A recent comment from Abdul El-Sayed sent me into a deeper exploration of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and David Graeber. Reading them in succession unsettled many of the economic stories I had inherited. Smith was not the cartoon prophet of unregulated shareholder capitalism. Marx exposed dimensions of labor and capital that Smith could not fully see. Graeber challenged the foundational story that money began with isolated people bartering in the first place.

Beneath all three conversations is a deeper question about relationship. Why are we taught to fear one another, fight over political labels, and blame our neighbors while concentrated wealth and power remain largely untouched? What happens when an economy forgets that every transaction rests on labor, trust, dependence, shared infrastructure, and a living earth?

This is an exploration of political fear, oligarchic power, economic mythology, and the possibility of building an economy that serves human thriving rather than treating profit as sacred.

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The Whole Story

A recent comment from Abdul El-Sayed sent me back into a question I have been circling for years. El-Sayed was explaining why he does not identify as a socialist. He considers himself a capitalist, he said, while also believing capitalism must be regulated. Then he pointed back to Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.

That move matters because it exposes how little precision we often bring to our political language. “Capitalism” and “socialism” have become less like descriptions of economic arrangements and more like weapons we use to sort people into friends and enemies. One word is supposed to mean freedom, prosperity, and common sense. The other is supposed to mean tyranny, scarcity, and the end of everything familiar. The categories are not allowed to become complicated, because complicated categories make fear less useful.

So I want to ask a different question. What if the capitalism we argue about today is not the same thing Adam Smith described? What if the political fear surrounding these words is part of a larger story, one that keeps us looking sideways at one another while concentrated wealth and power continue to organize the terms of our lives?

I am not talking about a secret room where every powerful person sits around smoking cigars and cackling. I am talking about an oligarchic class, people with extraordinary wealth, access, institutional influence, social networks, and shared interests. They attend the same schools, move through the same financial and political circles, sit on the same boards, and understand which arrangements protect their position. They do not need to coordinate every detail in order to recognize what works for them and organize around it.

This is not new. The robber barons understood that labor was easier to control when workers could be divided by race, ethnicity, religion, and national origin. Black workers, Mexican workers, Irish workers, Italian workers, and other immigrant groups were not naturally enemies. They were made into competing categories, then invited into or excluded from whiteness in shifting ways, often according to what would best preserve the existing order. The point was not merely prejudice, though prejudice was real and devastating. The point was power. A divided workforce is a cheaper and more manageable workforce.

The same political technology keeps returning in new clothing. The Red Scare taught Americans to fear communists and socialists. Today, the right often mobilizes fear around immigrants, racial justice, trans people, public assistance, crime, or the imagined threat of cultural replacement. The Democratic establishment often mobilizes fear around electoral catastrophe, political chaos, extremism, or the return of authoritarianism. These fears are not identical in content or consequence. Some of the harms they name are real, and some are manufactured. But fear can function similarly in both parties when it keeps people from asking who owns the systems, who writes the rules, who receives the wealth, and who is being asked to bear the cost.

The parties are not identical. They differ on policy, rhetoric, and the kinds of harm they produce. But both operate within a political economy where concentrated wealth has disproportionate access, influence, and protection. They may disagree about which neighbor we should fear while leaving the deeper architecture of oligarchic power remarkably untouched.

This is where Adam Smith became important for me. I read The Wealth of Nations and felt a persistent dissonance. The Adam Smith I encountered was not the cartoon prophet of unregulated shareholder capitalism that so many people seem to invoke. He was suspicious of monopoly. He understood that employers had structural advantages over workers in disputes about wages. He recognized that merchants and manufacturers could conspire against the public. He supported limits on interest rates because he worried that unrestricted lending would channel money toward reckless borrowers and speculative projects. He even worried that extreme division of labor could reduce workers to something less than fully developed human beings, and he supported public education partly as a response.

None of this makes Smith a Marxist. It does not turn him into a democratic socialist or a modern progressive. Smith believed that competition and self-interest, under certain conditions, could contribute to the common good. He believed capital could receive a legitimate return. He did not think the existence of markets was itself a moral failure.

But the Smith we have inherited in contemporary political conversation is selective. We remember the invisible hand and forget the warnings about monopoly. We remember self-interest and forget the employer’s power over labor. We remember markets and forget the moral, civic, and institutional conditions that make markets something other than organized predation. We use Smith to defend a system he would likely have recognized as deeply distorted by concentrated wealth, political favoritism, and the power of large firms to shape the rules in their own interest.

Marx on the other hand saw some of this more clearly and pushed the critique further, especially in the book Capital, Volume 1: Critique of Political Economy. Where Smith could describe the unequal relationship between employers and workers, Marx asked what was built into the relationship itself. Who owns the productive resources? Who must sell their labor in order to live? Who receives the value produced by that labor? What happens when capital is not simply a tool for human flourishing, but a system whose central purpose is to reproduce and enlarge itself?

Smith and Marx share a vocabulary around labor and value, but they do not share the same final vision. Smith believed a properly functioning market could produce general prosperity. Marx argued that the wage relationship itself contained a structural form of exploitation, because workers create more value than they receive in wages and the difference becomes the basis of profit. Smith worried about the abuses of capital. Marx questioned the social relationship that made capital accumulation possible in the first place.

I do not need either thinker to be completely right in order to learn from both. In fact, the need to choose one thinker as the final authority is part of the problem. We have been trained to treat economic traditions like teams. If you criticize capitalism, you must be a socialist. If you defend markets, you must accept whatever powerful people call capitalism. But serious thinkers are more difficult than the labels used to contain them.

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Then I read David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and the floor shifted again. Graeber challenged the foundational story that money emerged because isolated people were trading goods through barter and eventually needed a more efficient medium of exchange. Barter certainly exists, but Graeber argued that the historical and anthropological record does not support it as the universal starting point of economic life. What appears much more often is credit, obligation, trust, memory, and ongoing relationship.

That matters because the barter story gives us a particular picture of the human person. It imagines us as isolated individuals with possessions, looking for the most efficient way to exchange them. Relationship comes later, after the transaction. Graeber’s account reverses the order. We begin in relationship. We keep accounts because we live with one another. We borrow, give, owe, forgive, remember, and trust before money becomes an abstract instrument moving through an impersonal market.

Before debt was a number, it was an obligation between people. That obligation could express care and mutual dependence. It could also become a tool of domination. Once the relationship is stripped away, repayment can be treated as a moral absolute, even when the original arrangement was coercive, unjust, or impossible to fulfill. “You must repay” can become a way of hiding the question, “Who had the power to set the terms?”

Graeber’s critique also reveals something about the stories economics tells about itself. Foundational stories are never merely academic. They shape what we consider natural. If we believe human beings are fundamentally isolated barterers, then competition feels inevitable and mutual obligation feels secondary. If we believe debt is simply a neutral number, then debt forgiveness appears irresponsible rather than sometimes necessary for restoring life. If we believe markets are sacred, then any limit on profit appears to be an attack on freedom.

But every transaction rests on relationship, labor, trust, and shared life. The person buying a house did not build the roads, write the laws, educate the workforce, maintain the electrical grid, or create the land. The corporation earning a profit did not invent the human capacities, public infrastructure, ecological systems, and inherited knowledge that make its activity possible. The worker selling labor is not merely a cost. The patient receiving care is not merely revenue. The tenant paying rent is not merely a monthly return.

An economy becomes dehumanizing when it forgets these relationships. Human beings become labor costs, risk profiles, consumers, debtors, voters, units of productivity, or obstacles to growth. The language becomes efficient, and the lives inside it disappear.

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This is why fear is so useful to oligarchic power. Fear teaches us to see one another as isolated threats rather than participants in a shared life. It convinces workers that the problem is another worker. It convinces struggling people that the person receiving assistance is the reason they cannot afford housing. It convinces people that a migrant, a queer person, a protester, a bureaucrat, or a political opponent is the main obstacle between them and security. It asks us to fight over scraps while treating the people who control the table as inevitable.

The alternative is not a world without markets. Markets can be useful tools. But markets are not sacred, and profit is not the highest measure of human good. A human economy would begin with a different question: What supports human thriving?

That would mean fair compensation for labor, meaningful limits on monopoly and concentrated power, humane lending, and debt forgiveness where debt has become a mechanism of permanent domination. It would mean democratic ownership in places where shared control produces greater dignity and accountability. It would mean removing the profit motive from survival necessities such as healthcare, housing, and electricity. Those systems might be publicly owned, cooperatively owned, or organized through nonprofits. The essential point is that no one’s access to the conditions of life should depend on whether someone else can maximize a return.

It would also mean protecting rest, creativity, care, community, and ecological limits. Human beings are not machines whose value can be calculated by output. The earth is not a warehouse of raw materials. Economic security is not a luxury added after freedom. It is one of the conditions that makes genuine freedom possible.

This is where the conversation becomes theological for me. Empire is always trying to hide behind neutral language. Extraction becomes efficiency. Domination becomes leadership. Scarcity becomes discipline. Debt becomes morality. Profit becomes freedom. The bodies carrying the cost are pushed out of the frame.

Liberating truth begins by bringing those bodies back into view. It asks who is working, who is waiting, who is sick, who is displaced, who is indebted, who is exhausted, and who has the power to decide what counts as an acceptable sacrifice. Love is not merely a feeling we have toward one another. Love is the refusal to organize shared life around the expendability of other people.

I think that is also where grief belongs in this conversation. We grieve not only people who have died. We grieve communities hollowed out by extraction. We grieve the years consumed by debt. We grieve the healthcare that was denied, the housing that became unreachable, the creativity sacrificed to survival, the relationships strained by economic fear. Sometimes we grieve the life that should have been possible.

That grief is not a reason to surrender. It may be evidence that something in us still knows the difference between what is normal and what is humane. The fact that we can mourn a more just world means we have not completely accepted the lie that this is the only world available to us.

So I want to return to the question that began this reflection. What do we mean when we say capitalism? Whose version are we defending? Which parts of Adam Smith have been forgotten? What did Marx see that Smith could not? What does Graeber reveal when he tells us that money itself began not with isolated exchange, but with relationship and obligation?

I do not think these thinkers give us a finished system. They give us interruptions. They interrupt the stories that have become too convenient. They remind us that economic arrangements are made by human beings, that they can be changed by human beings, and that the economy is never separate from our moral vision of what people are for.

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The practice, then, is not simply to choose the correct label. It is to examine the stories we have accepted as natural and ask whether they make more human life possible. It is to read beyond the caricatures. It is to notice when fear is being used to turn neighbors into enemies. It is to ask who benefits when we stop looking at the structure and start blaming one another.

We were told that the market is impersonal, that debt is merely contractual, that profit is the measure of value, that scarcity is inevitable, and that our neighbors are the threat. Perhaps staying human means learning to tell a different story. Perhaps it means remembering that beneath every economic abstraction is a body, a household, a community, a living earth, and a web of relationships that none of us created alone.

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Practices for Staying Human

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

60-second Reclamation: One Economic Story

Notice one economic story you have been taught to treat as natural. It might be “people are poor because they do not work hard enough,” “debt must always be repaid,” “healthcare is a product,” or “there is not enough for everyone.” Write the story down. Then ask: Who benefits when I believe this? Who becomes invisible?

60-minute Ritual: A Deeper Look

Choose one relationship in your economic life and look at it without abstraction. This might be your work, your rent, a loan, a medical bill, a purchase, or a recurring subscription. Who made the thing possible? Who does the arrangement serve? Where is there mutuality, and where is there coercion? What would a more humane version of this relationship require?

Whole-life Rebellion: A Deep Dive

Read Smith, Marx, and Graeber with enough patience to let each one disrupt you. You do not need to become a disciple of any of them. Read Smith for the critique of monopoly and concentrated power. Read Marx for the analysis of labor and capital. Read Graeber for the social and moral history of debt.

As you read, keep asking three questions: What view of the human person is operating here? What relationships are visible, and which ones have been erased? Does this way of organizing life make greater freedom, dignity, care, creativity, and shared flourishing possible?

The goal is not to win an argument about economic labels. The goal is to recover an imagination large enough to see people again.

In this piece I talk about my years fitting shoes at REI, why I could never tell a customer that a barefoot shoe and a cushioned shoe were both “good shoes,” and what Andrew Yang got right in 2020 when he said we need new metrics for success. What gets measured gets done. So what would change if we measured human thriving instead of the bottom line?

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The Whole Story

A couple of Saturdays ago I woke up, started my morning scroll, and saw that someone who worked in marketing for a barefoot shoe company was announcing a new job. She was leaving to join one of those maximal cushion shoe brands, the kind with the towering foam soles and the aggressive ad campaigns. If you know anything about footwear philosophy, you know these two kinds of companies are not just competitors. They are opposites. One exists because it believes the human foot is brilliantly designed and should be set free to do what it was made to do. The other exists because it believes the foot needs to be propped up, padded, and managed. She was moving directly from one story to the other, as if the stories were interchangeable.

I want to be honest about my reaction, and I also want to be fair. I do not know her story. She had a paycheck at the first company, so unless she was being pushed out, this was a choice, but choices have contexts I cannot see. Maybe she never grabbed onto the education offered on biomechanics. Maybe she never believed in the product she was marketing in the first place, which is its own quiet indictment, that a company hired someone to tell a story she did not carry in her body. And maybe, like so many of us, she simply took the work that was in front of her, because we live in a society where survival often requires saying yes to things we do not believe in. I hold compassion for her. I really do. But compassion for the origins of a choice does not erase what the choice reveals, and what it reveals is a wound much bigger than one person’s career move.

The Wound: We Have Confused Profit for Value

Here is the wound I want to name. We now live in a society where the dominant question asked of any product, any company, any piece of work is not “is it good for people?” but “will it sell?” We create items that move because they meet a craving or a marketing-induced need, and we call that value. But meeting a demand is not the same thing as providing value. Selling is not the same as serving. Somewhere along the way we collapsed two different words into one. Values, the convictions about what makes the world better, and value, the economic measure of what the market will bear, got fused together, and the dollar sign won.

You can see the fusion in a single job change. When someone can move from a company built on one conviction about human bodies to a company built on the exact opposite conviction, and the move reads as ordinary, even savvy, that tells you the only value actually in play is the paycheck. The convictions were decorative.

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Why I Could Not Do It

Years ago I worked at REI, in the footwear department. And I can tell you plainly: I could not stand in front of a customer holding a barefoot shoe in one hand and a maximally cushioned shoe in the other and tell them both were good shoes. I could not do it, because those two shoes carry fundamentally opposite stories about what a good shoe even is.

My conviction, and I will own it as a conviction, is that the cushioned shoe is bad for the human body. It weakens your feet. It reduces your balance. It throws your body out of alignment. It does not deliver the benefits it claims to deliver. Even for a runner, the math does not work. Your foot gets heavier. There is a protrusion under your heel that invites a heel strike, and that heel strike sends more force rattling up through your legs with every step. Everything about that shoe, I believe, works against the design of the human foot and is bad for the human body.

And even when they abate symptoms like plantar fasciitis, they’re really just providing a temporary cover, like pounding antacids after a meal that gives you indigestion. The research makes it clear that the resolution is not found in support, but strength, as in strengthening the muscles in your feet. But support invites atrophy, so it might temporarily make you feel better, but it ultimately exacerbates the issue.

Now, you do not have to share my biomechanics convictions to feel the weight of this. The point is not the shoe. The point is that I had a value underneath my work, a belief about what actually helps human bodies thrive, and that belief governed what I was willing to say to a customer.

I used to directly ask customers, “Are you training for something?” If they were, my goal was to get them through the event, but I always invited them to come back after the event so we could work on a solution. If they weren’t in training, I’d ask if they wanted a bandaid or a solution and fit them accordingly.

Work without that kind of value underneath it is just the pursuit of a paycheck, or the moving of an audience, and we have built an entire economy on that hollowness.

The Wisdom: Value Is What Supports Human Thriving

So here is the reframe I want to offer, the wisdom beneath the wound. Value is what supports human thriving. That is the definition. Not what sells, not what scales, not what returns a dividend. What supports human thriving.

When we value only profit, we ignore everything else for the sake of the bottom line, or at best we deprioritize everything else. But when we value human thriving, the metric of success itself changes. And this is not a small tweak. It might mean some businesses can no longer function. It might mean some products need to go away. It might mean a genuine reorganization of how we approach things as a society. That is how deep the shift goes.

When Andrew Yang ran for president in 2020, he made a point I have carried ever since, built on the old management truth that what gets measured gets done. He argued that we need a new set of measurements. The stock market is a bad metric of national success. A company’s bottom line, shareholder dividends, stock buybacks, these are bad metrics. Instead, he suggested, we should measure things like how many people are living paycheck to paycheck. How many people are actually in a position to thrive in their daily lives. How healthy are we. What is our obesity rate. In other words, measure the thriving, and let the thriving tell you whether the economy is working.

I want to push that one step further, down into the body. In my theological tradition, the body is the sacred interface. It is how we encounter the world, each other, and God. A shoe that honors the design of the foot treats the body as kin, something to be respected and strengthened. A shoe that weakens the foot while promising comfort treats the body as a resource to be managed and monetized. And here is the tender part of the critique: people buy the cushioned shoe because they ache. The ache is real. The desire for relief is holy. What is not holy is an industry that monetizes the ache without healing it, that sells the feeling of care while quietly weakening the very body it claims to serve.

That is what profit-without-value always does. It finds a genuine human longing, and instead of serving it, it farms it.

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What Thriving Would Ask of Us

Imagine, for a moment, a marketplace where the first question asked of every product was the thriving question. Does this strengthen people or weaken them? Does this honor the bodies, minds, and communities it touches, or extract from them? Some beloved products would not survive that question. Some entire industries would not. That is not a bug in the vision. That is the vision working.

And before this becomes only about shoes or economics, let it land closer to home. Most of us, at some point, have taken the job, made the sale, or stayed quiet in the meeting, not because we believed in it, but because we needed to survive. That is not hypocrisy. That is what it costs to live inside a system that measures the wrong things. But grief is allowed here. We are allowed to grieve the compromises we have made, and to grieve the society that demanded them, and to let that grief become fuel for choosing differently where we can.

The woman changing jobs is not the villain of this story. She is a mirror. The question her move puts to all of us is simple and uncomfortable: what is the value underneath your work? Not what does it pay. What does it grow. Because value is what supports human thriving, and everything else is just revenue wearing the word.

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A Closing Image

The human foot is a small cathedral of arches, tendons, and twenty-six bones, engineered across millennia to carry a body through the world. You can pad it until it forgets how to hold you, or you can let it do the work it was made for and watch it grow strong. Economies are like that too. We can keep cushioning ourselves with the metrics of profit and calling the numbness comfort. Or we can let the system feel the ground again, the actual lives, the actual thriving, and build its strength on what is real.

What gets measured gets done. May we learn to measure what makes us more human.

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Practices for Staying Human

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

60-second Reclamation: The Thriving Question

Think of one thing you bought this week, or one thing your work sells. Ask it the thriving question: does this strengthen the people it touches, or does it merely extract from them? No shame, no fixing. Just one honest look at one ordinary thing. Awareness is the whole practice.

60-minute Ritual: A Values Audit

Set a timer and make two lists. On the first, write down the main ways money flows through your life: how you earn it, and the five or six places you most consistently spend it. On the second, write down your actual values, the convictions you hold about what makes the world better and helps people thrive. Now hold the lists side by side. Where do they align? Where have you been telling one story with your beliefs and another with your dollars or your labor? Circle one place of misalignment, not to fix it today, but simply to see it clearly.

Whole-life Rebellion: Grieve, Then Rebuild

Find some space to name, specifically, one place where you have sold out, where you took the paycheck or moved the product or stayed silent, not because you believed in it but because you needed to survive. Do not rush past this. Grieve it honestly, with the same compassion you would offer a friend, because the system demanded it and survival is not a sin. Then widen the grief: grieve the society we live in, the one that fused values and value until the dollar sign won. Let that grief do what grief is for. Let it clarify what matters. And then choose one concrete reorganization: a purchase you will stop making, a conversation at work you will stop avoiding, a metric in your own life you will replace, trading “did it pay?” for “did it help someone thrive?” Small is fine. Small is how economies of the heart change, one honest measurement at a time.

That feels honest to the work itself. Part of staying human is remembering that we are not machines. We do not exist to keep producing polished things while love, fatigue, tenderness, family, grief, and ordinary life wait quietly in the corner. Sometimes the human thing is to let the week be what it was and offer the truest thing already in your hands.

The first module is called Time doesn’t heal. Tending does. It begins with one of the most common phrases we hand to grieving people: “Time heals all wounds.”

I understand why we say it. We want to offer hope. We want to believe pain has an expiration date. We want to trust that if we can just endure long enough, the ache will eventually dissolve on its own. But many grieving people know the harder truth: time alone does not heal all wounds.

Time can pass over a wound for years without ever truly touching it. You can keep working, parenting, smiling, answering messages, showing up, and being praised for being strong, while something underneath remains ungrieved. The calendar can move forward while the body still remembers. People can stop asking about the loss while the loss is still reorganizing your inner world. Functioning is not the same as healing.

That is why grief needs tending. It needs witness, language, honesty, ritual, body awareness, and enough safety to tell the truth without being swallowed by it. Grief is not a problem to solve or a weakness to overcome. It is the soul’s response to love, rupture, absence, change, and meaning. To grieve is not to fail at life. It is to remain human after something has broken the world as you knew it.

This is also why I think we need a larger conversation about life after loss. Loss is not only death, though death is one of its deepest forms. Loss can be:

• the future you thought you were going to have,

• the family that could not love you well,

• the faith that no longer fits,

• the body that changed,

• the relationship that ended,

• the childhood you had to survive, and

• the country or community or sense of safety that no longer feels intact.

Sometimes grief shows up as sorrow. Sometimes it shows up as numbness, irritability, exhaustion, despair, disconnection, or the quiet question, “What is the point now?”

This course is not therapy, diagnosis, treatment, or medical advice. Sometime those things are necessary and helpful. Instead this course offers education and soul tending practices, because not every dark emotion is a pathology. Sometimes despair is not proof that you are broken you just need to find new meaning. Sometimes grief is love with nowhere safe to go. Sometimes things collapse because they can no longer hold the truth of your life. Sometimes the soul is not asking to be corrected. It is asking to be accompanied.

A productivity-obsessed culture often asks, “How quickly can you function again?” Soul care asks different questions. What happened? What changed? What did you lose? What did you not get to say? What part of you had to get smaller to survive? What kind of support would help time become healing instead of merely passing?

That is the heart of Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds. It is grief literacy and soul care for people who are tired of empty platitudes, forced positivity, and being rushed toward closure. Module 1 offers a teaching, a workbook, a threshold walk ritual, and a guided arrival practice. The invitation is gentle and practical: begin where you are, name what is true, listen to the body, and practice one small act of tending.

If you want the rest of the guided path through this work, you can learn enroll in Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds here. And for the next week, if you use the code “substack” you’ll get 25% off the course (I’m not going to give you the lesson and then charge you for it).

Healing is not the disappearance of grief. Healing is grief finding a place inside a life that can open again. A healed life is not a grief-free life. It is a life where love and sorrow can sit at the same table, where the lost and unfinished are allowed to belong to the story, and where time has been joined by tending.

So this week, I’m offering you the first module of that work.

Time alone does not heal all wounds. But time plus tending can change the texture of grief.

The Teaching Video

The Teaching Transcript

When I first began my own healing journey, I started to realize that a lot of what I was carrying wasn’t only pain. It was grief.

There were things in my history that were genuinely painful. Abuse. Neglect. Bullying. Moments that shaped me, named me, and taught me the wrong lessons about myself and the world. And when I finally reached a point where I was ready to face those stories and stop letting old wounds dictate present responses, the message I received from the most significant person in my life at the time was simple: “That’s in the past. Just get over it. Move on. Pretend it never happened.”

They were operating with a cultural assumption many of us have inherited: time heals all wounds.

But that message didn’t heal me. It shamed me. It taught me to treat my nervous system like an inconvenience. It taught me to abandon the younger part of me that was still holding what happened.

What I actually needed was different. I needed truth. I needed witness. I needed a way to feel what belonged to those years without getting overwhelmed or swallowed by it. Some of that support was clinical. Some of it was relational. Some of it was grief work and ritual, ways of telling the truth with my body, not only my thoughts.

And over time, something changed. Not because time magically erased what happened, but because time had help. Time plus tending began to change my relationship to the past. It didn’t rewrite the story, but it did soften the grip the story had on me and ultimately changed how I related to it.

I’m starting here because this course is not about fixing you. It is about helping you become more human. It is about learning the kind of tending that makes time able to do its work.

There is a phrase many of us have heard, and maybe even said to ourselves: “Time heals all wounds.” And yet so many people can tell you the truth. Time alone does not heal all wounds.

Francis Weller writes, “Time does not heal our wounds but becomes a product of them.” The longer we carry untended grief, the more it shapes our lives. Not because we are broken, but because grief is powerful, and the body keeps the score.

So why does this myth that time heals all wounds? Because many of us were raised in a grief-phobic culture. We treat discomfort as danger. We treat not feeling good as bad. We treat sadness as something to get rid of. Toxic positivity shows up here, not always as cruelty, but as avoidance. We rush to silver linings. We change the subject. We encourage people to be strong. We call grief a season that should end quickly.

So when grief stays, it is natural to assume something is wrong with you. But if a culture invites you to do something unhealthy, it does not become healthy just because everyone is doing it. And yes, that statement is the upscaled version of your parent’s asking you, “If your friends jumped off a cliff would you do that too? The point is, cultural habits can be common and still be harmful.

Untended grief does not just disappear. It becomes anxiety. It becomes numbing. It becomes irritability. It becomes isolation. It becomes overwork. It becomes addiction. It becomes the inability to be present. It becomes reactivity. On a larger scale, untended grief can feed how we approach war and violence, how we abandon one another, how we harden our hearts, how we pass pain forward.

This is why our carry-forward line matters: time doesn’t heal. Tending does.

All that means that this course is an introduction. We are learning grief literacy. We are naming what is happening in the body. We are learning that grief is not shameful. It is human. And we are stepping into simple grief-tending practices that fit real life.

In this module, you have three supports: the workbook, the ritual, and the guided audio. Each one has a different job.

The workbook is for clarity and language. It helps you name what you lost and what changed. It helps you tell the truth about what you did not get to say, and what you did not get to be. It also helps you detox the clichés you’ve been handed, so you can start replacing them with language that is honest and supportive.

If you only have the capacity for a little work, do this: choose one prompt that feels true, answer it simply, and stop. Small counts.

The Threshold walk is for your body. Grief is often a threshold experience. Something changed. Life before is not the same as life after.

This ritual is a gentle way of marking that truth in motion. It gives you a low-drama container to feel what is real, name what changed, and notice what you carry now. You are not trying to force a breakthrough. You are practicing honest contact.

The audio is for capacity. It helps you arrive in the present, orient to safety, and make contact with what is true without judgment.

If anything feels activating, pause the audio. Look around the room. Feel your feet. Return to breath. You are in charge of your pace.

As you move through this module, hold these questions:

1. Where have I been taught to treat my grief like a problem to solve instead of a truth to tend?

2. What part of my story has been shamed away or rushed past?

3. If time alone is not enough, what kind of tending might be needed?

And remember, you are not failing. You are being human. And you are learning to tend.

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The Workbook

Module1 Griefworkbook

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The Embodiment Ritual: A Threshold Walk

Module1 Ritualguide

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The Guided Audio: An Arrival Practice

The Invitation to Action

If this first module meets something tender in you, I want to invite you into the full course.

Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds is built around a simple but life-changing idea: grief does not heal by being ignored, rushed, managed, or spiritually bypassed. Grief heals through tending. Through witness, language, ritual, body awareness, honest meaning-making, and small practices that help the soul stay connected to life.

And grief is bigger than death. Death may be one of grief’s clearest faces, but we also grieve lost futures, changed bodies, family wounds, faith shifts, divorce, estrangement, trauma, aging, disappointment, and the versions of ourselves we had to leave behind in order to survive. If something mattered, its loss deserves care.

The deeper promise of grief work is not that you will never hurt again. It is that sorrow can become less exiled. Despair can become less shameful. Your body can build capacity. Meaning can return without denial. And joy can become possible again, not as forced positivity, but as a deeper yes to life that has made room for the truth.

That is the kind of joy I trust: joy with roots. Joy that has learned how to grieve. Joy spacious enough to hold love and sorrow at the same table.

If you are ready for a gentle, guided path through that work, here’s where you can enroll in Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds. And don’t forget to use the code “substack” for 25% off or reach out for the reparations rate.

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This piece begins with cholesterol, but it is really about a much larger pattern: the way we keep trying to silence symptoms instead of listening for causes. In our bodies, our grief, our despair, and even our politics, the symptom is not always the whole story. Sometimes it is the signal pointing us toward what most needs attention, repair, and truth.

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The Whole Story

I’ve been fighting my cholesterol for years.

I adjusted my diet. I cut out eggs. I reduced red meat. I added oats, chia seeds, hemp seeds, all the small rituals of responsible fiber. I exercised. I did the things that usually get recommended when cholesterol numbers are high.

And still, the number stayed high.

For five years, my total cholesterol hovered in the 230-ish range. In March of last year, it was 227. In December it was 231. Again and again, the same quiet frustration: I was doing the things that were supposed to help, but the number would not get below 200.

Statins were presented as the next obvious option. That is how the system tends to work: the cholesterol number is high, so prescribe something that forces the number down.

But that never sat right with me.

I had heard enough about statins to feel resistance in my body. Muscle pain. Weakness. Possible liver issues. Blood sugar concerns. The rare but serious muscle breakdown warnings. And there were murkier questions too, especially around the brain. I had watched my dad go through Parkinson’s, and knowing he had been on statins was enough to make the question feel personal, even if the research is not simple or settled.

I am not pretending to be a medical doctor here, and I am not telling anyone else what to do with their medication. I am saying that, for me, the offer felt like symptom management dressed up as a solution. Because the question still remained: why was my cholesterol high in the first place?

Lowering the number might reduce the visible marker, but it would not necessarily tell me what was happening underneath. And if there was a deeper metabolic issue, if something in my body was not processing or converting or clearing properly, then simply attacking the cholesterol number felt like turning down the volume on the alarm while the fire kept burning somewhere behind the wall.

I did not want to silence the symptom. I wanted to understand the cause.

