We talk a great deal about transformation. We have built entire traditions around the mechanics of becoming: the affirmations, the visioning, the willingness to release what no longer serves. And most of that work is genuine and necessary. But there is a question that transformation eventually forces on every serious practitioner, a question that our tradition has not always been willing to sit with long enough to answer. What happens after you become something more?
What happens when the becoming has actually occurred, when the shift is real and not imagined, when the person you were praying to become is standing right here in your own skin and you still feel the pull to keep reaching, keep revising, keep striving toward the next version of yourself as though the one you just became were somehow not enough?
Ernest Holmes understood this tension. In The Science of Mind, he taught that the spiritual practitioner must learn to work from a consciousness of completion, not toward one. The treatment, the prayer, the affirmation are not petitions sent upward to a distant God. They are recognitions of what already is. “We are not trying to make God answer our prayers,” Holmes insisted. “We are trying to become conscious of what is already done.” The work of becoming, at its highest expression, is not accumulation. It is recognition.
Thomas Troward, whose mental science laid much of the philosophical groundwork for New Thought, made a similar distinction between the originating mind and the distributing mind. The originating mind, which is Universal Intelligence, moves always from wholeness. It does not strive. It expresses. And we, as individualized expressions of that Intelligence, are most aligned with our own nature not when we are perpetually reaching forward but when we are fully inhabiting the present form that Life has taken in us.
This is the teaching that May is asking us to receive. Not the courage to change. We have practiced that. Not the willingness to let go. We have practiced that too. The invitation this month is to something harder and less familiar: the courage to stay. The courage to stop treating your current self as a waystation and begin treating it as an address. The courage to be rooted.
Roots do not apologize for where they are. They do not spend their energy wondering whether they ought to be planted somewhere else, whether the soil might be better across the field, whether some other tree has a more favorable position in the sun. Roots go down. They commit to the ground beneath them with a totality that makes growth possible precisely because the question of location has been settled. You cannot draw nourishment from soil you are always about to leave.
The spiritual bypassing that plagues so many sincere seekers is not, at its root, a commitment to the wrong ideas. It is a commitment to perpetual motion dressed up in the language of growth. We stay in the becoming because becoming feels holy. We keep the story of our transformation always slightly unfinished because a finished story feels dangerously close to complacency. But there is a profound difference between complacency and rest. There is a profound difference between stagnation and presence. A tradition that cannot make that distinction will produce practitioners who are perpetually spiritually mobile and almost never spiritually home.
Emma Curtis Hopkins, the teacher’s teacher of early New Thought, spoke often of the moment of divine recognition: the instant in which the practitioner stops performing their faith and simply knows. Not believes. Not hopes. Knows. That moment of knowing is not a launching pad for the next aspiration. It is the ground itself. It is what roots feel like from the inside.
So here is the question May is placing before us, simply and without softening. Can you let the person you’ve become simply be the person you are? Not permanently, not finally, not in a way that forecloses future growth, but genuinely, in this moment, in this body, in this life as it actually is right now? Can you let the person you have worked and prayed and suffered and opened to become, be enough to stand on?
Because here is what a rooted life makes possible that a striving life cannot. It makes genuine presence possible. It makes real relationships possible. It makes possible the kind of service that comes not from proving something but from offering something. A tree that is always questioning its roots cannot offer shade. A practitioner who has no ground beneath their becoming cannot offer witness. And what the world needs from us right now, perhaps more than our visions and our affirmations and our well-crafted consciousness, is our witness. Our actual, embodied, undefended presence in the life we have been given.
This is what it means to be rooted in the now. Not to abandon the future. Not to stop growing. But to let growth happen from a place of fundamental belonging: belonging to this moment, this self, this particular expression of Life that you are, right here, right now, without apology and without asterisk.
The courage to be rooted is real courage. It asks more of most of us than the courage to leap ever did. But it is the courage that makes everything else matter. Stand here. Breathe here. Be here.
The ground is already holy. You just have to stop moving long enough to feel it.