What happens when you’ve spent so long minimizing your own experience that you can no longer recognize how much pain you’re carrying?
In this episode, I step outside the fairy tale to explore what The Handless Maiden can look like in real life. I share the story of my first childbirth—how often I silenced what I felt, handed my authority to others, and insisted I was fine when my body was telling me otherwise.
This is an exploration of what happens when we believe trusting someone else requires us to stop trusting ourselves.
Along the way, an octopus shows us how something lost can grow back, and a turtle becomes an unexpected teacher in listening to the wisdom within us and trusting the next step without knowing where the entire path will lead.
Together, we explore the quiet ways self-abandonment happens, the healing that often takes place where no one else can see it, and the first small act of sovereignty: telling ourselves the truth about where we are.
And I’ll leave you with one question:
Where in your life might you be calling a nine a three?
Next week, I want to tell you where I believe I am in the maiden’s story now. And we’ll explore what can happen when we stop minimizing what we feel, begin trusting what we know, and finally learn how to use the hands we’ve grown back. We will see what a human life can look like when it remembers the wisdom of the turtle.
If you would like to stay connected between episodes, receive personal reflections, and be notified about new podcast episodes, join the Know Thy Soul email list:
Listen to the earlier parts of The Handless Maiden:
Part One: [The Handless Maiden, Part 1 | The Father Wound: When Love Requires Self-Abandonment]
Part Two — [The Handless Maiden, Part 2 | The Silver Hands: How Relationships Mirror Our Wounds]
Part Three— [The Handless Maiden, Part 3 | Growing Hands: Healing, Wholeness and Spiritual Sovereignty]
Mentioned in this episode:
- The Handless Maiden by the Brothers Grimm
- My Octopus Teacher
- Psalm 139:13–14
- Job 12:7–10
- The Tao Te Ching, chapter 37 and the concept of wu wei
- The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 70
- Taylor Swift’s 2023 TIME Person of the Year interview
🌿 Learn more, explore additional resources, and join the Know Thy Soul community at:
🎙️New episodes every Tuesday.
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The full episode transcript is below.
Hi friends,
Welcome to *Know Thy Soul*, where we explore the stories and symbols that help us reconnect with the wisdom already living within us.
For the last three episodes, we’ve been walking through *The Handless Maiden*. We’ve watched the maiden lose her hands, accept a pair of silver ones, enter the forest, and eventually grow her own living hands back.
But today, I want to step outside the fairy tale for a moment and ask a different question.
What does it actually look like to live without hands?
Because in real life, no one comes along with an ax and physically cuts them off. There usually isn’t one moment when we suddenly lose our ability to trust ourselves, speak for ourselves, or act on what we know.
It happens much more quietly than that—more like the woman with the leaking jar from the Gospel of Thomas, who kept walking as everything inside slowly spilled out behind her.
A little here.
A little there.
Until one day, we look inside and realize how much of ourselves is gone.
And today, I want to tell you a little bit about what that looked like in my own life.
Because the truth is, I didn’t discover these ideas in a fairy tale and then try to apply them to my experiences. I had already been living them for years.
The story simply gave me language for something I hadn’t yet known how to name.
There are so many parts of my life I could share with you here—so many ways I lost my hands without even realizing it was happening. And I suspect we’ll eventually get to many of them, after all, that’s why I started this podcast..
So don’t mistake this one story for the whole story. It’s only a snapshot.
And honestly, even this snapshot is hard to understand without the other stories we’ve been exploring. They give me anchor points. They help me locate myself inside experiences I didn’t have words for at the time.
But this is the story I felt guided to tell today, because one of the clearest examples of just how disconnected I had become from myself showed up in a place I never would have expected.
Childbirth.
Years ago, my 28-year-old self showed up for a routine appointment at 38 weeks pregnant.
I didn’t have the language or self awareness to understand it then but I was completely handless.
My doctor walked into the room, handed me a piece of paper with a date and time written on it, and said, “This is when you’ll report to the hospital.”
I looked down at the paper, confused.
“Why?”
“We’ll induce you.”
Are you seeing the king’s numbered pear garden already? Everything had been arranged and placed neatly in order.
There was just one problem. Nobody had asked the woman whose body was actually going to do this what she wanted.
I remember thinking, Wait a second. I’m not even 40 weeks yet.
Nobody had explained why I needed to be induced. It was simply presented as the next step, and I was expected to follow it.
But somehow, for the first and only time during that pregnancy, I pushed back. I said I didn’t want to be induced yet.