In January, I was visiting my friend Dr. Cherene in LA. She is a chiropractor by trade, but she also studies a wide range of functional health approaches and works with professional athletes who need to constantly optimize their bodies. We were talking through some medical things before an adjustment, and my cholesterol came up.

She started naming symptoms connected to MTHFR-related dysfunction. MTHFR stands for methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase, an enzyme involved in the methylation cycle, which helps the body regulate things like detoxification, DNA repair, neurotransmitter production, hormone metabolism, immune function, and cardiovascular health. In simple terms, methylation is part of how the body processes, converts, clears, and repairs.

She said, in essence, “You show signs of this. And one consequence can be high cholesterol, because your body may not be processing things well.”

That sentence shifted something for me.

What if the cholesterol was not the root issue? What if it was a signal pointing toward a deeper metabolic cause?

The protocol she suggested focused on supporting methylation and detox pathways: methylated B vitamins, especially B12 and B9, zinc, SAMe, and magnesium. For me, the change was real.

Two and a half months later, my total cholesterol had dropped to 203. This week, it was 182.

Almost 50 points down after years of trying to manage the symptom without knowing the cause.

The number mattered. Of course it mattered. But the number was not the whole story. It was pointing to something underneath.

And this is where the cholesterol story becomes something larger than cholesterol.

Because we live in a culture obsessed with symptom management.

We ask, “How do I make this stop?” before we ask, “What is this trying to reveal?” We ask, “How do I become functional again?” before we ask, “Functional for what, and for whom?” We ask, “How do I quiet the pain?” before we ask whether the pain might be telling the truth about a life, a relationship, a body, a culture, or a system that has become unlivable.

This is the wound: we have been trained to treat signals as enemies.

We do this with the body. We do this with grief. We do this with depression and despair. We do this with rage. We do this with politics. We do this with whole communities of people whose pain is inconvenient to the machinery that profits from their silence.

If the body hurts, we want the hurt gone. If grief interrupts us, we want the mourner to “move on.” If despair rises, we medicate, distract, numb, optimize, or spiritualize it before we ask what kind of world keeps producing despair. If rage erupts from the margins, we condemn the tone before we listen to the wound. If politics feels broken, we argue about personalities, parties, decorum, slogans, and spectacle while refusing to face the deeper corruption of money, extraction, and empire beneath the performance.

A culture addicted to symptom management will always call truth-telling dysfunction.

It will call grief weakness. It will call exhaustion laziness. It will call rage divisive. It will call despair pathology. It will call protest disorder. It will call holy maladjustment extremism. It will teach us to distrust the very signals that might lead us back to life.

But staying human requires a different kind of listening.

The wisdom is this: a symptom is not always the enemy. Sometimes it is the body, the soul, or the community refusing to let the deeper wound stay hidden.

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This does not mean every symptom is secretly wise in some simplistic way. Pain is not holy because it hurts. Suffering is not automatically redemptive. Bodies need care. Depression may need treatment. Anxiety may need support. Cholesterol may need medication. Grief may need companionship. Rage may need boundaries. Despair may need clinical care. None of this is an argument against help.

It is an argument against reduction.

It is an argument against treating human beings like malfunctioning machines whose warning lights simply need to be turned off.

You are not a machine. You are beloved dust. You are body and breath and memory and longing. You are nervous system and story. You are biology and attachment and culture and Spirit. You are not merely a set of numbers to optimize or symptoms to suppress. You are a living ecosystem trying, in all the ways living things try, to move toward repair.

When my cholesterol would not move, the issue was not simply willpower, diet, or effort. It was revealing that something upstream needed attention.

What if we gave our grief the same dignity?

What if grief is not proof that we are broken, but evidence that love has left an imprint deep enough to ache? What if despair is not always a personal failure, but sometimes an honest response to inhabiting a world that asks us to become less human in order to survive? What if rage is not merely a problem to manage, but sometimes the part of us that still knows a boundary has been violated? What if numbness is not laziness, but a survival strategy that once kept us from being overwhelmed?

Much of what looks like dysfunction began as protection.

Freeze, fawn, control, withdrawal, over-functioning, pleasing, shutting down, staying busy, staying numb, staying useful, these are not character flaws first. They are often ancient machinery doing what ancient machinery does. They helped us survive before we knew how to be free.

Grace does not shame the survival system. Grace creates enough safety for truth.

And truth is where healing begins.

Not the kind of truth that humiliates. Not the kind that says, “Here is what is wrong with you.” The kind that asks, “What love is still pulsing beneath the wreckage?” The kind that listens long enough to notice where the signal is coming from. The kind that sees the symptom and says, “Thank you for trying to get my attention. Now show me what needs care.”

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This is also why our political imagination is so thin right now.

We keep staring at the symptoms of a sick society. Polarization. Corruption. Performative outrage. The collapse of trust. The feeling that everyone is shouting and no one is listening. The sense that every crisis becomes content, every wound becomes a brand opportunity, every public good becomes another market to exploit.

But if we only treat the symptoms, the system keeps producing them.

We can rage about politicians while refusing to confront the money that buys access, shapes policy, and turns public service into theater for private gain. We can lament loneliness while maintaining an economy that isolates, exhausts, and commodifies people. We can condemn despair while protecting the systems that generate it. We can call people unhealthy while ignoring the soil their bodies and souls are forced to grow in.

Empire loves symptom management.

It lets the machinery stay intact while individuals blame themselves for breaking down inside it.

Love asks deeper questions.

Love asks what kind of world makes so many bodies inflamed, so many souls numb, so many families exhausted, so many communities suspicious, so many young people hopeless, so many elders isolated, so many workers disposable, so many mourners rushed, so many truth-tellers punished.

Love refuses to silence the alarm and call it peace.

Jesus, at least as I understand him, was never merely interested in helping people manage symptoms so they could return quietly to the systems that were killing them. He healed bodies, yes. He restored people to community. He touched the untouchable. He fed the hungry. He named hypocrisy. He confronted domination. He exposed religious respectability when it became a mask for harm. He listened to cries that polite society wanted silenced.

The Human One did not treat pain as an inconvenience to the powerful. He treated it as revelation.

Where does it hurt?

Who told you to hide it?

Who benefits if you stay quiet?

What would repair require?

That is not just medicine. That is theology. That is politics. That is spiritual formation. That is what it means to stay human in a world that keeps asking us to become efficient, numb, agreeable, and easy to manage.

The practice, then, is not to worship our symptoms or ignore the help we need. The practice is to listen beneath them.

The next time something in you refuses to “get over it,” pause before you declare war on yourself. The next time grief interrupts your productivity, ask what love it is honoring. The next time exhaustion makes you angry, ask what limits have been violated. The next time despair rises, ask whether your soul is telling the truth about a life that needs more support, more beauty, more community, more rest, more justice, more room to breathe.

And yes, get help. See the doctor. Call the therapist. Talk to the coach. Take the medication if that is what care requires. Change the diet. Move your body. Do the labs. Make the appointment. Join the group. Build the practice.

But do not let anyone reduce you to the symptom.

You are not the number. You are not the diagnosis. You are not the grief wave. You are not the panic. You are not the shutdown. You are not the rage. You are not the despair.

You are the beloved life underneath, trying to be heard.

If you are carrying grief, despair, or a life transition that will not be rushed into “normal,” this is the heart of my Life After Loss work. I help people listen to what pain is revealing, honor what has been lost, and practice becoming human again without shame. If that is the kind of support you need, reply to this email or send me a message.

The number was not the whole story. The symptom was pointing toward a cause.

Maybe yours is too.

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Practices for Staying Human

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

60-second Reclamation: Listen beneath the signal

Place one hand on your chest or belly. Name one symptom, feeling, or pattern that has been asking for your attention. Say quietly, “You are not my enemy. What are you trying to show me?” Do not force an answer. Let the question be enough.

60-minute Ritual: Map the root system

Choose one recurring symptom or struggle, emotional, relational, physical, or spiritual. On paper, write it in the center of the page. Around it, map possible roots: body, sleep, food, grief, stress, money, family systems, trauma, loneliness, work, culture, politics, spiritual wounds, unmet needs. Then circle one root that deserves compassionate attention this week.

Whole-life Rebellion: Build a repair ecology

Begin shifting from symptom management to root-care. This may mean building a care team, changing your relationship to work, joining a grief group, seeing a clinician, creating rituals of rest, practicing nervous-system regulation, doing functional testing, telling the truth in a relationship, or joining movements that address systemic harm. The question is not, “How do I make the pain disappear as fast as possible?” The deeper question is, “What kind of life, community, and world would make repair possible?”

That sentence has been sitting with me because our economy has trained us to look in the wrong direction. We are taught to see the owner, the investor, the executive, the entrepreneur, and say, “There is the maker.” We are taught to look at the worker, the caregiver, the cleaner, the driver, the teacher, the cook, the nurse, the farmworker, the person stocking shelves or carrying boxes or answering calls, and see expense, dependency, replacement, overhead. But what if that is backwards?

What if the people we have been told are “takers” are often the ones whose labor keeps the world alive? And what if the people most loudly claiming to be makers are often taking more from workers than they ever create alone?

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The Whole Story

A society tells on itself by who it calls a maker.

For years, we have been handed a story that sounds almost moral if you do not look too closely. Capital is brave. Labor is dependent. Owners create. Workers receive. Investors make. The masses take.

It is an old story in newer clothes, the same mythology Paul Ryan helped popularize when he framed society as divided between makers and takers. The makers, in that telling, are the entrepreneurs, owners, investors, executives, and people who allegedly carry the productive burden of civilization. The takers are everyone else, especially the poor, the working class, the disabled, the unemployed, the publicly supported, the unionized, the people who need help, the people whose labor keeps the world running but whose lives are treated as a cost to be minimized.

But what if the story is upside down?

What if the real makers are the people whose hands, bodies, minds, care, skill, attention, and time actually create the world we live in? What if the real takers are not the people asking for food, housing, healthcare, wages, rest, or dignity, but the people who extract wealth from labor they did not perform, then call that extraction virtue?

A society that wants to stay human must honor what people bring to the table. And workers do not merely bring something to the table. Workers build the table, harvest the wood, drive the truck, clean the room, prepare the food, care for the children, answer the phones, maintain the systems, assemble the machines, teach the students, tend the sick, write the code, pack the boxes, stock the shelves, and keep the whole trembling structure from collapsing.

Capital alone makes nothing. Money sitting by itself does not grow food, heal wounds, teach children, repair roads, comfort the grieving, build homes, or create beauty. Capital can organize work. Capital can purchase tools. Capital can take risk. But without labor, capital is sterile. It is seed locked in a vault, never placed in soil.

The wound is not that some people own things and some people work. The wound is that our economy has learned to treat ownership as sacred and labor as disposable.

The lie of the lonely maker

The myth of the capitalist maker depends on a kind of social amnesia. It asks us to forget the worker.

We are invited to look at a billionaire and see genius, discipline, risk, vision, and reward.

We are rarely invited to look at the warehouse worker, the delivery driver, the farmworker, the teacher, the janitor, the nurse, the line cook, the caregiver, the receptionist, the mechanic, the coder, the miner, the sanitation worker, or the person working two jobs and still falling behind, and say, “There is the maker.”

Sure we called them essential workers during Covid, but that only spoke to their production. The workers themselves were still treated as disposable.

This is not an accident. If we can be trained to see wealth as proof of contribution, then we can be trained to see poverty as proof of failure. If we can be trained to see ownership as creation, then we can be trained to see labor as replaceable. If we can be trained to see profit as virtue, then we can be trained to see exploitation as the natural order of things.

But the world is not made by capital. The world is made by people.

That does not mean every owner is evil, every investor is useless, or every business is exploitative. Staying human requires more honesty than slogan. Risk is real. Entrepreneurship can be creative. Organizing resources can be meaningful. Building something from nothing often requires courage, imagination, and sacrifice.

But there is a difference between honoring initiative and worshiping ownership.

There is a difference between receiving a fair return for organizing resources and claiming moral superiority over the people whose labor makes that return possible.

There is a difference between risk and extraction.

The question is not whether capital matters. The question is why capital is allowed to claim the whole harvest when labor planted, watered, tended, picked, packed, cooked, served, and cleaned up the meal.

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The wisdom Marx saw, and the soul must still name

Marxist theory gives us a language for something many workers already know in their bodies: under capitalism, labor creates value, but capital captures much of that value.

A worker produces more value than they receive in wages. That difference, what Marx called surplus value, becomes profit. The owner says, “I made this.” But the worker knows, somewhere beneath the exhaustion, “My life was spent making that possible.”

This is why productivity can rise while wages stagnate. It is why companies can report record profits while workers cannot afford rent. It is why executives can receive bonuses after layoffs. It is why the people who make the goods, deliver the services, care for the bodies, clean the buildings, and keep the systems alive are told there is no money for healthcare, no money for childcare, no money for paid leave, no money for a living wage, no money for rest.

There is money. It has simply been taken upstream.

This is the moral core of the makers and takers reversal. Labor is not taking from capital when it asks to share in the abundance it created. Labor is asking for the theft to stop.

And theft is not too strong a word when people’s productivity grows, the fruits of that growth are captured by owners and shareholders, and then the workers are told to be grateful for scraps. Theft is not too strong a word when a society depends on essential workers while treating them as expendable. Theft is not too strong a word when working people are told they must bear insecurity so capital can enjoy certainty.

This is not only an economic problem. It is a spiritual deformation.

When a person’s time is extracted without dignity, their humanity is being drained. When a body is used up for profit, something sacred is being profaned. When a worker is told their worth is measured by output, something in the image of God is being reduced to machine logic.

A society that keeps us human does not ask, “How much can we get out of people while giving them as little as possible?” It asks, “What would make work worthy of the human beings who do it?”

But capital takes the risk

The common defense is that capital deserves its outsized reward because capital takes the risk.

There is some truth here. Starting a business can be risky. Investing money can involve loss. Owners can fail. Entrepreneurs can lose savings, reputation, time, and opportunity. We should not pretend risk is imaginary.

But we should ask a more human question: whose risk counts?

When a business fails, investors may lose money. Workers may lose rent, healthcare, stability, identity, community, and the ability to feed their children. When executives make bad decisions, workers often pay first. When shareholders demand higher returns, workers are laid off, schedules are cut, benefits shrink, workloads increase, bodies break, and families absorb the shock.

Capital risks capital. Labor risks life.

Hear that again: Capital risks capital. Labor risks life.

Capital risks money, and money matters. But labor risks hours that cannot be returned, joints that do not heal easily, nervous systems that carry chronic stress, marriages strained by exhaustion, children growing up around absence, communities hollowed by closures, and bodies treated as replaceable until they finally refuse to keep going.

If risk justifies reward, then workers deserve far more than they are given.

And there is another problem. In our current system, capital is often protected from the very risk it uses to justify domination. Corporations receive bailouts. Investors diversify portfolios. Owners use bankruptcy law. Executives leave with golden parachutes. Shareholders demand public infrastructure, educated workers, legal protections, roads, subsidies, tax advantages, and state violence to protect property, then call their profits purely private achievement.

Meanwhile, workers are told the market is simply the market.

So yes, capital may take risk. But capital also builds elaborate structures to limit, outsource, and socialize that risk, while privatizing the gains. Labor is asked to absorb the human cost.

A staying human response does not deny risk. It democratizes our concern for it. It asks why the risks of ownership are treated as sacred, while the risks of working class life are treated as ordinary.

The table was never built by one person

The deeper wisdom is that creation is always communal.

No one makes alone. Every entrepreneur relies on roads they did not build, language they did not invent, workers they did not birth, teachers they did not pay, ecosystems they did not create, public systems they did not personally sustain, and generations of accumulated knowledge they did not produce from nothing.

This is why the myth of the self-made man is so spiritually dangerous. It cuts the visible person away from the invisible web that held them. It turns dependence into shame for the poor and invisibility for the rich.

But every life is received before it is achieved.

Every maker is first made.

A human economy would remember this. It would understand that work is not merely a private transaction between employer and employee. Work is participation in the common life. It is the ongoing creation of a world. When work is degraded, the world is degraded. When workers are dishonored, the table of communion is cracked.

This is where the language of staying human matters. We are not simply arguing for a different wage policy, though we need that. We are arguing for a different anthropology.

Human beings are not units of labor cost. Human beings are beloved dust, finite and holy, carrying gifts the world needs. Work should be one way those gifts become visible, not the machine that grinds them down.

The goal of an economy cannot be maximum extraction. The goal must be shared aliveness.

What would a human economy honor?

A society that honors the real makers would begin with a few moral commitments.

It would honor labor as creative participation, not merely expense. The person cleaning a school is not a line item. They are helping make learning possible. The person stocking groceries is not low-skill background noise. They are helping feed a community. The person caring for an elder is not economically marginal. They are holding the fragile edge of human life with tenderness.

It would ensure that productivity gains bless the people who produce them. If workers create more value, workers should share in that value through higher wages, shorter hours, stronger benefits, safer conditions, and more democratic say in the workplace.

It would treat rest as part of human dignity, not a reward for those who can afford it. Machines can be run until they break. Humans must not be.

It would protect the forms of work capitalism often refuses to value, especially care work, domestic work, ecological repair, community building, grief work, teaching, healing, and art. These are not secondary to the economy. They are the conditions that make any economy worth having.

It would stop pretending that the people with the most money necessarily made the greatest contribution. Sometimes wealth is the fruit of creativity. Sometimes it is the fruit of proximity, inheritance, monopoly, exploitation, speculation, coercion, or the ability to own what others need.

And it would ask of every system, every business, every budget, every policy, every investment: does this help people become more human, or does it require their diminishment?

That is the question empire hates.

Because empire can count profits. It can count productivity. It can count market share. It can count shareholder value. But it does not know how to count the soul cost of a parent too exhausted to play, a worker too anxious to sleep, a community too underpaid to gather, a body too used up to feel joy, a people taught to measure their worth by how much can be extracted from them.

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The real takers

The real takers are not the poor.

The real takers are not the workers asking for a living wage.

The real takers are not the people who need public support after being underpaid by private employers.

The real takers are not the exhausted, the disabled, the elderly, the children, the unemployed, or the people whose lives do not fit neatly inside productivity metrics.

The real takers are systems that take time without giving life back. They take labor without honoring the laborer. They take the commons and call it private genius. They take public goods and call it self-made success. They take bodies, attention, care, land, and future, then return burnout, debt, precarity, and shame.

The real takers are not people who need help. The real takers are the arrangements that make help necessary, then blame people for needing it.

A staying human politics begins here. Not with contempt for those who have wealth, but with refusal to let wealth define worth. Not with hatred of business, but with a demand that business serve life. Not with romanticizing labor, but with telling the truth that labor is where value becomes flesh.

There is no economy without workers. There is no profit without people. There is no table without those who make, serve, repair, and clean it.

So maybe the question is not whether workers are taking too much.

Maybe the question is how long we will allow takers to dress themselves as makers while the real makers are told to be grateful for survival.

A society that keeps us human honors the hands that make the world.

And if the table is built by many, the feast should be shared by many too.

If this conversation stirs something in you, especially around work, burnout, grief, or the ache of trying to stay human inside systems that keep asking you to become less than human, this is the kind of terrain I walk with people in coaching. If you want to find out more, schedule a discovery call.

Practices for Staying Human

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

60-second Reclamation: Honor Your Labor

Before your next work task, pause and place one hand on your chest or belly. Say quietly, “I am not a machine. My work matters, and my life matters more.” Take three slow breaths before you begin.

60-minute Ritual: Balancing Work

Make a two-column list. On one side, write “What my work gives.” On the other, write “What my work takes.” Be honest. Include money, time, body, energy, creativity, relationships, rest, dignity, stress, and meaning. Then ask: what would need to change for this exchange to become more human?

Whole-life Rebellion: Embody the Post Beyond Your World

Choose one concrete way to honor labor, your own or someone else’s. Join or support a union effort. Tip more generously where you can. Advocate for paid leave, childcare, living wages, and shorter workweeks. Refuse shame-based productivity talk. Build a business, household, church, or community rhythm that treats rest, care, and repair as sacred, not secondary.

Not healing. Not metabolizing. Not grieving. Not listening to the body. Just avoiding, managing, numbing, optimizing, diagnosing, distracting, and getting back to work.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that joy was the only acceptable emotional home. Everything else became suspect. Grief became something to get over. Fear became something to conquer. Anger became something to suppress or weaponize. Despair became something to hide. Sadness became something to explain away before it made anyone uncomfortable.

But the dark emotions do not disappear because we refuse to feel them. They change form.

They become anxiety, depression, addiction, rage, numbness, resentment, exhaustion, and a thousand other symptoms of a body and soul carrying what has not been given room to move.

This piece is about toxified emotional energy, about what happens when grief, fear, despair, and sorrow are exiled instead of befriended. It is also about the possibility that the way back to joy may not be around the dark, but through it.

Not because suffering is good.

Not because pain should be romanticized.

But because love is not afraid of the dark, and staying human may require us to feel what our culture keeps teaching us to numb.

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The Whole Story

There is a strange kind of pressure in our culture to be fine.

Not honest. Not whole. Not deeply alive. Just fine.

Fine enough to keep working. Fine enough to keep producing. Fine enough to answer the text, make the payment, attend the meeting, manage the children, post the photo, send the invoice, get through the day, and not make anyone too uncomfortable with the ache underneath it all.

We have decided, without always saying it out loud, that joy is the emotional default and everything else is a malfunction. Grief means something has gone wrong. Fear means we are weak. Despair means we have failed spiritually. Anger means we are dangerous. Sadness means we need to get over it. So when the dark emotions come, and they always come, we do not welcome them as messengers. We treat them like intruders.

But what if the dark emotions are not the enemy of our humanity?

What if our fear of them is?

We are a culture afraid to feel dark emotions because we have decided they are bad, and that fear is making us less human.

That is the wound.

And the wisdom is this: what we refuse to feel does not disappear. It changes form.

Sometimes it becomes anxiety. Sometimes depression. Sometimes addiction. Sometimes rage. Sometimes numbness. Sometimes despair. Sometimes a body that is exhausted from carrying what the soul was never allowed to name.

The emotional energy does not vanish simply because we suppress it. Like all energy, it moves, mutates, disguises itself, finds another channel. The grief we will not grieve becomes irritability. The fear we will not listen to becomes control. The despair we will not touch becomes cynicism. The anger we will not honor becomes cruelty, collapse, or chronic resentment. The loneliness we will not admit becomes consumption, scrolling, overworking, drinking, performing, disappearing.

And then, because the symptom has become louder than the wound, we start treating the symptom as the whole story.

This is where we need nuance, because medication can be necessary, merciful, and lifesaving. Therapy can be holy work. Clinical care can help a person survive when their nervous system is drowning. No one should be shamed for needing support, chemistry, diagnosis, or treatment.

But there is also a way a culture can use treatment language to avoid transformation. There is a way a system can help us manage symptoms while refusing to ask why so many of us are sick with loneliness, disconnection, overwork, grief, fear, and meaninglessness in the first place. There is a way medication can become one more tool of avoidance when it is offered as a substitute for feeling, grieving, telling the truth, changing our lives, repairing our relationships, or confronting the cultural machinery that keeps making us unwell.

We cannot medicate our way out of a culture that keeps teaching us not to feel. And the truth is, a lot of us are not feeling.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than one in five U.S. adults lived with a mental illness in 2022, an estimated 59.3 million people, or 23.1% of adults. The 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that 40.3 million adults had some form of mental illness and another 46.3 million adults had a substance use disorder. These numbers are not just private tragedies. They are cultural signals.

They tell us something about the water we are swimming in.

They tell us that millions of bodies are carrying what our dominant way of life has not taught us how to metabolize.

They tell us that we are not merely dealing with individual weakness. We are dealing with an emotional ecology that has been poisoned by speed, performance, isolation, extraction, domination, shame, and the endless demand to keep functioning.

We are not machines, but we are trained to live like machines. We are not brands, but we are trained to curate ourselves. We are not productivity systems, but we are trained to justify our existence through output. We are not consumers at the core of who we are, but nearly every platform, advertisement, algorithm, and economic incentive around us depends on our remaining restless, wanting, anxious, distracted, and easy to manipulate.

A society built on avoidance will always need industries of escape.

So we numb.

We numb with alcohol, weed, pills, porn, work, achievement, food, shopping, outrage, entertainment, sex, relationships, religion, self-improvement, busyness, certainty, and even healing language itself. Anything can become addictive when it is used to help us leave the body we are afraid to inhabit.

And at first, numbing can feel like mercy. Sometimes it is how we survive.

Psychic numbing is not a moral failure. It is often a trauma response, a way the body protects us when feeling everything would overwhelm the system. There are seasons when the nervous system closes the gates because too much pain is trying to rush through at once. That deserves compassion, not contempt.

But what protects us for a season can imprison us for a lifetime.

If we keep numbing the dark, the habit begins to generalize. We do not get to selectively numb grief forever while keeping joy untouched. We do not get to shut down despair without also narrowing wonder. We do not get to silence fear without also muting courage. We do not get to exile sorrow without also losing tenderness.

Eventually the capacity for feeling itself begins to shrink.

The heart does not become peaceful. It becomes less available.

This is one of the great lies of emotional avoidance: we think we are escaping pain, but often we are escaping aliveness.

Bill Plotkin, in Wild Mind, offers a helpful map for understanding the fractured inner ecology of the human person. He names the parts of us that flee toward escape and addiction, the wounded children who still carry old pain, the loyal soldiers who learned to protect us through control, performance, and vigilance, and the deeper resources of soul that invite us into descent, imagination, grief, and mature belonging.

In his language, when we are trapped in escapist patterns, we often need the medicine of the West, the dark muse beloved, the one who leads us down into the depths, not to destroy us, but to help us recover the life hidden beneath what we have refused to feel.

That feels deeply true to me.

Because the way back to joy is not always up.

Sometimes the way back to joy is down.

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Down into the grief we have postponed. Down into the fear we have mocked. Down into the despair we have spiritualized away. Down into the body that has been trying to tell the truth while our conscious mind kept saying, “I’m fine.”

This is not the glorification of suffering. Pain is not holy because it hurts. Darkness is not automatically wisdom. Despair does not become sacred simply because it is intense.

But pain can become holy when love meets it.

Grief can become a doorway when it is held in compassion.

Fear can become a teacher when we stop treating it like an enemy.

Despair can become a signal when we listen for the loss, longing, or impossibility beneath it.

Anger can become courage when it is metabolized through love and aimed toward repair.

The dark emotions do not automatically make us wise. But unbefriended, they can make us sick. They can turn toxic. They can pool in the body. They can harden into identities. They can leak into our relationships. They can become the very patterns we then judge ourselves for having.

This is why shame cannot heal us.

Shame only adds another layer of exile. Shame tells the anxious person they are broken. Shame tells the depressed person they are failing. Shame tells the addicted person they are disgusting. Shame tells the numb person they are dead inside. Shame tells the grieving person they are taking too long.

Grace tells a different story.

Grace says: something in you is trying to survive.

Grace says: this feeling is here for a reason.

Grace says: you do not have to obey every emotion, but you can listen.

Grace says: you can be overwhelmed and beloved at the same time.

Grace says: the goal is not to appear healed. The goal is to become more human.

In the Christian story (the one found in the Bible but missing in most churches), God is not only found in brightness, triumph, certainty, and praise music with a major chord resolution. God is found in wilderness, lament, blood, sweat, betrayal, groaning, silence, and tombs. God is found in a crucified body that refuses to pretend empire is not violent. God is found in women weeping at a grave before anyone knows resurrection is coming.

The tradition has always known what our positivity culture forgets: love is not afraid of the dark.

Jesus does not save by avoiding suffering. Jesus reveals a love that descends into the places we abandon, a love that tells the truth, absorbs violence without becoming violent, grieves without shame, and rises with wounds still visible.

Resurrection is not the denial of death. It is what happens when love goes all the way through.

This is the path to staying human.

Not pretending the dark emotions are good in themselves. Not drowning in them. Not building an identity around them. Not using them to excuse harm. Not refusing medication or therapy when those supports are needed. Not romanticizing collapse.

But learning to feel what is here with enough compassion that it can move.

That is emotional alchemy.

Not a forced transformation. Not turning grief into gratitude too quickly. Not bypassing sorrow with a lesson. Not rushing pain toward usefulness.

Alchemy begins with attention.

What is here?

Where does it live in the body?

What is it asking me to know?

What is it protecting?

What has not been grieved?

What needs care?

What needs truth?

What needs repair?

What needs to change?

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When dark emotions are met with mindful attention, they can begin to move instead of stagnate. Grief can become tenderness. Fear can become discernment. Anger can become boundary. Despair can become honesty. Sadness can become depth. Loneliness can become longing for communion. Pain can become a portal, not because pain is good, but because love is willing to meet us there.

And this matters beyond our private lives.

A culture that cannot grieve will become violent. A culture that cannot feel fear honestly will become obsessed with control. A culture that cannot metabolize despair will sell distraction as salvation. A culture that cannot honor anger will either suppress it in the powerless or weaponize it for the powerful. A culture that cannot sit with sorrow will keep demanding entertainment while the world burns.

Our unprocessed emotions do not stay private. They become politics. They become parenting. They become theology. They become policing. They become consumption. They become climate denial. They become religious certainty. They become contempt for the vulnerable. They become systems that punish in others what we cannot bear to feel in ourselves.

This is why staying human is not only an inner project.

It is an act of resistance.

To feel grief in a death-denying culture is resistance.

To listen to fear without letting it drive is resistance.

To metabolize anger into repair instead of domination is resistance.

To refuse numbness in a machine that profits from dissociation is resistance.

To reclaim joy, not as denial, but as the fruit of a heart that has been allowed to feel, is resistance.

We cannot numb our way back to joy.

We can only feel our way back to aliveness.

And feeling is not passive. It is one of the bravest things a human being can do.

Because the moment we stop running from the dark emotions, we may discover that they were not trying to destroy us. They were trying to return us to ourselves. They were trying to show us where love had been blocked, where grief had been waiting, where truth had been buried, where the body had been carrying the cost of our refusal.

If grief is part of what you are carrying, and if you are tired of being told that time heals all wounds, I created Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds as a more honest path through loss. One for those ready for support that honors grief instead of rushing you past it.

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The invitation is not to become someone who never feels anxiety, despair, anger, sorrow, or fear.

The invitation is to become someone who can stay present when they arrive.

Someone who can say, “This too belongs.”

Someone who can place a hand on the body and listen.

Someone who can let the wound speak without handing it the wheel.

Someone who can seek care without shame.

Someone who can descend without disappearing.

