25. The Work Miracles Cannot Do

Brazil had taught me to take grace seriously. Zhen would teach me to take its limits just as seriously.

Her suffering was real, but so was her longing to be rescued. As more people tried to help her, I began to confront a harder question: what happens when compassion starts carrying the weight that still belongs to the person receiving it?

Some work, I would learn, no healer or miracle can do for us.

For a time, Brazil gave me the dangerous hope that a life could be handed back to itself.

I returned from that country with the sense that something in me had quietly been set right. Work began to move again. Relationships loosened. The ordinary machinery of life, once blocked at every turn, started running with a strange new ease. I did not understand everything I had witnessed, and I did not pretend to. I knew only that I had arrived exhausted, frightened and spiritually hungry, and had come home with enough strength to begin again.

In one episode of my programme, I spoke about the healing centres, the small towns and the thirty-three entities said to oversee the work at the Casa. I described what I had seen with my own eyes, along with the accounts of others: illnesses lifting, prayers answered and impossible events unfolding in ordinary rooms. What moved me most was the humility of those places. The miraculous did not announce itself as spectacle. It appeared among buses, dust, heat and people waiting quietly for help.

The episode stirred the community. Many listeners were hearing for the first time of a place where illness, spiritual disturbance and the loneliness of the inexplicable might be taken seriously, and where treatment was offered without charge. To people who had spent years feeling dismissed or exploited by the spiritual marketplace, Brazil seemed almost unreal.

For a while, I was grateful. I believed I had pointed people towards a genuine opening.

Over the following months, people from the UFO and spiritual communities began making the journey. Some returned saying their health had improved. Others believed their prayers had been answered or described a force moving through them that they could understand only as something higher. Back in China, they shared their stories on Qianliao, then a major livestreaming platform. Their accounts gathered around mine and gave it a kind of communal confirmation. I was no longer the only person saying that something extraordinary had happened there.

For a while, I was grateful. I believed I had pointed people towards a genuine opening, a place where lives narrowed by illness, secrecy, fear, and spiritual confusion might be touched by something larger.

After the Brazil episode, Zhen’s messages took on a new urgency.

At first, she seemed like any other listener. She said the programme had moved her and that she wanted to tell me what she had been living through. There was a cautious sincerity in her tone, the kind of vulnerability that can make refusal feel unkind.

Soon the messages became more frequent and insistent. She kept asking to speak with me, then to meet me, as though direct contact had become essential. A current of dependency entered her emails and the messages she sent through others. She was no longer seeking information. She was trying to secure a place in my attention.

This kind of intrusion rarely announces itself as aggression. It can arrive softly, clothed in helplessness. Her suffering stirred my compassion; her fixation made me step back.

I understood, at least partly, how the projection had formed. In her loneliness, she may have imagined that I understood her in a way others did not, or that my experiences with extraterrestrial and spiritual forces gave me some special power to rescue her. She had placed me in a role I had never agreed to occupy.

Once I sensed this, I stopped replying. At that stage of my life, I was still learning one of the hardest forms of discernment: how to set a boundary without abandoning compassion. I had spent too many years appearing emotionally available to people looking for somewhere to place their pain. Kindness, I was beginning to understand, needs form. Without it, compassion can be mistaken for permission.

When I stopped responding, Zhen began reaching me through people in my circle. Eventually Liu was drawn in. Tender-hearted by nature, he recognised that her behaviour had become inappropriate, yet still believed one phone call might calm her and bring the matter to a close.

His instinct was generous: he hoped one clear conversation would loosen the attachment rather than deepen it.

That was where Liu and I parted ways.

“Shao,” he urged me, “just take the call. Zhen really likes you. She only wants to talk.”

“This is no longer a normal request,” I told him. “If she starts believing that speaking to me is what saves her, I become part of the problem.”

“She is having a hard time.”

“I know. She needs real support, and she needs to begin changing her own life. I cannot become the person she clings to whenever she feels lost.”

Liu’s impulse came from compassion. Yet some forms of suffering are not eased by being accommodated. An obsession answered gently may still take the answer as encouragement.

I feared a call would teach her that persistence could reopen the door.

Liu thought I was being cold. To prevent further misunderstanding, I asked Liu to join the call as a witness. The three of us formed a WeChat group. It became my first and final conversation with Zhen.

Her voice was bright, strained and almost breathless, as though she had finally reached someone who could interpret her suffering. She spoke of the pain in her life, but beneath her words I felt a larger demand. She was placing the burden of her transformation in my hands.

