The Mala I Grew Into | Respect Love Feel
Soft heart. Clear truth. Calm voice.
There are moments when an object we have carried for years seems to explain itself.
I wear a mala every day. It is made from rosewood and lapis lazuli. Months ago, I considered changing it. Something in me chose not to. At the time, I did not fully understand why.
Now I think I am beginning to understand.
For me, rosewood has come to represent warmth, grounding and the heart. Lapis lazuli represents truth, wisdom and clear expression. The beads between them create a pause: a small space in which heart and truth can meet before speech.
Together they have become a simple instruction for the person I am learning to be:
Soft heart. Clear truth. Calm voice.
When pain tries to choose who we become
I have been living through one of the most difficult periods of my life.
Under sustained pressure, it is easy to turn another person into a monster in the mind. Pain searches for a simple explanation. Anger suggests that if we can expose every connection, prove who was wrong and win every argument, we will finally be free.
But proving everything is not the same as healing.
I recently felt a genuine internal shift. I realised that behaviour I had struggled to reconcile with somebody I loved may have been shaped by many things I cannot fully know: fear, stress, outside advice and stories learned from other people’s experiences.
I may never know exactly what influenced another person’s choices. But I can choose not to fill the unknown with hatred.
That does not mean pretending painful behaviour was acceptable. It does not mean abandoning truth, boundaries or self-respect.
Understanding is not surrender. Compassion does not require access. Release does not require agreement.
It means refusing to let pain close a loving heart.
Truth does not need to become a weapon
My path is not silence. It is not dishonesty or passive acceptance. I will tell the truth.
But I do not want to use truth as a weapon. I do not want to distort it to punish somebody, and I do not want to betray it to protect them. I want to speak what I genuinely know, distinguish it from what I interpret, deliver it calmly and release control of what happens afterwards.
That sounds simple. For me, it is not.
My voice can become harsh under pressure. It becomes faster, louder and more forceful. I may use many words when one clear sentence would carry more strength.
I am learning that a harsh voice does not always come from a harsh heart. Sometimes it is an old protector: a voice that learned to become forceful whenever it felt ignored, misunderstood or threatened.
I do not need to hate that part of myself. I can thank it for protecting me and choose to speak differently now.
My current practice is small:
- Touch the mala.
- Breathe in: calm in.
- Breathe out: soften.
- Release the jaw and shoulders.
- Ask: What is the smallest truthful thing I need to say?
- Speak with less force.
- Stop.
I am learning to let silence hold some of the strength.
I am new to speaking
One of my guiding phrases is:
I am new to speaking.
I am not new to words. I am learning a new way for truth to travel from my heart into the world.
My first internal sentence may still be sharp. I do not have to speak that sentence. I can let the old protector speak inside and allow wisdom to decide what leaves my mouth.
This is not about becoming quieter because my truth is weak. It is about becoming calm enough for the truth to be heard.
Do not chase the extraordinary
A year and a half ago, during a retreat in Portugal, I followed a deeply calm daily structure. I practised standing meditation, qigong and eye gazing. I walked in nature, ate clean vegan food and lived without digital noise or caffeine.
Around the twelfth day, I experienced something extraordinary. I felt what I can only describe as an electric ball of energy. I could hold it and move it around my body. The experience continued for hours.
When I directed the energy towards my back and down a leg affected by an old spinal injury and nerve damage, I felt it move there with enormous force. Afterwards, the daily numbness that had remained in that leg was gone. As I write this, it remains gone.
I offer this neither as a medical promise nor as something another person must believe. It is my lived experience.
The retreat leader eventually helped me disengage from the intensity. Afterwards, he called me a healer. I asked whether that meant I could heal other people.
He replied:
You must heal yourself first.
I now understand that this may have been the real beginning.
Being a healer does not have to mean making claims or promising outcomes. It may mean learning to feel deeply without being controlled by every feeling. Turning suffering into understanding. Creating safety rather than domination. Helping another person reconnect with something already living inside them.
The title does not matter. The way I live does.
Part of me hopes to experience that energy again. But I do not want meditation to become an attempt to reproduce four extraordinary hours. I did not force the original experience. I created conditions for stillness and something arose.
The practice is not: make the experience return.
It is: become quiet enough to receive whatever today contains.
The deeper healing may already be returning in quieter forms: a breath before speech, a thought released without action, a boundary maintained without cruelty, an argument that no longer needs to be won.
The path is the return
Respect Love Feel began from a belief that people need somewhere safe to feel difficult emotion, release it and regain choice over how they live.
I understand that need because I am living it.
I do not present myself as perfected or fully healed. I am developing myself into the person I wish to be: calmer, more grounded and less controlled by anger and the stresses of life.
The work is not to avoid pain. It is to stop passing pain onward.
Each morning, I can hold the mala and say:
My heart remains open.
My truth remains clear.
My voice becomes calm.
I release what I cannot control.
Today, I live as my best self.
I will not perform this perfectly. Every breath before speech is a return. Every thought released without action is a return. Every moment when love survives pain is a return.
The energy experience showed me that something powerful lives within me.
My life now asks me to make that power gentle.
A small practice
Hold an object you carry regularly, or simply rest one hand over your heart. Take one slow breath. Ask:
What quality is life asking me to grow into now?
Do not force the answer. Carry the question gently.