Someone who can grieve and still love.

Someone who can feel the darkness without becoming loyal to it.

Someone who can stay human.

Because joy is not the opposite of grief.

Joy is what becomes possible when grief is no longer exiled.

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Practices for Staying Human With Dark Emotions

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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But I keep thinking about the Preamble. Not as a sacred object behind museum glass, and not as proof that America has ever fully lived up to its own language. I keep thinking about it because, right there at the beginning, the Constitution admits something we often forget: the union was never finished.

The phrase is not “a perfect Union.” It is “a more perfect Union.” More honest. More whole. More just. More capable of holding the people it once excluded, exploited, erased, and abandoned. And in the same breath, the Preamble tells us part of what that repair is for: to “promote the general Welfare.”

That phrase feels almost startling now. The general welfare. Not corporate welfare. Not shareholder welfare. Not market stability abstracted from human suffering. The general welfare. The conditions that allow actual people, in actual bodies, to live with dignity, receive care, raise children, grieve their dead, rest without shame, work without being consumed, breathe clean air, and belong to one another without being sacrificed to profit.

So as America approaches 250, I do not find myself asking how we can best preserve the country we inherited. I find myself asking whether we are willing to repair it toward the promise it has so often betrayed. Because if a more perfect union means anything, it has to mean more than nostalgia. It has to mean a country where the measure of our common life is not whether corporations are thriving, but whether people can actually live.

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The Whole Story

America is turning 250, and I keep thinking about the word “more.” Specifically the use of the word “more” in the opening line of the Constitution. The Founding Father’s didn’t talk about making something perfect. But more perfect. Even in its founding imagination, even beneath all the compromise and contradiction and violence, there was an admission hidden in plain sight: this thing was unfinished.

A more perfect union is not something you preserve in amber. It is something you keep repairing. And right there, in the same breath, the Constitution tells us part of what that repair is for: to promote the general welfare. Not the welfare of corporations. Not the welfare of shareholders. Not the welfare of markets abstracted from bodies. The general welfare. The shared conditions that allow people to live, rest, heal, eat, work with dignity, raise children, grieve their dead, breathe clean air, receive care, and belong to one another without being crushed by the machinery of profit.

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We keep quoting “We the People” while building a country for corporations. That is the wound. And it is everywhere. It is in a healthcare system that can bankrupt a family for getting sick. It is in housing treated less like shelter and more like an asset class. It is in wages that do not rise with the cost of being alive. It is in parents trying to raise children inside an economy that treats care as a private burden instead of a public good. It is in workers told to be grateful for jobs that drain their bodies, consume their hours, and still do not pay enough to build a life. It is in the quiet exhaustion so many of us carry, the kind that does not come from laziness or fragility, but from living in a society designed to extract more than human beings can sustainably give.

And then, when people ask whether another way is possible, we are told to be realistic. Realistic, apparently, means accepting that corporations can receive subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, legal protections, and endless political deference, while ordinary people are asked to crowdfund insulin, ration groceries, delay dental care, and treat rest as a luxury. Realistic means the market gets a safety net and the people get a lecture about personal responsibility. Realistic means we can imagine infinite money for war, policing, prisons, and corporate rescue, but healthcare, housing, childcare, climate repair, and student debt relief are treated as dangerous fantasies. A country organized around profit will always call care unrealistic.

But America 250 gives us a chance to ask a better question. Not, “How do we celebrate the country we inherited?” But, “What kind of country are we still willing to become?” Because the phrase “more perfect Union” is not a permission slip for patriotic denial. It is a confession of incompletion. It means the founding was not the finish line. It means democracy is not a relic we worship, but a living relationship we repair.

More perfect means unfinished. More perfect means the excluded must be brought in. More perfect means the harmed must be heard. More perfect means the promises have to become material, not just rhetorical. More perfect means liberty cannot belong only to those who can afford it. More perfect means the general welfare cannot be reduced to the quarterly earnings of companies that would replace every worker with a machine if the machine were cheaper. If a policy works for the market but breaks the body, it is not promoting the general welfare.

This is where the recent surge of democratic socialist candidates feels significant to me. Not because any label will save us. Not because a party platform can become a substitute for moral imagination. Not because politicians, even the good ones, can carry work that belongs to all of us. But because something in the public imagination is shifting. More people are asking whether the economy is supposed to serve human beings, rather than human beings serving the economy. More people are tired of being told that corporate growth is the same thing as collective flourishing. More people are beginning to notice that the language of “freedom” has been hollowed out when it means the freedom of the powerful to exploit and the freedom of everyone else to endure.

Maybe democratic socialism is surging because people are tired of being told that corporate health is the same thing as human flourishing. Maybe it is not a rejection of America’s promise. Maybe it is a demand that we finally take the promise seriously. Promote the general welfare. Feed people. House people. Care for people. Let people rest. Let people get sick without being destroyed. Let people grieve without losing their job. Let children learn without entering debt servitude. Let the earth breathe. Let workers have power. Let communities shape the conditions of their own lives. Let democracy mean more than choosing which representatives will spend the next term listening more closely to donors than to the people who elected them.

This should not sound radical. It should sound constitutional. It should sound spiritual. It should sound like the bare minimum of any society that claims to believe human beings carry dignity. In my theological language, salvation is not evacuation. It is embodiment. It is not getting out of the world, but getting free inside it. Liberation is the undoing of the forces that fracture relationship, within us, between us, around us, and through the systems we inherit and build.

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So when I hear “general welfare,” I do not hear a dry civic phrase. I hear a question of embodiment. Can bodies live here? Can nervous systems soften here? Can children grow here? Can elders age here? Can workers breathe here? Can disabled people belong here? Can those who don’t fit any box flourish here? Can Black and brown communities be safe here? Can immigrants be welcomed here? Can the grieving be held here? Can the earth survive us here? If the answer is no, then we are not promoting the general welfare. We are managing the machinery of harm.

And this is also making me rethink the shape of We Can Stay Human itself. For a while, I thought these pieces needed to be long enough to build a whole world. Maybe sometimes they still do. There is a place for the cathedral, for the long walk, for the essay that takes its time and lets the argument unfold like a river. But I am starting to wonder if, in this moment, staying human requires something more portable. Something people can carry into the scroll, into the group chat, into the family argument, into the voting booth, into the body. Not less depth. Less bloat. Not less conviction. More breath.

If a different kind of politics is beginning to win, maybe we need a different kind of public speech to meet it. A kind of speech that does not simply denounce what is broken, but gives people language for what they have been feeling in their bones. A kind of speech that can name the wound, offer the wisdom, and give us one practice for becoming human again.

So here is the wound: America has confused corporate welfare with the general welfare. Here is the wisdom: a more perfect union is not behind us. It is unfinished repair. And here is the practice: measure public life by the body. Before you ask whether a policy is moderate or radical, ask what it does to bodies. Does it feed them? Does it house them? Does it heal them? Does it protect them from violence? Does it honor their limits? Does it give them time to rest, grieve, create, connect, and belong? Does it help people become more human? Or does it sacrifice them to keep the machine running?

That question will not solve everything. But it will clarify more than we think. Because once you start measuring politics by the body, some things become very hard to defend. It becomes harder to defend a system where people die because they cannot afford medicine. It becomes harder to defend wages that require multiple jobs and still do not cover rent. It becomes harder to defend a planet treated as disposable. It becomes harder to defend billionaires going to space while children go hungry. It becomes harder to defend a country that asks people to love freedom while denying them the material conditions that make freedom livable.

A more human union would not be perfect. But it would be honest about what perfection requires. Not purity. Not nostalgia. Not domination dressed up as tradition. Repair. Care. Shared power. Material dignity. The courage to say that an economy is not healthy if the people inside it are breaking. The courage to say that the general welfare belongs to the general public, not to the donor class. The courage to say that government is not the enemy when it is used to protect the vulnerable from the powerful. The enemy is any system, public or private, that forgets the human beings it exists to serve.

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America is turning 250. I do not want a birthday party for a myth. I want a reckoning with a promise. I want us to stop asking how to preserve the country as it has been and start asking how to repair the country toward what it claimed it wanted to become.

A more perfect union. The general welfare. We the people. Not we the corporations. Not we the shareholders. Not we the market. We the people. Fragile, beloved, exhausted, beautiful, aching, unfinished people. Still here. Still longing. Still capable of repair. Still able, if we choose, to become more human together.

If this season has left you grieving what this country has become, or aching for a way to stay tender without going numb, that is part of the work I do through Life After Loss and Staying Human coaching. We practice how to remain present, embodied, and connected in a world that keeps asking us to shut down. If you want support in that work, check out my website or DM me.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Move Towards More

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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Seven weeks ago I published The Places That Hold Us, a reflection on third-place grief, and on the quiet violence of a system that treats the containers that keep us alive like disposable products. I wrote it in the raw ache of hearing the news: the gym was closing, the basement altar was being dismantled, and the nervous system would have to re-learn its coordinates.

So what did we do a couple weeks ago? We did something our culture almost never gives us permission to do. We held a funeral.

Not a metaphorical “well, that’s life” goodbye. Not a quick toast and a shrug. A funeral. We processed in with a hex bar in lieu of a coffin, shrouded and heavy as Ave Maria played beneath the laughter. We let the room enjoy the absurdity while still telling the truth about the loss. I wore a clerical collar and stole over gym shorts and gym shoes (Nunorm for those who might be wondering), because that mismatch is the point. We are bodies and we are meaning-makers. We lift heavy things, and we also bury what mattered.

And then the room became what it had always been, at its best: a place where people could tell the truth without being fixed.

About thirty-five of us sat there and offered witness to what the spreadsheet can never measure. The system calls it a gym membership. But what people were describing was a sanctuary of return. A third place where bodies were welcomed, where grief could move, where change could be held long enough to become real. We did not just mourn the closure. We honored the fact that a place like this had taught people how to keep living.

And for a few hours, both formally and then over bottles of wine and whiskey, we gave that truth the dignity of ritual and care.

Here’s more of what happened:

The Procession

My Opener

Dearly Beloved,

We are gathered here today to … well … what the hell are we doing?

A few weeks back after they announced the closure of the Denver Club Haus, as we were transitioning between a couple classes, Megan tossed out the idea that we should do a funeral.

And at one level, that sounds really strange. After all, nobody died. This is a gym. The only thing that outnumbers them in Denver are pot shops.

It’s a basement, a windowless room that we ourselves objected to because of the lack of light and the unwelcoming stairwell entrance.

That said, as odd as it might sound given the number of funerals I’m at, I don’t see myself as someone in the death business, but as someone in the life after loss business.

And the truth is, we are losing something rare, something special, dare I even say something holy or sacred. Because while this is just a place, just a basement, just a gym, it’s also a container where beautiful things have happened, and where we walked with each other through both joyful and painful things, and as much as we want to think things will be the same next week, if we’re honest, we know they won’t.

Yes, some of us will still be working out together. But others who’ve been part of the rhythm won’t be there.

Some friendships will hold, but a WhatApp group for the diaspora only works if we’re all intentional.

And while new is good and it creates opportunity for fresh growth, it can also be hard when you no longer find yourself in the same soil that’s been giving you life.

So in one way, tonight is about honoring that we all stand at a threshold, a point of transition, a gateway from one season of life into another. So we pause for a moment of intention, of remembrance, of celebration, and of reflection on what’s next.

We also honor the disruption that so many have felt over the past month.

When life is busy and everything seems to be working, we live in what author Miriam Greenspan calls deep forgetfulness. We forget the Buddha’s first noble truth: life hurts. And it doesn’t hurt because we’re failing, but because we’re human.

But we’re dislodged from this blissful forgetfulness when something ends. Sometimes a relationship, sometimes a dream, sometimes a body, sometimes a place. And suddenly we are aware once again of that forgotten truth.

It’s in these moments of renewed awareness it’s important to remember once again that our lives are sustained by rhythms, familiar faces, and passing through doors we’ve walked through a thousand times. In other words, we’re once again aware that our bodies need coordinates. Belonging needs a room. And if it doesn’t have one, it becomes difficult to ground ourselves again.

So we’re here to tell the truth about what this room held. We’re here to grieve the loss, yes. And to express what this place gave us that others haven’t.

What happened in this basement was not a product. It was a covenant of return. A people who kept showing up. A place where strength was built, and sometimes, without anyone making a big deal of it, so was the capacity to keep living.

And that means we’re going to speak aloud what was never honored by the language of spreadsheets and business decisions. Not to trash the powers that made those decisions, but to be more human than a bottom line ever can.

I bring up that last point because, after the announcement, like a lot of other people, I was thrown. There was anger and frustration, but it took me some time to put a finger on why. After all, they made a business decision, and that’s their choice.

But in making their business decision, I felt they never truly recognized what they’d created. They never listened to the voices of the people who were here, voices that had spent months not only talking about what could be done to make this place thrive, but help with the work to make it happen.

Instead we were reduced to wrong names or no names on what was dubbed a highly personal email, being described as a microcosm, offered more hollow promises, and of course those profoundly empathetic words produced by ChatGPT.

So to counter that, and to honor the loss, we are here to do three simple things:

We will remember.

We will witness.

And we will bless what was true so it can travel with us into whatever container comes next.

The first will come from all of us as everyone here will have a chance to share what this place has meant to them.

The second is something we will all do as we hear and honor the stories of others.

And the third will be something constantly happening in the background, as we make decisions on how to move forward.

So with that, I want to invite those of you who’d like to share your Gravity Haus story to do so. Share with us what this place enabled and what the people gathered here meant to you.

It can be a longer story, a favorite memory, an expression of gratitude, or just a couple words.

Open Sharing

A college lacrosse coach talked about how much the programming is meant to her. How at almost 50 she is still able to run the field with division one athletes, although she does it backwards and ready to blow a whistle at a moment’s notice. And the only thing she does to keep herself in shape was classes at the gym. The programming was that good.

People spoke about meeting a spouse, about watching a love story become a marriage and then a family, two kids arriving like living punctuation marks. People spoke about moving to Denver and being swallowed by loneliness, then walking into this basement and thinking, with surprise and relief: these are my people, this is my place. Someone named being at a bottom point in life and finding, in the simplest way, a rope back to themself.

And the stories went deeper, as they always do when a container is safe enough. A child coming out as trans, and the family learning how to stay tender. Someone stopping drinking. Marriages repaired. The hard work of becoming honest. The slow, stubborn reassembly of a life.

My Reflection

So I’m here today, because I got stood up.

It was one of those, she’s way too hot for me but I’m going to go for it anyway kind of dates. The plan was to do one of those open houses they had at Nurture right as we were coming out of Covid.

I got there that night and about 20 minutes after we were supposed to meet I got a message on Instagram that something had come up.

But instead of going home, I went inside and had a great night connecting with an array of people and providers. Now, if she showed up that night, I would have been all kinds of focused on her and not connecting with the people there. Instead, I enjoyed the vibe so much, I started hanging out at Nurture on a regular basis, which is how I found Gravity Haus.

It was one of those unexpected collisions. For years I’d been a distance runner. And in 2020 I was training to run Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim, a 46-mile slog from one rim of the Grand Canyon to the other and back. And then my body crashed and I learned the hard way that when you’ve blown past 40, doing nothing but endurance training will destroy your body from the inside out.

So here I was, a year later, failing at home workouts and needing something that would have me picking up heavy shit with guidance on how to do it well. And honestly, that first part terrified me because I’d never been a gym guy and didn’t know the first thing about kettlebells or dumbbells or barbells.

My first class was the Monday before Christmas in 2021 and I was the first one there. Amy King looking like Fitness Barbie greeted me at the door and I wasn’t sure what I’d done to myself. Then Sydney walked in and set up her phone so she could turn the workout into content. To be honest, I’m a bit surprised I came back.

But by Thursday, I was a member because I figured the workouts were what I needed. I just didn’t know how important the people would also become.

But that second class gave me a hint. It was just Paige, Steph, and I. Steph did the 12 Days of Fitmas in about 15 minutes. I’m not even sure if she broke a sweat. I made it halfway through, created a 6’ radius splash zone, and thought I might die. Then the three of us talked about divorce for an hour.

I never imagined that day what would happen over the next four and a half years. That it would be the place I’d learn to feel safe in my body again after someone I wish had stood me up came at me with fists and a kitchen knife.

That it would be the place I’d not only work through the stress of my dad’s cancer journey, but the place I’d find my support as I spent 15-months carrying my parents.

That Tracy would be there for the funeral, or that Brent would be saving the day and picking my brother up from the airport after his flight was delayed.

That the one expense I knew I couldn’t cut after losing my job would be the gym … not just because I needed the workouts, but because I needed the people.

The Blessing

Which brings us back to why we’re here, because people came to a space. As John has described it in his new endeavor, the common desire for workouts became the vehicle that allowed all this to happen.

That means what we are burying tonight is not just a gym. We are grieving the end of a container that helped us stay human.

But the container was never the brand. It was the people. It was the return. It was the agreement, spoken or unspoken, that you could come as you are and be met.

So as we close, I want to bless the diaspora. If you are heading to Platform Fitness with John to be a part of STNDRD FIT, may it become a place of life for you. If you are going somewhere else, may you find a room that fits, and may you help make it kind.

Carry the best of Gravity Haus forward. Not as nostalgia, but as practice. The practice of showing up. The practice of belonging. The practice of becoming strong, together.

Thank you for being part of this. Go gently. And keep choosing each other.

And if you want a next step (beyond the whiskey and wine as we shift this to a wake), make it uncomplicated. Before you walk out, trade numbers with one person. Make one plan. Be it coffee. A workout. A check-in. Just keep choosing each other and let the good that happened here happen beyond here.

The Next Step

Here is the part I did not see as clearly when I first wrote that essay: endings do not only scatter. Sometimes they reveal the real thing.

Because the container we lost was never just walls and equipment. The deeper container was the web of people, the covenant of showing up, the shared language of suffering and laughter and encouragement. And that covenant has not died.

One of the coaches is teaching at another gym now, building something of his own inside it. A new business, a new doorway, a new chance for the work to keep going. And some of us have followed, not as consumers chasing convenience, but as people choosing continuity. Choosing to keep sweating in the same orbit. Choosing to keep each other.

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We are also finding ways to gather that are not dependent on a single brand or lease. We’re throwing one friend a 50th birthday party, and the invite list is basically a love letter to the old room. People who would have remained “gym acquaintances” in another timeline are now becoming friends who share meals, milestones, stories, and actual life.

This is what I mean by re-creation. Not optimism. Not denial. The slow defiant act of making a new container when the old one is taken. The willingness to let the good remain, and to carry it forward on purpose.

The place is gone. The people are still here.

And if the system keeps trying to monetize, optimize, and erase the spaces that make us human, then our response is not only to grieve. It is to build. To keep choosing each other. To keep making third places out of whatever rooms we can find.

May what formed us there travel with us. May the belonging outlive the basement. May the container keep moving, until it becomes a village.

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If you’re in Denver and want to join us for programming that is “that good,” check out STNDRD FIT meeting at Platform Strength in Rino, just across the street from Improper City.

For those of you not in Denver, John will soon have online programming available specifically targeting GLP-1 users, people who spend most of their life on the road, and online options for what we’re doing in person.

And wherever you are, if grief over loss of any kind is weighing you down, jump over to my website and share your email. I’ll send you a pdf that unpacks how our approach to grief in the Western world actually makes the whole thing harder (and offers some thoughts on what we can do instead).

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Last November, right after the election, I talked about the electoral ricochet, how we keep slamming back and forth between disgust and disappointment, voting against the last administration instead of for a life we can actually live.

This week, I want to name a small, cautious hope: maybe the ricochet is starting to break.

Not because the system suddenly became righteous. Not because the party machines stopped being machines. But because a few candidates are winning attention, and sometimes winning ballots, by making the conversation about kitchen-table survival again: affordability, housing, healthcare, wages, transit, daily dignity.

Here’s what I’m watching:

• Maine: Graham Plater is now the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate after Janet Mills suspended her campaign. If that holds, it’s another signal that “business as usual” isn’t automatically getting the crown.

• Denver: Melat Kiros beat Diana DeGette in the Colorado House District 1 Democratic primary (by 28 points) has that unmistakable movement energy, the kind that doesn’t feel like it was manufactured in a consultant lab.

• Nebraska: If Dan Osborn’s polling continues to hold (and especially if it improves), it’s another example of a candidate landing not by performing culture-war theater, but by talking about the material conditions people are living inside.

And that’s just a small sample of what we see happening all over the country.

Here’s the throughline: these campaigns aren’t perfect, and they’re not all the same. But they’re leaning into the same basic moral claim: politics should make ordinary life more livable.

That’s what Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in NYC crystallized for me: not just “representation” as a symbol, but representation as a delivery system for relief: free buses, public groceries, rent stabilization, childcare, the stuff that actually changes a Tuesday.

So here’s the personal piece: in Colorado’s Senate primary, I’m planning to vote for Julie Gonzales over John Hickenlooper for this exact reason. Not because one person is going to save us, but because primaries are one of the few places we can sometimes push the ballot toward someone who’s even trying to plant in different soil.

Because yes, we can do a lot to stay human as individuals. But we also need container. We need soil. Putting healthy trees in poisoned ground doesn’t produce a healthy forest.

So my invitation this week is simple:

1. Look up your next primary election.

2. Ask: who is actually talking about affordability and daily dignity, not as branding, but as a commitment?

3. Confirm they're funded not by wealthy corporations and anonymously funded PAC’s, but by you and me (that’s how you know who they serve).

4. If there’s someone trying to break the ricochet where you live, help them get on the ballot. Vote. Volunteer. Tell a friend. Share their platform.

No grand conclusion this week. Just a hand on the thread, and a question: What if “staying human” also means choosing leaders who are trying to make the ground less toxic?

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But this week’s post is a little different. I used to be a pastor (sometimes I’ll introduce myself as a recovering Lutheran pastor). While I officially left that world in 2010, every once in a while The Sanctuary in Denver invites me back to preach. Last Sunday they did, and I shared a sermon on grief called “Good Grief.” It’s a reflection on the strange, holy terrain that often opens up after truth-telling, repentance, and repair.

Even if you don’t embrace a specific faith tradition, my hope is that it helps you stay human in the presence of relentless love.

Watch (audio available here)

The Whole Story

In November of 2018, I was sitting in this room, right here in The Sanctuary, just before a service. Without warning a wave of grief hit me. Not the kind of grief that comes when someone dies, though I’ve come to know that kind too.

This was a different grief. It was grief about the way I’d lived, grief about things I’d done, grief about the ways I’d hurt people, grief about the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be.

And I can trace that wave back to a sentence spoken to me a little earlier in that season, a sentence that, at the time, felt like an accusation, but in hindsight was also a kind of mercy.

My soon-to-be ex-wife looked at me and said, “You have all kinds of grace for perpetrators, but no mercy for victims.”

In other words: I could extend radical forgiveness toward myself, and even toward people who caused harm, but I didn’t know how to hold the reality of what harm does to the harmed. I didn’t know how to make room for accountability and repair.

I had a kind of grace that wanted to move quickly to “It’s fine,” “God forgives,” “Let’s not dwell,” “Let’s move on.” A grace that treated forgiveness like a delete button.

But that is not resurrection. That is not restorative justice. And it is not the Kingdom of God coming on earth as it is in heaven.

Rather, it’s what I would describe as an “incomplete grace,” which is a common side effect of shrinking a gospel about a renewed world into a personal ticket to eternity, a gospel that saves souls while leaving bodies, relationships, and communities to deal with the fallout alone. That kind of “salvation” is too small.

The Gospel that Jesus preached and the one that the Early Church carried forward was not about evacuation. Rather it is embodiment. It is liberation. It is new creation already unfolding in real lives, real systems, and real repair.

And like the effects of my hurtful actions didn’t just disappear, that grief didn’t pass quickly either. It became a kind of companion for the next year and a half.

And here’s something else I didn’t expect: as I stayed with grief over what I’d done, it opened me to an entire landscape of other griefs.

Grief for the harm done to others.

Grief for the harm done to me, and to the parts of me that had never known love.

Grief for the ways injustice bends a whole world out of shape.

Grief for what I never received.

Grief that didn’t start with me at all, but came down through family lines and cultural stories.

It was like repentance did not just expose a single wound, it returned me to the truth of being human in a broken world. And that widening was not a distraction from the Kingdom, it was part of my apprenticeship to it. Because you can’t move toward the reign of God without letting love teach you what to grieve.

At first, I didn’t know what to do with it. I tried to think my way out of it. I tried to outrun it. I tried to spiritualize it.

But it kept coming back. Not as punishment. Not as God’s anger. More like truth knocking on the door of my body.

Thesis: Grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief

And here’s what I learned in that year and a half. When grace takes away guilt, it often leaves grief. Because grace, when we receive it in fullness, allows us to see the world around us more clearly, more honestly, and less defensively.

So grace might cancel a debt, but it will leave you standing in the ruins.

Grace will forgive you, but it also invites you to wake up and see the world through divine eyes.

Grace says, “You are mine,” even as it leads you through the slow ache of becoming trustworthy again.

All that is to say that grace takes away guilt, but it often leaves grief. And that grief, tended in the presence of relentless love, becomes a path to a richer grace and personal transformation.

That’s what I mean by “Good Grief.” Not pleasant grief. Not romantic grief. But grief that tells the truth, softens the heart, and opens a person into the life of God.

And if “Easter” means anything beyond a day on the calendar, if it means life under the reign of the risen Christ, which means life “after Easter” is not life without grief.

It’s life where love refuses to let us stay numb.

It’s life where the mercy of God is not only comfort, but also courage.

It’s life where grief becomes one of the ways love makes us real.

So today I want to take us into two ancient texts: one is a story and the other a prayer. Then I want to use a framework created by Francis Weller in his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, to help us not only name and explore the kinds of grief we carry, but also to practice a different posture toward grief.

Not analysis. Not a lecture. An invitation.

An invitation to let grief do what it is trying to do, which is not to ruin your life, but to return you to it.

An invitation to stop treating grief as a problem to solve and start treating it as a truth to be tended.

An invitation to discover that sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is feel what love has been asking you to feel.

Practice: Clay (an embodied way to stay present)

Now before we go any farther, I want us to do something embodied, something simple enough for a child and honest enough for an adult. Because I realize that grief is uncomfortable, and I don’t want you to mentally or emotionally shut down as I invite you to dig in. So we’re going to put something in your hands. Not to fix anything, but to both help your body stay present and give your heart a constant reminder of how grief works.

This is one of the practices that is part of my new online course:
Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds, But Tending Does

In it, you’ll find this and other rituals, teaching, guided meditations,
and other tools to help you engage with grief.

Congregational practice: clay (a way to stay present)

So as you walked in today, you received a little baggy with a piece of clay in it. Go ahead and take it out.

Before you do anything with it, just notice what it feels like. It may feel cool. It may feel a little dry. It may feel stiff, like it doesn’t want to cooperate. The first feeling many of us have when it comes to grief is, “I don’t like this.”

And really, it doesn’t matter what kind of grief we carry. Whether the grief comes from what we’ve done or what’s been done to us, grief often shows up as the moment our bodies stop cooperating with denial. It’s the moment truth finally reaches the nervous system. It’s love refusing to let us stay numb. And whatever the source of the grief, the sensation is uncomfortable.

So we pick it up for a second. We don’t like the sensation. We don’t like what it brings up in us. We don’t like the way it interrupts the story we were trying to live. So we put it back down. We set it on a shelf. We tuck it in a drawer. We swallow it. We distract ourselves. We keep moving.

Then a week later, a month later, a year later, something happens that forces it back into our hands. And it feels exactly the same, cool, dry, stiff. And because it feels exactly the same, we assume nothing has changed.

And in a world that’s told us that time heals all wounds, we assume time isn’t working, or that we failed, or that grief is pointless.

So we put it back down again. This is the lie we live with. We think time heals all wounds. But time alone does not heal. Because if you never touch the clay, it never changes. Time is not magic. Time is a container.

What transforms grief is not time by itself, but time plus tending. Time plus tenderness. Time plus attention. Time plus a safe place to be honest. Time plus breath. Time plus a body that is allowed to tremble and soften. Time plus a community that does not rush you to be “over it.”

So here is the practice. Begin to work the clay, slowly. Warm it. Press it gently. Don’t force it. Don’t rush it. Stay with it long enough that it can respond to you.

If it resists at first, that’s okay. Grief resists at first. If it feels clumsy, that’s okay. Love is learned.

But as you work it, notice what begins to happen. The clay changes, not because you argued with it, not because you shamed it, not because you demanded that it become something else. It changes because it is being held. It changes because it is being tended. It changes because it is being warmed by your hands and given patient attention.

This is one of the truest things I know about grief. Grief that is ignored tends to harden. It can harden into cynicism. It can harden into blame. It can harden into numbness. It can harden into productivity that never rests and humor that never cries.

What tending does (from hardened to workable)

But grief that is tended becomes workable. Not erased. Not rushed. Workable.

So take a few breaths. Feel the clay in your hands. If you want to, let it represent grief you feel right now, be it loss, the parts of you that have not known love, injustice, the things you never received, or ancestral grief. And let this small practice be a gentle word to your body: you don’t have to force yourself to be okay. You don’t have to drop what is tender. You can stay with it. Love can hold it.

The story: 2 Samuel 11-12 (David’s collapse and God’s confrontation)

So with that, we turn to 2 Samuel.

In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab,and his servants with him, and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.

It happened, late one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, “Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?” So David sent messengers and took her, and she came to him, and he lay with her. (Now she had been purifying herself from her uncleanness.) Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived, and she sent and told David, “I am pregnant.”

So instead of sitting in the truth, David tries to manage the consequences.

He calls Uriah home from the battle, hoping Uriah will sleep with Bathsheba so the pregnancy will look like Uriah’s child.

But Uriah, out of solidarity with the soldiers and the ark, refuses. He won’t go home for comfort while others are sleeping in the open field.

So David escalates. He sends Uriah back to the front lines carrying his own death warrant: instructions to place Uriah where the fighting is fiercest and then pull back so he will be killed.

Uriah dies. The report comes back. David responds with chilling detachment, treating the death as an unfortunate but acceptable cost of war.

After Bathsheba’s mourning, David brings her into his house as his wife, and she bears a son. And then the narrator delivers the verdict: what David did displeased the Lord.

Not temptation, but power (a king sees, sends, takes)

Here’s what I want you to notice about 2 Samuel 11. It’s written almost without commentary. It’s spare. It’s blunt, like the writer refuses to soften what happens.

