What gives us a reason to keep living when so much has been taken from us? In the midst of profound suffering, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl recognized that people could still find meaning in their lives by how they responded to what they could not change. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl explains how people can endure immense suffering when they find meaning in their lives, including the courage with which we face unavoidable suffering.

Inner Freedom

Frankl speaks of human beings as having a spiritual dimension—the inner freedom to transcend circumstances and seek meaning beyond the self. This spiritual—or “noetic”—dimension cannot be reduced to biology, psychology, or social circumstances. It includes the capacity to take a position toward one’s suffering. Even when external freedom is taken away, a person may preserve inner freedom: the ability to decide what the experience will mean and how one will respond. This does not mean that suffering is inherently meaningful or that people should passively accept injustice. Meaning arises from the stance a person takes toward unavoidable suffering and from the values they continue to affirm despite it.

According to Frankl, self-transcendence involves moving beyond self-concerns and directing our attention toward a person to love or a cause greater than ourselves. This means pain need not consume all of our attention. We can acknowledge pain while choosing to focus on something we care about. For Frankl, spirituality is the human capacity to reach beyond the self and respond to life with meaning.

Meena Goll: Guidance, Surrender, and Grace

But what does this look like in a person’s life? This is where we meet Meena Goll and hear about her experience with forgiveness. While Frankl speaks of self-transcendence, Meena speaks of guidance, surrender, and grace. She describes forgiveness not as something she accomplished but as something she received. Both share the understanding that self-transcendence and forgiveness involve going beyond the self. Meena’s account invites us to consider how connecting with something greater than herself became part of her experience of forgiveness. Neither requires us to call the suffering necessary or the wrongdoing acceptable. The connection lies not in justifying what happened but in exploring what becomes possible in a person’s response to it.

Meena’s story began when she was thirty. It started as an ordinary day. Meena had just asked for a divorce and was no longer living at home. As she went about her day, unbeknownst to her, her abusive husband set her home on fire with her children inside, killing them and then himself. Meena did not witness it, but once she learned what had happened, her sense of reality was shattered. “A part of me died,” she recalled. The pain was so great that she considered taking her own life.

Yet one thought stopped her. If she died too, she felt her children would “die another time.” Her death would allow the violence that had taken them to claim yet another life. She decided that could not happen; her husband could not win again, so she chose to live.

“The Choice to Live”

This turned out to be a very hard decision for Meena. She could only live moment by moment, but choosing life created a small opening. Then she came across a book that told the story of Martin Gray, who had survived the Holocaust, rebuilt his life, and then lost his wife and children in another devastating fire. The book gave Meena hope. “If he was able to survive,” she remembered thinking, “I can too.”

This encounter became one of many experiences Meena interpreted as guidance. Before the tragedy, she had been an atheist with little interest in spirituality. Afterward, she began to experience unexpected sensations, intuitions, encounters, and coincidences. People entered her life, speaking about the soul, reincarnation, and realities beyond physical perception. She did not immediately accept these ideas, but they gradually opened her to the possibility that she was not alone.

Exploring Consciousness

One way to interpret such experiences is through the concept of nonlocal consciousness. This theory holds that consciousness may not be entirely produced by or confined to the individual brain. Instead, it might participate in a larger field of awareness that connects people across ordinary boundaries of space, time, and physical separation. Some people use this idea to interpret mystical experiences, near-death experiences, intuition, synchronicity, or an apparent sense of connection with those who have died.

For Meena, these experiences transformed her relationship with grief. They allowed her to imagine that death might not have destroyed every bond between her and her children. The possibility of a larger consciousness gave her a language for connection when the visible world seemed to hold only absence.

“Only a form dies.”

This new understanding deepened during a visit to Varanasi, India. Watching a body being cremated beside the Ganges initially awakened her fear. The sight of a body burning was inseparable from the deaths of her children and husband. She wanted to leave, but something inside her urged her to stay. As she watched the body burn, her fear gave way to an idea: perhaps death did not mean complete extinction. “Only a form dies.”

Meena felt relief. Although she was grieving the loss of her children, there was now room for gratitude, born of her renewed awareness of life, love, and connection. It came after years of grief, therapy, travel, spiritual exploration, and the difficult work of confronting her emotions. In Varanasi, these experiences seemed to coalesce into a new understanding. Her grief no longer defined the limits of her existence.

For Meena, gratitude opened the heart, and an open heart made forgiveness possible. “Forgiveness is not something we do,” she explained. It was something she experienced as a gift. She asked for peace and for her heart to heal. As healing came, gratitude followed; as gratitude grew, forgiveness appeared.

Many Paths to Forgiveness

From Meena’s perspective, forgiveness is not merely the removal of anger and resentment. It is a movement from isolation to connection. Meena described this movement as surrendering to a consciousness greater than her own. She did not believe she had forgiven through willpower alone. “I gave my hand to the consciousness,” she said. Forgiveness passed through her as grace.

There are many paths to forgiveness, and the spiritual path Meena experienced is one of them. For some, forgiveness can be a pragmatic choice, a decision not to hold onto anger. For others, it may begin as a pragmatic decision, and as people go deeper within themselves, they may experience a spiritual transformation. Meena’s journey invites us to consider forgiveness as more than a moral obligation. Sometimes it does begin with a decision. Sometimes it grows slowly through emotional work. And sometimes, as Meena experienced, forgiveness arrives through an encounter with a reality larger than the self.

Whether we call that reality God, grace, love, the soul, or nonlocal consciousness, it was deeply practical in Meena’s life. It helped her choose life. It allowed gratitude to coexist with grief. And it opened a path so that the worst thing that happened to her would remain part of her story without becoming the final definition of who she was.

To hear Meena Goll’s story in her own words, check out my latest podcast episode, “The Choice to Live”—Radical Forgiveness After Tragedy. Subscribe to Voices of Peace: Personal Forgiveness on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.