Episode 7: Growing Hands: Healing, Wholeness, and Spiritual Sovereignty

In the final chapter of The Handless Maiden, the maiden has spent seven years healing in the sanctuary of Here All Dwell Free. Her living hands have grown back. Meanwhile, the king has spent seven years wandering through the forest, learning to lay down his armor and soften the heart that could once offer her only silver hands—beautiful on the outside, but cold, rigid, and unable to feel.

When they meet again, neither is the person the other once knew. She has become a whole and spiritually sovereign woman. He must learn to recognize her, hear what his absence has cost, and love her without trying to rescue, possess, or change her.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why healing requires rest, safety, and the freedom to belong to ourselves
• How living hands symbolize inner authority, creativity, and spiritual sovereignty
• Why healing does not erase memory—and forgiveness does not automatically restore trust
• The king’s transformation from a hardened heart to a heart soft enough to feel
• Kintsugi and the possibility of allowing our wounds to become catalysts for rebirth
• Maslow’s idea of Being-love: loving another person without needing them to complete or rescue us
• The sacred marriage and the reunion of the healed feminine and masculine
• What it means to reclaim the authority of the soul

Drawing from fairy-tale symbolism, the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, psychology, and personal reflection, this episode asks us to consider where we may have surrendered our own hands—and whether something within us is now ready to return.

What is true within you may be forgotten, buried, or silenced, but it cannot be destroyed.

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Know Thy Soul explores myth, fairy tales, scripture, symbolism, psychology, and spiritual traditions as maps of the soul, revealing the timeless patterns that illuminate the journey home to ourselves. 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi friends, welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that help us grow our hands back. Before we begin today, I want to thank you for your patience while I took last week off. Those of you on my email list already know that I was in a car accident on my way to a retreat center in New York. I'm okay, but I needed to give my body time to rest. And after spending these past few weeks talking about growing our hands back, pushing through simply because I had planned to release an episode didn't feel like the right thing to do. I'll share more about what happened next week when we bring this story out of the fairy tale and into real life. And so, for today, we're returning to the Handless Maiden for part three and looking at how the story moves from wounding to healing. In part one, we saw how the wound forms. In part two, we saw how the wound shows up in relationships. Neither the maiden nor the king had healed when they found each other. She was looking for compassion, but all he could offer her were silver hands, beautiful on the outside, but cold, rigid, and unable to feel. And now, in part three, we offer hope. We'll see how both the maiden and her king heal so they can finally meet each other in true partnership. Maslow called this being love, the kind of love that becomes possible when we no longer need another person to complete us, rescue us, or become who we need them to be. We can finally see and love them for who they truly are. We previously followed the maiden as she lost her hands, left her father's home, and entered the forest alone. We watched her marry the king, become a mother, and then return once more to the wilderness, this time carrying her young son. And that is where we find her today. The maiden now wanders alone through the wilderness with her infant son, and again she prays for help. And again, help appears. Deep within the forest, she discovers a small house with a sign over the door that reads, Here all dwell free. And isn't that exactly what every soul is searching for? A place where we no longer have to earn our worth? A place where we no longer have to prove ourselves, perform, achieve, sacrifice, or become something else in order to belong. A place where we can simply be. The maiden has spent her entire life adapting herself to the needs of others. First her father, then the king. But here, for the first time, she enters a space where nothing is demanded of her. She's not judged, she's not condemned, she's not asked to make herself smaller, quieter, more useful, or easier to love. She's simply welcomed. And perhaps that's why healing becomes possible here. Because growth rarely happens in places where we are constantly defending ourselves. The soul does not grow well in environments where it has to keep explaining its pain, justifying its needs, or proving that it deserves care. It grows where it's safe enough to tell the truth. And maybe that is what this little house in the forest represents. Not an escape, but a sanctuary. Jesus offers a similar invitation to his disciples in Mark 6.31, where he says, Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest. And perhaps that is what the Hero Dwell Free offers the maiden. Not another demand, not another task, an invitation to come away from the world that wounded her and rest long enough for healing to begin. A woman dressed in all white came out of the house. Welcome, queen, she said, and led the maiden inside. She gently untied the little boy from his mother's back, gathered him into her arms, and nursed him. Then she laid him in a beautiful bed, freshly made and waiting for him. The maiden looked at her in wonder, How did you know I was a queen? I'm an angel, the woman replied, sent by God to care for you and your child. Seven long years pass. Throughout myths and sacred stories, seven often symbolizes a complete cycle of transformation. It's a number associated with wholeness, completion, and the fulfillment of a process. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the maiden's hands begin to grow back. I often think of this house as a symbol of the inner sanctuary that exists within each of us. A place beyond fear, beyond performance, beyond striving, a place where we remember who we are beneath all the roles, identities, wounds, and expectations. And perhaps that is why her hands begin to grow back here. Not because she fights harder, not because she tries harder, not because someone else heals her, but because she finally enters a space where she is free to become herself. And notice how the story describes it. Not overnight, not through some dramatic miracle, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way real healing often happens. One day you realize a situation that what once would have shattered you no longer has the same power. One day you speak a truth you never would have spoken before. You set a boundary you once would have been afraid to set. You trust yourself where you once would have looked to someone else for the answer. And only when you look back do you realize something has changed. The hands have been growing back all along. The Tao Te Ching asks, who can wait quietly while the mud settles? Who can remain still until the moment of action? The maiden does not force clarity or try to rebuild herself. She rests long enough for what has been disturbed within her to settle. And slowly the shape of her own life becomes clear again. And I think there's something important here about solitude, or at least about seasons of life where we are no longer constantly being reflected back through another person. When we are not being distracted or reassured, managed or defined by someone else, we're invited to learn how to sit with ourselves. We begin to recognize our own patterns. We learn how to comfort ourselves without abandoning ourselves. We begin to understand the difference between wanting connection and needing someone else to make us feel whole. That kind of inner stability does not close us off from relationships. It creates the foundation for a more honest one. Her healing is not about returning to who she was before the wound. It's not about growing back the same hand so she can resume the same life. It's about becoming someone new, someone capable of standing fully in her own spiritual sovereignty. It makes me think about what happens inside a chrysalis. Most of us imagine that a caterpillar crawls inside, grows a pair of wings, and emerges as a butterfly. But the transformation is far more radical than that. Inside the chrysalis, much of its larval body breaks down into something almost like a nutrient-rich soup, while structures that were there all along survive and begin forming its adult body. The butterfly is not simply a caterpillar with wings, it's a radically new form of the same life. And yet, the possibility of that butterfly was hidden within the caterpillar from the beginning. Perhaps this house is the maiden's chrysalis. From the outside, it may appear that nothing is happening, but beneath the stillness, an entire life is being reorganized. The identity shaped by her wound begins to dissolve, the belief that she's powerless, the habit of obedience, and the conviction that she must abandon herself in order to survive. She is not being returned to the maiden she was before her hands were severed. She is becoming the woman who can grow living hands of her own. Gertrude Mueller-Nelson writes that to suffer wisely and constructively is to grow mature. Suffering does not automatically make us mature, but suffering that is held within sanctuary, that's grieved and witnessed and allowed to transform us can. And that is what the maiden has been doing in this house. She has been abandoned by people, but she has not been abandoned by God. And here, perhaps for the first time, she's learning not to abandon herself. And perhaps this is part of what more women are beginning to claim today. Not loneliness, not isolation, but the sacred space to discover who they are apart from everyone else's expectations. Freedom from the constant pressure of everyone else's voices. Freedom to hear their own voice. Freedom to discover that the voice they have been searching for outside themselves has been quietly waiting within them all along. She is no longer the handless maiden waiting for the king to rescue her. She no longer chases, she no longer pleases, she no longer sacrifices what is sacred within her or centers a man or anyone else in the story of her own becoming. She no longer participates in relationships, institutions, or communities that treat the feminine as something lesser. She simply withdraws her energy from anything that requires her to portray what she knows. And only then does the king come back looking for her. Not because she's chased him, not because she's convinced him, but she no longer needs someone else to give her what she has discovered within herself. Chapter 61 of the Tao Te Ching says, the female ever conquers the male through stillness. And that is exactly what the maiden is learning to do here. She does not overcome through force, argument, pursuit, or control. She becomes still. But stillness does not mean passivity. It means she no longer abandons herself trying to persuade someone else to love her. Her boundary is not a threat. It's a quiet truth. If love requires me to cut off my hands, I will leave. If belonging requires me to become smaller, I will choose solitude. Because solitude in the house where all dwell free is not a punishment, it's a sanctuary. There, she discovers that the peace of belonging to herself is greater than any false belonging she could obtain through wounded relationships that ask her to abandon herself. She does not defeat the masculine. She simply stops allowing an unhealed masculine to defeat the feminine within her. The seven years in the Here All Dwell Free House are not a rejection of love. They are the work that makes a deeper love possible. And then the king returns home from war. But