Lessons from the Lady with the Lamp
By far the greatest gift of my work as a therapist is that while I hold space for others, my clients richly bless me with life lessons in return. A beautiful human chose me as their therapist last year and it is with her permission and her daughter’s blessing that I share some of the lessons I learned from her. She wanted so much to share her story and inspire others and had begun work on a blog she entitled The Lady with the Lamp. While my words fall woefully short of her magnanimous spirit, I hope to share a fraction of her wisdom.
I met our Lady a while after she received a difficult cancer diagnosis. She told me in our first phone call together about her journey learning about her diagnosis and choices she made seeking holistic care and then chemo. For the next leg of her life journey, our Lady understood she needed to go back to the past to heal from trauma that continued to impact her body, mind, and spirit.
I learned quickly how truly tenacious our Lady was as we worked together. She relentlessly pursued learning about trauma and the body and then went about uncovering painful wounds her system had long since hidden away. She bravely examined her own life patterns and showed up for each session raw and vulnerable. She sometimes wailed and screamed and moved her body as she let her system unlock pain, showing me that true strength can be loud and exposed and scary sometimes. What I understood about trauma in an intellectual way became flesh and blood and bone.
I was a witness to our Lady’s healing, watching her tiny frame and quiet voice grow louder and stronger even as the disease ebbed and flowed. She began to shed long-held patterns of people pleasing and used her voice in ways that sometimes surprised her, allowing anger in to set needed boundaries and advocating for every inch of her body and her autonomy. Our Lady never quit pursuing information for her treatment, challenging the medical system and trusting her body’s impulses and sensations even when doctors told her no or pushed back against her wishes.
In our Lady’s life journey, she opened herself spiritually, embracing many forms of energy medicine and becoming a student of sacred sound, flower essences, and vibrational medicine. She joined my spiritual trauma group and expanded every single group member’s consciousness with her insight and knowledge, teaching us about quantum physics, entanglement, and all of her beautiful observations of our natural world. She became an evangelist of sorts, leading others around her towards their own spiritual path while pursuing her own personal spiritual connection.
Our Lady began to reframe and examine life’s hardships as teachers, transforming continual experiences with mold in her life to growing awareness of what had become swampy and stale and a needed lesson in assertion. She understood parts of her cancer progression as areas of her body she continued to hold emotional pain and toxicity. Moments of pain became signs from the Universe of love and teaching. She experienced parental loss, multiple moves, complicated relationships, and continuous pain during our time together. Self-doubt and questioning occurred but never deterred her from a larger message of hope and universal love.
Our Lady didn’t focus much on her ending in this space and time, choosing instead to notice every present moment and spiritual message. We discussed the spiritual meaning and message in a blade of grass, a lovely insect visitor, synchronous timing with our themes in session. She feared pain and the end of her life but focused her energy and attention on learning all she needed to here, grappling and struggling with conflict while finding joy and meaning in all things. Our Lady declined suddenly, days after continuing to research clinical trials and alternate supplements. While her physical body has but precious moments left in this lifetime, she pursued healing to the ends of the Earth and beyond.
I grieve my Lady with the Lamp’s loss acutely and with awareness that she created ripples of awakening in my life and so many others she encountered. I take with me the absolute knowledge that she did not enter my life by happenstance, but by divine intervention beyond my understanding. She taught me to pay attention to spiritual messages all around me, to use my voice even when the words are painful and hard, to find meaning and love in crisis, to pursue gratitude in all things.
As I drove to say a final goodbye to this precious Lady today, I started listening to Brandi Carlile’s new album and knew immediately I was meant to hear this song and these words today. I shared the song with her and held her for a while, drinking in her physical form one last time. May the Lady with the Lamp light your path towards healing, strength, and love in all things. May her voice and power resonate and connect you with the universal and cosmic love she radiated. May her story of intergenerational healing expand outwards in its depth and breadth. May it be so.
And here are our Lady's own words in a special prayer she wrote for our group:
Today, I stand in the grace of seeing myself clearly.
I am no longer hidden behind the shadows of fear or shame.
I welcome the truth of who I am—whole, growing, and deeply worthy of love.
I feel the current of life moving through me. With each breath, I am carried by a rhythm far greater than my pain…a rhythm that knows healing, that knows peace.
I surrender to this flow, letting it wash away the residue of the past.
I release all toxicity—old patterns, false stories, wounds that once claimed space in my soul. They no longer define me. I bless them, and I let them go.
In their place, I invite peace…I welcome joy, love, and clarity…
I root myself in this present moment…alive to possibility, open to becoming.
I thank the universe for the grace that guides me..for the truth that sets me free…and for the healing that unfolds with each step I take.
Brandi Carlile, Returning to Myself
Is there some freewheeling watcher
Shootin' marbles in the sky?
Holdin' your ears between their fingers
Watching it burn 'til the fire dies
Why is it heroic to untether?
How is a lonesome Holy Grail?
And if we really come and go unknown
Couldn't I find myself in jail?
Oh, keeper, how I love you
I love you and you and you
And returning to myself is such a lonely thing to do
But, it's the only thing to do
Is it evolving, turning inward?
Oh, what an easy way to be
Only kneeling at the altar of
The great and mighty me
Let me break myself apart
Instead and scatter to my birds
Like a burial at sea
To be the gospel without words
Oh, my darlings, how I love you
I love you and you and you
And returning to myself
Is such a lonely thing to do
But, it's the only thing to do
There's no honor in the pilgrimage
Until a soul returns
To hold another's hand and then
And only then, it learns
That life is like a stone
Only skipping for a time
Oh, it never really holds its own
It'll never see the other side
And I was born to love you
I love you and you and you
Oh, returning to myself is such a lonely thing to do
Retuning to myself is just retuning me to you
That's the only thing I wanna do