What His Life Is Teaching Mine - Fathers and Daugthers
My dad, Kamal Lakhi, turns 80 years old today, and it felt really important for me to share my love for him with this community.
An immigrant from India, my dad was one of the driving forces of our move from India to the US when I was 5.
He doesn't talk about resilience. He just lives it. Has always lived it.
My father was born into the violence of the partition of India and Pakistan.
He came into the world at a moment when an entire subcontinent was being torn apart — families separated overnight, homes abandoned, the ground itself shifting beneath people's feet.
He arrived into that chaos, and somehow, he kept going. He has always kept going.
He came to a new country with almost nothing.
He worked. He built. He provided.
Not with grand gestures but with a daily commitment of a man who decided his family would have what he didn't. That decision, made somewhere deep in his bones, never wavered.
He didn't just survive what life threw at him. He reinvented himself every single time.
I think about the lineage we carry in our bodies, the ancestral threads woven into who we are before we take our first breath.
In somatic work, we speak of this often: how the body holds what the mind cannot name, how healing one generation ripples backward and forward through time.
My father is a thread I carry.
His steadiness lives somewhere in me, available when I'm willing to slow down and remember it.
When I look at my father at 80, I don't see someone who has arrived somewhere.
I see someone who never stopped walking. He has reinvented himself a dozen times to provide for us.
Hard-working in the way that only immigrants who have truly started from nothing can be.
Committed to his family in a way that was never spoken but always, always felt.
His refusal to give up lives somewhere in my chest.
His honesty is in my hands as I work on clients who are as resilient as he is.
His love... the kind that isn't always in the way you want, but you know is there if you need it.
My dad never called himself brave. Never called himself a survivor.
He just woke up the next day and tried again.
There is a profound teaching in that simplicity... one that no retreat, no modality, no certification can fully give you. It comes from watching someone live it.
My father has never done a sound bath. He has never journaled about his shadow self or sat in ceremony under the full moon.
He did learn Reiki 1 and 2 last year -- it was such a profound moment to teach and attune my father into my work.
And yet, in his own way, I would think he would say he is happy at 80 with what he has achieved and who he is.
When things fall apart, I have watched my father quietly rebuild without waiting for permission or the right moment. He just begins again.
I want to carry that part of him with me always, the knowing that no matter what..." it will be ok.
To this community, so many of you are in the middle of your own reinventions right now.
New beginnings that feel terrifying.
Starting over when you didn't expect to. Rebuilding after loss.
I want you to know that the capacity for "keeping on" of my dad lives in you and me, too. It has been there all along.
Sometimes it takes watching someone who has done it quietly for eighty years to remember that.
Happy 80th, Dad.
You are incredibly hardworking and resilient, and I admire that deeply.
Thank you for showing me, by just the way you live your life, what it means to keep going.
Our relationship has not always been easy (fathers and daughters, eh?)... and I have NEVER doubted if I could rely on you.
I love you more than I'll ever find the words for.
Big hug,
Priya