When you read this, I’ll be away. I speak five or six times a year at the New Age Health Spa in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. These are some of the sweetest times in my whole year.

I’d heard of the New Age from several friends and finally took myself there as a guest the first week of 2007. I’d sustained a dental injury and was suffering at the time from resultant migraine headaches and facial neuralgia. All I could think of to do was get away, get body work, rest and do yoga and meditate like crazy. It helped. It also introduced me to a heavenly place only two hours by bus from Manhattan.

But here’s where the Law of Compensation comes in. In September of 2007, my young stepson, James, died. He was 16. It was sudden, a freak illness. Everyone who knew him was devastated, his mother and my husband most of all, of course. So William and I moved upstate, to the town of Woodstock (no, they didn’t have the concert there, but everybody thinks they did so a whole cottage industry has grown up around the myth). Anyway, the move seemed like a good thing to do to help William heal, but in fact it was just me trying to help something that nothing could help. Still, we did it.

It was a tough time. The town was adorable but I couldn’t appreciate it when we were there. In addition to the fact that we were both grieving, I felt out of place and didn’t know a soul. The winter was severe. I had a book to write—Living a Charmed Life, which is, in fact, coming out in about two weeks—but I felt at the time that it would take a bona fide miracle for me to have to anything to say.

That’s when this amazing, compassionate “Law of Compensation” kicked in. I had applied months before to be a lecturer at the New Age. They said yes, and my first time to speak came just a month after we moved to Woodstock. We had these ridiculous MapQuest directions for driving there (they took us on a logging road through a state park with only one lane snow-plowed: if a car had come from the opposite direction, we’d have been there till spring). Even so, we—William drove, thank goodness—made it. The relaxation, the peacefulness, the closeness to God that I’d felt when I’d gone there nearly a year before was multiplied exponentially. I really had come home. The woods, the deer, the meditation hall, the healthy meals that somebody else prepared—all of these fed me on many levels.

And every other month during that awful first year after James passed away, I got to go back to the spa. I was there when the snow melted. And when the flowers budded. And when the sun was high and hot and the outdoor pool was a very popular place. I was there for the autumn leaves. And then we moved back to New York City.

I didn’t know if they’d ask me to lecture again in 2009, and although I’d have been disappointed if the invitation hadn’t come through, I would have still known that I’d been given that gift, that time at this healing place, when I really needed the healing. As it turns out, they are having me back, and I’ll bet anything that right at this moment I am one exceedingly happy camper. I’m doing yoga, or taking a meditation class, or getting “integrative meridian therapy,” a kind of Shiatsu that is my very favorite of many favorite spa treatments. But mostly I’m grateful, and in awe, and amazed that some angelic “team-up team” got the New Age and me together when it did.

Look around your life today and see what you’re being compensated for. Read Emerson’s essay “Compensation” for more of a sense of what this is all about. No matter what you’re going through today, there’s recompense in there somewhere providing you with some compensatory delight or diversion or steadiness or strength. If you don’t see it right off, look for it more closely—in your life, in your dreams, in your conversations. Ask that be revealed in your prayers, and ask knowing that it’s already done. (Jesus said we could do that, and I’m taking him at his word.) Accept the compensation. Accept the gift. Accept the grace.