I spoke as gently as I could, choosing each word with care.

“Zhen,” I said, “one phone call with me cannot change your life. Being close to me cannot change it either. If you turn me, or anyone else, into a symbol of rescue, you give away the strength you need to recover.”

I told her that healing begins through small, stubborn acts of self-responsibility. Even the extraordinary encounters I had experienced had not spared me the labour of living. I still had to face my flaws, correct old habits and restore order to my life one ordinary day at a time.

I did not pretend that the first step was easy. Trauma and what I understood as energetic interference, etheric implants or spirit attachment could weaken a person until ordinary action felt impossible. Yet suffering did not erase agency. Healing still required the participation of the person seeking it.

Zhen promised that she would work hard and change. She sounded sincere, almost pleading. When the call ended, however, I felt no relief. Her promises carried resolve, but also another request: that I believe in her change and remain emotionally within reach.

Later events confirmed what I had sensed but could not yet name.

Over time, I learned that Zhen had sought out Liu, Cheng—whom I knew through a hypnotherapist in our community—and several lightworkers. Each tried to help within their limits, offering advice, contacts, resources and unpaid support. Yet the assistance did not make her more independent. She became increasingly accustomed to being managed and rescued.

Eventually, Zhen decided to travel to Brazil for spiritual healing. The journey required preparation and some willingness to participate in her own recovery. Instead, it became another occasion for dependency. She asked people in the community to arrange the itinerary, make contacts, and manage decisions that properly belonged to her.

The contradiction was difficult to ignore. Before and after Brazil, Zhen had volunteered at Buddhist temples and was well acquainted with Buddhist teachings. Her life brought to mind a question often raised in spiritual communities: how can someone understand so many profound truths and still remain unable to live well?

Zhen’s preparations exposed that divide with painful clarity. Learned helplessness played a part, but so did weak problem-solving skills and blurred boundaries between what she could reasonably ask of others and what remained her responsibility.

It was then that another possibility unsettled me: help itself can become part of the trap. Each act of kindness shifted a little more of life’s weight onto someone else, until assistance risked reinforcing the very helplessness it was meant to relieve.

Not long afterwards, I heard that Zhen had arrived in Brazil and was moving between two healing towns.

Several Taiwanese friends living there mentioned her with visible unease. A Chinese woman named Zhen had arrived, they said, and was telling people that she knew me. She brought up my name almost everywhere she went and asked about the guesthouse where I had once stayed. Most unsettlingly, she wanted to stay there too, preferably in the same room I had occupied.

There was a disturbing literalness in her attempt to retrace my steps, as though the room I had slept in and the people I had known could bring her closer to whatever she believed had saved me. I explained what had happened before her arrival. Despite my discomfort, I asked my friends to look after her where they reasonably could. She was a young woman alone in a foreign country, and her condition appeared unstable.

At first, I hoped the towns might steady her. Others had arrived in real distress and gradually entered the local rhythm of prayer, treatment and self-examination. According to my friends, Zhen attended healing sessions for a few days, then stopped. She stayed inside the guesthouse. What occupied her attention was no longer treatment or the work of putting her life back in order, but the buffet meals.

The detail hovered on the edge of absurdity, with sadness underneath. Someone who has lived too long in disorder can turn even a sanctuary into a place of avoidance. Zhen had reached a town built around healing, but gravitated towards what required nothing from her: food prepared by others and a shelter in which her chaos could be contained.

After spending all her money, she began asking local people for free food and accommodation. A kind guesthouse owner gave her a room and fed her. My Taiwanese friends, whose sympathy had been worn thin by consequence, watched her accept one act of generosity after another while refusing the steps that might have restored some independence.

Mandy, one of those friends, described what followed.

“At first, people offered to take her to the healing centre, but she chose not to go,” she told me. “Someone found possible work so she could support herself, but she refused. Her parents sent money from China. She spent it and still would not return home.”

Local people later gave Zhen money on two separate occasions. She spent that too. A pousada owner contacted the Chinese embassy, which could not simply purchase a flight for her. Another overseas Chinese person then stepped in to help, yet Zhen remained in Brazil, moving between the two towns without committing herself to treatment.

The pattern was becoming difficult to miss.

Mandy emphasised that local Brazilians had helped Zhen repeatedly, asking for nothing in return. She understood Zhen’s condition through the spiritual framework we shared, describing her as affected by etheric implants and saying that the spirit doctor known as Dr Fritz had also attempted to treat her. Yet Zhen did not continue with the prescribed healing process. She resisted further treatment and, before long, appeared to slip back into her previous condition and familiar patterns of behaviour.

