The Tenderness Underneath

Melinda Edwards on Terror, Meeting, and the Love at Our Core

As a child in the Guatemalan highlands, Melinda Edwards prayed again and again to be saved — and felt nothing. She was certain she was going to hell. When a massive earthquake struck, when the family car went over a cliff, when lightning hit — each time, the same thought: This is it. I'm being left behind. Decades later, as a psychiatrist, a mother, and a spiritual seeker who has traversed the full arc from terror to tenderness, she offers a radically different frame: everything — even the terror — is a doorway back to love.

Melinda Edwards is a Stanford-trained psychiatrist, the author of Psyche and Spirit, and the founder of Living Darshan, a nonprofit dedicated to deepening the world's understanding of autism and neurodiversity as pathways toward collective awakening. She grew up in Nahualá, a Mayan Indigenous village in the hills of Guatemala, where her parents served as medical missionaries. Her childhood was marked by both the stark beauty of that world — no electricity, no running water, an outhouse that made her family the wealthiest in town — and a private spiritual terror that would shape everything that followed. In this Awakin Call, moderated by physician and peacebuilder Andrew Kim and hosted by Stephanie Nash, Melinda traced the full journey from that terror to a life dedicated to meeting what most of us turn away from.

The Girl Who Couldn't Be Saved

Melinda's parents were devout — not denominational, but intensely conservative, of the hellfire-and-brimstone variety. The sole instruction for salvation was simple: pray and receive the Lord in your heart. She did this over and over, waiting to feel something that never came. The absence became a secret she carried in shame, convinced she was fundamentally unsavable.

"I lived in terror that Jesus would come back and take my whole family, and that I would be left behind. And so this secret that I carried in terror and shame lended itself to just feeling deeply alone."
— Melinda Edwards

That terror became the lens through which she experienced everything. The 1976 Guatemala earthquake wasn't an earthquake — it was Jesus returning. The car going over a cliff wasn't an accident — it was the moment she would be sent to hell. Trauma wasn't spoken about in her family. The only instruction was to pray harder, to try to embody the qualities of Christ. By eleven, the weight of what she couldn't process had become more than her body could hold, and she developed anorexia nervosa. By twelve, back in the United States, she was skeletal, in heart failure, and hospitalized.

Her parents and doctor didn't believe in psychological illness — they tube-fed her and expected the problem to resolve. It didn't, because the source of the pain hadn't been met. It was only through therapy with a gifted therapist that Melinda began to encounter the layers of fear, rage, and grief she had been carrying. As she met each layer, her system began to unwind. And somewhere in that unwinding, a deeper longing surfaced — one she could only name as a longing for Truth, with a capital T.

"I was doing all this psychological work, which was so helpful and healing. But I realized there was more. I felt like I was just moving the furniture around in the house. And I wanted out of the house."
— Melinda Edwards

Biological, Psychological, Spiritual

Melinda offered a framework she uses to understand existence: three aspects — the biological, the psychological, and the spiritual — each successively more subtle. The biological is concrete, physical, the realm where science and medicine reside. The psychological encompasses our inner workings — emotions, thoughts, patterns of relating, trauma. And the spiritual, the most subtle, is what naturally comes into awareness as we meet and unwind the psychological contractions within us: our innate interconnection with everything and everyone. Not the idea of connection, but the lived experience of it. Another word for it, she said simply, is love.

She was quick to note that none of these aspects should be dismissed. For years, Melinda refused antidepressants while suffering from profound depression and suicidal thoughts, convinced that medication would derail her spiritual progress. Spiritual teachers sometimes tend to reinforce this belief that medication was avoidance. When desperation finally forced her hand, she discovered the opposite was true.

"I just felt like I was myself. The heaviness lifted, the suicidal thoughts dropped away. It wasn't a high, it wasn't an escape. The burden of that heaviness dropped away."
— Melinda Edwards

Just as the medical paradigm can bypass the subtle levels, she observed, the spiritual paradigm can bypass the gross ones. Andrew Kim put it cleanly: to ignore that we are body, or to ignore that we are spirit — both are dangers.

Mascara, and What's Underneath

When Andrew asked Melinda to illustrate the dance between psychology and spirit, she didn't reach for a clinical case or a peak experience. She reached for the day before the call. Her seventeen-year-old daughter Saatchi, who is autistic, had been using Melinda's bathroom while her own was being repaired. Day one: bright pink nail polish all over the hand towel and countertop. Melinda held her patience. Day two: black smudges everywhere — Saatchi had discovered the mascara and applied it, in thick clumps, to her eyebrows.

This time, Melinda lost her patience. She raised her voice. Saatchi, exquisitely sensitive, began to cry. And then Melinda did something precise: she named what was happening. She told Saatchi she wasn't yet able to be present with her, that she needed a few minutes to sit with her own frustration first. She sat. The anger dissolved quickly. Underneath it: pain — that she had hurt her daughter's heart over something as trivial as mascara. And underneath the pain: tenderness.

