“When the soul wants to experience something, she discards the image of the experience before her and enters her image.” ~Meister Eckhart
For most of my life, something inside me has made me feel bad. I moved around the world trying to fix something that I couldn’t name.
Then came a beautiful chapter that I hadn’t asked any more questions. I met my husband – and through his love I experienced the life-changing magic of being seen. His presence felt like sunlight. I’m softened. I’ve bloomed. For the first time, I felt safe.
Losing him to a young onset colorectal cancer was like seeing the sunlight go away. His final breath made me realize that I had finally evaporated. And during the long, painful months that followed, I began to look back at all the environments I had moved to: growth, adolescence, adults, relationships, gardens. And as a plant I was raised or wilted according to the conditions and my individual constitution.
His absence revealed the kind of care I had and didn’t know.
I was never flawed. I am a person with specific needs to thrive. It’s all about the correct light, language and nutrition needed to bloom.
Looking back, I can see that my basic needs, shelter and food, met, but I couldn’t understand what it means to feel emotionally safe or deeply gaze. Have I put my bike on the endless loop of what’s wrong? I was just doing it. survive.
Front of the audience. Attunement. Emotional safety.
These are not things that can be named missing when you didn’t know them. Not because someone was overtly cruel, but because no one was taught to ask, what kind of care does this particular care require?
Humans do not have cue cards. There is no tag “partial sun, hypoallergenic, daily emotional attunement.” We enter this world as a mystery.
My mother has the sixth sensation in her plant. She knows they are leaning when they need water or even without looking at them, as if they can smell it. She fits in with her garden in the way I experienced years later with my husband.
After he passed away, I longed for the kind of care we cultivated together. The way my heart sang when he saw me. The way he heard.
My relationship with my mother was at most tenuous for adults. But after my husband passed away, I saw her trying, as if I knew how she knew. Corrected. Filling space. Masking the pain in the spurt. On our occasional phone call she talked about her plants. Who was dry, who needed new soil and a bigger pot ready. There is no performance. There are no expectations. Just be careful.
I realized at that moment that she couldn’t provide me with the gaze she gave her plants. And for the first time I realized why. Her care was authentic. She’d never encountered a plant like me before.
Before I met my husband, I had already lived in survival mode for years. I have been taking self-medical care in the wake of emotional upheavals and family crises, eroding the smallest trust I had in myself. His love opened something to me. And after he passed away, I had to learn at this stage of my journey what my body safety meant.
Most of us grow up in environments shaped by inherited urgency, unconsidered patterns, and a generational lack of curiosity. There is no negligence here, but there are consequences.
The body maintains its score with its wisdom. It holds unmet needs and implicit truths like a second skin.
And it is often when we encounter a minor phor that reflects our inner experiences, which is what we spit out.
The ratiophor is in the form of an attunement. It’s not a solution, it’s a shift. It’s probably a feeling that nothing is wrong – not recognized. Rather than revising the past, the body can rest by creating meaning. Breathe.
We talk about regulations like it’s a technique. Breathe like this. It moves like that. However, in many cases, the true form of regulation is recognition.
What is outside of us reflects what lives inside. Melodies from our favorite songs. story. Reminiscent of us: You are not alone in this form.
And at that moment, your body will become softer. The charge will rise. We are watching.
This is why the Philor is important. Not only as art, but also as medicine. As an orientation. As a survival.
When we take a mirror in the sky where we can see exactly how songs, drawings, and sadness feel, we are given a kind of consistency. Our experiences of once scattered and silent are collected in shape. And form is something we can hold.
Often, it’s not the literal situation that makes us feel safe. It’s resonance. It’s a sense of security that someone else knows of similar pain somewhere.
Even if the paths are different, the terrain is familiar. And its familiarity provides the nervous system. When the ground feels too far, it’s about returning to self.
The metaphors that make us human are often subtle. Our Intuition Soldiers: They arrive as gut emotions, patterns, images, or melody that we continue to return. sea. desert. Cracked shell. A tree that blooms late every season.
They slowly take root on us. And one day, without realizing it, we see ourselves reflected in the world. And a sense of belonging begins to ripple through our inner landscapes.
Victor Frankl once wrote, “A person with a reason to live can withstand almost any way.” He realized that trauma researchers like Bessel van der Kork and Gabor Mate continue to illuminate.
It is not erased or justified, but is metabolized. held. I took a breath.
The meaning does not change what happened. It changes how we live within us.
This is where metaphors become more than language. It becomes a container – the pain passes through. A sturdy frame is enough to hold anything that’s not ridiculous.
Frankl discovered this truth in a concentration camp. Vanderkork found it in a body that refused to forget. Mate found it in soft pain under addiction and illness.
I found it in my mother’s garden.
And I keep finding it. With a phor that arrives like a lifeline when I don’t know how to explain what I’m feeling.
These minor phors do not heal wounds, but give them shape. And the form allows sadness to become something we can live on next to.
Philosopher is not something we create on our own. That’s what we receive. Through dreams, through symbols, through quiet choreography of nature.
A bird appears in your window. The lyrics of the song are exactly what you need to hear. A tree shape that reflects your own attitude of sadness.
These are not just coincidences. They are collaboration. The World, whispers: I will meet you. I’m with you. In that echo we find compassion. For pain, for the road, for yourself.
We like to think of ourselves as the author of our stories, but more often we co-write with them big ones. In the scenery. With our ancestors. Unresolved energy has been resolved and it’s starting to hurt.
The metaphor arrives from this conversation. It is what is seen and invisible, inside and outside. They root us in the relationship fabric of being.
This is what it means to be human. Not only to feel, but to recognize. Witness yourself as you are reflected in the leaves, lines of poetry, in the eyes of strangers. Not because we fit the mold to belong, but because something in the world has shaped ourselves so that we meet exactly our place.
–
Perhaps the more honest question is not “What’s wrong with me?”
It’s “What shaped me?”
“What conditions did I develop?”
“And what have you learned about the soil, sunlight and care that allows me to bloom?”
What symbol did you spot me along the way?
We are the existence of patterns and stories.
Philor is how the soul repulsates.
And the meaning is a thread that transports us home.
About Ira Casey
Ayla Casey is a writer, grief guide and integrative health advocate, exploring the meaning of self-resources through loss and difficulties. Her work centers the body as a portal of integrity, memory and belonging. She is a free companion in grievers and voice work, creator of Alchemy for Human Hearts, a storytelling platform for Grievers, caregivers and creatives, and author of The Little Book To Remember. Her offerings live at www.alchemyforhumanhearts.com.
