A note from Tara: This post was originally a writing prompt I issued to participants in my September 2017 30 Day Writing Challenge. It was so breakthrough-inducing for those folks I had to share it here.

I invite you to join us in November for the next 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders and Creators. Space is limited; register now: taranicholle.com/30-day-writing-challenge.

A little while back, I had to see a head and neck doctor for something or other. While he was in there, I remembered something weird I’d seen during my own DIY doctor stints in the mirror.

I asked him to please look at these weird little bumps I’d seen growing in my throat. I’d asked my own GP about them, and he had no idea what they were but said they looked like “healthy” tissue so not to mind them.

This specialist took one look, stepped back and asked: “When did you have your tonsils out?”

About 30 years ago, I replied.

“Well, what you have here is a pretty rare case of tonsillar regrowth,” he diagnosed. Tonsillar regrowth, I’d learn, is a completely harmless but completely bizarre phenomenon in which one’s tonsils can make little efforts to grow back after you’ve had them out. Physicians think this only happens when the original tonsil tissue was somehow not completely removed.

They don’t grow back all the way to full size; in fact, we’ve been calling my tonsil spots “tonsil buds” or “tonsil nubbins.” But think about this. Something that was natural and innate in my body was cut out (with good reason, at the time). And that thing so insistently demanded to have its rightful spot in my body that it is growing back, fresh and healthy, over three decades later.

Takeaway #1: Aren’t our bodies miraculous? Marvelous? Wondrous? Like, actual, literal wonder? We focus so often on our aches and pains and cellulite. But ever since that day last year, I cannot stop thinking of my body as this marvelous contraption that is so self-correcting in favor of its own well-being, of its own healing, that it will try to grow back what’s been cut out.

Takeaway #2: What is inborn in you, the innate gifts, talents, callings and destiny with which you came here, cannot be totally cut out. Not by failures, not by age, not by even discouragement, or doubt or fear, unless you allow that to happen. Not by a bad childhood. You might think you are too old or too traumatized or too something to do the dream that’s in your heart, but I ask you to please just humor me and try on the belief that these things have all been preparation.

They have honed you, burnished you and thicken your skin. They have tenderized your heart, but also strengthened it. They have helped you get clear. They have helped you become more wise. More loving. More you.

Now, the world needs you. You feel it. I know you do, or you wouldn’t be here.

POD #17: Tonsillar regrowth 

Do you have a dream or a calling that has been dormant, or has just not been an area of focus, for any reason?

What is it? Name it. Detail it. Describe who you would need to be in order to let it regrow, to give it fresh life.