There was fatigue in Mandy’s voice, and beneath it the hard edge of anger that emerges when kindness has been exhausted.

“The healing centres did everything they could,” she said. “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.”

I understood her frustration. Zhen had travelled to Brazil seeking spiritual treatment, then repeatedly refused the treatment offered. Meanwhile she accepted accommodation, meals and the continual efforts of strangers to rescue her from each new crisis.

“She keeps consuming the time, energy and money of kind people while refusing to change,” I said. “She is still running away.”

“Yes,” Mandy replied. “She wants other people to be responsible for her life.”

Something heavy settled in me. If a person refuses to pick up her own life, everyone else remains outside the door, however hard they knock.

Later, Joyce, a Brazilian acquaintance connected with another healing centre, told me more. According to her, Mr. Lazaro, a healing medium at the centre, had been the first to look after Zhen. He had tried to remove an entity attached to Zhen. He instructed her to remain in the healing town for several days, resting and receiving prayers so that the work could take root. Zhen left before the process was complete. Joyce believed the entity eventually returned.

When she wrote again, her helplessness came through in every line. Zhen’s condition had become unstable, she said, and the returning entity was too strong for Mr Lazaro to handle easily. Then she added something that echoed my own concern: “We feel she does not truly want to separate from that spirit. It is as if some part of her enjoys being noticed by it.”

I sat with that message for a long time.

The message clarified the pattern I had struggled to name. Again and again, Zhen reached for rescue while withdrawing from the participation it required.

In the end, I could only reply, “Everyone has tried to help her, but she has never truly cooperated with being helped.”

From the accounts I received, Zhen’s healing journey in Brazil had failed. She had reached two towns known for prayer and healing. People arranged treatment, offered shelter and even helped with her return home. Yet every form of assistance stopped at the same threshold: no one could enter the healing on her behalf.

That was the hardest truth to accept. A healer might intervene, and prayer might bring relief, but neither could replace the inward act of participation. Without Zhen’s cooperation, compassion could touch the surface of her life without changing its centre.

Only later did I understand that compassion had to hold two truths at once. Zhen’s pain—shaped by poverty, isolation, trauma and what I then understood as spiritual interference—was real. So were the consequences for people who tried to help her.

Pain does not cancel responsibility. A wounded person can still harm those who try to help. Compassion becomes clear-eyed only when it recognises both the wound and its consequences.

That distinction stayed with me long after she left Brazil.

With the help of several people, Zhen eventually returned to China and reunited with her family. She continued moving from one temple to another, searching outside herself for something powerful enough to save her. What she seemed unable to do was return to herself.

Only after Brazil did I see the pattern more clearly. Zhen was far from alone. I had met people immersed in Buddhism, Taoism, and New Age spirituality who could speak fluently about karma, other dimensions, and the soul’s purpose. Yet when ordinary life became difficult, they often struggled to think clearly, define the problem before them, or decide what action to take. Spiritual knowledge had given them a language for suffering without always giving them the analytical mind and real-life skills required to navigate it.

I saw the same difficulty in requests for help that reached my inbox. Some arrived as dense blocks of emotion with no clear sequence or discernible request. I sometimes had to read them several times simply to reconstruct what had happened. The distress was real, yet without the ability to define a problem, finding a way through it became far harder.

The fracture appeared in relationships too. People spoke of “love and light” while disregarding another person’s boundaries, or interpreted sacred texts with sophistication while their own lives remained in chronic disorder.

Practical judgement grows through experience, feedback and honest self-examination. Without that discipline, spiritual knowledge can remain a vocabulary rather than a way of living. It may give suffering meaning, but it cannot do the work through which a life changes.

Zhen’s story changed the way I understood spiritual rescue. The longing to be saved can coexist with a deep estrangement from one’s own agency. Lasting deliverance still asks the person being helped to participate in her own return.

Brazil left me with a final lesson. I had experienced events there that I could only understand as miraculous, and at times they had carried me. They could steady a person through the darkest hour. They could not choose for us.

Awakening has to submit itself to ordinary life. It must enter our judgement, our treatment of others, and our acceptance of what remains within our power. A teaching may speak of the highest realms, but if it never reaches the choices made on the ground, it cannot illuminate the path beneath our feet.

Beyond miracles, there is still the work of saving ourselves.