Welcome to Jhanurji Healing,
Beloved one.
Take a gentle breath,
Let the body settle,
And feel the light in your heart begin to rise,
Soft,
Steady,
Remembering.
This reflection is called Light that Remembers,
It's about what it means to stay in love without turning away from truth.
I've been sitting with a lot lately,
Words from teachers I deeply respect,
And the parts of me that both agree and ache.
Lisa A.
Romano once said,
When we're being fed fear,
We're being taught to dissociate from our center.
If you can obey the light,
You'll live a life full of light and abundance,
And when people tell you how terrible the world is,
Be very cautious.
Why spread fear when you can spread faith and hope?
And I feel that.
Fear can hijack our nervous systems,
It can steal our peace,
It can make us forget the truth of who we are.
But the world is hurting,
Not just in concept,
But in flesh and lineage.
People are suffering from systems,
From history,
From power,
And some of us,
Myself included,
Have lived our lives inside that pain.
As someone who has been historically excluded,
I don't have the luxury of pretending the world is fine.
My body remembers what it's like to be unseen,
Unheard,
Unsafe.
And I know that's true for so many others,
Those whose skin,
Gender,
Body,
Or story have been marked as less than.
So when I hear turn away,
Something in me resists,
Because for people like us,
Turning away can sound like being erased,
Like silence dressed up as peace.
Then I listened to Hugh Byrne last week.
He spoke about engaging with compassion and living with joy in troubled times,
About the bodhisattva,
The one who awakens yet chooses to stay until all beings are free.
And that moved me deeply,
Because maybe that's what obedience to the light really means.
Not closing our eyes,
But opening them wider,
Wide enough to see the pain and still choose love.
And maybe the point isn't to turn away from the world's suffering,
But to walk toward it differently,
To carry light that remembers where it's been stolen,
To hold both consciousness and justice,
Energy and embodiment,
Love and truth.
Because light that forgets history becomes blindness,
But light that remembers,
That kind of light can heal generations.
But there's something else I've been feeling,
Something that lives deeper in the collective body.
For so many of us who have been historically excluded,
What's happening in the world right now isn't new.
It's the same story we've lived for generations,
Fear,
Division,
Injustice,
Only now more people are starting to feel it.
And part of me aches at that,
Because we've been saying it all along,
We've been showing the world what oppression feels like,
What it does to the heart,
How it fractures families and futures.
When pain belonged to us,
To poor,
Brown,
Black,
Queer,
Unseen people,
It was dismissed as our fault.
Now that the same systems are cracking wider,
People are finally calling it crisis.
And there's a sad and holy irony in that,
A sickness we haven't yet named,
And I don't have all the words for it yet,
Only a feeling that this reckoning we're living through is asking everyone to finally feel what those living beneath hierarchies of worth have felt for centuries,
What those crushed beneath white supremacy have carried in their bones and bloodlines.
And maybe that's part of the healing too,
That the world is being initiated into our pain so that at last we can begin to heal it together.
And maybe there's a soul reason behind it all.
Maybe some of us chose to come here this way,
To live inside the stories the world calls margins so that we could help heal them from within.
I know my being gay isn't random biology.
It feels like part of a soul contract,
A way to learn unconditional love in a world still learning to love.
Maybe black and brown and indigenous souls who have carried centuries of harm are also carrying the codes of restoration,
The wisdom of what the world forgot.
Sometimes I imagine the soul saying,
I will go where love has been exiled.
I will remember it there.
If that's true,
Then every act of acceptance,
Every time we refuse to pass the pain,
Isn't just human healing,
It's soul evolution.
The lessons keep circling until the light inside them is seen.
Last year,
I shared a video by Brian McLaren.
He said,
Something is dying.
Something is trying to be born.
What is being born is not as loud and angry as what is dying.
You can feel it.
It's being born in you.
And I feel that,
That quiet birth inside all the noise,
That tender,
Steady pulse beneath the grief,
Maybe what's being born is a light that finally remembers,
A light that refuses to forget who has carried the darkness the longest.
And I don't say this with bitterness.
I say it with hope that those of us who have carried the weight for so long can now help teach the world how to carry it differently,
With more tenderness,
With more truth,
With more love.
Because love that forgets history becomes denial,
But love that remembers,
That's the kind of love that can change the world.
That's the light I follow.
The light that remembers.
The light that stays.
As you rest here,
Feel your breath as a bridge between your light and the world's ache.
May your heart remember that love is the strongest in the places it was once forgotten.
May your light be the kind that remembers and stays.
Thank you.
