Kintsugi Heroes
Greg Boerma
Greg Boerma learned that joy and happiness are not the same thing, and that taking full responsibility for your own wellbeing makes you whole enough to show up for others.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Greg Boerma grew up in a big family surrounded by sport, movement, and the constant pull to try the next thing. Swimming, basketball, water polo, scuba diving, mountain biking, ice hockey, he gave everything a go and found richness in that variety. His father's early nudge to join different sports pulled him out of shyness and opened a way of seeing the world that never quite closed: the ability to notice wow in a flower, a camera, a conversation. That childlike engagement with life became his foundation.
But life broke him in ways that mattered. A light plane crash left him with spinal injuries and years of painkillers. Loss came in forms that changed him. He found meditation not as escape but as a tool to sit with pain and still a mind that would not rest. Over time, a shift happened: he learned that happiness is transient, here while the ice cream lasts, gone when it isn't, while joy is something deeper. Joy runs underneath even sadness and trauma. It is not a feeling you chase. It is a state you build and tend, a thing you wake up with if you have done the work to make space for it.
What Greg discovered is that this work is not selfish. Taking full responsibility for your own wellbeing at one hundred percent does not close you off from others; it opens you to them. When you stop carrying past trauma into the present moment, you stop dragging it into the future. When you spend time in gratitude for breakfast, a camera, hand drums, the chance to sit with someone and listen, you shift what your attention finds. In relationships, forgiveness matters more than perfection. And the thing that actually heals is not listening to what someone else says should work for you, it is owning it, making it your own truth, and living from that place.
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