So we canceled it.
A week later, I returned for another appointment.
The nurse took my blood pressure. Then she took it again. Eventually, she asked me to lie down so she could take it a third time.
After a while, they came back and told me it was elevated. I had two choices: I could stay on bed rest until my due date a few days later, or I could go directly to the hospital and be induced.
I remember feeling completely overwhelmed. Those may technically have been choices, but I didn’t know how to evaluate them.
I didn’t know how elevated my blood pressure was, what the actual risks were, or what questions I should be asking. I only knew that they were the medical professionals and I wasn’t.
A week earlier, I had found enough of my voice to say that I didn’t want to be induced. But now there seemed to be a medical reason, and I didn’t know how to sort through what I was feeling.
So I did what I always did back then.
I handed the decision to someone else.
They told me to go to the hospital.
So I went.
Looking back, I still don’t know exactly what was happening with my blood pressure that day. Maybe it really had been elevated at the doctor’s office and came back down by the time I reached the hospital.
What I do know is that the first nurse I met at the hospital had a definite chip on her shoulder about doctors sending what she called “high blood pressure moms” over for inductions.
Every time she came in to take my blood pressure, she would glance at the monitor and mutter something under her breath.
“Huh.”
A little later, she checked it again.
“Looks fine to me.”
Then there was another reading.
“Funny. Still looks normal.”
It was clear that she was frustrated about something. Apparently, doctors sending “high blood pressure moms” to the hospital for inductions wasn’t exactly her favorite thing.
And somehow, I had landed right in the middle of a disagreement I didn’t understand.
Nobody explained why my blood pressure readings were different. Nobody sat down and walked me through what was happening or what my options were.
I was just a scared first-time mother trying to do the right thing.
Eventually, the decision was made to keep me overnight and begin the induction the next morning. Again, nobody asked how I felt about that.
Nobody told me that my doctor wouldn’t even be there the next day, or that her partner would most likely be the one delivering my baby.
And I didn’t know enough to ask.
Later, that same nurse inserted a medication called Cervidil near my cervix to help prepare it for labor. And let me tell you, it sure felt like she was taking every bit of her frustration about “unnecessary inductions” out on my cervix.
Nobody had warned me that this part might hurt. The way they described it, I imagined her gently placing a little medication where it needed to go.
Instead, it felt as though the baby had stolen something from her, hidden it somewhere behind my belly button, and she was digging around, determined to get it back.
Apparently, my cervix had become the stand-in for every doctor who had made her angry.
Then, just before her shift ended, she offered me one final reassurance.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It won’t start labor.”
A few hours later, I discovered just how wrong she was.
By two o’clock in the morning, labor hit me like a freight train. I had never experienced pain like that in my life.
Suddenly, every strategy I normally used to deal with discomfort stopped working. I couldn’t distract myself, think my way through it, or make it go away.
So I did what my body knew how to do. I tightened against it. I fought it. I tried to push through it—anything except surrender to what was happening.
At some point, a nurse walked in and asked what seemed like a ridiculous question.
“On a scale of one to ten, how bad is the pain?”
I remember thinking, How would I know? I had never done this before.
How was I supposed to know whether this was a five or a ten? Couldn’t it always get worse?
All I knew was that I was begging for an epidural.
To make matters even better, the hospital had apparently decided that the middle of the night was the perfect time to perform maintenance on the air conditioning.
I was so hot that I asked someone to open the window. I don’t know what I thought an open window in Virginia in early summer was going to accomplish.
The room didn’t get cooler. The air just got thicker.
Meanwhile, the anesthesiologist was waiting for approval from my doctor, but nobody could reach her.
So I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
When the epidural finally came, I welcomed the relief.
And to be clear, there was absolutely nothing wrong with wanting that relief. I was in excruciating pain, and I was incredibly grateful when it stopped.
But looking back, there is something symbolic about how completely I welcomed the numbness.
Because numbness was familiar.
Isn’t that what silver hands allow us to do? They allow us to keep functioning, but they cannot feel.
And I had become very good at functioning while disconnected from what I was feeling. I had spent much of my life numbing pain.
It just usually wasn’t physical pain.
Around five in the morning, my doctor finally arrived to break my water.
As she was doing it, she casually mentioned that she had a graduation to attend later that day, so her partner would probably be the one delivering my baby.
My heart sank.
I had only met him a few times, but every interaction left me feeling uncomfortable and unsettled. He had made jokes that crossed lines I didn’t think a doctor should cross.
