11/02/2025
Timeless Truth: The Hamster Wheel and the Prayer Wheel
Every day, the wheel turns.
Sometimes we run it.
Sometimes we pray it.
From the outside, they look the same … both full of motion and repetition.
But what moves them couldn’t be more different.
The hamster wheel is powered by compulsion.
It’s the drive to fix, to prove, to keep up.
It moves fast but goes nowhere, fueled by a nervous system that forgot how to trust stillness.
Then there’s the prayer wheel.
It turns too … yet its rhythm is slower, rounder, infused with devotion.
It’s moved not by pressure but by presence.
Over time, this has been something life keeps showing me in layers … how the same motion can be powered by such different forces.
The body always tells the truth first.
Restless legs. Tight breath. The hum of urgency in the chest.
These are often the moments I can feel the mind gripping the wheel again, trying to steer what was meant to flow.
Between the two is something subtle … a quiet axis that allows the motion to turn into meaning.
That axis is nuance.
It’s the space where grace lives, where we start to feel the difference between urgency and aliveness, between effort and offering.
To the untrained eye, these shifts can look the same … especially to those who knew our older rhythms.
But part of this work is learning to hold what’s transforming within us, even when others can’t yet see it.
That’s the confidence born of grace: to keep turning from the inside out.
Stillness isn’t the absence of pace.
It’s the return of presence.
The wheel will always turn.
The question is: what’s turning it in you?