THE CLIMB: WHAT WOULD THAT FEEL LIKE

There are people in your life who are owed an apology — and something else entirely. Something most people have never named. Something that sits on the other side of the amend, quieter than the apology and just as necessary.

This week I found that other side.

---

## I. The Call

Amends, as most of us understand them, move in one direction. You go back. You acknowledge the harm. You make it right as best you can. That is real and it is needed and it is not the whole story.

What came to me this week is that most people you owe an amend to from the heart — the ones where the harm runs deep because the connection ran deep — those people are also the ones who built you. The same relationship that left a wound also left something else. Something that does not cancel the harm but exists alongside it with equal truth.

I call them the life-changers. Not the muses — though those matter. Not the inspirations. The ones you look back on and know, with a certainty that comes from somewhere below thought, that you would not have become the person you are capable of becoming without them. They may have brought pain. They may have brought suffering. And their pain and their suffering — the shared experiences, the hard seasons — those were the path. To freedom. To light. To love.

They are more than you can honestly ever put to words. You just know it. That deep knowing from the soul.

And here is what I have learned: even if the human in front of you cannot fully receive what you are giving them — even if the pain you caused them is still too present, still too heavy — their soul feels it. The giving does not require a particular reception to be real.

Both sides of the amend are owed. The acknowledgment of harm and the acknowledgment of building. Most of us only give the first half.

---

## II. The Fracture

There is a part of me I have been circling for a long time. A creative part. A loving part. The one who wrote letters and sang and poured himself into the people he cared about with a fullness that was hard to explain and harder to sustain.

This week he finally showed himself to me fully. Not sitting nearby — fully present, fully seen, face and all. He has been there through everything. He was there through the hardest passage of the ceremony two weeks ago. He was there in the conversation where a young part of me was told he did nothing wrong. And this week, for the first time, he trusted me enough to let me see him clearly.

Through him I was shown the two relationships that shaped what I know love to be. What they gave me. How they supported and loved regardless of circumstance. How my soul saw them and treated them and wanted for them. I wrote them letters. I sang to them. I gave them everything I had.

And then the fracture — the moment the story I had been telling about those relationships changed direction entirely.

I have always said they took me as far as they could take me. That morning I understood for the first time: it was not them. I took them as far as I was capable. Something in me — the truest part — knew when to let them go so they could become what I had always seen in them. I was not ready to go further. I was not yet the man who could continue to build them toward what they could fully become.

That is a harder truth to hold than the comfortable version. And it is the more honest one.

It was him all along. That part of me. Giving love outward with a completeness he had not yet learned to give inward. Giving others the love I was trying to give myself now.

---

## III. The Forge

The morning after — the fog had to clear before anything else could arrive. I sat in it. I breathed through it. Partway through I told myself: it is okay, this is just a day of clearing.

And then it came.

Through the Jaguar walking — not elevating above the hard times but leading through them — I was brought to a presence of light. The message was not complicated. It did not require decoding.

Ease their suffering. You are here to ease their suffering. Find a way.

Not from a position of elevation. Not as a healer standing above the work. As a humble servant seeing the pleasure of what that service does for people. Seeing what it does for them. That is the true gift — not what comes back, but the joy of the giving itself.

And then the last message before I opened my eyes and began writing:

This is not just in meditation. This is with your eyes open. This is as you are living.

I had not fully believed that before. I had known it. I had written about it. I had not felt it as available to me in the ordinary moments of an ordinary day. That morning the door opened.

---

## IV. The Collapse

Within twenty-four hours the eyes-open living was tested.

Not in ceremony. Not in meditation. In the ordinary situations that were already present — a relational situation I had known for some time was not aligned, a pull toward someone who activated a very familiar and very wounded part of me. Both naming themselves as tests. Both asking the same question underneath all the surface detail:

Do you love yourself? Are you settling? And if you are settling — why?

The worthiness wound does not only live in ambition and financial goals. I learned this week that it lives in relationships too. In the pattern of moving from one to another just to have someone present, knowing they are not the right fit, taking what is available rather than what aligns — because some part of you believes that is all you are going to get.

That is the wound in relational form. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just the quiet settling that happens when the belief in deserving has not yet fully caught up with the vision of what is possible.

The heart knows something the ego does not. My heart knows no tests. My heart does not care about my past. My heart does not react from fear or from story. My heart simply acts for what is best for it.

The work is learning to access that in the moment. Not in the chair with everything set up perfectly. In the conversation. In the situation. When the test is actually happening and the ego is working hard and the pull toward the familiar is real.

Ease their suffering. And turn that inward. Ease your own.

---

## V. The Return

What does life feel like without the weight of perception?

Not what does it look like. Not how does it appear. Not what will others see or think or say. What does it actually feel like?

That distinction — feel versus look — arrived this week as the clearest and most practical teaching I have found. Because every question I had been asking was a look question dressed as something else. Should I do this — look. Is this the right path — look. What will this become — look.

There is only one question worth asking and it comes from the heart. Not the mind. Not the stomach. Not any other part. The heart.

Take a breath. Ask your heart: what would that feel like?

That is the whole discernment practice. That is LAF at its most elemental. Listen to the heart. Allow what it answers. Follow where it leads.

And then turn it outward. Because the work that begins inside is the same work that happens with anyone you sit with — a client, a friend, a family member, a stranger who needs to talk. You are not there to control how they receive what you offer. You are not there to deliver a message in a way that produces a predetermined response. You are there to help them find their way back to their own heart. To free them from perception. From look. And give them feel.

That is the practice. First with yourself. Then with everyone else.

---

## VI. The Walk

Saturday morning. The candles lit from the ceremony. One specifically — for a journey of compassion and grace I took once — took a little longer to blow out.

That was the message.

Give yourself compassion. Don't forget.

It is easy to forget. The outward momentum builds — the mission, the family, the calling becoming the career, the building that has been directed to begin — and gradually, quietly, the practice pulls away from its source. Ease their suffering pointed so completely outward that the internal tending quietly stopped.

This morning the weight lifted when I remembered where it all started. Not in ceremony. Not in a vision. In me. In the relationship I am building with myself. In the recognition that I still need to heal, still need to grow, still need the attention and the love and the compassion I give so freely to others.

Where you came from is not a neighborhood. It is not a city or a specific place or a chapter of your life you are supposed to honor. Where you came from is your heart. It is where you have always existed. It is where you will continue to exist once you leave this earth — your energy, your soul. That is the origin. That is where you return when you get lost.

Don't forget yourself. You cannot fight for something so hard that you lose the place you came from.

And taking care of yourself is not always a grand gesture. It does not always arrive with a vision or a ceremony or a dramatic breakthrough at the end of it. Sometimes it is quieter than that. Sometimes it is just a breath and a decision.

Sometimes it is just the conversation that needs to be had.

---

What would that feel like?