At one appointment, after noticing the baby’s position, he said, “Oh, the baby’s upside down. You must have had sex upside down.”
At another appointment, I had rushed to the office bleeding and terrified that I might be having a miscarriage.
Thankfully, an ultrasound confirmed that the baby was fine. But because of the position of my placenta, I was placed on pelvic rest—which essentially meant no sex.
The doctor looked at my husband and joked, “Don’t worry. Your penis won’t fall off.”
Maybe some people would have laughed.
I didn’t.
Something in me recoiled every time I interacted with him, and now I was being told that this man would be delivering my child.
Everything inside me was screaming no.
I wanted to leave. I wanted to go home. More than anything, I wanted someone to ask me what I wanted.
But by then, the induction was underway and my water had been broken. I felt trapped.
A few hours later, her partner came in to check my progress. And I did what I had learned to do so well.
I put on my silver hands, smiled politely, and did what I was told.
He explained that there was some meconium in the amniotic fluid and that my daughter was “sunny side up,” meaning she was facing upward instead of toward my back.
Then he estimated that she was too large to deliver vaginally. I would need a C-section, he said, and he would return at noon to perform the surgery.
Wait.
What?
First, it was high blood pressure. Then an induction. Then I learned that my own doctor wouldn’t be delivering my baby.
And now I needed a C-section?
What was happening?
But once again, I said nothing. Everything inside me was screaming, and I stayed quiet anyway.
Because the doctors knew best.
Now, I want to be clear. This isn’t an argument against doctors, inductions, epidurals or C-sections. Modern medicine saves lives every single day, and there are times when each of those interventions is absolutely necessary.
But we have a way of dividing everything into opposing sides: natural or medical, intuition or expertise, good or bad—as though wisdom must live entirely on one side or the other.
I don’t think it does. I think wisdom lives in what I call the sacred middle—the point exactly between the two, where the division falls away and they are no longer opposing forces, but parts of a single whole.
We have already seen it in the white circle the maiden draws around herself. She stands at its center, protected by a boundary the devil cannot cross.
And by the end of the story, the sacred middle no longer exists only within her. It exists between the man and woman, who can finally stand opposite one another without standing in opposition—equal, balanced, and whole.
We’ll keep returning to this sacred middle as the stories unfold, because in many ways, every journey home is a journey back to that center.
For now, the problem wasn’t that I trusted medicine. The problem was that I believed trusting medicine required me to stop trusting myself.
Needing someone else’s hands does not require us to surrender our own.
That is what this story is about.
It is about what happens when we become so disconnected from our own authority that we don’t even know how to participate in decisions about our bodies and our lives. I wasn’t asking questions. I wasn’t expressing what I felt.
I had simply handed myself over to the process.
Thankfully, there was one person in that room who hadn’t forgotten how to use her voice.
Her name was Cathy.
Looking back now, I think Cathy had grown her hands back.
As the doctor prepared to leave and finish his office hours before returning at noon for the C-section, Cathy spoke up.
“Doctor,” she said, “Sometimes babies turn when mothers start pushing,” she said. “Can I push with her while you’re gone and see what happens?”
He laughed.
“Shoot your shot.”
And then he left.
Over the next hour, Cathy quietly worked with me.
There was no drama, no ego, and no power struggle. Just one woman using her knowledge and her voice to advocate for another woman.
And sure enough, my daughter turned. She moved down into the birth canal, and suddenly everything began progressing very quickly.
In fact, it happened so fast that Cathy had to page the doctor several times to get him back to the hospital.
To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t come the first time she called. But every unanswered page seemed to confirm what my body had been trying to tell me all along: I did not feel safe with this man.
By the time he finally walked into the room, he practically caught my daughter on her way out.
And that supposedly oversized baby?
She weighed seven pounds, nine ounces.
Perfectly healthy.
I, on the other hand, was a little harder to assess.
I had torn badly during the delivery, so the doctor suggested leaving the epidural running longer while he repaired the damage. That meant the catheter had to be inserted again, and I remained numb while everything was taken care of.
A few days later, my daughter still wasn’t gaining weight, so we found ourselves back at the pediatrician’s office several days in a row.
All of our attention was focused on her. Meanwhile, my own condition was slowly deteriorating, and no one—not even me—was watching the mother.
Eventually, the pediatrician stopped looking at the baby and looked directly at me.
“You look terrible,” she said. “You need to see your doctor.”
And do you know what I said? “I’m fine.”
I genuinely believed it.
