• Grace is freely given and freely available.

• A small, random act of kindness almost always lands bigger than intended.

• Grace and kindness linger longer than whatever preceded it.

Core Statement

Grace shared freely and randomly convert everyday moments into meaningful ones.

Why It Matters

First, some context. I woke up early to get some work done before sitting with a client in Seattle. An extra hot chai is a generosity I show myself when visiting coffee shops—locally and globally. Unfortunately, I knocked over my chai tea latte in this particular shop on this particular morning. A familiar rush of embarrassment, disappointment, and frustration spread through me as my drink spread across the table. The spill itself was not the important part. What mattered was how it was met. The woman behind the counter came over with kindness, understanding, and a lightness that had no edge of irritation in it. She didn’t just clean up the mess. She remade the chai exactly to spec and handed it back to me, and somewhere in that small exchange, my mood lifted along with it.

What stood out wasn’t the perfunctory service, but the feeling held with it. For a moment, I felt like the only thing in that room that mattered. Seen, heard, valued, for no reason other than she happened to be the kind of person who shows kindness freely.

That’s what I’ve come to think of as collateral grace. A smile, a gesture, a small affirmation or acknowledgment, a random act of kindness, a simple remade drink without conditions. When kindness is given freely, its impact almost always outweighs what was intended. The giver rarely knows how far the ripples of impact travel. And here I am, still touched by that everyday moment made meaningful.

Reflection Prompt
When is the last time you performed a random act of kindness? Can you remember the last time someone’s kindness landed bigger than intended? Did you let yourself notice it?

• Our bodies, minds, and souls are borrowed, not owned.

• The walls we build to protect old wounds also block the grace meant to reach us.

• Becoming love is the practice of receiving and offering grace without condition.

Observation

I was lying on my mat at Love Yoga in Whitefish on an overcast Sunday. The heated room was a welcomed reprieve from the uncharacteristically cold June weather. Anna was teaching one of her final classes before adventure called her and her family elsewhere. I laid down, one hand on my heart, one hand on my gut, and let the restorative practice slow everything down until what was buried began to surface.

What surfaced was a realization. Whatever separates us, the stories, the distance, the careful management of who gets close and who doesn’t, simply dissolved. I could feel something sacred inside and around me at the same time, with no clear edge between the two. The micro- and the macrocosmic stopped feeling like different scales of the same thing and started feeling like one. The material and the spiritual stopped competing for my attention. The invisible became entirely noticeable. An aura of grace enveloped everything in and around me, and whatever normally keeps us from God’s grace disappeared. Yoga means “to yolk” or “to unite” and this was simply that—a union of all things as one. Moments like these go by many names: samadhi, non-duality, consciousness, but grace feels most accessible to me.

Revelation

I started to appreciate that we walk through life as if we own what we’ve been given: our bodies, our minds, our life. But none of it is actually ours. A body is a tiny collection of cells, microorganisms, electrical impulses, and chemicals, borrowed from the stars and the Earth, working in a unison none of us designed and few of us notice until the noise quiets down enough to feel it. We are stewards of our bodies; we don’t own them.

The same is true of our minds, our emotions, our souls. The quality of a life depends less on what we are given or what we own, and more on how we steward it, through both the nurturing environments and the challenging ones too.

Meaning

For most of my life, particularly before sobriety, I did not know how to receive grace. Even when it was always available, I pushed it away—undeserving, foreign, unworthy. I pushed people away, severing relationships when they got tough, inconvenient, or uncool. I hid, from others and from myself. People saw a version of me they appreciated, but I never let them see enough to truly know me. I was certain that if I let anyone close enough to really see me, they would eventually reject me, so I left before they could or I pretended to be someone I wasn’t. (See also: Armor Up!)

I convinced myself that strategy made sense once. Protecting what was soft and delicate inside me to from being hurt. But it also meant spending years standing just outside of every relationship I was in, guarding a door that grace had been trying to walk through the whole time.

The work I have spent decades doing, helping people heal, started long before I understood what healing meant. I now believe an essential component of healing is recognizing the preciousness of what we have been given—this body, this life—and learning to be a good steward of it rather than a guarded owner. What I felt on that mat was what it might feel like to stop guarding the door entirely, even for a few minutes, and let the veil lift.

I call this Becoming Love. Not the love that has been bent and distorted by pain, the kind we earned or withheld or used as leverage, but the love that holds what is true and good and quietly guides us toward our next right action. It is a concept I have been developing, shaping, and stewarding over the past decades, and one I plan to share with the world shortly.

This month’s series is about grace, and the myriads of ways it shows up. Open your hearts, still your minds, and prepare yourself to receive the grace that abounds.

What to Carry Forward

• To be a blessing, we must share our blessings. We are borrowed from the stars and the Earth, remember that.

• The walls that protect us can easily imprison us.

• Becoming Love starts with learning to receive what we didn’t earn.

Reflection Question
What part of yourself have you been guarding so carefully it’s forgotten what it felt like to be nurtured, not just protected?

• The quality of our questions depends on our perspective.

• The questions we ask determine the outcomes we live.

Micro Prompt

Perspective is a choice, sometimes the only one. It determines if the questions we ask leave us feeling helpless to our circumstances, “Why is this happening to me?” Or if they offer clarity, “what is this asking of me?” Both begin with the same pain, but only one turns you into a creator.

Three Things to Consider

💭 Idea: Reflect on the hardest moments of your life. What does your perspective say about your orientation to that pain? A creator uses every adversity to grow. A victim relies on their circumstances to define their character. The only difference between the two is perspective.

📖 Read: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. The foundational text on how the story we tell ourselves about suffering determines whether it destroys or defines us for the better.

