What fills the holes in the silence we hold

There are moments in life when words cannot reach the place inside us that aches. When the pain becomes so vast, so consuming, that silence becomes the only language left to speak. But even in silence, something waits—something holy, something true, something aching to be met with love.

Years ago, I found myself standing at the edge of such a silence.

My sister had just passed after a long, devastating illness. She left behind two young children and a trail of grief that tore through my family like wildfire. Her relationship had been one filled with dysfunction—one I had begged her to leave. She didn’t. And when she got sick, the illness lingered like a shadow that would not lift. It broke my heart. It broke our parents’ hearts. It broke the hope that perhaps my voice could have saved her. I carried anger and grief like stones in my chest—stones that whispered you didn’t do enough.

In the wake of her passing, I found myself at a shadow workshop led by Debbie Ford at the Deepak Chopra Institute in La Jolla. I had already been working as a coach and understood the power of shadow work, so when I was invited to help facilitate future workshops, I said yes.

I didn’t know that saying yes would lead me into one of the most profound moments of my life.

It was the first workshop I ever coached, and the group numbers were uneven. I ended up being paired with a participant for an exercise meant to stir connection: to look into each other’s eyes and send love—pure, unspoken love.

As I sat across from her, something in my gut turned. A deep discomfort welled up inside me, intuitive and unexplainable. After the exercise, she bolted from the room. I felt the weight of her pain but had no name for it yet.

When she returned, we were to repeat the exercise. This time, she snapped.

“You’re looking at me with hatred… with disgust,” she said, trying to pull away.

I gently held her hands. “What’s happening in your stomach right now?” I asked. “Because I can feel it.”

Her eyes widened. The dam broke. She began to sob.

“I’m bulimic,” she whispered. “And no one… no one has ever known.”

We sat together in that sacred silence. Her secret, carried for years in the dark, finally had breath. She was not hated. I did not recoil. The disgust she projected onto my gaze was what she carried inside. And in that moment, love did what it always longs to do—it held her anyway.

I don’t know what became of her after that day. I pray she continued to heal. But that moment remains a living testimony: sometimes, the silence we hold is not empty. It is full—of wounds and memories, of self-loathing and fear, of stories we never told. And what fills those holes is not fixing, not solving, not even speaking.

What fills them is presence.

What fills them is love.

What fills them is the courage to sit, to wait, to see—and to let what’s hidden finally come home.

And maybe that is what healing is: not the absence of pain, but the filling of the silence with grace.