Never mind that I had God knows how many stitches in one of the most sensitive places in a woman’s body after pushing a tiny human through it. I couldn’t sit in a hard chair, and I was terrified that I was already failing my daughter.
I was on an emotional roller coaster with no end in sight. I wasn’t doing the sitz baths I had been told to do, and I had a fever hot enough to fry an egg.
But I was fine.
But the pediatrician insisted that I call the OB-GYN who had delivered my daughter—the last person on earth I wanted to see.
And once again, I did what I was told.
I called him just as his office hours were ending. He told me to meet him across the street at the emergency room.
So we went.
He never showed up.
It turned out that I had a severe bladder infection.
Then a young intern told me that he needed to examine me—you know, down there. I immediately began to cry.
I had just pushed a baby through that part of my body and been stitched back together. It was the last place in the world I wanted anyone to come near.
He seemed genuinely confused by my tears. But no one stopped to ask why I was crying, explain what was about to happen, or help me feel safe.
The exam happened anyway.
And just as it had in the labor and delivery room, someone else had to look at me and tell me that I was not fine. I could not recognize how sick I had become.
Because numbness doesn’t always mean that we feel nothing.
Sometimes it means we are feeling everything, but we have become so accustomed to overriding those feelings that we no longer understand what they are trying to tell us.
For years afterward, I replayed that birth in my mind. I thought about the induction, the almost C-section, all the questions I wished I had asked, and all the things I wished I had said.
I thought about every moment when something inside me knew that things weren’t right—and how I had stayed silent anyway.
Looking back, what strikes me most is the irony of it all.
My body had spent nine months doing something my conscious mind could never have directed on its own. It had grown an entire human being.
Psalm 139 describes God knitting us together in our mother’s womb. For the first time, that image began to mean something different to me.
Not only had God formed my daughter through my body; that same God had once formed me through my own mother’s body. That sacred intelligence has formed every one of us in ways our conscious minds could never fully understand or control.
And that intelligence didn’t stop working the moment we were born, as though God had finished the job and retreated somewhere else.
It is still here, moving through every one of us—keeping our hearts beating and the breath of life flowing through us.
And in my case, it was using pain, exhaustion, and eventually fever to tell me that something was wrong.
The sacred had not left my body. It was still speaking through it.
And yet, I treated my body as though it had nothing meaningful to say.
By the usual measures, the birth was a success. I delivered vaginally, my daughter was healthy, and we both went home.
I am deeply grateful for that. But those facts do not tell the whole story.
What was the experience actually like? Did the mother feel heard and informed? Did she understand her choices and feel like an active participant in one of the most sacred experiences of her life?
Or did she feel as though something was happening to her?
It takes a special kind of practitioner to care about both outcomes: bringing a healthy baby into the world while also helping the mother feel heard, respected, and empowered.
And while I left that hospital with a healthy daughter, I left knowing something else too.
Somewhere along the way, I had lost touch with my own knowing.
I had become handless.
I switched OB-GYN practices immediately after that experience and found a doctor I trusted. But like many practices, hers included several doctors, and whoever happened to be on call would deliver the baby.
I wasn’t willing to take that chance again. So with my next two children, I scheduled inductions to make sure she would be there.
And she was wonderful. Both deliveries were wonderful.
In fact, something happened during one of them that the nurses later told me would have led many other doctors to perform a C-section. But this doctor remained calm, worked with what was happening, and delivered my daughter vaginally without a problem.
Looking back, I had learned something—but I still hadn’t grown my own hands back.
I had simply found a doctor whose hands felt safe enough to place my life in.
And that mattered. It was a step.
But when I became pregnant with my fourth child, I began to see just how thoroughly the pear garden was still numbered—and what could be lost when order and clinical information left no room for compassion.
We discovered that the pregnancy had begun with twins, but the second baby was not viable. The doctors spoke about it so clinically, without seeming to recognize what that news meant to me.
They may have been giving me medically accurate information, but I had just lost a baby.
I didn’t need them to change the outcome. I needed someone to acknowledge the loss. I needed compassion and enough room to grieve.
At the same time, something inside me was telling me not to schedule another induction. This time, I wanted to trust my body and allow my son to come in his own time.
But if I went into labor naturally, I could no longer guarantee that the doctor I trusted would be the one on call. Any of the OB-GYNs in that practice could deliver my baby—including the doctors whose lack of compassion had just shown me that I no longer felt safe there.
So I had a choice.
I could override what I was feeling and schedule another induction so I could control who delivered my baby.
