There was a time

I believed healing would arrive

as silence.

No more fear.

No more guilt, longing, or grief.

No more trembling.

No more old stories or scary images

rising unexpectedly in the night.

I believed peace meant

the absence of disturbance.

But Life,

in its strange and mysterious wisdom,

kept returning me

to the very places

I thought I needed to escape.

Not to punish me.

Not because I was failing or regressing.

But because there were still innocent places within me

unconsciously taking fiction as truth.

And with each return

of these old images, stories, and sensations,

there was a quiet, wordless whisper beneath it all:

“Do you see it now?”

Do you see the truth beneath the story

your mind is creating?

And slowly, with each return

of the very experiences my mind had learned to hate,

something soft and gentle began unfolding.

Do you see it now?

Not the disappearance of fear.

Not the eradication of longing.

Not the absence of guilt or shame or terror—

but a growing understanding

that what my mind had learned to call awful—

NEVER WAS.

The monsters my mind

had created and erased

a hundred times over

were never real.

They were thought.

They were my mind’s sincere attempts

at survival and self-protection.

And gradually,

a quiet realization emerged:

Maybe the resurfacing

of old fears, wounds, and longings —

in the form of shadowy images and stories,

of morning dread and middle-of-the-night terror —

was never an interruption to the path at all.

Maybe it was the perfection of the path.

Maybe all those visitors

circling back again and again

were part of the waking-up itself.

And maybe each return

of old images and sensations

was simply the kindness of the design

revealing the deeper truth

beneath everything I thought I knew.

~Missy Maiorano 2026

This past weekend, I found myself thinking about how all three of my daughters learned to ride their bikes. How at first there was such terror in wobbling. Such obsession with falling. Such certainty that every moment of instability meant danger. My girls absolutely LOVED and trusted their training wheels. In fact, those training wheels became symbolic of safety itself. And of course, they also trusted the external support of Pete and me running alongside them, one hand tightly gripping the backs of their little bike seats while they pedaled with all their might down the street. They trusted that something or someone outside of them would keep them from tipping too far in either direction. And honestly, that support was perfect and beautiful in the beginning. The training wheels were wonderful. Pete and I faithfully jogging behind them in the North Carolina heat, hunched over and breathless while trying not to let go of those bike seats too soon, was wonderful too. It was all part of the learning.

But eventually something extraordinary began happening all on its own. Without fanfare or drama, our girls simply began riding without the training wheels… and then eventually without Pete and me. The whole thing unfolded so naturally that there was never really a single dramatic moment where they suddenly “became riders.” Even before they fully trusted it, balance was already emerging. Tiny corrections were happening naturally inside their little preschool-sized bodies. Their handlebars would wobble slightly left, then right, then steady again. Their bodies were learning balance before their minds fully understood what was happening. Without realizing it, they were discovering that everything they truly needed to ride those bikes had been within them all along. The wobbling was not evidence that they were failing. The wobbling WAS the learning itself.

And over time, something else began growing alongside the wobbling: trust. Not trust that they would never tip sideways or skin a knee. Not trust that every ride would feel smooth and graceful and easy. But trust in the ride itself. Trust that their bodies knew what to do. Trust that balance could emerge naturally. Trust that life itself was intelligent enough to teach them what they needed to learn through the movement of their experience.

And honestly, the deeper I sat with this over the weekend, the more it began feeling like this is exactly how waking-up happens too. The wobbling. The leaning on external supports. The seasons of contraction followed by seasons of expansion. The desperate grasping for certainty. The eventual realization that maybe the very thing our minds are calling awful are actually not at all what we have learned to believe.

When I first broke out in hives and facial swelling years ago, I had all kinds of external supports. I had really wonderful pharmaceuticals that helped tone down the burning and itching. In the VERY beginning, I had amazing high-dose intravenous steroids that made everything disappear for two glorious weeks and convinced me we had “solved the problem.” I had doctors, specialists, support groups, and friends doing everything they possibly could to help me feel safe and hopeful again.

But slowly, one by one, the training wheels began falling away. First the steroids stopped working. Then the antihistamines stopped working. Then all the other medications gradually stopped working. Even the special diets that initially seemed helpful eventually started making the symptoms feel even more intense and consuming. The doctors — even the functional medicine doctors — slowly ran out of ideas. And eventually there came a point where nothing outside of me seemed capable of fixing or rescuing or stabilizing what was happening inside me anymore. The training wheels were gone. There was no one metaphorically holding onto the back of my bike seat while I wobbled wildly from left to right.

And somehow, beneath all the protesting and terror, there was also a quiet knowing that even THIS was trustworthy. The falling away of the training wheels was essential to my path.

My mind absolutely hated it, of course. My mind protested loudly and dramatically. It demanded answers. It demanded certainty. It demanded relief.

But underneath all of that noise, there was something much quieter and wiser beginning to emerge. A deeper knowing that perhaps this entire season was not interrupting my life at all. Perhaps it was teaching me how to turn inward. Teaching me how to discover what remained when all the external supports finally—and brilliantly—fell away.

I want to pause here because this deserves a moment to be fully digested.

One of the things I happened to stumble upon during those early days of wobbling mostly on my own was a funny little parable about a man who prayed to God for patience. And instead of simply handing the man patience, God answered his prayer by giving him a traffic jam so that he could discover the patience already within him. Then the man prayed for peace, so God sent him a complete shit-show of chaos so that he could begin uncovering the peace that had always existed beneath the noise. And finally, the man prayed for someone to love — someone to rescue him from his loneliness — and instead, he was given a season of silence so that he could rediscover the Love that had quietly lived within him all along.

