Quiet Reflections and Prayers
As I looked back
on the long journey,
the thought came
that if I had to choose
a place to start again,
I would go back
to the first time
I was moved
to trust
my own heart —
when there was nothing
left to try
except to drop everything
and find out
what was left.
I would start again
from there.
— Laurie, What Now
Sometimes prayers
become wordless —
when there are
a million words
in the heart,
but not one
to match
the rawness
of emotion felt.
And so I offer
my deepest silent
prayer
to the place
of peace
in us all
in this moment
and the next.
And I honor
our steps
as we find our way.
— Laurie, What Now
I wish to reflect
all that is soft,
to offer my love
to all that is not —
to remind us
of the sacredness
of the journey
and the beauty
in the transformation.
— Laurie, What’s Right Here
There is a love
that reaches
to the wounded place
inside.
And there is a love
that flows
because it has touched
this reaching —
needing only
to express
its unending gratitude
for its own embrace.
— Laurie, Heart Space
The shifts toward greater alignment with my heart were painfully subtle at times, but I learned that movement is movement. I found any amount of flexibility in my mind and body could be held and carried into more movement and more gentle guiding of unaligned fragments of Self back to the center of my deepest heart — in each moment.
There was a continuous movement within the stillness of my true Self. It was the softening of all parts of me that had felt separate and lost in repetitive cycles of emotional pain.
I had reached the place of enough is enough and decided to find my way to tenderness. Tenderness came out of the realization I was reliving the exact same old pain I had vowed to never feel again. It came out of the last bit of gathered strength to try one more time to hold and honor it instead.
One day I got it that life isn’t supposed to get completely sorted out. I understood there is always a place of unsettledness. Who’s to say what and how much to sort through and surrender and how much to leave alone in the transformative state of raw tenderness?
I couldn’t help but look back on all the time and energy spent trying find someone or something to help me out of the mess in my head. I thought of all the countless dramas I had acted out in my life in hope of a solution to this unresolved trauma — my piece of the collective suffering.
Then I got it that at any point I could have seen that I was okay with where I was (because of course I was more okay than I knew). I could have identified with the healer in me, the totality of all of the parts of me that had struggled to find relief — not knowing they didn’t need to go it alone.
And so in that moment, I vowed to not waste one more bit of energy doing things that only tired me out, including all useless kinds of thinking. I vowed to keep my heart open to the quiet prayer within.
Sometimes enough is enough.
The silence of my true Self was always there. Even when the world around me and within became noisy and my body wasn’t still at all — the underlying silence never left.
For a while, parts of me did their best to survive. The noise created in my mind served as a way to focus away from attempts to sort out what couldn’t be processed completely from that place. Had I been able to access more highly consious parts of me, I would have been shown a gentler way.
In truth, I was shown this gentler way, but needed to reach a place where I could hear more clearly. I needed to step out of that seemingly separate and fractured self.
There, in the sacred space of my true Self, instead of struggling against parts of the whole, I became healer of my own heart.
I learned to look for the light in every experience, no matter how dark it looked at first glance. It meant being willing to not know exactly how situations would transform, while knowing they would in fact transform.
It meant being willing to be still in my heart and diligent with thoughts while daring to place my feet in the world of form.
There was a delicate softening — the transformation into tenderness. Tenderness spilled over again and again from the ever-present quiet prayer within my deepest heart.
Laurie's Notes 