Or I could listen to what my body was telling me and find somewhere else to go.
And just as the Handless Maiden eventually realized that she could not remain in the place where she had been wounded, I knew I could not stay there.
So this time, I listened.
I left the practice and found a midwifery group. This time, I wanted to trust my body and give my son the opportunity to come in his own time.
And for 41 weeks, I waited.
Then I was told that I couldn’t safely wait any longer. I would need to be induced again.
I was crushed. I had changed practices, given my body more time, and tried to do everything differently—only to find myself right back where I had started.
But I also knew that what mattered most was bringing home a healthy baby. So we began the induction.
By this point, my body knew exactly what to do when the Pitocin hit.
And boy, did it hit me like a freight train.
The contractions came so quickly that I could barely catch my breath between them. I couldn’t sit still, and my entire body was clenching and twisting with every wave.
Now, you would think that by my fourth labor, I would have figured out how to answer the pain-scale question.
Spoiler alert: I had not.
I once heard someone say that when men are asked to rate their pain, they compare it with the worst pain they have personally experienced. But women are more likely to imagine a ten as the worst pain any human being could possibly endure.
I have absolutely no idea whether that is scientifically true, but I know which category I fall into.
To me, a ten would have to be something like having your limbs ripped off while giving birth and being burned at the stake. And even then, some part of me would probably still be thinking, But what if someone were also poking your eyes out? Couldn’t it somehow get a little worse?
So when the nurse came in and asked that same dreaded question—“How bad is the pain?”—I still didn’t know how to answer.
I hated that question. I was exhausted, annoyed, and in no mood to contemplate the outer limits of human suffering.
So I said something like, “I don’t know. Maybe a three?”
The nurse stared at me.
Now, remember, I was at a new hospital. And apparently, this hospital had invested in a very advanced piece of medical technology that the first one did not have.
A pain chart.
You know the one. It has ten little faces that become progressively more miserable as they move from one to ten, so you can find the face that most closely matches your current level of suffering.
The nurse picked up the chart and held it in front of me.
“Girl,” she said, “you’re not a three.”
Then she pointed to an exhausted-looking red face almost all the way at the right end of the chart and said “You’re a nine.”
I was shocked.
A nine?
How could I possibly be a nine? Nine was one step away from the worst pain a human being could conceivably endure.
But then I looked at myself—or maybe, for the first time, I saw myself the way the nurse was seeing me.
I could barely breathe through the contractions. I couldn’t sit still, and my entire body was clenching and twisting with every wave.
She was right.
The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t hurting. The problem was that I had become so accustomed to minimizing my pain that I could no longer accurately recognize it.
For perhaps the first time in my life, someone else was validating my pain more accurately than I was.
Maybe this was the compassion I had been searching for.
She couldn’t feel the pain for me, and she couldn’t take it away. But she saw it. She acknowledged it. And she refused to let me dismiss it.
Because she could see the truth of my experience, I began to see it too.
And that was when I began to understand something much larger.
We often think sovereignty means becoming stronger, more independent, or more self-sufficient. But sometimes the first act of sovereignty is much simpler.
It is learning to tell the truth.
This hurts.
I’m not okay.
I need help.
Because if we cannot accurately recognize our own experience, how can we trust ourselves to navigate our lives? How can we know when something is wrong or honor our own boundaries?
Looking back now, I can see that I had spent years disconnected from my feelings—not because they weren’t there, but because I had learned to dismiss them, explain them away, and tell myself I was fine when I wasn’t.
That, I think, is one face of the silver-handed life: still functioning, still doing everything expected of us, but no longer able to feel what it is costing us.
Years later, I took my daughter to a sleep doctor. At one point, he asked whether she woke up feeling rested.
Without even thinking, I replied, “People do that?”
Everyone in the room laughed.
I wasn’t joking.
I genuinely didn’t know that waking up rested was a thing.
Then there was the time I took that same daughter to the emergency room after she fell off her scooter and injured her wrist.
The doctor looked at how swollen it had become and explained that the swelling was a sign that it might be broken.
I winced.
She looked at me and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Well,” I said, “while we’re here, could you X-ray my ankle too?”
A month earlier, I had injured it, and my ankle had swollen up like a balloon. It still hurt, but I had done absolutely nothing about it.
When the doctor looked at the X-ray, she asked, “How are you walking on this?”
Not only had I been walking on it for a month, but I had run a half marathon the weekend before.
And if you’re thinking that growing your hands back is a one-time event—that one day they return and you are suddenly cured of every old pattern—you are mistaken.
