How often do you look in the mirror each day? Maybe a quick assessment before leaving the house and a short review again at night?

When you look, how many times do you raise your eyes to meet your own reflection? How often do you hold yourself in your own searching gaze? And when you look, what are you looking at, or rather, what are you looking for?

You know what you want to see, and you are aware of how you seek to find it and look for how to get it. What you scan for in the mirror is confirmation of something you’ve already decided on. Approval. Or disapproval.

You no longer look to see yourself as you are but only as a measure of who you want to be. The gap is where you monitor change and determine how good or bad you have become. You actively search for what you don’t want to find by asking the same routine questions:

“Am I getting older?”
“Do I look tired today?”
“Is that a grey hair? A new line?”
“Are those bags under my eyes? Why are they always so bloodshot and weary?”

You strain over the reflection of the one in the mirror searching for what is broken to fix, what’s lagging to improve, what is not right and needs to change to make you more like how you want to be because you think that if you could just look a certain way, you’ll finally feel a certain way, too.

Maybe you want to be accepted, celebrated, loved, and taken seriously; or perhaps you want to belong, to be heard, to feel like you exist and that you matter. Unconsciously, you have been collecting, storing and making meaning from a lifetime of feedback that showed you on the most primary, superficial level, the ‘better’ your appearance, the more responsive the world was to offer any semblance of the feeling you seek.

But even when you’ve felt it, even when you proved to everyone out there that you really are the one you’re trying to be, the one you think you need to be to feel it, it wasn’t persuasive or compelling enough to convince you that it was actually true. The world rewards a good appearance with the same shallow examination you offer your assessment in the mirror. That’s why you keep looking, and why you need the world to keep looking at you and with you.

The approval you seek is conditional on the maintenance of what’s being approved, which is not anything like the actual belonging, acceptance, or love that you want.

The world cannot confirm it for you or give it to you because it cannot see you well enough to offer anything but the superficial notion of what you want. You only get that from depth, understanding, and real contact.

The shallow evaluation that nods to confirm your approval is a quick and non-invasive hit that gives just enough to carry on with your day in a restless, begrudging acceptance but never delivers ease or assurance sturdy enough to not keep checking.

It is an entry point to proceed that you confuse with the whole experience, only to end up at the same gates of assessment without ever entering the space where the very action required to show you what you want to feel takes place. You look in the mirror and stay looped in the same line, but never cross the threshold or pass through the door. All you confirm from outside is that you are in fact, in the right line to get what you want, or not.

This has always been a structure of our species but modern internet culture exemplifies this.

The internet was one of the greatest breakthroughs in human history. For the first time, nearly the entirety of human knowledge became accessible to almost anyone with a connection. It should have been a cognitive revolution. Instead, it is now an emotional one.

Rather than using the internet primarily to expand our understanding of the world and each other, we increasingly use it to regulate how we feel about ourselves. Social media transformed the internet from a library into a mirror where every interaction serves as a way to glimpse in the mirror and confirm we are still ‘good enough’. The currency shifted from information to validation where every notification is a tiny possibility of acceptance, every “like” is a micro-dose of social reward, every comment is feedback on our place within the tribe, every scroll is another opportunity to compare ourselves to thousands of people we were never meant to measure ourselves against, let alone know every detail of their carefeully curated existence.

Eventually, the constant stimulation diluted our sense of self so fundamentally that we began checking not only as a way to confirm our sense of approval and belonging, but more insidiously, we started checking as proof to confirm that we were still here.

It was no longer just about if we still matter, but also that we exist. In a matter of years, we transformed the greatest information network in human history into the world’s largest emotional regulation system. We took perhaps the most powerful educational tool ever created and reduced it to a machine for outsourcing self-worth.

Here we gather online to find ourselves staring in the mirror, hardly aware that we are separate from it, and nearly void of any concept of self-perception without it. We collapsed the distance between ourselves and the mirror nearly so completely that we forgot we were looking in one at all.

We abandoned the feeling of being within ourselves, as the one inside the body who looks. We get entranced by all we see and our eyes jump around quickly, landing on nothing yet still attempting to take it all in. We form loose impressions by compressing many fragmented observations into a single, simplified conclusion without really seeing any of them.

We no longer experience ourselves as the one who looks, but as the thing being looked at.

The observer and the observed collapse into one, and without that distance, there is no space for curiosity, compassion, or recognition. There is only assessment.

We have become both the one searching and the one being searched for, endlessly scanning ourselves for evidence of whether we are enough, while becoming increasingly disconnected from the one who was there before the search began. We mistake observation for awareness, evaluation for understanding, and the ability to see ourselves for the ability to truly know ourselves.

It is not something that can be scanned for quickly and resolved with a fast conclusion —that is a way of looking that needs constant reinforcement. It’s the depth with which you are willing to seek and the discomfort of the unfamiliar contact without pulling out prematurely by assessing what you see about the part of you who looks.

There’s no meaning to be made from seeing yourself. There’s nothing to measure or deduce any conclusion from the contact. There is only the contact itself.

Trying to explain or evaluate it is to impose worldly measures on something entirely otherworldly and it’s that precise admission — that something in you is otherworldly, unknown, beyond definition and description — is exactly why it is so uncomfortable, almost unnatural, about seeing it.

Yet the more you look to really see yourself and the longer you allow yourself to be seen, the less you need confirmation of what you already know if you let yourself feel it without forcing the feeling through some lens you were trained to accept and believe, like the one that you’re not enough or lacking in some way or incomplete and separate. The one that asked you to forget the truth about who you are.

The humorous bit is that the self that you are searching for is the same self that is doing the searching. You cannot find yourself as an object because you are not an object to be discovered. You are the awareness that has been present through every attempt to define, improve, prove, or become.

The moment you stop reaching outward for evidence and grasping inward for conclusions, you meet the part of yourself you thought was missing. The bit that got buried beneath the constant need to interpret, assess, explain.

How to see yourself as you are, and not as you appear to be:

Look into the mirror, but not like you do in the morning or when you’re trying to find something to accept or change.

Look again, look deeply, and really look for the one who seeks. Look in the mirror and this time, actually make contact with your own eyes.

Look into each eye separately, then together, then separately again. Look as deeply as you can with an open curiosity. Resist the urge to withdraw when discomfort rises but instead, hold your gaze. Notice the instinct to search for something to evaluate.

Are the eyes red and bloodshot?
Is the pupil large or dilated?
Are your lashes thinning?
Do the eyes look tired or strained?
What flecks of color flash and which ones fade?

Notice, and then release all that and look again.

Observe any friction— rising uneasiness, awkwardness, or restlessness — and your desire to respond by breaking contact with yourself. As the pressure to pull away swells, do something uncomfortable and stay just a beat longer than you want to. Challenge yourself to be inside the discomfort of full presence with yourself for a moment longer than feels tolerable.

If you lingered, you made contact. You just caught a glimpse of who you actually are when you’re not masquerading and parading who you think you need to be. You saw a glimmer, maybe for the first time ever, of your most true and honest self.

You might be tempted to look again, but it’s time to exit the room and leave the deep mirror gazing alone for the day. There’s no need or even benefit to intellectualizing what you think you saw. Do not get caught up in rumination or attempt to make sense of what you witnessed, nor what you think it means.

Go on with your day and live your normal daily life.

We are collectively starving for authenticity, especially within ourselves, but do not be seduced by your hunger.

A brain that concludes quick interpretations from shallow observations is only a threat to the truthfulness you seek.

A mind that rushes to reclaim authority by returning to stare at that which it does not yet understand will only be met by a reflection that terrorizes the inner world.

When you look, there is much you may see. But one thing you will not see is demons, monsters, or phantoms of dark creatures set on your possession and consumption. But if you don’t know how to embrace both your light and your shadow with equal recognition, your head will easily mistake the pieces of you that are startling and unknown as malevolent.

It is our human tendency to make predators of what we do not yet understand.

The goal is not to see and rush to recognize or accept what is there. You do not need to instantly interpret and internalize. In fact, that is where the only real danger lies, in projecting and attaching to a false story too soon.

Although it is a common, prevalent reaction, particularly in a world flailing for comfort and certainty, it only further damages the psyche and your sense of self.

What you see first does not seem like it belongs and that’s why it feels scary because seeing it means confronting that it does. It is an inseparable part of your true essential self.

It is the work of a heavily burdened unconscious that defaults to a conditioned reflex to distort what is honest and true into something threatening and hostile. A mind still inexperienced with the divine eternal within will maladaptively leap to assert power by warping reality, polluting it with the old corrupted patterns. You do this automatically and instinctively under the guise of safety and control long before you are ever conscious of what’s formed beneath the surface of your awareness. But the world is not always safe and almost all of your life is well beyond control. If that does not feel comforting to hear, it’s even worse to accept.

But once you do, the carefully orchestrated illusion you designed to contain your life force begins to dissolve; the illusion that you could take something so infinite, so fluid, so alive, and force it into a fixed shape. You believed that with enough rehearsed consistency, you could condense and contain your whole self along some narrow continuity, and call it identity.

You are not an abstraction that can be reduced to just one thing, not even a handful. You are the living expression of dimensionality, nuanced and emerging in a wholeness far outside description. You are not a category, but a constellation.

Who you know yourself to be is not all of who you are. It is simply all you have allowed yourself to know and to experience once you created the pattern of being that way and the world reinforced it. What you repeat reveals parts of you but not the entirety of you. You do not feel whole not because you are lacking or broken, but because your awareness of your wholeness is incomplete. The feeling is not wrong, only unfinished.

There is so much more to you than you know. When you dare to cast a wider vision, you invite yourself into a greater belonging where you are not left unchanged by what enlarges you. Once you see, extraordinary breakthroughs and rapid transformation become everyday and ordinary.

This is why miraculous change suddenly happens in new environments or with new people because they expose and encourage you to express alternative ways of experiencing the world, and yourself, through it. When you interrupt the congruent expectation by seeing differently, you update what you look for in the one who looks. But you’re not seeing something new, you are seeing what has always been there, only now with new eyes that allow you to see more. And you don’t need to endlessly pursue unfamiliarity to see it, you need only observe what is unfamiliar by surrendering what’s expected.

You can try this any time by looking for yourself in the mirror and making eye contact with yourself long and deep enough to encounter a flash of something else.

Discomfort will tell you to come back and keep checking. But that is not a reason to. It is not something that requires daily or constant commitment, though there may be times in your life where it serves as an essential guidance.

You can only touch what you are willing to reach for. If you desire a profound connection, then be prepared for a penetrating exploration. An untrusting glimpse that is guarded by shallow confirmation is only going through the motions that created the very dependency to keep searching.

The further you look, the deeper you witness. The larger the depth of your gaze, the greater your sense of knowing yourself. As you become more comfortable with being seen, you will release the impulse to recede or reject what is there. Although the mind may still instinctively create stories and meaning, sovereignty will strengthen as you choose to accept and integrate before you intellectualize, interpret, or overanalyze.

The feeling is the measure; everything else is just more. The feeling is your knowing of what is real before the world asks you to demonstrate that it is true. When you are willing to be deeply present with yourself, you learn to validate your own unequivocal truth. You now carry a powerful sense of knowing that is so irrevocably and profoundly felt that you no longer need to see to believe.

To be loved is to be seen. To be fully, transparently witnessed is to be held in the very light of awareness and acceptance.

When you have the courage to invite all of what you see into the full embrace of who you are, whole and complete, you are able to elevate not only yourself, but all that is alive and has been alive into an indescribable, undefinable bliss entirely beyond words.

And if you’re really brave, without breaking your own gaze, speak these words with your own voice out loud and without trying to listen to the mind for confirmation, but let yourself really hear them:

“I love you, and I accept you, unconditionally.”

Learning to look and listen alongside you, SJT

YES, I’m aware this is ‘crazy’, AND… fvck it, let’s go.

^{Oh before we start, it would be rad and appreciated if you please subscribe if it feels right - thank you!}

^{The iconic 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider from CERN}

CERN is an antimatter lab that blasts subatomic particles at each other trying to access different timelines — oops, sorry, to study the universe. Both valid tbh. (Not conspiracy, minus my edit; it’s real.)

They switched it off June 29. And here’s the part I want to be honest about: it wasn’t mysterious, but it was planned. It was scheduled years ago when the collider finished its final run and went dark to start a four-year upgrade. No cover-up that I can confirm but a standard maintenance window.

Which, to me, makes it more interesting, not less.

Because the physics of it is that there is never “no effect.” The system stretches to stabilize under any energy shift. Yes —those particle collisions are massive in the subatomic space and relatively insignificant in the totality of Earth’s and the solar system at large energy…AND they still existed. They are not something the universe doesn’t feel or notice, no matter how small. The ripple effect is not easily measured or cleanly observed and certainly less so understood when considering matters of trying to touch and making contact with the fundamental laws of nature and the universe.

It might not be as obvious or as far-reaching as some Reddit threads, but complex systems don’t respond to change in obvious ways, and almost never in linear ones.

If you imagine reality is a giant web under tension, you tug one thread and the whole web redistributes that tension because every connected system is always seeking equilibrium. Homeostasis, balance, harmony — just like us.

And I think that’s why I’m feeling so ‘off’ as a whole because something really has shifted and I feel it, everywhere and deeply.

Whether that’s happening physically, psychologically, spiritually, or symbolically… who knows. For some of us it’s isolated and precise, and others it’s coming from all directions fast and furious.

The grace I’m clinging to is that to my knowledge, there is no species on Earth so good at adaptation as humans. The dissonance I feel is the transition between here and there. I am in process, in the gap, in the void - and curiously, that’s ALL I have been writing about recently.

Since CERN powered down, solar activity has been loud. Increased intensity and frequency of flares, geomagnetic noise, the Earth’s electromagnetic environment generally unsettled. Am I claiming CERN caused that? No, but I also can’t claim it didn’t either. I’m claiming that I noticed both, in the same window, in my body.

Recall, you are made MOSTLY OF WATER. So depending on your level of sensitivity — which for me personally is on the high end — what you FEEL is bigger, because your own body is striving to recalibrate.

Sensitive is not bad, by the way — it means increased capacity to perceive.

Humans are remarkable pattern-recognition machines. Sometimes we’re detecting genuine environmental changes. Sometimes we’re detecting changes inside ourselves and projecting them outward. Usually… it’s both.

And look, I'm clearly not the only one doing it. Depending on your digital home, many corners of the internet are currently convinced the shutdown is reversing reality itself. No receipts, obviously, because that’s the point of the editing, isn’t it? I make no claims here but the thing nobody's saying is that the reports themselves are the data.

A whole lot of people, in the same window, feeling the same shift, reaching for the same explanation. That's either the universe redistributing tension… or it's a mirror. I'm not sure the mirror is the less interesting option, either.

TINFOIL HAT OFF FOR A SEC. *breathe*

What this actually means day-to-day

Patience. Trust. Surrender. The right action for right now.

You can’t really do anything about this. But you can manage your expectations and how you relate to it.

NO, this is not a permission slip to let yourself off the hook. It’s a call to adjust and adapt accordingly.

And BELIEVE ME, I’VE BEEN FEELING IT. Last Sunday I could not stay conscious or upright. I wasn’t sick, but I was living an experience inside the brain and body of literally no one I have ever known in my entire life — but here I am. My 17-year-old dog with dementia has been struggling too. So have our grandmothers in the nursing home.

What do we all have in common? SENSITIVITY.

Which again — is not a weakness. Often it’s a signal of strength. But it’s a depleted resource, because that capacity gets recognized and drawn on by the people who don’t have it. No wonder ND brains are always at the short end of it. Give, give, give, give, manage more.

Here’s what I’m prioritizing

Readjusting my standards. Meal planning and being perfect is too much to ask right now, and every discrepancy becomes a hit to the ego — dissonance in the psyche that I’m not living up to who I know I can be.
So: hit protein. That’s it. And no processed food. And HYDRATE LIKE A MANIAC — under electromagnetic stress the cell burns through more energy seeking homeostasis and depletes faster.

Touch grass 2x more than usual. Be mindful of UV — those midday rays are rough right now. But take your shoes off and get in contact with the Earth. Sunrise is best, obviously, and go while the grass is still wet — water is the better conductor to transfer ions.
And YES, get off tech, because it ramps up positive charge in the body and drains you faster. To mitigate this somewhat, I’ve been taking double this full-spectrum magnesium (yes, I affiliate with them, since 2020 because it works, savings code SJT) — 400mg/day split morning and night, and 20mg creatine in the morning for my brain, and 5mg post workout.

Phone on airplane mode, wifi off, unless you’re actively using it. Sleep with it outside the bedroom if you can.

Ideal is turning the wifi router off at night — but not for anything my husband would never, so don’t reach for perfect. Aim for good enough for now. And let yourself nap if you need to, 20 minutes won’t wreck your night.

End the shower on FULL cold. 10 seconds to start, work your way up. Shivering mildly when you get out = good. Do this before 2pm or it’ll mess with your sleep. What you want is to stimulate mammalian dive reflex. aka the brace where you pull breath in and contract inward (sometimes I involuntarily scream) THEN THE MOST IMPORTANT BIT: REGULATE before jumping out - even 3s of controlling your breathing from sharp quick and shallow to ONE extended exhale then leave the cold.
If that’s too much opt for ice face: a bowl of cold water, 20–30 seconds at a time, breathing breaks between for about 2-4 min. Welcome back, dopamine.

Breathing and tapping. Yes, yes, you know. But actually do it. And take a second afterward to actually identify the feeling you’re having and what it might be trying to tell you.

Listen to binaural beats (7.83 Hz) — Spotify, YouTube, whatever. Music HEALS. And honestly, whether the frequency thing is measurable or theoretical or just higher UV and humidity matters less than the reality that vibration is not neutral. Use it to recalibrate. If there’s a sound bath near you, it’s worth once a month if you can swing it.

Sauna, and double your hydration afterward. Take an activated charcoal after to bind to toxins that are released into blood stream so they don’t reabsorb and make you feel worse.

Respond to what your body is giving you. Don’t force. My workouts have been inconsistent messes…then I reframed them as opportunities to improve technique, form, mind-muscle connection, tempo — and I’m winning again. It really is about honoring what you do do, and doing it well, by shifting what you measure.

Check your internal tension. If you’re walking around BRACED all day, you’re preparing for shock absorption. If you’re RELAXED and OPEN, you’re ready — you don’t need to prepare.

If you’ve ever done an extreme sport you know this. Snowboarding: the more tension you carry, the more likely you are to fall and get hurt. The more relaxed you are, the more RESPONSIVE you are to shifts in the environment — because you’re ready, you don’t have to get ready. And even when you fall, your body flows with it instead of fighting it. (Sadly, it’s the same reason drunk drivers walk away from accidents. Don’t be that ASSHOLE tho.)

This is the Letting Go (David R Hawkins) book in practice. And remember, it’s just that — a PRACTICE.

And lastly

Try to have some faith, and I know faith is HARD, but also amazing. Practice the art of surrender and trust.

It’s not supposed to be easy. In fact, we know it’s not really going to get easier — life after a certain point becomes loss mitigation. But that’s not dire. It’s kind of EXCITING, because through it you gain more confidence, more ability to serve, and you get closer to the ultimate creation.

I used to be so anxious it was debilitating. Then I realized: I can either be anxious, or I can trust God. Not both.

That might not be the right fit for you, and please don’t wear it if it isn’t. I don’t believe God called us all to walk the same path and believe the exact same things in the exact same way. Thou mayest.

Similar, maybe, but always slightly different. Your connection to source, to God, to yourself, is your own — and usually that voice that knows exactly what to do is already THERE, just buried under the noise of other people (like me, and these spaces), offering good, but not entirely aligned-for-you wisdom.

Only you decide what’s true for you. As you are now.

Whether this post resonates with you or sounds completely insane… that’s okay.

Keep the practices that make you more present and discard the stories that make you contract or brace (but if your willing, maybe explore that hey?).

And if all of this turns out to be complete nonsense, well what of it, really.

Drinking more water, touching grass, eating enough protein, getting sunlight, breathing slower, sleeping more, praying, and trusting a little deeper still seems like a pretty good way to spend the week.

Personally, you’ll find me rolling, pulsing, possibly even gyrating in some rhythmic swinging mess as I hum, chant, sing to the elements and maybe she is vagal toning while moving bile and lymph fluid, or maybe she was just born this way.

I guess we’ll never know, but part of that is what makes life so wonderful, don’t you agree?

How are y’all feeling out there?

Feeling electric and eccentric — SJT ⋆✴︎˚｡⋆

^{In that series, we explored three ideas:}

1. ^{that the self who understands is not the self who governs,}

2. ^{that discomfort in a new place is not evidence you made the wrong choice, but confirmation of real movement,}

3. ^{that belonging is not a condition to stay, but what comes after you learn how to stop reaching for something else}

^{The essays name the what and the why. Here, we look at where and how it’s running in your life, and we start the actual work.}

^{Part one is a somatic audit. You’ll identify where you are reaching instead of staying, and you’ll move past the story about it into the felt sense.}

^{Part two is a targeted EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping sequence that will change your orientation toward the pull.}

PART ONE

A somatic audit is not a list of stressors, complaints, or things to fix. The goal is not to analyze your life but to learn how to observe your experience.

It is an awareness diagnostic that helps you navigate beyond the stuff happening in your life and shifts awareness to what’s happening inside you in response to it.

Its purpose is to identify where the nervous system is still oriented toward a place you have already left.

We begin here.

STEP ONE: IDENTIFY

Prepare a quiet space with writing tools and guard 5–10 minutes of uninterrupted and undistracted time.

Start by taking a long inhale through your nose. Breathe in as much as you can. When you think you’ve taken a full breath in, reach for a tiny bit more by really expanding your lungs to the maximum.

Then softly open your mouth and let the breath slide out of you slowly without trying to measure or control anything.

Breathe again. (Actually pause your reading and do this.)

One more time.

Now ask yourself:

Write the first thing that you feel. What arrives before you start trying to make it make sense?

This is a practice about honoring sensations before editing them into neat or cohesive thoughts. Remember, this is a practice for you alone.

