pause before you react. Follow the feeling versus engaging in argument. When something keeps nagging at you, sit with it instead of pushing it away.

Who knows, it might just be strange angels at the door.

Admit them. Admit them.

This post is adapted from a talk given at CSL Capistrano Valley [www.cslcv.org] on May 17, 2026, part of a five-week series on Divine Doubt. I’m sharing the central ideas here each week for those who aren’t in the room — or who were and want to sit with them a little longer.

If this resonated, share it with someone who might enjoy it.

If I’m being totally honest, there are certainly times I have doubted the path I’m on. Times I’ve questioned my beliefs, wondered about the credence of what I teach, felt the ground shift under what I thought I knew. And when I look honestly at those times, what I find is a subtle slide of my awareness — from the power within me to looking for power outside of me. I can see how doubt was a compass, a way to come back to what I actually know to be true.

In the tradition I teach — a strand of practical mysticism that emphasizes the creative power of thought and the ever-present nature of the Divine — there’s a particular pressure to be certain. Our affirmative prayers often begin with “I know.” Our statements of principle begin with “We believe.” Certainty can seem like the goal, and doubt can read like weakness or failure.

But that reading misses something important. The doubt I’ve experienced in my own practice has usually been pointing to something specific: the places where I’d quietly started treating conditions and outcomes as the source of my security rather than the deeper truth underneath them. This is how doubt becomes instructive.

That kind of doubt is not the enemy of faith. In fact, it might be one of its most honest expressions.

Two Squirrels

A colleague of mine, Christine Green, shared a metaphor recently that really broadened my thinking about doubt.

She described watching a squirrel in autumn, moving with focused purpose — assessing, gathering, making decisions about what was needed and what wasn’t. That doubt (“Is this enough? Is there more? Is this the right spot?”) wasn’t paralyzing the squirrel. It was animating it. The doubt was intelligent. It was keeping the squirrel in motion toward its own thriving.

Then she described a different squirrel — one she’d watched in the middle of traffic, cars coming from both directions. Darting left. Stopping. Darting right. Stopping. The same instinct that served the first squirrel completely overwhelmed the second.

Same animal. Same impulse. Two entirely different relationships to the signal.

This is the distinction I want to explore about doubt. Constructive doubt reads the environment. It asks: Is this true? Is there more here? What am I missing? It keeps us honest, keeps our thinking alive, prevents our beliefs from calcifying into dogma. Reactive doubt has stopped processing information and started spinning. It’s moved beyond being instructive; it’s taken over. It generates worry, anxiety, fear, and contraction — it’s downright exhausting.

The invitation for now is simply to notice which squirrel you’re being when your doubts arise. Not to fix anything — just notice how you respond, and what happens when you do.

The Idol of Certainty

Theologian Howard Thurman writes about the danger of making an idol of commitment — of letting the thing we’re committed to matter more than the truth the commitment was meant to serve. I think we do the same thing with certainty.

Certainty feels like solid ground. And the ego is simply built to want solid ground — it keeps us safe, knows where the walls are. It’s not wrong for wanting certainty. The ego is just loving us and doing its job.

But here’s where it gets spiritually interesting: the opposite of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.

Certainty closes the door, as if there is nothing more to know. And in a universe that is infinite and ever-unfolding — letting our need for certainty set the ceiling of our spiritual life is how faith quietly hardens into dogma.

The ego wants the itinerary. It wants to know every stop before the journey begins. And that is understandable. But faith — real, living faith — says: start walking. The path will show you what you need to know when you need to know it.

Big Doubt, Big Enlightenment

There is a teaching from the Zen tradition — attributed to Korean Zen master Nine Mountains, and part of what teachers call the Three Essentials of practice — that says:

Small doubt, small enlightenment. Big doubt, big enlightenment.

The full teaching identifies Great Faith, Great Doubt, and Great Determination as the three pillars of the spiritual life. And the part that consistently surprises people: great faith and great doubt don’t oppose each other. Great faith actually activates great doubt. The deeper your trust in the nature of things, the bigger the questions that trust opens up in you.