I wish it worked that way.
As I mentioned in last week’s episode, I was recently rear-ended on the New York State Thruway and sent spinning across all 5 lanes of the highway at 65 mph. Since then, I’ve been receiving fairly intensive chiropractic care for the pain in my back and neck.
While reviewing my X-rays, the chiropractor pointed out an area of arthritis around the T5 area of my spine.
It was as though someone had turned on a light.
For years—decades, even—I have struggled to sit upright in an ordinary chair. Even as I write this episode, I am reclined.
If I’m sitting in one of those standard hard plastic chairs, chances are my legs are elevated somehow, or I am slouching to take the pressure off my back.
But never once did I think, maybe this isn’t normal, maybe I should have someone look at it.
I had lived with it for so long that I had simply learned to accommodate it.
Once again, it took someone else looking at my body to tell me that something I had normalized for years might actually deserve my attention.
And my therapist, who listens to this podcast, is probably nodding very knowingly right now, because we spend a lot of time talking about my tendency to put everyone and everything else ahead of my own needs.
Hi, Kim.
We talk ourselves out of what we’re feeling. We explain it away. We minimize it. And because we have no reference point outside our own experience, we assume that whatever we’re feeling must simply be normal.
I think women become especially good at this—not because we’re born that way, but because we’re taught to endure. Be grateful. Don’t make a fuss. Keep going. Take care of everyone else.
It starts early. We get our first periods and say, “It feels like my insides are trying to claw their way out through my stomach.”
And we’re told, “That’s normal. Go to school. Go to work. Take care of everyone else. Don’t stop. Don’t complain. Just push through.”
Somewhere along the way, we stop asking whether what we’re feeling might actually deserve our attention. We become strangers to our own experience.
We become, in a sense, handless—not because the knowing isn’t there, but because we’ve lost our ability to recognize it, trust it, and act on it.
That’s what the nurse gave me that day: a reference point.
She looked at me, saw what I couldn’t see for myself, and said, “Girl, you’re not a three. You’re a nine.”
Looking back, I wonder whether she was one of the compassionate people the maiden had set out to find. She couldn’t make the pain disappear, but she could see it. And because she saw it, I could begin to see it too.
At the time, I thought it was just a funny story about childbirth. I had no idea how important that moment would become.
It wasn’t really a story about the pain scale. It was a story about how disconnected I had become from my own experience—how much pain I could carry while still telling myself I was fine.
But that moment became a catalyst. It didn’t reconnect me to myself overnight, but it did begin the long process of learning how to listen.
And looking back, I can’t help but notice that the process would take at least seven years—the same amount of time the maiden spends in Here All Dwell Free. I had to heal the disconnection created by years of overriding myself and learn to trust what I heard enough to act on it.
I had to grow my hands back.
That nurse gave me a mirror. She reflected something back to me that I couldn’t yet recognize for myself:
I was hurting far more than I realized.
And isn’t that what stories like *The Handless Maiden* do?
They hold up a mirror and help us see what we cannot always see alone.
They give us a pain scale.
They help us recognize where we are, how much something hurts, what we have lost—and perhaps what needs our attention now.
The questions didn’t come all at once, but over time, I began to ask them.
How many times had I ignored my own knowing or placed everyone else’s needs above my own?
How many times had I handed my authority to someone else because they seemed more qualified to understand my life than I was?
How many times had everything inside me been screaming while I stayed silent anyway?
Because if I’m honest, that pattern wasn’t confined to the labor room. It was showing up everywhere.
And in future episodes, we’ll explore some of the other ways it shaped my life. Because over the next decade, I would slowly enter my own version of the house called Here All Dwell Free and begin the process of growing my hands back.
There’s a documentary on Netflix called *My Octopus Teacher*. In it, filmmaker Craig Foster tells the story of the extraordinary relationship he developed with an octopus living in the waters near his home in South Africa.
He swam out to visit her every day, and over time, she allowed him into her world.
Then one day, a shark attacked her and tore off one of her arms.
She survived, but afterward she retreated into her den beneath the rocks. She was weak, wouldn’t eat or come out, and for a while, Foster wasn’t sure she would survive.
Then, about a week later—and I can’t help but notice that here, too, healing is marked by the number seven—she emerged. And Foster noticed something extraordinary: a tiny new arm had begun growing where the old one had been torn away.
It would take about one hundred days for the arm to grow back completely, but the healing had already begun.
