The Two Sides of Grace

I was twenty years old, a senior at New York University with a near-perfect GPA and a straight path to law school, when an Ayurvedic doctor in London undid the entire arrangement in a single, unplanned session.

It was the turn of the century, Christmas of 1999. My father, a literary agent, was being treated at a healing clinic in London and scheduled me to see one of the same practitioners he was seeing — Dr. Duja Purkitt, a Western and Ayurvedic doctor — while I was visiting. I had no idea what Ayurvedic medicine even was, but I went along with it.

The doctor sat me down and listened to my pulse. That was all. And then he began telling me things — about my inner world, about family members he had never met, about thoughts I was carrying and emotions I hadn't spoken aloud. There was no way he could have known any of it, and that stunned me.

He had me lie down, worked on my back, and the whole time he shared profound wisdom about how to live effortlessly. I can't remember a word he said. I can only tell you what it did.

The image I've used ever since is of an arrow striking a target — and the whole target splintering apart. Something broke open in that room. And in the aftermath, I understood, all at once, that everything I had been chasing on the outside — the security, the success, the happiness, the sense of being OK — was actually derived from the inside. That we carry something untapped within us, and that this medicine clears away whatever covers it.

In that moment, I knew the direction I wanted to point my life. I just had no idea where it would lead.

❦  An Unplanned Plan  ❧

I flew home to New York and promptly lost all interest in school. My grades slipped; I nearly dropped out in my final semester, because I knew that whatever I was going to do with my life would have nothing to do with what I'd been preparing for. I had no concept yet of "inner work." I wasn't spiritual. I was simply a young man who had glimpsed something true and couldn't unsee it.

So I followed it — one step, then the next. I worked at a legendary underground record store, became a DJ, produced music. Looking for my own Ayurvedic doctor, I found instead a practitioner of an ancient Japanese healing art, and sitting with her on the first session, I felt that same splintering I'd felt in London. 

This is powerful work, I thought. I want to do this. And I did. A couple of years later, I had a small practice of my own on the Upper West Side. I wasn't engineering a career. I was just saying yes to what opened.

❦  The Light Side of Grace  ❧

Years later, in Santa Barbara, CA, a woman named Lori walked into the office where I was working. She ran a nonprofit that brought healing programs to orphan survivors of the Rwandan genocide, and she invited me to join on her next trip to the country. There was only one catch: I had to raise a few thousand dollars for the airfare and accommodations.

This was the very early days of email, when you could still BCC hundreds of people at once. So I gathered every address I'd ever corresponded with and sent one message: I've been invited to Rwanda to work with genocide survivors. Would you be willing to support some of my expenses?

A woman I had met only a couple of times — she'd come to me for sessions in NYC — didn't even write back. She simply mailed a check for the entire amount, with a note that said, "Good luck in Rwanda. Send me an update." I still have that letter.

When you walk into the unknown with your heart open, trying to do good work, life will meet you. I have too many examples now to believe otherwise.

That pattern — putting something out and watching it return when needed — has appeared again and again across my life. I've come to live by it.

❦  Who Is Serving Whom?  ❧

Rwanda, in 2009, was my first real journey into the wider world, and it changed everything that came after.

We were working with first-generation survivors — secondary-school students, carrying invasive memories that made it impossible for them to study. One boy, about fourteen, dressed neatly in his school uniform, told us his survivor story in the calmest voice. 

He had watched his parents killed before his eyes, had been beaten and left for dead among the bodies, and had been miraculously rescued. It moved me, deeply, how he shared such painful information in a dignified, calm way. 

I had come to help these students. I had techniques, a healing background, good intentions. But sitting across from that young man, I was leveled by a single question: Who is serving whom right now? In that moment, he was serving me. He was teaching me.

What I learned there has guided every hard place I've worked since — the leprosy-affected community in Ahmedabad and the harsh slums of Nairobi. I learned there is a dignity in every fate I cannot fully understand, and that it was not my job to fix this student or reroute his trajectory.

It was my job to be present. To listen. That, it turned out, was healing enough.

As Joseph Campbell once said, "Follow your bliss. If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you. I say, follow your bliss... and doors will open, where you didn't know they were going to be."

In Rwanda, on that trip, I found my bliss and have been following it ever since.

❦  Burning the Ships  ❧

In 2011, I quit my job, gave up my apartment, sold my possessions, and booked a one-way ticket to India. I'd trained for years in a therapeutic modality that teaches you not to engineer an outcome for the client but to follow what genuinely emerges in the process — to trust the unknown and decide from what is actually showing up in front of you.

And I'd read how the ancient armies, arriving on foreign shores to fight, would burn their ships, leaving only two options: succeed, or not. 

In my early thirties, frustrated with the life of paying bills to get by, and with something burning in me I couldn't yet name, that image set me free. I leapt. 

During my initial time in India, I connected with Manav Sadhna, an NGO and community in Ahmedabad that is rooted in love. In 2019, I founded Mahtabe, a formal nonprofit that serves as an umbrella organization for all our efforts over the years.