Notice what is actually there when you stop performing every layer of identity that you’ve built in the external world.

What stays with you when let it all go and just stay with yourself?

If this feels uncomfortable, good, that’s a signal that you’re getting a glimpse of whose still there, underneath it all. And it’s normal to rush from the discomfort of seeing yourself by jumping back into character.

This is not something you need to witness as a measure of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are at the practice, but notice if you start trying to assess your skills.

This is a practice of creating space and being in that space.

You cannot be in the space in any evaluative way without some former orientation to somewhere else. In the space, you are just there. There’s no measure, just you staying with yourself in the space you can hold.

Being in more space for longer is not better than being in less space for shorter. The quality of the space and time is not conditional on the traditional metrics, but rather the intention and desire to allow yourself to be yourself is the only goal.

If this feels weird, that’s normal. Exhale your judgment for not ‘getting it’ right away. There’s nothing to get and there’s no where to go.

Breathe.

And ask yourself:

Write what you honestly feel. It doesn’t need to make sense and it’s okay if it surprises you or has no context.

Notice where your attention keeps going when it leaves the room you are actually physically in. Where are you trying to go?

Stop forcing a dramatic expectation and stop editing to make it more than what it really and honestly is. The reach is rarely revolutionary. It is often very ordinary and mostly automatic:

• Thinking what it’s like right now, how’s the weather in the place you left.

• What time is it? How much time has passed?

• Imagining the experience of being on that beach, at that party, in that life you are not living.

• Rehearsing the conversation with somewhere not present now and revising what you could have said.

• Romanticizing a version of yourself that you keep returning to because at least you knew how to be that person.

Write whatever comes up first. Where do you keep trying to go?

You can be entirely committed to a decision and still feel your body preparing to go back.

That’s why this question is harder than it looks. The mind wants to defend the choice you already made. Instead, the goal is to notice where the nervous system is still orienting. Not the story about it, but the reach itself.

The most common resistance is answering from the head instead of the body.
A few common scenarios:

A. You might defend your decisions instead of describing the pull.

“I know I made the right call.”
“I don’t actually want to go back.”

Both can be true, and the reaching is still happening.

B. Or you might minimize it.

“It’s just nostalgia.”
“This is normal, it will pass.”

Yet your attention keeps returning to it.

C. You might immediately jump to the external:

“Everything around me is harder than I expected.”
“Everything is so different.”
“I miscalculated.”

You might notice a mix, a flash of feeling muddled with rationalizations.

Try to release the common sense explanation your brain wants to find and really sit into the question: where are you still living, if not here?

A useful sign that reaching is present is when there is a strong urge to explain why the old place was better, or to prove to yourself that you were right to change. Both are the same reach, in opposite directions.

The honest answers are often much simpler than expected. For example:

This instinct to check social media as an escape from where I am.

This lean forward, always, like I’m about to be somewhere else.

This rehearsing of what I’d say if I went back.

This bracing, every time something here doesn’t match what I pictured.

Most people don’t struggle to find the answer. They struggle with allowing it, because naming the reach often comes with a judgment or evaluation where we label something in us as wrong, bad, not enough.

It isn’t. Keep going. In a world increasingly full of places to spend your attention, learn to pay attention to yourself.

Your attention is a valuable resource. And attention is not just what you give to the world, but it’s what you use to build an inner world.

If you lose the ability to be alone with your own mind you will know a lot about the world out there while understanding very little about the world within.

STEP TWO: INHABIT

Take a moment to read your journal and process what you’ve just identified. Close your eyes for a moment, take a breath, and bring to mind without jumping into explanation about what you just named. Just bring it to the centre of your focus and hold it there.

Then being awareness to your physical body and ask yourself:

Don’t try to locate it in your mind. You don’t need to be able to name the place or even describe it. Try to be an observer of what sensations your body experiences when you think about the pull. Sit into the feeling and explore where in the body something shifts when you search for it.

A pulsing tug in the back of one shoulder. An ache in the elbow. A lean forward in the chest. A twitch in the finger. A tightening at the base of the throat. A hollow under the ribs. A restlessness in the legs.

There is no wrong answer. The body is always responding, even when the mind says I’ve made my peace with it.

Ask:

Where do I feel it?

Do not try to describe what it means, just record how it feels, just the raw sensation.

It may be in one place or multiple places as the body rarely experiences things in a single location. Let yourself map it without simplifying it.

Ask:

How long has this sensation been here?

Is this new? Did it come after the crossing? Or is this the same pull you have felt in every new room, but recycled through this one?

That last question is deeper than it appears.

A pull that arrived with this move is telling you something about this move.
A pull you have carried into every room you have ever entered is telling you something about you.

Once you’ve located where and how it shows up in the body, there’s one more question that does most of the work in this practice and it’s also the one most people skip.

The rest of this practice is available to paid subscribers inside The Studio, the paid practice space of Strong + Sovereign. Subscribe below to unlock the full audit + tapping sequence.

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You know yourself deeply and still can’t get out of your own way.

You have done the work and yet you remain blocked.

It’s not a lack of awareness.
It’s not a story that keeps you stuck.
It’s not a shortage of understanding or preparation.
It’s that you continue to think the way forward requires you to do something when it simply asks you to be.

You block yourself by what you do. And you do a lot.

You keep adding to a collection of saved posts of what you want.
The baby blue Porsche with the tan interior.
The eclectic home filled with curated paintings tucked up beside the ocean. That amazing dress from that designer who just knows a woman’s body—how great you would look in that dress!
The endless exotic vacations you greedily ogle past your bed time as you slip into restless dreams of rehearsed visualizations of how you think it will feel to be there, with all that.

You mistake the absence of a feeling for evidence that you’re in the wrong place.

When you can’t go forward fast enough, you end up reaching back.
You still check the weather in the place you want to be, the one you just left. Not the one outside the window you avoid because it’s jarring to face such a different reality. You look back at the one you keep a second clock for, the place with the rain you can still feel.

You romanticize what was and inflate the old feeling until it outruns every reason you had for leaving it.

Your body starts making subtle preparations to move again. Long before your conscious mind is aware, your nervous system primes a return to the familiar by rehearsing old routes, reaching for old habits, and relying on predictable patterns of a life you thought you left behind. Without actually agreeing to it, you’ve begun orienting toward the door your conscious self swore it was done with.

Without letting yourself land where you are, you are persistently pulled by the expectation that arrival will deliver certainty or peace. You believe if you could just reach that final destination or achieve that finished state you will finally feel what you think it takes to let yourself be in your life.

But there’s nothing to get and there’s nowhere to go.

•••

Instead of enjoying where you are, you trace the old limitations over the new space and hesitate at imaginary edges because freedom still feels like trespassing.

You lean forward only to check back. You can see where you want to go, but something stops you from continuing to move toward it even after crossing the threshold that brought you here.

Although you are not in your former conditions, the old sensations from the past echo with a continuity that restricts you in the present.

You freeze despite all reason, and even desire. You live like the dog who stands in the yard with their head down exactly two steps over where the invisible fence used to be, the electric collar long removed.

You are able to move forward, to inhabit more—but you don’t. You know everything you need to know, more even, and still can’t get out of your own way. Your constraint is gone. Nothing is stopping you now but you.

There is an invisible tether to an internal story that still insists on being true. The world is no longer drawing any lines—you are. The conviction that you will always remain who you have been becomes so self-generating that it no longer needs validation from reality because it now enforces itself.

You hauled your block all the way to the new space, and were still surprised when you gravitated toward it. It was you who brought it here. The block is a myth that’s only maintained by the habit of stopping yourself right at the edge of everything you actually want. It’s not held by anything other than your commitment to carrying it.

You’ve done everything right. You got to where you want to be, but it doesn’t feel the way you thought it would. It’s not familiar yet. And soon you find yourself subtly drifting back toward the door. The real threshold, the one you worked so hard to cross, that opens onto the hallway where you swore you don’t want to return.

You are frustrated because you know better, yet here you find yourself, retracing your steps, slowly erasing progress as though you are reeled back by a version of you that won’t let go.

But nothing is actually pulling you. The magnetic tug is really a default to the part of you that has yet to fully release the old allegiance. The truth is you don’t yet know how to be yourself here so you recite the old internal rhythm that leads you back to where you just came from.

You have moved but you feel held back by the old world not because anything is actually holding you, but because you never untethered yourself from the thing that did.

You know better, but your authority is still coming from the one who narrates your life instead of the one who lives it.

And here, you learn the self who understands is not the self who governs.

You begin to govern the moment you stop letting what used to be true decide what you do next. It’s when you sit inside the tension of the formless state while it’s still developing into shape and decide that not only will you stay in that discomfort, but you will actually allow it.

It’s the courage to remain in this reality longer than the memory of the old one.

•••

In that pause, you may still feel a nudge to move away, back, to somewhere else other than where you are. Sometimes you feel pulled because you are still attached to an old wound. Other times you are simply registering a new signal, an accurate truth about bad ground.

On the surface they’re identical. Both bring resistance, both insist not now, not this. That’s exactly why the feeling itself can’t be trusted. They separate underneath.

A wound resists because moving threatens who you have been.
A signal resists because the ground is not able to hold the growth yet.

Distinguishing a true signal from a wound in disguise is the work. Life will ask you to move before you know with any certainty. You can’t tell for sure if it’s you or if it’s the place. Sometimes the truth is that it’s both. It’s not easy and there’s no short-cut.

•••

You arrive without the confidence to fully be there. You’ve stepped into a new room only to find it full of strangers and strange conditions. The novelty disarms you. You feel vulnerable, shy, exposed because although you wanted this, anything that doesn’t match your expectation collapses your faith that this is actually where you are meant to be.

Nothing is wrong, but it’s also not quite right. What is it?
You make yourself dizzy trying to find it.

You scan for something you might recognize as a safe place to land and collect yourself. That you might brace yourself against something familiar.

A faint vertigo creeps up the more you spin looking for it because that’s the thing about being fully untethered. When you dissolve the old attachment and release the wound, the same freedom also feels like floating in a void before you learn where and how to anchor.

You exist in a gap filled with uncertainty and crowded with doubt. You recognize where you are but you haven’t put down markers to belong yet.

What is quiet is not absent.

You are physically present but not yet settled into trusting what that means. Your becoming runs behind your arrival.

And so, hovering in the middle of what you wanted, you settle on the one conclusion that can quickly get you out of the grey: the feeling is wrong, so the place must be.

You don’t immediately declare it but you quietly decide: I don’t belong here. This was a mistake. I want to go home.

But the discomfort of arriving in a new place without knowing how to be there is not evidence you made a mistake. The mistake is making a verdict before the experience has finished landing.

You decided you made the wrong move because you couldn’t sense how you belonged to it. But you can’t belong to where you haven’t been.

What’s absent isn’t missing, it’s just not accessible until after you stay.

Yielding to the impulse to explain before you understand is how you misinterpret what’s fully there.

The real wrong choice is what you do after you can no longer tolerate feeling so foreign. It comes either from reaching back toward the old door, or from rushing to collect and define the space—to curate false understanding before you’ve lived in it.

The gap is its own threshold you must endure if you want to stay. One you have to learn to survive despite the instinct to see it as a problem to solve.

But you cannot simply wait for evidence to arrive, you have to be there long enough to find it. The proof doesn’t come from waiting, it is on the far side of the staying.

What you seek is never going to meet you at the door. You have to put your feet down onto what’s not steady and participate in it enough before you can know. Arriving only confirms that you are somewhere new—living there confirms if it’s right.

You keep telling yourself, “I’ll know when I belong here.” But you have it backwards. Knowing comes much later, never first.

Discomfort is not evidence of a wrong choice, but confirmation of real movement.

•••

The desire to leave does not mean you made a mistake, and neither does it make you wrong for feeling it.

Lack of conviction is not a personal deficit but a territorial one.

Moving across the threshold from your old life to your new one cost you the stability of what was familiar.

You’ve stepped into the new room but part of you hasn’t finished processing that crossing. The change in you follows the change around you.

Even change that you choose doesn’t always feel good, and there’s nothing wrong with you if you notice that.

Expecting to seamlessly transition from one world to the next and instantly regain your composure from your own rearrangement is what makes it feel like failure.

Before you can measure what you’ve gained, you’ll notice all you lost.

Crossing is the moment of faith. Staying is the longer work of courage. You don’t stay because you feel like you belong—you stay, and belonging follows.

Courage is the resolve not to harden into a single, finished self. It’s the willingness to stay unfinished.

The goal is not to become someone without blocks, but someone who stops organizing a life around removing them—a life that is no longer one long sequence of striving through various stages of becoming. The aim is not control over identity, or even the discovery of a truer one, but the capacity to participate more than you manage.

This is where sovereignty parts from self-help and self-knowledge.

Self-help asks, “Who should I become?”

Self-knowledge asks, “Who have I been?”

Sovereignty asks, “Who am I choosing to be today?”

Sovereignty is the capacity to live from where your life has already arrived—faithful to present reality rather than a memory of the past. It is what governs a life no longer led by the voice of fear, but by the one who actually lives it.

And from that authority, the door stays available. Leaving again is not an escape or self-sabotage, but a fully chosen act, once the room has done its work.

Sovereignty is not a refusal to ever leave, but a refusal to let the impulse to flee decide for the whole self.

^{The series gave you the why. The Studio is the how: the practice that pulls you through by overriding understanding entirely. The discipline of living what you know is now available for paid subscribers. This is the way out of the paradox that trying to think your way out created.}

^{Learn the work of Staying with yourself here.}

You know yourself deeply and still can’t get out of your own way. The way is not being blocked by something in you — it is you.

You can’t get out of your own way because the way is protecting you from a version of yourself that you don’t yet have the capacity to meet.

Not only are you afraid of failure, you’re also afraid of being the version of yourself who finally succeeds, and the stories you tell about what either means. You think it’s easier to stay the same, but nothing can and nothing does. Eventually, everything must change, even you.

Getting out of your own way means choosing to change. It’s deciding to become someone else.

Becoming someone else will cost you who you are. But the price is not self-hatred. There is a version of you who thinks that softness is weakness, that rest is laziness, that fear is cowardice. It’s the one who demands you wage war on yourself to earn the next version of you. It may look like discipline, but it’s driven by punishment. It does not create the kind of change that holds. You don’t destroy yourself into change. You love yourself into it.

The courage to change is not comfortable, easy, or smooth, but it’s not nearly as hard as the cost of staying the same. The refusal to become anyone else other than who you’ve always been will cost you who you might have been. It’s sacrificing your future potential for the myth of stability in what cannot last. Nothing stays preserved in the way we know it. Electively or not, you will become someone else, and it will cost you who you are.

There is a life that’s waiting for you to be ready, but ready is a lie that keeps you blocked in a perpetual state of preparation. Pretending you’ve already become someone else never works because your body never accepts your performance as truth when it feels like a lie. Acting as if is still a story. Faith is moving without one.

You will never be ready and you cannot prepare. You get out of your way when you become the one who stops postponing yourself from living. You start living when you stop waiting for the version that is holding you back to catch up or consent.

The part of you that doesn’t move is not the enemy, but the part that has not yet bought into the future you. Your attachment to the version of yourself that still requires conviction is why you cannot change.

You do not find faith and then change. You change, and in doing so, find faith.

Change is not something that happens to your life. It is what your life actually is, when you stop resisting its pace. The harder you resist, the more you block and withhold yourself from participating in life’s fullness.

Change is scary because it requires you to move from the false security of a predictable outcome to the open and unknown territory you haven’t mapped yet, without any guarantee that it’s better or will work out.

The map doesn’t exist until you go out and make deep enough contact with what’s there to create it. And even once you do, it’s still only a representation of the ever-changing complexity of what’s really there. To experience a new truth, you have to let go of the old one.

Change asks you to release both what you know and what you have always known before what you are still yet to know has replaced them.

It makes you more vulnerable because the cost of change is immediately visible and felt, where the cost of not changing remains so subtle we don’t acknowledge it until it becomes impossible to ignore.

You tell yourself that it’s easier to stay the same than it is to change, but controlling the story does not control the outcome. Sometimes the story is what’s keeping you stuck.^🔗 It only delays what’s coming — just without your consent.

Because change comes regardless of how you feel about it. You don’t get to keep any of this — not what you’ve built, not what you’ve understood, not even the version of you that believes it will last. You die with nothing, and everything leaves you — not maybe, but definitely. The only question is whether you choose it or if it chooses you.

The change you choose unnerves you, disorients you, and asks you to move before you feel ready. But it also strengthens something in you as you begin to trust your own direction.

The change that chooses you shocks you. It arrives uninvited, stripping away and hollowing out what remains of any desire to reach for life.

Most people think you die when your soul leaves your body, your heart stops, and you take your last breath. But you die the moment you stop approaching life. There are many people still living who are not alive.

But before you can let go, you have to look. You have to be willing to look at who you actually are, and who you’ve actually been with enough honesty that you are able to witness the truth of it, because you cannot release what you have not seen.

Who you want to become is relying on you to fully examine the patterns that formed you, and to see how they shaped you into the one that brought you here, to this moment of wanting something different.

Part of what makes lasting change possible is learning to witness what was developed without your awareness or agreement. You must clearly identify what cannot come with you to where you are going.

And once you are clear on who you can no longer be, you must meet who you might become with enough willingness to hold the possibility open without certainty or promise. Change asks you to see what is not yet fully visible, before you can believe in that version.

You do not become whole by collecting more, but by releasing what no longer fits and allowing what fits better now to take hold. What remains is not a smaller self, but a truer one.

The versions of you that doubted, feared, or could not yet carry what was ahead were in your way, yes, but they were not blocking you because they were deficient or broken. Each piece of who you are is a necessary part of becoming the one capable of what life eventually asks of you.

Witnessing yourself without judging, bashing, or loathing can be humbling, even embarrassing. But it is better to learn from what you see than to keep living from it.

You can’t change what you don’t see, nor what you are unwilling to see. Maybe people live in the undercurrents of the semi-conscious but deeply suppressed states of denial, delusion, deferral of blame and responsibility. The body knows, but the mind refuses to admit it. It will not witness what it is too afraid to face, most often this is because it feels powerless to change it, but this is just another story. And the body keeps living what the mind has tried to leave.

This is why insight alone is not enough. You can name the wound, define a new identity, recite the affirmations — but if your lived experience does not match the story, the body defaults to what is familiar. Familiarity is not fact. It is repetition. Behavior keeps the story alive. What you do is what the body believes.

When you compassionately witness instead of criticizing, measuring, correcting, you can clearly identify what you need to stop being internally for you to freely do what you need to externally.

And from that place of clear vision, the choice to change becomes something more than strategy or willpower. It becomes a statement from you, to yourself that says: I am worth finding out. Worth the discomfort of outgrowing what no longer fits and admitting what never did. Worth the risk of becoming someone you don’t know how to be and even someone you might not anticipate. Worth leaving the false safety of what is here now for the possibility of what might exist, and what might cease to exist as collateral.

I am worth finding out.

What are you here for other than the experience of being alive? Everything is a win when the goal of life is to experience, but you block that ability by refusing to change.

Who you are is not a destination you arrive at or a possession you claim, but an ongoing process you live. It is a continuous practice of surrender — and when you choose your change, surrender is not felt as defeat, but as trust.

Both kinds of change will remake you, but only one is yours. That change, even when it hurts, is a movement toward something more true for what is right now. The choice is not between getting better or getting bitter. The choice is whether you love it all enough to let it go. Whether you love yourself enough to give yourself the opportunity to change.

The pain of growth is different from the pain of staying.

You don’t know what’s right until you’ve lived what isn’t. Choosing to change before you have proof or safety is the deepest form of self-respect there is.

It’s not always the fear of failing to change that holds you back and keeps you blocked. Sometimes you get immobilized by the fear of never actually trying, of never showing up in your own life. Instead of inhabiting and experiencing it, you end up watching it from the outside. You want to feel the texture and truth of life, but something always blocks you. So you try over and over to understand why, but knowing more never works.

You think you know yourself. You’ve done all the intellectual work. And still you stay blocked because knowing without doing is no way to become who you came here to be. Mental restructuring is not lived restructuring.

Deep down, you know the way there isn’t more awareness or knowledge. It’s choosing to be someone you haven’t been yet, and having the willingness to exist in the space between who you were and who you’re becoming without collapsing it prematurely.

Moving through the threshold is the work. It is staying suspended in the space of no longer being who you were, and not yet having a clear understanding of who you are becoming, without rushing to grasp the first things you find. A place where you can see your life clearly, but cannot yet locate yourself within it. This is the space where life asks if you are willing to show up in reality as the person you don’t yet believe you are.

And it’s not driven by the discipline of correcting what’s wrong with you. It’s an act of devotion to your growth and expansion, to explore more of what’s real, and to move toward more of what’s yours.

You are stuck because you don’t believe in your ability to stay in the gap between understanding yourself and trusting what you find there long enough to see the other side of it. You are too attached to the story of the one who stays stuck. Some of that attachment is fear. Some of it is loyalty — the part of you that loves you too well to let you become someone it cannot recognize.

Are you holding on because it’s really that great, or are you holding out until the desire to change dies off?

You think the goal is to become someone so evolved that your identity is final and complete. But what if the goal is actually to be able to hold every identity lightly enough that reality can revise it?

The gap is where the revisions happen — the inches of the doorway itself. The physical act of moving through it is driven by the belief that you can, even before you are fully convicted. It’s not a leap of faith, but a tiny step forward. For that, you must learn how to trust yourself.

^{This is the third of four pieces on the paradox of self-knowledge: why what you reach for after knowing yourself keeps you in the same place.}

^{Read Part 1: Why knowing yourself isn’t working
Read Part 2: You are the stories you tell, but sometimes the story is what’s keeping you stuck}

^{What follows:
Why the refusal isn’t the failure but the freedom you haven’t met yet. Read Part 4: You don’t stay because you belong. You belong because you stayed.}

^{The second of four pieces on how knowing yourself can become the way you stay stuck in your own way. Read Part 1.}

You know yourself deeply and still can’t get out of your own way.

The way out isn’t more knowledge. But neither is the next thing you reach for.