🎬 Watch: Inception by Christopher Nolan. If you can’t watch the whole movie (highly recommended) at least watch “an idea is like a virus“ clip. Thirty seconds; the metastatic story in its simplest form.

Closing Thought

The story that defines you was built one question at a time. So is the one that sets you free. The only difference between the two is perspective.

• Questions provide the leverage to build our own truth.

• Being given an answer robs us of the soul-stirring opportunity to find it ourselves.

• The right question does more enduring work than the right answer.

Hook

In all four Gospel accounts, Jesus asked 307 questions and gave 8 direct answers. He wasn’t being cagey or withholding information, but doing something more valuable.

Context

A Sunday sermon by Pastor Mark in Venice offered this data point, and it has stayed with me since. Jesus was less interested in transferring information than in stirring something in the people he encountered. He asked questions that required reckoning, invited reflection, exposed assumptions, and created conditions for genuine understanding rather than borrowed certainty.

How many times have you tried to help someone you love by giving them the right answer? Stay or leave, take the job or quit, handle it this way. And how often did the answer land the way you hoped?

Insight

When we give someone an answer, we bypass the process by which they would have arrived at their own truth. Information easily acquired rarely converts to knowledge. The discomfort of not knowing is indispensable to insight formation. Questions allow us to hold that tension long enough for wisdom to emerge.

Why does that matter? Because the stories we tell ourselves relates to the advice we offer others. The metastatic story thrives in the absence of clear questions. Asking “why is this happening to me” shuts the door on deeper inquiry. Asking “what is this asking of me” opens it back up. (See also: Eras Are Human, The Inner War)

Questions are the scaffolding that make all of it possible. Stories become the construction; choices become the function.

Application

Before turning to an answer this week, try offering a question instead.

Reflection Question

Is there a question you’ve been avoiding that, if asked honestly, might change the story?

• Many of us are living inside stories we never consciously chose.

• Awareness of the narrative is the first step toward changing it.

• The questions you ask determine the truth you find.

Theme

Before you can write a better story, you have to notice the one you’re already telling.

Mini Teaching

We don’t always choose our stories deliberately. They are often inherited, constructed under pressure, or transmitted from the people and environments that shaped us. By the time we recognize them, they feel less like stories and more like the ground we’re standing on. That is what makes them so difficult to revise: not that they are false, but that they feel foundational.

The practice this week is simple and uncomfortable. It is a short self-inventory built around the questions you are currently asking about the hardest parts of your life. Not the answers, just the questions. Because the questions reveal the story. (See also: Intentional Transitions)

Notice / Reflect / Try

Notice: which questions are driving your narrative. Pause them long enough to get to the original idea. Notice which feelings are expressed through this narrative, and which are not. Is there a different story you could be writing that leaves you feeling empowered?

Reflect: on the hardest parts of your life. What is the story you are telling yourself about those experiences? Are they helping you heal or worsen the injury?

Try: asking yourself open-ended, curious questions about the idea you’re holding around a painful event or your suffering. Does the narrative change or shift when you lead with curiosity? Is there a more generous interpretation of that idea that helps you heal rather than exacerbate the wound?

Integration

You don’t have to rewrite the whole story today. But notice what questions are driving the current narrative.

Reflection Question

What question are you asking most often about your hardest circumstance, and what does it assume about you?

• A story rooted in real pain can still become a distortion.

• Unchecked narratives spread through our thinking, feeling, and perception until they feel absolute.

• Feel the feelings, drop the story.

Core Statement

Every metastatic story begins with something real: a wound, a loss, an injustice, a fear. But the pain can also create the potential for a distortion to begin.

Why It Matters

Our minds create stories to make sense of the world. It is how we translate experiences, process emotions, share wisdom, and ultimately survive: physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. After a painful event, we reach for a narrative that explains what happened so we can assign meaning to it, often because our feelings feel unmanageable or naked without a story to validate them. This is both a flaw and a feature. The flaw arises when the story that takes root is rooted in our trauma—the conditioned beliefs and behaviors shaped by developmental pain. When the story stops being a response to pain and starts being the identity built around those feelings or ideas.

A metastatic story feels like clarity. It can feel like wisdom extracted through suffering. Our conviction says: I know what happened, I know who is responsible, and I know what it means about me and the world. It resonates truth because it grew out of something true. But somewhere in the growth, it began to serve our self-protection more than our actual understanding.

Left unchecked, it spreads. It colors what we perceive, shapes what we feel, and narrows what we believe is possible. It moves us from authority over our own lives toward a form of helplessness. (See also: Gentle Hands, Hold Your Past Lightly)

The way out is not to suppress the story but to recognize the distortion creating it. Daniel Boorstin said, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” A story cannot spread that has no fuel to grow. There are limitless interpretations that fuel our stories when looking outward instead of in. Stripping it all back, at the center of it all is a feeling. Pema Chödrön’s sagely advice, “feel the feelings, drop the story.”

Reflection Prompt

Where in your life does a story feel so certain, so true, that you have stopped questioning it?

• The story we tell ourselves after a painful event matters as much as the event itself.

• Victimhood is a posture the mind adopts for self-protection.

• The right questions lead toward clarity. The wrong ones lead deeper into the wound.

Observation

September 29, 2015 is a date I will carry for the rest of my life. It was the day my duplicitous, underground life was brought into the light. Not by my own conscience or courage, but by exposure. A woman I had encountered while working abroad revealed me, my actions, and my lies. Everything I had been hiding—the infidelity, the alcohol, the elaborate architecture of deception I had built to escape my life and myself—was suddenly visible.