That is not the absence of faith. That is faith going deeper.

The Path of the Modern Day Mystic

This fall, I’m going on sabbatical. Part of that time will involve walking a significant stretch of the Camino — one of the great pilgrimage routes of the world. I have wanted to do this for years. And yes, I have significant doubts: about my physical readiness, about what I’ll find, about how it will change me.

But when I sit with those doubts, I recognize the first squirrel, not the second. The season of my life and my career is asking me to slow down, to let go of certainty for a while, to dive deeper into my own faith. My doubts aren’t stopping me from going. They’re part of why I’m going.

It’s a journey I’m calling the Path of the Modern Day Mystic — and I’ll be sharing it here as it unfolds.

There is a tradition on the Camino of carrying a credential — a small document that pilgrims get stamped at each stop along the way. Not evidence that you’ve arrived. Just evidence that you’ve been walking.

Devotional doubt is the willingness to keep walking even when you don’t have the full itinerary. It is, in its own way, the most honest act of faith available to us.

A Question to Sit With

Before you look for answers this week, I want to offer a question to simply be in for a while:

What doubts are you currently hiding — and what do you fear those doubts say about you?

Not to fix them or pray them away. Just to look at them clearly, maybe for the first time, and discover that they don’t have the power over you that shame has given them.

This is the first stamp. You showed up, you were willing to look at the doubt rather than manage it. That is enough. It’s a good beginning.

The door is open. I’ll see you next week.

This post is adapted from a talk given at CSL Capistrano Valley [www.cslcv.org] on May 3, 2026, opening a five-week series on Divine Doubt. I’ll share the central ideas here each week for those who weren’t in the room — or who were and want to sit with them a little longer.

If this resonated, share it with someone who might be in the middle of their own traffic-squirrel moment.

Some of you may know this scam. It starts innocently enough — “Got a minute? Can you help me?” — and turns into a request that exploits the trust people have built with someone they care about.

When I found out, I was a little angry, honestly. But underneath that, I felt something else…

I felt sad for them.

I found myself wondering: what kind of life is a person living when exploiting the love people have for each other seems like the answer to their problems? What has the world taught them about whether love is real, or safe, or available to them?

I went to bed thinking about it. And somewhere in the night, I woke up with these words on my heart:

All people need is to love and be loved.

Even that person. Especially that person.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Here’s what I want to explore with you — because I think it matters right now, in the world we’re actually living in:

What if love isn’t something we ration out to the people we decide have earned it? What if it isn’t a reward for good behavior or a feeling that shows up when conditions are right?

What if love is simply the water we all swim in — available to everyone, withheld from no one — and our practice is learning to live from it consciously and artfully, even when it’s hard?

And what if we could learn — really learn — that taking care of ourselves and continuing to love are not opposites? That it’s not either/or, but both/and?

As I sit with this, I have two stories that I think illustrate what this actually looks like in real life.

Choosing to Respond to Hate with Love

The first comes from Valarie Kaur’s beautiful book See No Stranger. In it she writes: “You are a part of me I do not yet know.”

I’ve been carrying that sentence around for weeks. Because it reframes everything — not just how we see strangers, but how we see the people who hurt us.

Rana lost both of his brothers to senseless violence. His brother Balbir was planting flowers outside his business when he was shot five times in the back, just days after the September 11th attacks, by a man who directed his rage at people he called “towel heads.” It was as senseless and tragic as violence gets.

And yet Rana insisted on responding to hate with love.

A few years after the murder, on his way to the annual memorial for his brother, Rana spotted the killer’s wife and daughter. He recognized them. And he invited them to dinner.

Some time later, he called the murderer in prison to forgive him.

Let that land for a moment.

Rana didn’t pretend his brother wasn’t murdered. He didn’t make excuses for what the killer did. He felt every ounce of his grief — and he chose love anyway. He protected his heart and kept it open at the same time.