We have worked on various initiatives, including clearing sewage-clogged alleyways, supporting girls' education in a leprosy community, and partnering with Teacher Grace Kavoi. She has developed the Malezi Centre, a low-cost school for underprivileged children in one of Nairobi's most challenging slums, into the city's first solar-powered school, which has educated more than 20,000 students to date.

In all that time, living in the unknown and putting the needs of others before my own has never once failed me. I've always been supported.

❦  The Dark Side of Grace  ❧

There is a light side of grace — the check that arrives from a near-stranger. And there is a darker side — the illness that brings you to your knees and turns out the light. I have now lived both.

A severe case of systemic Lyme disease tore me apart over the course of seven years. I had been traveling the world, deadlifting four hundred pounds, running sub-six-minute miles; I had assumed I was invincible, because nothing bad had ever really happened to me. 

Then everything was wiped away without notice and without apology. There were stretches when I couldn't walk, couldn't use a computer, couldn't talk on the phone, and required assistance to bathe.

My mother and I sometimes had only a few minutes in the morning for me to say what needed to get done. The rest of the day I lay on my back, in silence, navigating intense levels of fear and, at times, total hopelessness and despair.

Looking back, the disease was my deepest teacher. It somehow burned away a great deal of fear I had been carrying, unaware. It honed me down to the only three things I know really matter: truth, love, and service. 

And it taught me, viscerally, what every spiritual text says and almost no one believes until life proves it — that we are not in control. Everything I had called mine — my gifts, my strength, my abilities — was never a possession. It was a loan, and it could be (and was) recalled without my permission.

So the question became: what will I do with what I've been given, for as long as I'm allowed to keep it? Love, serve, and continue to understand what is true.

One way you get free spiritually is by going to the deepest places of fear — and coming through.

Lyme disease also undid the lone wolf in me. I'm an only child; I had always done my own thing, certain I needed no one.

By the third relapse, I had spent years climbing the mountain to recovery only to be kicked back to the bottom — three times over — and my spirit broke. I gave up and now know that painful edge of not being able to go a step further.

It was my mother and a few noble friends who refused to let me. That's not an option, they said. There are too many kids depending on you now, and all those you are yet to serve.

Then, at the final hour, a friend sent me to a gifted physician in New York who diagnosed in one meeting what years had failed to name, and prescribed medicines produced in W. Africa. Fifteen days later on the protocol, I was on the track to getting my life back.

I did not reach the other side of Lyme on my own strength. I was carried — by my mother, by friends, by clinicians who picked up panicked phone calls at six on a Sunday morning. When you receive that much kindness and grace, you don't get your freedom back and go back to your old ways.

You understand that it has been returned to you with certain conditions.

❦  The Stuff Life Is Made Of  ❧

Last month, returning to Kenya for the first time since the diagnosis felt like a miracle — a trip that the year before had been unthinkable.

When we told our community of supporters what we hoped to do in the country, the journey wasn't just funded, it was overfunded, in two weeks. People believed in a story alone, and backed it. 

At Malezi, a twenty-year-old graduate spoke to us, and the room fell silent. Half of my friends are six feet under, he said, lost to gang violence and police brutality. Malezi saved my life. It is my home.

For me, that is the stuff life is made of. Not the fancy car or the nice house — the stories of transformation. They are what make me come alive, and what I want to spend the rest of my years helping to facilitate, however they show up. 

A dear friend says you walk through life holding a flashlight that lights only the next few meters. You can't see the whole road. But you can see enough to take the next step. And from where I'm standing now, the next stretch looks amazing. 🙏🏻

❦  Collapse is Not The End ❧

People sometimes ask what I would say to someone at the very edge, where giving up feels inevitable and surrender feels impossible.

I don't think there's much you can say. You hold their hand. You stay. My own mind, in its despair, could only see a few options — and that was exactly why I was hopeless. It couldn't see the other ways out that existed anyway. 

So if you're at that edge, here is the one thing I'm now sure of: you do not know how things will turn out. There is almost certainly something there you cannot yet see. And strangely, it is not a bad place to be — that edge. It can — and did mine — change the essence of your being for the better.

I don't draw a hard line between inner and outer work, between giving and receiving. Where does one end and the other begin? It simply blurs. I serve these communities, and they cleanse and teach and remake me, constantly. 

It was my job to be present. To listen.

Post-London in '99, the path that unfolded has turned out to be one continuous cleanse — the Ayurvedic doctor, the boy in Rwanda, serving in the slums, the years on my back in silence — each one washing something away so that something truer could come forward.

The fear that once made me hide has mostly burned away; it's definitely a practice, but I can't be anything but honest now. And so I'll leave you where I find myself: still walking in uncertainty, with my heart open, held by others, pointed toward the only three things I know for sure — truth, love, and service. 

My life is being rebuilt. Something new is beginning. I still have no idea how it ends, and that's OK.

— as told by Christopher E. Lowman, founder of Mahtabe and author of There is Life After Lyme, on a Story Booth.