My first response was not accountability; it was despair, followed by anger and injustice. I felt victimized, looking to hold other people accountable for the consequences of my choices. I wondered who was responsible for selling me out, replaying the string of casual affairs and drunken one-night stands throughout my marriage. I asked why me, why this, why now. Who else is responsible? The asking felt justified because the pain was so real. I didn’t grow up to be a cheating alcoholic because everything in my life went smoothly. Shaping my life and world view was a story of suffering, filled with wounding and shame, that preceded this moment. That narrative, and the questions I was asking in my discovery, fed a deep sense of victimization as I looked for others to blame: the women, a high-pressure work environment, my ex-wife, my childhood, my parents. But blaming everyone and everything took me further away from my pain, and further away from the truth.

Revelation

What followed was a long, pressured, and reluctant unraveling. My ex-wife’s unrelenting refusal to let me return to the shadows eventually forced me to take medical leave, admit myself into rehab, and sit inside a community of broken people who were asking the same hard questions I had been running from for years.

There I met a therapist, Omar Minwalla, who did something that changed everything. He did not give me answers but helped me face my stories, but this time asking different questions. These old stories helped me avoid accountability, soften their impacts, and preserve my ego. Over the years, I used every known tool of manipulation to keep them alive. With his help, I started to ask better questions, develop the resiliency to be accountable, and remove the tools of self-preservation that were keeping these stories of victimhood alive. I stopped asking why this was happening to me and started questioning what I was protecting. Not who is responsible, but what is true. The difference between those two sets of questions is the difference between a story that spreads and one that begins to heal.

Meaning

I call this the metastatic story. It is the narrative the mind builds around an idea after a painful event, born out of self-preservation, rooted in partial truths, and when left unchecked, capable of infiltrating everything: how we think, how we feel, what we believe, and even what is possible. The protagonist in the movie Inception, describes an idea as resilient, unquestioned, and even parasitic. Once it takes hold, it is almost impossible to eradicate without intention and effort. It bears the illusion of absolute truth even though, at its core, it’s a distortion.

My metastatic story convinced me I was the real victim. That my pain and suffering was greater. That my wounds entitled me to soothe them however I needed. None of that was entirely false, but neither was it entirely true. My pain was valid, but valid pain does not justify the harm I caused in response to it. Understanding our wounds is not the same as excusing what we do because of them. That was the truth I had to learn to hold, not instead of my pain, but alongside it.

Walking into that fire, asking the harder questions, and recasting my life around new values and new stories was not a single moment. It was, and remains, a daily choice. I asked recently in a LinkedIn post, “What is the lie you tell yourself to keep your heart safe?” A lie doesn’t have to look blatant; it just has to bear the semblance of truth. Getting to this core shame belief is not easy, it takes support, safety, and containment. If you’ve been struggling with your own metastatic story, please reach out to see how we can help.

What to Carry Forward

• The questions you ask in the aftermath of pain often shape what you will find.

• A story of victimhood can coexist with real pain and still be a distortion.

• You can hold multiple truths at once: your pain was valid, and it did not entitle you to harm yourself or others.

Reflection Question

What story are you currently telling yourself about the hardest moments in your life, and is it leading you toward clarity or deeper into the wound?

• Prayer is not meant to stay inside the church.

• Prayer is how we speak to Love, and play is how we go live it.

Micro Prompt

Prayer is often treated as something done in a church—from the pews, genuflected, hands clasped, in quiet contemplation. But prayer—private or public—was never intended to stay on the bench or the pre-dawn morning. It was meant to be carried outward: the first choice, the first interaction, or the first conversation. Prayer becomes the gift you give yourself and those around you.

Three Things to Consider

💡 Idea: The word pray and the word play are separated by a single letter. Prayer is how we return to the center of ourselves. Play is how we bring ourselves into the world. Prayer is how we speak to Love, and play is how we go live it.

📖 Read: The Enlightened Heart edited by Stephen Mitchell

This definitive collection of spiritual poetry gathers voices across 2,500 years of spiritual traditions and people—from the Upanishads and Lao-tzu to Walt Whitman and Rainer Maria Rilke. Perhaps prayer is just poetry spoken to and from the heart.

📺 Watch: Discovering the Power of Prayer with Tara Brach

From a psychological and mindfulness-based perspective, this talk beautifully explores the common ground between secular mindfulness and deep spiritual longing. Tara Brach discusses the universal human desire for connection that drives transformational prayer, looking at what we are actually reaching out to when we pray and how to cultivate a practice that feels authentic, regardless of belief system.

Closing Thought

Prayer is not the province of religion. It is the communication vehicle that strengthens the relationship of our choosing. Whether that is God or Love, our orientation can anchor us into a higher intelligence that rises above the tumultuous nature of the human condition.

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• The Lord’s Prayer offers a repeatable framework for honest, intentional communication with a higher power.

• Each movement addresses a different dimension of the human condition.

• You do not have to be religious to pray with intention and depth.

Hook

Most people who grew up in a church know the Lord’s Prayer by heart. In fact, many non-religious likely recognize it as familiar, too. Far fewer have considered what it’s actually teaching us about prayer, and fewer still have tried to make it their own.

Fair warning, we explore religious themes through both a spiritual and secular lens. The straddling of these two experiences is an attempt to find curiosity and respect for both worldviews, building bridges instead of walls.

Context

Jesus did not give his disciples the Lord’s Prayer to glorify Himself. He gave it to them as a model to avoid being a hypocrite, boasting about their piety, or speaking “many words” and “empty phrases”. Speaking to flex your vocabulary or fill rooms with noise is not a demonstration of honest, oriented, humble communication with God. Matthew 6:9-13 maps five distinct movements, each one addressing something the human heart consistently needs regardless of its denomination or orientation. I offer below an analysis for both spiritual (God) and secular (Love) dispositions.

