Dear Reader, Early this week, someone who had expressed interest in walking one of my pilgrimages next year messaged me to say they had decided not to join us. They had been watching the protests in Barcelona, where a march over housing prices ended with fires in the streets and clashes with the police. I totally empathized with them. Traveling to Europe and going on a pilgrimage is an important decision. But the experience got me thinking about how often in the past I held myself back from...
8 days ago • 4 min read
Dear Reader, Early on my first Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage across northern Spain that people have walked for over a thousand years, I was climbing one of the steepest hills on the route when a man passed me. He was clearly much older than I was, and he was walking faster. I could hardly believe it. A few kilometers up the road, I found him sitting by the side of the path with a cold beer. I sat down next to him and we started to talk. He was 84 years old, from Mexico, a...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Dear Reader, When you hear the words "the Will of God," what do you feel in your body? What thoughts come up? I remember when I was 26 years old and my younger brother was tragically killed at only 24. "Why did he die? Why did God take him when he was so young?" I remember asking my mother, who said to me, "Well, it was God's Will." I heard the same explanation when my father passed away, when there was a big earthquake, or when a plane fell from the sky. Whatever the loss or tragedy, the...
22 days ago • 5 min read
Dear Reader, On September 30, a flydubai passenger plane was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 174 passengers and eight crew on board. Partway through the flight, the co-pilot turned on the captain, struck him on the head with a crash axe, and tried to hijack the plane. The captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian pilot with 17 years of flying experience, collapsed on the cockpit floor with his head split open and bleeding, as the plane began to plunge. Picture him there, powerless and in pain,...
29 days ago • 4 min read
Dear Reader, This past week, I facilitated the last Path of the Heart seminar of the year here in Granada, with participants from the US and the UK. I've been facilitating this seminar for more than 10 years, and this was possibly the seminar where I played the most music. Again and again, a song took us where words couldn't. I want to share the lyrics of one of the songs, The Sacred Way: You have to lose your mind to find your heart.You have to lose yourself to find your way.Who looks...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Read this on GabrielGonsalves.com Dear Reader, Have you ever wondered why it is often easier to meditate with a group of people than alone? Why stillness comes sooner, why you drop deeper, and why the experience can feel more profound than the same practice by yourself on your living room floor? Something is happening in that room beyond posture or technique. When two or more people gather with a shared, sincere intention, forces begin to move between them. Jesus pointed toward this when he...
about 2 months ago • 17 min read
Read this on GabrielGonsalves.com Dear Reader, This past Wednesday, I opened our Sacred Heart Meditation Circle, part of the Heart Mastery Community, by singing a new song I received this week. The song is called “The Sacred Way,” and it’s about returning to the spiritual heart. Throughout the performance, my knees were shaking, and my voice cracked more than once. You’d think that after years of singing in ceremonies and circles, there would be no shaking left in me by now. No cracking...
2 months ago • 13 min read
Read this on GabrielGonsalves.com Dear Reader, Dolly Parton died earlier this week. She had just turned eighty after a short fight with cancer, the same kind of short, sudden fight my sister and my mother each had with cancer of their own. The news landed hard even on people who never owned one of her records or could hum one of her songs. What stayed with me wasn’t the headline. It was learning what she’d actually given her life to: the foundation she built, and more than that, the care she...
2 months ago • 12 min read
Read this on GabrielGonsalves.com Dear Reader, The older I get, the more I notice it. What I think is happening is usually not what’s happening. A friend goes quiet. I fill in the blanks. They’re ghosting me. I said something wrong. Someone’s tone changes and my body decides it knows why. Can you relate? Six years ago, just before lockdown, I watched this pattern take over at a ceremony in Austria. What happened that night became the story behind a song I later wrote called “Flesh and Blood.”...
3 months ago • 12 min read