“In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle… David remained at Jerusalem.”

Right away, the text is telling us something is off. David is a king, but he’s not where he’s supposed to be. He’s disengaged. He’s drifting.

And then he sees Bathsheba. And this is where we have to be honest. The story is not mainly about sexual temptation. It’s about power.

A king sees. A king sends. A king takes.

Bathsheba is not presented as a seductress. She is presented as someone acted upon. The text names her identity through relationships that, in the ancient world, should have protected her: “the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah.”

And then once David has used her, he tries to manage the consequences. He tries to cover. He tries to control. And when control fails, he arranges Uriah’s death.

This is what sin does when it is mixed with power. It turns people into problems. It turns image into something to protect at any cost. It turns love into collateral damage.

And the narrator ends the chapter with a line that should stop us: “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.”

Not “David felt bad.” Not “David apologized.” Not “David posted a statement.” The text says: God saw. God cared. God did not look away.

Confrontation as mercy (Nathan: “You are the man”)

Then comes Nathan.

And the LORD sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die, and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”

Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. And I gave you your master’s house and your master’s wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah. And if this were too little, I would add to you as much more. Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.

Nathan doesn’t start with accusation. He starts with a story. A rich man steals a poor man’s beloved lamb.

And David burns with righteous anger.

Which is fascinating, isn’t it? David can feel outrage until the story is about him.

Then Nathan says the words that crack the whole thing open: “You are the man.” I read that and I hear my ex saying, “You have all kinds of grace for the perpetrators, and no mercy for the victims.”

This is not God humiliating David. This is God rescuing David from his delusion.

Because here’s the truth. God’s relentless love does not only comfort us. God’s relentless love confronts us, not to crush us with shame, but to restore what has been fractured and to bring us back to love.

David responds with a sentence that feels too small for what he’s done: “I have sinned against the Lord.”

No defense. No spin. No blaming. No “but she… but I… but if you knew what I’d been through…” Just truth.

And, ultimately, Nathan says something that is the heart of grace: “The Lord also has put away your sin; you shall not die.”

Grace can take away guilt. But the story also makes clear: consequences still ripple. And that is where grief enters. Grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief. Because forgiveness doesn’t mean “nothing happened.” Forgiveness means love refuses to let what happened be the end of the story.

And I want you to feel the strange, holy tension in that moment. David is forgiven, and David is not spared. The guilt is addressed, and the grief is not bypassed. Grace has spoken, and the world is still real.

This is the shape of love in scripture. Love does not pretend. Love does not flatter. Love does not collude with denial. Love tells the truth and then stays.

Some of us were handed a version of faith where grace is a loophole. A spiritual escape hatch. Say the right words, feel the right feeling, and you never have to touch the sorrow.

But the grace of God is not an exit from humanity. It is an entrance into it.

Grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief. Because grief is what love feels when it refuses to let you stay asleep. Because grief is what a conscience feels when it comes back online. Because grief is what a body feels when it finally believes it is safe enough to soften.

So if you are listening to this story and something in you wants to shrink back, or rush ahead, or make it tidy, I want you to notice that. And if you can, let yourself stay with the tension.

The prayer: Psalm 51 (repentance as re-creation)

That’s exactly what David did. He stayed with the tension. He let the reality of what he’d done sink in. And then he wrote a poem.

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.

What’s striking is that the Psalm is not primarily self-hatred. It’s not performative shame. It’s not spiritual theater. It’s an honest prayer for cleansing and re-creation.

Listen to the verbs. “Blot out.” “Wash me.” “Cleanse me.” That’s not someone trying to minimize. That’s someone acknowledging the stain is real.

That said, we should address one key line: “Against you only have I sinned.” This should not be read as a spiritual loophole that erases the humans harmed.

In this story, Bathsheba bears the image of God. So when David takes her, when he rapes her, he is assaulting the image of God. He is assaulting God.

That is the higher court. The sin is not smaller than the harm. It is bigger. It is cosmic. It is a violation of love itself.

So this verse is not permission to keep repentance private. It is a recognition of the true depth of the crime. Repentance that never turns toward repair is how harm stays in the dark.

Then David says something deeply psychologically wise: “You desire truth in the inward being.” Not just behavior management. Not just “I’ll try harder.” Truth in the inward being.

As the poem continues he pens the line: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” The word “create” here is not “help me improve.” It’s closer to “make something new.”

This is what grace does. Grace is not God saying, “It’s fine.” Grace is God saying, “Come back to life.”

David continues with: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation.” Which means guilt is gone, but grief remains. David has been forgiven and still needs restoration. Still needs joy rebuilt. Still needs the work of repair.

Grace isn’t a delete button (guilt vs grief)

Grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief.

Guilt tries to end the story quickly. Grief refuses to hurry because grief is trying to tell the truth, not only about what was done, but about what it did.

And sometimes the proof that grace has actually reached you is not that you feel instantly fine, but that you are finally able to feel.

So I want to name something gently but clearly. If you have never felt grief after forgiveness, if you have never felt sorrow after being loved, if you have never felt that ache of waking up to what you did, or what was done to you, then love has a deeper invitation for you.

Because love makes us feel. Love makes us honest. Love makes us real.

And this is where “Good Grief” begins. Not with shame, but with tenderness. Not with self-destruction, but with a heart that is finally awake.

So what do we do when we finally wake up and “Good Grief” appears on our doorstep?

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Framework: Weller’s five gates (learning to carry grief with skill)

Francis Weller says grief is not something we “get over.” It is something we learn to carry with skill. He names five gates, five doorways through which grief comes into our lives. And I want to use those gates today because they help us do something our culture almost never teaches us to do: tell the truth about sorrow without letting it harden us.

In a grief-phobic world, we often treat grief like a threat, like an intruder, like a sign that something has gone wrong. But what if grief is not the enemy of faith. What if grief is one of faith’s most honest companions. Not because grief is good in itself, but because love is good, and love always carries sorrow. The deeper you love, the more capacity you need. The more tenderness you need. The more truth you need. The more God you need.

So I want to walk through these gates by driving us back into the story of David and Bathsheba. Not to make David the hero. Not to make Bathsheba a footnote. But to name the grief that the text itself refuses to bypass. Because the refrain holds true here: grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief. And that grief, tended in the presence of relentless love, becomes a path to a richer grace.

As we name these gates, you do not have to fix anything in yourself. You do not have to perform insight. Just notice what stirs. Notice where your body tightens. Notice where you want to move away. And if you need to go slow, go slow. The God of steadfast love does not rush.

Gate 1: Loss

The first gate is loss. Loss is grief for what is gone, for what cannot be unbroken, for what cannot be undone. In this story, loss is not only the loss that comes after the death of a child. Loss begins the moment David uses his power to take what is not his. Something is lost immediately: integrity, safety, trust, innocence. The world gets smaller and harder. A person becomes collateral.

And here is the truth we have to tell. Even when God forgives, you may still be standing in the ruins. Some losses can be repaired. Some cannot. “After Easter” life does not require you to pretend you didn’t lose anything. Resurrection is not denial. It is love making room for reality.

Gate 2: The parts of us that have not known love

The second gate is grief for the parts of us that have not known love. This gate asks a hard question: what unloved place in David made him reach for domination. What starving place made him treat a human being as an object. Again, that does not excuse harm. But it does point to something that Psalm 51 names when it says, “You desire truth in the inward being.” David is not only confessing what he did. David is naming what he needs: “Create in me a clean heart… renew a right spirit within me.”

In other words, “I cannot heal myself by willpower. I need love to reach the places in me that formed under fear.” Good grief here is not self-pity. It is the grief that tells the truth about the inner fracture so it does not keep spilling outward into other bodies.

Gate 3: Injustice

The third gate is grief for injustice. If we say the word sin and do not name injustice, we are not reading this story honestly. David’s sin is power. A king sees, sends, takes. A king uses a woman. A king kills a man. A king tries to manage the consequences with more violence.

Notice how God responds. God does not look away. God sends Nathan. Love confronts. Not to crush David with shame, but to refuse collusion, to name what happened, to bring the harmed back into view. And if you want to live “after Easter,” part of discipleship is learning to grieve injustice without becoming injustice. Learning to feel anger without letting it hollow you out. Learning to seek repair rather than revenge.

Gate 4: The things we never received

The fourth gate is grief for the things we never received. This is the grief of missing nourishment: protection, attunement, tenderness, guidance, a steady sense of belovedness. This gate matters because unmet needs do not disappear. They shape the ways we cope. They shape the ways we grasp. They shape the ways we control.

When David prays for cleansing and re-creation, part of what he is asking for is what he does not have in himself. A clean heart. A right spirit. A joy that can be restored. A steady presence. Good grief here is letting yourself mourn what you never got, so you stop demanding that your coping strategies, or your power, or your image management fill the hole.

Gate 5: Ancestral

The fifth gate is ancestral grief. David is not only an individual with a private failure. David is a king inside a lineage and a system. His choices do not come out of nowhere. They are downstream from stories of patriarchy, conquest, entitlement, and violence. In other words, this story is not only about one man. It is about what power does when it is cut loose from love.

The invitation here is not to blame your ancestors as a way of dodging responsibility. It is to tell the truth about what was handed to you, grieve what got passed down, and then become the one who interrupts the pattern. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is grieve what your family never grieved so your children do not have to carry it as fate.

This is one of the practices that is part of my new online course:
Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds, But Tending Does

In it, you’ll find this and other rituals, teaching, guided meditations,
and other tools to help you engage with grief.

Integration: Titration + containment (how to touch grief without flooding)

So let’s go back to the clay that’s been living with it in your hands while we moved through the story and the Psalm.

If you still have it, bring your attention to it for a moment. Notice what it feels like now compared to when we started. For many of you, it is warmer. Softer. More responsive. It is pliable. It is workable. In fact, I’m guessing many of you have been quietly playing with it throughout this message.

That change is the point. It is a small parable your nervous system can understand. Time by itself does not transform grief. But time plus tending does. Attention does. Breath does. A safe place does. The presence of relentless love does.

And this is where it gets practical. When you and I talk about grief, it is easy to either avoid it entirely or to plunge into it so fast we get overwhelmed. Either way, we stop being human.

In the coaching work I do, one of the ways I help people stay with grief without getting flooded is by practicing something called titration. It is a small dose of the truth, on purpose, for a brief moment. Not your whole story. Not everything at once. Just a thread.

And then, you don’t just stay raw. You need somewhere for that truth to land. Today, I want the Table to be that landing place. I want communion to be our containment.

First, titration. Choose a point of grief that has brushed up against you today. Maybe it is loss. Maybe it is injustice. Maybe it is the parts of you that have not known love. Choose just one. Not your whole life. Just one thread.

Now bring it to mind for a moment. Notice what happens in your body. Tightness, heat, heaviness, numbness, tears, a desire to run, a desire to shut down. No judging. Just noticing.

And as you feel it, I want you to take a deep breath in, and then take a longer breath out.

As you feel that grief, I want you to imagine it sitting next to you, and now ask it, what do you need from me?

Maybe it just needs to be recognized and honored because it’s the kind of grief that flows from love with nowhere to land.

Then again, it might embody a part of you that you’ve always rejected, an inner outcast that needs to know it is loved too.

Perhaps, like me when I started my grief journey, it’s a recognition of harm you’ve done and acts of injustice you’ve committed. Here the grief might invite you to explore repair and how to live a life of amends.

Then again it could be an ache that birthed from love, care, or safety that you were denied, and the grief is asking you to show up today to give yourself the care you never received.

Or it could be something your family has carried for generations, and you are now invited to be the one who breaks the pattern.

So do not rush to solve it. Just notice it. Hold it gently. And as we come to the Table, let Jesus hold it with you.

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Communion: The Table as a place for guilt and grief

I want to close simply, because we are not going to close with an idea. We are going to close with a meal.

If you are carrying guilt today, there is grace. Grace that tells the truth without crushing you, grace that puts away sin without putting you away.

And if you are carrying grief today, you are not behind, and you are not failing. Grief is often the evidence that love is still alive in you, still refusing to let you live numb.

We just practiced coming back to the clay, and we practiced titration, a small honest touch of grief without drowning in it. Now we come to the Table as our containment.

In a moment, we will come to the Lord’s Table. And I want you to notice what God gives us there. Not a lecture, not a slogan, not a spiritual workaround. God gives us something received: bread that you do not bake, a cup you do not fill, a body broken, blood poured out.

This is how grace comes to us, not as an escape from our humanity, but as God entering it.

So if guilt has been telling you, “You are not worthy to come,” hear the gospel. The Table is not a reward for the clean. It is mercy for the truthful. You do not come because you have made yourself safe. You come because Jesus is safe, and Jesus is making you new.

And if grief has been telling you, “This ache means something is wrong with you,” hear the gospel. The Table is where sorrow is not rejected. The crucified Christ knows grief from the inside. The risen Christ does not shame your tears. The risen Christ feeds you in them.

Grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief. And at this Table, God does not ask you to bypass that grief. God gives you strength to tend it.

So as you come, you can carry your clay with you, if you want. Let it be your reminder that grief changes over time when it is held with tenderness.

And when you hold the bread in your hands, let it speak to the parts of you that have not known love: you are being fed. When you drink from the cup, let it speak to injustice: God sees, God confronts, God heals, God will not collude. Let it speak to the things you never received: here is nourishment given without condition. Let it speak to ancestral grief: here is a new story being given to you, one you can pass on.

We do not come to this Table to prove anything. We come to receive. We come with truth. We come with tenderness. We come with whatever grief is still shaping us. We come with whatever guilt grace has put away. And we come because God’s relentless love has made a place for us.

Grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief. And that grief, tended in the presence of relentless love, becomes a path to a richer grace.

So, church, let’s come to the Table. Dark cups are wine, light cups are juice. All of it is the gifts of God for you.

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I think we’re suffering because we were never taught what to do with grief once it arrives. We were handed clichés instead of containers. We were trained to move on, stay strong, keep it private, and be “fine” as quickly as possible. Then we wonder why time passes and the ache is still living in our bodies.

This post is about that lie, and the alternative. Time is not magic. Time is a container. When grief is tended, time can become healing. When grief is ignored, time often just becomes distance.

And I’m sharing this now because my foundational course, Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds, Tending Does, is live. If you’ve been waiting to feel better “with time,” consider this an invitation to stop waiting and start tending.

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The Whole Story

In November of 2018, I was sitting in a church sanctuary just before a service. The room was quiet in that particular way churches can be quiet, like the air itself is trying to be polite.

Without warning, a wave of grief hit me. Not the kind of grief that comes when someone dies, though I have come to know that kind too. This was different grief. Grief about the way I had lived. Grief about the ways I had hurt people. Grief about the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be.

I can trace that wave back to a sentence spoken to me earlier in that season, a sentence that, at the time, felt like an accusation, but in hindsight was also a kind of mercy. My soon-to-be ex-wife looked at me and said, “You have all kinds of grace for perpetrators, but no mercy for victims.”

In other words: I could extend forgiveness toward myself, and even toward people who caused harm, but I did not know how to hold the reality of what harm does to the harmed. I did not know how to make room for accountability and repair. I had a kind of grace that wanted to move quickly to “It’s fine,” “God forgives,” “Let’s not dwell,” “Let’s move on.” A grace that treated forgiveness like a delete button.

But like the lingering effect of my actions, that wave of grief did not pass quickly. It became a companion for the next year and a half.

And in a strange way, it was also my introduction to grief.

I had a category for grief that made sense to me: death, funerals, the clean kind of sorrow our culture knows how to name. I did not have language for the grief that shows up when you tell the truth. The grief that rises when you wake up to harm, when you begin to see what power does to a person, when the nervous system stops cooperating with denial.

Over time that first wave opened into other griefs.

There was grief for the harm I had done, which is its own kind of sorrow, not self-pity, not theater, but the ache of seeing clearly. There was grief for the harm done to others, the kind that makes you wish you could reverse time and also makes you realize you cannot. There was grief for the harm done to me, the old wounds and the invisible scripts, the losses that never got a ritual, the tenderness I had learned to call weakness.

And then there was grief for the ways the harm done to me was shaping the harm I was doing to others. Hurt people hurt people, yes, but more precisely: untended pain keeps reaching for somewhere to go. If it is not allowed to be held, it will look for a release valve. It will leak into relationships. It will harden into a posture. It will turn into control, contempt, numbness, urgency, or a religion that is more about being right than being real.

I began to realize there are many gates into grief, and many kinds of grief waiting behind those gates. Loss is one gate. Injustice is another. The parts of us that have not known love is another. The things we never received is another. Ancestral grief, the sorrow we inherit without consenting to it, is another.

And eventually that brought me to a lesson I wish I had learned sooner, a lesson I now think is one of the most urgent forms of literacy a human can have in a grief-phobic world.

We’ve been told a lie. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Time is not magic. Time is a container.

What transforms grief is not time by itself, but time plus tending. Time plus tenderness. Time plus attention. Time plus a safe place to be honest. Time plus breath. Time plus a body that is allowed to soften. Time plus a community that does not rush you to be “over it.”

Time does not heal all wounds. Time reveals what has been tended, and what has been left alone in the dark.

The myth we were given (and why it fails us)

In our grief-phobic culture, “time heals all wounds” is one of the most common blessings we offer each other. It is also one of the most common abandonments.

Not because it is always said with bad intent. Usually it is spoken as a small mercy, the best words we can find when we do not know what else to do with someone else’s pain. We do not know how to sit with sorrow without trying to fix it, so we offer a phrase that sounds hopeful and lets us escape the room without feeling useless.

But a phrase can be kind and still be incomplete. And for many of us, that incompleteness lands in the body like a verdict.

If time heals all wounds, then why does the wound still ache.

If time heals all wounds, then why does a song, a smell, a certain kind of light at dusk split me open again.

If time heals all wounds, then why does my grief keep returning as pressure behind the eyes, tightness in the chest, irritability, numbness, chronic productivity, sudden rage, or a loneliness I cannot name.

If time heals all wounds, then why do I feel like I am failing at grief.

The cultural story goes like this: give it enough time, and the pain will go away.

But anyone who has lived through real loss, or real betrayal, or real rupture, or the slow death of a dream, knows something else is true.

Time does not automatically metabolize sorrow. Time does not magically give the body capacity. Time does not supply the witness you did not receive. Time does not build ritual where your community has none. Time does not teach your nervous system to feel safe again.

Time is a container. A container can hold healing, and it can also hold avoidance. It can hold tenderness, and it can also hold numbness. It can hold honest grief-work, and it can also hold the kind of coping that looks functional from the outside and feels like rot from the inside.

Time is not the healer. Time reveals what has been tended.

A gentler, truer frame

Here is the reframe that changed my life:

Time alone doesn’t heal grief wounds. But time + tending can.

Not “tending” as performance. Not tending as a heroic self-improvement project. Not tending as spiritual bypass with nicer vocabulary.

Tending as the slow, ordinary, embodied work of attention, witness, consent, breath, meaning-making, nervous system support, ritual, and community.

Tending is what makes the container usable.

And if you have ever felt confused by grief, ashamed of grief, embarrassed by grief, or exhausted by your own emotional weather, I want to say this as plainly as I can.

You are not broken. You are human.

Why I’m releasing this course now

Over the last years, I have sat with a lot of grief. Some of it is the grief that follows death. Some of it is the grief that follows endings that do not come with funerals. Some of it is the grief that comes when you finally tell the truth about the harm you have done, or the harm that was done to you. Some of it is grief for the parts of us that have not known love. Some of it is grief for injustice, for a world bent out of shape, for the violence that has become normal. Some of it is grief that did not start with me at all, but came down through family lines and cultural stories.

And what I keep discovering is that people are not lacking grit. People are lacking containers.

We are not failing because we are too sensitive. We are failing because we were not apprenticed. We were not taught what grief is. We were not taught what grief does in the body. We were not taught how grief moves through relationships. We were not taught how to be witnessed without being fixed. We were not taught how to honor sorrow without turning it into identity.

We were taught to be impressive, and then we were shocked when grief did not respond to being impressive.

We were taught to “move on,” and then we were surprised when the body refused.

So I built Life After Loss: Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds, Tending Does as a foundational course in grief literacy and grief-tending. It is designed for people who want practical, body-aware, consent-forward ways to be with grief without being swallowed by it.

It is for humans who have felt the quiet panic of thinking, “I should be over this by now.” It is for humans who have tried to think their way out of grief and found that grief lives somewhere deeper than thought. It is for humans who want to stop making grief either a private shame or a public performance.

It is for humans who want to become more human.

The small parable that keeps teaching me

I once handed a room full of people a small piece of clay in a plastic bag. Not as a gimmick, but as a way to help their bodies stay present.

At first, the clay felt cool, stiff, dry, uncooperative. The sensation itself was an honest metaphor for grief.

And this is what so many of us do with grief. We touch it for a second, we do not like what we feel, so we put it away. We set it on a shelf. We swallow it. We distract ourselves. We keep moving.

Then, later, something forces it back into our hands. And it feels exactly the same. So we assume nothing has changed. We assume time is not working, or that we failed, or that grief is pointless.

But if you hold the clay, and warm it, and press it gently, and stay with it long enough for it to respond, the clay changes.

Not because you argued with it. Not because you shamed it. Not because you demanded it become something else. It changes because it is being held.

This is one of the truest things I know.

Grief that is ignored tends to harden.

It can harden into cynicism. It can harden into blame. It can harden into numbness. It can harden into productivity that never rests and humor that never cries. It can harden into a spirituality that rushes to closure because closure is easier than presence.

But grief that is tended becomes workable. Not erased. Not rushed. Workable.

Time is a container. Tending is what makes time do its work.

The theology under this (for those who want it)

My north star is simple, and it costs me something to keep saying it because our culture has a thousand alternative gospels.

God is Love, fully and always.

Love is not a strategy. Love is not leverage. Love is not a reward. Love is the elemental fabric of the divine.

Which means salvation is not evacuation. It is embodiment. It is liberation. It is new creation already unfolding in nervous systems, relationships, communities, and the stories we tell about who we are.

If God is love, then shame is not a tool of transformation. Shame can coerce compliance. Shame can manufacture behavior. Shame can produce performance. But shame does not heal. Shame does not integrate. Shame does not make a person safe. Shame makes a person hide.

And grace, if it is real, does not bypass reality. Grace tells the truth, and then stays.

In one of my recent sermons I wrote a line that has become a refrain for me: Grace can take away guilt, but it often leaves grief. And that grief, tended in the presence of relentless love, becomes a path to a richer grace.

For some of us, grief shows up after we finally stop defending ourselves. For some of us, grief shows up after we finally let ourselves feel what has always been true. For some of us, grief shows up when we finally wake up to injustice, to the harm we have participated in, to the ways power deforms us. For some of us, grief shows up when we realize how much we did not receive.

None of that grief means you are failing. It may mean you are becoming honest. It may mean you are becoming human.

The problem is not that you have grief

Part of the problem is that we were trained to grieve alone.

We live in a culture that privatizes sorrow. We do not have shared rituals. We do not have apprenticeship. We do not have language for the nervous system. We do not have communal containers for tears that are not performative. We do not have communal containers for anger that does not become violence. We do not have communal containers for truth that does not become shame.

So we do what we were taught to do. We cope.

We scroll. We hustle. We drink. We numb. We spiritualize. We call dissociation “strength.” We call shutdown “maturity.” We call “moving on” healing. We treat forgiveness like a delete button. We confuse speed with faith. We confuse “I am fine” with “I am free.”

Then time passes, and the wound is still tender, and we feel ashamed.

But shame is not a diagnostic. It is a cultural weapon.

So I want to offer a gentler diagnostic.

If grief still hurts, it might be because you have been trying to heal without tending. Not because you did something wrong. Because you were never given the tools.

What this course is (and what it isn’t)

Life After Loss: Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds, Tending Does is a foundational course for anyone who wants to understand grief as a whole-body experience and begin building a repeatable grief-tending practice.

It is designed especially for people who have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that grief is something you should “get over.” It is for people who feel anxious about grief, or ashamed of how long it is taking. It is for people who have tried to “think” their way out of grief. It is for people who want practices that are gentle, embodied, and consent-forward. It is for people who want to build support that fits real life, not an idealized version of it.

It is not therapy. It is not mental health treatment. It is not crisis care.

It is education, witness, and practice, offered in a way that honors the nervous system and refuses shame as motivation.

What you’ll learn (in plain language)

By the end, you will be able to name why “time heals all wounds” is an incomplete cultural story, and how that story harms people. You will understand, in plain language, some basic grief and nervous system dynamics, including why grief gets stuck, why it spikes, why it goes quiet, and why it returns. You will have a set of simple, repeatable grief-tending rituals you can do without drama or perfection. You will have a realistic support plan for “wave days,” the days grief hits unexpectedly or intensely. You will be able to build a small practice stack, daily, weekly, monthly, so time becomes a friend instead of a threat.

What I mean by “tending” (so this doesn’t turn into another self-improvement project)

When I say tending, I am not asking you to become a better griever so you can be more efficient at being alive.

I am talking about learning to meet grief the way you would meet a wound. You do not yell at it. You do not pretend it is not there. You do not keep ripping it open and calling that honesty. You clean it. You cover it. You check on it. You learn what irritates it. You learn what helps it close.

Tending is the difference between being flooded by grief and being in relationship with grief.

It is the difference between avoiding grief and romanticizing grief.

It is the difference between living with a raw wound and learning how to care for the tender place without building your whole identity around it.

Who this is for (and who it isn’t)

I made this course for people who are not trying to become experts in grief theory. You do not need a new vocabulary to prove you have done your work. You need a way to stay present with what is true without getting swallowed.

This is for you if you have ever thought:

• “I’m fine, and I don’t believe myself.”

• “I don’t want to talk about it because if I start crying I won’t stop.”

• “I’m tired of being the strong one.”

• “I’m angry, and I don’t know where to put it.”

• “I’m numb, and I feel guilty about being numb.”

• “My grief makes sense to me in private, but I feel crazy in public.”

This is also for you if your grief does not look like tears. If it looks like work. If it looks like irritability. If it looks like perfectionism. If it looks like forgetting what you just walked into the room to do. If it looks like over-functioning. If it looks like under-functioning. If it looks like disconnection.

And it is not for you if what you need right now is crisis care. If you are in immediate danger, or considering self-harm, or unable to function, I want you to reach for local, immediate support first. This course is designed to build capacity, not to replace urgent care.

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Why I built it this way

Most grief resources assume one of two things.

Either they assume your grief is primarily psychological, so the answer is insight. Or they assume your grief is primarily spiritual, so the answer is belief.

But grief is a whole-body, whole-life reality. It shows up in the nervous system. It shows up in relationships. It shows up in memory and concentration. It shows up in sleep. It shows up in appetite. It shows up in how safe your body feels in your own life.

That is why this course is structured the way it is.

It is not trying to turn you into someone who “handles” grief.

It is trying to help you become someone who can stay human inside grief.

The structure (4 modules, one arc)

This course follows a four-part flow.

First, we name the myth and the cost of waiting it out. We tell the truth about how “time heals all wounds” can become a way to abandon ourselves and each other.

Second, we bring the body into the conversation. We name grief as a nervous system experience. We explore why grief does not metabolize without capacity and support, and why so many of us get stuck in cycles of suppression, overwhelm, and isolation.

Third, we talk about the village. We name the community problem, the fact that our culture has made grief a private project when grief is meant to be witnessed and ritualized. We explore why other cultures carried grief differently, and what we can recover without romanticizing anyone.

Fourth, we build your practice. Not a fantasy plan, not a life overhaul you cannot sustain, but a repeatable set of containers, private and relational, that help time become healing.

Each module has story, teaching, practice, and integration prompts, plus downloadable resources and guided audio.

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One clear invitation

If you want to go deeper, the course is now available: Life After Loss: Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds, Tending Does.

If you have been waiting for grief to get easier “with time,” consider letting this be the moment you stop waiting and start tending.

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This piece is about that kind of day, and about what threat-rhetoric, outrage cycles, and constant catastrophe forecasting can do to our humanity over time. Not only in what we believe, but in what we become.

I am not trying to offer a hot take. I am trying to name a formation and offer a counter-formation. A slower, more grounded spirituality that can hold collapse without becoming collapse. A way of staying human that looks less like certainty and more like presence, grief, tenderness, and the ordinary work of repair.

Lately, for me, that way has looked like compost. Building a container where what is dying can become soil.

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The Whole Story

This past Tuesday had that end of the world feeling.

Not in the poetic way. In the nervous system way.

The kind of day where you can feel your chest tighten before you even know what headline you are about to read. Where the air in the room changes. Where your mind starts sprinting ahead into catastrophe math, violent images you did not consent to, and the dull throb of powerlessness.

And then a sentence hits the feed like a match.

Trump saying, “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

What apocalyptic rhetoric does to us

I do not want to argue the logistics of that line here. I want to name its effect. Rhetoric like that does something to us. It turns the world into a hostage situation. It trains our bodies to live in a constant state of bracing. It pulls the future closer to the edge. And it dares us to keep loving anyway.

So what do we do when it feels like the world could end tomorrow?

Plant the tree (even if the quote is misattributed)

There is an old line that floats around, often attributed to the reformation theologian Martin Luther, and while it’s almost certainly not something Luther said, it holds a certain wisdom: “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree today.”

Because the question is not only, “Is the world ending?”

The deeper question is, “What kind of human am I becoming while I watch it burn?”

That question is the one I keep returning to, because the assault on our humanity is not only happening through policy and propaganda. It is happening through formation. The constant drip of threat, outrage, and spectacle is shaping our nervous systems, shaping our imaginations, shaping what we think is normal.

And it is working. We are becoming a people who confuse being activated with being alive. We are becoming a people who confuse being informed with being wise. We are becoming a people who can name a thousand villains and still do not know how to compost our own grief.

Core convictions I’m returning to

In moments like this, I want to return to a few of my core convictions.

God is love, fully and always. Grace is the operating system. The goal is becoming human. Scripture is a sacred meta story, not a weapon. Salvation is not evacuation. It is embodiment.

If love is the fabric of reality, then the work in apocalyptic times is not to become more certain. The work is to become more human. More present. More honest. More capable of grief, which is simply love in motion.

Compost: a slow, unglamorous spirituality

I keep thinking about compost this week. Not as an aesthetic. Not as a metaphor I had to invent. Literal compost.

I am building compost bins. I am recycling old shipping pallets. Binding them together to form a container. Creating a place where scraps can become soil. It is small and ordinary and a little messy. It is also strangely grounding.