Insight

Pray with confidence and worship. (Matthew 6:9) Begin by orienting yourself toward an ultimate power, not your problem. Worship is reverence for who you are speaking to as well as clarifying why that relationship matters. It is about orienting away from the wound and towards the source of healing.

Pray with peace and seek the wisdom of higher powers. (Matthew 6:10) Before you bring your will and agenda, ask what higher powers would do. This is the movement from self-direction to surrender, from my will to something larger and wiser than my own fear, preference, or limitation.

Pray with faith for what you need. (Matthew 6:11) Bring your actual needs, not the manicured, sanitized, or curated version you think you should want. As a requirement, honesty must precede the practice. Our hearts only open when we risk emotional exposure through both vulnerability and authenticity.

Pray with humility and confession. (Matthew 6:12) Name what you have gotten wrong with these three steps: introspection (take inventory), accountability (take responsibility), and humility (be willing to change). This is not self-flagellation or -punishment, but the clearing of the excuses, rationalizations (rational-lies), or walls erected out of self-preservation. It starts with the self and makes authentic connection possible, bringing accountability to ourselves and our relationships.

Pray with openness for authentic power. (Matthew 6:13) This is not power over our circumstances or other people. It is power with them. It’s the collaborative strength that comes from being in alignment with powers greater than ourselves—call it God or Love.

Application

You do not need to use these exact words. This is not a petition to change the Lord’s Prayer, a movement to avoid scriptural language, or anything other than an attempt to bridge spiritual truths to a wider audience. Focus on the intention behind this ancient wisdom—worship, surrender, honesty, accountability, and openness. These five movements can hold anything you bring and are not the exclusive province of religion. They serve as a relational map—one that works whether you are a lifelong believer, a questioning skeptic, or someone with a different belief system.

A Prayer to Love

Our Love, which flows through all things, hallowed be your nature. Your presence come, your will be done, in my heart as it is in all creation.

Give us this day what we truly need, and forgive us the ways we have withheld love from others, as we forgive those who have withheld it from us.

Lead us away from the smallness of fear, and deliver us from the stories that keep us from you.

For yours is the infinite heart, the boundless light, and the power that holds all things together, now and in every moment we choose it.

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• Fasting is not about abstinence from food, but abstinence from distraction.

• Fasting from distraction creates the inner stillness necessary for honest prayer.

• The quietude of early morning is one of the most accessible and underused spiritual resources available.

Theme

Before you can speak honestly, you must be able to hear clearly.

Mini Teaching

When most people hear the word fasting, they think of food. Or rather, the lack of food. But fasting is more than what we don’t eat. At its root, fasting is the deliberate removal of what competes for our attention so presence, clarity, and receptivity can arrive.

My morning practice begins before the dawn does. There’s no phone, no noise, no lights except the fireplace. The house is quiet in a way it will not be again for hours. That silence is a necessary ingredient for my prayer practice. Stillness is less about the absence of sound than the clear receptivity it allows. It is the threshold that allows honest prayer, honest thought, and honest feeling to become possible. (See also: Stillness Is the Common Path, Activate Your Stillness)

Fasting from distraction is simple in concept, but not always easy to execute. It removes the cacophony of noise that keeps the mind preoccupied—the news, the notifications, other people’s urgencies—and creates a space where something subtly can be felt or heard. Contemplation requires time and space. Receptivity and attunement require presence. Intuition, the kind that actually guides us rather than reacts for us, does not compete well with a crowded mind or a “noisy” room.

Prayer spoken into the noise is still prayer. But prayer spoken from stillness lands different. It may feel more honest, more present, and more open to what is communicated back. The static of our daily lives is not benign. It shapes what we think, how we feel, what we assume we know, and what we believe is possible. Fasting from it, even briefly, allows for something clearer to emerge.

Notice / Reflect / Try

This week, before you pray, meditate, journal, or simply sit with your thoughts, subtract something first.

The phone, the computer, and the electronics are a must—put them or yourself in another room. If you can, sit before the sun comes up. Light a few candles. Avoid playing any music. Give yourself the gift of five minutes of nothing before you ask for or offer anything in your prayers.

Notice what surfaces in that space. It may first be the active mind filling the space with its own internal noise. It may be the thoughts or worries you were trying to avoid. Just because it arrives doesn’t mean you have to follow it. Talk to your higher power—your heart, to God, to the universe—and ask them to take this noise away from you. The discomfort of early stillness is just the beginning; a reminder that you are human—not an indicator that something is wrong. The more you communicate with your higher powers, the more they will conspire to work with you.

Integration

Fasting doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t need a retreat, the perfect morning or space, a rocking chair or a fireplace. It only requires that you arrive before the day does and give yourself the quietude that honest prayer benefits from. Creating the proper conditions supports both the work and the intention.

Reflection Question

What do you think you would hear, or feel, if you subtracted the noise before you started speaking?

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• Sacrifice and thanksgiving can create a connection to eternity at any moment.

• Thanksgiving is the hard, private practice of returning to what is true and good even when circumstances are not.

• Prayer is how we carry this covenant outward.

Core Statement

Most of us tend to wait for the right conditions to be fulfilled before we can be grateful. We expect our will to be done before we can appreciate what life offers and delivers. Gratitude is not just the feeling that follows good circumstances, but rather a practice we bring to all circumstances. A heart oriented toward sacrifice (service) and thanksgiving (gratitude) creates ripples of impact that echo into eternity. It is the deliberate and consistent choosing to define itself by faith and action rather than reluctance or passivity.