Subscribe now

You are stuck in the story you tell about yourself, and why you keep blocking the freedom you say you want.

You don’t merely have a story about your life. You live your entire life through the story of it. Over time, these stories become who you are. Your stories shape your identity.

Telling a different story, then, is perhaps the single most powerful step to getting out of your own way. Re-authoring your own story asks you for evidence of an alternative narrative.

This is how you consciously develop a richer, more complex story about who you are. It’s not about creating a false positive story, but a more complete one.

The more attention you give to certain experiences inside of the stories you tell, the more significance they gain. As you shift your focus and strengthen different elements of your story, you progressively shift your identity by the ongoing interpretation of what’s true about you in your story.

When you move from rigid certainty to a more nimble curiosity, you move from the map back to the territory. This feels significant because it is.

Changing your story is real and important work, but it’s not to be mistaken for change itself.

A new story can create a new orientation toward your life. It can help you notice possibilities and alternatives you previously filtered out. It can loosen the grip of old identities and make different actions possible.

But a story is still only a representation. It is the map of yourself. You can update it your whole life without ever stepping onto the ground it describes.

The danger emerges when you mistake a representation of reality for reality itself. Your descriptions are not the same as your direct experience. Your labels are not the same as the person living inside, beneath, and around them.

The subtle trap is when you confuse a more empowering narrative for the transformation itself. Watch what happens when you apply this to the thing in your way and you quickly realize that insight alone is not enough to remove what is blocking you.

Understanding your block better doesn’t move it but instead, sharpens your view of it. This makes you a better observer with the same stuck-ness.

More information only changes the narrative of it, not the thing itself. You become better at telling stories about what's in your way — why it's there, where it came from, what it means even — but you never work on moving it; you just move yourself around it.

You start to observe yourself: Examining it, interpreting it, describing it from different perspectives, with more detail and sharper angles, but never changing anything more than your own understanding of it.

The most painful part about this is that as you strengthen the story about your block, so you strengthen the reality of it. For with every repetition of and addition to that story, the more vividly you shape it into a more concrete picture of truth.

And this does not make it easier to overcome, but now, much harder, for you have given the story of your stuck-ness magnitudes of power by investing so much energy into its existence.

In this stage, you are a witness to yourself as you relate to your block. You may get excited at your capacity to watch yourself and consciously identify when you get caught up in the magnetic force of the story that is keeping you stuck.

You may even congratulate yourself for your keen ability to recognize when, why, and how you block yourself. You see in higher definition where your observations get more precise, but your behavior doesn’t budge.

At what point does understanding become another form of control?

This happens when your behavior is more focused on keeping the story alive than it is invested in the actions outside of the story — the true self-led pathway to overcoming why you are stuck.

Real limits exist. The story you build around them is different from the limit itself. You have to move as though the block is part of your process, and not the whole of it.

But it’s easier to get stuck in the trap of pursuing more clarity, rather than more authority.

When you can narrate facts and list reasons why you are stuck in more detail, you get the illusion of action because you are making intellectual progress that feels like movement.

In reality, you are only changing your perception of the problem — possibly even how you relate to it and self-orient toward it — but changing your point of view is not the same as changing your Self.

Moving your position around the block, even when it means improving your stance to have a deeper, sharper, more sophisticated understanding of it, does not actually move it.

And even quieter is the trap of getting overly attached to the new story, which is a different kind of block.

Now seemingly free from the limits of your old identity, you settle into a new description of yourself that feels more open simply because you have better language to describe who you are. But nothing has metabolized through the lived experience in your body. Nothing has actually changed in your life.

You get stuck revising your beliefs about your identity story, without changing the habits that would actually produce a different life.

You think the goal is to know, once and for all, who you really are, truly and irrefutably.

But who you are is not who you’ve always been, nor is it who you will always be. ₍^{Read: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should)}

What if the goal is actually to be able to hold every identity lightly enough that reality can revise it?

A story is a map of the self. The body is the territory. Self-awareness brings you into the hallway, a better story can open the door — but it can’t walk you through it.

^{This is the second of four pieces on the paradox of self-knowledge: why what you reach for after knowing yourself keeps you in the same place.}

^{What follows:
Why the part of you that won’t move loves you too well to let go.
Why the refusal isn’t the failure but the freedom you haven’t met yet.}

^{Read Part 1: Why knowing yourself isn’t working
Continue: Part 3 → Becoming someone else will cost you who you are}

^{This is the most exhausting place to be. You see exactly how you get in your own way, and still do it.}

^{Understanding, no matter how precise, will not move you. Getting out of your own way is something else entirely. Because thinking your way out is the same structure that keeps you stuck inside of it.}

^{This is the beginning of a four-part series and a practice on the paradox of self-knowledge and what to do when knowing yourself stops being enough.}

You know yourself deeply and still can’t get out of your own way.

You already know what to do. You just don’t do it.

You think it’s because you don’t understand. But deep down, you know that understanding was never the problem.

Knowing more isn’t what’s missing. The search for understanding becomes how you avoid what you already know.

You keep telling yourself that if you understood the pattern just a little better, you’d stop.

You became a collector and curator of sophisticated models of avoidance.

The books you dog-ear and underline.
The therapist who made you feel seen.
The framework you can quote.

You can describe yourself in a way that feels like progress without ever making any. Because understanding is not the same as movement. Self-knowledge can become a hiding place so convincing you stop noticing it’s a cage.

The collecting began as a way through. Then it became the place you stayed. And slowly, without noticing, you started mistaking knowledge for change.

This is the most generous lie you tell yourself: that the next thing you understand will be the one that finally moves you.

The next book. The next conversation. The next time you sit with it.

You tell yourself it isn’t avoidance because it looks like effort. It even feels like effort because the part of you reaching for truth is genuinely trying.

But effort can still be avoidance when it happens in a place where nothing has to change.

You can explain everything. You can name it, organize it, and articulate it beautifully. But you’re in the exact same place.

You’re not stuck because you don’t know how to move. Something in you is keeping you still.

You are stuck because you still believe knowing yourself is the freedom, when it’s only the hallway.

You don’t need more information. You need to live what you already know.

^{This is the first of four pieces on the paradox of self-knowledge: why self-awareness is often the very thing that keeps us stuck.}

^{What follows:
Why understanding more sharpens the block instead of dissolving it.
Why the part of you that won’t move loves you too well to let go.
Why the refusal isn’t the failure but the freedom you haven’t met yet.}

^{Continue: Part 2 → You are the stories you tell, but sometimes the story is what’s keeping you stuck.}

^{In that space, we explored three ideas:}

^{1. that worth is not something you have but something you are,}

^{2. that the body must live truth before the mind can be convinced,}

^{3. that beneath the endless act of measuring yourself is a compassionate observer that was there all along}

^{The first essay names the architecture. Here, we look at where it's running in your life, and we start the actual work.
Part one is a somatic audit. You’ll identify what exists in your life that you feel, on some level, shouldn’t and you’ll move past the story about it into the felt sense.
Part two is a targeted EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping sequence that will change your orientation toward it.}

PART ONE

A somatic audit is not a list of stressors, complaints, or things to fix. The goal is not to analyze your life but to learn how to observe your experience.

It is an awareness diagnostic that helps you navigate beyond the stuff happening in your life and shifts awareness to what’s happening inside you in response to it.

Its purpose is to identify where the nervous system is holding tension, resistance, threat, or effort that has become so familiar it is no longer consciously noticed.

We begin here.

STEP ONE: IDENTIFY

Sit for 5–10 minutes in a quiet space, with no phone, and the tools to write what you find by hand.

Ask yourself:

Then slow down and scan sensations, not thoughts.

Name it without editing yourself.

Not what you want to change. Not your goals or your plans. But what exists in your life that you feel shouldn’t…

What is in your actual life right now that produces an unsettling sense of wrongness like it doesn’t belong?

This can be a relationship, a habit, a job, a version of yourself, a feeling you keep having, a pattern that keeps showing up.

Write whatever arrives first. You can refine it, but start raw.

Take your time and sit with the feeling of it rather than the obvious answer you think you should give. It’s normal to initially answer from your thoughts, but this question is asking about something deeper.

You can think something is fine while still feeling tension, frustration, fear, or discomfort around it.

That’s why this question is harder than it looks. The mind wants to explain, justify, or solve. Instead, the goal is to simply notice what your nervous system is reacting to. Not the story about it, but the reaction itself.

The most common resistance is answering from the head instead of the body.
A few common scenarios:

A. You might start explaining and telling stories. You might try to justify why something exists by analyzing and trying to solve it.

It’s normal to answer with what you think should bother you rather than what actually does.

B. Or you might minimize your reaction.

“It doesn’t really bother me.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“I’ve accepted it.”

Yet your attention keeps returning to it.

C. You might immediately jump to external circumstances:

“My job.”
“My finances.”
“My relationship.”

When the question is really asking: What are you internally resisting right now?

A useful sign that resistance is present is when there is a strong urge to explain, defend, fix, or get rid of something.

The honest answers are often much simpler than expected. For example:

This constriction when I wake up and remember the day ahead.

This urge to disappear into scrolling the moment I feel even slightly overwhelmed.

This sense of internal resistance when I think about responding to messages or demands.

This bracing whenever I imagine showing up fully as myself.

Most people don’t actually struggle to find the answer. They struggle with allowing it by layering explanations.

STEP TWO: INHABIT

Close your eyes for a moment. Bring to mind what you just named.

Ask yourself:

Don’t try to locate in your mind. Just feel into and explore where in the body something shifts when you search for it

A tightening in the chest. A hollow in the stomach. A weight on the shoulders. A restricting in the throat. There is no wrong answer. The body is always responding, even when the mind says “I’m fine.”

Ask:
Where do I feel it?

Describe the location and what it actually feels like. Do not try to describe what it means, just record how it feels, just the raw sensation.

It may be in one place or multiple places as the body rarely experiences things in a single location. Let yourself map it without simplifying it.

Ask:
How long has this sensation been familiar?

Is this new? Has it been years? As long as you can remember? Only recently?

Once you’ve located where it shows up in the body, there’s one more question that does most of the work in this practice.

The next move is the one most people skip.

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These are just a few of the frustrating thoughts that cloud my mind every single time something good is happening in my life.

I can appreciate the little things just fine, in fact, I know few people who find such pure happiness from the simple things like blooming flowers, the new arrangement of clouds, and basic birdsong.

But where it involves me, I become critical. I have been this way for as long as I can remember. Every win, every accomplishment, every high and success was tainted by my own inner voice fixating on the fractions of imperfection that could have been better.

I interrupt my own happiness so automatically that I spent a year disarming myself before my own wedding day. I have never experienced time so untethered from criticism — all I recall is how undeniably visible I felt and how willingly I embraced love.

Life is not meant to be lived constantly on guard. Most of life happens inside the everyday. All of life happens inside the brain. And my brain has always been critical of my existence inside my own life, which is, apart from frustrating and depressing, completely exhausting.

I cannot tell you how many times I have thought, I cannot keep doing this, and then I keep doing it anyway.

It is remarkable how quickly the exhaustion within me began to spill beyond me.

A hostile inner world will eventually create an equally hostile reflection of itself in the outer one. As much as my critical narrator pushed me to higher and higher levels of excellence, it seeped into my vocabulary with others, too. As drained as I was becoming with my own high standards, I started to notice this feeling was not just internal.

I am great at getting into relationships. I see people fully and deeply in ways that most people have never experienced before. That pulls them in. But the same skill that attracts a connection is the one that severs it because that level of visibility is more than most people want.

Over time, the same pattern always emerges no matter the person or the context. A tension would arise and thicken until the ease of communicating was so taut that it snapped entirely.

It happened enough for me to realize: I am abrasive. People find me hard. I couldn’t keep blaming others because the common denominator was me.

The inner critic I’d aimed at myself didn’t know how to stay aimed only at me.

I framed criticism as an advantage. I thought without it I’d lose what made me me: ambitious, persevering, determined, courageous, and successful.

I never considered that I created the critic as a response to fear — fear of who I might be if I wasn’t in the constant pursuit of more.

I was afraid to meet that version because I had never really let myself be her.

There have been plenty of opportunities, but the most striking one came from winning my IFBB pro card. I was shocked. It took me over a month to understand what had happened. But no one else was surprised — many people had even expected it. What did they see in me that I didn’t? So I started to take a look and what I found was nothing like what I had feared.

I thought healing would soften me and make me lose my edge. It hasn’t.

I still use survival energy as a catalyst to get things done in furious bursts and angry sprints. But now that energy has direction. I approach life with strategy. I move toward a long-term vision. I act from a place of self-trust that I am building something true to me — not grabbing what’s in front of me because it’s there.

What I know now is that just because I can, doesn’t mean that I should.

At first, it felt like I was not doing enough and I panicked. I misunderstood that doing less did not mean I was less. Slowly, I came to realize that I was simply now doing less of what was not meant for me. Every time I strip off a layer that came from my reactionary self, more of who I actually am comes into focus.

I spent so long fighting for validation large and loud enough to prove my own worth to myself. Every day was a battle to overcome and become more and better than I was because I genuinely believed I wasn’t good enough yet, but with more, I might be.

Still every time I closed the gap between where I was and where I expected I should be, the inner critic didn’t quiet down. It attached to the next horizon and measured the new gap.

With each expansion, I would quietly confirm a small pleasure in creating a whole new level of opportunity to fulfill because I was convinced that my purpose was to fulfill my potential. I built a system where as long as I kept pushing what was possible, my life had meaning.

I tricked myself into believing that my entire worth existed within that singular purpose and I designed it as an unattainable goal — a target that moved as I approached it. Tension became the measure of progress. The closer I got to the goal, the further out I expanded it. My capacity grew and my expectations increased with it. Wrapped up inside of it all was an illusion of self-esteem that hinged on the unwavering pursuit of more. I could see it, but I could never feel it because I always placed it a few steps ahead.

I learned to do this in childhood, where it felt necessary to be loud as a mechanism for getting my needs met, and I haven’t turned the volume down since. In fact, I’ve only turned it up — but the louder I get, the less the world is able to meet those needs.

I see this and still I fear that if I am not constantly loud and visible, I will be forgotten and overlooked. Maybe many will miss me.

But it would be a shame to miss myself.

I have gotten a lot of attention, both good and bad. I have received a lot of praise and criticism alike. Neither changed how I felt about myself. Being seen and heard is not the same thing as being understood, respected, valued, or loved.

I concluded from very young that fighting for more was what got you more, and the world confirmed that. The more I found to push my potential and the harder I fought to close the gap toward achieving it, the more I got. But the kind of more that the world gives is not the kind that the self is actually seeking. I wanted to feel like I had value and worth, but the world cannot provide that. There is no amount of money, possessions, status, fame, even adoration and love that can convince us of something that we do not intrinsically believe for ourselves.

The world tries to convince us of many things, and still more things we seek from the world in an attempt to convince ourselves. But worth is not something you have. It’s something you are.

My accomplishments and success did not give me worth. They revealed a semblance of it — a peek of what was already there, that I could only see once I learned how. I saw more of it the more I showed up for myself. The more consistently I showed up, the more I respected myself for doing so, and the more convinced I became that I was someone worth showing up for.

Learning self-respect taught me self-worth.

I’ve been a competitive athlete my whole life, but it wasn’t until I started lifting weights that I understood that self-respect is a skill.

I started working out because I needed to quiet the noise in my head and get back into my body. Right before I started in the gym, I endured a traumatic event that scarred me deeply both psychologically and emotionally, but it completely dissociated me from my body.

I knew if I didn’t take measures to process and heal, my inner critic would destroy me with blame and shame, so I did the only thing I could think of: become so physically strong that I would never feel so helpless again.

I didn’t expect to fall in love with bodybuilding, but I did. Everything required to be a better bodybuilder increasingly made me a better person.

I wanted to feel confident and capable, but I was timid and insecure. Still, I kept showing up.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d stumbled into something somatic — a way of learning that bypasses the thinking mind entirely by showing tangible proof. My body was learning what my brain couldn’t be talked into.

I wasn’t just rehearsing a fictional story that I was strong and sovereign, I was living it in my daily reality. Every rep was giving my brain evidence that this was true. I didn’t learn self-respect by reciting affirmations, challenging limiting beliefs, or trying to think more positively. I claimed my worth by repeating a lived, embodied experience of what was now irrefutably mine.

I saw myself as someone worth caring for.

Breaking the habit of who you have always been is not easy, but it is simple. It feels hard because we treat it as a cognitive problem. We assume that if we can think differently, we will become different. But awareness is not transformation.

We do not change by declaring a new truth. We change by practicing one.

What is repeated becomes familiar. What is familiar becomes automatic. Change begins when your actions teach the body a new way of being.

The body has to feel it before the mind can believe it. Only then does the mind begin to accept what the body already knows.

I tried telling myself I was enough. Intellectually, I understood that I had intrinsic worth without needing to prove anything, but I didn’t believe it.

The words landed in my ears but never penetrated deep enough to feel true.

I learned this happens because the brain has a filter — the Reticular Activating System, or RAS — that prioritizes what repetition has taught it to see.

I had trained mine to look for evidence of my lack. The affirmations were inadmissible.

This is why insight alone is not enough. You can name the wound, define a new identity, recite the affirmations — but if your lived experience does not match the story, the body defaults to what is familiar.

Familiarity is not fact. It is repetition.

When the habit of acting like I was worthy of getting stronger became familiar, the belief that I was worthy was no longer a question—it was simply known.

Fear of being unworthy had been the captain of my life. I had given my inner critic total authority to lead. I was so controlled by criticism that for most of my life, I thought my brain was set to destroy me. But my brain was always on my side. It was only fighting me because I had been using it as a weapon.

It was not until I actively stopped engaging in the fight that I had an opportunity to see myself as anything more than a fighter.

The same weapon was now a tool.

When the internal warfare ceased, I became suddenly aware of how my posture had contorted into what I'd put into it. All the pressure I had compressed into form trying to keep myself under control was now boundless and unrestrained.

When I climbed out of my armor, it became obvious what my devotion to struggle was costing me. The life I was striving for required so much effort that I had forgotten everything else I carried.

I never considered that the same fear that was driving me to seek love was also holding me from it. I didn’t believe that everything I searched for could be resolved by simply no longer being someone at war with themselves.

The real work was absolving myself of the need to resolve every friction and instead, integrating with a new orientation.

Effortless posture is not fixed or rigid. It’s a position of no longer holding, but allowing.

I was able to drop out of the resistance enough to see how I had mistaken my critic for my identity. The more I unattached from this vice, the more I saw that it was only one voice among many.

The loudest voices were those of fear. They judged, criticized, measured, and corrected. But underneath the noise, I found a compassionate observer.

It was the presence that has been quietly keeping company with you the whole time. Witnessing, unabashedly and unflinching through every storm. It sits beside each experience, never advancing or withdrawing, just staying.

You find it in the fraction of space that exists between “this is happening” and “I am this.” You meet it by lingering in the pause you want to rush through. You know it by staying in the gap you have been trying to avoid just one beat longer than usual.

When the war stops, you see more clearly how you are not what you achieve externally, but what you stop being internally.

People can only meet you at the depth they have met themselves. Our ability to love others is limited or expanded by how deeply we’ve learned to love ourselves. And so too is acceptance, belonging, respect, and every other thing we keep looking for outside ourselves — it all starts with us.

I am still in the process of deepening my experience with myself. I always will be. That is more of a relief now that I’m no longer exhausted by my expectation of achieving it.

The process is a relationship, not a possession.

I am still working on sitting inside my reactivity instead of pouncing on it to prove something.

I am still working on letting it be, on letting me be, without imposing what I could or should do just because I can.

I am still learning to hold desire and ambition without rejecting either entirely.

I so badly want to jump into life the way I always have and get things done. But not everything is for me. Now, I most powerfully want to get the right things done.

Not every opportunity is an obligation.
Not everything we carry needs a cure.

The relief of being in process is that you are allowed to be in motion without having to justify the motion with arrival. Not being done means that nothing is over. This is not permanent, nor are you or I. We are participating in something that is still forming.

I used to think the goal of life was to fulfill my potential, now I think the goal is simply to experience what it means to be alive.

I want to know what it’s like to really be here, in my life instead of outside of it, tallying each moment and appraising its usefulness.

There is no usefulness. There is no potential. There is only contact, depth, intensity, presence.

You don’t stand outside your life collecting markers of it to measure your progress. To really live life, you must enter it, and let it enter you. The experience you feel is evidence that the meeting happened.

And the depth to which you meet yourself is the very same to which you can meet life.

༄ Measuring less, meeting more — SJT

Endings are not the hard parts of life, though for most, they feel that way. Endings become hard when we see them as the destruction of who we have always been. And when we believe destruction of the identity is also the destruction of the self, we suffer.

An ending can feel like losing yourself because you’ve become accustomed to living from only one chamber of who you have the potential to be.

We think we are one, uniformed essence, that there is a solitary ‘real self’ underneath all the conditioning and experiences that shaped us. But the unsettling discovery is that there is no singular self beneath it all, only the full range of parts we contain, most of which we’ve never met.

Most of us do not feel whole because we believe that those parts of us that are unfamiliar, under-explored, unexpressed, and mysterious are foreign fragments that do not belong. But all parts of you belong.

You are whole, but you’re living in fragments of self. When you stay within a selection of fragments, you contract and compress your essence. When you build a life entirely from an approved and familiar aspect of your multi-chamber self, endings feel like a loss.

But what if they were simply an invitation to move from a position of mere spectator — the one observing the other seemingly incongruent aspects of your inner being — to a participant, the one who lives inside of and in touch with those other, less familiar chambers of who you might actually be?

MIND THE GAP, IT’S NOT EMPTY

You already know something is ending, or has ended, or is trying to end. The question is not whether you can feel it, you know you can. The question is whether you are awake inside that experience, or watching it happen to you from a distance.

To participate in your own life rather than just witness it, you first have to know where you are. Not which city, not which stage, not which version of the story you’ve been telling — but where you actually are inside the honest cartography of your life right now.

Most of us can’t answer that because we genuinely don’t know.

