On a street corner in her city, a man sits in front of the cinema with nothing on but pants. It can be bitter cold or the height of summer. He has no sign, and he rocks back and forth, asking passersby for money. Danielle LaPorte has watched him for a couple of years, and in a six-minute video posted to YouTube in January 2021 she uses him as a starting point for a question most of us answer too fast: when someone's suffering looks like madness, how do we know it isn't a chosen path toward enlightenment? Her answer is neither "romanticize the pain" nor "stop caring." She argues that our judgment closes a door that should stay open, that the mystery of another person's soul is larger than our verdict, and that leaving that mystery intact can make us kinder and more useful, not less.
LaPorte is candid about where she starts. Watching him, her first response is anguish. "It just tears me apart," she says at about the one-minute mark, and she describes the spiral that follows: the sense that he must be mentally ill, that he has probably been abused in this life or another, that his life is terrible. She is not hiding the reflex. She is naming it, which is the first step in her argument.
Then she realizes something uncomfortable. That spiral, she says, "actually doesn't help him." Her distress does nothing for the man on the corner. It mostly keeps her company in her own stress. The realization leads her to a practice she describes simply: leave room for a lot of mystery about why he is living this life.
"My anguish, like going down that spiral, actually doesn't help him, and that I need to leave room for lots of mystery about why he's living this life."
Danielle LaPorte, YouTube video, January 2021 (around 1:12)
To make her point, she turns to an image most viewers will find far more extreme: the sadhus in India who hold one arm raised straight into the air, standing on one leg, sometimes for years and years. In her telling, this is devotion and commitment, and the suffering is deliberate. She frames it as "chosen suffering to transmute pain into expansion," and she notes the physical cost plainly, with blood flow atrophied and sometimes fingers rotting. She does not soften that. She also does not pretend the choice is invisible or private. It is out in the open.
The comparison matters. LaPorte draws a line from those sadhus to monks in the Dark Ages, and to modern practitioners who still sometimes wear the hair shirt and beat themselves. In each case, a culture has made intentional suffering into a form of spiritual seriousness. Society responds with a mix of reactions she names directly: "wow, you're going for enlightenment, I'm not up for that," or "you're just nuts." Often there is some respect, or at least curiosity. She asks why the same logic doesn't extend to the man on the corner.
Judgment is quick and it feels like clarity. If we can label someone insane, we can stop being unsettled by them. If we can label a practice enlightened, we can admire it from a safe distance. LaPorte's point is that both labels are verdicts about a soul we cannot see into. She puts it bluntly: how does she know the man "hasn't, on a soul level or even just an intellectual mental level, made the same type of choice for the same reason"? She admits she cannot make the call about his degree of enlightenment or consciousness. For all she knows, he could be a highly evolved bodhisattva who has chosen suffering and is on what she calls the fast track to God. "I don't know," she says at about the four-minute mark, and that admission is the spine of the whole talk.
The question is not whether the man is actually a bodhisattva. LaPorte is not making that claim. The point is that the possibility should not be ruled out. Once we leave that possibility open, something shifts. Her words are specific: leaving room for the potential of respecting his soul's choice, she says, "helps me be at peace," helps her honor him, and helps her send love instead of only pity or angst about his circumstances.
This is a subtle distinction and worth slowing down on. Pity looks down. It says, "your situation is unbearable and I am sorry for you," and it often keeps the pitier at a distance. Empathy sits beside the other person. LaPorte says she feels "such sympathy and empathy" for what he is going through, and she is clear that these feelings are real. What she rejects is the leap from feeling to certainty about what his suffering means.
This is where the video could have gone wrong, and where LaPorte is most careful. A spiritual reading of suffering can become a permission slip for indifference: if it's his soul's choice, why intervene? She refuses that conclusion. "I can honor his soul and respect his soul's choices," she says, "and leave some money in front of him, and maybe when I see him again try and give him my shawl or call social services." Respecting the mystery and caring for the person in this world are, in her view, not competing commitments.
She also warns against a particular failure of contemporary spiritual culture. "Sometimes new age thinking can actually be so harsh and divisive," she observes, with people reducing everything to "it's his soul's choice" and walking past. Her correction is to say yes, and yes again. Inclusiveness, in her framing, means holding both truths at once: the soul's choice is real and mysterious, and the human being in front of you still deserves food, warmth, and a phone call to someone who can help.
That is a demanding standard, because it asks us to give up two easy exits. One is the exit of the critic, who sees insanity and decides the matter. The other is the exit of the mystic, who sees a sacred choice and stops being responsible for the outcome. LaPorte stays in the uncomfortable middle. She acknowledges she cannot know, and she acts anyway.
Near the end, LaPorte asks the question she thinks matters most: "How can we not suffer over someone's suffering, still feel sympathy and empathy, and do what can be done for sacred justice and just everyday human care?" She leaves that question open. Her closing invitation is to "leave lots of room for mystery of the soul's choices and how we all choose to make our way back to source."
Read closely, the talk gives three working principles. First, notice the judgment as it arises, the spiral of "this is insane" or "this is terrible," and ask whether it is helping the person at all. Second, hold open the possibility that a soul is doing something you cannot see, which is an act of humility, not a claim of approval. Third, let that openness turn into action that a person in crisis actually needs: money, clothing, a call to social services, a shawl. The mystery is not an excuse for passivity. It is a way to stop being cruel with your own mind while you act.
LaPorte's example is small and local, which is part of its power. She is not asking viewers to decide whether sadhus are enlightened or whether the man on the corner is a saint in disguise. She is asking them to notice how quickly they reach a conclusion, and what that conclusion costs them and the person they are looking at.
If this talk stayed with you, the most useful next step is to watch your own reactions the next time you pass someone visibly suffering. Notice whether you feel pity, anguish, or a quick judgment that closes the question. Then try LaPorte's move: name the mystery, offer what is practical, and let the outcome belong to a larger story than your own.
LaPorte has a companion piece on the same theme, "YOU ARE THE GURU: The hottest truth of all," available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GjtJ_-dbTg. Her site, daniellelaporte.com, describes a Heart Centered membership with fuller sermons and field notes for living from the heart. Her daily reflections on the spiritual path appear on Instagram under @daniellelaporte. Each of these extends the same question she closes with: how do we honor the choices of souls we cannot fully know while still doing what love asks of us here?