Why It Matters

Anxiety is the looping prison of a reality that doesn’t exist. A fictional story conjured up in our minds and played on repeat. It happens because of our distress of the unknown or deep care for a specific outcome. When present, it creates tunnel vision, focusing our aperture down to a perceived threat, a gap in knowledge, or a thing that is wrong, missing, or unresolved. Unchecked, it pulls us inward and downward, tightening around the wound or worry until it becomes our whole story.

Philippians 4:6 offers one of the most psychologically precise instructions in scripture: “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” This series is about the power of prayer, but it is worth noting the importance of thanksgiving. Thanksgiving does much of the heavy lifting in the context of prayer.

Thanksgiving is the practice of gratitude. It makes who we are, what we have, or where we are, enough. It asks the mind to hold what is present alongside what is difficult, and in doing so, disrupts the vicious cycle of anxiety. This is not your typical gratitude practice, bulleted journal entry, or hashtag comment. It is the hard, private practice of returning to what is true and good even when circumstances are not, before they are okay, or reveal no indication of ever being okay. The only requirement is to look honestly with intention for peace and right action in what may come.

[Image: eternity tattoo]

I tattooed this on my body as a daily reminder. In every moment, you can create eternity by choosing sacrifice (outward act) and thanksgiving (inward disposition of the heart). Prayer is the carrier to declare this covenant. A practiced reorientation to define ourselves not by our wounds but by the infinite source our wounds have kept us from reaching.

Reflection Prompt

What would change if thanksgiving came before the request, rather than after the relief?

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• A promise is a covenant made to the future.

• To swear is to pledge allegiance and fealty to truth.

• Prayer is how we honestly and humbly communicate both in sacred relationships.

• 💛 Summer promotion: scroll (or read) to bottom 💛

Observation

We were in a Friday Power Sculpt class at Love Yoga in Whitefish. Our teacher Amanda was hyped up, building the room’s energy, and reached for two words at once. She meant to say “promise” and “swear” and what came out instead was “prayer.” She laughed it off as we laid on our backs preparing for the sweat session to start, but the words stuck with me. It kept resurfacing while on the mat, so I turned to my wife and said, “promise plus swear equals prayer. Help me remember that.”

A promise is an intention directed toward the future. To swear is to bind yourself to truth or responsibility. Prayer, as I’ve come to experience, is the act of offering both in communion with something larger than ourselves. It is not just a practice or internal monologue, but the conscious act of building a relationship. And like any meaningful conversation, it requires the right “partner” to converse with as well as honesty, accountability, and a willingness to be changed by what you hear back.

Revelation

My relationship with prayer started shortly after traveling to Uganda. Tami and I spent a week in Kaihura with Will and Sandy Bredberg and the extraordinary community built by Faith Kunihira at Bringing Hope to the Family. What I witnessed there, and what I wrote about in an earlier piece, was joy in the presence of material scarcity. What was abundant was a spiritual richness—gratitude without condition, connection without distraction—that unified the community into a chosen family.

Coming home, I felt the weight of the “modern” world’s discontentedness, insecurity, restlessness, and frenetic anxiety. The insatiable appetite for more alongside a persistent sense of lack felt even more present than it had before. As my pastoral mentor and friend, I asked Will about it and what to do. Our conversations in Uganda and after about life, spirituality, and faith reconnected me to something I had forgotten was absent.

I wanted to talk to God. As much as I was “spiritual,” I hadn’t really bothered to talk to God since I left my inherited Catholic roots. I didn’t want to pray because things were hard or out of desperation, but to try and connect to something absent in my life. Something that brought a level of contentedness, joy, and peace in those with limited material resources. My goal wasn’t to communicate, but to connect. To open a bidirectional line from my heart to His. Like any relationship, what is neglected withers. What is ignored is deprioritized. A relationship without communication weakens.

This was a relationship I had been neglecting without fully realizing it. I wasn’t yearning for religion; I was yearning for connection to a higher power; call it Love or God.

Meaning

My grandfather Emil J. Moos was a pious man. In his recliner in Lincoln, Illinois, next to the TV remote and his book of jokes, he always kept his rosary. The feel of the beads and smell of the leather bag that holds them still brings me back to the living room in his house. He prayed the way some people breathe, steadily, without announcement, as though it were simply what you did when you were alive and paying attention. Fifteen years after my grandpa’s passing, I was fortunate enough to be gifted his rosary by my stepmom who had been using it for her own prayers.

I started praying in the morning. Beginning around 5:00a with a daily devotional, my rosary, a cup of tea, my rocking chair, the fireplace and our dog, Daisy. I pray, about any tensions and joys in my life, my day ahead and those past, what I am grateful for, what I am struggling with, anything. I speak openly, humbly, and honestly—the way you speak to someone you trust or yearn to trust.

Meditation is the yin to prayer’s yang. Meditation is how we listen to God. Prayer is how we speak to Him. Together they complete a conversation that most of us never learned we were allowed to have. Trapped underneath or behind religious doctrine, prayer was a theological ordinance and not something accessible to secular lives.

The research on prayer is consistent: regular prayer reduces anxiety, lessens loneliness, and orients the mind away from rumination and toward presence. I know this firsthand as my existential distress around dying slowly disappeared anchored into a higher power. Similar to last month’s series on “laughter”, prayer changes how we hold what we cannot change. It does not remove suffering, but it can reorient our experience and perspective of it. It can remove our distress around the things in our lives we can and cannot change.

