What a car accident taught me about angels
A couple weeks ago, I was in a car accident when someone ran a red light and hit me in an intersection. The airbags went off and my car was totaled. Thankfully, I walked away mostly unscathed aside from a sprained finger and a few bruises and scrapes.
While the accident itself was shocking and intense, the aftermath was all angels.
The people who pulled over to make sure I was okay. The strangers who called the police and stayed to give witness statements, helping the report reflect what truly happened.
The insurance agent (yes, somehow!) who was so unexpectedly kind and calming, checking in on me frequently and expediting my case so I had a check within just a few days.
My sweet puppy Sula, who sensed my energy the moment I returned home and met me not with her usual bitey puppy hype, but with gentleness, licks and cuddles.
Ever since the accident, it's as though my whole world became angels.
Angels everywhere.
Not in the shiny, escapist way new age spirituality can sometimes portray them - but in the deeply human ways grace arrives through other people. Through care. Through presence. Through the feeling of being held in the middle of something destabilizing.
Somehow, the accident returned me to a place within myself that feels like home.
In my last newsletter, I shared my updated website and mentioned that Angelic Breath Healing was no longer featured there. Since the accident, I've had a complete change of heart. There is now an entire section devoted to Angelic Breath Healing again on my website here.
Angelic Breath Healing is in many ways my vocational hometown.
It is the place my services originally emerged from - and also the place that can feel almost too familiar. Sometimes the parts of me that long to grow, expand and evolve want to distance themselves from the rhythm of what feels like my hometown. To prove I've moved beyond it somehow.
Over the past several years, I've felt a real desire to distance myself from new age spirituality. From spiritual bypassing. From the reduction of the sacred into formulas like: Call on this angel for this problem. From spirituality that feels disconnected from the body, from Earth, from grief and from the complexity of being human and meeting life's inevitable curveballs.
At the same time, I've been deeply devoted to studying and growing within the fields of herbalism, trauma resolution, dreamwork, and somatic care.
And the deeper I go, the more I realize angels were never separate from any of it…they are woven in all things!
Through the presence of plants. Through the body's wise knowing. Through dreams. Through synchronicity. Through the stranger who stops their car to help after an accident. Through the mysterious grace that meets us exactly where we are.
I think part of maturing spiritually has meant allowing my understanding of angels to deepen - to stop searching for them somewhere outside of everyday life and instead begin recognizing them within the ordinary, human moments of being alive.
I've pushed myself far outside of what feels comfortable and familiar over the years. And yet, moments like this accident seem to call me back home again…back to the breath. Back to the unseen grace weaving within all things.
While I intend to continue studying in the directions I'm called, I also feel genuinely excited to weave Angelic Breath Healing back into my offerings in a more visible way again - less as a step backward, more as a return and a deepening.
And in all honesty, behind the scenes my life is deliciously full right now. I'm getting married one month from today, I just completed 300 hours of my first year of clinical herbalism school and received my certification in Fundamentals of Medical Herbalism (yay!) and I have a very sweet English Lab puppy named Sula to love and care for.
The accident reminded me to slow down enough to actually inhabit this season instead of rushing through it or wishing myself into the next chapter.
So this summer, I feel especially called back to the basics: simple spaces of breath, presence and listening. The kinds of gatherings that ask nothing dramatic of us - only sincerity, willingness and a little more room to hear the grace present beneath the surface of our lives.
I'm feeling excited to lead more one-off Angelic Breath Healing classes and intimate spaces for gathering in the months ahead - spaces to slow down, soften, reconnect and breathe together again.
And I'd genuinely love to hear from you: is there an Angelic Breath Healing class or experience you'd especially love to be part of right now? A theme or kind of gathering your heart is longing for? Feel free to respond and let me know what's calling to you.
I feel that's what the angels have been teaching me lately - not to rush through being human, but to be more fully here for it. To let this fleeting, beautiful life reach me, reach all of us, while we're here.
With love,
Madeline