What I Found When I Stopped Believing I Was Broken

I didn't come to Buddhist psychology through calm contemplation. I came to it the way most people find what they genuinely need — sideways, through a series of doors I didn't know were connected.

My path toward Buddhist teachings didn't begin in a meditation hall. It began with Druidry — with my Nordic ancestors and their animist understanding of the world as alive, relational, porous. The sacred wasn't separate from the ordinary. The divine wasn't withholding. That reorientation, quiet as it was, began unraveling something I had carried since childhood: the belief that I was, at my core, broken.

Fundamentalist Christianity had given me original sin as my origin story. Druidry gave me interconnectedness. Shamanism gave me tools. And Buddhist psychology, when I finally found it woven through the curriculum at Sacred Stream Foundation, gave me a word I hadn't known I needed: wholeness.

Not the wholeness you earn. Not the wholeness that comes after sufficient suffering or sufficient surrender. The wholeness you already are.

That distinction is not small. For someone raised to believe that repair was the highest spiritual aspiration available to her, the idea that there was nothing fundamentally wrong in the first place was not comfort — it was revolution.

The teaching on the three roots of suffering — attachment, aversion, and misknowing — arrived with the force of something I already knew but had never named.

Attachment has been the through-line of my deepest pain. The hope placed in people who couldn't hold it. The outcomes I needed to control. The expectations I built so carefully and watched collapse so reliably. I grew up in an environment shaped by abandonment, loss, and betrayal, and I responded the way children do: I learned to want things so hard I thought I could will them into being. If I just hoped clearly enough, loved fully enough, needed it just right — surely the world would meet me there.

I didn't understand yet that the wanting itself was where I kept getting hurt. Not because desire is wrong, but because my attachments had calcified into demands — demands I placed on people, on circumstances, on the future — and reality, indifferent to my architecture, kept declining to comply.

Misknowing, the third root, feels the most tender to me now. So much of my suffering was built on stories I mistook for facts. About who I was. About what I deserved. About what was possible. The unexamined assumptions running quietly beneath everything, shaping every choice.

Naming these three — attachment, aversion, misknowing — didn't dissolve my suffering. But it gave me somewhere to look.

Silent meditation was new territory. I had relied for years on guided meditations, high-frequency music, external structure — scaffolding I didn't realize I'd been depending on until I was asked to sit without it. Samatha practice invited me into a stillness I hadn't trusted myself to inhabit. The silence felt vast and slightly dangerous at first, the way any unmediated experience does when you've been managing your inner life from the outside.

I'm still learning to stay there. But I'm learning.

My teacher Isa offered a definition of Dharma that I've carried with me since: anything that facilitates a closer connection to oneself and one's relationship to reality.

I've turned that definition over many times. It's deceptively simple and quietly radical. It doesn't require a tradition, a lineage, a set of correct beliefs. It asks only: does this bring you closer to what is true? Does this help you see more clearly?

By that definition, the collapse of my old structures was itself Dharma.

When what I thought I understood about my life — my sense of self, my frameworks for meaning, the narratives I had used to make sense of my pain — was reduced to rubble, I discovered something I couldn't have found any other way: the ground beneath it. The path forward only became visible because what had been obscuring it finally fell.

That's not a consolation. It's the mechanism.

I came to this sideways, through doors I didn't know were connected. Druidry and shamanism and a classroom at Sacred Stream where someone finally said the word wholeness like it meant something.

It meant everything.

The path was always there. I just had to let enough fall away to see it.

I share this not as someone who has arrived, but as someone who knows the particular disorientation of having your entire framework dissolve beneath you — and who found, in that rubble, something more solid than what had stood before. This is the work I carry into every session, every teaching, every conversation with someone standing at the edge of their own unraveling. You don't need to be fixed. You need someone who knows the difference.