Many of us define Love and God by the traumatic or wounding experiences around it. But these wounds are keeping us from connecting to the higher powers and intelligence available to us all. Prayer is one of the most direct paths back to accessing that sacred wisdom, bypassing the gatekeepers of doctrine or denomination. We need to uncomplicate our path back to a relationship with Love or God. That repair starts with an honest, clear, and humble pouring out of our whole heart.

What to Carry Forward

• Prayer is part of a conversation that most of us never learned we were allowed to have.

• You can pray to God, to Love, to Creation, to whatever you hold as larger than your own fear.

• A regular practice of prayer prepares you for the joys and trials of the human experience.

Reflection Question

Who or what do you speak to when facing fear or uncertainty?

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• Laughter regulates the body and resets the mind.

• Humor interrupts overthinking, catastrophizing, and tunnel vision.

Micro-Prompt
If you’re stuck in your head this week, this is your cue. Laughter is one of the fastest ways out.

Three Things to Consider
💭 Idea: I am a self-proclaimed laughaholic. I laugh at human nature, my own mistakes, my wife’s shenanigans, our kids’ personalities, and just about any joke, including my own. I laugh too loudly at movies—an inherited familial trait I proudly embrace. I love and laugh at bad puns. I never realized it was so healthy. Embrace your inner laughaholic.
📖 Read: Something that once made you laugh uncontrollably. A book, an old text thread, a ridiculous email chain. Yes, even if it’s ridiculous. Calvin and Hobbes would always do this for me.
🎧 Watch: Five minutes of something absurd. No multitasking or background activity. Full commitment—grab the popcorn, turn off your phone, and luxuriate in it.

Closing Thought
Health includes joy, play, and laughter—take the dose!

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Hook
We track biomarkers and habits for predictors of longevity, and yet, no one tracks how often we laugh.

Context
I can tell you my resting heart rate. I cannot tell you how many times I laughed last week. But most people can see the nature of my heart by the kindness of my face, my words, and my smile. Laughter paves the way for the gentleness of my heart to be shared and shown freely.

The research literature shows something quite startling:

1. People who laugh less than once a month have nearly double the mortality risk of those who laugh weekly.

2. Older adults who laugh almost every day have lower rates of functional disability.

3. Watching something genuinely funny improves vascular function.

4. Social laughter improves pain tolerance.

This is not about mood; it’s about longevity. It’s a direct correlation between the dispositions our hearts and our own cardiac morbidity and mortality.

Insight

When we laugh:

· Internally:

o Blood vessels dilate

o Stress hormones drop

o Endorphins rise

o Muscles relax

o Parasympathetic nervous system activation shifts us out of threat mode and into relaxation and flexibility

· Externally:

o Nothing changes.

o Circumstances are undisturbed

o Responsibilities stay the same

o Bills remain

o Diagnoses stand

o Conflicts persist

But the dispositions of our heart become more willing, flexible, and adaptable. Laughter is not about escape; it’s physiological nurturance. Adaptable systems overcome and endure.

Application
If laughter were a health metric, how consistent would you be?

Reflection Question
What would change if you treated laughter like medicine instead of an afterthought?

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• Laughter is spontaneous, but always accessible.

• You do not have to wait for permission to be amused.

• Shared and solo laughter both strengthen resiliency.

Theme

We often treat laughter like an accident. But it can and should be cultivated intentionally.

Mini Teaching

My wife, Tami, talks to herself constantly. Then she smiles. Then she laughs. Then I laugh. She’s completely entertained by herself, and me with her. There is no dialogue, no audience, and no interaction—it is simply the playfulness of the mind and relating to herself positively, purely, and playfully. She is her own best friend, and it’s one of the most endearing things about her. I relish the moments when I spot her lips moving when she thinks no one is looking. “Who you talking to?” I’ll ask. “Myself!” she sweetly replies.

My laughter is as containable as water through a sieve. I laugh at everything, including things that don’t always land for other people. It doesn’t matter. The goal isn’t performance, it’s self-orientation. Laughter signals something to my mind, my heart, my body and to the room: we are safe enough to play. We are unapologetic and unabashed by our humor.

We don’t have to give up our laughter just because we need to grind through something with our full attention. Two things are often true, and the presence of one doesn’t extinguish the other.

Practice

Today, create laughter on purpose. Try one or more of these:

• Text the person who makes you laugh hardest and tell them you want to get silly.

• Rewatch a scene that has made you laugh before—not something new, something historically golden.

• Make a joke in a moment that feels slightly too serious and notice what shifts.

• Laugh out loud at something mildly funny instead of suppressing it.

• Tell a self-deprecating story that is actually safe and playful, not shame based.

• Spend two minutes narrating your own life like a nature documentary.

Give the critical, judging parts of your mind the day off. Invite in the parts of your personality that yearn to play and be seen.

Integration

If nothing else changes this week, let your laughter be more frequent than your restraint.

Reflection Question

The next time you feel tension or seriousness arrive, identify the beliefs that keep you from laughing or reaching out for play. Is there an old story that is keeping you from joy?

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I want to introduce you to someone special, who has joined the Soul Surgeon team and whose work I believe is going to make a real difference for the people we serve.

Deb Zalon is a certified performance coach with a Master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, and she is now our Preparation and Integration Specialist. What makes Deb particularly well-suited for this role is a combination that is genuinely rare: she has the relational depth to sit with difficult emotional material and the structured, accountability-driven approach to help people move from insight to durable change. She is especially skilled at identifying the recurring patterns that persist even after breakthrough moments, which is exactly where most healing stalls. She is also a mother of five, and she brings a groundedness to this work that no credential can fully capture.

You can learn more about Deb on the team page at soulsurgeon.com/team.