the home he left behind is gone. His wife is gone and his child is gone. And the promise he made not to forsake her has been broken. Until now, the maiden has carried the consequences of the wounds he has not faced. She has lived with his absence, his defenses, his projections, and everything that entered the relationships because he was not there. But she is no longer there to carry any of it. And now the king has to face the consequences himself. He has a choice. He can do what he's always done, he can put on his armor, find another battle, and keep believing the enemy is somewhere outside of him. He could find another woman to rescue, begin the cycle again, and ask her to fill the emptiness he has not yet learned to face within himself. Or he can put down his armor. He can stop looking outside himself for something to conquer or someone to save and enter the forest. Because when you're at war, your defenses have to stay up. You don't simply stop to question yourself. You don't turn inward. You keep your eyes fixed on the enemy in front of you. But now the king has come home and there is no enemy waiting for him there. There is only an empty castle and the unbearable truth of what has been lost. What lies before him is not another battle. It is the far more difficult journey into the forest and into his own heart. And eventually, what we have neglected demands our attention. The journey we have postponed can no longer be delayed. The maiden's journey began when she walked into the forest. The king's journey begins only after she has regrown her hands, and then he comes home and discovers that she's gone. Immediately upon entering the castle, the king asked for his wife and child, and at this the mother began to weep. You wicked man, she cried, why did you write to me and command that two innocent souls be put to death? She placed the letter before him, the letter the devil had forged in his name. I did as you ordered, she said, and showed him the eyes and tongue she had as proof. Now remember in the first part of the story, we talked about the importance of tears. The maiden's tears kept her connected to God. They protected her because even when everything else was taken from her, she remained connected to what she felt and knew to be true. And now it's the mother who weeps. For seven years she's carried the weight of what happened. She knows that an innocent woman and child were driven into the forest. She knows that she protected them from death, but she could not prevent the terrible consequences that followed. And perhaps her tears are the first crack in the king's armor. Throughout this story, tears appear whenever something that has been buried must finally be felt. Not because tears are weakness, but because feeling is often how truth finds its way past our defenses. And then something happens that we have not seen from him before. The king weeps. Until now, whenever the king has encountered suffering, he's responded by doing something. He gives the maiden silver hands. He promises not to forsake her. He provides a castle and sends instructions from a distance. Those actions may look like compassion, but we've already seen that they are also shaped by his own wounds. He gives her the hands he thinks she needs. He offers the kind of care that allows him to remain powerful. Even when he wants to help, he remains in control of what that help will look like. But now there is nothing he can do to undo what has happened. There is no battle he can fight, no command he can give, and no gift he can offer that will bring his wife and child home. For the first time, the king cannot remain outside their suffering because now he is finally beginning to see it. He has to let it enter him, to feel the weight of what his wife and child have endured and the part he has played in their pain. This is compassion becoming real within him. Compassion begins when another person's suffering becomes real to us. Until now, the king has not had the eyes to see the maiden's inner world. He saw that her hands were missing and tried to replace them with silver ones, but he never understood what it meant to live inside her wound. Now he is beginning to imagine what she experienced after he left. Her terror, her exile, and the unbearable cost of carrying their child alone into the forest. He cannot change what has happened, but he can allow himself to see it, feel it, and be changed by it. He may not yet understand every way his absence left him vulnerable. He may not yet recognize how his own wounds shaped the relationship, but for the first time he allows himself to be touched by the consequences, and that changes something. The king's mother assured him that the queen still lived, but that she and the child had been sent out into the world. Without hesitation, the king left the castle and set out to find them. He vowed that he would not return until his wife and child were found. And so the king entered the forest. For seven years he searched. Previously, the king only knew how to fight or flee, but this journey is different. There is no enemy for him to defeat in the forest. There is no battle that can restore what has been lost. The forest cannot be conquered, it can only be entered. And this time, the king is not leaving the relationship to escape what it's asking of him. He enters the wilderness because he is finally willing to follow the people he left behind. No army can help him, no messenger can take this journey in his place. He cannot give an order and expect someone else to bring his wife and child home. This is a journey he must make alone. This is part of what psychological healing asks of the masculine, to begin moving beyond our intentions and become curious about our impact. We stop asking only what did I mean and begin asking, what did the other person experience? Now he has to imagine what she endured after he left. He has to live with not knowing whether she's safe, whether his child survived, or whether either of them will ever want to see him again. There