SPIRITUAL CHALLENGE for OCTOBER 2025
Un-Harden Your Heart
My spiritual challenge for personal growth this month is to un-harden your heart. The details of this month challenge come from Rev. Cameron Trimble.
Each day this month, take up Rev. Trimble’s advice to take time to reconnect with your body’s signals—especially when you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or tuned out. Your body knows before your mind does that something isn’t right. Choose a moment each day to pause and scan yourself gently: What’s numb? What’s aching? What’s alive?
• Instead of judging or fixing, just attend—with kindness.
• Place your hand on your chest or your belly. Let your breath meet your presence.
• Say aloud (or silently), “I am here. I will not abandon myself.”
Let this become your daily act of sacred resistance, a refusal to go numb, a return to tender presence.
With so much hate and violence directed at so many right now, it’s challenging to keep compassion and empathy alive. But we must. The alternative is to participate in a descending spiral of hate from which it takes generations to recover.
The recent death of right-wing reactionary hate monger Charlie Kirk provided an opportunity to let loose the cannons of karma on a well-deserving horrible human being. The temptation to do so was overwhelming for a lot of people. I was personally grateful for the various people of many faiths who, without condoning his work, his hateful words, or his politics, reminded us that no one deserves to be killed; no one deserves to be the target and victim of politically motivated violence. Not even Charlie Kirk.
I’ll admit I am not mourning his loss. He was a hateful, hurtful, harmful and dangerous person. I don’t want to celebrate his death because that is to become the monster that Charlie Kirk allowed himself to become. I’m not mourning his loss, but I can’t celebrate death and violence because eventually it becomes easier to do so. It will get easier and easier to harden my heart and dehumanize others.
Recognize when your heart is hardened or hardening. Your heart may be hardening if you find it difficult to forgive people even when they truly make amends, feel emotionally detached, are more irritable, angrier, and isolated, and increasingly cynical and with a sense of hopelessness. Our hearts harden due to emotional and physical trauma and pain. We build emotional defenses for self-preservation and in order to lower defenses we must find and cultivate relationships and find places where we feel safe and accepted.
Our hearts harden through emotional processes, not logical or reasonable ones. There is no argument or reasoning that can soften a heart because the softening heart is also the result of an emotional process.
I will practice softening my heart this month and I invite you to do the same. Rev. Trimble says that keeping our hearts tender is a revolutionary act of resistance:
When the world numbs, staying tender is a revolutionary act.
“It’s not sentimentality, not bypass. It’s sacred refusal…
• Refusal to stop weeping when harm is done.
• Refusal to look away when truth is buried.
• Refusal to close off when the world needs more openness, not less.”
In times like these we are called to hold grief and hope simultaneously. As we practice doing this, we soften our hearts. And the world needs people operating from soft, open, loving hearts to combat the hurt and the hatefulness.
Take up Rev. Trimble’s daily practice this month and see if it helps. As always, I’d love to hear about your experience with the challenge.