Why Preparation and Integration Are Not Optional

In my model of care, a psychedelic journey is not a standalone event. It is the middle of a process. What surrounds it determines much of what becomes possible inside it, and nearly everything that becomes lasting after it.

Preparation is not paperwork or a checklist. It is the deliberate work of creating the inner conditions for a meaningful experience. This means clarifying intention, surveying the emotional and relational terrain, building nervous system readiness, and establishing the foundation of safety, transparency, and trust that makes it possible to go inward without bracing against the unknown. The goal is to make the unfamiliar as familiar as it can be, so that when the medicine opens the door, you can step through it rather than stand at the threshold.

A 2025 study in Psychedelic Medicine from Johns Hopkins and NYU examined psilocybin’s effects in professionally trained clergy from four major world religions. These were psychedelic-naïve individuals who had spent decades in spiritual formation, a sustained, intentional practice of self-examination, meaning-making, and deepening their relationship to purpose and connection. After their sessions, the vast majority reported experiences among the most spiritually significant of their lives, with positive changes persisting through 16 months of follow-up. We are not suggesting that result is guaranteed for anyone. What the study implies, and what I believe, is that a prepared mind, one that has already built a flexible and practiced architecture for meaning-making, tends to receive a psychedelic experience more fully and translate it more durably. The medicine met people who had spent years cultivating the very conditions preparation sessions are designed to build. That is not incidental.

Integration is where the journey becomes your life. Research from Gül Dölen’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins, published in Nature in 2023, demonstrated that psychedelics appear to reopen critical learning periods in the brain, windows of heightened neuroplasticity that were previously thought to close in early development. During and after a psychedelic experience, older conditioned patterns of thought and response become more malleable. This window does not stay open indefinitely. Integration is the practice of working skillfully within it, translating what was felt and seen in a non-ordinary state into new choices, new responses, and new ways of moving through your actual life. What I call Post-Psychedelic Embodiment, the deeply felt incorporation of new understanding into who you actually are day to day, requires the right support during this period to take root. Without it, even the most profound journey tends to remain a meaningful memory rather than a lived transformation.

Working with Deb

Deb offers three structured packages designed to support you through the full arc of a psychedelic journey, as well as individual sessions if you need focused support at a specific point in the process.

Foundation Integration — $575 1 preparation session + 2 integration sessions

A focused container for one psychedelic journey. The preparation session orients you to the work ahead: clarifying intention, identifying the emotional and relational material most active in your life, and building steadiness before the experience begins. The two integration sessions help you make sense of what emerged, place it in the context of your daily life, and begin translating insight into action.

Deepening Integration — $950 2 preparation sessions + 3 integration sessions

For those who want more space to work with the emotional, relational, and behavioral patterns that a journey can surface. The additional preparation time allows for more thorough priming and mapping before the experience, creating a stronger foundation to return to afterward. The three integration sessions give the experience room to keep revealing itself across layers, moving between inner understanding and real-world application while the brain’s receptivity is still active.

Full Arc Integration — $1,300 2 preparation sessions + 5 integration sessions

Designed for people who want enough continuity to work with the full impact of a journey, not just the acute experience but the patterns it disturbs, the new responses it makes available, and the gradual process of making those responses feel natural and stable. Five integration sessions provide the repetition and sustained support that durable change actually requires.

Individual Sessions — $200 / 50 minutes If you are not ready for a full package, or need support at a specific moment, preparation and integration sessions are available individually.

To schedule with Deb or ask questions, reach out at heal@soulsurgeon.com.

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• Laughter shifts physiology without denying reality.

• Small daily doses improve resilience, adaptability, and decision-making.

• Laughter is best shared with good company.

Core Statement
If laughter were a supplement, we should all be tracking our daily intake.

Why It Matters
We live in an era where everything is trackable, measurable, and observable: sleep, calories, macros, biomarkers, screen time, and so much more. But rarely—if ever—do we ask: how often did I laugh this week?

Large cohort studies suggest that people who laugh weekly live longer than those who laugh rarely. Daily laughter correlates with lower disability risk. Ten to fifteen minutes of genuine laughter increases heart rate and blood flow in ways comparable to light exercise. In other words, laughter is good medicine. Shared amongst our peers, its relational medicine, too.

But here’s the part we forget; laughter does not require denial. It does not pretend life is easy. We don’t lose permission to laugh when life is sad, serious, or stifling. Instead, it simply softens the grip of seriousness long enough for perspective—and higher cognitive functioning—to return. It is a nervous system reset disguised as silliness and play.

So for the sake of your heart, nervous system, relationships, and overall wellbeing, consider this your prescription: microdose laughter every 15 minutes or as needed for stress, overwhelm, and life’s absurdity.

Give yourself permission to watch something ridiculous. Call the friend who makes you laugh uncontrollably. Let yourself laugh too loudly in public without apologizing or censoring yourself. Notice how your body feels afterward. Notice the sides of your mouth lifting upward like branches of a tree reaching for the light.

The best news, no script, copay, or pharmacy is required for this heart medicine.

Reflection Prompt
What would change if you treated laughter like a daily practice instead of an occasional moment?

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• Laughter disrupts the tension of life’s circumstances without distorting reality.

• Play broadens our perspective and interrupts perfectionism.

• Joy and seriousness are allowed to coexist.

“If necessity is the mother of invention, play is the father.”

- Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative.

“You can learn more about a person in 1 hour of play, then 1 year of conversation”

- anonymous, falsely attributed to Plato.

Observation

I laugh a lot. In fact, it’s a defining characteristic. I am known amongst friends as the person who laughs at all things—bad puns, good jokes, joyful moments, even the terrible ones. I don’t laugh to trivialize the severity of a moment, but to bring levity into the seriousness of life.