For Rana, love was never just a feeling. It was a practice. A daily, costly, eyes-open commitment to refuse the lie that hatred gets the final word.

A Tiny Act of Kindness That Changed Everything

My second story is simpler — and maybe that’s exactly the point.

It comes from NPR’s My Unsung Hero podcast. A man named Ken Wilcox tells of a time when he was working for what he describes as a “tyrant,” while also grieving the loss of many friends to AIDS. Walking down a street in Washington D.C. on a cold January day, feeling hopeless and full of despair, a woman walking toward him deliberately caught his eyes….

and smiled.

She said nothing. She just smiled, and walked on. She had no idea who he was or what he was carrying that day.

But that one smile was enough to keep him going. He quit his job shortly after. And eventually became a minister — a vocation he loves deeply.

His words: “I have to marvel at the idea that all of that has come about because this one wonderful woman on a street in Washington D.C. on a cold January day decided to smile at me. She is my unsung hero.”

I’ll admit — when I first found this story the name Ken Wilcox seemed familiar. I just thought it was a beautiful illustration of ordinary love. And then I looked him up.

And of course, Dr. Ken Wilcox is the Senior Minister of a Center for Spiritual Living in St. Augustine, Florida - a colleague on a similar path.

That anonymous woman didn’t just keep a stranger going on a hard day. She set a minister’s life in motion. And she will never know.

Both/And

Here’s what strikes me about these two stories side by side.

Rana’s love came at a very dear price. He had to walk through unimaginable grief and choose, over and over again, not to let hatred win. The woman on the street in Washington gave away three seconds and a smile.

And both were transformative.

This is the genius of love as a daily practice — it doesn’t require heroism. It doesn’t require that you have it all together or that you feel particularly loving on any given day. It just requires the willingness to show up, consciously, as love in the moment you’re in.

And here’s the both/and that I keep coming back to: in the case of the scammer who tried to exploit our community’s trust — we set a boundary, we warned each other, we took care of ourselves. And we kept showing up for each other. And somewhere underneath the frustration, I found room to feel something like compassion for a person whose life has led them to this.

That is mature love. Not sentimental. Not naive. Not a doormat. But rooted in the understanding that we are all, somehow, part of each other. That…

“you are the part of me I do not yet know”.

The Invitation

We all have opportunities every single day. The person who annoys you. The situation where you feel over your head. The stranger who needs a smile. The person who has hurt you and doesn’t deserve your forgiveness — and yet.

Love is always the answer. Not because it’s easy or because the other person has earned it. But because it is the truest thing there is. The water we all swim in, whether we know it or not.

And when we are willing — to feel the feeling, walk through the circumstance, and love anyway — something shifts. We stop being victims of the world’s hardness and start being agents of its healing.

On the pathway of becoming, love is the way-show-er.

Where in your life is love asking you to practice it today — not as a feeling, but as a choice?

About thirty years ago, I found myself sitting in a room with colleagues at an executive management retreat, quietly terrified.

I was the Finance Director for a statewide nonprofit. I was good at my job. Smart enough, it turned out, to spend years outrunning a story I had never told anyone in a professional setting.

As we got started the facilitator asked us each to create a timeline of our lives — showing how we got to where we were, sitting in that room that day.

I froze.

Because my timeline had things in it I had never said out loud at work. I hadn’t finished high school the traditional way. I had a GED. No college degree, I found myself pregnant and opted for a vocational certificate instead, and a history with addiction that had taken me somewhere far from the life one typically expects for success people.

I had gotten very comfortable not telling that story. Nobody had asked. And I had learned that my performance told people enough.

I went to the facilitator privately before it began. I began to cry as I told her how afraid I was about people finding out about my past. I feared they’d judge me and think less of me.

She was kind. She let me know I could choose what I wanted to share. Then she said something important:

“It’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be.”

