ESSAY · AUGUST 2026
Devotion and the Undefended Heart
A reflection on devotion, the lesser life we are talked into,
and the courage to answer a fuller one.
and the courage to answer a fuller one.
by Maureen Owen
I have heard devotion calling my whole life, even when I didn’t yet know its name.
I remember a time when I used to think of devotion as discipline or duty. Now I know that is not devotion at all. Devotion is an act of love we return to—not the steeling of ourselves toward obligation, but a daily choice to listen to our hearts and respond. It is what happens next: choosing, again and again, to honour the call to a fuller life.
Nayyirah Waheed names this with bone-deep precision: the lesser life is not the one we are lured toward, but the one we are talked into accepting—the life that asks the least of us and gives the least back. The fuller life is already reverberating in our hearts and bones, waiting to be recognised and answered.
My guide on this quest has been the goddess in her many incarnations. Their mythologies offer a living language for my soul, giving me words for my gifts and wounds—a thread I could follow to return to wholeness rather than fracture. Myth gave me names for my own story—Medusa for my reclamation of the body, Lilith for my refusal to stay in a marriage that required my silence, Boudicca for the spirit that will not bow.
Without these stories, my experience might have seemed random, personal, or shameful. With them, I can see my life as part of a larger feminine lineage. I can meet other women at the level of soul instead of performance, and live from that place despite every limitation our culture places on women who dare to try.
Six months ago, my heart asked me to listen in a different way, as I sat with my mother while she was dying. People around me urged me to leave. It was all too much, they said; they wanted to save me. They loved me. They could not bear this kind of suffering again.
Yet I knew she didn’t want to die alone. Over the years she had said, again and again, “Maureen, can you imagine dying alone? There is nothing worse than that. No one wants to die alone, afraid and all by themselves.” She never asked us to be there, but I knew in my bones the force of these words. For her, the worst thing was to be alone and abandoned on a deathbed. I felt my heart answer: I will not abandon you.
In that room I faced a choice. One path led toward the lesser life—the easier path, each person managing their terror by taking distance, sidestepping the hardest aspects of death and loss.
Or I could listen to my heart and surrender: welcoming everything, bringing my whole self to the experience. Knowing that loss cannot be avoided, accepting that it takes courage to choose love when death will claim it all, trusting I was strong enough to bear this loss and remain open.
I chose the second path because, through years of devotion—honing my capacity to listen to my heart and let it shape my life—I had learned to live from the inside out. In that moment there was nowhere left to hide from what devotion required. I was called to show up fully and let my undefended heart be my guide.
I sat there, holding her hand, allowing my love to become a prayer.
Most of us defend our hearts against death, grief, and the full weight of loving someone who is mortal. Looking away, the busyness, the well-meaning insistence that I leave the room—these were not failures of love. They were the reflexes of hearts already scarred by suffering, hearts that could not yet imagine staying awake inside that much pain again. My devotion, in that moment, was to a different vow: to keep my heart present, even there.
The love that grows from staying at that threshold is not ordinary love. It is fealty—devoting yourself to living with an undefended heart, letting the nearness of death teach you that you do not need armour to accompany someone you love to death’s door. This love is not only given; it is received. The one who stays receives something back from the dying that cannot arrive in any other way: a knowledge of life and death held together, changing how you live afterward.
So, when I ask now what I am called to devote myself to, I no longer listen for duty. I listen to what my heart is already calling me toward and ask whether I am willing to respond.
Devotion is not the lesser life endured, but the fuller life consciously chosen—the decision to live in harmony with an undefended, unarmoured heart.
— Maureen
I remember a time when I used to think of devotion as discipline or duty. Now I know that is not devotion at all. Devotion is an act of love we return to—not the steeling of ourselves toward obligation, but a daily choice to listen to our hearts and respond. It is what happens next: choosing, again and again, to honour the call to a fuller life.
Nayyirah Waheed names this with bone-deep precision: the lesser life is not the one we are lured toward, but the one we are talked into accepting—the life that asks the least of us and gives the least back. The fuller life is already reverberating in our hearts and bones, waiting to be recognised and answered.
My guide on this quest has been the goddess in her many incarnations. Their mythologies offer a living language for my soul, giving me words for my gifts and wounds—a thread I could follow to return to wholeness rather than fracture. Myth gave me names for my own story—Medusa for my reclamation of the body, Lilith for my refusal to stay in a marriage that required my silence, Boudicca for the spirit that will not bow.
Without these stories, my experience might have seemed random, personal, or shameful. With them, I can see my life as part of a larger feminine lineage. I can meet other women at the level of soul instead of performance, and live from that place despite every limitation our culture places on women who dare to try.
Six months ago, my heart asked me to listen in a different way, as I sat with my mother while she was dying. People around me urged me to leave. It was all too much, they said; they wanted to save me. They loved me. They could not bear this kind of suffering again.
Yet I knew she didn’t want to die alone. Over the years she had said, again and again, “Maureen, can you imagine dying alone? There is nothing worse than that. No one wants to die alone, afraid and all by themselves.” She never asked us to be there, but I knew in my bones the force of these words. For her, the worst thing was to be alone and abandoned on a deathbed. I felt my heart answer: I will not abandon you.
In that room I faced a choice. One path led toward the lesser life—the easier path, each person managing their terror by taking distance, sidestepping the hardest aspects of death and loss.
Or I could listen to my heart and surrender: welcoming everything, bringing my whole self to the experience. Knowing that loss cannot be avoided, accepting that it takes courage to choose love when death will claim it all, trusting I was strong enough to bear this loss and remain open.
I chose the second path because, through years of devotion—honing my capacity to listen to my heart and let it shape my life—I had learned to live from the inside out. In that moment there was nowhere left to hide from what devotion required. I was called to show up fully and let my undefended heart be my guide.
I sat there, holding her hand, allowing my love to become a prayer.
Most of us defend our hearts against death, grief, and the full weight of loving someone who is mortal. Looking away, the busyness, the well-meaning insistence that I leave the room—these were not failures of love. They were the reflexes of hearts already scarred by suffering, hearts that could not yet imagine staying awake inside that much pain again. My devotion, in that moment, was to a different vow: to keep my heart present, even there.
The love that grows from staying at that threshold is not ordinary love. It is fealty—devoting yourself to living with an undefended heart, letting the nearness of death teach you that you do not need armour to accompany someone you love to death’s door. This love is not only given; it is received. The one who stays receives something back from the dying that cannot arrive in any other way: a knowledge of life and death held together, changing how you live afterward.
So, when I ask now what I am called to devote myself to, I no longer listen for duty. I listen to what my heart is already calling me toward and ask whether I am willing to respond.
Devotion is not the lesser life endured, but the fuller life consciously chosen—the decision to live in harmony with an undefended, unarmoured heart.
— Maureen
The essay ends. The invitation doesn't. If you are ready to go deeper.