is no immediate reward for his search. No one is watching, no one is praising him for being a good king or a devoted husband. For seven years he must remain faithful to someone who is not there to reassure him, admire him, need him, or tell him that all will be forgiven. That is a very different kind of love. It's no longer the love of a rescuer who needs to feel powerful. It's becoming the devotion of someone willing to remain present even when he's powerless. The maiden's journey teaches her to stop abandoning herself for others, and the king's journey teaches him to stop abandoning others for the sake of only himself. She learns to become the subject of her own life. He begins to understand that she is a subject too. The maiden must learn to ask, what do I feel? What do I know? What do I need? The king must learn to ask, what has she experienced? How have my choices affected her? Who has she become? Her journey moves her from self-abandonment into selfhood. His journey moves him from self-centeredness into relationship. Both are ultimately tasked with finding her. And the story gives us a beautiful image of the difference between these two journeys. The maiden is also in the forest, but she's still living inside a small house where anyone can dwell free. The house is more than a shelter. It represents the inner home she has slowly created within herself. Inside the house, she's safe enough to rest. She receives nourishment. She cares for her child. And over time, her living hands grow back. She is no longer wandering through the unconscious. She has learned how to dwell within it. But the king has no house. He wanders through cliffs, caves, and the wilderness because he has not yet found a center within himself. The forest strips him of everything that once told him who he was. There's no throne here, no castle, no army, no armor, no numbered garden. He cannot command the forest to tell him where she is. He cannot conquer his way through it. All he can do is keep walking. For seven years the king refused to give up hope. The story tells us that he neither ate nor drank, but was sustained only by God. Taken literally, this makes little sense, but symbolically, it shows us that he can no longer draw strength from his role, his achievements, or his control. He must learn to live from a deeper source, from his connection to God within. The same divine nourishment that sustained the maiden now sustains him. Until at last the king came upon the little house bearing the words, Hear all dwell free over the front door. And notice something important. Once the maiden's hands grow back, she does not go searching for the king. She does not spend seven years trying to convince him to change, rescue him, or lead him into the forest. She continues becoming who she is. She raises her son, lives her life, and deepens her relationship with God. Her life is no longer organized around whether or not the king transforms. That does not necessarily mean she has stopped loving him. It means she has stopped confusing love with pursuit, rescue, and self-abandonment. If the king is going to change, he must choose that journey for himself. He must enter the forest, face what is waiting there, and find his own way to her. We can love another person without completing their journey for them. We can allow them the same sovereignty we are learning to claim for ourselves. The angel welcomed the king inside, and he immediately asked about his wife and child, but instead of answering, she offered him something to eat and drink. The king refused, and after seven years of searching, all he wanted to do was rest. He had finally reached a place where he could no longer keep moving, searching, or trying to force an answer. Before he could be reunited with his family, he had to stop and be still. Overcome with exhaustion, he lay down to sleep and covered his face with a white cloth. In myths and sacred stories, sleep often represents surrender, a transition between states of consciousness and the symbolic death of an old identity. The white cloth resembles both a veil and a burial shroud. The king who fights, commands, and tries to control the world must symbolically die before another way of seeing can emerge. The king arrives believing he knows whom he is seeking. For seven years he has carried the memory of the wife he left behind, a young queen with silver hands. But the woman he remembers, she no longer exists. To borrow from Taylor Swift's Look What You Made Me Do. I'm sorry, the silver handed maiden can't come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, because she's dead. Now, it's funny, but it also names something sacred. Real transformation often asks an old identity to die so that a deeper life can emerge. Christianity places this mystery at the very center of its story. Jesus does not return from the tomb and simply resume the life he lived before. He rises transformed. And at first, even Mary Magdalene does not recognize him. But even in resurrection, Jesus still carries his wounds. When Thomas doubts him, Jesus says in John 20, 27, put your finger here and see my hands. Resurrection does not erase what happened to him. His wounds remain part of his body and part of his story, but they no longer have the final word. Like the golden scenes of Kinsugi, the places that were broken become part of the beauty of what has been remade. Perhaps our wounds can become like that too. Not the end of our story, but the catalyst for our rebirth. And in that symbolic sense, the old maiden is dead too. Not her deepest self, but the version of her whose survival depended upon obedience, accommodation, and allowing other people to define her life. Seven years in the sanctuary have transformed her. She has grieved, healed, and learned to belong to herself. She has grown living hands. The king believes his task is to find the wife he lost, but when he arrives, his real task will be to recognize the woman who has emerged. The angel went to tell the maiden that her husband had come. The