I didn’t fully believe her. But I went back in. And I shared — honestly. I let people see the path I had actually walked.

And the world didn’t end.

What I felt afterward was deep relief, and something I couldn’t quite name at the time. Today I know what it was.

Belonging.

Not because my sharing proved anything, but because I had stopped hiding something. The gap between who I was performing and who I actually was — that gap closed just a little. And in that closing, something that had felt like separation became connection.

The Two Voices That Keep Us Separate

Most of us know what it feels like to stand behind a carefully constructed version of ourselves.

We learn it at a young age. We build personas that are polished— personas that whisper: I am worthy of being here.

And underneath every persona, there are two voices doing the work.

Pride says: protect the image. You’ve worked too hard to let them see the seams.

Fear says: if they really know you — the whole of you — you’ll be rejected.

Together, they construct what I can only call the great lie: that we are fundamentally separate, that our real selves must be defended, that the distance between us and other people is something to be carefully managed.

This lie doesn’t just make us lonely. It exhausts us. Think about how much energy goes into maintaining the performance — the careful omissions, the polished answers, the version of yourself you’ve decided is presentable.

What if you could use all that energy for better purpose?

What Vulnerability Actually Is

Here’s what I want to be clear about, because this word gets misunderstood.

Vulnerability is not emotional oversharing. It’s not looking for audiences to display your pain or telling everyone everything. You don’t have to be reckless about it.

What it is — at its core — is this: the willingness to stop hiding your authentic self.

Your story has chapters that are messy, incomplete, sometimes embarrassing. But underneath your story is something whole — the real you, the one that exists before the performance begins, your authentic soul.

When we hide our story out of pride and fear, we end up hiding that authentic soul as well. We hold our carefully edited version so tightly that we sometimes lose touch with what’s underneath.

And here’s the spiritual truth that changed everything for me: vulnerability keeps us soft enough to be transformed. Not broken. Not shattered. Just malleable — workable — available to the life that is trying to emerge through you. Vulnerability keeps us soft enough so that Spirit can work with us.

The Belonging Was Already There

Here is the thing that still moves me when I think about that retreat so long ago.

The belonging was already there.

It was there before I spoke. It was there before I cried to the facilitator. It was there the moment I walked in. The connection between me and my colleagues wasn’t something I created by sharing my story.

It was something I revealed.

We tend to think of connection as something we build — through charm or achievement. As if belonging were a reward we earn by presenting well enough.

But what if it isn’t? What if connection is simply the nature of things — what exists underneath all the performing and protecting and pretending — and vulnerability is just the practice of letting the illusion of separation fall away long enough to feel it?

That’s not just a comforting idea. It changes how you move through the world.

Because if belonging is something you reveal rather than earn, then the very act of showing up honestly — just as you actually are — is enough. More than enough. It’s the whole thing.

And when you do it, something extraordinary happens: other people recognize themselves in you. The walls come down — not just yours, but theirs too. Your willingness to be seen gives them permission to be seen.

This is how real connection works. It doesn’t descend from above as some mystical experience. It emerges in the ordinary moments when two human beings stop pretending with each other and simply meet honestly and authentically.

Grace Meets Us in the Fear

One more thing about that retreat room. And it has to do with the woman who met me in my fear before I went back in.

She didn’t try to fix me. She didn’t promise it would be fine. She just told me the truth — it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be — and gave me back my choice.

That is what grace does. It doesn’t eliminate the risk or guarantee the outcome. It simply reminds you that something larger than your fear is holding you. That you are not alone in this.

Healing rarely comes in the moment of revelation. It comes in the moment of release — when you stop spending energy on the distance between your real self and your performed self.

When you surrender the performance, you free up everything that was holding it in place. And that energy becomes available for something real.

The very things we’ve been hiding — the GED, the addiction, the failure, the fear, the doubt, the grief — those aren’t obstacles.... they are the pathway.