When I met my wife, she was smiling and laughing. I have often said, “it’s as if all of the Earth’s joy is surging through her body.” She has a disarming, slightly crooked smile, welcoming eyes, a face that can light up a room, and together, we laugh constantly. Our home is loud, playful, occasionally inappropriate, and rarely solemn for long. We find humor in trivial things—parenting missteps, our own intensity, and even our deepest hurts. Our children often roll their eyes, but they always join in on the fun. It would be easy to mistake that disposition for avoidance or immaturity, but it’s not.

Some of my most meaningful clinical moments were created through laughter. I remember sitting with a dear friend and client in the middle of her profound existential distress. We had moved through grief, fear, questions about purpose and mortality. At one point she paused, and deadpan said, “life doesn’t have to be so serious.” The laughter followed. That deep, freeing laugh that reminds your Spirit that it’s free. We spent the next several hours laughing about the absurdity of being human.

Nothing about her circumstances changed. But everything inside her shifted. She felt lighter, unburdened, and liberated. Her shoulders relaxed, breathing slowed, and vision expanded. In that moment, by inviting in laughter, her life, her perspective, and her vision changed.

That moment—and specifically—that sentence has stayed with me ever since.

Revelation

There is a difference between denial and disruption. Denial distorts reality; laughter interrupts our identification with it.

When we laugh, the body responds—blood vessels dilate, muscles relax, endorphins release, cortisol lowers, social bonds strengthen. Large longitudinal studies have shown that people who laugh regularly have lower rates of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality than those who rarely laugh.

The research validates what I think we all naturally know. Laughter is good medicine. It frees us from the shackles of our perspective, loosens the grip of perfectionism, and unlocks the prison of reputation management. It allows us to see ourselves not as projects to perfect, but as humans participating in something messy and alive.

I often laugh at serious moments, not to trivialize them, but to stay grounded within them. Laughter reminds me that I am not the center of the universe, nor the sole architect of outcomes. It’s the permission that leads us out of catastrophizing, disrupting our vicious cycles before they distort our reality and skew the perspective of our circumstances.

The ancient wisdom of the Old Testament acknowledges this eternal truth, “A cheerful heart is good medicine” (Proverbs 17:22). The New Testament reminds us to “count it all joy” when facing any trial (James 1:2)—not because suffering is amusing, but because endurance forms something deeper within us…resilience.

Meaning

Laughter is play expressed and shared. It’s infectious in the air, spreading faster and further than the cleverest microbe. There is nothing childish about it. In developmental psychology and evolutionary biology alike, play strengthens flexibility, adaptability, and survivability. It is rigidity that causes stress, strain, and fracturing.

Seriousness can quietly harden into self-importance. We begin to believe every misstep is catastrophic, every awkward moment defining, every failure permanent. But laughter breaks that spell.

It allows us to laugh at ourselves instead of worshiping our image. It invites silliness, which keeps us grounded and humble. It creates relational warmth, signaling “everything about this moment is okay.”

As a family culture, we lean into this. We tease kindly, we exaggerate our flaws, and we celebrate ridiculousness. It does not diminish maturity or responsibility but rather humanizes it.

Joy and suffering do not have to be opposites or antidotes. They can sit at the same table because laughter does not betray truth, it helps us bear it.

What to Carry Forward

• You are allowed to laugh in serious times.

• Levity is a practice, a right, and a responsibility.

• Play keeps the heart young, nimble, and adaptable.

Reflection Question

Where can laughter soften tension without losing sight of what matters?

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Key Takeaways

• Every life unfolds in seasons.

• Honoring a season doesn’t mean clinging to it.

Micro-Prompt
We move through eras whether we name them or not. Pausing honors when a season is ending and another is beginning.

Three to Consider
💭 Idea: You can honor a season without trying to stay in it. The friendships, identities, roles, and versions of you that once fit were not mistakes. They were chapters.
📖 Read: Ecclesiastes 3:1 “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
🎧 Listen: Taylor Swift, “Never Grow Up.” *Play a song that brings you back to a moment in your life — a first kiss, a first love, the summer before leaving home. Let it surface the nostalgia. Play it and honor it.

Closing Thought
Bless the season that shaped you. Step gently into the next.

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Many of you have been patiently waiting for an update that I promised was coming shortly after the start of the year. But, life had other plans.

In the time since then, we have been fortunate to bring our work to you personally and privately, in your homes, sacred spaces, and temporary habitations. We’ve had the privilege of meeting with you in LA, other cities and states, and in other countries.

And now we are approaching the final few weeks before we welcome our first clients back into the new Sanctuary. This cottage/bungalow is a smaller space, but beautifully designed by my wife, and showcases some familiar comforts. Many of you may recognize the white cloud couch. We are now located in Venice, just a few short steps behind Blue Bottle Café on Abbot Kinney.

If you are interested in our work, we are now finally ready to host clients in our space starting April 13th. My schedule is particularly full over the coming weeks, but we do have availability if you’re interested now or in the future.

Because of the downsize, we are likely going to limit capacity to individuals, couples, and possibly smaller groups. We are just waiting for the final pieces of furniture to look at our capacity. If there are requests for private offerings and groups, we are still able to bring our work and medicine to other spaces, rentals, and private retreats.

If you’re curious, please reach out. Send us an email at heal@soulsurgeon.com, visit our website, or send us a text at (424) 415-9112 using your phone, Signal, or WhatsApp. We’d love to show you the space when we have time. We’d also relish the privilege to participate in or continue to be an ally on your healing path.

With love and light,

John Moos, MD aka Soul Surgeon