We’ve been moving too fast to notice, or we’ve confused the map we made years ago for the territory we’re actually standing in. We’ve confused velocity with direction, productivity with progress, and arrival with meaning. We’ve been so committed to getting there that we’ve stopped asking where here actually is.

Before anything else — pause — and locate yourself.

What is true and what we rarely admit plainly is that you are not in just one place. You never are.

We are not a single story moving in a single direction. We are many cycles running simultaneously — some in their infancy, some approaching culmination, some slipping away to completion in the background while we look the other way.

The world is in flux. Yet the human brain craves stability, so it detects patterns and compresses movement into a labeled reality, and pretends it’s stable.

Endings confront the myth in the stories we’ve been telling and collapse the predictable continuity of both the future we were living toward and the familiar orientation of our identity of ‘us, in that context’.

While endings offer the opportunity to awaken to where we are, they more often thrust us from the experience of being there too long.

After an ending, people either cling to the past, or rush to the future.

We think we want to go back to the way things were, but we forget that it is impossible. The world we grew up in no longer exists. The way things used to be has dissolved, and so too has the version of us who belonged to that time and place. The river is always flowing.

And although it can feel like it, the river is not taking you away from your life. The river is your life.

But where is the river going? Once we release what’s already gone, we are overcome by a surge of action and aspiration for what comes next.

But the question is not, where are you going, only, where are you?

When helping others navigate their own endings, we know to meet people where they are. But how often do we meet ourselves there?

Where you are is in the space between identities. You are in the gap between who you were being and who you are becoming.

It may feel confusing, disorienting, even full of grief and longing because you are still trying to inhabit a reality that has already moved on.

The gap is a sacred space, a threshold to honor inside the suspension of forward momentum.

In Japanese philosophy, Ma (間) is negative space that is not empty. It is the meaningful “in-between” space that allows things to exist more fully as themselves.

It is the silence between notes in music, the pause between breaths in speech, the space between objects that defines how focus lands on what is there, letting it breathe.

Ma is a form of relational presence. It is how we relate to the tension of non-form that becomes the signature texture of a life uniquely our own.

We tend to divide life into clean boundaries so we can define and make sense of it. But reality is not made of clean separations. It is not a tearing at the seams between closed and open states. It is continuous and in motion. Cyclical and spiraling — up, out, onward.

The gap, ma, the space in between the highs and lows of life is the very structure of our lives. It is where meaning is made. It is where we separate who we are from who we once were, where we learn to navigate the contrast of the various aspects of the different fragments and chambers of our being.

What happens between peak and valley, one event to the next, between win and loss, birth and death, creation and destruction — is the in-between. There is before, after, and now. But now is the only place we can truly exist.

We celebrate birth with love. We meet death with avoidance, denial, fear. But between them is our actual life — the dash on the tombstone. The weight of that dash is what represents our journey from there to here in our process of becoming.

We try to turn life into destinations: before and after. As if transformation is final, a sequence of moving from one fixed state into another. We transition from childhood into adulthood, from single to married, from overweight to weight loss, from poverty to wealth gain. We check the box with finality as if these are sealed thresholds we cross and never revisit.

But nothing is truly final in the way we imagine. We move through thresholds, but we also continue circling. So much of what is ‘over’ remains alive inside of us, only displaced, waiting to be remembered and re-engaged.

O’Donohue explored the etymology of the word threshold. It comes from ‘threshing,’ which means to separate the grain from the husk.

A threshold moment is not just a change. It is a process that reveals what is essential by stripping away what no longer belongs.

A threshold feels like loss, but it can also feel like clarity, if we are wise and still and willing enough to listen for that emergence.

Yet in a world in constant motion, there is a lived tension of being in the liminal space without rushing into the next identity, escaping the discomfort, or forcing conviction too early.

We cannot hold reality still, because nothing is still. But we can hold the urge to immediately define or resolve by holding our attention long enough to bring awareness to notice the change before it settles into meaning.

Some things do not need to be cured because they were never meant to be carried. Sometimes relief does not come through presuming a neat conclusion, but by feeling the soft realization that we no longer have to keep carrying the burdens we mistakenly learned to live with.

Thresholds are emotional events. Emotions feel like they require action because, biologically and psychologically, they often do. Emotions are designed to mobilize us, but thresholds ask for presence before action.

This is the benefit of pausing inside pivotal moments and learning to slow down, to fully experience the different qualities of presence gathered there, and to turn inward with undivided attention until we sense the inner voice, the feeling rather than the force, that is shifting us forward.

Change becomes a fundamental passage once you learn to inhabit your life consciously. What happens here, in the threshold, shapes who you become there.

You will get there, but right now, you are here. And it’s the only place you need to be.

WHEN YOU MOVE FROM THE MEDIAN

Life is not a sprint, but it’s also not a marathon. It might be most like an impossibly long triathlon, or a really disorganized heptathlon. Life is a series of undefined intervals of various lengths, intensities, and durations. Each with their own offer of growth, perspective, skill, and adaptation.

The in-between is the rest station, a transition zone where you reorganize and change systems. In triathlons, the swimmer must enter the transition tent to strip off their wetsuit and goggles before they slip into their cycling shoes and helmet.

You need only imagine how ridiculous, ineffective, and frustrating it would be to ride a bike in a wet suit to understand how rushing through every threshold in life is causing you similar pain.

Life needs us to honor the shift. Transitions are where life is actively reorganizing you.

Staying in the flux of continuous motion, no matter how imperceptible, is inevitable and unavoidable, but maintaining the same speed and direction is not.

Slowing down requires us to lose momentum.

In physics, momentum is continuity — mass × velocity, something our pattern-prone brains love. Momentum is what keeps something moving in a direction once it’s already in motion. But that same quality also means it is resistant to change. The more momentum you have, the harder it is to stop, and the harder it is to change direction without force or damage.

Inertia is the tendency of an object to resist changes in its state of motion unless acted on by an external force.

This is why some endings hurt so bad. We refused to slow down enough to not be shocked by the impact.

We associate momentum with progress, but often it’s just a prolongation of prior truth. When that truth ceases to exist, we lose the unconscious continuation and suddenly, we are asked to make another choice.

When we are no longer being carried forward automatically, released from an existence on autopilot, we are forced back into the uncomfortable position of the consciousness captain.

We are flung into a position of having to actually take the helm again, of owning our direction, choosing intention, and becoming responsible for who we are and where we go next.

Most people do not like this position. We flatten, medicate, distract, define, rush, perform. We choose the managed median over the volatile truth. We prefer something that feels stable, socially acceptable, and emotionally controllable, even if it isn’t fully real or alive for us. We look outside of ourselves, reaching for what or who is immediately there with little discretion or consideration other than relief from facing the tension in the transition.

So we rush the space, as we are a society so entrenched in our definitions, our labels, and the false security of our identity.

We call this time a void, and maybe it is so. But the secret blessing inside a void is that your distractions and disguises cannot join you here. This is precisely why we fear it. Inside the void, there is nothing but the naked nothingness of truth, no masks, no titles — just you and your mind, asking you to pay attention to what is.

Attention in the void is the awareness becoming aware of itself, which is the highest honor and deepest responsibility.

Consider what sinister spirit convinced us to live for the figurative Promised Land of tomorrow at the expense of today?

It is the human condition to skip through the experience of today by filling it with the output for tomorrow. Especially in modern life, each moment where something is “not happening” is an emptiness we interpret as failure. So we surrender all our energy and attention into distant horizons, rarely noticing the life that’s unfolding in the very moments we are trying to get through. And we wonder why life feels so unstable, so hard, so riddled with unwelcome change.

Attention is life directed. Where it goes, so you go, also. What it focuses on strengthens. Over time, what you repeatedly attend to becomes the architecture of your reality.

For a long time, my attention was directed toward becoming less of myself. I just wanted to be stable, normal, and more like everyone else. I pursued this mythological desire for belonging until I found myself on a powerful cocktail of psychiatric medications that flatlined my entire reality.

The lows were gone, but so were the highs, and I started to worry the essence of my own self was gone with them.

At first it felt like I had just gone numb. I thought maybe I had become immune to suffering, but then I realized I was just suffering in a new way.

I could see life, I was even technically still in the experience of it, but I couldn’t reach it, I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t participate in it. I was now separated from being in it by a glass that grew thicker and foggier and more muted by the day. I wanted to scream, but all I could do was watch life slip further away.

Yes, pain was gone, but so was excitement, anticipation, wonder, grief, desire, spontaneity — everything that made life life, and that was its own kind of pain, one I wasn’t prepared for.

I decided that I wanted to live in the wild, dangerous, openness of raw reality again. I would rather oscillate in the harsh volatility of what is genuine and abrupt. I would rather experience unfathomable highs and even endure the most unimaginable lows, in fact, I’ve even come to appreciate them. For the deeper the contrast, the more depth and sincerity is felt in gratitude.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The higher the high, the lower the low. Yet each low is matched with an equal potentiality for another high, it’s simply a matter of noticing and choosing. This is what creates the texture, meaning, and authenticity that makes our lives our own.

The fluctuation on the horizon is evidence of life itself and speaks to its very presence.

And between each rise and fall is the common ground that holds us all. The in-between is an ideological no-man’s land. It’s the middle territory, the landing space, the return to baseline centre where no matter how fleeting, it offers a reprieve. An offer of peace, trust, clarity, even love that is simply under-appreciated without knowing great distance from it.

In this sense, leaving the unsustainable polarity of extreme devotion to one chamber of life is less an absence and more a return to the magnetic centre of the fragmented but whole self.

Appreciating these seemingly conflicting tensions without resolving them reminds us that belonging does not come from fitting perfectly and finitely in an external state, but that we belong primarily and completely to ourselves. Understanding this makes us less likely to skip the less exciting middle, to dissolve the space inside the gap and close it just to prove some measure of worth.

Meeting yourself inside the threshold, you realize there is nothing to prove and no one to prove it to.

I used to climb mountains to feel like I belonged. I wanted to be validated, accepted, seen and loved. But once I saw myself, there was no need to be seen by anyone else. I am no longer willing to climb another empty mountain for the sake of being seen, but now I climb because I so eagerly want to see more of the world.

STAY IN IT

I recently experienced the mountains (yes, plural) beneath me rupture and crumble. People have been asking me, “How are you coping? Are you doing okay?”

And the truthful answer is that I am the opposite of okay.

But I know one day I will be not just okay, but genuinely good again, so I keep marching toward that time until I am in it. My humble duty is neither to wait too long straining for the perfect conditions of its arrival, nor to miss it, but to notice goodness as it creeps back in, and when it does, to let myself live it.

When life asks us to slow down, we don’t listen, so life forces us and we freak out. We confuse slowing down with stillness. We think stillness is stagnant. But in reality, stillness does not exist. What if what we perceive as stillness is simply movement that has become so coherent you can no longer see it breaking apart?

My biggest joy through the pain of the last 12 months was how still I remained during the rupturing of everything I thought was stable and certain. I am grateful for how I observed first, how I stayed online in my life, although the urge was to run and run fast.

The biggest challenge through our biggest changes is to not default to what we have always known. For me, that meant not numbing out, distracting myself, pushing reality away or avoiding it, but staying in it. Being present with it, no matter how bad it hurt. Even when I most wanted to escape, I stayed.

Before life asks us to begin again, it first asks us to find where we are. A path that is truly our own is not as easily found as the obvious but misaligned options laid before us.

The path of a more integrated self reveals itself as we walk it. Thresholds are less a return to a place inside of us and more a reconnection to an ongoing communication with ourselves — the internal compass that nudges when we veer off course and edges us back toward what is most coherent with the whole of who we are.

You will get there, but right now you are here. This part has a purpose. To get there, you only need to keep moving in the right direction, but which is right is precisely what and why you’re here now, to come to know what you don’t yet know, or rather, what life is asking you to remember.

This is not easy, but it’s also not complicated. It asks you to suspend what you think you know by being open to more and attached to less.

As kids, we are in such a rush to grow up, but the old only want to be young again. This is because time is a powerful lens through which we see our lives with new perspective. Everything we didn’t notice when we were restless and distracted now becomes important simply because it’s harder to reach.

What would you give to turn back time, for the chance to live one more day in the place, as the person, at the time of the then that you hurried away from?

We can’t go back. But we can save our future selves from such desires by asking: how much are you missing of what’s here in your avoidance of now?

There is something in this time right now that you will one day wish for that you are not appreciating fully — what is it? Bring it into centre focus. Give it your attention.

We retain memory only by making memory. We make memory by our presence and attention to the moment.

Life goes by faster when you stop paying attention to the moments that make a day and compound into the narrative of your life. We grow old when we stop having new experiences and go on autopilot. Thresholds invite us back into the attentive space of now and ask us to stay there long enough to notice something about where and who we are so that we come to know it as if for the first time.

We miss so many great treasures in ourselves and in our lives because we are absent in our experience of them.

How you are toward your life is the way life will be toward you. You get more of what you notice.

The outer world is a reflection of the inner one. An inner world that is painfully unobserved and neglected in favor of a future-world that might never exist is one that reflects very little of what we want to see.

Thankfully, we can change the lens anytime.

A threshold is a perfect place to pause and reassess what we’ve been seeking. It’s a chance to get curious and a choice to create a new, better lens, or a decision to keep the old ones.

In the space of nothingness, we can allow ourselves to be moved, transformed, impressed upon by the beauty of the moment without fear or assumption that we might be devoured by the void. It’s where we learn to trust that we are being transformed by it.

The space is a passage, not a problem. It’s a proximity, not a place. It’s a process and if you allow it, it can be a pleasure as well.

BEGIN AGAIN

Everything is borrowed. Time alone is yours. But a life observed is not the same as a life lived.

Although we measure time as linear, we do not experience it so.

Over and over, we move through the cycles of our life. We revisit, apply, learn, create, evolve — and around we go again. We repeat, but we can never repeat exactly. Life does not duplicate our experiences but meets us with similar lessons in different forms.

Nothing returns the same way twice, we don’t return the same either.

History doesn’t actually repeat itself, but it does echo. The pattern feels familiar, often eerily so, but it is not identical and always altered.

We try to make life permanent by capturing it, defining it, attempting to stabilize it; but life is not meant to be held. We cannot hold a life, only our attention to the experience of it as it moves.

The past is not behind you. The future is not ahead of you. They are both accessible in the now where you remember or imagine them. Eventually, everything becomes an invitation back to presence.

We do not move forward so much as we deepen, circling around what we thought we had already known.

Life is not a loop, but a spiral. To begin again is to reach the part of the spiral that expands from the edge of a similar point but with a different depth. The outer shape may feel familiar, but your position in relation to it has changed. You are not where you were but above it, beneath it, or beside it, in a place more spacious around it.

Life on autopilot is a looping reality that accelerates momentum. Endings inhibit our ability to complete another loop and place us into space undefined. Time does not stop, nor do you, although it feels that way sometimes.

The moment you realize you are on a new timeline is when you accept and actively choose the trajectory of your spiral. That choice is what moves you from spectator to participant.

The break in momentum and coherence feels like failure when really it’s a call for change and re-alignment — beginning again is actually evidence that you’re still in motion.

The collapse of one chamber of our lives can feel like ruin if it’s the only place we’ve allowed ourselves to be. But each fragment within us is a chamber of its own just waiting to be explored and strengthened. What dissolves restores our capacity to grow in different ways and in different places.

We think these spaces of transition are embarrassing blemishes to cover up and hurry through as we continue advancing our lives toward their otherwise noble striving for growth. The strange truth is that the more we rush the threshold, the more life returns us to it, asking us to learn what we keep trying to forget what we know.

Endings are the unwelcome vehicle for growth. The difference between looping and spiraling is that looping assumes there is one real self to return to while spiraling understands there never was.

We have so much we want to become, we can become, we might become; but we are not any of it until we first acknowledge who we are.

You can’t actually operate from anywhere other than your current reality. The moment you stop pretending otherwise by perpetually orienting toward a future version, the more honest the relationship you build with yourself.

When change happens we want the change to complete quickly so we can get to where we think we should be. We mistake progress for continuity. The paradox is that acceptance itself is the progress.

You grow the moment you stop trying to be elsewhere and fully accept where you already are. So where are you?

❥ Staying in it with you, a fellow participant, SJT

We all think we want options. We believe that more choice means more access, more success, more status — that getting more, at last, will fill the lack caused by whatever core wound we're chasing. Love. Acceptance. The thing underneath the thing.

But if that were true, I’d be rejoicing instead of cursing every time I turn down the condiments aisle (yes, a whole section dedicated to sauce, since the food itself is not enough, much like you and I). Instead, I am confronted with 200 choices about which ketchup is ‘best.’

We equate having more options with more abundance, more importance, and more freedom, but this is a mistake.

We think variety is the ‘spice of life,’ but in fact, the true best way to make anything taste better is not to add more to what already is. It’s to go without.

Hunger is the spice of life.

To know its absence long enough to appreciate its presence, where the longer we have been without, the more deeply we are capable of celebrating the simplicity of what it is.

No longer caught in the illusion of what it could be, untethered from the fixation that it needs to be something more like that over there, we are enraptured by the honesty of what it is, as if it were the first time we’ve come to know it.

And so we come to appreciate it more. But the more value we give to what we already have, the less predictable and controllable we are — and the world hates that.

So we consume and we yearn and we strive for more more more. Never reaching the elusive utopia of contentment; holding our happiness at an eternal distance of almost, if we could only just get a little bit more.

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…”

Joni Mitchell croons in her famous song, Big Yellow Taxi.

The beauty is in the simplicity we failed to notice while we had it that we can only observe once it’s gone.

Ask anyone who’s lost someone they love and they’ll be the first to tell you that in almost any context, no matter how painful or limited, what they wouldn’t give for one more day with the person they love again.

We overcomplicate things because we can. We under-appreciate what we have because we can sense, sometimes even see, that we could have more.

We are so eager to force our way out of the innocence of youth, unlocking bigger achievements, new levels, more responsibilities — and for many, we confuse this as meaning, wearing our busyness, awards, and increasing obligations as a badge of status and importance that symbolizes our worth.

We inflate ourselves with illusions of credibility and with stories of special intrinsic value that we have accumulated so much, but yet, we always want more.
Indeed, we even create complex justifications for more simply to sustain everything and everyone we’ve thus acquired.

We create entire worlds around the fallacy of absolute dependence on us, raising ourselves to increasingly higher standards and distinguishing ourselves with elaborate pedestals of self-importance.

Paradoxically, we put ourselves in our own cages by conditioning our ecosystem and our self alike to always perform at a certain level, capacity, and rate of expansion; confusing our pride with purpose.

If all this — status, money, responsibility, achievement — were truly a reflection of our worth, why would we need to keep collecting it? If it were all taken away in an instant, what would be left and could that alone sustain everything that we’ve collected? Could it even sustain only us?

And what is the measure of success anyway if we only use it to build a shell that projects a mirage of a fabulous life, but we can neither step into it or be satisfied with it?

I’ve written about this in a series called Eternal Easter, on the feasts of our lives: what we think nourishes us, what never can, and what actually does. The premise is simple: the quality of our attention determines the depth of our appreciation. The more open we are to the ordinary day, the more we can enjoy what already is.

“Enough is a feast.”

This deceptively simple teaching by the Buddha cuts straight against the modern instinct to keep optimizing, accumulating, upgrading, striving for more.

What is enough, and when will we know?

Few of us have ever defined it for ourselves — and our culture would prefer that we didn’t. It constructs our existence inside containers of fear, scarcity, threat, and lack, whether they are physically or emotionally true or not.

A society that is scared and sick and separated is a very profitable one.

If we never pause to take inventory of what is, we will forever be living in the gap of lack by comparing it to a past that no longer exists or a future that never does. We will always need more.

The trap of more is two-fold. Even once you arrive —you get there, you attain it, you have enough, society changes.

Even among those capable of appreciating the top, eventually, everything changes.

Society shifts, what was considered good is now bad, the goalpost moves — usually right as we approach it — and suddenly, what you have and where you are is once again, no longer enough.

Whether it’s an evolutionary byproduct or a marketing design matters less than how pervasively true it is.

Falling behind once meant banishment, and banishment meant death — and though the stakes now are only psychological, we still treat them as fatal. The slow torture of watching what you cannot touch is as corrosive to the soul as any poison was to the ancestral body.

The hedonic treadmill of More and Better brought us to a point of luxury our ancestors could not have dreamed of. And yet we are living in the most abundant time in human existence while people struggle with their physical and mental health more than ever. Maybe the lived reality of keeping up with modern culture is collapsing increasingly more bodies and minds into despair. And maybe this is also the first time we’ve ever had such a luxury.

Even when things are going well, we have a particular proclivity to make it hard for ourselves. Our values change, the dynamic reorganizes, we invent entirely new metrics and standards that depreciate the value of all our other qualities and assets, so we begin the climb again.

We like difficulty because it gives us something to pursue, a problem to solve, fix, and eventually, overcome. We leaned into dopamine-dominant behaviors that rewarded the excitement of seeking. Our modern world not only offers new novelty at every turn, but it also compresses time, nearly obliterating the space between action and attainment. We are a species wired for more and seduced by the belief that it’s not enough.

Paradoxically, the chase offers enough reward to keep chasing. The allure of enough leads us to overextend and expose ourselves to too many things, increasing our vulnerability, threatening our sense of security, and convincing us the solution is found in “just a little more.”

We entangle ourselves in increasingly complex webs that eventually become liabilities, some of which we now require to maintain our image of enoughness, fewer to sincerely improve or amplify it. All the while convincing ourselves that it’s all a representation of our worth.

A more accurate measure of worth is realized through knowing what is worthy to us, personally.

But where do we find that in the myriad of conditioning and noise where most people would not recognize the sound of their own voice if it were the only one with them in the room?

To be capable of rejecting ideas, turning away opportunities, releasing desires, letting go of what seems really good from the outside, and what sometimes even feels good but no longer right, is no easy business.

Not only do we come to love places, people, ideas, businesses, objects, jobs, even fragments of our personalities — we also come to identify with them. Changing our mind feels like a threat to who we are. That fear holds some people in place, caged by fear. For others, it's the doorway to pursue something more real now. Now is the key word.