The Thing I Didn’t Plan to Tell You

I want to end with something I didn’t plan to share when I first drafted these words.

The young woman in that retreat room — the one who cried to the facilitator, who was working twice as hard to be half as good, who was terrified her colleagues would see the cracks in her armour — that woman eventually received an honorary doctorate in divinity.

I don’t tell you that to impress you. I tell you because I want you to understand what becomes possible when you stop spending your energy defending a version of yourself that was never the whole truth anyway.

The practice of becoming — the one that actually works — is not about becoming someone different. It is about becoming more fully who you already are. Dropping what is false. Trusting what is real.

Pride will still whisper. Fear will still knock. Even now, even after everything, I feel it sometimes... because I’m human.

The practice isn’t silencing those voices. It’s learning to hear them, recognize them for what they are, and choose truth anyway.

Every single time we do — the gap closes. The separation dissolves. We remember what has always been true:

We were never alone. We were never truly separate. We were always, already, one.

That is not something you have to earn by being perfect.

It is something you get to discover by being real.

What would you let yourself share if you knew it wouldn’t cost you your place at the table?

Easter. Happy Ostara. Happy Spring. However you name this season, something in us seems to open up when we this time of year comes around.

And when I think about the Easter story, it lands a little differently for me than it’s often told.

Easter marks the end of Holy Week for Christians around the world. There seems to be a lot of attention on the crucifixion — on the suffering, the sacrifice, the idea of a God who required retribution and offered up a son to pay the debt of human sin. I get the pull of that story. It names something real. It meets us in our brokenness. When you are struggling, or when you love someone who is suffering, it can be difficult to see things from a place of perfect, whole, and complete.

And yet the more potent part of the story is the resurrection. Not Jesus’s personal resurrection but the idea that we can all reclaim ourselves when we surrender to our divinity. That’s where the story of Jesus of Nazareth gets real for me. It’s the story about a man who surrendered his humanity so that he could integrate it with his divinity; we are shown the promise of our own eternality in the example set by a master teacher.

What “Sin” Actually Means

In new thought philosophy, sin isn’t damnation. The word itself — hamartia in the Greek — simply means missing the mark. It’s the gap between who we know ourselves to be and how we’re showing up in the moment. Not a verdict, just an observation. And more importantly, an invitation.

The invitation to remember who we are and to reclaim our wholeness.

The Jesus I Find Compelling

The historical Jesus grew up in a religious culture that routinely excluded the poor, the sick, and the “unclean” from the temple — from God’s presence, essentially. And he simply refused to accept that. From the core of his being, he knew: there are no exceptions. Every person, regardless of station or circumstance, belongs to God. Is one with God.

So he became a champion for the ones who’d been left out. He lifted people toward their own wholeness. He let suffering break him open — not break him down. And that is a profound distinction.

To be so grounded in love that when you encounter someone else’s pain, you don’t get pulled into it — you feel a love rise up in you that serves both of you. It was a powerful model 2,000 years ago, and it’s no less potent today.

The Both/And of Easter

Here’s what I believe: there is wisdom in the crucifixion and the resurrection. We don’t get to skip the dying. In fact, one of the spiritual traps in new thought traditions is the temptation to rush straight to prayer — to want the uncomfortable thing to simply go away — before we’ve been fully present with what it has to teach us.

The crucifixion, metaphysically, is about being present with suffering long enough to glean what it carries. To walk through it, not around it. To let it do its work.

And then — always, I mean ALWAYS — there is a resurrection. There is an eternal cycle of dying and a renewal. There is always a way through to the other side, where we remember the greater truth of who we are.

Jesus didn’t die for our sins, he died to the limited experience of the material world. Jesus rose up out of the ashes of his fate and reclaimed his divinity – the same divinity that lives in you and me.

The Invitation

What breaks your heart? Bring it forward and let it break you open. And from the place of an open heart invite your own divinity to experience life through you ... right where you are, right in the thick of this thing we call life.

