This is the miracle of who we are

More than 30 years ago, in what seems like another life, I trained in Swedish massage. Like so many other things, I kinda fell into it, but it turned out to be the place I needed to be just then. It was a small group — just four of us, randomly thrown together by this class — and so it generated the kind of closeness that feels almost miraculous.

I thought of that kind of miracle this morning. The every-day kind. The kind we don’t notice until we can’t believe we didn’t.

The instructor for our massage class was an energy-healer, and I was most definitely a skeptic. I think all four of us were at some level. Even so, when she asked if we would be interested in knowing more about her energy-healing work and maybe even try to do it, we all said yes. I don’t remember much from the actual work, but I remember her instructions clearly. As we went through exercises of holding and sensing energy, she said, you don’t have to believe in any of this. You just have to feel what you feel.

I have come back to the wisdom in those simple words many time during my life. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I took them to heart in any operationalized way. I have lived for decades in my head, overthinking, over-intellectualizing, believing that I somehow needed to “know” with my brain before I could believe with my soul or do with my body.

But the words have stayed present, and have come up as a clear memory at various times. They came to me again in the words of a coach not so long ago, who asked me to follow the wisdom of my integrated self. “Ideally, you’d ‘know’ everything the way you know you are hungry,” he said: “Fully. Not questioning, just knowing it with your body, mind, and soul.”

This is the miracle of who we are, of what we can be, if only we let ourselves. The fact that we already know. There is no need for water-into-wine or walking-on-water type of miracles.

We are already there.