Inviting Suffering to Coffee

A Meditation on Shame, Trauma, and Disruptive Grace

Some thoughts came to me while walking mindfully, as Thich Nhat Hanh teaches — placing each step with attention, letting breath and body return to one another.

I am learning, slowly and imperfectly, to live in the here and now. Because this is where life is lived. Not in the wreckage behind me. Not in the imagined future filled with dread.

But here. This breath. This footstep.

I’m learning to invite Dave’s shame — the man who set both fires that upended my life — into my consciousness.
His shame became my suffering. His terror became my trauma.

And I’m learning to sit with it, on my terms.

For a long time, I let his darkness shape my light. His fear became the lens through which I viewed the world. I lived in the past, bracing for the next loss. I lived in fear, scanning for what might come burning through my life again. I lived in worry, rehearsing outcomes I could not control.

That way of living welcomed the second arrow — the Buddhist image of how suffering is often doubled.

The first arrow wounds us. The second is self-inflicted: our resistance, our avoidance, our reliving.

I let the second arrow stay lodged for years.

But ignoring pain doesn’t heal it.

Pretending it doesn’t exist only buries it deeper.

So now, I try something new.

I invite it to coffee.

I look shame in the eye. I speak gently to my trauma.
I ask, Who are you? What are you trying to protect?

I sit with the self I was before it all — the woman I left behind in the ashes.
I hold her.
I tell her she didn’t deserve it.
I thank her for surviving.
I love her.

And then, I wish the pain well.
And I ask it to leave.

This is not easy. And it is not linear.

Some days, I am back in the fire.
Some days, I’m grieving the time I lost. The woman I used to be.
And I’m still getting to know the woman trauma helped form.
Some days, the coffee gets cold.

But more and more, I am learning to sit down — without fear, without shame — and simply be.

Abstract, Paul Blenkhorn

This is disruptive grace.

Not a suffering handed down by a God trying to teach me a lesson.
Not divine punishment.
But a rupture.
A holy interruption that cleared space for something I’d never made before:

Grace for myself, in the only place life happens — here.