Because while some part of the world is shouting about ending civilizations, I am standing in my yard holding a pile of wood and thinking, “This will take time.”

What compost teaches us

Compost is slow. Compost is unglamorous. Compost can smell. Compost does not reward urgency. Compost is what happens when you stop pretending that what is dying is useless, and you create conditions for transformation.

And I wonder if this is one of the spiritual invitations of our moment. Not to deny how dangerous things are. Not to numb out. Not to pretend that a sentence like “a civilization will end tonight” is just another headline.

But to remember that renewal, real renewal, takes time. That the old does not become the new by decree. That the death we are witnessing, whether it is the death of norms, the death of innocence, the death of stability, or the death of empire stories, has to be metabolized. It has to be broken down. It has to be grieved. It has to be composted.

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The stories that are collapsing

We are living inside the collapse of many stories. The story that the market will save us. The story that violence will keep us safe. The story that strongmen are strong. The story that speed equals progress. The story that being right is the same thing as being good. The story that we can consume our way into wholeness. The story that domination is destiny.

Some of these stories have been rotting for a long time. What we are seeing now is not just new chaos. It is an acceleration of decay.

If your God is control, decay feels like failure

And here is the honest truth. Decay is terrifying when you do not have a theology big enough to hold it.

If your God is control, decay feels like failure. If your God is certainty, decay feels like betrayal. If your God is empire, decay feels like the end.

But if God is love, then decay can also be the doorway. Not the doorway into naive optimism. The doorway into something truer.

Compost is not magic. It is not instant redemption. It is a process where what is old breaks down into something that can nourish new life.

That is what grief does too. Grief is not a detour from love. Grief is the price of love. And grief is also a kind of soil.

Refusing grief makes us manipulable

When we refuse grief, we do not stay clean. We stay brittle. We stay reactive. We stay easy to manipulate. When we refuse grief, fear becomes our leader. When we refuse grief, we look for someone to blame. When we refuse grief, we become the kind of people who can cheer for cruelty as long as it feels like control.

So if you felt undone this week, I want to say this gently. Something in you is responding to real danger. Something in you is responding to a fractured world. Something in you is responding to the possibility of loss. That is not weakness. That is love.

The question is not whether you will feel it. The question is what you will do with it.

Presence over dissociation

There is a kind of spirituality that treats fear like a personal failure. Try harder. Pray more. Have better thoughts. Declare victory. But that spirituality often just teaches people to dissociate.

The work of staying human begins with a different posture. It begins with presence. It begins with honesty. It begins with naming what is true without becoming possessed by it.

Power versus love

In the We Can Stay Human framework, I come back to this tension again and again: Power versus love.

There is a way of being in the world that I would call the taking form. It moves through control, scarcity, domination, fear, and the need to win.

And there is a way of being in the world that I would call the forgiving form. It moves through vulnerability, surrender, communion, creativity, and the stubborn refusal to dehumanize.

Apocalyptic talk is almost always an attempt to recruit us into the taking form. It says, “Brace.” It says, “Pick a side.” It says, “Become a weapon.” It says, “Make your heart hard, because soft hearts do not survive.”

But the way of Jesus, the Human One, is not to harden. It is to become embodied love in a violent world. Not in a sentimental way. In a costly way. In a grounded way. In a way that learns how to face fear without becoming fear.

What we can do when it feels like the world might end tomorrow

That is why I keep circling back to what we can do when it feels like the world might end tomorrow.

We can plant trees. We can build compost bins. We can make dinners. We can hold our kids and tell them the truth without handing them our panic. We can call our friends and ask how their bodies are holding the day. We can donate to efforts that reduce suffering. We can show up locally. We can refuse to let the algorithm become our priest. We can remember that our sphere of control is smaller than our sphere of concern, and that it is still holy.

Compost doesn’t reward urgency

The late capitalist machine wants you either paralyzed or activated. Paralyzed so you keep consuming. Activated so you keep clicking.

But compost asks for something else. Compost asks for patience. Compost asks for attention. Compost asks for containment. Compost asks you to do what you can, where you can, as you can.

That phrase has been sitting with me lately. Do what you can.

Not what you wish you could. Not what you think you should. Not what makes you look righteous.

What you can. Where you can. In your actual life. With your actual limitations.

As you can. In the body you have today. In the energy you have today. In the constraints you did not choose.

This is not a call to smallness. It is a call to reality. Because one of the ways dehumanization works is by ripping us out of the present. It puts us in constant mental time travel.

If the worst happens. If the next headline drops. If the next election goes sideways. If the next war escalates. If the next disaster hits. If, if, if.

And meanwhile your actual life is waiting. Your neighbor is waiting. Your body is waiting. Your grief is waiting. The sacred is waiting in the only place it has ever been waiting.

Here. Now.

In the compost pile. In the kitchen. In the phone call. In the quiet decision to not dehumanize the person in front of you. In the long exhale. In the small act of repair.

Faithfulness is devotion to love

The alternative to apocalyptic paralysis is not denial. It is faithfulness. Faithfulness is not certainty about outcomes. Faithfulness is devotion to love. And love, real love, is not abstract. It takes form.

It looks like food. It looks like shelter. It looks like listening. It looks like boundaries. It looks like tears. It looks like art. It looks like organizing. It looks like compost.

What we’re really grieving

I want to say something else that might be hard. We are grieving more than events. We are grieving the loss of stories that once made the world feel coherent. And when coherence collapses, we reach for something.

Some people reach for conspiracy because it feels like a story. Some people reach for a strongman because it feels like a father. Some people reach for contempt because it feels like power. Some people reach for religion because it feels like certainty. But none of those are the same as becoming human.

Becoming human is slower. Becoming human requires that we tolerate ambiguity. Becoming human requires that we let our nervous systems learn something other than bracing. Becoming human requires that we stop confusing outrage with moral formation. Becoming human requires that we learn the discipline of grief. Because grief is the place where we tell the truth without giving up on love.

Grief is the place where we say, “This is broken,” and we do not turn that truth into a weapon. Grief is the place where we say, “This matters,” and we refuse to become cynical. Grief is the place where we let the old die without pretending that death is the end of the story.

Resurrection as the pattern

This is where my theology matters. Resurrection is the pattern, not the exception.

I do not mean that in a triumphalist way. I mean that the divine life keeps working through death. Not by bypassing it. By entering it. By composting it.

The Christian story, at its best, is not a story about God saving us from the world. It is a story about God loving the world into new creation.

It is not a story about escape. It is a story about reweaving. And that reweaving is slow.

It is nervous system work. It is community work. It is ecological work. It is the kind of work that happens when people choose love in the small, unphotographed corners of their lives.

Going outside instead of becoming what I hate

So yes, when someone says “a civilization will end tonight,” part of me wants to scream. Part of me wants to scroll. Part of me wants to argue. Part of me wants to fantasize about control.

But another part of me wants to go outside. Another part of me wants to put my hands in the dirt. Another part of me wants to build a container for transformation. Another part of me wants to remember that I do not have to become what I hate.

This is where the We Can Stay Human project keeps landing for me.

Staying human is not being nice. Staying human is not being neutral. Staying human is not pretending that the world is fine. Staying human is refusing dehumanization as a spiritual practice.

It is refusing to let fear make you cruel. It is refusing to let outrage make you numb. It is refusing to let spectacle steal your attention from the sacred work of repair. It is remembering that the goal is not to be right. The goal is to be whole.

Integrity as wholeness

Integrity, in the deepest sense, is wholeness. It is being one thing all the way through. It is refusing to split your soul into a public self that performs and a private self that collapses. It is refusing to build your identity on reaction. It is refusing to become an instrument of the taking form.

And here is the paradox. The more the world escalates, the more radical it becomes to stay grounded. The more the world dehumanizes, the more revolutionary it becomes to practice tenderness. The more the world threatens, the more holy it becomes to plant trees.

This is not sentimental. This is resistance. It is the kind of resistance that does not only fight the system “out there,” but also refuses to let the system reproduce itself inside our bodies.

Because that is one of the great tricks of violent power. It wants you to mirror it. It wants you to become the kind of person who can only feel alive through domination. It wants you to become a person who cannot tolerate slow work. It wants you to become a person who cannot bear grief, so you outsource your pain into blame.

The invitation: a slower way

If staying human means anything, it means we refuse that formation. We become people who can hold fear and still choose love. We become people who can tell the truth and still keep our hearts open. We become people who can act without needing to perform. We become people who can do what we can, where we can, as we can.

And we become people who can think big picture without abandoning the present. Because compost is big picture. Compost is a long obedience. Compost is a bet on the future. Compost is an ecological yes spoken in the face of decay. It says, “Even this can become soil.”

That does not mean everything will be redeemed in the way we want. It does not mean harm is not harm. It does not mean we should tolerate oppression or excuse cruelty.

It means we refuse the lie that death has the last word. It means we refuse the lie that chaos can only produce more chaos. It means we believe in the slow work of reweaving.

And that belief is not theoretical. It shows up in what we do today. It shows up in whether we let ourselves grieve. It shows up in whether we regulate our nervous systems or live in constant activation. It shows up in whether we keep showing up for our relationships. It shows up in whether we keep making art. It shows up in whether we keep feeding each other. It shows up in whether we keep telling the truth. It shows up in whether we keep planting trees.

So here is my invitation for today. If this week sent you into doom, you are not alone. If this week sent you into rage, you are not alone. If this week sent you into numbness, you are not alone. But you do not have to live there.

There is another way. A slower way. A truer way.

The way of compost. The way of grace. The way of becoming human.

We will need our activism, yes. We will need our analysis, yes. We will need courage, yes.

We will also need a spirituality that can hold the collapse without becoming collapse. A spirituality that can face death without worshiping it. A spirituality that can see the rot without surrendering to cynicism. A spirituality that can name what is being lost and still plant something.

Because even if the world ends tomorrow, there is still something sacred about how we live today. And if the world does not end tomorrow, we will still need soil. We will still need community. We will still need nervous systems that know how to rest. We will still need men and women and nonbinary folks who know how to grieve. We will still need people who can love without becoming naive. We will still need people who can tell the truth without becoming cruel. We will still need the slow work.

So I am building compost bins this week. I am doing what I can, where I can, as I can. Not because compost will save the world. Because compost is one way I am refusing despair. Because compost is one way I am practicing faithfulness. Because compost is one way I am staying human.

And maybe that is the invitation for you too. Not necessarily compost bins, unless you want them. But some small, stubborn act of life. Some container for transformation. Some practice that says, “I will not let threat become my theology.” Some gesture that says, “I belong to love, even here.” Some choice that says, “The old can become soil.”

We do not know what tomorrow holds. We do not get to control the headlines. But we do get to choose how we show up. We do get to choose whether fear makes us smaller. We do get to choose whether outrage becomes our identity. We do get to choose whether we will mirror the taking form or practice the forgiving form. We do get to choose whether we will keep planting trees.

And if tomorrow comes, may it come to a world that has decided to stay human.

Before you go, a quick note. If you are feeling overwhelmed, stuck, or spiritually exhausted in this season, I offer 1:1 coaching and grief support built for exactly this kind of moment. If you want to explore working together, you can find more here.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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We came down here to celebrate my partner’s birthday. Friday night was Boyz II Men and Toni Braxton, a step back in time that simultaneously felt like an invitation to see both then and now with fresh eyes. This weekend is also the Easter parade, a whole city practicing resurrection (or at least using resurrection as a reason to celebrate) with brass and color and bodies in the street.

In the process, I am noticing how much of my life lately has been about returning.

Not returning as regression, or nostalgia, or trying to get back to some former self. Returning as realignment. Repentance, in the truest sense. Turning again toward love. Toward what is living. Toward the part of me that still believes new creation is not a doctrine, but a pattern.

This means resurrection is the pattern, not the exception.

Sometimes it looks like a dramatic breakthrough. More often, it looks like small, steady acts of choosing life in a world that keeps trying to grind us into performance. It looks like choosing presence over polish, tenderness over numbness, delight over dutifulness. It looks like letting the body be the sacred interface again.

Three places I feel that “returning” right now:

First, Illuman, an organization that exists to help men heal, connect, and find deeper purpose. I’ve been asked to begin a new rhythm of posting that is less about impressing, and more about telling the truth with light in it. Not bypass light. Not curated light. The kind that shows up when we stop making our wounds into disqualifiers and start treating them like altars. Just a quick monthly hit that I’ll also post on my YouTube channel.

Second, Life After Loss. The course is moving forward. I am building it slowly on purpose, because grief is not a machine problem, and I refuse to treat people’s pain like a funnel. My hope is to offer something that feels like companionship, ritual, and sanity in the long middle where time does not magically heal and yet life still keeps asking to be lived.

Third, my yard, which I’ve started calling Jubilee Homestead. 1.1 acres in Northwest Denver that I’m slowly reworking from lawn to life. A xeriscaped front yard. A small permaculture farm. A large community space. I am getting ready for the spring work, and it is teaching me again what the mystics always knew. Compost is theology. Soil is a gospel. There is a way the earth refuses hurry and still insists on possibility. You cannot bully a garden into wholeness, but you can tend it faithfully, and life will keep breaking through.

This is what I mean when I say we can stay human.

Not by trying harder to be “better.” Not by perfecting our coping strategies. We stay human by practicing return. By letting love be the operating system. By remembering that we are here to play, not perform, and that our longing is not a flaw. It is a compass.

If you want a simple question to carry on this Easter Sunday, here it is: What kind of life are you trying to embody right now?

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And while I’d usually have a paywall here, on this abbreviated week I wanted to give everyone a one hour ritual for embodiment.

Set aside one hour sometime this week. No pressure to make it pretty. Just make it real.

1. Prepare the space (5 minutes)

Put your phone on do not disturb. Light a candle if you want. Make tea. Sit somewhere your body can exhale.

2. Name what is true (10 minutes)

Write without editing:

• What is dying in me right now?

• What is trying to be born?

• Where am I tired of performing?

3. Choose one “quality of life” to embody (10 minutes)

Pick one word or phrase you want to live from for the next two weeks. Examples:

• steadiness

• courage

• tenderness

• honesty

• play

• dignity

• devotion

• enoughness

4. Give it a body (15 minutes)

Ask: If this quality lived in my body, what would it change?

Be specific. How would you:

• breathe

• speak

• walk

• rest

• set boundaries

• love people

• love yourself

Write five sentences that start with: “If I embodied , I would…”

5. Make one small vow (10 minutes)

Choose one action you will take in the next 48 hours that matches your word. Keep it modest and doable. Examples:

• 20 minutes outside, no headphones

• one honest conversation

• one hour on the thing you have been avoiding

• one meal cooked slowly

• one act of repair

• one act of delight

6. Close (10 minutes)

Put a hand on your chest or belly. Say, out loud if you can:

“I do not have to earn my life. I can return to it.”

A death. A hospital room. A sanctuary full of bodies trying to hold it together. A family looking for words sturdy enough to carry what just happened.

And in those rooms, whatever faith we have is no longer theoretical. It becomes practical. It becomes visible. It either helps us stay human, or it gives us an escape hatch.

This is a piece about the version of Christianity many of us inherited, the one that trains us to bypass grief and outsource responsibility, and how the earliest Jesus movement was pointing at something far more grounded. Not an exit strategy, but a way.

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The Whole Story

Earlier this week, I officiated a funeral. Now, if you’re new here, you might not know that this is a regular thing for me. My primary source of income is working with families who’ve lost a loved one but don’t have a pastor, priest, rabbi, or eloquent uncle to help with the actual service.

So a few times a week a funeral director connects me with a family. Together we create the funeral, celebration of life, or ritual to help people step into life after loss.

With one of the families I served this past week they asked me to select music for the service. I did, linking the selected songs to what I was going to say. And then, at the last minute, they swapped one of the songs.

They swapped out “How Great Thou Art” for “Amazing Grace.” That might sound like nothing. Two beloved hymns, both familiar, both beautiful. But I’ve learned to pay attention to what we reach for in rooms like this.

Because funerals can reveal what we believe the way fire reveals what was always inside the wood. When grief is in the room, we stop pretending. And what a lot of modern Christianity reaches for, especially in death, is not the way of Jesus. It’s afterlife insurance. It’s a story that sounds like comfort but often functions like anesthesia.

Your loved one is in a better place. So you shouldn’t feel this much. So you shouldn’t fall apart. So you shouldn’t rage or ache or collapse into the earth.

And in the same move, it quietly says something else. It says the point of your life was simply to get out of it.

Which means it has almost nothing to say about how to live. Not in a rich way. Not in a grounded way. Not in a way that actually makes humans more merciful, more truthful, more repair-capable.

Now, as an officiant I do funerals for militant atheists and devout Christians and everyone in between. I’m grateful for all of it. But the families I love working with most are the Christian-adjacent ones. The ones who are not trying to force the room into a neat religious script. Because in those rooms, there’s space.

Space to bring scripture in as story, not as a weapon. Space to talk about God as presence, not as a transaction. Space to name grief as sacred, not as a failure of faith. Space to ask the real question funerals always raise. Not “How do we get to heaven?” But “How do we live on the other side of loss?”

And if we’re honest, that is the question early Christianity was formed to answer. Not with moral scorekeeping. Not with an escape plan.

With a way. A way of living. A way of being human. A way that, from the start, ran directly against empire. And that’s the story I want to tell this week.

And even if you do not call yourself Christian, at some level you have still been shaped by this story. If you were raised inside it, it probably shaped you enough that it helps explain why you do not want the label now. Because when the version of Christianity we inherit is mostly escape, it does not just fail people in death. It fails them in life.

It turns grief into something to bypass. It turns hope into something to postpone. It turns love into something to earn.

And then, eventually, it shows up in public life too. It shows up when faith conforms itself to political power. It shows up when bombs dropping in places like Gaza and Iran are celebrated because they are squeezed into an end times storyline. It shows up when a religion that once formed people for mercy becomes a machine for certainty, domination, and holy indifference.

So yes, this is about a funeral hymn swap. But it is also about why so many of us have felt faith fail us, and why we need a path back to something truer. Something that once again invites us to stay human.

The gospel was a way, before it became an exit strategy

Did you know that the first Christians did not call their movement “Christianity?” That word comes later.

In the book of Acts, what they call it is simply “the Way.” That matters.

The Way is not an ideology you agree with. The Way is not a product you purchase. The Way is not a moral report card. The Way is a path you walk. It forms you by practice. By community. By the daily work of learning how to live inside a different reality.

Which means the gospel, at its roots, is not a reward system. It’s an apprenticeship. And the apprenticeship is not about earning a ticket out of earth. It’s about becoming the kind of person who can help heaven take root on earth.

And one of the strange, quiet proofs that it was working was not that Christians won arguments. It was that people started asking questions. Not because early Christians were more powerful, but because they were living differently.

There is a line in 1 Peter that always stops me: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” Notice what is assumed. The assumption is that hope is visible. That it is embodied. That it shows up in how you treat people, how you hold suffering, how you share resources, how you refuse to return violence for violence.

It was not just doctrine to be defended. It was a way of life that made strangers lean in and say, “What is it about you?” It was a witness that had shape, not just personal piety, but a social imagination, a new kind of community.

And what did that community look like? There is a line in Galatians that is often quoted like a Hallmark card, but it was originally a declaration of a new world. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, for you are all one.” Many scholars believe it echoes an early baptismal creed, a line you would hear spoken over your body as you came up dripping from the waters.

Not because differences were erased, but because the hierarchy of difference was.

In a world organized by ethnicity, status, and gendered power, the church was meant to be the place where those walls did not get the final word.

Which means the Way was never just about where your soul goes when you die. It was a practiced alternative to the way the world organizes itself.

That’s what Jesus teaches us to pray.

Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done.
On earth.
As it is in heaven.

Not later. Not somewhere else. Not after you die. Here.

This is not a denial of the mystery of what comes after death. It’s just a refusal to turn “what comes after” into a bypass of what’s here. Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. And if that sounds too abstract, let’s make it concrete.

When hope becomes escape, it tends to produce a certain kind of Christian. A Christian who can be at peace with violence as long as they believe the end of the story is guaranteed. A Christian who can tolerate injustice as long as they believe God will sort it all out later. A Christian who can offer grace to perpetrators while withholding mercy from victims.

That last line is not theoretical for me. It comes from my own story.

Early in my theological formation, my faith was shaped by shame. Lots of guilt. Lots of fear. Lots of sin management. And the “good news” I learned was essentially this: You are awful, but Jesus died for you, so you can go to heaven.

It was supposed to create gratitude. But what it often created was moral and relational distortion.

Here is what I mean. When I believed I was fundamentally broken, I lived from brokenness. Shame did not make me holy. It made me desperate.

For me, that desperation showed up in compulsive behavior around sexuality. I was unfaithful. I lied about it. And then I used “grace” like a sedative, a loophole. As long as I could tell myself I was forgiven, I did not have to face the effects of what I had done.

There were consequences, but I treated the harm like it should evaporate. Like confession was the same thing as repair.

And while I told myself I was just trying to manage my chaotic inner world, my chaotic inner world was not contained inside me. It spilled onto the people closest to me.

My former wife once said something that landed in me like a stone. She said, “You have all kinds of grace for the perpetrator, but no mercy for the victim.”

That is what happens when grace becomes a legal loophole instead of a transforming presence. When salvation is framed as a transaction, it can absolve harm without repairing it.

It can comfort the guilty without protecting the wounded. It can soothe the conscience while leaving the world unchanged. And that is not the Way.

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How faith got co-opted: three waypoints in the shift

If the early Jesus movement was a way of life that ran against empire, how did we end up with a Christianity that so often props empire up?

Not with conspiracy. With history. With ideas. With institutional power. With a slow drift that eventually became a new religion.

Here is the through line. When faith marries power, leaves the body, and sells an escape, it becomes controllable. The Way becomes an exit strategy.

Here are three waypoints that help us see the arc without turning this into a seminar.

First, power. Second, body. Third, hope. When those three shift, everything else shifts with them.

Waypoint 1: When empire made Christianity legal, and then useful

For the first few centuries, Christians were a vulnerable minority. They had no state power. They had no army. They had no mainstream cultural dominance.

They had practices. They had a table. They had a story of a crucified Messiah who refused the taking way of power.

Then comes Constantine.

And to be clear, this is where we need to tell the truth about what Constantine was, and what he was not. It was not a moment where someone sat down and decided which books would be in the Bible. It was not the first time Jesus “became” the Son of God, as if early Christians had never said anything divine about him until empire got involved.

It was a political moment. Constantine had an empire to stabilize. Christianity had become large enough to matter. And the church was in a deep internal conflict about how to understand the person of Jesus.

So Constantine convened bishops to debate, argue, and attempt a unified confession, not because he was a theologian trying to find truth in prayer, but because unity in the church helped produce unity in the empire.

That is the shift. The question was no longer only, “How do we follow the Way of a crucified Messiah?” It also became, “How do we make this faith work at scale, in the center of power?”

This is one of the first places the taking way starts to get baptized. The giving way becomes language, while the taking way becomes the engine.

Christianity moves from persecuted movement to sanctioned religion. And once the faith becomes socially advantageous, the incentives change.

When the religion of the poor becomes the religion of the powerful, it will be tempted to reshape itself so the powerful can keep being powerful while still feeling holy.

A God crucified by empire for challenging empire is inconvenient for empire. So the cross gets turned from an indictment of domination into a mechanism of personal forgiveness.

Sin becomes individualized. Salvation becomes privatized. The kingdom becomes future. And empire gets to keep running the world.

And this is not just about “bad leaders.” It is about formation. When your survival depends on belonging to empire, your theology will eventually start to sound like empire. Your God will start to feel like an emperor. And your hope will start to drift away from the work of being human here, into the promise of reward somewhere else.

Waypoint 2: When dualism offered an escape hatch from the body

Alongside political power, there was also a philosophical drift. A kind of spiritualized dualism that treated the body as suspect, the material world as temporary, the “real” story as happening elsewhere.

You can feel the Platonic influence in the background, the idea that the physical world is a shadow on the cave wall, and that the “real” reality is somewhere else, in pure spirit, pure idea, pure light.

And once that story gets under your skin, you do not just become less embodied. You become easier to control. Because if the body is not sacred, then suffering bodies are easier to ignore. If earth is a temporary waiting room, then earth is easier to exploit. If salvation is leaving, then the work of loving becomes optional.

And this is where you can start to see how spiritual dualism becomes a kind of spiritual self-centering. Not a pop-psychology insult, but a posture. A posture that turns faith into my transcendence, my escape, my private purity, while refusing the humility of being creaturely, finite, dependent. It is religion as self-protection instead of love.

The body becomes an inconvenience. Other people become background characters. The world becomes disposable.

And again, the taking way sneaks in, not always with violence, sometimes with sophistication. It teaches us to float above pain instead of entering it.

But the Christian story, at its center, is not disembodied. It’s resurrection. Not a ghost floating away. A wounded body made new. A world restored. A promise that matter matters.

Which means any Christianity that trains you to despise the body is not just spiritually unhealthy. It is politically convenient.

Because people disconnected from their bodies are easier to manage. People taught to endure suffering for a heavenly payout are easier to extract from. People trained to see earth as disposable are easier to recruit into systems that destroy it. And people taught to see their bodies as “less real” are less likely to listen when their bodies say, “This is not the Way.”

Waypoint 3: When hope became evacuation, and faith became a control mechanism

Once Christianity is aligned with power, a new kind of hope emerges. Not hope as a way of living, but hope as an exit.

And here too, the taking way shows up as a temptation. It offers control through fear, compliance through reward, and calls it salvation. The question shifts from “How do we become a people who embody God’s reign?” to “How do I make sure I’m in?”

And when that becomes the central frame, it’s only a matter of time before fear becomes the primary tool. Do the right things. Believe the right things. Avoid the wrong things. And if you fail, there’s a punishment.

Heaven becomes reward. Hell becomes threat. And the Way becomes an anxious moral project.

This is where Christianity stops forming people for love, and starts forming people for compliance.

Not always. Not everywhere. But enough that you can feel the pattern. And you can see the fruit.

You can see it in funeral language that can’t tolerate grief. You can see it in churches that can’t tell the truth about harm. You can see it in Christians who become more invested in being “right” than being merciful.

And you can see it in history. You can see it in slaveholder religion. You can see it in versions of Christianity that trained enslaved people to obey, endure, and wait for heaven, while those who held the whip called themselves saved.

You can see it whenever a theology of the next life is used to pacify people in this one. “Be good and you will be rewarded later.” “Suffer quietly and God will make it right after death.” “Accept your place now, because the real world is coming.”

That is not hope. That is sedation. And when you put sedation in the hands of those who benefit from the status quo, it becomes a tool. A way to keep people compliant. A way to keep harm unchallenged. A way to keep grief from turning into truth. A way to keep truth from turning into repair.

If that sounds extreme, look at our current world. Look at how many Christians are willing to bless war and nationalism and domination, as long as it can be squeezed into an apocalyptic storyline.

Escapist theology does not just bypass grief. It bypasses responsibility. It baptizes empire. And it trains people to call it faithfulness.

Amazing Grace, and the hinge between absolution and repair

This is why the hymn swap matters.

Amazing Grace is not a bad song. But many of us learned it inside a shame-based frame. I once was lost, but now am found. I was a wretch. And now I’m safe. For a lot of people, that becomes a private spiritual story disconnected from repair.

But the actual story behind the hymn is not private. John Newton was a slave trader. Not in some vague metaphorical sense. In an actual historical sense.

He hauled human beings from Africa to the Americas and sold them into bondage. His “wretchedness” had names. It had bodies. It had blood. And yes, he came to see the horror of what he had participated in. Grace found him.

But here is the hinge. There is a difference between absolution and repair.

Absolution is the removal of guilt. Repair is the restoration of what was harmed. And if all you have is absolution, Christianity becomes an exit strategy, even from your own responsibility.

Years ago, I was teaching in Africa. One of my students asked me, in reference to Newton, “What did he do to restore Africa? To repair Africa? To replace what he had taken?”

At the time, I did not have a theology that required repair so the question left me dumbfounded. I had a theology that offered forgiveness. I had a theology that could wash the perpetrator clean. I did not yet have a theology that demanded mercy for the victim.

That question became part of my transformation. Because it forced me to admit something. If grace only moves guilt off the perpetrator’s conscience, but does not move the perpetrator toward repair, then what we are calling grace is not the Way. It’s absolution without transformation. It’s spiritual laundering. It’s cheap hope.

But grace, in the way of Jesus, does something else. Grace moves us from guilt to grief. Not as self-hatred. As awakening. As the moment you finally feel what you have refused to feel. The moment you finally tell the truth about what has been done, and what you have done. The moment you finally let your heart break open enough that you can no longer live the old way.

Grief is not the enemy of faith. Grief is often the doorway into it. Because grief is how we become human again. And humans who can grieve honestly are harder to recruit into empire.

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The Way: two paths, two engines

If you want a philosophical compass for all of this, here it is. There are two ways to be in the world.

Henri Nouwen once named it like this. The taking way. And the giving way. One is the way of power. The other is the way of love.

The taking way is driven by fear. It grasps. It controls. It extracts. It has to win. It has to secure itself. It is always building higher walls.

The giving way is guided by belovedness. It shares. It restores. It tells the truth. It practices repair. It knows that life is found in communion, not domination.

The tragedy is that a lot of Christianity ended up preaching the giving way while serving the taking way. It preached forgiveness while protecting exploitation. It preached heaven while abandoning earth. It preached grace while bypassing grief.

And the result is what you see all around you. A faith that is supposed to make us more human often makes us less.

More afraid. More brittle. More certain. More willing to harm. Less able to grieve. Less able to repair. Less able to be present.

So here is the invitation. Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. The Way is not an exit strategy. It is apprenticeship into a different reality.

A reality where heaven is not a destination. It’s a practice. A reality where the prayer is not “get me out of here.” The prayer is, “Make me the kind of person who can participate in your healing of what is here.” A reality where grace does not just forgive. Grace transforms. Grace moves guilt into grief. And grief becomes the engine of repair.

What it looks like to live this way (not morally, but philosophically)

Not “do this, don’t do that.” Something deeper. A reorientation. A new operating system.

To live the Way is to be guided by a different set of engines than the ones empire offers.

Guided by love, not driven by fear. Guided by embodied presence, not driven by escapism. Guided by mercy that protects the wounded, not driven by grace-as-loophole. Guided by solidarity, not driven by comfort. Guided by hope-as-practice, not driven by hope-as-evacuation.

If you want a simple diagnostic, ask yourself this. What does my faith do to my body?

