Lotus 🪷 Friends

a love letter to the friends that are with us in the muck + our sheer brilliance

I coined this term years ago, and once you hear it you’ll know exactly who yours are.

A lotus friend is the one who is with you in the muck. Who sees you at your most raw, your most undone, your most unrecognizable — and stays. Who also gets to witness your sheer brilliance, your becoming, your light. Because those two things always go together. You cannot have one without the other.

My first paid subscriber to my Light Ride™ meditations this week is one of my lotus friends. We met in corporate America and watched each other grow through more seasons than I can count. But what I keep coming back to — what makes my heart grow three sizes every time I let myself go there — is one specific night I will never forget.

It was my wedding anniversary. My kids were away. I had been waiting for my then husband to come home so we could celebrate, and as the hours passed the apartment got quieter and the light outside got darker and something in my gut started getting very loud.

I was alone and scared and my mind was spinning in every direction at once. Worst case scenarios on top of worst case scenarios. And underneath all of it, a knowing I had been trying to outrun for a long time — that something was seriously wrong. That his behavior had become increasingly erratic. That the word addiction kept rising up in my body no matter how many times I pushed it back down. I had been holding all of this completely alone. The people closest to me had no idea what was happening inside our home, inside our marriage, inside me. I had been keeping his secrets without even fully realizing that’s what I was doing.

Eventually I got in my car and drove the windy streets looking for him. Ditches. Side streets. Anywhere. The darkness made everything feel more ominous, my headlights cutting through streets that all started to look the same. I came home with nothing and sat with that for a moment — and then made a decision I should have made a long time before.

I was done holding this alone.

I called her.

Twenty minutes later she was at my kitchen counter. Level headed, clear, steady in a way I couldn’t be in that moment. She encouraged me to call the police. A very sweet officer responded and asked me gently — do you think he was drinking or using drugs? Tentatively, I said yes. He told me that in these cases, usually another precinct picks them up and calls it in.

That’s exactly what happened. There had been an accident. Someone else had been involved. And suddenly words I never imagined would belong to my life were being said out loud. Jail. Arraignment.

She went with me.

What happened when we arrived to bail him out has stayed with me in a different way. The officer we encountered there was nothing like the first. He was cold, cutting — and in the way he spoke to us I felt something I was not prepared for. Shame. Like somehow this was mine to carry too. Like I should have prevented it. I understood his frustration, I did — but his lack of compassion for what I was walking through that night still makes me shudder. To this day when I drive past that station something in my body tightens.

Some details of that night are crystal clear. Others have gone hazy. But what has never faded — what I can still feel as clearly as if it were yesterday — is her. At my counter. In my passenger seat. Steady when I couldn’t be. Holding what I couldn’t hold alone.

That’s a lotus friend.

This week, she became my first Light Ride™ subscriber. I stepped into something new and tender and mine — and she showed up. Again. Of course she did.

The lotus grows in muddy water. It needs the muck to become what it is. So do we.

Who are your lotus friends? Tell me about them in the comments.

As a gentle reminder, remember to trust your light, because what lights you up, lights up the world.

With love,

Katie Sol 💖