The right way.

What is the right way? Where is humanity headed? These are not new questions. Most people ask them at least once a decade, usually quietly, often in the dark. I have asked them too. And I have learned that the answer rarely arrives as a sentence. It arrives as a recognition.

My childhood was a spiritual one — though I didn’t have that word then. Long summers at our family cottage, magical hours with my brothers, a kind of perception of the world that felt entirely ordinary to me. School was where I learned, with some surprise, that other people did not see what I saw. I went quiet. So quiet that my teachers, at one point, questioned whether I could speak at all.

I felt other people’s states acutely. To walk down the aisle of a bus or a train was almost unbearable — the emotional weather of strangers landed in my body. Sometimes it made me physically unwell. For a long time I thought this was a defect. Later I learned it was an instrument I had not yet been taught to tune.

Adulthood became a long, patient training of that instrument.

Anthroposophy first. Healing work. Eastern meditation. Years in India, in Egypt, in the Andes. Zone therapy, beginning in 1985 — the most clinical of my disciplines, and in many ways the one that taught me the most about the body’s intelligence.

And then there was Christjan. My son, born in 1992. Premature, deaf at first, with seizures that lasted five years. There were nights I sat with him on the floor while he asked me — in his own way, in the language a child of that age has — whether he could leave. The Earth, he said, was too hard. I sat with that, and I sat with him, and I worked with everything I had been trained in.

Christjan is thirty-two now. He lives in Jutland, runs his own business, and has built a life I am quietly astonished by. He found his right way. It was not the way the medical literature had predicted for him.

So when people ask me what the right way is, I tell them this. The right way is the one where you can feel every cell of you holding a small celebration of joy. Not constant ecstasy. Just recognition. The body saying yes, this fits. We are built to live lives our cells recognise. Most of us are not living those lives. That is the work — the slow, ordinary, daily work — of coming back into a body that can carry you.

If something in that paragraph caught your breath, you already know. Sit with it. And if you would like company in the sitting, you know where to find us.

— C.M.

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