story doesn't tell us that what she felt in that moment, but I imagine there must have been some hesitation. After all, the last message she believed had come from him condemned her and her child to death. Healing does not erase memory. Forgiveness does not mean pretending the wound never happened, and it does not require us to take someone back. Trust must be rebuilt through more than words. When the cloth fell from the king's face, the maiden asked her son, named Filled with Grief, to place it over his father again, and the child obeyed. The king heard him call the boy his father, and while still sleeping, he let the cloth fall a second time. This time, filled with grief, could no longer contain his confusion. Mother, he asked, How can this wild man be my father? I have no father here on earth. You taught me to pray to my father in heaven. And before the king can truly be reunited with his family, he has to hear those heartbreaking words from his own son. Filled with grief is not blaming him or trying to punish him. He is speaking with the simple honesty of a child. This man may be his father by blood, but he has never known him as a father. The king has spent seven years searching for his son, but filled with grief has spent fourteen years growing up without him, seven years before the search began, and seven more while his father wandered through the forest looking for them. And perhaps this is why the child's name matters so much. Filled with grief is the living reminder of everything the maiden and her son carried while the king was away. His name will not allow their suffering to be covered over simply because the king has finally found them. The wound remains visible, but perhaps the wound can also become the place where the light enters. It's like Kinsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold. The cracks aren't hidden, they're traced, allowing the breaking to remain part of the vessel's visible story. And to my eyes, the repaired vessel is often more beautiful than it was before. Not because the breaking was beautiful, but because the repair is. Konsuki does not tell us that the vessel needed to break. It reminds us that wholeness is not the same as returning to what we were before. The wound can be tended and transformed without being erased. And perhaps filled with grief is the golden seam running through his family. His name bears witness to what was broken, while his life bears witness to what survived. And before the king can truly become his father, he must hear what his absence has meant. There are no silver hands that can recover this wound. He must see it, allow it to enter his heart, and love the family that has been shaped by it. And hearing this, the king awakened and asked the maiden who she was. She answered, I am your wife, and this is your son filled with grief. But the king does not recognize her. Her face was the same, her voice was the same, but his wife had silver hands, and the woman standing before him had living ones. Sometimes healing can be surprisingly disorienting to the people around us. We are still ourselves, yet we no longer move through the world in quite the same way. We stop abandoning ourselves, we stop saying yes when we mean no. We stop carrying responsibilities that don't belong to us. And the people who know us through our wounds may have to learn who we are all over again. And isn't it a little funny? I mean, the king has spent seven years wandering through the forest, sustained only by God. He has aged, he's exhausted, and I imagine he's filthy. He probably looks less like the king who left for war and more like Tom Hanks and Castaway. Yet the maiden recognizes him. She's not confused by his wild appearance, but the king struggles to recognize her because the silver hands are gone. He's so focused on the woman he remembers that he cannot recognize the woman standing in front of him. Then the angel brought out the old silver hands, and the king finally understood that this was his wife. The silver hands form a bridge between the woman he remembers and the woman standing before him. They hold the history of everything that happened between who she was and who she has become. The king needs to see them because he must hold both truths. The wound is no longer part of her body, but it was real. Healing has transformed her, but it has not erased what she's endured. And at last they were reunited. And overcome with joy, the king cried, A heavy stone has fallen from my heart. And what a beautiful image that is. The story does not say a weight was lifted from his shoulders. It says that a stone fell from his heart, the very place that had been hardened for so long. And this immediately brings us to Ezekiel, where God promises, I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. Perhaps this is what the king's seven years in the forest have done. They have not made him weaker, they have made him soft enough to feel. And there's a line from Noah Khan's song, Strawberry Wine, where he sings, No thing defines a man like love that makes him soft. And the king has finally learned how to be soft. I imagine he's been carrying this stone since childhood. I mean, he grew up in a world where boys were told to take it like a man, suck it up, and never cry. A world that taught him that feelings, or at least the soft ones, belonged to girls. The hard feelings were allowed. Anger could become aggression, hurt could hide beneath pride, and fear could be turned into control. But grief, tenderness, longing, and the need for comfort had to be swallowed. And so he learned to harden himself. Perhaps the stone is made of every grief he was never allowed to name, every tear he learned not to shed, and every tender part of himself he had to lock away in order to become the man this world expected him to be. Perhaps that hardness is also what gave the devil room to forge the letters. On the surface, those letters drove the maiden from the castle, but symbolically, she left because she could no longer live inside a