What the Soul Already Knew

April 2026 | Living REAL with Heidi Coleman

Earlier this week after work I sat down, logged into my dad's medical portal, pulled his test results and summary, saved them, and emailed them to him and my brother so everyone would have them.

Nobody asked me to do it that way. I just did it.

That was the soul. Quiet. Unglamorous. No audience. Just love doing what love does without needing a reason.

Then I called him.

We talked about his medical bills and the ordinary logistics of someone getting older and needing more support. And then at the end — and I want to be honest about this — I asked him how he felt about the current administration. About the war.

His answer and mine could not have been further apart.

I felt sick to my stomach.

And then I told him we were just going to live separate lives moving forward.

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I've been sitting with that ever since. Because Michael Singer would say — and he'd be right — that the sick feeling was my ego. That his response is just an event passing through consciousness. That my suffering comes not from what he said but from my resistance to it. That the work is to stay open. To not close around what disturbs you.

The ego asked the political question at the end of the call.

The soul had already done its work two hours earlier — quietly, after a long day, without being asked.

That's the teaching.

The ego needed to know where he stood. The ego got the answer and reacted. The ego drew the line and said we'll live separately now. The ego was protecting something — my sense of how the world should be, my identity, my values, my need to not be complicit by proximity.

The soul just loved him. Downloaded the results. Sent the email. Showed up without requiring him to deserve it first.

I thought about my mom.

She met her dementia diagnosis with humor. "It doesn't matter. I won't remember." She didn't close around what was coming. She didn't need the world to be different than it was in order to stay open to it. She just kept living — with presence, with grace, with an outlook that didn't require anyone around her to agree with her or validate her or be who she needed them to be.

That was soul. Undefended. Uncontracted. Just here.

I'm still learning from her.

Here's what I'm sitting with today:

The ego will always have a reaction. The sick feeling was real. The line I drew was real. I'm not pretending otherwise. But what if I let the ego's reaction just be weather — passing through, noted, not acted on — while the soul keeps doing what it already knows how to do?

What if the work isn't to figure out how close to stand to someone whose beliefs disturb me — but to notice which part of me is making that calculation?

The soul already helped him earlier this week.

The ego needed something from the conversation that the soul didn't require.

Both are real.

Both are me.

The both/and here isn't about politics or distance or who deserves what. It's about learning to recognize — in real time, in the middle of a phone call with your father — which one is driving.

That's the REAL work. Recognize which part of you is in the room. Embrace it without judgment. Align with the deeper one. Live from there.

Even when it's hard.

Even when you still feel a little sick.

Even when you're not sure you got it right.

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If you're navigating a relationship right now where love and difficulty are living side by side — the journal is here when you're ready. Seven days. Fifty-six prompts. A private space to finally say the things you can't say out loud.

heidicoleman.com/journal