• 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?

• 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.

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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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Key Takeaways

• Witnessing life’s transitions expands our capacity for empathy and meaning.

• Healthy change still carries grief, even when nothing is wrong.

• Transitions are sacred thresholds between who we were and who we are becoming.

Observation

I found myself unexpectedly emotional watching the season finale of Stranger Things. It wasn’t the monsters or the plot twists, but the unfolding of the final scene. Five children, tested by adversity, honoring their innocence one last time before stepping into something more complex. The camera lingered just long enough to sanctify the moment.

Not long after, I watched Taylor Swift’s The End of an Era docuseries move through her Eras tour, consciously honoring each chapter of her life and artistry. Album by album, she revisited former versions of herself. Eras marked by adversity, creativity, and kinship. Themes that feel deeply human: growing up, new love, heartbreak, reinvention.

These were cultural moments, easy to dismiss as entertainment. Yet something in me stirred.

Then I look at my daughter: senior in high school, college applications submitted, anxiously awaiting the letter determining where she spends the next four years. Conversations lean into the future, abandoning the present. My thoughts shift from “when she grows up” to “when she leaves.” Nothing has happened, and yet, everything has changed.

Revelation

What moved me in those moments was not nostalgia, it was witnessing. When we watch people move from adolescence into adulthood, when we watch an artist move from one era into another, when we watch our children stretch toward independence, we are confronted with the fragile, beautiful truth of becoming.

Transitions are thresholds. They mark the space between who we have been and who we are about to become. They hold the past in one hand and the unknown in the other. In witnessing them, we are also returning to ourselves. These thresholds calls us back to our own lived experience.

Even healthy transitions carry grief. Not because something has gone wrong, but because something has mattered. We grieve not only people, but roles and identities. We grieve seasons and their rituals. We grieve places, like the way a house once sounded. We grieve the version of ourselves who was needed in that moment.

Meaning

There is real power in witnessing humanity without trying to control it.

We live in a culture that rushes through thresholds. We are encouraged to optimize and reinvent without looking back. Yet something in us longs to pause at the doorway.

Witnessing is what makes transitions sacred. It transforms change from disruption into meaning. When we allow ourselves to feel joy and ache at the same time, we expand our heart’s capacity. Our empathy deepens. Our understanding of our own story softens with gratitude.

I am reminded of this every time I look at my children. I see the innocence of who they were and the resilience of who they are becoming. I see it when I look in the mirror or at my wife. We were children once, carrying our own stories, hardships, joys, and transitions. We contain multitudes, and hardship can integrate into wisdom. In bearing witness to their growth, we grow. It’s humanity’s beautiful feedback loop ensuring each generation heals and grows with the next.

Our past does not have to imprison us; it can liberate us. When relationships and families hold our stories lightly, with reverence rather than rigidity, we are free to write new chapters without erasing the old ones.

Transitions are not problems to solve. They are invitations to feel.

What to Carry Forward

• Honor the thresholds in your life instead of rushing through them – yours or theirs.

• Allow joy and grief to coexist without interpreting either as a challenge to solve.

Reflection Question

What transition in your life is asking to be witnessed rather than managed?

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Key Takeaways

• Stillness is a shared doorway across mystical traditions.

• Healing emerges through reconnection and patience, not achievement or control.

• Love may be the most accessible language for the infinite we’ve lost touch with.

Observation

Religion has become polarizing–some people believe, others don’t. As Rumi wrote, “out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Away from the debate, something quieter and more human is unfolding. People are turning back toward mysticism, spirituality, and faith not out of nostalgia, but out of a yearning, a spiritual hunger. Logic, data, and explanation have taken us far, but for many, they no longer satisfy the deeper questions of meaning, belonging, and purpose.

We live in a culture optimized for productivity, distraction, and hyperindividualism. Implicit in this culture are the ideas that worth is measured, attention should be fragmented, and reputation is a project to manage and improve. Somewhere along the way, many have lost touch with something infinite. Call it what you want: nature, the cosmos, the divine, Source, Spirit, God. If the mere reading or utterance of those words makes you recoil, you are not alone. For the sake of this exploration, you can call it Love. What’s missing is not a belief system, but a lived connection to the unconditional infinite. A “God-shaped” hole, unsatiated by material achievement or consumption.

Revelation

Two recent encounters converged for me, sparking a revelation. Science spoke to me through a peer-reviewed study showing that people who reported stronger mystical-type experiences during psilocybin-assisted therapy showed more profound and lasting improvements in treatment-resistant depression. The elements of these experiences were consistent: a sense of unity, awe, deep knowing, and sacredness. Healing tracked not just with chemistry, but with a feeling of transcendence.

