Each month, return to “Science of Mind Afterglow” for a full article from the previous month’s edition. It’s a free preview of our transformational content, and we’ll include a new spiritual contemplation to enhance your daily practice. Get ready to pick up new divine signals and insights!
Contemplation: Get still and quiet your managing mind for a moment. Breathe in, long and slow. Hand on your heart, consider where in your life you’re asking for change. Name three ways you might let yourself be met exactly as you are today, and feel into that truth.
Especially Looked After
by Rev. Dr. David Ault
Ernest Holmes wrote that we may contemplate our relationship with the Infinite by thinking of ourselves as especially looked after.
The first time I read that, something in me became still, and for many decades to follow, that phrase carried everything I needed it to carry — warmth, unconditional love, the sense of a universe that was not indifferent. To think of myself as especially looked after was to locate myself inside something benevolent.
It was enough. For a long time, it was more than enough.
But teachings that capture us at one stage of our development have a habit of deepening. And what I’ve come to understand is that being especially looked after is not a one-dimensional comfort. It is not the cosmic equivalent of a warm blanket. It is something far more demanding, far more alive than that.
Drop the Hero Complex
I was at a wedding reception in Texas not long ago. My home state. A room full of people I am technically related to but do not really know — not from estrangement, not from any dramatic rupture, but simply because I left that environment at a very young age and built a life elsewhere.
There were cousins and nieces and great-nieces and nephews and one remaining sibling, an older brother. He didn’t recognize me. The early stages of Alzheimer’s had taken the David he remembered, and what remained of his memory were only the people who had been around him continuously.
I sat with that. I didn’t try to fix it. I didn’t try to insert myself into the collaborative warmth of the room. I noticed that I felt I didn’t belong there, not in a way that felt like injury, just in a way that felt like fact. And then I noticed something else:
The part of the ego associated with David — the part that has always run a quiet campaign to be the hero in the room, to be recognized, to matter, to close some ancient gap between who I am and who I was told I needed to be — that part spoke up clearly.
The reason you feel this way is because you are not the hero in this narrative.
I expected to feel shame at that. Instead, I felt awe. Something was watching that thought arrive, naming it accurately and not collapsing into it — not performing belonging, not walling off in protection, not doing anything at all except sitting in the room and sending love to people celebrating a life milestone.
I didn’t need to belong. I didn’t need to be the hero. I didn’t need, for once, to make myself useful enough to earn my place.
That is what being especially looked after had grown into. Not the warm blanket but the precision of a love that tracks you accurately enough to name the exact costume you’re still wearing. That love somehow makes it possible to sit with it, quietly, without the whole performance machinery engaging.
A Deeper Prayer Is Heard
There’s a version of Holmes’ phrase that gets domesticated quickly. We hear “looked after” and we imagine protection. We imagine being spared. We imagine the universe as a kind of cosmic caretaker, smoothing the path, cushioning the falls.
But that is not the whole of what Holmes was pointing at, and it is not what the experience actually delivers.
What I have come to understand, imperfectly, still in process, is that to be especially looked after is to be tracked with a love precise enough to see what the prayer underneath your prayer actually is — not what the ego asks for but what the soul reaches for, inarticulate and persistent, underneath all the managing and maneuvering and performing.
And when that deeper prayer is heard, what arrives is not comfort. What arrives are the exact conditions required to dissolve whatever is standing between you and what you actually asked for.
That is sometimes terrifying. It is sometimes the ripping off of a cosmic Band-Aid, all at once, in a room full of people who don’t recognize you.
Emotion and Thought Arrive Together
Here is something I have come to believe about trauma that I did not always consider: Trauma is not stored in the body. That idea has truth at the edges, but at its center, it now feels incomplete.
What I would say more fully is that in the original moment of wounding, an event, an unprocessed emotion and a thought formed under duress became inseparable. They arrived together.
The emotion, having no container large enough to receive it in that moment, does not disappear. It goes into the body, which takes up a kind of faithful vigil on its behalf. The clenching, the bracing, the chronic vigilance — these are not errors. They are the body corresponding accurately to what was never allowed to complete its cycle. That part is real and deserves to be met as real.
And yet what actually perpetuates the pattern, what keeps the body on duty long after the original danger has passed, is a thought, formed in a specific moment, about specific people, in specific circumstances, that has been running ever since as though it is current information.
The people who harmed you are not harming you now. The ones who abandoned you, who were complicit, who looked away — they are not doing those things now. The evidence that convinced a child that no one cares and the world is not safe was real in its moment.
But the moment is over.
Combine Faith in All We Do
What the thought doesn’t know is that the moment is over. And so it campaigns. It builds systems of prevention and protection and strategy. It wears the body down keeping watch for a danger no longer present. It stores itself not in the tissue but in the mind’s insistence on being right about what it learned.
And the body — the faithful, brilliant, blameless body — can only correspond to what the mind believes is true.
Sitting in that reception, looking at the offspring of people who once caused real harm, I felt something shift. Those people are not in this room, not in any way that could reach me now. What was in the room was a wedding. People celebrating. My brother, not recognizing me, in no way meaning anything by it.
What was in the room, if I let it be, was entirely workable.
This is what rings true for me in Holmes’ urging to combine faith in all we do with the feeling of being especially looked after.
Not that the path would be cleared or that the history would be erased. Not that someone would arrive to protect the child who needed protecting back then. That child is grown now, and grown differently than history predicted. And that alone is evidence of something.
The Prayer Beneath the Prayer
What Holmes meant, I feel now, is that the Intelligence that runs this whole design is not indifferent to your deepest reaching. It receives the prayer beneath the prayer. It responds with something more accurate than comfort — with the precise conditions required for the costume to come off, one layer at a time, in a room full of relative strangers or on a pontoon boat on a Cambodian lake or at a wedding reception in Texas.
The looking after is not one-dimensional because love is not one-dimensional.
And the invitation, the thing we are asked to bring to the relationship, is not gratitude exactly, though gratitude follows. It is willingness: the willingness to be met, the willingness to let the looking after reach us in the form it actually arrives in, rather than only in the form we’d prefer.
At the level of this singular human life, our efforts still matter. Showing up still matters. The work still contains meaning.
But something larger than the work is also always at work. Something that does not need your management. Something that has been tracking you with an accuracy and a care that the ego will likely find, at least at first, almost too precise to bear.
That is especially looked after. That is what Holmes pointed at.
And my sense is that most of us, myself very much included, are still in the early chapters of learning to receive it.