I like to imagine that if we could have interviewed her afterward, she might have told us that she had been in her own version of Here All Dwell Free.
She disappeared from the world for a while. She rested. She healed. And somewhere beneath those rocks, her body began growing something new in the place where something had been taken from her.
Later, when she was hunted by a shark again, the film shows her finding remarkable new ways to protect herself.
And I don’t imagine she would have said, “Yes, I finally conquered my fear of sharks.”
The shark was still dangerous. Fear still had something important to tell her.
What had changed was that she trusted herself. She couldn’t control whether another shark would come, but she could trust herself to listen, respond, and find a way through when it did.
I’ve watched a version of this happen with many women I know after divorce. When the marriage ends, there is often a period when they seem to disappear for a while.
They become quieter. They pull inward. From the outside, it might look as though they’re stuck or giving up, but something much deeper may be happening.
They’re grieving the marriage and the divorce. They’re untangling themselves from the judgment and the loss. And sometimes, they’re healing from the person they had to become in order to survive it.
Whenever a friend is walking through that season, I reach out and let her know that I’m there if she needs me. But somewhere inside, I also trust that she may be in her own Here All Dwell Free, slowly growing her hands back.
And sometimes, what she needs most isn’t advice, another book, or someone telling her what to do next.
Sometimes she simply needs rest, space, solitude, and time for something new to grow.
The Handless Maiden spent seven years in the house called Here All Dwell Free.
The octopus retreated beneath the rocks while her arm regenerated.
Because sometimes, what looks like disappearing is actually healing that no one else can see.
Interestingly, last week I joked that the maiden might borrow Taylor Swift’s line: “The old maiden can’t come to the phone right now.” That version of her was gone.
But I hadn’t realized how closely the story surrounding that song echoes this same pattern.
In 2016, after an enormous public fallout involving Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift disappeared from public view. She later said that she moved to a foreign country and didn’t leave a rental house for a year.
When she finally emerged, it was with *Reputation*—the album containing the very line I had joked about.
I don’t know what happened inside that rental house, and I don’t know whether Taylor would call it Here All Dwell Free. But the shape of the story is hard to miss.
She entered that house publicly wounded and disappeared from view.
When she emerged, she was sovereign—a woman with hands, ready to author her own story.
And what she created from there would surpass everything that had come before.
Now, most of us aren’t going to emerge from our own Here All Dwell Free and sell out stadiums.
But sovereignty isn’t about the size of what we create. It’s about living in relationship with our own knowing and becoming who we were created to be.
And years later, standing in my own backyard, I would encounter another teacher who seemed to understand this completely.
She had never read a book, attended a workshop, or spent years trying to find herself.
She had never lost herself in the first place. She was simply living exactly as she had been created to live.
That teacher was a turtle.
It was spring, shortly after the kids had finally returned to school following the COVID quarantine. I was outside working in my garden when I noticed a painted turtle just beyond the fence.
She was completely absorbed in what she was doing, so I set down my tools, took off my gloves, and walked over to watch.
Using her back legs, she was slowly digging a hole in the earth. She would scoop out a little dirt, then reach back in and do it again. She was preparing a nest where she would lay her eggs and leave them until they were ready to hatch.
And I remember standing there thinking, How in the world does she know how to do this?
No one taught her. Her mother wasn’t standing beside her, explaining how deep the hole needed to be. She didn’t have a doctor guiding her through the process, and she certainly hadn’t read *What to Expect When You’re Expecting: The Turtle Edition*.
All she had was her body and some deep knowing living inside it.
And what struck me was how completely she trusted it. Not because she knew how everything would turn out—she couldn’t possibly know what would happen to those eggs or where her babies would eventually end up.
She simply knew what this moment was asking of her, and she followed it. She kept reaching into the earth and moving one small scoop of dirt at a time.
That turtle wasn’t trusting the destination. She was trusting the path.
She trusted that she would know what to do when it was time to do it.
As I sat there watching her, I began to realize that nature seems to understand something we’ve forgotten.
A deer doesn’t smell a predator and stop to wonder whether she’s overreacting. A bird doesn’t feel the call to migrate and decide to stay because flying south sounds impractical.
Nature receives information and responds to it.
That turtle wasn’t questioning herself or looking for reassurance. She certainly wasn’t polling other turtles on social media to make sure she was making the right choice.
Whatever life was asking of her in that moment, her body knew how to answer.
And that was enough.
Taoism has a name for this kind of movement: wu wei. It is sometimes translated as “non-doing,” but it doesn’t mean passivity. It means acting without forcing, moving in harmony with what the moment is asking of us.