Biblical scripture was the other catalyst. Psalm 46:10 reads, “Be still, and know that I am God.” It’s a frustratingly simple command. Stop. Listen. Let go of control. Stillness is not inactivity, but an essential condition to prepare the body, mind, and soul, sharpening our capacity to hear those extrasensory messages: intuition, inner intelligence, clarity…God? When the mind softens, perception widens and clarity unfolds.

What struck me is how universal this instruction is. Hinduism speaks of stilling the fluctuations of the mind. Taoism teaches non-striving. Buddhism practices calm abiding. Jewish mysticism emphasizes self-nullification. Sufism returns again and again to remembrance. Mindfulness teaches conscious awareness. Different worlds, same doorway. Stillness is the invitation, the opportunity, and the path.

Meaning

Mystical experience is not about escapism. It is a return to wholeness–a reconnection of our fragmented selves–that modern life rarely affords. Psychedelic experiences don’t create this truth, but they can reveal what has been culturally suppressed: that healing is not about fixing what’s broken, but remembering what, or where, we belong to.

My own path reflects this. I was born into religion, turned away from it, and placed my faith entirely in science. For a long time that felt sufficient, until it didn’t. Over years of travel, clinical work, relationship, loss, suffering, love, and growth, an internal reconciling grew. Stillness became a space I revisited over and over again to find clarity, alignment, and peace. It occupies one of the five conditions of my humanistic model of care. Not as an empty ideal, but as a lived practice. Stillness is sacred and precious, allowing the ego to loosen, intuition to return, and love to materialize out of abstraction.

Love, for me, has become the most honest translation. If God feels distant or charged, love is always accessible. Infinite, unconditional, connecting. The thing we keep reaching for through productivity, validation, consumption, and distraction, yet perhaps always feels just out of reach.

What to Carry Forward

• Stillness is an active practice of connection, not withdrawal.

• What we yearn for cannot be earned, optimized, or consumed.

Reflection Question

What becomes possible when you invite stillness instead of holding on to control?

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Key Takeaways

• Peace originates in the places we’d prefer to avoid.

• Healing requires courage over comfort.

• Light reveals what needs repair.

Observation
Christmas arrives wrapped in the language of light and peace. Each year, we return to familiar scenes of warmth and softness. In remembering Christmas from the Christian perspective, there is a passage from the Bible (Luke 2:29–32), where a holy man blesses the infant Jesus acknowledging Him as the salvation and light. But just a few lines later (Luke 2:34–35), he adds a warning we rarely hear at Christmas: salvation will bring division, and the truth of many hearts will be revealed. When we hold this message as story rather than scripture, the pattern is familiar. Healing doesn’t mean comfort. It uncovers what needs to be seen before peace can take root.

That tension shows up often in my work. Clients come wanting immediate relief, clarity, and wholeness. What they don’t expect is that healing can begin with disruption. Old memories percolating to the surface. The slow roar of dormant feelings begins to emerge. Old patterns rooted in survival are finally confronted and questioned. It can look (and feel) like things are getting worse when we’re finally moving toward what is true.

Revelation
A surgeon cannot restore what’s failing without first seeing what’s beneath the surface. Even the gentlest intervention requires full visibility. The anatomy and its pathology must be revealed before anything can be repaired. The same happens in our inner world. We want peace, but we often want it without the discomfort required to reach it.

In clinical spaces, I’ve supported clients stepping bravely into this moment. Hoping for ease and calm, they’re met instead with the truth–their pain and suffering–they’ve been carrying for years. Truth isn’t punishment; it’s the first step toward relief. I know this from my own life as well. My journey to wholeness started with something I didn’t want to acknowledge. A pain finally named, and a suffering that began to resolve. The turning point came only when I stopped trying to protect myself from the truth and let it do its work.

Meaning
This is the heart of the Soul Surgeon metaphor for me. Healing is not passive. It’s an act of care that may start with discomfort but moves toward wholeness. Light isn’t only something that warms; it also reveals. My signature, “with love and light” speaks to both. Love reminds us of what is infinite within us. Light reveals the truth about our purpose and meaning. Together, they invite a peace that grows from integrity and lived truth.

As we move through the holidays and into a new year, this feels like the work ahead. Not the pursuit of ease, but the pursuit of truth that makes real peace possible.

What to Carry Forward

• Let the season’s light illuminate what needs care, not just what feels good.

• Choose the kind of peace that grows from honesty, not avoidance.

Reflection
What truth is asking for your attention so you can step toward real peace?

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