"And then the tenderness that's always underneath the pain. That's really the other side of the coin. Just that exquisite tenderness, which is love."
— Melinda Edwards

She went back to Saatchi. They cried together and came together in what Melinda called an even closer, more beautiful way. The point wasn't the resolution — it was the path through it. Every contraction, she said, every flash of anger or fear or shame, is an opportunity to drop in. And these aren't private experiences. When she meets her own frustration, her own pain, she is meeting the collective's pain. Because they're not separate. The stories differ; the core experience is the same.

"Until we can meet these aspects within ourselves — not just mentally, but fully, energetically, be fully present with them in our body — until we can do that, we can't fully meet another's pain, shame, anger, fear. Because they're not separate."
— Melinda Edwards

Back Through the Branches

Edwards offered an image she returns to often: a great mother oak tree, the kind found in the American South, with roots plunging deep, a massive trunk, and branches reaching far out and high. In her frame, the roots are Truth — emptiness, no-thing, the starkness of what is. The trunk is Love — born of Truth, meaning no separation, unity. And as consciousness individuates, it moves out along the branches, further from the trunk into the forms and experiences of this realm.

Close to the trunk, the branches carry what she called the direct emanations of love — the qualities the Bible names as the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. To these she added two of her own: sincerity and humility. Further out, the branches carry experiences that seem distant from love — violence, cruelty, the collective upheavals of the present moment. But they are all still connected to the trunk. Everything is born of love, she insisted, whether it seems like it or not. And because everything is connected, everything is a doorway back — through the branches, into the trunk, and into the roots.

What struck Edwards most about the Galatians verse she grew up singing was a phrase that was never explained to her as a child: with such, there is no law. The insight came to her years later — that when these qualities flower naturally from our core, there is no need for law, for superego, for conscience. They aren't superimposed by the mind. They emerge because the flute has been cleared enough for love to come through.

The Wisdom of Porousness

Saatchi was diagnosed with autism at sixteen months. From birth, she seemed to be in pain — crying constantly, never sleeping, screaming in grocery stores. Edwards didn't understand it then. In retrospect, she sees a being so open and porous that the fluorescent lights, the sounds, the emotional energies of everyone around her were flooding in with nothing to filter them. Saatchi was exquisitely sensitive at every level — the five physical senses, the psychological, and the spiritual. She would sometimes speak her mother's thoughts aloud.

As a single mother driven by fear for her daughter's future, Edwards threw herself into every therapeutic modality she could find and afford. Every basic skill — pointing, squatting, turn-taking with a ball — had to be painstakingly taught over months and years. But over time, the foreground shifted. Edwards had assumed she was the teacher. She came to recognize that Saatchi, simply through her presence, her porousness, her lack of separation, was opening Edwards at an energetic level she hadn't expected.

"My sense about her and other autistic people is that they really come to us from another realm. They are residing in what we called the spiritual, in this subtle, subtle aspect of existence. And in this way, they are breaking the path for all of us."
— Melinda Edwards

This understanding became the foundation of Living Darshan, a nonprofit Edwards founded after receiving what she describes as a download during meditation — a vision so specific it included the buildings. The organization has two arms: education and outreach to deepen the world's understanding of neurodiversity, and a residential community and retreat center where autistic and neurodiverse individuals can live with support while anyone can come for spiritual retreat, immersed in the energy field these porous, high-frequency beings naturally create. Edwards noted that the vision had little traction for years — until the cultural moment caught up. The popularity of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, which brought the capacities of neurodiverse individuals to a mainstream audience, signaled a collective readiness that hadn't existed before.

Being Fully Met

Before the internet, before yoga studios, before spiritual teachers were accessible, a few books found their way to Edwards — Ram Dass's Grist for the Mill, Nisargadatta Maharaj's I Am That, a book by Ramana Maharshi. Some fell into her hands at a Unity bookstore; one arrived unbidden from a stranger's mother. She didn't understand I Am That, but she knew it was true, and the relief of knowing that other human beings had realized what she so desperately longed for was immense.

Then someone sent her a newspaper clipping: Ram Dass was coming to Durham, North Carolina. She got in her car and went. What happened when she saw him was simple and total.

"I saw him and I wept, because that was the first time that I recognized in another living being the truth that I so profoundly longed for. And to recognize the possibility — it makes me want to weep now. I wasn't crazy. This is real, with a capital R."
— Melinda Edwards

During a break, she waited in line to speak with him, palms sweating, mind trying to engineer a special connection through their shared link to Guatemala. But when she reached him, all the strategy dissolved. She wept. He wrapped his arms around her, and from the depth of his belly came a sound — a hum, a vibration — that met her completely. She had never been so fully met. Afterward, she stood to the side and watched him receive each person who came, meeting every one of them exactly where they were. That experience embedded itself in her and became the template for her own work — with patients who are homeless, chronically suicidal, psychotic, people who have harmed others. People who are suffering enormously, who may have no spiritual language, but who are, she said, all on their way back home.

"When others are fully met — with that open space — what needs to come forward for healing comes forward. But to hold the space for a deeper awakening requires us to have traversed that path."
— Melinda Edwards

Asked to offer one final thing to everyone listening, Edwards offered two. The first was what her daughter says: You are love. You are love, through and through. The second was Rumi: "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

Awakin Call with Melinda Edwards · Moderated by Andrew Kim · Hosted by Stephanie Nash · An initiative of ServiceSpace