And for some reason, this silly little parable landed so softly and sweetly inside me. I understood the deeper pointing immediately. My desperate pleas for relief and the eradication of my physical and emotional symptoms were not signs that I was weak or broken or doing life incorrectly. They were simply the very normal functions of a human mind built for survival. None of this was a problem to solve. It was simply an opportunity to see even more clearly.

Beneath all those desperate pleas, there was something much wiser quietly whispering:

“Do you see it now?”

Do you see that the hives, the swelling, the gun-to-the-head terror, the depression, the intrusive thoughts, the desperate grasping for certainty… are not separate from the waking up?

They ARE the waking up.

And at first, I only saw this in tiny little glimpses. Brief moments where something opened and I could suddenly feel — on a deeply embodied level — that these terrifying images and itchy, burning symptoms were not at all what my mind was insisting they were. For a few seconds at a time, I would see something completely fresh in both the symptoms and the fear itself.

The symptoms were not blocking freedom.

The fear was not blocking freedom.

They were becoming the very mechanism waking me up to freedom.

And in those brief moments, I would sense what I could only describe back then as Truth.

Truth felt light. Open. Loving. Hopeful. Alive.

And then, just as suddenly, the seeing would vanish and my mind’s hypnotic stories would rush back in and take over again. The symptoms and terror would fall right back into the category of “objectively awful,” and that feeling I called Truth would suddenly feel impossible to access again.

But even THAT eventually began feeling strangely trustworthy too.

Back then, I used to describe the experience like this: it felt as though God had briefly pulled back a giant metaphorical curtain and allowed me to glimpse what was REALLY happening beneath all the labels, judgments, fears, and stories of my adorable little mind. And in those brief moments, I could actually FEEL truth in my body.

Not the mind’s interpretation. Not the catastrophic story. Not the labels.

Just truth. Life. Energy. Presence.

There were no words for it. No images or explanations. But there was this unmistakable feeling moving through my body that felt like "All is well. I am held. I am lived."

And then, just like that, the curtain would close again. The deeper seeing would disappear completely, and the mind’s fearful trance would once again feel like objective reality.

But slowly, over time, even this began making sense to me. The curtain was not closing to be cruel. Life was not teasing me with peace and then snatching it away again.

Something much deeper was happening.

The constant dance between seeing and not seeing, between contraction and expansion, was slowly growing my trust in the process itself. It was allowing my understanding to mature and stabilize rather than simply becoming another temporary emotional high for my mind to turn into a finish line.

Because in those early days, every single time the curtain opened, I would instantly fall into that innocent little trance: “Oh my God, I finally see it! I’m done now! This is it! I will never feel those things again. I’ll never fall for my mind’s stories again. Hallelujah — I’m finally fixed.”

And honestly, it’s almost funny to me now how predictable the next part became.

It was so obvious—that brilliant rhythm of expansion and contraction. Because right on cue, the curtain would close again. The contraction would return. The fearful stories would feel absolutely real again. The symptoms would flare. The dread would rise back up in my body.

And my sweet mind would immediately panic: “What the hell happened? How is it possible that I felt so peaceful and clear yesterday, and now today feels so awful again? I don’t understand.”

And THIS, I now realize, was the beginning of truly understanding power and the intelligence of what I call the spiral staircase.

For so many years, I misunderstood healing because I imagined it as a straight line. I thought growth meant leaving old fear behind forever. I thought once I truly understood something deeply enough, I would somehow graduate beyond it permanently.

No more contractions. No more terrifying thoughts. No more grief suddenly rising up out of nowhere while folding laundry or driving to Target or standing in line at Starbucks.

I genuinely believed awakening meant becoming untouched by life.

But Life, in its wisdom, kept refusing to cooperate with that story.

I began noticing that each time I had an insight or each time there was a period of lightness and freedom, there would always be a return of some old fear or grief or anger right on its heels.

And every single time they resurfaced, my mind would immediately interpret their return as failure…and going BACKWARDS.

But slowly, over time, something very subtle began revealing itself. Although the experiences looked familiar, I was not actually meeting them from the same place anymore.

The metaphorical second-floor version of me experienced fear very differently than the tenth-floor version of me.

After each insight or each new level of expansion, it was as if I was on a new floor of the path. The spiral staircase, as it turns out, WAS MY PATH. So when I was on those “lower floors” of awareness, I experienced scary thoughts or images or symptoms from a place of absolute suffering.

But as that spiral staircase moved me up a few floors, it seemed that the Intelligence of Life would bring those exact same thoughts, images, and symptoms back again. Why? So that I could see them more clearly from this new level. So that I could see with clarity what my mind had called objectively horrible when I was on a lower level.

Gradually I began realizing that the return of old fear did not mean I was back at the beginning. The return WAS the staircase itself. There was more of a curiosity, “OH! You’re back again. Let’s see what you look like from this level!” 

Life was bringing these experiences back because each new level of awareness allowed me to see the exact same experiences with fresh eyes, a softer nervous system, and a more open heart.

The old grief would return — but now I could stay present long enough to let myself cry instead of immediately collapsing into hopelessness.

The old longing would return — but now I could feel the tenderness underneath it instead of scrambling to make another person responsible for fixing it.

The old fear would return — but now I could recognize that my body’s symptoms did not mean danger.

Over time, I learned to trust those little returns of old thoughts and symptoms and emotions that I once thought should be gone forever.

I learned to trust that Life itself may be far more intelligent than my frightened little mind can yet imagine.

What a gift to simply be open to the possibility that the return of old scary thoughts or old painful longings are not AT ALL what we think they are. They are the spiral staircase pulling us forward, up, and out of illusion.