"Each of us is on a journey back to the Love that we already are — whether we recognize it or not. The gift and challenge of being human is that suffering, in all its forms, can become a doorway Home." – Melinda Edwards, MD
Melinda Edwards — a psychiatrist trained at Stanford Medical Center — was in the grocery store when she realized her four-year-old had vanished. She found Saachi near the registers — hands deep in a stranger's pockets, beaming. To Saachi, who was diagnosed with autism at 16 months, shorts were just shorts and she was obsessed with their pockets. That they were on a stranger was irrelevant.
For years, Melinda tried everything to change this behavior — therapists, strategies, drills. Nothing worked. Then one day, instead of trying to fix her daughter, Melinda sat with her own reaction. The frustration dissolved into fear, fear into sorrow — first for Saachi, then for herself. And then beneath that deep sorrow — an exquisite tenderness. And with it, a connection with everything and everyone she hadn't expected. That shift reframed everything. Melinda came to see Saachi and others on the spectrum not as people to be fixed but as beings who teach — not through words or formal methods, but through their very spirits. It's a view that puts her at odds with the medical establishment she trained in.
A psychiatrist in Charleston, South Carolina, Melinda provides care for deeply underserved adults — some homeless, some chronically suicidal, some who have harmed others. "We all are longing to be received," she says. Her clinical work has its own edge: she has studied integrative medicine with Andrew Weil, researched the effects of MDMA on PTSD alongside Michael Mithoefer as part of the pioneering MAPS-sponsored clinical trials, and writes as a columnist for Autism Parenting Magazine.
Melinda grew up in Nahualá, a Mayan village in the Guatemalan highlands where her parents served as medical missionaries. The families there had no electricity or running water, cooked over open fires in single-room adobe huts, and washed clothes in the river. Melinda's family was considered wealthy because they had an outhouse. She moved to the U.S. at twelve — into a strictly religious boarding school, where childhood trauma and near-lethal anorexia followed. Later came the grueling intensity of medical training, which left its own scars. In her twenties she moved to the Bay Area for her residency — partly to be closer to spiritual teachers. When she encountered Ram Dass, she wept: "Something in me recognized in him that which I had been seeking." She chronicles it all in her Amazon bestselling memoir Psyche & Spirit: How a Psychiatrist Found Divinity Through Her Lifelong Quest for Truth and Her Daughter's Autism — endorsed by Anna Lembke (Dopamine Nation), Sharon Salzberg (Lovingkindness), and Krishna Das.
In 2017, hospitalized with influenza and pneumonia, Melinda was forced to confront the possibility that Saachi might one day have no one to care for her. Out of that reckoning she founded Living Darshan — a nonprofit whose name draws from the Sanskrit for being truly seen. It was born out of Melinda's vision of a world where Saachi's spirit and the spirits of others would be truly seen — dedicated to honoring the wisdom of individuals on the autism spectrum through conferences, community involvement, and speaking engagements.
Join Dr. Andrew Kim in conversation with this mother-psychiatrist-seeker who keeps discovering that everything is a doorway back to love.