Does it make me more available to grief, more capable of truth, more able to love real people in real places?

Or does it make me numb? Does it make me certain? Does it make me impatient with pain? Does it make me hungry for a cosmic escape hatch?

The Way is not tidy. It is not efficient. It does not bypass grief. It walks through it. Because the only kind of faith that can resist empire is a faith that has been trained to stay present.

Not just in joy. In loss. In complexity. In the body. In the earth. In the suffering of your neighbor. And yes, in the slow work of repair.

Closing: the prayer we forgot we were praying

Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we are not praying for evacuation. We are praying for infiltration. For the life of God to move into the life of the world. For the heaven we keep talking about to start shaping the earth we keep abandoning.

“Thy kingdom come. On earth. As it is in heaven.”

If Christianity is the Way, then the question is not whether you believe in heaven. The question is what kind of person your hope is forming you to become.

A person who can tolerate injustice because “it’s all going to burn anyway.” Or a person who can grieve honestly enough to refuse the taking way. A person who can love. A person who can repair. A person who can help bring heaven to earth.

Hope is not an escape. Hope is a way of living. And the Way is still here, waiting for us. It’s inviting us to stay human.

Before I draw the paywall line, one clear invitation. If you feel grace moving you from guilt to grief, and you want help moving through grief in a way that makes you more present, more human, and more useful to the world around you, I’m creating a course of practices for that. Here’s the link so I can let you know when I’m done and you can get it at a launch discount.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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It is not the grief of losing a person. It is the grief of losing a place that helped you stay a person.

A room you returned to when the world was too much. A set of faces that became familiar enough to be safe. A ritual of showing up that taught your nervous system, slowly, that you did not have to carry everything alone.

We live in a culture that treats places like products. If the product stops performing, it gets rebranded or erased. But humans do not experience places as products. We experience them as containers, as anchors, as the kind of ordinary holy ground where life can move again.

This is a story about my gym closing. It is also a story about the quiet demolition of third places, and the stubborn work of resistance, which is building new containers when the old ones get taken.

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The Whole Story

Last Friday, I heard the rumor. The kind of rumor that arrives like a hairline fracture. Nothing breaks yet, but you feel the structure shift.

Then Tuesday it became official. The Gravity Haus Denver Clubhouse is closing. The last day is April 30th. Six weeks from now.

At one level, this is a story about my gym closing. At a deeper level, it’s a story about what happens when the spaces that hold our humanity get taken, and what it looks like to build something the system cannot monetize.

A place becomes an anchor

As a bit of background, I’ve trained at Gravity Haus for more than four years. But even saying that does not capture the way a place can become a nervous system anchor. It does not name what happens when a room becomes a refuge, not because it is beautiful, but because it is true.

And that last line reveals why the response now is more than going to find a new gym.

The basement that became holy

With Gravity Haus, it was never the physical space that grabbed me.

At first, it was a small black room with turf and odd windows. Light came in at horrible angles at different times of day. Nothing about it felt curated for transcendence.

Then, last May, it moved into the basement of an office building. Yes, they added coworking to go along with the gym, but to get there, you go down concrete stairs into a decorated basement. And as much as they tried to make the basement space look and feel good, the lack of natural light makes it abundantly clear, you’re in a basement.

So if you are trying to picture the sacredness of this place, you need to understand something. It was not an aesthetic holy. It was not the kind of holy that comes from stained glass or mountain views. It was the kind of holy that happens when humans keep showing up.

That means what I’m trying to name here is bigger than a gym. I’m trying to name what it costs us when the spaces where we can be human get erased, and what it looks like to resist that erasure.

Because while it’s about people, people need a places to gather. Bodies need coordinates. Belonging needs a room. A community without a container eventually dissolves into text threads and good intentions. You can love people deeply and still drift if you do not share time and space.

So yes, it was the people. But the basement mattered too. Not because it was impressive. Because it became a shared altar. We made it holy.

We made it holy by returning. By sweating there. By suffering there. By laughing there. By talking about the things that matter most there. By letting the hardest seasons of our lives move through our bodies instead of staying trapped behind our ribs.

Holy is not always what a place is. Sometimes holy is what a place has held. And so that basement became one of the most important places in my life.

Lesson one: covenant, not just coordinates

That is the first lesson. Place is not only geography, and it is not only people. Place is what happens when people and space make a covenant with each other.

And that covenant is not abstract. It is made out of very ordinary materials. It is made out of the concrete stairwell you walk down when you are tired. It is made out of the smell of sweat that is not glamorous, but honest. It is made out of the half-second pause at the bottom of the stairs where you decide, again, to enter. It is made out of a room full of bodies that are not trying to impress anyone, just trying to stay alive.

A snapshot of what this place actually was

Most days, if you came a few minutes early, you would see the same small scene. People trickling in with the look that says, “I do not know if I have this today.” Water bottles thudding on the floor. Someone rolling out a tight calf. Someone laughing too loud because the laughter is a pressure valve.

And then, inevitably, some small act of recognition. A nod across the room. A “hey, you made it.” A coach looking at you, not like a number, but like a human.

It is hard to describe how much those tiny moments matter when life is heavy. Because even when life is hard, the world does not stop. It keeps demanding productivity. It keeps demanding composure. It keeps demanding that you be fine.

But a third place like this does something different. It does not ask you to be fine. It asks you to show up. And then it gives you a rare gift. It lets your body tell the truth.

The nervous system learns through return

This is why I keep using the language of container. Because what you receive in a place like this is not only fitness. It is capacity.

The nervous system learns safety through repetition, not through slogans. Through return. You walk into the same room. You see the same faces. You do the same warm-up. You suffer the same honest suffering.

And slowly, without you having to force it, your body starts to unclench. Not because your problems are gone, but because for one hour you are not alone inside them.

And when the class ends, something subtle has shifted. Breath is deeper. Jaw is softer. The mind is less frantic. It is not that everything is healed. It is that the grief has moved.

This is the kind of healing that does not come from ideas. It comes from place.

How the place held me

The workouts I did there were class-based. Which means what I really did, five to six days a week, was show up to a shared rhythm. A set time. A familiar suffering. A handful of faces that became steady over the years. People at different times, different days, and somehow it braided into an extended family.

Gravity Haus held me through an abusive relationship, the kind that ends with a permanent restraining order. It held me through my dad’s cancer journey. It held me through my dad’s death. It held me through losing a job.

But it did not hold me by giving me answers. It held me by giving me a container. A place where I could metabolize stress with my body. A place where encouragement came not as a motivational poster, but as a glance, a joke, a simple “good to see you,” a trainer who believed you could do one more rep. A place where grief could move, instead of calcify.

The day I came back

I was never a real gym guy. The first day I showed up, I was completely out of my element. I got my ass kicked. It took three days before I could walk again. And then I came back.

That first week, I went on Monday. Then I came back on Friday, the day before Christmas. It was a tiny class. Just two of us and a trainer. There was some kind of workout pyramid, the Twelve Days of Fitmas. The other person finished in about twenty minutes. At an hour, I was halfway through and dying.

Afterwards, the trainer, the woman who ripped through the workout in no time, and I talked about divorce. I began to think that I’d found my place.

I came three days the next week. Then five days a week after that. It was the first time in my life I made a serious attempt to lift weights.

So a place that initially felt very not-home became the place that felt the most home in my life. And losing a place like that is a real kind of grief. Not because you worship the building. Because what you lose is the container for being human.

The assault on third places

In a disconnected society, we keep losing our third places. Not home. Not work. The in-between spaces where belonging has room to grow. And our nervous systems are paying the price. Because the human animal is not built for floating. We are built for rhythms, relationships, and return.

And the resistance starts here. Not with a grand theory, but with the stubborn insistence on building containers where people can keep showing up.

The email that refused to honor a community

And here is where the righteous fury shows up for me. Not in the fact that a business closes. They can make that choice. It is theirs. But in the way it was handled.

The closure was announced via email. It was positioned like a personal note, like, “you matter, we want you to hear it from us.” Except the email came with the wrong name for some people. Mine came with no name. And it did nothing to acknowledge what those of us who gathered there day after day have built together.

It was basically: We’re shifting the coworker space over to this hotel, we’re closing the gym, and here are other services you can use with your membership.

In other words, we’re rearranging the product offering. But we are not grieving with you. We are not honoring what this place has been. We are not even willing to speak the words: people built a life here.

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Capitalism’s spiritual poverty

This is capitalism’s spiritual poverty. Not only extraction of money, but extraction of meaning. A world where the bottom line becomes a god, and humans become collateral. And I want to slow down here, because this is not just a gym story. This is a parable.

We are living through the steady demolition of place, and most of us are not calling it what it is. We call it convenience. We call it modernization. We call it market forces. We call it “they had to make a business decision.” But in the body it lands as exile.

If you have been paying attention, you have seen this script everywhere. Places that held people get shut down, consolidated, optimized, or repositioned. And the human cost is treated like a rounding error.

The system has a particular kind of genius. It learns how to turn everything into a commodity, even belonging. It will sell you community as a subscription. It will sell you wellness as a brand. It will sell you connection as content. But the moment the spreadsheet says the belonging is not profitable enough, it disappears.

You are not failing at being human

This is where I want to name something that feels obvious, and still has to be said out loud. Humans are not built to live placeless. We are not just minds floating through the internet. We are bodies. We are creatures. We are local.

Your nervous system does not bond with concepts. It bonds with rhythms, with faces, with doors you have walked through a thousand times, with the sound of a room you know, with the ordinary miracle of being expected.

This is why a third place matters. Not home. Not work. The in-between place where your life is allowed to be more than survival. Where you are not performing for a paycheck. Where you are not managing the chaos of a household. Where you can simply be a person among people.

And the tragedy is that we are losing these places while being told we are gaining freedom. We are told that being untethered is the dream. Remote work, digital nomadism, constant mobility, frictionless delivery, endless options.

But options are not the same thing as belonging. Endless choice can be a form of starvation. If you can go anywhere, and you belong nowhere, you end up eating connection like junk food. You scroll. You consume. You binge other people’s lives. You let algorithms simulate intimacy.

Then you turn the phone off and the room is quiet, and your body panics, because it is not meant to live without a village.

If you have ever wondered why anxiety is everywhere, why depression is everywhere, why loneliness is everywhere, why so many people feel like they are barely holding it together, I want to offer one answer. We are trying to survive in a world that keeps dissolving the containers that make life survivable.

A cruel god

And here is the more prophetic layer. It is not accidental. The system benefits when you are isolated, because isolated people are easier to manage.

When you do not have community, you have fewer mirrors. Fewer people who can tell you the truth. Fewer people who can interrupt the story that you are alone, that you are the problem, that you should be ashamed.

When you do not have community, you have fewer hands. Fewer people to help you carry the weight. Fewer people to say, “come over, eat, sit, breathe, let’s figure it out.”

When you do not have community, the system becomes your default provider. Your therapist. Your friend. Your distraction. Your god.

And it is a cruel god. Because the system does not love you. It does not know your name. It does not care that you survived an abusive relationship. It does not care that you buried your father. It does not care that you lost a job.

It will take your money, your attention, your energy, your body. And then it will tell you to buy a little more self-care if you are still tired.

This is where I want to speak directly to the part of you that feels that exhaustion. You are not failing at being human. You are trying to be human in a world that is actively hostile to the conditions that make humanness possible.

Holy ground

And that is why a gym can become holy ground. Not because barbells are sacred. Because place is sacred. Because bodies are sacred. Because a community that keeps showing up, week after week, can become a kind of liturgy. A repeated ritual of suffering and laughter and encouragement. A small rebellion against the story that you are on your own.

So yes, I am angry about the email. Not because I want a better customer service experience. Because the email is a window into a deeper contempt.

The contempt says: Your relationships are not real. Your belonging is not real. What you built here is not real. Only the transaction is real.

And I have had enough of that contempt. Because I have watched what place does. Gravity Haus held me through grief and rebuilding. It held me through the unraveling of a life. It held me while I rebuilt a body I did not know I could have. And I know I am not the only one.

Which means this closure is not just an inconvenience. It is a rupture. A rupture in rhythm. A rupture in connection. A rupture in the nervous system’s sense of safety.

So if you are grieving the loss of a place, don’t try to minimize it. You are not being dramatic. You are having an appropriate human response to the loss of a container that held your life.

The counter-story

Now, the next layer. Here is the counter-story I am refusing to let die. Even if a place closes, the people do not have to disappear.

In my own little circle, there are four of us especially close, two guys and two women. We hang out regularly. We are part of each other’s social circles. We are constantly texting, talking, encouraging each other through life.

And the trainers have been fantastic. The programming has changed my body. I put on about twenty pounds of muscle in four years. I am the strongest I have ever been. I feel fantastic at 51.

But beyond that, they are good humans. I consider them friends. Which means the question now is not only, “where will I work out?”

The deeper question is this. How do we practice solidarity when the system shrugs? How do we refuse to let a community get dissolved just because it is not profitable enough for someone’s spreadsheet? How do we keep choosing each other?

Re-creation as rebellion

Because solidarity is not a vibe. It is not a hashtag. It is not a political identity. Solidarity is the slow, stubborn commitment to shared life. It is the decision that my life is bound up with yours. It is the refusal to let the system turn us into consumers of one another instead of kin.

And here is the deeper claim. I do not actually think the opposite of capitalism is simply different policies. Policies matter. But the deeper problem is formation. Capitalism forms us into a particular kind of human, a human who believes they are alone, a human who believes their worth is productivity, a human who believes relationship is optional as long as they can purchase services, a human who believes everything is replaceable, even people.

This is why losing third places is not just sad. It is strategic. Because third places are where solidarity is trained. Third places are where you learn how to be with people outside your family system, outside your workplace, outside your ideological bubble. Third places are where you practice small repair, small kindness, small resilience. Third places are where you remember you are not a machine.

So when those places disappear, we become easier to exploit. And that is why I want to speak prophetically. If we want to stay human, we have to fight for place. Not only for our own comfort, for our collective survival.

We have to grieve what is being taken. And we have to build what the system refuses to build.

This is where I keep thinking about re-creation. Not as escapism. As rebellion. Re-creation means making again, rebuilding, restoring, creating containers where life can take root. It is what happens when the system says, “everything is a transaction,” and we answer, “no, some things are covenant.” It is what happens when the system says, “you are on your own,” and we answer, “no, we are going to make a village.”

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Bless what was true

This is what I was getting at in a previous post where I argued that the future grows in cracks.

When a corporate email fails to honor what was sacred, we can still honor it. We can grieve what is ending. And we can bless what was true.

Because one of the system’s quieter violences is this. It tries to convince you that if something ends, it did not matter. But that is a lie.

A place can be real, and still be temporary. A community can be sacred, and still be fragile.

The diaspora

So what does that mean for the Gravity Haus diaspora? It means we grieve, not only the inconvenience, but the rupture. It means we tell the truth about how it landed, not to stew in it, but to refuse the gaslighting.

It means we gather. We’re gathering on WhatsApp. We are planning social gatherings. We are talking about future gym possibilities. We are sorting out how we can keep choosing each other.

Because if the place is going away, we will have to build a new container. Not alone. Together.

In other words, we are insisting that we stay human.

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One invitation before the paywall

Before I draw the paywall line, one clear invitation. If this stirred something in you, I’m creating a course on loss. More importantly, it’s about life after loss. It is not a productivity hack. It is tools for staying human when the places and people that held you start to disappear.

Join the waitlist here, and when it’s ready, I’ll send you a discount code: Course waitlist link.

Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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Instead I’m off staying human.

But a few weeks ago I was on the Sovereign Submission podcast. I encourage you to check it out!

Sovereign Submission

Transforming Anger to Grief through ritual with Joe Burnham

Most men don’t know how to grieve. We know how to get angry. We know how to shut down. We know how to say “I’m fine” when we’re absolutely not fine…

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6 months ago · 3 likes · Taylor Ashton Ellwood and Joe Burnham

It is your attention. It is your nervous system.

Because before a nation can be moved into violence, ordinary people have to be moved into a story. A story that makes some lives feel distant. A story that makes aggression feel like protection. A story that makes dissent feel like betrayal.

This piece is about that recruitment. How it happens, how it works on the body, and how it narrows our compassion without asking permission.

It is also about rootedness. The kind of rootedness that refuses to outsource humanity to headlines. The kind that can hold complexity without hardening into contempt.

And it begins, as so many things do for me, with a tree.

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The Whole Story

As my partner and I arrived at the bottom of the Rio Grande Canyon outside Taos, New Mexico this past week I almost immediately sensed we’d come to the right place for the moment. A chance to, at least for an afternoon, leave behind a world where I felt something in me starting to fray.

Not a dramatic unraveling, not a public crisis, just that quiet interior shift where your attention gets hijacked. Your jaw tightens without asking permission. Your breathing climbs into your chest. You find yourself doom-scrolling with the same compulsive energy you used to reserve for old addictions, and you can tell, somewhere in the animal part of you, that you are being hunted.

So we took a day. We stepped away from the noise, the screens, the constant feed of fear and certainty masquerading as information. We drove out, and we walked. Although on this trail, it was more scrambling over rocks on a rugged riverside. The kind of hike that gives you no choice but to not just touch earth, but to grip onto it.

There is a kind of sanity that returns when you let your body remember that you are not an app. You are not a headline. You are not an argument.

Then she said: “Check out that tree.” It was old, gnarly, narrowed by time and weather, twisted in on itself like it had been shaped by a hundred storms it never asked for. It was not a picturesque Instagram tree. It was not a tree trying to impress anyone. It was simply a tree that had lived.

We just sat there. I found myself completely enchanted by this sacred presence. She started to wonder if our hike had ended. If the rest of the afternoon would be one long gaze at the Ent-like creature before us, my own personal Treebeard.

At some point a thought rose up in me so clearly it almost felt like it belonged to the tree itself. As if the wind carried a sacred wisdom from the branches to not just my ears but my soul.

This tree cannot be recruited. It can be bent by wind. It can be stripped by heat. It can be carved by drought and flood, but it cannot be recruited.

It does not get swept into frenzy. It does not outsource its attention to whatever loud force is trying to hijack the moment. It is rooted. It stays with its place. It does what it is here to do.

And then the next thought followed. If this tree has been alive long enough, it has been rooted through most of the history that led us to the war we are watching unfold right now.

Coups, revolutions, oil deals, propaganda cycles, presidents, generals, speeches, sanctions, and the long, slow conditioning of a public that has been trained to accept violence as inevitable. This tree has been here through all of it.

It does not solve any of it. But it witnesses something most of us have forgotten. Time is longer than a news cycle. History is longer than our selective memory. And the human soul, if it wants to remain a soul, has to learn how to become unrecruitable.

Because that is what is happening to us right now. We are being recruited. Not only into a particular opinion about Iran, not only into a particular political posture, but into a particular way of being human. Or to say it more honestly, we are being recruited into being something less than human.

So when the world goes crazy, the question is not only, “What should I believe?” The question is, “How do we stay human?” And the question underneath that is, “What are they trying to recruit me into becoming?”

Because that recruitment always has a destination. It is trying to recruit you into a smaller circle of compassion. Into numbness. Into tribal certainty. Into a nervous system that cannot hold complexity. Into a spirituality that baptizes domination. Into a life where you can watch other people’s bodies be broken and still feel like the “good guys.”

That is the recruitment. And the only thing that can withstand it is rootedness. Not rootedness as escapism. Not rootedness as “I don’t care.” Rootedness as resistance. Rootedness as refusing to let empire colonize your imagination. Rootedness as staying awake.

The Recruitment Machine

We tend to talk about war as if it is primarily a military event. But war is also a narrative event.

War requires consent. Even when leaders act without public support, they still require a social atmosphere where dissent is manageable, where the public is disoriented, and where “complicated” is treated as treason.

So the first battlefield is not the desert. It is your attention. And the recruitment machine has some predictable strategies:

1) Narrative compression

The story is always made smaller. History is chopped into a convenient starting point that makes “us” look reasonable and “them” look insane.

It is remarkable how often the official story begins at the moment someone else reacts, and how rarely it begins at the moment we acted.

This is one of the core tricks of propaganda. If you can control where the story starts, you can control what looks like self-defense.

2) Moral laundering

Aggression is dressed up as necessity. Preemptive violence is described as “stability.” Economic domination is described as “freedom.” The killing of strangers becomes “national security.”

And if anyone asks questions, the question itself is treated as suspicious.

3) Dehumanization

If you want to make violence palatable, you have to make the targets feel less real.

You do it with language, with stereotypes, with selective footage, with simplified archetypes. They are “fanatics,” “terrorists,” “savages,” “threats.”

Meanwhile, our own violence is always “surgical.” Our bombs are “precision.” Our deaths are “tragic accidents.”

Their deaths? They’re just “collateral.”

4) Belonging pressure

The machine does not only persuade you. It threatens you.

If you do not repeat the story, you will lose your place at the table. You will be called naive. You will be called unpatriotic. You will be called antisemitic or anti-American or sympathetic to terrorists.

And because we are human, because we all perpetually feel a tension between belonging and authenticity, many people will choose belonging over truth.

And that is why this is recruitment. It is not just information. It is formation. It is trying to form you into the kind of person who can live with what is being done in your name.

1979 and the Myth of the Reset Button

With all that in mind, if you grew up in the United States, odds are high you were taught that the Iran story begins in 1979. The hostage crisis becomes the first page. It becomes the moment the movie starts. That is the convenient starting point.

And yes, the hostage crisis was real. It was traumatic. It mattered. Human beings were taken. Fear entered families. The nervous system of a nation got lit up. But that is exactly why it makes such a useful recruitment tool.

Because when you start the story at 1979, Iran appears as the aggressor and the United States appears as the injured party. The moral roles get assigned before anyone asks a single historical question. We are recruited into a simple script. They are irrational. We are rational. They are fanatics. We are defenders.

This is narrative compression. It is the propaganda move where history is chopped down to a size small enough to fit inside a slogan. And when you compress the story enough, you can justify almost anything.

Starting the Story Where It Actually Starts: 1953

So if we want to stay human, we have to do something both simple and uncomfortable. We have to widen the timeline. We have to refuse the myth that history began at the moment America felt threatened.

With Iran, one of the clearest places to widen back to is 1953. In 1953, the United States and Britain backed a coup in Iran. Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, had moved to nationalize Iran’s oil industry.

That word nationalize can sound like a policy detail. But it is not. It is the dangerous idea that the people of a sovereign nation should benefit from their own resources. And empires do not like that idea.

So the coup happened. And whether you tell the story through MI6, the CIA, Operation Ajax, oil interests, Cold War narratives, or the mechanics of destabilization, the moral shape remains the same. A foreign power helped remove a democratically chosen leader because that leader threatened economic control.

Then the Shah’s rule was strengthened. A long arc of resentment, distrust, and defensive posture followed.

This is not to say Iran has done nothing wrong. It is to say the villain does not enter the story out of nowhere. When you destabilize a society, when you humiliate a people, when you teach them through decades of policy that sovereignty is only allowed when it serves Western interests, you plant seeds. And those seeds grow.

This is what the tree was reminding me. You cannot keep pouring poison into the soil, then act shocked when the fruit is bitter.

Reagan, the Hostages, and the Shape of Power

There is another chapter here that sits in the category of contested history, and I want to name it with care.

The “October Surprise” theory claims that members of Reagan’s 1980 campaign interfered behind the scenes to delay the release of American hostages, undermining Jimmy Carter.

Official investigations have said the evidence falls short of proving an agreement. So I am not going to state it as settled fact. And still. The hostages were released at the precise moment Reagan took the oath of office.

As a child I was told it was because Reagan was strong and Carter was weak. But as I take a closer look at history, the official narrative sounds more and more like propaganda. Like recruitment.

And the fact that we find ourselves having to even ask these kinds of questions itself reveals something true about the world we live in. Power uses people. Suffering becomes leverage. Human bodies become props. And political mythology needs a villain and a hero so badly that it will shape reality to fit the script.

That is not an Iran problem. That is an empire problem.

The Offer That Didn’t Fit the Script

Another detail that matters in this moment is that in 2015, Iran entered into a comprehensive nuclear agreement with the United States, the EU, and other world powers: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

This agreement included extensive verification and inspection protocols by international monitors. According to those monitors, Iran was complying with the terms of the deal.

In 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the agreement, despite Iran’s compliance and despite objections from our European allies. As best I can tell, Trump’s actual reasoning for the withdrawal? Because the agreement was achieved by the Obama administration, and in Trump’s mind, an Obama deal is always a bad deal.

What’s more, after that withdrawal, Iran indicated, even in the days before the latest war began, a willingness to negotiate terms even more comprehensive than the original deal. Those offers were not seriously engaged with by the United States or Israel.

And when a story is being sold to you as inevitable, any evidence of alternatives matters. When leaders publicly say they are open to verification and inspection, and that gets treated like a footnote, we should ask why. When there were agreements on the table in the past, and they were dismantled for political theater, we should ask what kind of “security” is actually being sought.

Because sometimes war is less about eliminating a threat and more about sustaining a story. A story where certain leaders need an enemy. A story where certain industries need contracts. A story where fear keeps the public manageable. And if that is true, then refusing the story becomes an act of staying human.

“They Are Crazy”: How Trauma and Reaction Get Weaponized

And that leads us to one of the cruelest dynamics of history. When you traumatize a people, you create conditions where traumatized responses become more likely. Then you point to those responses as proof that your violence was necessary.

This is how the story stays self-justifying. When an outside power humiliates and violates a society, that society does not become calmer. It becomes more reactive. It becomes more defensive. And the wound becomes a recruiting tool for extremists, for fundamentalists, for nationalists, for anyone who can offer a simple explanation and a strong identity.

This is how radical movements gain power. They take legitimate pain and convert it into ideology. They take fear and convert it into purity. They take humiliation and convert it into domination. And then, decades later, the empire looks at the extremists it helped fertilize and says, “See? They’re crazy.”

That is recruitment too. It recruits you into forgetting causality. It recruits you into acting as if our hands are clean.

Israel, Trauma, and the Tightrope of Truth

Now, here’s the larger irony: in mainstream American discourse, Iran gets cast as irrational: “crazy,” “fanatical,” “unhinged.” Israel, meanwhile, gets treated as automatically justified: a rational ally doing what it has to do. But the fringe on both sides are driven by trauma.

While Iran’s is rooted in Western intervention, Israel’s is rooted in her history. Antisemitism is not an idea. It’s a force. It is centuries of scapegoating, expulsions, pogroms, ghettos, and then the Holocaust: industrialized evil on an almost incomprehensible scale.

When children grow up inside a story that says, “People will hate you for being Jewish, and nothing you do will change it,” that’s not just a belief system. That’s the traumatizing of a nervous system. Trauma changes how bodies interpret the world. It makes threat feel omnipresent. It can make preemptive violence feel like protection. It can make domination feel like survival.

And when trauma becomes collective, when it is carried generation to generation, it can harden into national identity: We are always one inch away from annihilation, so anything becomes permissible.

That means there are fanatics on more than one side of this conflict. There are radicals on more than one side. But only one side gets the benefit of the doubt, over and over, even when its aggression is louder, more organized, and far more resourced. That is how recruitment works.

That’s because trauma doesn’t just create villains. Trauma creates narratives that decide, ahead of time, who gets understood and who gets demonized. When a people’s fear is familiar to us, when their story fits our inherited moral map, we call their violence “security.” When a people’s fear is foreign to us, we call their violence “terror.”

So no, Iran is not “crazy.” Iran is traumatized and becoming more so by the day. And Israel is not “crazy.” Israel is traumatized. And trauma, when it is unhealed and politically weaponized, can make almost anything feel justified.

To make matters worse, Israel’s history is now being weaponized so that any honest discourse gets deem antisemitic. This is part of what makes honest conversation about the Middle East so combustible right now. There are real histories of persecution and genocide. And there are also real histories of colonialism, occupation, displacement, and state violence.

The recruitment machine loves nothing more than a conversation so charged that everyone retreats to slogans. Because slogans don’t require grief. They don’t require listening. They don’t require the terrifying work of holding multiple truths at once. If we want to stay human, we have to be willing to do that work anyway.

So let me say something as clearly as I know how. Critiquing the actions of the nation-state of Israel is not the same thing as blaming Jewish people. Jewish people are not a monolith. Jewish people are not responsible for the policies of a government.

Antisemitism is real, rising, and deadly, and it must be confronted wherever it shows up. And at the same time, the state of Israel, like any state, must be accountable for what it does. Because trauma does not justify atrocity. The trauma of the Holocaust does not justify apartheid. It does not justify the systematic destruction of another people.

In fact, if you know what it feels like to be dehumanized, scapegoated, hunted, told you do not deserve to exist, then the moral demand is the opposite: you refuse to do that to anyone else. Israel’s own Scripture says this.

But instead, we have Benjamin Netanyahu and his four decade advocacy for war with Iran, consistently framing Iran as an existential threat requiring military action. It’s the same argument he made about the Palestinians in Gaza where we watched mass civilian death, collective punishment, and the destruction of infrastructure required for life: with American weapons, American funding, and American political cover.

Ultimately, when trauma is unhealed, it doesn’t disappear. It gets weaponized. It becomes a shield for policies that would otherwise be morally indefensible. And that is exactly why staying human matters here: because if we cannot tell the truth about suffering and power at the same time, we will get recruited: either into supporting the Iran war, dehumanizing Palestinians, or into collapsing Jewish people into a caricature. None of those paths is human.

The Money Pipeline: How Influence Gets Purchased in Plain Sight

But there’s more, because alongside trauma, there is another force at work: money. Organized, targeted, and designed to make political dissent expensive.

OpenSecrets shows pro-Israel groups spending about $60.5 million in outside spending in 2024. That is real money aimed at winning races.⁠⁠ It sits in the same weight class as the entire ‘environment’ bucket ($75.4M), and it is more than double the combined spend on gun control and gun rights ($27.0M).⁠⁠ This is what I mean by recruitment. Not just ideas, but incentives. Money shaping which truths are safe to say out loud. The point is, there is a well-funded ecosystem whose job is to reward compliance and punish deviation: especially in primaries, where a relatively small amount of money can reshape a race.

This is the part of the story that reporter Ryan Grim ran into so hard that what began as, “I’m covering the Squad,” became a book that is, in large part, about the pro-Israel political ecosystem surrounding them: specifically the implicit threat of what happens when you speak too loudly, or even just refuse to speak the approved lines.

In interviews about The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, Grim describes how pro-Israel groups’ spending doesn’t just support candidates, it disciplines the boundaries of what elected officials are willing to say about Israel.

