I was well into my late-thirties before I made my first visit to a therapist’s office. That afternoon, I pulled up in a Range Rover, dressed from head-to-toe in a slick, black suit that had been tailored to perfection. I didn’t walk into his office so much as I strutted, sitting myself down in his overstuffed armchair and looking him straight in the eyers.

“I just need to know what love is,” I said, hoping we could wrap this up in under the 50 minutes I’d booked. “I’ve been told I don’t know what love is, but if you can tell me what book to read or what schematic to study so I can learn it, I’m happy to do that. Oh, and what form of payment do you accept?” I asked, reaching for my wallet.

Matching me gaze for gaze, he said, “I can’t help you.”

There was a slight pause.

“But I have money,” I said.

The hint of a grin formed around his mouth. “I can’t help you,” he repeated. But, he said, he knew a woman who could.

Catherine was a little old lady who ran a counseling practice out of her upstairs spare bedroom. For two years we met in that upstairs spare bedroom, once a week, studying the past and patterns of my life like it was going to be on the final. She taught me things about myself that I never knew. Sometimes she’d spend the entire session holding me while I sobbed. It was deeply intense work—the kind of work I never even knew existed.

That was my waking-up process.

Then, practically the moment I was finally awake and aware, Catherine retired. Fuck, I thought. What now?

That’s when I met Gena.

“I sit with people,” she said the first time I met her. An Episcopal priest with expertise in contemplative prayer and mindfulness, that’s literally what she did. Twice a month, for an hour a-piece, you could make an appointment to sit in Gena’s small, seafoam-walled office that was entirely empty except for two chairs, facing each other, right in the center of the room. One chair was for her clients, the other for Gena. You sat. She sat. Then… nothing. Just silence.

“Well, that sounds awful,” I thought.

But I sat with her.

In the beginning of my work with Gena, all I wanted to do was retell all my old stories: my life, my childhood, my suffering, my questions about everything I wanted to know, but didn’t.

“All totally irrelevant and unnecessary,” Gena would gently say. I can’t count all the times she had to tell me that before it finally started to sink in.

But it was there—in that sitting, in that silence, in that little empty room with the seafoam walls—that I learned to create. I learned to tell myself a different kind of story: One about who I am, and where I really come from, and the deepest truth of myself. I remember thinking, You just shut up and sit. That’s it. If you do that, slowly but surely, the answers you’re looking for start to reveal themselves to you.

Have you ever taken the time to really sit down and create a vision for your life?

If you have, are you showing up for that vision, every single day?

Is your vision one that supports you in embodying loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity?



How might your life change, if it was?