relationship shaped by the hardness of the king's heart and the mother wound he never faced. Even the silver hands he gave her embody that hardness. They're beautiful and valuable, but they're also cold, rigid, hard, and lifeless. They become an outward symbol of the emotional and spiritual connection they shared at that time. Beautiful on the surface, but lacking the warmth, tenderness, and depth of true intimacy. I do not believe losing his wife and child created the hardness in the king's heart, but it forced him to see what that hardness had cost, not only him, but the people he loved. And so the stone does not fall simply because he finds the maiden. It falls after he has entered the forest himself, surrendered the identity he once knew, heard the grief his absence created, and recognized the healed woman standing before him. The king entered the forest searching for his wife and child, but somewhere along the way, he also found the wounded child within himself. He has faced his own pain and returned capable of meeting the maiden as she truly is, not as someone to rescue or possess, but as a whole and sovereign woman. And this is why their reunion becomes possible. At the beginning, I told you that Maslow called this being love, and perhaps now we can see what he meant. Being love is not about loving someone for what they give us or for the role they fill in our life. It's about seeing and loving them as they truly are. She no longer needs the king to give her hands, and he no longer needs to be the one who saves her. She has learned to belong to herself, and he has learned how to love a woman who belongs to herself. The king, the queen, and their son returned home together, and there was great rejoicing throughout the kingdom. And notice that filled with grief returns with them. Their grief is not denied, forgotten, or abandoned in the forest. It's brought home and given a place within the kingdom. The story ends with the reunion of the king and queen. In fairy tales, we might call this the happily ever after, but symbolically, it points towards something much deeper. It points toward what many traditions call this sacred marriage, the reunion of masculine and feminine after each has undergone the transformation required to meet the other consciously. This is not a return to the relationship they once had. The wounded maiden and the unconscious king are gone. The woman who returns has living hands, and the man beside her has finally shed his armor. His heart has softened, and he is finally able to love the woman she has become. Because within each of us lives a maiden learning to trust her own hands, and a king learning to lay down his armor. One teaches us how to belong to ourselves, the other teaches us how to love another person without asking them to abandon who they are. The Bible returns again and again to the image of the bride, the bridegroom, and the wedding feast. In Revelation we read, Let us rejoice and exult, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. And that language matters here. The maiden has made herself ready, not by waiting to be chosen, but by healing, growing living hands, and becoming fully her own. An early Christian text called the Gospel of Philips takes this image one step further through the mystery of the bridal chamber. It says that Christ came to repair the separation that existed since the beginning by uniting the two again. Perhaps that's what this ending is pointing toward. Not two incomplete people who need one another to become whole, but two people who have undergone their own transformation and can finally meet one another without domination, rescue, or self-abandonment. We'll explore the bridal chamber and the sacred marriage more deeply in future episodes because this image appears again and again throughout the world's spiritual traditions. Most of us have never physically lost our hands, but women and men alike have surrendered the authority of the soul. We have learned to ignore our intuition, silence our truth, and suppress our feelings. We have prioritized everyone else's needs above our own and become disconnected from our ability to create the lives we truly desire. Perhaps that is why this story continues to speak to us. But the deepest invitation hidden within this story is not simply to understand it, it's to recognize yourself within it. Because what is true may be forgotten, buried, or silenced, but it cannot be destroyed. Whether we call it truth, wisdom, intuition, the voice of the soul, or our direct connection to God, the principle remains the same. What is eternal cannot be severed. Whether it takes five years or 5,000 years, that which has been exiled continues calling us towards its return. The feminine returns to her rightful place. And if the idea that you've never been separated from God feels foreign or almost impossible to believe, then keep showing up with me here week after week. I'll tell you every story I know. I'll share every bit of wisdom I've gathered, and together we'll keep searching for the place within you that still remembers the way home. Because if there's one thing I hope these stories help you remember, it's this. No matter what has happened in your life, there is still a place within you that has never been separated from God. That is the place we've been trying to find together from the very beginning of this podcast. And next week, we're going to bring the handless maiden out of the fairy tale and into real life. I'll share more of my own story, how we lose our hands in ordinary ways, what it looks like to move from self-abandonment towards spiritual sovereignty, and how, choice by choice, we begin to grow our living hands. And if you're not already on my email list, you can join through the link in the show notes. That's where I share more personal reflections about what these stories look like in real life, and where you'll hear from me if life changes the podcast schedule. Until next time, my friends, may you know thy soul. It already knows the way.