The past few days have been challenging. I’m here in Vermont, while my husband is in Negril, Jamaica - where our home just weathered a Category 5 hurricane. I’ve received a few brief messages from him, enough to know he’s safe, but no phone call yet. What I have seen are the images of devastation across the island.

Jamaica is one of those places that captures your heart and never lets go. It’s certainly captured mine over the eight years we’ve kept a home base there. It’s easy to love Jamaica, and even easier to love Jamaicans—so full of vitality, humor, warmth, play, and expressive life.

These past few days have been a lesson in sitting with the unknown. Our home there is made of temporary structures while we prepare to build something more permanent - and temporary structures aren’t designed for Category 5 winds. Last night, I finally learned that there was significant damage, but thankfully not total destruction. Still, I haven’t spoken to my husband, and there is much still unknown. I’ve been scrolling through videos and local footage, searching for a glimpse of our neighborhood, and feeling a heavy ache of empathy and grief as I see people say, “I’ve lost everything. I have nowhere to go.”

Holding Both: Grief and Gratitude

At the same time, I’m sitting here in my cozy home in Vermont. My husband is alive. My second home wasn’t destroyed. So I have every reason to be grateful, coherent, and centered.

And yet - it’s both. I call myself a bothist because I believe we tend to get too either-or about these things. Either we’re devastated or we’re grateful. Either we’re spiritual and composed or we’re falling apart. But the truth is that life is both. My heart can break for Jamaica, can be confounded by the lack of communication, while I also hold deep gratitude for my own safety and blessings.

This past week has brought loss on multiple fronts. A beloved member of our Biofield community passed unexpectedly. Friends are going through crises. The collective grief in the air feels thick. So it’s been a moment of letting all of that move through -without bypassing it, without numbing it, but also without drowning in it.

What I Mean by “Purplewashing”

Spiritual bypassing is when we use spiritual concepts to avoid feeling what’s real. I call it purplewashing. You know - trying to be “so coherent” that we stop being honest about how much something actually hurts. Or, on the other hand, trying to numb ourselves with food or distraction because we don’t want to feel at all.

We don’t want to suppress our feelings, and we don’t want to indulge them to the point of losing our center either. The goal is to stay real - to acknowledge what’s happening in the body and heart - while holding a wider, wiser coherence around it.

Because when we do that, our heartbreak can exist inside a container of steadiness and love.

Leaning Into Connection

Another key piece of coherence is community. Over the last few days, I’ve had friends and family check in, offer support, and make sure I’m okay. That human connection helps so much. When we’re isolated, hard times can hit harder.

Jamaica has community in spades. People help each other there. They clean up together, rebuild together, feed one another. I was watching videos thinking, “Jamaican women clean like nobody’s business,” and laughing a little through the tears. Just about every man has a machete - ready to cut, clear, rebuild. They’re used to hard times, and they get through them by leaning on each other. That’s coherence in action.

The Bothist Way

So how do we stay resilient and healthy in the face of life’s ups and downs? By allowing both.

It’s okay to feel sad, scared, or uncertain. It’s okay to cry, to rage, to not have it together. And at the same time, you can hold that experience inside a greater coherence - a knowing that all is ultimately well. That life is eternal. That we are more than these temporary bodies and circumstances.

If you have a community, lean into it. If you don’t, go outside - connect with trees, animals, the sky, the earth. Nature offers that same stabilizing field. Feel yourself held in the embrace of the living world.

In Closing

Talking through this helps me too. I hope it helps you.

The bothist philosophy reminds us that we don’t have to choose between heartbreak and coherence, between grief and gratitude. Life is a symphony of both.

So let’s feel it all - and stay connected, coherent, and compassionate through it.