Every morning, I receive a blessing.
It comes gently, woven into the rhythm of a daily phone call with my mother. We check in, exchange a few words about the day ahead, and before the call ends, she sends me off with prayers: for ease in my work, for protection as I navigate uncertainty, for joy to meet me unexpectedly.
These blessings aren’t formal. They aren’t transactional. They arise from the marrow of her care—as natural and necessary as breath. And each time, I feel something settle inside me. A quiet knowing: I am held.
In the cosmologies of the Dagara and Dogon peoples, blessings are not reserved for the exceptional or the holy. Blessings are part of everyday life. They are the threads that tether us to the unseen world, the ancestors, the Earth, and one another. A blessing is an energy transmission—a whisper from spirit, carried through language and intention. It is not the same as a wish. It is an affirmation of what is already sacred.
Among the Berber people, blessings are offered with every greeting, every departure, every shared meal. These are not hollow words, but living spells—woven to protect, uplift, and affirm the continuity of life. We bless not because life is easy, but because it is precious.
Modern neuroscience is catching up to what our ancestors always knew: that our nervous systems respond to love, safety, and ritual. When someone blesses us, especially someone we are bonded to, our bodies remember trust. Our cortisol levels drop. Our sense of possibility expands. Blessings regulate, cohere, and attune.
For many of us raised in modernity, blessings have been relegated to religion or stripped of their potency. We forgot that blessing is a practice of relationality, not just a ritual. That to bless someone is to see their essence, affirm their path, and resource their soul.
My mother doesn’t bless me because I earned it. She blesses because she knows that I am walking through a world that is both beautiful and brutal, and she wants my spirit to stay intact.
And this, I believe, is the heart of blessing:
It is an act of soul-tending. A remembrance that we are not alone. A transmission of love that asks for nothing in return.
So I ask: What would shift in your life if you knew you were already blessed? How would you navigate change, challenge, or heartbreak if you knew you were not walking alone?
Who blesses you? And who are you blessing?
Blessing is not the domain of the ordained. It belongs to all of us. It is a medicine we can carry in our voices, our hands, our presence. It is how we say to one another:
I see you. I honour you. I walk with you.
May we become a people who bless not only at ceremonies, but in our daily speech, in our glances, in our silences.
May we remember that to bless is to affirm life.
And that our very existence is a blessing in motion.