The turtle wasn’t doing nothing. She was working hard. But she wasn’t fighting life or demanding to know where the path would lead before she took the next step.
She was cooperating with it.
Maybe this is why the book of Job tells us, “Ask the animals, and they will teach you.”
The *Tao Te Ching* says it another way:
“People follow the earth.
The earth follows heaven.
Heaven follows Dao.
Dao follows what is naturally so.”
And perhaps it is why the heroines in so many of the stories we grew up with were always surrounded by animals. Ariel had Flounder. Cinderella had the birds and mice. Sleeping Beauty seemed to have the entire forest.
The animals always knew something the human characters had forgotten.
If you want to remember the natural order of things, look outside.
Nature never left the Garden.
Only humans did.
Watching her, I couldn’t help thinking about my own experiences with childbirth. I was a member of what is supposedly the most intelligent species on the planet, yet I had spent so much of my life looking outside myself for answers and talking myself out of what my body already knew.
Meanwhile, this turtle was trusting the wisdom written into her very bones.
I had learned to second-guess myself.
She simply listened and responded.
It made me wonder: When did we lose that?
When did we become so disconnected from ourselves that we began believing wisdom existed everywhere except within us?
We talk about nature as though we’re somehow separate from it, but we’re not. The same intelligence telling that turtle where to dig was also alive in me.
Think about it. I had grown four human beings inside my body. I couldn’t have told a single cell how to become a heart, a hand, or an eye. I had no idea how to do any of that.
And yet, something within me did.
That same intelligence was beating my heart and healing my wounds, but I had spent years assuming that everyone else understood my body and my life better than I did.
The irony was hard to miss.
As I watched that turtle, I made a decision. I was tired of living disconnected from myself, handing my authority to other people, and trying to force life to unfold according to my plans.
I wanted to learn how to listen again.
The turtle couldn’t show me where the entire path would lead. She simply reminded me that I didn’t need to know.
I only needed to hear the next instruction—and trust myself enough to follow it.
And as I watched her, I found myself thinking about the Handless Maiden again.
In the language of the story, this turtle had never become handless. She had never learned to distrust what her body was telling her. And when the knowing came, she acted on it.
There was no gap between what she knew and what she did.
Maybe that is what it means to have hands. It doesn’t mean that we can see the entire destination. It means that we can act on the next thing we know.
I had spent years trying to grow my hands back.
The turtle was showing me how to use them.
That day, I made a vow.
I would try to live more like the turtle. I would stop demanding to see the entire path and begin trusting the next step.
I would trust that there was a deeper intelligence at work in my life, even when my logical mind couldn’t understand where it was leading me.
I had no idea where that decision would take me.
But it would change everything.
That nurse many years ago held up a pain scale and helped me see something I couldn’t see for myself.
My hope is that this podcast can offer you a similar mirror—a way to see your own experience more clearly when you’ve been living inside it for so long that you’ve begun to mistake it for normal.
So before you move on with your day, I want to leave you with one question:
Where in your life might you be calling a nine a three?
Maybe it’s physical pain. Maybe it’s exhaustion, grief, anger, loneliness, or a longing you keep explaining away. Maybe it’s a job or a relationship that looks fine from the outside but is slowly draining the life out of you. Maybe some part of you has been insisting that you’re fine because you no longer remember what fine actually feels like.
You don’t have to fix it today. You don’t have to know where the entire path will lead.
For now, simply tell yourself the truth about where you are. Bring forth whatever is inside you that has been begging to be heard, let it speak. Feel it. Honor it. Listen to what it has been trying to tell you.
Because in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “If you bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will destroy you.”
Maybe this is what he meant.
What we refuse to feel doesn’t disappear. It stays inside us, asking more and more loudly to be heard. But when we finally bring it into the light—when we name the nine instead of continuing to call it a three—something can begin to heal.
Perhaps that is where sovereignty begins.
And perhaps that is how our hands begin to grow back.
And if someone came to mind while you were listening, consider sending this episode to her. Not because you know what she should do, but because sometimes we need another woman to sit beside us, hold up the pain scale, and gently say, “I don’t think you’re a three.”
Next week, I want to tell you where I believe I am in the maiden’s story now.
And we’ll explore what can happen when we stop minimizing what we feel, begin trusting what we know, and finally learn how to use the hands we’ve grown back. We will see what a human life can look like when it remembers the wisdom of the turtle.
Until next time my friends,
May you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
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