And as you make space for your own personal renewal use this mantra to keep you focused on what’s really true about you and your life.

There’s only one Life.

This Life is God’s Life.

This Life is Perfect.

This life is my life now.

We become what we’ve already been all along, not because we added anything, but because we’ve stripped away the attachments and become present to our true nature.

And this, my friends, is a resurrection worth celebrating

Hosana — and What It Actually Means

Palm Sunday tells one of the great stories of collective hope — and collective disappointment. As Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, the crowds threw palms before him and cried out, “Hosana, hosana!”

Did you know that hosana literally translates to save me — save us?

Here was a people ground down by Roman occupation, carrying centuries of oppression, and suddenly there was this luminous figure arriving like royalty. Of course they wanted him to fix it. Of course they wanted him to vanquish their enemies, clear the field, make it all better.

But Jesus didn’t claim the kind of power they were asking for. He stepped away from worldly kingship because he knew a larger truth. And when the crowd realized he wasn’t going to be their political savior, their hope collapsed.

“Hosana” is the cry of a people who believe their power comes from something outside themselves.

Sound familiar? War. Gas prices. Economic ills. The political chasm that has us sorting people into camps. It’s easy to keep waiting for someone — or something — to fix it. We’ve been practicing that pattern for millennia.

The Trouble with Small Thinking

Here’s what I know about the power of Spirit: it does not discriminate. It gives of Itself freely to all who will drink from Its chalice — to all who will accept the good that comes to them and allow it to move through them.

The only thing that gets in the way is our small thinking.

When we mistake a temporary condition — a diagnosis, a difficult relationship, a financial season — for the whole truth of what’s happening, we stop being open to possibility. We think the thought, then we think it again. We do the thing, then we do it again. Sometimes we end up marrying the same person again. (They change faces, but it’s the same dynamic.) Sometimes we take the same job with the same boss in a different body.

None of that is fate. It’s consciousness. And consciousness can change.

“There is no condition that has more power than the movement of Source through an open mind and an open heart.”

I was in a conversation recently with someone I love, and I caught myself falling right into the collective groove of fear and reaction. I had to stop myself mid-sentence and say: I have to change my thinking. I’m stuck in a current of consciousness that isn’t serving this situation.

And that’s the practice. Not pretending the hard thing isn’t hard. But catching ourselves before we get all the way down that groove — snapping the rubber band, so to speak — and choosing a new thought.

You Signed Up for This

Consider leaning into possibility, courting it, actually making room for it.

Because the invitation is to allow pure imagination to guide us. It’s stepping into the willingness to make room for an idea that isn’t yet visible in the material world.

The trick — and it does take some hutzpah — is to not be seduced by separation. Us and them. Left and right. Mine and yours. Separation is the consciousness behind the “hosana” cry. Oneness is what makes new possibility .... well possible.

I have people I love on every side of every divide, and I believe most of them Have intentions. They just disagree — sometimes loudly, sometimes painfully — about how to get there. But when I start from a place of oneness, something shifts. Not in them, necessarily. In me.

You’ve probably felt this. When you do your inner work, when you shift your thinking, that person who was driving you crazy doesn’t necessarily change — but the eyes you see them with do. The heart you meet them with does.

If someone’s annoying you and you change — did they get nicer? No. You changed. And you cannot help but affect the people around you when you’re willing to do your part.

Here’s the honest truth: if you’re reading these words some part of you has already signed up for this work. You’ve signed up to be a way-shower. A light bearer. Someone who is willing to choos differently, one thought and one relationship and one conversation at a time.

That’s not a small thing. In fact, that’s the whole thing.

What We Are Looking For, We Are Looking With

Ernest Holmes, founder of Centers for Spiritual Living and author wrote:

“We arrive at a consciousness of unity only in such a degree as we see that what we are looking for, we are looking with, and we are looking at.”

Read that again. Slowly.

The thing we are seeking — love, wholeness, freedom, possibility — is not out there waiting to be found. It is the very awareness we are looking with. It is already present. It has always been present.