Who you are is not who you’ve always been, nor is it who you will always be. And thank goodness — it is, after all, in your nature to become. Not more. Just other than you were.

Yet it is very hard to navigate the ambiguous territory of Where To Run Next (so I wrote about it) without feeling confident in the place we will launch from. For setting down a path clouded in the uncertainty of the path itself while carrying uncertainty about yourself is nearly the most certain way to ensure that you do not set out at all.

But feeling confident in our ability to find our way usually rests on a quieter foundation — an earlier acceptance of what was true for us, and what was not.

We know more about the truth of who we are by knowing with certainty, who we are not.

Everything we know about ourselves, we know from the unconscious or deliberate construction of what the world showed us. We internalized those inputs and organized them into what we call an identity, a self, a lens of perception that now colors everything we perceive, and much that we don’t.

When a person undergoes radical transformation, they are often surprised to see, seemingly for the first time, what was always there. So powerful are the constructs of perception.

And still we learn more about ourselves from failure than from a life that only moves in a steady sequence of confirmed successes. Stepping outside the boundaries of who we think we are, daring to experiment a little, trying, asking, succeeding sometimes only to decide it’s not really the right feeling.

This is the inception of more.

And from a sincere desire to find something authentic, we adapted to provide more options, more access, more variety to discover what is really our own. What started as an innocent pursuit to discover how to discern the true self from the performative one morphed into a limitless smorgasbord of possibility.

Variety is good.

We need to have options. Monopolies are dangerous, not just for distribution of power and control, but also for survival. Think the vulnerability of mono-crops, the necessity of genetic variance, and the benefits of idea-sharing. A melting pot has more advantages than drawbacks because when one system dominates, everyone loses in the long run.

Humans are the same.

We are not meant to exist in a silo but go off, get out, and seek as we explore our identity. Ancient cultures used to practice sacred ceremonies for rights-of-passage, often marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, that were characterized by controlled identity disruption followed by structured integration.

We still practice the identity disruption but we’ve outsourced the control and we have discarded the integration entirely.

Marketing and the instantaneous nature of modern culture hijacked the way we establish ourselves. Advertising funneled everyone through the same hallway of manufactured desires, encouraging us to chase the same things. It was important messaging that we be en vogue, on trend, with the times, so as not to get left behind.

Suddenly, our appearance and the commodities that supported our image became the primary signals for power, status, belonging, worth. Consumerism culture became the signal of self, creating characters that sustained entire industries such as the luxury goods market, to maintain their illusion.

For instance, we want new clothing. We wanted it because we saw someone in our community with it in real life. Then we wanted it because we saw it on a billboard or television. Then we wanted it because it was on an influencer or ad somewhere on the internet. And all the while, the gap between wanting and having collapsed.

What happens when we shorten the distance between desire and acquisition so far that as we think, so we have?

And to many, that sounds awesome. We do not want to commute, we do not want to clean or get groceries, or input data onto spreadsheets — we are not only willing, but excited to outsource the menial and meaningless. Yes, we are deeply committed to this opportunity to pursue meaningful work, deeper purpose, and higher ways of living. So a few skills get atrophied along the way, what does it matter?

AI and the internet can show us answers, but not understanding. If we don’t think through things ourselves by struggling with them, applying them, testing them, they don’t stick. Information is not knowledge. Thinking is the practiced skill that turns it into one.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” — Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast
You cannot carry Paris with you unless you were present enough to let it in.

Western culture told us that we can do anything, that we were in the land of opportunity. As a by-product, we really thought that we really could do anything, and assumed that because we could, we should.

You are special.
You are unique.
You matter in a very important way.

And it’s all true and it’s all possible, but they forgot to share the most important part: it’s impossible to define what’s not there. Light only exists in darkness. The contrast of what isn’t gives rise to what is. You’ll be a surface copy of nothing in particular until you go deep on a few things, which means rejecting a lot.

The first time I remember the crushing feeling of anxiety was in grade 4. I was ten years old and I was filled with so much potential. I tend to land somewhere beyond average with nearly everything I do. In school, that seems like everything that matters in the entire world. Every subject I was better than most, and where I really applied myself, which was everywhere by the way, I was The Best.

“You have so much potential,” the adults would coo in wonder. I know it was well-intentioned but it also led me to pull out all my hair until I had a bald patch and my skull was swollen.

If I had so much potential, then surely there was a huge responsibility to fulfill this potential. Clearly the only way that I could ever attain success, which was of course, the key to belonging and love, then I had nothing more to do than solve world hunger, end all wars, cure cancer, and win an Olympic gold medal while earning a star on Hollywood Boulevard.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Some dreams are better after they die. Most of the time, the dreams that become reality are only enjoyable because of the awareness of all the dreams that had to be sacrificed in order for them to exist.

Dreams require sacrifice. Sacrifice requires discernment. Without it, the wrong dreams are chased, the wrong sacrifices made, and the wrong reality is created.

How can we know what’s wrong?

Our ancestors used to eat things and literally die. This did not have to happen very often before the whole community learned what were the wrong things to eat.

But now we have more, so much more that we have muted our senses, becoming desensitized to know the effect of what is wrong.

Buffet studies prove that people eat significantly more in buffet or all-you-can-eat settings because satiety signals get overridden by variety and environment. We are less nourished by more. We taste less, our senses get overwhelmed and overstimulated and we cannot pay enough attention to enjoy anything.

Modern culture is now a buffet, physically and digitally. Learning shifts from clear survival feedback to blurred long-term inference, and perception becomes less discriminating even though capacity remains. In other words, discernment gets vague and ambiguous.

More now equals less.

Living on the West Coast, I took up a lot of outdoor hobbies and consequently, acquired a lot of gear to support my new hobbies. And new gear meant a new learning curve understanding how to use it, clean it, store it, fix it.

Every time I tried something new, I did something else less. More hobbies created more ways to experience where I lived, but it had a hidden cost of having less experience with those activities I had previously loved.

A little bit of everything is a lot of nothing.

Not surprisingly, I got a little better than average at everything, but excellent at nearly nothing. Essentially, I got to the level of plateauing with a skill where the next level would require me to sit in the problem and struggle with it, to commit deep enough to really be IN the sport, not just about it in good weather. And what did I do? Change hobbies, of course.

The discomfort of real growth is where most swap, swipe, trade for something new where the growth from beginner to competent is more swift, easy and rewarding.

As a result, we are becoming less resilient, less capable of overcoming what we used to endure. Instead of allowing ourselves to be ignorant explorers, or experience the growing pains of being a beginner, we would rather rob ourselves of the opportunity to genuinely improve than admit we have any weaknesses.

The internet allows anyone to position themselves as an expert, and many falsely do. In the information age, not-knowing is no longer normal and some even consider it socially irresponsible. So we skim the headlines, glance over the abstract, and allow our opinions to get shaped by shoddy summaries.

Instead of sitting with a question long enough to integrate a real understanding of the value of asking it, every unknown has a neatly presented semblance of an acceptable answer that appears faster than it took us to even ask. But who is programming the answers, and are they accurate?

It’s not bad, nor should we judge ourselves for reaching for such modern conveniences. We exist today because our ancestors were so keenly averse to pain. We are not going to easily walk away from thousands of years of genetic programming simply by deciding to do so.

We’ve been told our whole lives we could be somebody. Is there no better time than now to see if that’s true?

And yet to suggest you could be somebody is to suggest something is lacking in who you are now. So the next time that temptation visits, answer it: “I already am somebody. In fact, I quite like who I am right now.” But don’t just say it to perform it, really let yourself feel it.

The paradox with cultivating discernment is that more doesn’t necessarily make it easier. It most clearly comes in the absence of external input.

You can only distinguish your voice from all the others once you’ve been in a place where it’s really the only one. The irony is that we’ve created a world where that is almost impossible, considered even, a little weird to be alone, still, and silent.

Most people do not know how to be alone, less want to be alone, many are afraid.

I once had a client who signed up for a 5-day silent retreat only to all-but force their way out after one and a half days. The silence drove them mad. Many people are like this, more at ease when their brain is stuffed with endless chattering noise from other people’s existence, or the never-ending string of unfinished tasks, to-dos, and empty thoughts. The mind will construct nearly any means to avoid itself.

I personally believed that my mind was set out to destroy me. From as early as I can remember, I had a sense that things were not quite right in my head.

While other kids appeared to exist in the uncomplicated realm of reality before them, I felt as though my brain had run laps and created entire ecosystems of meaning that all seemed to end with the conclusion that if anything went slightly less than perfect, I was the problem.

Every experience was a mental battlefield, and being alone was full out war. I was medicated and treated for mental illness, but that only made things worse. Now my brain knew it was the enemy where the only possibility of peace was destruction.

Then an unlikely experience in a temporary city in the middle of the desert forever changed all that.

I spent the greater part of 25 years trying to overcome myself through battle. I tried to defeat my demons, exhaust, outsmart, deplete, and even over-medicate my brain into a state of sedation so it could not hurt me. Less than an hour in a DMT-ceremony ended the fight and reunited me with the truth: my brain was on my side. It was only fighting me because I had been using it as a weapon.

Reuniting with the parts of yourself you ostracized because you thought they were bad, harmful, or something to be ashamed of is a funny feeling because suddenly, everything you thought you knew about yourself is no longer the way that you’ve always known it.

This is what the body knows before the mind does. And it knows what hasn’t been lived through — even as the modern world gets better and better at helping us avoid living it.

Suddenly, I got it: “If I got all this wrong, then everything else could be wrong, too. It doesn’t have to be wrong, but it might be.”

While that sounds scary, it also means that everything that holds you back, everything you fear, everything that you think might be wrong with you and even the world, can be challenged.

And through challenge we find change.

But the kind of challenge that produces change is rarely the easy kind. It’s the space after we’ve maxed out what we think we are capable of, it’s the ceiling we hit that tells us this is our natural limit. It’s where most people stop because it requires a little more than they are willing to give or believe they can. It’s me, changing hobbies the moment I reached a certain proficiency.

Taking it to the next level asks more of us in ways that are uncomfortable and for a while, feel like we are losing. Progress is rarely linear, we develop skills better and faster from what goes wrong than we do from a smooth progression.

No wonder so many of us are content to continue to color inside the lines. The predictable outcome is safer than taking a chance on the unknown.

We are naturally risk averse, encouraged even, to stay within our perceived range, otherwise we might get hurt. It can be costly, painful, sometimes even crushing. Sometimes however, it is stunningly rewarding. Life intermittently rewards the audacious and the delusional.

Someone less talented, less qualified, less invested than you is living your dreams simply because they took action.

You will never be ready. Potential is nothing compared to a hundred messy attempts. You will never be fully prepared. Talent is worthless until it is developed into skill. You will never know until you go. The path reveals itself as you walk it.

There’s a difference in doing everything with enthusiasm and ignorance, and doing the right things — but you can’t know which is which until you get in the game and get dirty.

“What disturbs men’s minds is not events, but their judgments on events.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion, 5

We don’t suffer from events, we suffer from our interpretation of them. We fear so much what others might think that we forget to think for ourselves. So we chose nothing of our own and life became beige.

The price of doing everything is having nothing distinguishable of one’s own. After some dabbling, the only way to create a life that feels authentic is to get really good at closing doors, letting dreams die, saying no, and turning away from the distracting noise.

Commitment is easy until it becomes inconvenient. Consistent, disciplined focus becomes the greatest challenge where the price demands the rejection of all the shiny opportunities that look so much nicer from the outside.

The grass is greener where you water it. And still, there is a value in knowing that sometimes grass doesn’t belong in the garden at all.

I’ve never been good at quitting things. In fact, I made it a core piece of my identity that I wasn’t someone who quit. I stayed in relationships, jobs, places, well past their expiration date; despite mounting deterioration, I had a funny pride at my tenacious nature. But this was a stubborn bid for control that always ended badly.

Ironically, the more I resisted the energy of quitting, the more life forced me to learn the art of letting go. Surrendering to life’s inevitable exits is a very humbling experience. For my part, I always believed that if I just did a little bit more, I could create a different outcome. I saw quitting as a weakness, a character trait that I weaponized to achieve much but appreciate little, so tightly clinging to everything as if I could keep any of it.

No, at some point, life really does become a sobering sequence of loss that will humiliate you if you don’t learn to gracefully release what is no longer yours. But these endings are part of the natural rhythm, the flow of life, not failures. Not even loss. For now there is a space for something new to enter, but you can’t receive flowers as long as you are holding rocks.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
— Semisonic’s famous line in Closing Time.

It is only our resistance to this on-going, eternal change that we suffer. Sometimes letting go is less about giving up or failing to meet the challenge, and simply the natural progression of the next step.

The cost of doing everything is actually doing nothing, but only giving a performance of everything while experiencing none of it. Some things need to go so we can really live.

David Hawkins wrote a book about the difference between ego-driven effort and aligned, coherent action. Power vs Force.

Force is what we use when we try to hold life in place by pushing and straining to maintain what has already run its course. It is an effort, often heroic, often culturally celebrated, against resistance, and it always depletes. We preach about perseverance and reward persistence, but force is finite. Eventually the system collapses.

Power does not push. It aligns. It allows what is complete to fall away without struggle, and what is still alive to continue without interference. What remains is not stretched thin by maintenance, but strengthened by truth. But rarely do we make movies about letting go.

Everyone knows what giving up in defeat looks like, the same way we know the many paths of pushing on. Few of us would recognize the quiet surrender of what no longer works, nor how a loss of what’s gone is really a gain.

It is contextual wisdom without a formula. Learning this is another practice in discernment that only comes from experience, as much as we would love a step-by-step protocol and a clear instruction manual.

How do you know which choices are power and which are force? I am sure that a chatbot can offer a fancy flow chart or smart infographic, maybe even a 3-step plan but my intuition tells me that one of the few things that still separates us from our ever-sophisticated AI is our ability to feel what we don’t yet know.

The answer is in the body, or more accurately, part of the soul. While the mind can be fooled into false comfort, the body is continuously making decisions about safety, energy, emotion, and action faster than the conscious mind can think. All healing requires returning to the body.

You can’t get enough of something that almost works, but you’ll never feel satisfied until you do the uncomfortable work it’s standing in for. What works for you — not what worked in the past, but what’s right for you, the one reading this now — is not likely what’s trending or popular but often the very thing we resist most. The irony and the gift alike is that the moment you surrender to what your body is actually asking for, the less it needs to ask at all.

If becoming more has many entry points, the path to enoughness has just as many. Just because you can access many paths, modalities, or tools doesn’t mean you should follow all of them. Choice without discernment becomes another form of avoidance.

In the end, life is not the work of collecting more ways to grow or heal, but in staying with the way that actually asks something of you long enough to let it change you.

I’ll be honest, for all the opportunities life gave me, I didn’t learn just because you can doesn’t mean you should until 2024.

It was summer and I’d just won my IFBB pro card as the Canadian Natural Wellness Champion — a pursuit that had taken a decade of consistent, disciplined commitment. I was back in Ontario visiting my family, who I’d see maybe once a year for over a decade.

I had the chance to jump straight back into prep and do my pro debut at the Ben Weider — the event where I could qualify for the Olympia, every pro’s biggest dream. But throwing myself at the foot of a new mountain meant leaving the summit I’d just reached without appreciating the view. It also meant less time, and less attention, for family.

I had many friends from growing up in Niagara and living in Toronto. Many, many friends. Not one of them came to my show. You know who did? My family — including my 82-year-old grandfather, who drove from Fonthill to Toronto and back to watch his first, and as it turns out, last bodybuilding show ever.

That summer was the last time I saw my grandad alive. He died the next spring, before I could get back.

I didn’t know it then. I see it clearly now. I had made it my whole identity to become a professional bodybuilder — the coaching practice, everything built around it — but my family values ran deeper than the identity ever did. Just because I could compete that same year didn’t mean I should. Every decision has a cost.

Maybe I’ll never compete at the Ben Weider. Maybe that was my one shot at the Olympia. I’ll truly never know. What I know now is that I will die one day, and all of it — every superficial achievement — will mean nothing next to having shown up for the people I love while I still could.

The opportunity cost of that summer with my family is not a price I will ever be willing to pay.

You’ve been told your whole life you could be somebody. But you already are somebody — the question was never whether this was true, only whether you’d notice before the noise convinced you otherwise.

So before the next temptation of more arrives, and it will, find the thing about who you are right now that you’d be unwilling to trade. Not the title, the possession, or the achievement, but what is underneath all that. When you find it, sit with it long enough to feel it in your body.

That feeling is the measure. Everything else is just more.

❀ ⛰︎ Holding fewer rocks, making space for flowers, and enjoying the view, alongside you, SJT

Something strange happened in my life recently. It fell apart. And I don’t mean one area of my life got shattered and it shifted my lived experience, I mean the entire existence of what I knew as my life — my identity in every element of family, work, health, relationships, and home — all collapsed and dissolved, suddenly and completely.

Truthfully, I am still awakening from shock. But as I began to open my eyes to reality and brush the dirt off my shoulder, I noticed something beautiful, and also very strange…

I am more in love with the little fragments, with each precious debris I can gather, and earnestly more in love with myself, than I have ever been. I am still surprised by this.

I have never been someone who took my life for granted, and yet what I see now, I did not see before.

Most of us are paying attention to something. The question is: to what?

Even though we sincerely try to not take too much for granted, we each, in our own ways, come to soften our gratitude for the small stuff.

We become preoccupied with all the little things that do go wrong and might go wrong.
We get absorbed by the gap between what exists, what could, and the not-quite-perfectly-fulfilled expectation of what we want.
We are so fully occupied in anticipation of all we think we need to overcome, protect, and strive for.
We concentrate so much of our attention on tiny metrics that we disproportionally inflate their significance.
We spend all our energy optimizing and improving so that we confuse ourselves about what even matters and miss the quiet goodness stitched into ordinary life.

It’s been almost 30 years since psychotherapist Richard Carlson wrote his famous book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all Small Stuff.

It was relevant then, but it’s more applicable than ever today, in our culture built on overstimulation, outrage, urgency, and constant comparison. Many people live in a near-permanent state of hypervigilance where the small stuff multiplied exponentially, and we are sweating all of it.

The core encouragement is to not be consumed by the small things, but whether from overwhelm or cynicism, somewhere along the way, many of us also stopped appreciating them.

The risk of getting really good at dismissing little irritations is that we also accidentally start dismissing little joys.

Maybe the real danger of constantly saying “don’t sweat the small stuff” is that eventually, you stop noticing the small stuff altogether and forget that life is made almost entirely of it.

Sometimes we need the big stuff to collapse and fall apart to be reminded that it’s actually all assembled from small stuff. And that small stuff is still here, even if it looks way different when it’s deconstructed.

The way out starts there.

Healing, meaning, and rebuilding happen the way all things do: through tending to the small things, by going brick by brick. The hard part is knowing which bricks will help build your life, and which don’t belong to you at all.

TOO MANY BRICKS IN THE WALL

Most of us have become numb to the small stuff, and frankly that’s a normal reaction to a world that demands we acknowledge everything as a Very Big Deal. Some of it is warranted, but it’s also worth admitting that there are now trillion-dollar industries with business models based on the continuous manufacture and distribution of fear.

How quick, how easy it is to become overburdened by the swelling insistence ordering us, “Here! Now this! You must carry this brick.”

It’s overwhelming. And it feels kind of scary. When we are bombarded by fear, our attention narrowly fixates on survival and self-protection. Our personal reality becomes a long sequence of tangible reasons to be afraid. The more we live in fear, the more our life contracts.

The trouble with endless input is that our mind absorbs more than it deliberately selects. Without fully choosing it, all the small stuff is scanned for threat, harm, and anticipation of pain or loss until any actual presence is eroded by our future-orientation driven by fear.

The particular intimacy with how life feels for each of us is shaped more by what we choose to notice and receive, and less by what happens.

“Small things are often more dangerous than big things, for they can get in through small openings.” — Philomon Sylvester

But the same openings that let in small harms are the very same that let in small goodness. The difference is in what we are oriented to receive. What we fail to choose gets mistaken for what is happening to us and what we fail to notice gets completely missed as if it never happened at all.

This is why fear is so corrosive to love specifically because love requires our presence.

Love is an active orientation that asks us to expand our perception to observe more of the small stuff in what is with us now in the present.

But in practice, this is not always as straightforward as it sounds. Often it is pain that opens our perception of reality involuntarily. Unwelcome loss has a particular way of commanding our attention.

Pain imposes the truth of what is upon us, thrusting our senses into the present whether we like it or not. It pins us to a moment in time often against our will, even when we would rather be anywhere else, in any other version of reality than this one.

Where fear prevents our presence, pain demands it. Even those who have become masters at avoidance and denial are penetrated by the unwelcome arrival of what really hurts.

Fear orients us to an imagined future that doesn’t exist.
Pain is the arrival that forces us to face what is happening and what has happened. You can’t anticipate your way out of it — it’s already here.

Fear and pain feel like similar emotional territory because they are both hard and they both hurt; but where fear pulls us out of reality, pain smashes us into it.

The less we try to flee, shun or avoid it, and the more we allow it, crashing into the now and confronting loss enables us to feel more alive again, if only in a truly terrible way.

It’s precisely through this sharp collision with presence that we become more porous, more present, more awake to what’s legitimately here. Sometimes we need to be pierced by pain to awaken from the numbness of fear. And through the strange ways we are rearranged by suffering, something within us begins to orient itself toward love.

My orientation began to shift with the fragrance after rain. I love rain. It rained a lot in the place I called home, but had to leave. It rained too much, or so thought many people. But not me. For me, rain was a summon to connect with the day. You have to think about what you’re doing when it’s raining outside. The usual response is to grab an umbrella, but I never did.

The impression of countless water clusters hurrying home-bound to the earth beneath us all reminds me how I am not separate from this world, but united with it. I find rain comforting, inspiring, even a little romantic. Rainy days beckon us to slow down, look around, and slip into a luxurious contemplation of all that feels almost-forbidden in the rush of an outcome-driven world.