And it isn’t theoretical: the machinery has explicitly targeted members like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, so much so that in their electoral defeats, you can see the warning system working exactly as designed. And when politicians learn, again and again, that criticizing Israeli policy can trigger millions in spending against them, many will choose a safer path: silence, slogans, or moral confusion.

And that doesn’t even touch on individual donations like the $250 million Miriam Adelson gave President Trump during his 2024 reelection campaign. The donation, a thinly veiled bribe that gave her so much control of the US’s policy towards Israel that Trump actually namechecked her at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

So money is also recruitment.

The American Religious Recruitment: Armageddon as Strategy

And then there’s the faith element. Now, before I talk about theology, I want to name something that often stays in the shadows of “serious” political analysis.

A lot of what drives war is not only geopolitics. It is story. It is myth. It is what people think God wants. And that is why religious imagination becomes one of the most potent recruitment engines in American life.

If you can convince a population that violence is destiny, you don’t have to persuade them with evidence. You only have to activate their faith. So when we talk about “staying human,” we are not only talking about ethics. We are talking about what kind of God we are being invited to worship.

Is it the God of domination, the God who blesses empire, the God who needs enemies to prove strength? Or is it the God whose name is Love, whose way is compassion, whose kingdom looks like bread shared and swords laid down? That question is not abstract. It shapes whether we become healers or accomplices.

There is another layer of recruitment that I cannot ignore, because it has shaped American political imagination for a long time. There is a strain of American Christianity that has made peace with violence. Not reluctantly. Not with grief. But enthusiastically.

It has turned the Middle East into a stage for end-times fantasies. It has treated war like prophecy fulfillment. It has imagined devastation as destiny. And I want to say this plainly. That is not Christian faith. That is a death cult wearing Bible verses like jewelry.

Whatever you believe about Jesus, whatever your relationship to Scripture, this much is clear. The call of spiritual maturity is not to accelerate catastrophe. The call is not to bring about the end so we can escape. The call, if it has any resemblance to the heart of Jesus, is to bring heaven to earth. And heaven looks nothing like war.

When religion blesses domination, it is recruitment. It recruits people into calling violence holy. It recruits people into feeling righteous while harming others. It recruits people into being less human.

The Shadow Economy: Sex, Secrecy, and the Leverage of Shame

There is one more layer I want to name with caution. It sits downstream from the recruitment tactics we have already named, and it lives in the shadows.

In 2025, Drop Site News reported on longstanding allegations that Benjamin Netanyahu used the possibility of exposing Monica Lewinsky related material as leverage in negotiations over convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard.

I cannot prove that allegation in a court of law, and Drop Site does not present it as a settled fact. But if their reporting is even close to true, it tells us something important about the moral weather. Netanyahu is not opposed to blackmail as a tool of statecraft.

With that in mind, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were public friends for years. Trump even publicly said Epstein liked women almost as much as he did, and liked them young. Moreover, the newly released Epstein documents keep putting Trump’s name back on the page.

Epstein was also closely connected to prominent Israeli figures. Reporting tied to the released material describes an unusually close relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. It also describes connections to senior Israeli military intelligence figure Yoni Koren.

So here is the question I cannot shake. If Epstein built a world where sexual exploitation created leverage, and if political leaders have shown themselves willing to use sexual leverage as a tool, then can we really rule out that some of what we are watching is being steered by blackmail?

I am not claiming I can prove a direct chain from file to phone call to policy. I am saying that power has a long history of using shame as a steering wheel. Staying human means we do not dismiss that possibility just because it makes us uncomfortable, and we do not declare it proven just because it fits our fear.

What Rootedness Looks Like (and What It Is Not)

Which brings me back to the tree, the one that stayed rooted at the bottom of the Rio Grande Canyon, the one that invited me to stay rooted in a world gone crazy.

So what is rootedness? Rootedness is not passivity. Rootedness is not a trendy version of “stay in your lane.” And rootedness is not spiritual bypass, where we go touch grass so we don’t have to confront power.

Rootedness is the inner stance that lets you confront power without losing your soul. It is the ability to stay present when the machine tries to speed you up. It is the ability to keep your compassion wide when the machine tries to narrow it. It is the ability to say, “Yes, this is terrifying,” without letting terror dictate what you call true. Rootedness is how we refuse recruitment into being less than human.

It is not cynicism. It is not “both sides” as a way of avoiding moral clarity.

Rootedness is the ability to stay present when the machine tries to speed you up. It is the ability to hold complexity without collapsing into paralysis. It is the ability to tell the truth without turning truth into a weapon. It is the ability to grieve without hardening. It is the ability to act without becoming what you hate.

Rootedness is how we stay human.

And it is learned. It is practiced. It is built like muscle. This is what I’ve been trying to do throughout this piece.

Grief: The Antidote to Becoming a Monster

It is also important to note that one of the reasons the recruitment machine works so well is that it offers people a way to avoid grief.

Francis Weller talks about what he calls the gates of grief. One of them, the one I think many of us need to stand at right now, is grief for the suffering and injustice of the world.

This is the grief we feel when we watch children pulled from rubble. When we watch propaganda turn human bodies into statistics. When we realize that entire populations get treated as expendable, while the people who profit keep calling it security. It is grief over everything recruitment attempts to do.

That means this kind of grief does something inconvenient to those who are out to manipulate us. It keeps the circle of who matters from shrinking. It makes strangers real. It makes bodies count. It makes it harder to speak in abstractions like “strategic interests” when those “interests” are measured in actual human lives.

And when you feel this kind of grief, it is not a weakness, it is evidence that your heart has not fully been colonized.

Because if you cannot grieve, you are easily recruited. Unwept sorrow becomes conspiracy. Unheld fear becomes scapegoating. Unnamed powerlessness becomes a hunger for domination. And if you watch enough violence, if you let enough injustice pass through your eyes without grief, something in you begins to die. You become less human.

Grief keeps you human. Because grief hurts. Grief makes you porous. Grief makes you feel what you would rather numb.

And for those who’s hearts are hardened, Weller describes grief as a powerful solvent. It softens the hardest places in our hearts. It loosens the calcification that forms when we keep swallowing pain without metabolizing it.

So when we can stay with this kind of grief, when we allow it to break us open, this kind of grief becomes a kind of moral clarity. Not the holiness of certainty. The holiness of a heart that refuses to shut down.

So What Do We Do When the World Goes Crazy?

I don’t trust clean answers for moments like this. But I trust practices. I trust rootedness. I trust the slow work of becoming unrecruitable. Here are three movements that feel faithful to me right now.

1) Tell the truth with receipts, and without contempt

Refuse narrative compression. Refuse the myth that history began yesterday. Learn the timeline, then share it. Not as a weapon. As an act of human dignity. Because propaganda thrives on amnesia. Truth is a form of resistance.

2) Train your nervous system not to be hijacked

If your body is constantly in fight-or-flight, you will be easy to recruit. You will crave certainty. You will crave a villain. You will crave a tribe.

Rootedness starts in the body. Breathe. Walk. Touch bark. Look at the sky long enough for your eyes to remember distance.

This is not self-care as consumerism. This is spiritual warfare against dehumanization.

3) Grieve what is real, so your love stays wide

Let the grief come. Grieve the dead. Grieve the lies. Grieve the way violence becomes normal. Grieve the way trauma multiplies. Grieve the part of you that wants to stop caring because caring hurts. Grief is how you keep your humanity intact.

Tell the truth. Train your nervous system. Grieve what is real. That is how we stay human.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Stay Rooted

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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This is an essay about the difference between aspiration and actuality. About the ways we confuse a north star with a finished identity. About how our protective strategies are not a moral failure, but a wounded intelligence that once kept us safe. And about the slow work of moving from performance to authenticity, so that what we most deeply believe can become something we can actually live.

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The Full Story

When my long-distance girlfriend started talking about spending most of the summer here, my first response was uncomplicated joy. I love the idea of her being nearby. When she is here, life feels better. She sees me more than anyone ever has. She knows me more than anyone ever has. There is a way she is attuned to my heart and my being that still surprises me. So the thought of “life feeling better” more often, even most days, felt like pure gift.

But then the conversation ended. I laid down to sleep. Things got quiet in the dark. My mind had space to wander. And that is when the question arrived. My chest tightened. My thoughts went frantic and started reaching for control. What if I am not different? What if I have not changed?

Not because she has given me any reason to doubt love, but because there is a part of me that still believes love is safest when I can manage my image. It is easier to feel lovable when I am not fully seen. It is easier to feel in control when I can curate. Daily closeness does not let you curate for long.

I have watched this pattern show up before. I was married to two radically different women, and the struggle in me still rhymed. Different partner. Same gravity in my body. When love got close enough to see everything, I felt the urge to disappear inside myself. To become distant, elusive, escapist. Not because I did not care, but because being fully known felt like exposure, and exposure felt like danger. Why? Because the loudest and most defining message of my childhood was, “You are not worthy of love and acceptance.”

So when the lights go out and my mind wanders in the dark, what is the question I’m asking? It’s not a verdict, it’s a wonder: Is there a gap between who I actually am and who I aspire to be?

Actual vs. aspirational

Let me name what I mean by those words.

Actual is not who I am on my best day. It is who I reliably become when I am tired, triggered, surprised, or exposed, the version of me that shows up when I am not managing my image. Actual is my honest baseline.

Aspirational is the self I long to be, the truer way of loving I can see in my imagination and sometimes touch in real moments. It can be a genuine north star. It can also become a mask, a version of myself I perform to stay safe, stay impressive, or stay in control.

This is the spine of what I am trying to name. Aspiration is holy. It is the soul remembering what it is here for. But aspiration can also become a disguise, a spiritual costume, a version of me that sounds true and feels true, but has not yet been trained into my nervous system.

Actual is what shows up when I cannot curate.

So I lay there and wonder what is actual and what is aspirational.

I have reason to believe I really have changed. I have done real work. I have more presence, more awareness, more honesty available to me than I used to. And at the same time I have not fully lived that reality in the daily heat of a close, local relationship, for a long time. So I find myself wondering, in the quiet: Is there still a gap, or am I only afraid there is?

The tension is that transformation often looks the same at first from the outside. I can move toward who I aspire to be. I can pretend to be who I aspire to be. And over time, with enough truth and enough practice, who I aspire to be can become who I actually am.

When a nation confuses aspiration with actuality

And I want to name something else, because this actual versus aspirational tension does not only live inside individual people. It lives inside groups. It lives inside institutions. It lives inside nations.

Every community has a story it tells itself about who “we” are. We have a sense of our character. We have a sense of our goodness. We have a sense of what we represent. And in that story, “actual” and “aspirational” get braided together.

A nation, for example, can tell a story about itself that is partly honest, partly mythic, and partly aspirational. We can believe we are who we long to be. We can narrate ourselves as courageous, fair, freedom-loving, and generous. And sometimes we really are. Sometimes we are living into the best of our stated values.

But we also have shadows. We also have wounds. We also have strategies for not being seen as we are.

And a lot of political disagreement, I think, is not only about policies. It is about which story we are living in. Some people relate to our national story as if it is already actual, as if we already embody what we claim. Other people keep pointing to the gap, not because they hate the country, but because they cannot pretend they do not see what is true.

One concrete example is the story we tell ourselves about race. Some people look around and say, “We are beyond all that.” They point to obvious signs of progress. They point to the presence of Black leadership in the highest levels of government. They point to laws on the books, to diversity initiatives, to programs intended to help those who have been historically marginalized thrive. And from that vantage point, anything that still names racial inequity can feel like unnecessary division.

And yet the lived experience of many Black, Indigenous, and other people of color does not match the story of a fully post-racial society. The aspiration may be real. The longing may be sincere. But when we confuse aspiration with actuality, we stop listening. We stop telling the truth. We treat the naming of the gap as an attack, instead of treating it as an invitation to become who we claim we are.

When one group needs the aspiration to be treated as reality, and another group keeps naming the reality that contradicts the aspiration, the conversation becomes very hard. It feels like an attack. It feels like betrayal. It feels like accusation.

But it might be something simpler and more human than that. It might be the same pattern we have been talking about at the personal level. If I am not allowed to admit what is actual, then I have to defend the aspirational self as if my life depends on it.

The same thing happens in a body. When we cannot admit what is actual, we defend the aspirational self as if our belonging depends on it.

And there is danger in that, whether we are talking about a nation or a relationship.

Grief, strategy, and the wounded child

And grief, I am learning, is one of the main forces that can keep that question foggy. For me, so much of this is what Francis Weller calls the second gate of grief, the parts of us that have gone without love. Those parts do not just struggle to receive love. They struggle to be seen and stay.

In my body, “gone without love” does not usually feel like sadness first. It feels like strategy. It feels like the wounded child inside me scanning the room for what will win approval. It feels like the part of me that learned to survive by staying impressive, staying useful, and staying hidden.

Plotkin’s four postures

Bill Plotkin has a map for this that I have found painfully clarifying. He says our wounded child tends to organize around two questions: Am I going to try to stay safe by belonging or by leaving? And is the fuel underneath me fear or anger?

So one version of the wounded child becomes what he calls the Conformist. This is the insider who lives by fear. The Conformist learns early that love feels conditional, so it starts studying the room. What do they want? What will keep me included? How do I become easy to approve of? It is not fake, it is adaptive. It is a child trying to survive.

Another version becomes the Prince or Princess, the insider who lives by anger. This part stays close to belonging too, but it is not trying to earn love through compliance. It feels entitled to the rewards of the community, the material and social benefits that signal, “You matter here.” And it will reach for those rewards through entitlement, contempt, intimidation, and control.

Underneath, the Prince or Princess is often carrying a brutal inner truth: I do not have a clue who I really am. There is anger here, and there is hunger. Sometimes this posture forms in a home where performance was demanded, but rewards were also dangled. It was not who the child wanted to be, but the bribe made it worthwhile. Over time, the performance hardens into a belief: I have paid for this. I deserve it. It is still chasing safety, just with a different kind of armor.

Then there is the outsider who lives by fear, the Victim. When belonging feels too costly, this part chooses retreat. It expects rejection before it happens, so it tells a story that explains the distance. Of course they will not understand. Of course I will end up alone. Of course it will not work. It is safer to be resigned than to be surprised.

And finally there is the outsider who lives by anger, the Rebel. This part is often furious about the abandonment it has suffered. It does not believe it is eligible to acquire the rewards of mainstream society in any legitimate way, so it stops trying. Underneath there is often the same ache and confusion: I do not have a clue who I really am. But the Rebel adds a vow: I am not going to act like them. I am not going to be like them.

So the Rebel achieves an outsider pseudo-identity by adopting styles and behaviors that negate, counter, or even try to destroy the mainstream. And here is the irony Plotkin points to. In rejecting one form of belonging, we often end up conforming to another. The Rebel becomes “real” by refusing the mainstream, while quietly conforming to the code, the fashion, and the posture of fellow rebels.

Most of us can find ourselves in more than one of these postures depending on the moment. The point is not to diagnose ourselves. The point is to notice the protective logic. The wounded child makes a very human bargain: If I can just become the right kind of person, I will finally be safe to love.

This is not villainy. It is protection. It is what a nervous system does when it learned early that being fully seen could cost you belonging.

But there is a cost. If I never reveal myself, no one can love all of me. I am left with connection, and yet still haunted by the question: If they saw all of me, would they stay? Or do they only love this crafted, curated version?

The practice is not to shame these strategies, or to “power through” into intimacy. The practice is to grieve what made them necessary, and to thank the protective parts for how they tried to save me, while slowly teaching my body that love can be survived.

This is the long move from performance to authenticity. It is the slow work of becoming someone who can be seen without disappearing.

One of the ways I can tell something is actually different in me now is simple. When fear shows up, I can name it.

Old me did not do that. Old me waited until the fear turned into distance. Old me waited until the fear turned into a story. Old me waited until the fear turned into escape.

Now, when I notice the familiar tightening in my chest, I can say it out loud. I can tell the truth before the strategy has time to become a personality. I can come to my partner and say, “Here is where I’m at. Here is what scares me. I want you to have a heads up that this is probably something I’m going to wrestle with at some point this summer. And I want to do it together.”

That might sound like a small thing, but it’s not.

Because this is where the actual versus aspirational question becomes more than an idea. It becomes a test of what I do when I cannot curate.

For a long time, my aspirational self was the version of me that could be present, generous, reflective, and loving. I could access that self under certain conditions. I could even sustain it for a while. But the moment I felt exposed, misunderstood, or crowded, something else would take the wheel. A strategy would light up. And then I would have to decide, consciously or not, what kind of person I was going to be.

This is why I think so many of us get confused about whether we have changed. We imagine the proof of change will look like peace. We imagine it will look like never getting activated. We imagine it will look like being unbothered.

Containers vs. capacity

But the truth is, you can grow a lot and still get activated. You can heal a lot and still have old reflexes. You can develop good containers, good routines, good structures, and still discover that those very containers are also limiting your capacity.

That was the realization that unlocked a big conversation for me recently. I had read something about capacity, about the difference between having a well-managed life and having a wide enough soul to stay present when life gets messy.

It hit me that I have built my days in ways that make it easier for me to show up as who I want to be. That is a gift. That is also a risk. Because if my goodness is only available inside a carefully designed container, then I am still one hard season away from becoming someone I do not want to be.

Here is what I mean by “container.” I have built a morning ritual that helps me center myself every day. I take time to locate where I am, to process what is happening inside me, and to return to my breath, my body, and my truer intentions.

I have an evening frame too, a way of wrapping up the day, releasing what I am carrying, and finding my way back to myself before sleep.

And I have also built a life that gives me a lot of space. I can show up fully for a funeral, or for a client, or for work that matters, and then I can come home and have room to decompress. I can withdraw. I can think. I can recover my clarity.

Those are containers. They are not bad. They are wise. They have helped me heal.

But daily intimacy does not always allow for that kind of space. When someone lives in your house, you cannot always disappear into your own rhythms. You cannot always get away from the friction of being seen.

And in those moments you do not just need a good container. You need capacity.

Capacity is the ability to stay true to yourself without needing to constantly retreat and rebuild yourself. Capacity is what lets you hold your center in the middle of real life, in the middle of interruption, in the middle of conflict, in the middle of another person’s needs colliding with your own.

This is one of the reasons I think long-distance can feel easier for some of us. It quietly protects our containers. It gives us time to reset. It gives us space to curate.

But if I am serious about love, if I am serious about becoming actual, then part of the work is letting closeness become the gym where capacity is built.

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An alternative vision: spirit as ground, psychology as path

Here is the alternative vision I am reaching for. I do not think the goal is to become the kind of person who never gets activated. I think the goal is to become the kind of person who can stay present when I am activated.

Spiritually, I am trying to live from a deeper claim than my nervous system is often willing to believe. That I am worthy of love and acceptance. That grace is not a prize for good behavior. That love is not earned by being impressive, useful, or easy. Shame cannot form me into love. Only love can do that.

Psychologically, the work is letting my body catch up to that truth. Letting my nervous system learn, slowly, that being seen is not automatically danger. Letting closeness build capacity instead of triggering collapse. Learning to notice the protective reflexes earlier, thank them, and choose something truer.

In other words, the spiritual names what is possible. The psychological is how it becomes actual.

If that language feels tender or confronting, I want to slow down and say this plainly.

This is not a call to stop having containers. Containers are wise. Containers are how many of us survive. Containers are how many of us heal. The question is not whether you need them. The question is whether your goodness depends on them.

Because if I can only be kind when I am rested, only be honest when I have time to process, only be present when I have had my ritual, then my “aspirational self” is still mostly a version of me that lives inside optimal conditions. It is real, but it is not yet reliable.

Capacity is what makes the aspirational self portable. Capacity is what lets you stay yourself when the day goes sideways, when you get interrupted, when you are misunderstood, when you are tired, when someone else’s nervous system is loud, when you cannot retreat into quiet to reassemble.

So if you are reading this and feeling exposed, I want you to hear this with compassion. Your strategies are not proof that you are broken. They are proof that you adapted. The work is not to shame the adaptation. The work is to build enough capacity that you have more choices.

That is the actual versus aspirational question in plain language.

The aspirational self says, “I want to be loving.” The actual self is what shows up when love costs me comfort.

The aspirational self says, “I want to be honest.” The actual self is what shows up when honesty risks my image.

The aspirational self says, “I want to be safe.” The actual self is what shows up when my nervous system decides we are in danger.

And here is the part I am learning to hold with a lot more compassion. The moment those old alarms go off, the question is not, “Am I good?” The question is, “What part of me is trying to save me right now?”

In my case, I can feel how early I learned to survive as the Conformist. If I can just read the room, if I can just be helpful, if I can just be easy, if I can just be impressive, I will be safe to love. And when that does not work, I can feel the Prince or Princess energy rise up, the angry insistence that I deserve something, that I have earned something, that I should not have to keep proving my worth.

This is why receiving love is so complicated for the parts of us that have gone without it.

It is not only that we do not believe love is available. It is that we fear what love will reveal. Because love does not only comfort. Love also sees.

So the real fear is not, “Will I be loved?” The real fear is, “If I am truly known, will I still be loved?”

When I brought all of this to my partner, I did not do it with a neat conclusion. I did not do it with a performance of progress. I did not say, “Don’t worry, I’m better now.” I laid it out more like this. “This is where things are. This worries me. I feel confident because I can see the evidence of growth in my life, but I also want to tell the truth about the edge I am standing on.”

And I could feel that my honesty did two things at once.

It made space for her fear. If someone has never lived with me day to day, it is not irrational for their mind to wonder what they might discover, even at the extreme: “What if you become a different person? What if you lose it? What if I move my life and then regret it?”

And it also made space for love. Because vulnerability is not only disclosure. Vulnerability is an invitation. It says, “Here is the part of me that has felt unlovable. Will you come near anyway?”

This is why I don’t think the proof of change is the absence of fear. I think the proof of change is the absence of escape. I think the proof of change is the willingness to name what is happening inside me before it hardens into withdrawal. And I think the proof of love on the other side is not that someone never gets afraid. The proof of love is a willingness to step into the truth with you, to meet the tender places without punishing you for having them.

That does not mean anything is guaranteed. It does not mean every relationship can hold it. It does not mean we do not need boundaries, wise pacing, and real accountability.

It simply means this. The path from aspirational to actual is not paved by self-hatred. It is paved by honesty. It is paved by grief. It is paved by the slow retraining of a nervous system that learned early that being fully seen could cost you belonging.

And if you are reading this and recognizing yourself, I want you to hear the invitation under all the language. You are not broken for having strategies. You are human. The question is not whether you have them. The question is whether you are willing to see them, and whether you are willing to grieve what made them necessary.

The ethics of aspiration

Because when I confuse aspiration with actuality, I start making promises I cannot keep. I start selling a version of myself I cannot reliably embody.

Sometimes it is not even malicious. Sometimes it is sincere. I really do want to be that person. I really do believe I am becoming that person. I might even be that person in certain conditions.

But if I present aspiration as if it is already actual, I end up creating a mismatch between what someone thinks they are signing up for and what they will actually experience.

That mismatch erodes trust.

In intimate relationship, it can look like this. I aspire to be loving, connected, emotionally present, honest, and steady. I speak about myself that way. I believe it is true.

And then I get scared. I feel exposed. I feel crowded. I feel misunderstood. And what shows up is withdrawal. Defensiveness. Evasion. Escapism.

The other person is not only hurt by my behavior. They are disoriented by the difference between the story and the reality. They are left wondering if they were deceived. They are left wondering which version of me is real.

This is why actual versus aspirational is not just an interesting concept. It is an ethical one.

Honesty about what is actual is not self-condemnation. It is care. It is care for the people we love. It is care for the communities we belong to. It is care for the promises we make.

It is also the only place transformation can begin.

Because aspiration is not bad. Aspiration is holy. Aspiration is the soul remembering what it is here for. But aspiration becomes dangerous when it is used as a cover, when it becomes a way of avoiding the grief, the repair, and the slow practice required for it to become actual.

So the invitation is not to shrink your aspiration. The invitation is to tell the truth about where aspiration is already embodied and where it is still a longing. To tell the truth about the conditions under which you can access your best self, and the conditions under which your protective reflexes still take over.

That is how trust is built. That is how repair becomes possible. That is how the aspirational self stops being a costume and slowly becomes a home.

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Closing

Before I close, I want to return to the sentence that started all of this for me.

Actual is what shows up when I cannot curate.

That is true in a nation. That is true in a relationship. That is true in my own chest, in the quiet, when the lights go out and my mind starts reaching for control.

So my hope is not that I will never feel fear again. My hope is that fear will stop driving. My hope is that the truest things I believe spiritually will become livable psychologically.

That my body will learn what my soul keeps trying to remember.

That aspiration will stop being a costume, and slowly become a home.

Below the paywall, I want to offer three practices that help move this from insight into embodiment, from aspiration into actual.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Move Towards Actual

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

Read more

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The Whole Story

On February 21, 2025, my father died.

I’m writing this one year later, with his ring on my finger and a strange kind of quiet in my chest. Not peace exactly. Not closure. More like the hush that comes after a door shuts and you realize the room has changed temperature.

That weekend has become a marker in my body.

I can still see the light in the room. I can still hear the way my name sounded when he said it. I can still feel the moment everything in me wanted to bargain with time.

And I can still feel the other thing that surprised me: the way I showed up for him in those final months was not the way our relationship had trained me to show up.

For 15 months, I kept finding myself doing something I didn’t think I had in me.

I was fathering my father.

If that phrase makes you flinch a little, good. It should. It’s upside down. It’s tender. It’s complicated. And it raises a question I’ve been carrying ever since.

Why did I do it?

The Breathwork Revelation

It was November 2023, and I was lying on a yoga mat in a room full of strangers, breathing in a rhythm that felt like it might crack my chest open.

It had been the kind of week that leaves you hollowed out. My father had called earlier that week with the word no one wants to hear: cancer.

That announcement sat on top of a pile of other hard things, each one adding weight until I could barely stand upright.

This particular breathwork practice works by triggering something primal in the body. You draw breath in a specific pattern, and it lights up the nervous system. It’s like flipping the sympathetic response into overdrive, but you’re doing it in a safe container where whatever needs to surface can come up.

And it did.

The limbic brain went wild. Old grief, present fear, fury, exhaustion, all of it came rushing to the threshold.

And then I screamed. I let it all out.

In the silence that followed, something else arrived.

It wasn’t a voice exactly. It was visceral. A knowing so clear and true that it bypassed every defense I had.

The thought, if you can even call it that, settled into my bones with absolute authority:

I need to father my father.

There was no resistance. No negotiation. Just this deep, quiet certainty.

This is what I need to do.

This is the work in front of me.

Fathering My Father

Over the course of those 15 months, I think I missed maybe three or four appointments related to my dad’s cancer treatment. Every other one, I was there.

I would drive from my house in central Denver to my parents’ home in the northwest corner of the metro area, pick them up, drive to the VA hospital on the northeast side, sit through the appointment, and then reverse the whole triangle to get them home before heading back to my place.

Every appointment was a full day affair.

And I showed up for nearly all of them.

But presence wasn’t the only thing I offered.

I kept my parents laughing. I kept the mood light. We had nurses and hospital staff literally standing outside our room during appointments because they heard the laughter spilling out from inside. Amid all the fear and uncertainty, I made space for delight. I refused to let cancer turn every moment into a funeral.

At the same time, I was paying attention. I was the one taking notes. I was tracking everything the doctors said, making sure my parents understood the next steps, clarifying medication schedules and side effects, translating medical jargon into plain language. I held the logistics so they could focus on what mattered.

And then there was the deeper work: helping my dad grieve his own life. As the months went on and the treatments stopped working, we began the hard conversation about hospice. My dad started to reckon with his own death. He was afraid. He was sad. He was facing the end, and he needed someone to walk that edge with him. So I did.

I sat with him. I honored his fear. I didn’t try to fix it or rush him past it. I let him name what he was feeling in as much as his old school masculinity would allow him to name a feeling.

And I told him something I’d never said before: I was proud of him. Proud of how he was handling all of this. He could have gotten angry. He could have gotten bitter. But instead, he got softer. He became easier to be with. He received the hard news with grace.

And I wanted him to know that I saw that. I admired it. I respected the way he was moving through this passage. It was one of the most sacred moments of my life.

If you only knew my relationship with my dad through the lens of those 15 months, you would have assumed my dad and I always had a close relationship. You would have thought this was just how we were. That we’d always laughed together like this. That I’d always been able to show up for him with this kind of tenderness and strength.

But that’s not the case.

The Truth Beneath the Surface

I want to name something plainly because it’s one of the hidden tensions in this whole story.

There are two versions of me in it.

There’s the version you would have met in the VA waiting rooms, telling jokes, carrying a notebook, making sure my mom ate lunch.

And there’s the version of me that existed for most of my life, the one who didn’t know how to be close to my dad.

The relationship I had with him for most of my life was not warm. It was not emotionally intimate. I did not go to him for advice. I did not lean on him when I needed fatherly support. The tenderness I longed for was not something I could reliably access.

So when I say I “fathered my father,” I don’t mean I suddenly discovered I was the world’s most devoted son. I mean something more specific. I mean I showed up for him in a way I didn’t receive from him.

And that raises an important question. What made that possible?

A month into this process, my parents said something that made the question unavoidable. They framed my presence as duty. They called me the good oldest son. The one doing what a good oldest son does. And I had a visceral reaction to that language.

Not because I’m above obligation. Not because I never do things out of duty. But because that wasn’t what was happening here.

This wasn’t performance. This wasn’t a box I was checking. This wasn’t me earning a gold star. This was love. This was choice.

Underneath that reaction was a clarity I didn’t have words for at the time: I wasn’t trying to become a better son. I was trying to become a freer human. And freedom required telling the truth.

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The Grief Work That Made It Possible

My goal, the conviction I carried out of that breathwork session, was this: I am going to father my father better than my father ever fathered me.

That sentence holds a world of grief. Because it implies something else: I needed a father I didn’t have. Or at least, I needed a version of him I couldn’t consistently reach.

And part of the reason I was able to show up for him during his cancer journey was because I had done grief work beforehe was diagnosed. Not grief for his death. Grief for what I expected and did not receive.

It started in October on a beach in Miami.

I was taking a couple of days off, and I brought Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow with me. I’d heard about the book from someone I’d call a Soul Guide, and I knew it was time to read it.

Weller writes about five gates of grief.

Most of us are familiar with the first gate: everything we love, we will lose. That’s the grief we associate with death and separation.