You are not waiting to be saved. You are already the answer to a prayer.

✦ Affirmation ✦

I am a possibili-tarian.

I release the idea that I need to be ‘saved’ and claim the power that lives within me.

I choose Oneness. I choose possibility.

I am the yes that the Universe is waiting to fulfill.

When we turn on the news there’s a lot coming at us. And then, on top of that, life has a way of bringing things closer to home. Situations we didn’t choose. Things we wouldn’t have signed up for.

And in those moments, it’s natural to feel the heaviness of day-to-day life.

But friends in these moments our spiritual beliefs aren’t just feel-good see-you-Sunday connections anymore—they are necessary.

Because it’s one thing to talk about spirituality when life is going well. It’s another thing entirely when you’re in the middle of something you can’t fix, control, or fully understand.

That’s when spiritual beliefs really become practice.

~~~

There’s an old saying: when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

I’d like to appropriate it for our discussion today, consider:

“When the going gets tough, our spiritual practices get going.”

Not fixing.
Not figuring it all out.
Not attempting to control the outcome.

Just plain old practice.

And if I’m honest, that’s not always my first move.

Sometimes my first move is to find someone who agrees with me about how awful something is. You know… a little shared “awfulizing” can feel good.

But I can’t stay there very long anymore.

Because at some point, I remember—this is not only the work, this is the path.

There’s a story about a young monk who goes to an elder and says, “I want to grow spiritually, but life keeps bringing things I don’t know how to deal with—fear, uncertainty, disappointment. What do I do?”

And the elder says something incredibly simple:

“Welcome everything. Push away nothing.”

You might be thinking...

“Everything?!?”

Yes. Everything.

Not because everything is pleasant, or suffering isn’t real.
But because life—God, Spirit, the ThingThat Makes the Grass Grow - whatever words you use—is still moving through everything.

Emma Curtis Hopkins, the mother of New Thought and Applied Metaphysics said it even more boldly:

“This too is good, this too is God, and I demand to see the blessing in it.”

Now let’s be clear—that doesn’t mean we look at something painful and pretend it’s good.

It means we refuse to believe that Spirit has somehow left the building.

Spirit is still here.

The real question is .... are we?

~~~

Dr. Ira Byock tells a powerful story a man who was dying of cancer. And he said something that stopped everyone in their tracks.

The dying patient said, “I would never have chosen this illness… but I would not trade what it has given me.”

What it gave him was presence.

Before he got sick, he was busy—like most of us. Always moving, always doing. And then everything slowed down.

Conversations got deeper.
Time mattered more.
Ordinary moments became… not so ordinary.

And he said, “I wish I had learned this sooner.”

The illness wasn’t the blessing.

The awakening was the blessing.

~~~

I’ve been sitting with that a lot lately.

Because life has a way of bringing all of us moments that could take us down… yet those same moments can also awaken us to newness.

Awakening us to what matters, to Presence and to the people right in front of us. But we can only experience the newness if we make room for it. And in the midst of crisis and challenges it’s not usually our first instinct.

Let’s talk about expectancy for a moment and how that plays into all of this.

I’m not speaking about wishful thinking.

Rather I’m referring to a willingness to stay open to the possibility that something meaningful is still unfolding—even when we can’t see it yet. I’m suggesting that we learn to expect a new possibility even and especially in the face of disappointment and challenging times.

Because if we don’t make the space, well, it’s easy to get pulled into the appearance of things and assume that’s the whole story.

It isn’t.

So maybe the practice is simpler than we think.

When something hard shows up…

Pause.
Breathe.
Stay aware.

Remember the monk:

Welcome everything. Push away nothing.

Remember Hopkins:

This too is good… and I demand to see the blessing in it.

Maybe not right away.
Probably not perfectly.

But sincerely. Because sometimes…

the blessing is not the removal of the difficulty,
but the awakening it brings.