Walking around in the rain is a spiritual experience. Rain drops fall spontaneously, plopping themselves on our heads, our ears, our nose, so naturally and uninhibited by any desire to splatter themselves well, accurately, or in a certain way.

When it rains, my attention collapses from its ordinary structure of filtering the world into useful pieces. The vast expression of a world in motion rescues me from endless conceptual ideations, and returns me to a more immediate and tactile reality. The breathing world is arbitrary and exposed; so different from the coherent backdrop we project onto it, which is easier to ignore.

The world springs to life when it rains. Even once the rain stops, traces of it persist, reminding us how even briefly, we also were able to clear our world of excess.

The smell after rain is like the earth remembering that it is Earth, real and alive — a formidable force awakening to the power of what it truly is. Rain makes me feel this way, too, real and alive.

After rain, a vibrant afterlife lingers. The air feels clear, the earth refreshed and open, the sky relieved, the creatures of the land restored, and always, I am more willing to be touched by what is trying to reach me.

Losing the structure of everything felt a lot like surviving a storm.

My whole world had been irrevocably altered. My own self, as I knew it, had also been briefly unmade. It felt surreal to reorient myself inside the very devastation I had been bracing against, but navigating from this new position nudged me to notice what had formerly been so small it never got past the edge of my awareness. My attention was astonished.

At first, I was too stricken with shock to allow anything in. I could see small sparks of life reemerging intellectually, but I was unable to absorb any feeling of touching reality.

Even as new life began to bloom, I held a tenacious dedication to stay attentively bound to my painful experience rather than releasing or escaping it. But I couldn’t cling to time no matter how unwillingly I was pinned to it; now soundlessly slipped into then. How quickly the unobserved present becomes the past.

All the while, the inconsequential things invited me to notice how they were now charged with new meaning. But something within me struggled:

How dare I notice now, celebrate beauty, take delight in the present, feel joy, or trust in love again after everything that it just cost me?

In every way, the depth of my pain, loss, and suffering was a testament to the height and verity of my love. How lucky I am to have experienced something truly my own, so certain in my devotion to it that its absence felt so destabilizing. Was this very pain not also proof that I was capable of great joy, pleasure, and goodness?

There is so much gratitude mingled with my grief that it’s quite impossible to disentangle them, nor am I sure that I should want to. And yet, wasn’t it too soon to start opening myself to what’s lovely in life again? Surely, I cannot hold anything while my arms are still stretched toward everything I can no longer reach.

It was too much at once. I couldn’t possibly accept anything good from deep inside the very bowels of darkness. But even in the deepest void, light persists —it always finds a way to enter.

What is the realization of our fears but evidence that time has the remarkable authority to turn imagination to truth and truth to memory. What we love becomes part of the unreachable past. We can imagine what was lost just as clearly as we once imagined visions for the future, but we can access neither.

Everything that comes also comes to pass. Good or bad, this too, is temporary.

The unshakeable fact of the impermanence of everything is more than just tragic, it’s also poetic. Is there not something in this very moment now that you will miss once it’s gone? What is that thing?

The strength of pain is also a reminder of the promise of it. How can you love it — that person, that place, that little thing you love in the special way that only you do — before the fresh tides of change sweep it into the inaccessible past?

It hurts. Of course it does, that is the reality of loving something sincerely. But if we resist fleeing from it, pain forces the same opening that love depends on.

How dare I open myself to love the little delights of life again?

How dare I not?

HINDSIGHT IS 20/20

I’ve lost many things I loved in my life. Many I had to let go of unwillingly, but each time, what was lost became more beautiful.

When we lose something, someone, someplace we love, we have to navigate how we now relate to what no longer exists. That reorientation requires us to examine the genuine truth about what we know, and consider everything that we don’t.

And in this mystery, in the perplexing collection of various little unknowns, we often get better at loving what’s gone than when it was here. We become more forgiving, more tender and open to possibilities that were too implausible while still inside the complication of our attachment to it, tangling us in webs marked by presumption and expectation.

It’s easier to give our full attention to the past once it’s liberated from the tension of competing with the future-reaching demands of fear and desire.

Falling in love is particularly thrilling because our attention is consumed by the present moment. When this happens, our perception expands to absorb everything it can reach, as we stretch time with our insistence to see the moment in its fullness. It’s a voluntary opening to both genuinely see, and be seen.

Gradually what we see flattens into a repeatable understanding where familiarity replaces the attentiveness that novelty once required.

We want to experience that same aliveness again so we seek it by swapping what we know for the novelty of what we don’t every few years, until that too, becomes predictable.

We don’t actually need anything new, we need to practice paying attention to what is here without the expectation we know all there is to know. Assumption destroys the mystery that keeps us engaged.

Loss gives us a kind of vision that lets us see what was lost with the depth of attention that presence requires, but only after its gone. Yet for this to be true, loss is simply the removal of interference.

Which means the capacity was there all along. We were just too attached to our habits to reach it. We had decided what was familiar was true and stopped questioning whether it still was. The barriers of assumption kept us from accessing what was always there.

Much of loss is not just simply looking back, but it’s finally being willing to see what was truthfully always there.

If loss removes the barrier to see something clearly, we must admit that this very moment now is also in some way clouded by the same projections and assumptions we take for granted.

After loss, our perception reorganizes around what is still usable or meaningful. But what if we could learn how to identify and appreciate new depths of what exists while it still does before we lose it?

Although this sounds obvious, it’s not intuitive. In fact, it’s much harder than it sounds because it asks us to suspend our belief that we really know the thing, person, place we love as well as we think we do.

Sustaining love is an ongoing practice of imagining our love in the same fullness we once sought. It continues to seek what cannot be fully found but maintains the desire to search all the same. It asks us to keep trying to figure it out, to allow ourselves to be surprised, and to believe that love can never be fully-known. By refusing to see our love as fixed, but instead as evolving and dynamic, we introduce enough mystery to be actively attentive to it, and not just rehearsing a memory of it.

We build a construct of what we love through a compilation of all the small stuff we notice. We stop actively loving when we stop noticing. It’s often only through loss that we remember how to look again.

But what if we didn’t require loss to learn this? How do we train ourselves to see what is here now with the same clarity we will one day bring to its absence? How do we stay present to a life that’s constantly being remade against our will?

This is exactly what life has been asking me to find out.

LOOK AGAIN

I don’t know how many tools belong in a toolkit but I do know why there are so many: different problems require different tools in different ways.

That’s how I see myself in life right now. I’m sorting through the rubble, I’m deciding what’s meaningful, what’s useful, what’s painful, what’s loveable. And those each require different tools.

Each of those need me to take a different orientation than the one that worked over there, for the other, in a time that’s already past, as a person who no longer exists.

Some tools are new, asking for a steadier attention as I move through unfamiliar ground and learn what is needed of me now.

Some tools are old and familiar, but I must approach how to use them in new ways.

This is not a very efficient way to live. Time feels tediously slow because I am deliberately engaged in learning what I don’t yet know. Which as it turns out, is a lot.

I get tired, impatient, and frequently very bored. I want nothing more than to go back to my old life as it was before it was destroyed. I miss it so deeply that I am afraid
of how willingly I'd surrender what's coming, of how eagerly I’d trade it for what's already gone. The irony of this desire is that so long as I remain unconscious in my present life, I will repeat the pattern and keep being surprised by my suffering.

Everything in life changes, but until our awareness changes, life will keep presenting the same lesson in different forms. We break the cycle when we become conscious enough to respond to the lesson differently. We do this by truly loving the life we currently have. Not the one we want, not the one we lost, only the one we have.

Appreciation and gratitude are not the same and it’s more than a matter of linguistics. It’s a perceptual difference.

Gratitude looks at things; it’s something we can observe at a distance.

Appreciation is a presence from inside of things; it only happens from having full contact with what’s actually in the moment while we are there with it.

We give gratitude by taking inventory of the big and small stuff and by making note of what we have been taking for granted.

We can give gratitude for things we’ve appreciated, but we only appreciate what we were present for.

Mary Oliver wrote that attention is the beginning of devotion. Devotion is a practice of sustained appreciation. You cannot see what you haven’t appreciatively attended to.

A daily cup of our favorite coffee is a nice thing to be grateful for. It’s an entirely different thing when we appreciate that cup of our favorite coffee. The one we had on a late Tuesday morning where we weren’t rushing or distracted; when we had a chance to sit down with it and hold it with both hands, warming our fingers that got cold from watering the new spring buds while the morning mist still lingered and the bold aroma of fresh roasted beans beckoned us to take a breath so deep that it softened our shoulders in anticipation of tasting this simple, rich pleasure. And we did, with every fullness we could afford.

The coffee we appreciate is the one that has meaning, which can be as simple as our intention to slow down and be present, or as nuanced as the need to create a sliver of space for ourselves on that particular day, in that particular moment.

Gratitude knows what we love already. Appreciation obliges us to be open and willing to fall in love a different way, even if we’ve been exactly here a thousand times before.

This is what it means to orient ourselves toward love. It’s not not a fuzzy feeling we go looking for, hoping that it arrives, and scurrying to capture it in some hungry, grasping way. It is a direction we deliberately face by making a decision about where we point our attention and what we allow ourselves to fully receive.

The truth is that we have never quite been here as we are now, because both life and self are in constant motion.

I have spent much of my life attached to the past, or anticipating the future. I want so badly to skip ahead to the part where it all works out and I’m happy again, but happiness is not an attainable permanence or possession.

Happiness just happens— in fact, it happens all the time. It’s only when we notice it that it becomes a felt experience we can touch deeply enough to remember. Happiness is something we have to look out for and pay attention to, or we miss it and mistake our lives for unhappy ones. It’s easy to believe happiness isn’t here when, in truth, we are the ones who are unavailable.

Happiness is realized through the practice of noticing, and the space we give ourselves to do it.

Noticing begins with refusing the speed at which attention usually moves, and it’s moving faster every day. It’s resisting the forced compression of time with an indulgence in unmeasured time. It’s choosing to expand in a world that wants you to contract.

It’s the rebellious act of being entirely irresponsible in ways that are specifically decadent to you. I recently declared myself socially irresponsible, liberating myself from keeping up with all that imposes itself as important to know.

This decision did not just free up more time, it freed up a lot more mental energy. Released from the strain of maintaining a rigid stance, I could be curious again. Who is this person in front of me when we stop parroting our punchiest soundbites back and forth?

When I’m not caught in the crossfire of redistributed fear, I can actually perceive what’s with me in my living, breathing presence.

Disengaging from the obligation to participate prevents me from rushing through each experience, allowing ordinary things to fully form before moving on. It’s astonishing how much is here.

Ironically, the old life I think I miss so much accounted for every minute either by my fulfillment of a requirement, preparation for it, or the conclusion that preceded the next. I stole back minutes by extending breaks or meal times only to completely zone out, mentally glossing over the life I was trying to reclaim.

I could not tell you much about the texture of those days. The planning and preparation overshadowed the experience of them.

The moments that became the most meaningful were not large or exciting, but simply the small stuff that became more vivid once I let them be small and unchanged.

Part of my life exploding involved moving from the sanctuary of massive old-growth Hemlock trees, towering Douglas-firs and ancient western red cedars to a smattering of maples and oaks that comparatively, look like sticks and shrubs.

Every day I take a walk and struggle not to compare them. I long for what was and I yearn for what I wish to be, both at the expense of what is. These trees here will never be those trees there. And thank goodness, because maybe if all the trees were the same I’d stop noticing them, and I really love my trees.

Not everyone loves trees, and not everyone loves rain, but nearly everyone loves a sunny day. But the sun that shines perpetually gets reduced to an accustomed background that we stop noticing.

I love sunshine more after I have known the cold and dreary rain. I appreciate a sunny day because I have felt the long absence of sun against my skin intensely enough that I seek the sun when it is out.

I am less adapted to sunshine so I give more attention to my orientation inside a sunny day. I don’t just notice it more, I experience it more, I appreciate it more, and I remember it more. This attention is not forced, scheduled, or scored against a checklist as a measure of how well I am performing my well-being.

It’s an honest way I’ve been exploring how to slowly open myself up again and find what’s here that I might love. I find more all the time.

Although the trees here are not as dominating as the ones out West, they are not without their graces. Where my old giants stretch into the heavens, obstructing the sky with their clutter, these local leaf-puffed domes yield to a massive sky where restless clouds compose and dissolve across a boundless canvas.

The sky is so big and the trees are so short that I can see complete sunrises, full sunsets, and an endless configuration of clouds arranging themselves to participate, every single day. Except of course, when it rains.

But once the rain has fallen, and its familiar fragrance still lingers on the ground, the sky does something particularly spectacular. Sometimes, with the right alignment of water, light, and a willing eye, the sky is briefly smudged by a fragment of a rainbow.

Sometimes we only notice the sky once it falls, but everything doesn’t need to collapse for us to learn to see.

I never anticipated life as it is now, but as much as I can resent the contrast, I have to admit that I am also elevated by it. The very opening that ended my old life is the same one that thrust me into the life I am in now, more finely attuned to it’s presence.

You don’t need to wait for something bad to happen to find this opening either. You only need a willing eye and the decision to orient yourself toward what’s already here, waiting for you to notice it.

🌧️ Falling in love with the small stuff, alongside you, SJT 🌈

Life is going to hurt you. Sorry to bust the comfortable bubble of denial, but ready or not, it’s coming for us all.

People will disappoint you, let you down, leave you, betray you and hurt you in ways that are entirely unfathomable, and if you’re really lucky, they will only do it unconsciously and unintentionally.

The ones you love and care about the most will hurt you the most because they have the capacity to do so.It’s part of the deal that comes with the territory of opening up to someone so deeply.

Vulnerability allows you to experience incredible depths of connection and profound love. The ability to be vulnerable with another establishes layers of openness and honestly that create meaningful intimacy as well as foundational trust.

But vulnerability also makes you vulnerable. It’s a connection with risk where you are susceptible to becoming wildly exposed to hurt and harm. You offer vulnerability sincerely, with a desire for reciprocity, but such emotional risks are not without cost. And often, you pay that cost.

In fact, the price of love is always pain. Life is a practice of surrender and letting go.

The things you love will someday leave you. Not maybe, but definitely.

This grim truth is not meant to depress or deter you, but a reminder to be present with what you have while you still have it.

To love fully, deeply, truly; despite all the complications of relationships.

To let things exist in their imperfection, including yourself.

Because one day, be it five, ten, fifty years from now, you will look back at this moment and wish you could return to it, exactly as it is.

But you can’t.

All you will have is the memory of who you were at that time and how it felt.

And you will reflect either with gratitude, knowing you appreciated it, or with regret, knowing you spent your time trying to make it something else instead of seeing the complicated beauty of what it was.

Perfect in its perfectly flawed way.

Which is exactly what made it uniquely yours. Memorable. Special.

May you have the courage to acknowledge all that is well in your life, and to love it, unashamedly, boldly, openly, unapologetically. And may you also have the courage to let go of what is no longer good for you while you still have the opportunity to find what is.

Because the only promise is change. Not only in circumstances, but in how we feel, relate, and reflect.

May you have the courage to love your life, even and especially when, to all outward appearances, it feels the least lovable. Because it is precisely then that you come to understand the value of this one beautiful life.

This doesn’t mean do not love, in fact, quite the opposite. For life is nothing but grey without the brilliant colors of love. It means find the things worth loving, and loving them, even when it hurts. Especially then.

It’s about cultivating the discernment to choose who earns access to hurt you. That often means creating boundaries. It sometimes means letting go of people without boundaries, the ones who want access to your depth on their terms.

May you have the courage to choose love that is worth the pain, and the honesty to admit that not everyone is.

Many are. But you forget that you get to choose, so you stay in relationships longer than you should, attaching yourself to pain out of habit and history more than choice and desire.

You forget that love is not an excuse to endure suffering at the cost of someone else who consistently makes their pain your problem. Even when, especially when, it’s unconscious, it’s no act of nobility to allow a stream of hurt to be inflicted upon you simply because of proximity.

People who hurt you are not your charity work; they are your addiction to moral superiority at the expense of your self-respect. You call yourself compassionate but every time you absorb their hurt, you’re choosing the story of who you are over your own integrity and dignity. The role makes you feel noble, but tolerating abuse does not make you a saint.

A real saint understands that sainthood does not require self-erasure. A real saint can witness someone’s pain without absorbing it. A real saint does not use self-abandonment as virtue, let people hurt them, and call it love.

It’s no measure of love to tolerate harm from those you love. Simply because someone is hurting does not give them a pass to hurt you.

Choosing the right pain is choosing the right love. And you don’t know what’s right until you have learned what’s wrong. There are only two mistakes.

The first is believing that love is ONLY pain - that’s not love - that’s abuse.

The second is believing that you are not worthy or capable of real love. This is a common belief after the loss of unaligned love. The irony is the path to love starts with loving yourself, which is far more painful than anyone wants to admit.

Because really loving yourself requires you to look at all the ways you’ve been hurting yourself and allowing yourself to be hurt and pretending it was love.

It means facing the ways that you have been hurt as well as the ways that you have hurt yourself and others by believing love looked, sounded, and felt a certain way.

It’s painful because it means acknowledging all the love lost, all the opportunities gone and all the moments ruined by pain when they could have been love. That requires grieving, forgiveness, often anger, sometimes shame, but always, the commitment to let go. To live alongside, but not inside all the ways that love let you down and left you only with scars, chasing empty promises but always finding yourself in the shadows of love, instead of the spotlight of it.

And admitting this often makes you bitter.

Bitterness is the first honest, initial reaction to the hurt and harm by being overlooked, left, or rejected by those you love. Bitterness happens from the specific pain from a rupture in our prior investment. A stranger’s cruelty doesn’t strike you the same way.

Most people unconsciously stay in bitterness far longer than they should because they don’t allow themselves to be bitter.

You grew up in a world that told you bitterness was a personal failing and unattractive flaw. It is anger that hardens into confirmation of the truth you tried to deny: love is pain. Everyone eventually in their own way, will hurt you in ways you never thought possible.

Bitterness calcifies when the disappointment stops surprising you and starts confirming your expectations for hurt and harm as proof. It hurts the most with those you thought were the exception, but there are no exceptions to the rules of life: everyone and everything must go.

The paradox is the more you hold people to impossible standards or the more you avoid the uncomfortable truth, the more bitter you become when reality inescapably arrives.

Most people do not want to be bitter, many more believe they are not bitter yet move with the subconscious weight of heavy bitter baggage.

There is no shame in feeling bitter, but the danger happens when you shape an identity from the injury that hurt you instead of allowing the input to show you where you simply felt pain, and from it, how to get better.

The seduction of bitterness is being vindicated about something real. You begin to value being right more than being open to recalibrate and heal from the injury. The moment of being proven-right feels like clarity, even like winning, but it comes with the cost of a tainted world-view. It is both intoxicating, and very dangerous.

Bitterness is a trap that serves to justify overly rigid boundaries where kindness becomes suspicious, apologies become manipulation, and intimacy becomes performative. It’s an honest but flawed measure of self-protection and self-preservation that isolates you from the very experiences that can help metabolize bitterness into growth and connection.

The most painful part is when unacknowledged injuries not only make you bitter, but also make you the problem. The patterns of hurt that get glossed over and brushed off instead of allowed to exist with awareness to the harm caused are the most insidious kind because they are a double injury.

In addition to the pain they invoked, they are also layered with judgment for making others uncomfortable or even guilty.

Holding people accountable often comes with the territory of being misunderstood as the problem. Now you are the bad guy because you haven’t processed it, moved on, forgiven and grown the way everyone wanted you to. Your boundaries are mistaken for bitterness that becomes a display of your failure to heal, where it’s considered your choice to remain wounded.

When bitterness is justified, the world asks you to make a difficult choice: express the bitterness and be dismissed as stuck, dramatic, or difficult, or suppress it and let everyone believe a story that is not true. They want you to move past it without them having to validate that you had reason to be there in the first place.

Here, most people concede to what others want of them, and not what they feel honestly for themselves. But the moment you start doubting whether you’re entitled to feeling bad or bitter, whether you’re overreacting, or whether you should be over it by now, is the moment you start self-betraying.

Which is often how people move from bitterness as an event to bitterness as an identity, for once you start betraying yourself, you abandon your truth for a perception that taints everything through an increasingly bitter lens.

The cruel part is that bitterness isolates you because it’s justified. If it were petty or irrational, it would be easier to dismiss and move past. When bitterness is avoided, denied, and suppressed, it grows until it demands you acknowledge it, even if no one else will.

And so life asks you to choose what feels impossible: You can be right and alone, or you can be accepted and self-betraying.

Yet there is always a third door. Bitterness is unpaid debt you can alchemize into personal freedom through forgiveness. It’s also the catalyst to earning the invaluable skill of discernment.

Where feeling bitter initiates from pain of personal injury, it also invites the opportunity for developing earned emotional wisdom. Bitterness asks you to bring awareness to the transgression and allow that pain to pass instead of rushing to superficially transmute or alchemize it into a lesson. It asks you to admit that things are not okay, and to let it be uncomfortable without demanding you to accept what is unacceptable.

Real forgiveness - the kind that does not come with strings attached or superficial display - happens after you have allowed bitterness to exist, not before. Forgiveness can only be offered once you have forgiven yourself for being so vulnerable and trusting in the first place. Bitterness happens when you blame yourself for the patterns you ignored and the signs you dismissed.

Bitterness can transform into forgiveness once you stop needing the other person to change or apologize. It comes when the cost of holding on hurts you more than the cost of holding them accountable.

The tricky thing with both is that they reinforce an identity story about yourself that can put you on dangerous moral high ground as being the bigger person, which is its own kind of self-betrayal if you are performing magnanimity when you actually feel rage.

Effective forgiveness gives you space and permission to grieve. The loss of trust, respect, love, and even an entire relationship is worth grieving. You must not only grieve the loss, but also your attachment, dependency, and fear of emptiness after loss. Most of us do not know how to grieve. It’s very uncomfortable to stay with the sensation and allow it not only to exist, but exist without judgment or rush to resolution. Yet that is the only way for it to pass. Once you stop fighting it, analyzing it, or suppressing it, it is free to go.