But it was the fourth gate that cracked me open: what we expected and did not receive.

That gate names the grief we carry for the love, attention, safety, and belonging we needed as children but never got. It’s the grief for developmental losses. For unmet needs. For the ways we were supposed to be seen and weren’t.

I sat on that beach and wept. Because suddenly I had language for something I’d been carrying my whole life but didn’t know how to name.

When I returned I designed a ritual to move through that grief.

I started by researching the basic needs every child has. I wrote down a list of statements about what children should receive from their parents.

Things like: You should be seen for who you are. Your interests should matter. Your emotions should be welcomed. You should feel safe to be yourself.

Then I took a stack of paper and did something strange. I wrote with my left hand. This moved the exercise out of my cerebral cortex and into something more primal, more connected to the limbic brain.

It slowed me down. It made the writing feel less polished, more raw. It brought the child in me closer to the surface without fully regressing into childhood.

With my left hand, I wrote what I actually remembered receiving as a child. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, bursting with excitement about the football game at recess. That was the thing that made me feel most alive most days. And my dad would blow it off. He’d redirect the conversation to math or science. He wanted to know what I was learning, not what was making me come alive. I was not seen for who I was. I was seen for who he wanted me to be.

After I finished writing with my left hand, I switched to my right hand and wrote what should have happened. I wrote as the adult version of me speaking to the child version of me. I gave myself the affirmation I needed. The encouragement. The acknowledgment. I named what happened and said plainly: This was wrong. You deserved better.

Then I tore those pieces of paper into strips and burned them in a candle holder. I let the ashes sit there for four weeks. I didn’t clean them out. I let them rest. At the end of those four weeks, I did a ritual borrowed from Bill Plotkin’s work with the four directions.

I mixed the ashes with water and painted myself with them. I sat in the north, the south, the east, and the west, asking each direction what message it had for me. What each direction wanted and needed from me.

I don’t remember the specific messages I received. But I remember the feeling. I remember sitting in the ashes of my grief, wearing it on my skin, letting it be part of me instead of something I was trying to escape.

And then I washed it off. I stepped into the water and let it go. Not because the grief was gone forever, but because I had tended it. I had given it the attention it deserved. I had honored the loss.

That ritual changed something in me. It dissipated the anger I’d been carrying toward my parents. It created emotional capacity where there had only been resentment and self-protection. It freed me to show up differently. And a year later, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I was ready.

Not ready in the sense of “prepared for cancer.” No one is prepared for that. Ready in the sense of having already met a certain kind of grief. Ready in the sense of having already named the wound. Ready in the sense of not needing to pretend.

Love Without Earning

Here’s the conclusion I reached in the wake of that reaction to the “duty” language. When love is motivated by duty, it becomes fragile. It becomes transactional. It becomes a ledger. It becomes something you can lose if you fail.

But when love is motivated by freedom, it becomes holy. Because then it’s not a performance. It’s not a strategy. It’s not even an identity. It’s a choice.

The strange thing is that choice is more demanding than obligation.

Obligation can be done from the outside. You can fulfill a duty while staying emotionally absent. You can do the “right thing” while nursing resentment.

But love as choice requires presence. And presence costs.

That’s what I was giving my parents. Not the appearance of devotion. Not the performance of being a good son. Presence. And presence is the most countercultural thing we have.

This Is the Path Forward

We live in a culture that has no idea what to do with grief. We avoid it. We outsource it. We drown it. We swipe past it. We buy our way out of it. We numb it. We stay busy enough that it can’t catch us.

If grief is a wave, consumer culture is one of the ways we try to build a seawall. More work. More productivity. More hustle. More entertainment. More Amazon boxes on the porch. More scrolling. More “fixing.”

And when that doesn’t work, we reach for medication. Or ideology. Or the belief that if we can just think clearly enough, we can solve it.

But grief is not a math problem. Grief is not a bug in the system. Grief is not an error to be eliminated. Grief is a passage. Grief is a portal.

It’s the way we metabolize loss so that loss doesn’t calcify into bitterness, numbness, or rage. It’s the maintenance practice that keeps us human in a world that constantly assaults our humanity.

I could not have fathered my father the way I did without doing my own grief work first. The wounds I carried would have gotten in the way. The unprocessed pain would have made me reactive, defensive, distant.

I would have shown up, maybe. But not fully. Not freely. Not with love.

Grief work gave me the capacity to give what I never received. To offer tenderness where I had known harshness. To see my father in his vulnerability and honor it, even though he had never done the same for me.

That’s what grief work makes possible. It doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t undo what happened. But it transforms how we carry it.

It turns the weight of loss into something we can hold without being crushed by it. It alchemizes pain into presence, resentment into compassion, fear into courage. And it allows us to break cycles that have been running for generations.

The Ring and the Legacy I’m Choosing

By the end, my father was barely moving. He was in and out of consciousness. But the last word I clearly heard him say was my name.

And then, somehow, he managed to remove a ring from his hand.

I couldn’t believe he had the strength to do it. But he did. He took off the ring and gave it to me.

That ring has a history. My grandmother made it for my grandfather. My grandfather gave it to my father on his deathbed. And my father gave it to me on his. I wear it every day.

But here’s what I think about when I look at it. My legacy does not have to be the same as my father’s. I fathered my father differently than he fathered me. And in doing so, I began a new legacy.

At my dad’s reception, my aunt came up to me. She’s his sister. She said, “I know you didn’t want this role. I know you didn’t strive for it. But you have become the father.”

I know what she meant. She meant I was now the one who would carry something forward. She meant I was now the one who would steady the center.

Some people might name that role with older language. But my aunt would never use the word “patriarch.” And honestly, I don’t want it. Not as a label. Not as a legacy. Not as a structure. Because when I hear that word, I don’t just hear “leadership.” I hear emotional distance. I hear hierarchy. I hear power used as protection. I hear the kind of masculinity that makes tenderness feel like weakness.

So the question that’s left for me is not “How do I become the patriarch?” The question is: How do I embody responsibility in a family system that has been shaped by patriarchy, without reproducing its emotional and relational damage?

And I keep coming back to the same answer: Grief.

Grief is what allows us to name what was broken and choose something different. Grief is what gives us the emotional fluidity to be present instead of performative. Grief is what makes repair possible.

I still carry grief about my relationship with my dad. I grieve that there will never be the relationship I wanted. I grieve that I never had a father I could go to for advice. A father I could lean on when I needed relational support. A father who actually saw me for who I am.

That loss is real. And it will always be real. But because I did the grief work, I was able to show up for him at the end in a way that honored both of us.

I was able to father him through his death. And now I get to carry that forward. I get to reshape what fatherhood looks like in my family. I get to embody it differently.

That’s the gift of grief. It doesn’t erase the wound. But it allows us to live from the scar instead of the open gash. It allows us to approach the world, and the people we love, with tenderness instead of defensiveness. It allows us to break the cycles that have been running for generations and offer something new.

The ring on my finger is a reminder. The legacy is different now. Because I did the grief work. And it helped me to stay human.

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The Invitation

If this story resonates with you, if you recognize yourself in the ache of unmet needs or the weight of unprocessed loss, I want you to know: this work is possible. And you don’t have to do it alone.

Grief work is not about wallowing or staying stuck in the past. It’s about metabolizing loss so you can move forward with freedom. It’s about creating the emotional capacity to show up fully in your life, to give what you didn’t receive, to reshape the legacies you’ve inherited.

I offer Life After Loss coaching for people who are ready to do this work.

If you’d like to explore what that might look like, I invite you to book a discovery call. We’ll talk about where you are, what you’re carrying, and whether working together makes sense.

You can find more information and book a call here.

This work is sacred. It’s hard. And it changes everything because it allows us to stay human.

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Three Embodiment Practices To Help You Move Through Grief

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.

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Not with tips or techniques or advice about spicing things up. Not with roses and romance and happily-ever-after promises.

I want to talk about what happens when an entire culture, both religious and secular, teaches you to be afraid of your own aliveness. When your body becomes something to manage instead of inhabit. When intimacy becomes performance instead of presence.

I want to talk about what it costs us. And what it takes to get it back.

This post is personal. It’s vulnerable. It includes stories about my own failures, my divorces, my decades of believing lies about my body and my desire. It includes a morning ritual where I moved my hips and spoke truth to my throat. It includes grief about what purity culture stole from me and from the teenagers I taught.

But it’s not just my story. It’s yours too.

Because whether you grew up in purity culture or hookup culture, whether you were taught that sex is sin or that sex is currency, whether you’ve spent your life suppressing desire or performing it, the result is the same:

We were never taught how to be whole.

This post is about reclaiming erotic wholeness. Not as sexual technique, but as a way of staying human. It’s about integrating body and spirit, passion and commitment, desire and wisdom. It’s about learning that pleasure is sacred, that consent is essential, that your body gets a vote.

It’s about what it means to be alive in a world that wants us performing, numbing, hiding, or extracting.

So if you’re tired of performing. If you’re carrying shame about your body or your desire. If you’re wondering why intimacy feels so hard. If you’re realizing that what you were taught didn’t prepare you for real relationship.

This one’s for you.

Let’s talk about missing the intimacy that keeps us human. And let’s talk about how to get it back.

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The Whole Story

This post exists because a couple weeks ago, I woke up with my sacral energy, that sensuality and passion that is more primal than curated, buzzing like a swarm of bees. Not in a way that needed managing or suppressing, but in a way that wanted integrating.

I could feel it as a low hum, a warmth pooling in my pelvis. Not urgent. Not demanding. Just... present. Alive. It’s not unusual for me to feel that way, but on this morning it was particularly intense. And unlike decades past, rather than trying to make it go away, these years I aim to embrace the wisdom on Mantak Chia and cultivate it. Nurture it. Even expand it.

On this particular morning I sat with it in my morning ritual: one hand on my sacral center, one on my heart, breathing from my pelvis through my solar plexus, heart, and throat with the words, “I speak the whole truth of me.”

And what rose through that channel wasn’t shame. It was wholeness.

I let my hips move. At least as much as my 51-year old hips that are about as antithetical to Shakira’s as you can get can move. The goal was slow figure-eights, circles that felt like prayer. And while I’m not sure what an outsider would have observed, my body remembered something my mind had forgotten: that desire isn’t the enemy of holiness. It’s part of it.

“I allow desire. I am alive,” I whispered as my hips swayed.

Then I brought both hands to my throat, that vulnerable space where truth either gets spoken or swallowed, I continued: “I speak the whole truth of me. Sacred and wild, tender and free.”

And that’s when the resistance hit.

Not from my body. From my mind.

The “good boy” voice that’s been with me since childhood. The one that wants to conform so I don’t get in trouble. The one that invites me to be smaller so I can stay hidden in the corner. And this time, it combined with cultural awareness in attempt to get me to limit myself: You’re a 50-something straight white male. Do you really want to focus on sex and desire in a world shocked by the release of the Epstein files? A world where men who look like you have used sex to do so much harm? You? Twice divorced and still figuring out how to be in a healthy relationship, you?

And as abusive as it felt, there is a fairness to the question.

But then another voice rose. Quieter, steadier, rooted deeper: You’re contextually wise.

My partner, she invites this sacral-to-throat integration to show up as consensual possession and claiming. She asks me to speak desire plainly. To take what I want. To delight in our mutual aliveness.

With my friends, it’s playful raunchiness in contexts where everyone knows the game and consents to the banter. We’re real with each other. Unfiltered. Human.

In my grief work, be it funerals, coaching, breathwork or the creation of ritual, this same channel becomes compassionate truth-telling. The courage to sit with what’s uncomfortable, to name what’s real, to hold space for the unspeakable.

And in my public voice, like this one, it’s the willingness to address sexuality, embodiment, and desire with integrity. Not titillation. Not performance. Just truth.

The throat doesn’t need to speak everything everywhere. It needs to speak the right truth in the right context with the right people.

That’s not repression. That’s wisdom. That’s staying human.

As I continued through my ritual space I sat with the ancient texts. Like Ephesians 5:3-4. Ones the church used to beat me with, and sadly, ones I once used to abuse, “But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality… nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking.”

Except this time, I read it differently. This time, I wondered: what if raunchiness rooted in gratitude is actually holy? What if desire expressed with consent and context is a form of worship?

And then Thomas Merton’s words landed like a benediction: “For me to be a saint means to be myself.”

I realized something. My body was telling me the truth I’d been too afraid to speak for decades:

Erotic wholeness is not optional for staying human. It’s essential.

And purity culture tried to kill it in me.

The Golden Gate Bridge and the Tragedy of True Love Waits

When I arrived at the church in 1998, one of the first major events I was asked to organize as the new youth pastor centered around True Love Waits.

At that point, it was still relatively light. Just a “say no to sex before marriage” message. A commitment to honor God with your body. But by the time I was a few years into youth ministry, it had metastasized into a full theological system.

Multi-church gatherings for kids ranging from 7th to 12th grade. Mainstage events followed by breakout sessions where groups divided based on age and gender. We talked about purity, about guarding our hearts, about how sex was a gift from God meant only for marriage.

I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris became required reading. We had accountability groups where guys confessed their “struggles” with lust. We taught girls that their bodies were stumbling blocks, that what they wore could cause their brothers in Christ to sin. We framed desire as the enemy, not as information.

Purity wasn’t just about behavior. It was about thought life. It was about guarding your heart so completely that you didn’t even allow yourself to imagine intimacy until you had a ring on your finger.

The message was clear: Your body is dangerous. Your desire is a threat. The only way to be holy is to be sexually dead until the wedding night, and then, magically, to come alive on command.

After some “mishaps” earlier in my twenties, I’d recommitted myself to purity. I followed all the rules.

The Courtship That Wasn’t

I dated the way I was supposed to. We kept ourselves accountable. We set clear boundaries that kept us from even kissing until after the engagement, and not openly until our first kiss at the altar.

I married the woman I was supposed to marry. Not because I was deeply in love, not because we had built something together that felt like life, but because when you’re the youth pastor you’re supposed to marry the woman who spends every non-working and non-sleeping hour at the church.

We had a foundation of friendship. We’d spent a lot of time together in group settings. She thought I was funny. I appreciated her as a person. And according to the theory and theology, that was enough.

Here’s what I knew about her: her church involvement, her commitment to ministry, that we could laugh together in a crowd.

Here’s what I didn’t know: that she avoided conflict like it was contagious. That she carried trauma I couldn’t see. That she had no more framework for thinking about sex and sexuality than I did. I knew nothing about what her body wanted or feared. I knew nothing about mine.

I knew the surface church version of her. She knew the surface church version of me.

We didn’t know each other.

I had my doubts. I remember sitting in a coffee shop in the months before the wedding, reading about how things are different in Eastern cultures versus Western ones. The analogy offered said that in the West, we put a hot cup on a cold saucer, while in the East, they put a cool cup on a hot plate.

The idea was that we tend to start off hot and heavy and then cool with the familiarity that comes during life together, while they would learn to warm up to each other over time.

I went forward, trusting that the warming would come.

I believed that if I followed the formula, if I put in the right input, I’d get the right output. That’s what my theology taught me: obedience produces blessing. Do it God’s way and it will work.

There was a moment I could have walked away.

I remember it clearly. Shortly before the wedding, my parents came out to meet her. We were on a walk, and she was a few steps ahead of me. I looked up and saw her, and something in me whispered, What the hell are you doing?

I could have stopped. I could have been honest. I probably would have had to leave that church, find another job, start over somewhere else.

But I didn’t. I kept walking.

The Switch That Didn’t Flip

On the wedding night, you were supposed to flip a switch. All that dead, guarded, suppressed desire? It was supposed to become holy, joyful, mutual intimacy. Just because a pastor said some words and you signed a legal document.

It didn’t work that way.

The switch didn’t flip. Not for me. Not for her.

Because neither of us knew ourselves, we couldn’t know each other. And because we didn’t know each other, we couldn’t meet each other in that vulnerable, tender, terrifying space where intimacy actually lives.

The warming I’d hoped for never came. Maybe we had a few moments here and there where it felt like something close to connection. But mostly, we stayed cool. Lukewarm at best.

I don’t want to tell her story. That’s not mine to share. But I can tell you mine.

I didn’t know myself. I didn’t know my needs, my aches, my longings. I had no attunement to my own body, no language for what I wanted or feared. All I knew was that she seemed to trigger every wound I carried and leave every longing untouched.

And I’m sure, on her side, I did the same.

She wasn’t ready for any of this. Neither was I.

We tried. We really did. But you can’t build intimacy on a foundation of shame and obligation. You can’t suddenly trust your body when you’ve spent years treating it like the enemy. You can’t experience mutual desire when one person has been taught to suppress all longing and the other has been taught it’s owed to him.

It was tragic.

The Bridge

I remember one day when I was 26, I’d been married just a few months. Still in that early, delusional phase where hope overrides evidence. Still believing that if I just did it right, everything would work out.

It was this day where I led our youth group to San Francisco to join hundreds of other teenagers for a True Love Waits march across the Golden Gate Bridge.

I remember the fog that morning. Thick and cold, the kind that makes the bridge cables disappear into gray. We walked in pairs as the cars rushed by. Someone at the front carried a banner. Parents who’d helped us drive down snapped pictures that would land in the next church newsletter.

We thought we were crossing into a new world. We were crossing into a trap we’d built together.

The tragic irony wouldn’t reveal itself for years. Joshua Harris, the man who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye, would eventually renounce the book and divorce. I would divorce. Twice.

As I look back on that season of life I realize I was trying to map my way through a relationship world I was never taught how to navigate. I was too nerdy to date in highschool. I only had one girlfriend in college. As I stepped into my role as a youth pastor, I was offered purity culture as the way forward. But purity culture didn’t prepare me for relationship. It prepared me for performance. It didn’t teach me intimacy. It taught me compliance.

But here’s the thing I’m learning: mainstream culture isn’t any better.

Whether you grew up in purity culture or hookup culture, whether you were taught to suppress desire or commodify it, the result is the same. We were never taught how to know ourselves. We were never given tools for building real intimacy.

We were taught to perform.

I’m sorry to her. For not being ready. For not knowing myself well enough to show up as a whole person.

I’m sorry to those kids. For teaching them a theology that would fracture their ability to trust their own bodies, to feel their own desire, to build real intimacy.

I’m sorry to myself. For staying in obligation when love was never there. For choosing the formula over the truth my body was trying to tell me.

And now, on this Valentine’s Day morning I find myself inviting all of us into something different:

Not performance. Not obligation. Not purity or sex-onomics. But erotic wholeness that keeps us human.

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What Our Culture Stole From Us

So what has our culture stolen from us?

Purity culture is one expression of a much deeper problem in how Western culture teaches us to relate to our bodies, our desires, and each other. Whether the church taught you to suppress sexuality or mainstream culture taught you to perform it, the underlying message is the same: you are not allowed to simply be human.

Your body is either a threat to manage or a product to market. Your desire is either sin or currency. Your relationships are either contracts of obligation or transactions of consumption.

Nowhere in this system are you invited to know yourself. To feel your own aliveness. To build intimacy rooted in presence instead of performance.

So let me name what we lost. Not just in purity culture, but in the broader culture that reduces us all to performers in a script we never agreed to.

1. We lost the integration of body and spirit.

Purity culture taught us that the body is a threat to the soul. That sexual desire is the enemy of holiness. That to be spiritual, you must be disembodied, especially below the waist.

But mainstream culture taught us the opposite extreme: that the body is all that matters. That sexuality is performance. That desire is something to optimize, not integrate.

I learned this viscerally. In those accountability groups, we’d confess our “struggles” with lust, and the prescribed solution was always the same: pray more, read your Bible more, stay busy, avoid triggers. Never once did anyone say, “Your body is telling you something true. Let’s get curious about what it’s trying to communicate.”

We were taught to “bounce our eyes,” literally trained to look away any time we noticed an attractive person. We were told to “take every thought captive,” which in practice meant we spent enormous mental energy trying not to think about sex, which of course made us think about it constantly.

The result? A generation of people who can’t feel their own aliveness without shame. We learned to live from the neck up. We became brains on sticks, disconnected from the very bodies God called good.

And here’s what neither culture told us: You can’t selectively numb sensation. When you shut down your capacity to feel desire, you also shut down your capacity to feel joy, grief, tenderness, delight. You don’t become more spiritual, you become less human.

And when you treat your body as a performance vehicle, when sexuality becomes about metrics and technique instead of presence and mutuality, you lose the same capacity. Different path, same destination: disconnection from your own aliveness.

2. We lost consent.

This one took me the longest to see.

Purity culture didn’t teach us about mutual desire, boundaries, or enthusiastic yes. It taught us obligation. The man was owed sex in marriage because that was his “need.” The woman was supposed to submit, even when her body said no.

In premarital counseling sessions across evangelical churches, couples were taught that sexual refusal was a form of withholding. That both partners had a biblical duty to meet each other’s needs. Pastors quoted 1 Corinthians 7: “The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.”

Duty. Not desire. Duty.

No one ever asked, “But what if one person doesn’t want to? What if their body is saying no? What if they’re tired, or touched-out, or grieving, or just not in the mood?”

The answer was implied: your body doesn’t get a vote. You made a covenant. You owe this.

But secular culture isn’t much better. It just flips the script. Instead of women owing sex as marital duty, women learn to use sex as currency. Give him what he wants physically in hopes of getting what you want emotionally. Trade your body for connection, attention, commitment. Or in the age of rampant seeking of Sugar Daddies, it’s your body for provision or luxury.

It’s the same extraction. Just dressed up differently.

Whether it’s Christian obligation or secular transaction, the result is the same: sex becomes something owed or traded rather than mutually desired.

I didn’t understand consent. Not really. I understood obligation and transaction. And when desire didn’t show up the way I expected, I felt hurt, rejected, like something was being withheld.

It never occurred to me that a body saying no carries wisdom. That “no” is valuable information about what someone needs, what feels safe, what’s actually mutual.

I’m learning this now, at 51, in a relationship that’s teaching me what I should have learned at 20: that consent is not just the absence of “no.” It’s the presence of enthusiastic yes.

That desire is not something one person gives and another takes, trades or earns. It’s something that arises mutually, that both people get to feel and express and honor in each other.

That “I don’t want to right now” is not rejection or withholding. It’s self-knowledge. And it creates space for “I do want to” to mean something real.

Whether you were taught that sex is marital duty, transactional currency, or casual no-big-deal, the result is the same. We were never taught that consent is ongoing, embodied, and sacred. That mutual desire is the only foundation for real intimacy.

And without that? There is no intimacy. Only extraction.

3. We lost curiosity.

Desire is information. It tells you what you long for, what you value, what makes you come alive. It’s a compass pointing toward beauty, connection, and delight.

Purity culture taught us to fear our own desire. To see it as something that would lead us astray. So instead of getting curious (Why am I drawn to this? What is this desire trying to teach me?), we shut it down.

Meanwhile, consumer culture taught us to fulfill desire immediately. Swipe right. One-click purchase. Instant gratification. No space for the slow unfolding that real intimacy requires.

Both approaches kill curiosity. One by suppression, one by satiation. And without curiosity, we lose the ability to be playful, explorative, vulnerable. We lose the capacity to discover ourselves and each other.

4. We lost the sacredness of pleasure.

Purity culture framed sex as duty, not delight. Procreation was holy. Everything else was suspect.

And consumer culture framed sex as commodity, not connection. Pleasure became a product. Orgasms became metrics. Bodies became objects to optimize.

I was taught that sex had three purposes: procreation, unity, and (distant third) pleasure. But even that third purpose was framed carefully. The “marriage bed is undefiled,” sure, but there was always an undercurrent of suspicion around pleasure for its own sake.

Especially women’s pleasure.

I don’t remember a single conversation in all my years of purity-culture youth ministry where anyone acknowledged that women’s bodies were designed for pleasure. That the clitoris exists for no other reason than to feel good. That female orgasm has no reproductive function. It’s pure gift.

Instead, the message was clear: men have needs. Women have duties. Sex is something women give and men take.

I carried that into my first marriage. I didn’t know how to ask my wife what she wanted. I didn’t know how to slow down, explore, be curious. I knew how to perform the mechanics (because that’s what marriage allowed), but I had no framework for mutual joy.

It wasn’t until much later (after divorce, after therapy, after a lot of unlearning) that I began to understand: the body was made for pleasure. God wired us with nerve endings that have no purpose except to feel good.

And that’s not incidental. It’s essential.

Because pleasure is presence. Pleasure requires you to be fully in your body, fully attuned to sensation, fully meeting another person in vulnerable openness.

Both cultures robbed us of sacred pleasure. One by framing it as sin, the other by framing it as transaction.

But here’s the truth: pleasure is incarnation. It’s what it means to be fully alive in your body, fully present with another person, fully meeting in vulnerable mutuality.

A culture without sacred pleasure, whether religious or secular, isn’t liberation. It’s just another form of control.

5. We lost the integration of passion and commitment.

Purity culture sold us a lie: that passion and commitment were opposed. That you either had wild, uncontrolled lust or you had covenant faithfulness.

Meanwhile, secular culture sold us the opposite lie: that commitment kills passion. That real desire requires novelty, not depth. That staying with one person means settling.

But real intimacy, staying human intimacy, requires both passion and commitment.

It requires the fire of desire and the rootedness of trust. It requires showing up to your partner not as a sexless saint or a controlled object, but as a whole person: longing, tender, wild, and free.

We were never taught how to hold both. Religious culture said choose commitment. Secular culture said choose passion. And both left us starving for wholeness.

What if Desire Is Sacred?

Here’s what my theology says now. It’s what I wish I’d known at 26, marching across that bridge:

Desire is not sin’s playground. It’s the compass of the soul.

The body is not an obstacle to transcend. It’s the sacred interface through which we encounter the world, each other, and God. Resurrection doesn’t deny the body, it affirms it. Jesus didn’t come back as a ghost. He came back embodied, with scars still visible, asking for food, inviting touch.

If God honors the body that much, then our sexuality isn’t something to suppress, it’s something to integrate.

And integration doesn’t mean “anything goes.” It means consent and context.

That morning, when I felt that sacral-to-throat activation, I realized something. My erotic aliveness doesn’t have one expression. It has many. And each one requires contextual wisdom.

The throat doesn’t need to speak everything everywhere. It needs to speak the right truth in the right context with the right people.

That’s not repression. That’s wisdom. That’s staying human.

Erotic Wholeness Keeps Us Human

Here’s the through-line I want to offer you this Valentine’s Day:

Erotic wholeness is not about “getting off.” It’s about staying alive.

In a world that wants to commodify your body, numb your longing, and reduce your sexuality to either performance or shame, to stay erotically whole is an act of resistance.

It means:

• Honoring the aliveness in your body without needing to act on every impulse.

• Feeling desire as information, not demand.

• Letting passion and commitment dance together, not war.

• Celebrating pleasure as a gift, not a transaction.

• Speaking your whole truth, sacred and wild, tender and free, in the contexts where it can be received.

Erotic wholeness doesn’t mean you’re always sexually active. It means you’re alive to your own longing. Awake to beauty. Willing to feel the pull of desire without collapsing into compulsion or shutting down into numbness.

It means your body gets a vote. Your pleasure matters. Your “no” is sacred. And your “yes” (when it’s free, mutual, and rooted in trust) is holy.

A Theology of Sex That Keeps Us Human

So here’s what I believe now, at 51, after two divorces and a morning ritual that integrated my sacral fire with my sacred voice:

Sex is not about procreation alone. It’s about connection, play, presence, and mutual aliveness.

It’s about two people showing up as whole humans: not performing roles, not fulfilling obligations, but delighting in each other.

It’s about consent as the baseline and curiosity as the fuel.

It’s about letting your body speak its truth and trusting your partner to hear it without fixing, shaming, or demanding.

It’s about pleasure as a form of prayer, because when you’re fully present in your body, fully alive to sensation, fully meeting another person in mutual vulnerability, that’s incarnation.

God doesn’t ask you to be disembodied. God asks you to be whole.

And wholeness includes your sexuality. Not as an add-on. Not as something you manage until it’s socially acceptable. But as a core part of what makes you you.

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What Now?

If you’re reading this and recognizing the wreckage of purity culture in your own story, if you’re realizing that you’ve been living from the neck up, performing intimacy instead of feeling it, or stuck in shame every time desire stirs, I want you to know:

You’re not broken. You were lied to.

And if you never had purity culture but grew up on the secular side, if you’ve been using sex as currency, trading your body for attention, connection, or the hope of commitment, I want you to know the same thing:

You’re not broken. You were lied to.

Mainstream culture taught you that your body is leverage. That if you give physically, you might get what you need emotionally. That sex is the price of admission for intimacy, the down payment on connection, the audition for commitment.

Maybe you learned to say yes when your body wanted to say no, hoping this time it would turn into something real. Maybe you performed desire you didn’t feel because that’s what keeps someone interested. Maybe you got really good at technique but lost touch with what you actually want. Maybe you gave your body away freely while your heart stayed locked up tight, because vulnerability felt more dangerous than nakedness.

Purity culture dressed extraction up as duty. Secular culture dresses it up as liberation.

Different script. Same disconnection.

The way back to wholeness doesn’t require you to blow up your life or abandon your freedom. It requires you to reintegrate: body and spirit, passion and commitment, desire and wisdom.

It requires you to grieve what was stolen. And then to reclaim what’s yours. That’s the way we stay human.

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Need Something More Personal?

The three practices below the paywall are powerful. Whether you take 60-seconds, 60-minutes, or embrace a larger transition, they are some of the same tools I’ve used to help me reconnect with my body after decades of disconnection. I believe they can help you too.

But sometimes, you need something designed specifically for your story.

Maybe purity culture didn’t just disconnect you from your body. Maybe it tangled itself around a specific trauma, a particular shame, a wound that needs its own medicine.

Maybe secular culture’s transactional script left you performing so long that you don’t even know what your body wants anymore.

Maybe you’re carrying something that needs more than a general practice. You need a ritual built for you.

That’s some of what I do.

I create custom rituals that help you step back into your body. Rituals that meet you exactly where you are. That speak to your specific disconnection, your particular grief, your unique path back to wholeness.

We’ll start with your story. What you were taught. What was stolen. What you’re longing to reclaim. And then I’ll design a ritual that gives your body a way to move from disconnection to integration, from performance to presence, from shame to wholeness.

Sometimes it’s breathwork. Sometimes it’s movement. Sometimes it’s a sequence you do alone. Sometimes it’s something you bring into relationship. Always, it’s yours.

If you’re ready for something designed specifically for your healing, book a custom ritual session here.

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