Once you are unbound by bitterness and grief, you can more objectively observe the patterns of behavior and signs you missed so you can become more discerning. When you are still hurt, your hurt creates a bias that creates harsh boundaries that are reactive to your pain. Discernment is different. Discernment creates boundaries from a desire for self-respect, not in retaliation or removal of access.

Discernment is where experience becomes integrated wisdom. It helps you understand which boundaries are necessary and where to put them. It helps you define how to apply them and to whom without being rigid or malicious. Discernment is the difference between building boundaries instead of walls. It’s not punitive, nor does it require repair or acknowledgment but simply names reality and adjusts your behavior accordingly.

Yet even after offering forgiveness and creating discerning boundaries, people are not obliged to acknowledge either of them. This is an invitation to challenge your sincerity of both.

When people consistently fail to respect your boundaries, you have to decide if this is a relationship worth keeping. The same way that people are not obligated to respect your boundaries, you are also not obligated to owe anyone anything, including access to you.

If keeping the relationship requires you to abandon your boundaries, you’re not keeping a relationship but maintaining an arrangement where the other person gets what they need at your expense. Anyone who benefits from your lack of boundaries will not like when you develop them. Anyone who only loves you when access to you is on their terms, not yours, is not actually offering you love, but control in disguise.

You can fully forgive someone who never sought your forgiveness - you can even actively love them - but have no space for them in your future.

Boundaries are inconvenient because they require the other person to acknowledge and adjust their behavior. They also often require other people to validate and honor the new dynamic. And many people do not want to do that. Nor are they obliged.

Sometimes people who aren’t directly involved in your boundary start enforcing the boundary violation on behalf of the person you set the boundary with. It’s easier to brush off the boundary-setter as the problem than admit the uncomfortable truth that maybe this person has harmed them too, but they are not ready to see it, admit it, or heal from it. The truth is most people want to see the best in others even if it blinds them to their own pain. Often, anyone pressuring you to drop the boundary is showing you something about their own relationship to the person you’ve set the boundary with.

And the truth is also that it is not really your business because we cannot change anyone’s behavior, only our own. It would be nice if people supported you, especially those that you really love, because their refusal to honor your boundaries with others is betrayal of a different kind. But it’s also all an opportunity to get better instead of becoming bitter.

Better at recognizing patterns and acknowledging pain.
Better at allowing grief and learning how to forgive.
Better at becoming discerning and acting from self-respect.
Better at trusting yourself and honoring your truth.
Better at choosing yourself and choosing people who also choose you.

Because when you get hurt by someone and you both acknowledge that hurt, you are actively choosing love, and the inevitable pain that comes with it.

When you choose someone you are saying, “I choose your love and I choose your pain.” It also means choosing the painful self-reflection, behavior change, and personal growth that comes from acknowledging how you, too, inflict hurt.

Choosing love sends a message to your deepest self that says, “you are worth it.” It shows you that you are worth the vulnerable exploration into real trust, real connection, real growth, real love and all the pain that comes with the territory of being seen as your most authentic self.

And yes, it is scary, that’s why love takes so much courage. But only through love do we find our liberation.

In real love, the kind that doesn’t cling or demand or extort, we learn to love ourselves more wholly for who we really are.

Real love is not a need, but a choice. Something we want and desire, but do not require to validate our existence or value.

Real love is the vehicle by which we experience ourselves through others. Hopefully, we choose people that allow us to embody a pure, unrestricted, and forgiving essence of self-expression and not one that exists only in the identity of a martyr or embittered actor.

Real love is a witness to who we have the potential to be when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to love and be loved, not despite the hurt and pain, but alongside it.

Real love sees you for who you really are, not how they wish you could be.

Real love is when you both decide, “I choose this, I choose you,” because even though it sometimes hurts, I choose this pain because it’s worth the price of love with you.

Real love asks us to choose over and over and over, way after opening ourselves to love, but in every moment after when the hurt is real and we have to ask: “do I still choose this?”

Real love is admitting that sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it’s no, and sometimes it’s choosing the same love, but differently than we did before.

Real love is not absent of pain or even boundaries, and it never asks us to perform someone we are not just to maintain the illusion of something that’s changed.

The people who are worth it will choose this with you. The ones who aren’t will show you what happens when you choose a boundary.

And either way, you’ll know because you chose yourself first.

Learning to choose myself alongside you, SJT

For those brave enough to be the villain in someone else’s story so they can be the hero of their own. I see you, and I respect you.

It’s not that I have not been insincere in my performance, but I have lived an exaggerated version of truth. The woman who pranced and posed and altered the pitch of her voice to fit neatly into the performance expected of her is not not me, but it’s also not all of me.

The truth is I have felt squished, compressed, and restrained by the increasingly uncomfortable mold to which I can no longer conform. I have tried so hard to contain what simply is not meant to be contained. So I’m setting it free.

The truth is I do not fit, and it’s not just that I do not fit anymore, but I never did. I never fit in, and finally, I no longer want to. I have been holding myself in to the point of combustion, ever building pressure to release, to expand, to embody the fullness of my essence, but always, I found myself time and time again, withdrawing force, reigning back, and forcing a veil upon the truth of my light.

I wound up settling for a projection that was more palatable, more acceptable, more in step with everyone else — but that is a lie, and I am no longer willing to tell it.

This expression was not dishonest, it was initiated from somewhere real. But it was only ever one dimension of what is far more layered. The deeper I pushed the completeness of it down, the harder it fought to surface, breaking through in sharp, jagged fragments that interrupted the illusion of an otherwise smooth storyline.

I have been creating a pretty, albeit predictable picture of a good life, but the better I got at coloring inside the lines, the more I began to mistake my life as a reflection of anyone else’s. And I am bored of this.

Dance, monkey, dance. The world and its chorus demands of us. So we do, until we fall out of rhythm with the music we cannot even hear and we try to step to a beat of our own. Maybe the reason you no longer dance is not because you got old or never learned how but because your body simply refused the performance.

My body has always known what my mind could not afford to admit. So lost inside the performance, so busy with preparing the next act, my mind has no space to admit the truth that had been hiding, unacknowledged, but deeply felt. This is not it.

My body always knew. My bones ache with the urge to grow into their strength. My muscles quiver with anticipation for the opportunity to initiate the larger expression my body has been craving. My limbs lick the edges of all the space I yearn to claim as I stretch in preparation to carry myself, more whole and authentic, in my true range.

Not everything, of course, will need to be shown and shared. The best bits are always withheld as the delicious secrets they are. Yet from these private treasures, the spark starts an undeniable momentum that will not be contained for any pretty packaged belonging, nor roaring approval, nor thunderous applause.

I belong to me now in a way that no longer needs all that — of course, I like it, but it’s nothing to live for.

I am layered, complex, and often in contradiction, but that’s a happy paradox that is not a problem to resolve or explain, only held up and celebrated as the courageous act of seeking truth I don’t yet know.

You might feel this too, long before you become brave enough to know it. Or maybe, like me, you have decided that the show is over, that it’s time to wrap up production without offering any clean conclusion, that you are done mistaking performance for living. Maybe you have also decided that it’s time to live a different life.

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Indeed, Sir Shakespeare, we are often our closest reflection of self in play. But I have found myself between acts, and while you are welcome to perform, As You Like It, I simply must create a life that is more than a repetitive performance. I cannot exist for one that is predictable and ultimately, pointless.

This does not mean that I will not perform again, but that right now, my body demands to touch other dimensions of existence more deeply. I long to experience different forms of expression free from the narrative of what’s expected from someone who follows the script and stays confined to the container or restricted to the cage.

I desire to move through it as someone definitively outside and entirely without. I want to exchange the domestic safety of the zoo for the raw, untamed wilderness of jungle.

I want to start to move to the sound of my own drum. I want to learn how to listen for what that even sounds like. Do you know the sound of your drums?

It will be hard to understand and confusing to most — that’s fine, encouraging even, as the oddity of living as the full paradoxical, undefined self is as intriguing as it is bewildering and mysterious. It is apt to be misunderstood. But who cares? I do not.

My body has had enough and refuses to play puppet any more. The parts I love will show up much as they always have and maybe, for all outward appearances, it would appear that nothing has changed. But what it looks like is neither my business nor concern.

Everything has changed irrevocably because now, I am devoted to living the feeling. And in this act, the curtains are crashing down as I burst, twirl, gesticulate, and leap with glee, and a shadow of uncertainty, ambivalent to the noise, committed only to moving as my bones, my body, my breath always ached for.

And how, my darling, do we find you?

🐾 Wild and well, and dancing madly, SJT

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AN INVITATION TO PLAY

We are a society becoming increasingly optimized, but deeply unwell. Part of the problem is the hyper-focus on the individual life as it continues to move away from the community and the family core.

Another major tug away from well-being is our loss of playful exploration, of silence, and stillness, of unstructured observation.

I want to bring that back into life. I used Easter dinner as an opportunity to offer my own family an invitation to play. It went something like this…

“Humor me, will you?”

I announced to my family that before sitting down to feast, we would be playing a game. The first phase would required everyone to separate and disperse throughout the house so they were somewhere alone. They were prepared, although a little suspicious of my intentions.

I gave no instructions other than the only rules were that we could not speak and we could not be on our phones for a full five minutes.

Then I set a timer and we observed five minutes of silence, each in our own way and in our own place.

It was uncomfortable. Even for me, who knew the intention of the exercise and also knew I could, if I wanted to, reach for my peaceful centre and just be there.

The time stretched on for what felt like the longest five minutes of all time. I tried walking around a little. I pretended to observe things deeply.

It was hard not to feel the collective energy of unease with the unfamiliar. Some leaned against doorframes, walls, staircases, shifting position often. Some found partial respite watching the passing world from windows. Some tapped. Some sighed. I earnestly attempted to find meaning in a stained glass window before submitting inward to acknowledge the uncomfortable energy and my commitment to not rush to fix it or move out of it.

It was fascinating to observe how powerful the silence and stillness felt. It was unmistakable, distinguished with heavy tension and unfulfilled expectation.

A little shy of five minutes, a false alarm sounded as a timer in the kitchen ended. The relief expressed itself in audible exhales and light laughter, only to realize it wasn’t actually our release, and time still bound us to the silence.

I thought at one point my mum might lose her mind, instead of staying still, she bounced around the whole house to give all fifteen guests a hug. The restless urge is apparently inherent.

Then finally, the alarm delivered us.

We sat down for dinner and I asked if anyone felt like sharing what they noticed.

Some people thought the exercise had a specific direction that required specific answers, and launched into intricate recall, detailing where they had been.

Many recounted physical observations of the world in front of them. One person fell asleep. Another reflected upon something they saw, and felt it as a relation to something within them.

Then we ate dinner. A true feast of salad, freshly made buns, lots of butter and good wine. Prime rib, mashed potatoes, roasted carrots, sautéed vegetables, everything covered amply with ladles of rich gravy.

We concluded with the English Queen’s vanilla cake, layered with strawberry jam and icing, topped with mini chocolate eggs, served of course, with tea. We feasted until we were fat and greasy and far beyond full, our voices full of laughter and great stories alike.

Then, just as the imperceptible silence of the oft-avoided gap started to enter, I stood up to announce phase two.

I passed a basket around the table. Inside were riddles and questions, folded and waiting. I called the game ‘Very Bunny’, an Easter trivia competition. Whoever answered the most questions correctly would win.

Then I presented the prizes: three chocolate Easter bunnies, each a different flavour. Milk, dark, hazelnut. Because we all covet different things.

The energy shifted immediately.

The contrast with phase one was intentionally sharp. I wanted to invite people to sit in unfamiliar stillness and then offer them the known pattern of striving. Where the first act had been about quiet being-ness presence, this was a bustling shift to doing-ness presence. People perked up and leaned in as voices overlapped, ready to race to answer first.

Competition has a curious impact on people. It sharpens some and flattens others.

Some loved the chance to win, to prove, to perform. Others visibly tensed, displaying passive interest, but all attentively anticipated.

Each person was to take their turn asking a question. Each person delivered the question at their own pace and cadence, some carefully and articulately read their riddle while others loudly burst it out.

In trivia, the depth of knowledge is not measured so much as the quickness of displaying shallow knowledge. For those who can answer fast, knowledge is one currency where speed is the advantage.

“Why did the Easter Bunny cross the road?”

“To prove he wasn’t chicken!”

The first voice won. The others groaned while someone made a comment about dad jokes.

The room tightened and loosened in turns but everyone kept playing, eager to finally get their chance at success. It was much like the exact mechanics of the life most of us are already living, compressed into ten minutes at an Easter table.

When it was over, the top three were announced and I was one of them. As a competitive person myself, who built a lot of success in the pursuit of achievement, this wasn’t much of a surprise to anyone.

In sequence, we selected our bunnies. I chose mine, dark chocolate, the best quality chocolate of course, and purposely made an immediate demonstration of unwrapping it as quickly as possible.

“I wonder what’s inside.”

I was secretly trying to condition people in the same way that society conditions us with other illusions of expectation. All eyes were on me, curious and quizzical alike.

The foil came off in strips. I snapped its head off in front of everyone, dramatic, performative, as if I was so eager to see the prize I’d won, to find what was waiting inside.

I held the two halves in my hands and looked questioningly at each.

I gasped then paused long enough for the table to notice the pause.

Then I held them up with an expression of utter dismay with the hollow cavity facing out.

“It’s empty!” I wailed in disappointment.

The room exhaled into laughter. Relief, mostly that I hadn’t lost my mind over something so childish as a toy inside an Easter egg.

I broke the bunny into pieces and passed it around to share so anyone who wanted chocolate could have some. The prize wasn’t mine to hoard, it was hollow anyway.

Then I pulled out my notebook and cleared my throat for the last time.

“Now if you’ll please allow me a philosophical indulgence.”

I began reading my personal notes aloud, then passed the notebook around the table and asked each person to read a section until it came back to me.

Some people were enthusiastic and contemplative.. Some people tolerated it while secretly rolling their eyes behind their head. Both are normal human responses. The point wasn’t agreement. It was just the invitation to play.

A SEAT OF ONE’S OWN

The most remarkable thing about the human brain is that it produces a personal representation of reality, not reality itself. For all our efforts, we can share a meal, a game, an experience with others but we cannot fully share our reality with them.

Fifteen people sat at that table. Fifteen different Easters happening at once.

Those who couldn’t sit still during the silence and those who appreciated the quiet of it. Those who loved the competition, those who didn’t, and those who seemed indifferent to it.

All of us seeking and perceiving different things, enjoying or avoiding different elements, foods even, literally nourished, emotionally satiated to varying degrees, or left hungry by the very same feast.

This was a different Easter for everyone in our family as we were all feeling the absence of my grandad in our own way. I designed the game as a reflection to share in a playful manner one of the biggest silent lessons my observation of him taught me.

THE CONTRAST OF LIFE

The traditional Easter egg hunt teaches us to narrow our vision and look for one valuable thing: CHOCOLATE. Even if you don’t like chocolate, everyone participates in the hunt, often ruthlessly trying to get more than everyone else.

The hunt mimics real life in many ways. How many of us walk through life this way: preoccupied from presence, with our attention narrowed to what has been pre-labelled as worth finding.

The first silent space offered the opposite. It was designed to be a contrast to the steady rhythm of pursuing the next thing to find. It was simply a moment to notice.

And since we are so conditioned to pay attention to what we think matters, everyone noticed something specific and unique to them.

Life works this way too. You must make it your own.

The bunnies were hollow on purpose as a mirror of how easily we get wound up in the pursuit and attainment of the things we believe we desire. Sometimes, our beliefs get shattered. We convince ourselves that gaining the next thing will offer a particular sense of fulfillment, but it never does.

We expect things to be better than they are and spend most of our lives contrasting fantasy to reality and wondering why we are restless, dissatisfied, and so uncomfortable with the stillness and the silence.

The bunnies were hollow to remind people to seek what you actually want. And a caution of the deflation and disappointment in chasing what other’s deem worthy. There are far too many people living a performance of someone else’s life instead of authentically experiencing their own. You master the role at the expense of the self.

It’s not that chasing goals is wrong or bad, in fact, that is part of what makes life so rich and interesting. But as much as it is important to chase goals that are personally meaningful, it’s also an invitation to enjoy attainting them as much as pursuing them. It’s one thing to get to the top of the mountain and really appreciate the view, and quite another to only be able to see all the other mountains still yet to climb.

When you get there, enjoy it fast if that’s your style or savor it slowly. Keep it for yourself or share it as much as you can. But anyway you do it, know that you can’t live there, it’s not where you find fulfillment.

There is no nourishing feast inside the bunny.

How many of us spend our lives fighting for a seat at tables where we don’t belong? Performing, competing, earning approval, trying to squeeze ourselves into the shape of someone else’s expectations. We think belonging means fitting in, being accepted or chosen and therefore, deemed worthy enough to stay.

But the table you actually belong at doesn’t require you to earn your seat. A good table is only complete because of the particular way you bring yourself to it. Your quirks, your preferences, the parts that don’t quite fit anywhere else are precisely what make your seat yours. A good table holds all of it and has a seat for everyone.

Easter is a moveable feast. It does not fall on the same date every year. It cannot be summoned or forced into arrival. It happens when certain conditions align, two incommensurable rhythms of solar and lunar, meeting at the right moment.

Easter is the paradox of life.
It is the striving and surrender.
It is the seeking and stillness.

If you walk in the right direction holding both openness and intention, the feast will find you.

Grief, love, joy, loss, the people at your table — they all return on their own cycles, in different forms, when the conditions are right. You cannot force them or will them to arrive on time, or even in a certain way. You can only prepare for them, attend to them, and receive them when they come.

It’s easy to mistake busyness with productivity. But the hardest work is not the hunt as the hunt is much a demonstration of skill, the depth to which you can play.

The part most of us struggle with is the preparation. We want to skip the gap. We try to avoid surrendering into the simplicity of being. We overburden ourselves with doing only to put off practicing peace as a skill. The pause is where we learn to cultivate such peace in the days between feasts so that when the feast arrives, we are ready to be nourished by it.

Time is not linear. It spirals outward, circling back upon recurring experiences, each enriched with their particular angle of novelty from the slight ways we’ve digested new understanding of the world, and ourselves.

The sacred cannot be summoned, but you can prepare to receive it as deeply as you are open to witness it.

When it arrives, the depth of your perception may nourish you, not just for a day but for the rest of your life.This is the art of making memories to nurture an enriching life.

Hemingway knew this in his reminiscent recollection of his time in as a young writer in Paris, fondly referring to it as “A Moveable Feast,” the title of his last book.

A moveable feast is more than a memory, it is the thing you carry forward because you participated in letting it in. You weren’t rushing to the next thing or racing your mind somewhere else, you were present enough to be in it.

You cannot carry Paris with you unless you have known the wait of its absence.

The days between feasts are not empty and meaningless, or trivial obstacles to rush through. They are the preparation. The hunger that makes the feast a feast.

Real life happens in between the milestone moments that mark our lives. The highs and the lows define the structure, but the time in between gives the gradient and texture. The overall feeling of your life is in the everyday and how deeply you choose to be with it.

Between it all — the hunting, the feasting, the competing, the playing, the winning, the losing — the greatest luxury in life is time and presence with the people we share it with.

Easter will come again. It always does. The table will fill, some seats will empty, some new ones might appear, too. It’s breathing and alive, just like life.

The bunnies will be hollow, but every now and then, a surprise might appear. The stillness and silence will patiently wait for us to remember it, notice it, enjoy it or not.. And somewhere, in the gap between feasts, we will all prepare ourselves —in our own way, intentionally or not — to receive what we’ve been seeking all along. A life of one’s own making.

You can fill your basket with chocolate eggs or the presence of searching for them. My suggestion is both.

Still seeking while learning to sit in the silence alongside you, SJT

SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE

I was headed East for a summer celebration on a budget flight that had a connection stop in the middle of Canada— Saskatchewan, I believe. Upon arrival, we were all asked to get off the plane but to not leave the airport. We were crammed in a stuffy cranny with high windows looking out at our plane, not able to access it, waiting for the layover to conclude.

Half-way through the expected time, a fuzzy announcement declared that due to unforeseen circumstances, the layover would now be twice as long. We were instructed to stay in the same place and wait. A short while later, they announced it was further delayed. Then again, one more time. One hour stretched into eight but still, we all stayed there stuck, suspended in a hot and dirty corner on the promise of just a little longer. The worst part was the uncertainty; if we had known it would be eight hours from the beginning, we might have left and come back, gone to eat. Instead, in the buzzing and stuffiness, with time getting tacked on again and again, we were stuck in limbo.

I remember sitting on the dusty floor by a window trying to sleep, then in my restlessness, trying to do walking lunges around the gate without getting sweaty, then approaching the counter only to find a long line and no information, pacing, reading without focus. All of this among the crying, the complaining, the sneezing, the coughing, the burping, the slurping, the chatter, and above all, the intermittent announcements for other passengers and other flights, with my own carefully attentive ear straining for anything about my own, yet always finding only its conspicuous absence.

Exasperated, exhausted, and entirely overstimulated, I sat to meditate in a final effort to rein some personal control over the uncontrollable chaos that surrounded me.

Once again, I settled into the agitating routine of wrestling my mind toward stillness as I had often done so unsuccessfully for months prior, but this time, something gave way. I was so astonished to slip into a peaceful centre, a place I never had before, that I almost shocked myself out of it. But getting there was no issue anymore. I found myself in a calm and nurturing stillness that felt just like a hug for my brain.

Inside the tender threshold between sleep and wakefulness, I truly had nowhere to go, so I remained there, for how long, I will never know because time had completely unbound me. In my new posture that espoused an uncharacteristic calm, the interval between sitting down on the ground to sitting back in my seat on the plane was of no matter other than a pleasant pause. I don’t clearly remember how awareness beckoned me back into reality, but eventually I learned that a new plane had arrived, and we were ready to fly again.

The final diagnosis was that the airline’s older plane had fully given out. The airline, and consequently, all of us the passengers who had just taken the dying plane’s final flight, had to wait until another plane in better shape arrived to take us to our final destination. The strange part was, most of us just wanted to get it over and done with —to get to where they were going and get on with it already.

Many people were complaining about the wait, but none were grumbling about the fact that we had just flown on a plane that was now deemed unflyable, nor how terrifying the consequences of that fact might have turned out otherwise.

The part we try to ignore is that we are much like that plane. If we don’t stop, we will be forced to stop, for a long and unknown time, sometimes even permanently taken out of commission before we reach the destination we had intended for ourselves.

THE ART OF SURRENDER

When you think of places that can teach you the peaceful art of surrender, the airport is the most unlikely. It is arguably one of the greatest modern conveniences to travel, but the general sentiment is that it is one of the greatest modern inconveniences to the psyche. It is here that I learned to surrender.

The thing about learning to surrender is that you do not just learn it once. It’s an art form that you must practice, over and over again.

I wanted to practice meditation. I intended to get there through discipline and commitment but right as I was on the verge of declaring ‘it’s not for me’, life offered the most unlikely teacher. The airport offered an opportunity to approach things differently, and it worked. But you cannot rely on the alignment of conditions, good or bad, alone to seize the invitation. You have to be ready to claim the good when it’s presented to you. And it’s often presented in a silver lining that’s easy to miss if you’re not in the habit of searching for it.

Life continues to encourage me to practice the art of surrender, always in different ways that would be otherwise easy to mistake for something bad, or to miss entirely. Sometimes the opening crashes in, booming and demanding. Other times it’s soft, subtle, less urgent. But the more I devote myself to the art of surrender, the more I find glimmers, hints, windows of peace in the extraordinary everyday.

In fact, it is available at all times and to everyone. Even you.

But most of us neither accept the invitation, let alone do we even notice it.

For all our careful planning, a lot of the good things and bad alike come down to luck. Luck determines the conditions of our lives just as much as effort shapes what we do within them.

The flight gets delayed. The plane breaks down. The peaceful centre of meditation, sought for months yet never found, magically arrives in a Saskatchewan airport on a dusty floor among strangers. You cannot schedule that. You cannot plan it. You can only be ready for it, or not.

Saskatchewan was the luck. The months of sitting down and trying, failing, sitting once more and trying again was the preparation. And my ability to feast from that moment required both.

This is the thing about a moveable feast. It does not arrive on a day you circled. It arrives when two incommensurable rhythms finally angle toward each other. It’s both your striving and your surrender, your hunger and your stillness. You cannot force the alignment. You can only keep walking in the right direction and trust, the same way we trust the ecclesiastical moon, that the calculation is close enough.

You either believe or you don’t that if you attend carefully to the life in front of you, the feast will find you. But you have to know what you believe and commit to it fully because the level of your conviction is the level of your preparation. And you receive to the depth and fullness of how well you prepared.

The gap, the hunger, the surrender, the practice— these are not the opposite of the feast. They are how you get prepared for it.

The path reveals itself as you walk it. You cannot see the whole road. You can only attend to where you are standing, and trust that if the conditions are right and you are ready to receive them, what is meant to nourish you will. The satiated soul recognizes the feast not because it was announced, but because it was ready.

A MAN NAMED LEN

This Easter was my first Easter with my family in a decade. It was also the first Easter we all spent without my granddad, a man named Len. Len was not just the figurative head of the family, he was also the heart of it.

Loud, playful, and always leading us through new culinary and trivia explorations, his powerful voice lingered in a room long after the aromas of his ambitious cooking had left.

He died suddenly, though not entirely unexpectedly, early June. Much like the plane, his course stopped not quite where or how was expected, but his journey ended irrevocably, nonetheless.

Being my grandfather’s granddaughter, I am shaped by a similar playfulness, inquisitiveness and adventurousness. At its best, it’s loud laughter and tight hugs, an insatiable curiosity and a get-it-done nature, and a broad sense of real love. But at its worst, it’s a booming clash of something misunderstood or misheld, a restless and unsettling energy for life beyond this, and a massive absence— a large, looming gap in love, unrequited the way I might hope it to be.

My perception of my granddad is a fragmented portrait of a mysterious man named Len, who seemed deeply unsatisfied, an unsatiated man. A seeker, but not one who was looking for peace, wisdom, or the gifts from within, but one always seeking something else outside himself. He had luck. He traveled every corner of the world, built a life of real outward substance and filled it with real adventure. But the feast never became portable. It never became something he could carry.

When I declared my decision to move West, he boldly told me: “You can’t outrun your problems.” I realized now that he wasn’t talking to me. For my part, I was never trying to outrun anything, but rather I was running toward the version of myself I knew that I could be. The one I am still becoming now. I know now that it was advice he was giving himself, unconsciously, it seems as it was advice he never quite managed to take.

You cannot carry Paris with you unless you were present enough to let it in. Len saw Paris. He saw a great deal of it. I hope, in the moments I couldn’t see, that some of it stayed with him.

This Easter we all felt his absence and his presence at once. While I could no longer offer my granddad an invitation to feast, the rest of our family was all here.

I decided to offer the invitation in physical form. I stood up, I cleared my throat, and I invited everyone to play a game.

The final instalment of Eternal Easter offers an invitation to play, and also to feast. But right now, it’s time for me to feast in a literal way.

𓌉◯𓇋 Preparting to surrender, and return satiated with you, SJT

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A MOVEABLE FEAST

Spring is my favorite season because it rolls in as storm clouds over dead, frost-bitten land and from this barren nothingness, has the audacity to deliver snowbells and daffodils. She finds us thin and despairing from winter’s dregs, but seduces us with timid warmth and wavering rays among speckled rainclouds. Yes, spring is the everything season. Everything happens in spring. Buds begin to bloom and beauty of every kind bursts to announce her commanding arrival, offering us life, refreshed and renewed. And always somewhere in spring, we celebrate the gift of salvation itself, through Easter.

Easter can be celebrated anytime between March 22 and April 25. Among snow squalls and cherry blossoms, the holiday can fall on 35 possible dates, some of which do not recur for centuries. This curious anomaly is the result of two incommensurable rhythms, solar and lunar, that never quite resolve. As the celestial bodies above us weave in and out of sync, our own inner world mingles in similar flux. It’s most strongly felt in the bittersweet opening where heavy spells of grief finally yield to the gentle invitation of gratitude, and the grace of good times, once more.

Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. The solar year and the lunar month refuse to divide cleanly into each other, so the Church invented an ecclesiastical moon— a mathematical phantom that approximates the real one to allow for uniformity. This strange solution becomes more beautiful considering it is an imperfect representation that is not always accurate to the actual lunar light, yet we collectively navigate ourselves toward it. In a poetic but universal way, we are all self-orienting toward an assumed light we trust rather than a perfect light we cannot see.

This makes Easter a moveable feast. One that drifts, returns, reappears on its own terms, in its own time, when the conditions align. It’s a remarkable passage that we carry without question; we need no particular intensity of faith to know that it will happen again this year as it did last, but markedly, always, a little different than Easters past. Yet when this same faith is asked of us in the face of loss, pain, suffering, our trust falters and we instead insist our deliverance to be on schedule. We have no patience for the careful alignment of life’s next blessing. We want to skip ahead, rushing back into our joys and jubilations at whim, without the forbearance to savor the unique coordination of each feasting moment in its own delicious, particular quality.

We think time is linear, but much like our ecclesiastical moon, it too, is a construct of a different kind. We refer to time in numbers assigned to seconds, minutes, hours, but we relate to it much differently. When you are with someone you love, or engaged in an interesting project, or pressing attention narrowly toward a deadline— time rushes, compressing and disappearing seamlessly. When you are immersed into the new and novel, or eagerly anticipating news, or suddenly caught frozen in grief, surprise, or loss— time stretches, expanding, it seems, to near eternity. We know time as numbers that convey positioning, but we feel time as a varying intensity of experience.

Time is not a straight line. It is more like interlocking circles, infinite forms in recurring collision. That which is sacred is not punctual, but instead arrives perfectly on time for when it is designed. It cannot be summoned, but it can be calculated, watched for, prepared for. The sacred happens when conditions align, partly by luck, partly by preparation, partly by the ancient, approximate mathematics of a life attended to. And when it arrives, if you are ready to receive it fully, it nourishes not just for a day but for the rest of your life.

How does one get to such a state of readiness? You must first admit that you are hungry. Not just in a physical sense but in an existential one. You must be hungry for the truth.

The truth is also not punctual. But like our ecclesiastical moon and time itself, it keeps its appointments.

THE GAP

The truth finds all of us, eventually. Those of us who reject and resist it the most are the very same who need to be liberated by it most deeply.

But between the truth and our freedom, there is a gap.

On the other side of that gap is peace. Not the fuzzy kumbaya kind you think you can buy as a pill, luxury item or otherwise, nor the kind you think you can learn from a guru, an enlightened expert or even a well-posed prophet. The kind that only comes from being in your gap and staying there long enough to learn what it has to teach you.

On the other side of that gap is a kind of peace that only you can give to yourself. No one can give it to you the same way no one can take it from you. You can access it any time, should you choose to, and once you have it, you will carry it with you, always. But you have to find it first.

I can tell you a bit about my gap, and although ours might feel similar, it won’t be quite your own.

My gap felt like chaos when I first found it. I claimed I wanted peace, but I was living for chaos.

Somewhere in the middle of another breakdown, a haunting truth crept across my consciousness like an unwelcome shadow: the common denominator was me.

In all of it, no matter how carefully or earnestly I positioned myself as the receiver of chaos, the victim of it, I was also the very centre of it, every time. Why would I do this to myself? I desperately pondered, trying to pinpoint the onus of blame outside myself before settling where most people get stuck: my parents, of course it was their fault.

An echo of my psychology and neuroscience education reminded me of a particular phenomenon in the developing brain that learns to mark chaos as ‘safe’ simply because it’s familiar. The pattern-hungry brain prefers predictability, even painful predictability, more easily registering safety in known chaos than accepting it in an unfamiliar calm.

Every now and then, a new or unexpected force ruptures the practiced pattern and the brain, despite itself, cannot unsee it. When facing undeniable truth, reality fractures, shattering even the most foundational illusions, as the brain, through all discomfort and resistance, irreversibly adapts. Once the brain expands, it cannot go back to old form. The truth that comes to light cannot be re-called into the darkness of ignorance.

It’s not your fault, but it is your responsibility. Chaos was a responsibility I neither wanted nor felt capable of claiming. And yet, that one choice to claim it radically changed my life.

Most of us didn’t realize we grew up inside chaos until after we had survived it. Chaos wasn’t an event, it was the every day.

An unstable and inconsistent childhood became the mirror for my adult life. Everything felt like friction. Even when things were good, a destructive force (usually me) had to find the thread of what was wrong and pull it until it became full-blown wreckage.

Awareness of this propensity to never be satisfied, happy or ‘chill’ became a repeating theme in therapy after another win, another accomplishment, and still, I was unfulfilled and empty. It is the reason I did such intensive work leading up to our wedding, because I didn’t want my mind to ruin the big day the way it ruined everything else. It’s also what led me West— to the land of great adventure, where the predictable course of chaos met its match with the unpredictable landscape of limitless heart-thumping drama.

The first time I hit flow state was hurtling down the legendary Frisby Ridge, an advanced mountain biking trail in Revelstoke, BC. The sun was setting, I was getting goosebumps on sweat-stained skin and the ‘grizzly bears in area’ warning sign from the ascent spiked a nervous but thrilling urgency to descend quickly, but in one piece.

We had just struggled up 12 km of gnarly roots, bulging rocks, tight twists and sharp turns under the thick enclosure of dense forest to burst into open altitude of the mountain crest— but now, time was critical, requiring a swiftness that exceeded my ability. We began our descent and I quickly lost sight of my husband after a series of abrupt starts and stops that sent me squealing with terror at the steepness and speed. The dim light encroached from descending back into the dank forest and I knew I had no other choice but to surrender my fear and trust my skill.

Our biggest growth comes from meeting our biggest gaps, not secure with the skill to manage them, but precisely without it. Armed only with the faith that we are capable of figuring it out, we must rise to meet the demand.

So I went for it, and at some point, my hyper fixation on coordinating my limbs in reaction to the unpredictable terrain in front of me gave way to something I can only describe as complete joy. Time ceased to exist, much like my separation from the mountain itself, and the action formed through and of me without effort or resistance.

I remember witnessing a rare stillness and expansive focus where the world faded yet was also incredibly rich in detail. My senses were heightened to the extreme, but instead of pressure, I felt wholeness with the moment. I can’t tell you how long it lasted, only that by the time I noticed this peculiar yet tantalizing sensation, I was a good ways down the trail and rounding off the final stretch with hoots of laughter and apparently, newfound riding skill. All the tension I carried before gave way to ease and a sense of embodiment that I’ve tried to carry with me into other feats of partially reckless, always ambitious experiences.

I touched it again riding alpine edges in deep powder at Whistler. I held it high over my head and felt it in every trembling muscle winning the overall title at my first self-coached bodybuilding show. I was undone by it paddling the wild ocean waves beside behemoth humpback whales. I was carried by it in the ecstasy of our wedding day. Each one an uncanny reaching for the adrenaline-inducing familiarity of chaos, this time in a consciously chosen territory. Once the glow of each feast faded, one after another, I found myself returning to the residue of restlessness and discontent again. I was so eager to find fulfillment but everywhere I looked, no matter how monumental or challenging the experience, only a hollow centre reflected back, with nothing I could hold.

I was still hungry, but I was no longer sure what I was hungry for. The heart-pumping adrenaline had mixed with something new: awe, wonder, inspiration, love. The natural world opened something inward. The expansion could not be contained. And slowly, my appetite for thrill, achievement, and excitement ceased to satisfy.

I knew I needed something other than chaos, but I oscillated around peace for a long time before pursuing it. Peace sounds boring to those who were forged in chaos — at least that was the lie I told myself. But it was too late, undeniable truth had fractured reality and the old pattern could not hold.

Every time I found myself in deeply pleasant moments where the rush of aliveness mingled with something else that came more slowly, I leaned toward it a little further. The more I learned to relax, the more receptive I became to all that I had been missing by filtering the world through the tight lens of survival.

I began to notice how the easy unfolding of small things made me feel good, even when I thought I was feeling bad. Simple pleasures like wet grass under my feet, sunshine on my skin, a long exhale that loosens the shoulders, floating in salt water, new socks, melting really good chocolate on my tongue— life started to offer me little rewards, winks of my receptivity, in the inconspicuous every day.

Here, I found peace.

Some people think this comes with age but I know too many people of advanced years who die without having ever known it. This sounds sad, and it is, but it’s also good news, because it means it’s not something you have to wait for but something you can earn, curate, practice, and learn.

Peace is a skill.

But the world we live in is structured away from that skill. Most people spend around seven hours a day on screens, which adds up to over 100 days a year, a full quarter of their lives, consuming a world they are not actually living in.

The phone is not designed for peace. It is designed to feed our addiction to chaos.

I always knew I didn’t want to live in chaos, but the familiarity of stress hormones felt like an addiction too hard to overcome. I didn’t quit stress, I shifted my relationship to it.

I didn’t try to dissolve or deny my natural tendencies — some of my best memories and greatest achievements came from the storms of chaos. But I did change how I saw myself in relation to stress. I was no longer willing to play the part of helpless puppet once I realized it was actually me who was in charge. But before I could claim this, I had to separate myself from stress as a personality and find my control centre.

Like many who seek a peaceful centre, the first place I looked was meditation.

I had built a decent padding of pride through my ability to adapt and gain new skills quickly in chaos, so my slow and clumsy search for peace was a frustrating venture, and one I almost quit many times.

Transcendental, loving-kindness, body scan, visualization, vipassana, zen, in therapy, with breathwork— I tried it all, to no avail.

Time marched on ambivalently and although my awareness of my addiction to stress and my intention to reorient were evident, I found myself no closer to peace than I was separate from chaos. I grew weary and uninspired, always sitting down and settling into the same circus routine of getting carried away on a torrent of aimless thought, drifting further, it seemed, from the peaceful centre I sought.

But it wasn’t until I was stranded at an airport in the middle of the prairies that I finally found it.

Maybe you know this feeling, too. Where you have decided who you are no longer willing to be, but you’re not yet sure of who you will become, and less so, how.

Sometimes life has a curious way of delivering us exactly what we need when we least expect it. That is, of course, if we let it. Sometimes life tries to whisper encouragement that is too easy to ignore. Sometimes life needs to speak peace to us by using the only voice we know, chaos.

It doesn’t matter if your own world is whispering or shouting, but only that you trust that the path you’re being shown is the one that will take you where you want to go. And right now, I most want to go to bed. As luck would have it, life agrees.

Part three illuminates the delicate art of surrender, but now, surrender instead to sweet dreams.

𓆸 Curating calm against all instinct, SJT

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You are not looking for the wrong things. You are looking in the wrong places.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal made this observation in the 17th century but today, it has only deepened in relevance.

That agitation, that dissatisfaction, that restlessness – that is the gap between you, and everything you just consumed that deepens every time you put down your phone after a long scroll.

What is that feeling? It’s deeper than discontent, it’s wider than envy or inspiration, and bigger and more disruptive than any distraction.

It’s uncomfortable because it’s an unconscious acknowledgment of something pressing at our awareness: that there’s a gap, and we cannot fill it.

We might not recognize it as a gap, but we sure know it as a hunger. More and more, we are starving for something real, something of our own, something that makes us feel alive and here in this life.

I have hunted this eagerly myself, on an aggressive quest to satisfy the insatiable hunger for life; loudly pursuing the moment where time unbound me and I was nothing but fully alive.

I sought high, open mountain tops and wide, wild oceans. I went faster, higher, further – and every now and then, I would find it. But so much time seeking left no time for finding, and eventually I’d find myself empty and searching again.

Maybe your hunger is quieter, or maybe it’s louder – but you too, try to feed yourself in different ways: horror films to awaken you, gambling to excite you, the rush of new love to refresh you. A smorgasbord of cheap thrills can be summoned by our fingertips, all promising to close that elusive gap, the gnawing hunger, before we’ve even registered what it is we are searching for.

But while they can feed us, they can never nourish us. Although they promise a feast, they deliver a shell.

The most insidious versions cost nothing and return the weakest crumbs; faint signals tricking our brain into believing that watching someone else eat is the same as eating for ourselves. You are salivating over the addictive tease of watching another feast, even when you know it’s fake, and mistaking it for your own. So you swipe on, spending entire days consuming a cornucopia, yet always coming away starving.

Eventually, the biological collides with the existential and you are forced back into now. Hungrier than ever, you must reckon with the physical demands of the body as the psychological ones cling with threatened awareness…that in the absence of what almost works, but never does, there is now a gaping void. The unavoidable gap.

You know when you feel it. Overcome with a sudden urgency to make up for lost time and do something productive. In this space, the laundry gets folded, the dishes get washed, the bathroom might even get cleaned. Each completed task becomes justification for numbing what you know but wish you could forget. Ironically, as you busy yourself, the work is filled with other people’s voices from podcasts or shows, but it’s easier to justify since you’re doing something.

And when you’re done? The screen opens again as a break, the digital pacifier of our age. What was the pacifier used for with the newborn anyway? A means of self-regulation from which we eventually have to wean the baby off, in place of more nurturing ways to find comfort. But the phone is pulling us from real life instead of towards it.

The baby needs a pacifier to fill the gap between moments of care, nourishment, and attention because their nervous system has not yet learned to find safety from within. The baby must receive that safety from others, until they learn to give it to themselves.

Even with the best effort, many of us, most of us in fact, didn’t learn this lesson in full because you cannot, really. There is no perfect upbringing, and thank goodness, for it gives us a gap. A chance to learn for ourselves, of ourselves.

But most of us avoid this gap because, like the babies we once were, we don’t know how.

The gap is where we learn.

We think of the gap as the space between where we are and where we want to go.

But the gap is often a place we all know that we’d rather not admit. It’s the undeniable, often frustrating space that exists not before the goal, but inside it.

It’s gaining, finishing, achieving, arriving, winning, attaining finally The Thing that we seek, only to become eerily aware of how empty our vessel still remains. This thing that we exalted and pursued, that which held all the promises for fulfillment and satisfaction, arrives. And then, quite quickly really, after the joy of completion settles, we come to find that this too is unable to nourish us fully.

That’s just greed, you might think. Just ego. But you can’t intellectually trick yourself out of the immensity of truth in that feeling. It’s not more you seek, though you might mistake it so. And off some of you go for more – bigger achievements, higher status, a fresh relationship, a lower number on the scale, more money, more power, more stuff – but at each finish line, you are left with you and your gap, no more filled than it was when you were with so much less.

Most of us think a good life is something we can have if we work hard enough. Yet for all our careful planning, a lot of the good things and the bad alike come down to chance.

Luck determines the conditions of our life just as much as effort shapes what we do within them. Whether it’s good luck or misfortune that we experience, and to what depth, depends on how prepared we are to receive it.

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Hemingway lived his life as a testimony to what becomes possible when luck is met with the readiness to receive such opportunity. The Paris he knew as a young writer is not the Paris it is today; yet for those present enough to receive what is before them, any city, any life, can become just as rich a feast.

The true feasting of our lives arrives partly by conditions we do not choose. Whether the luck of that alignment becomes something we can carry – whether it nourishes us for a lifetime or passes through us undigested – depends on whether we have learned to sit at the table rather than hunt for a seat at it.

Hunger sharpens our perception. Real hunger widens the senses and opens awareness to our environment in broad search of something, anything to feed it. Many people go to Paris expecting a sweeping impression of romance and history, so they come back with digital pictures, souvenirs, and little else.

You cannot carry Paris with you unless you were present enough to let it in.

Hemingway knew this as a young man in cold cafés, genuinely hungry, genuinely poor, writing through unfiltered observation; this was his preparation. And yet so many of us are too ill prepared to notice our luck when it’s before us, so we make another pass through the buffet and wonder how, with so much variety, we are still so starving.

Perhaps like me, you are here, too. Finding yourself in the final thirsty seconds of reading this, also famished for an unknown nourishment. I might know where to find it, but first you’ll have to tuck my voice away and find your own as you relinquish the seeking of the mind for what the body already knows.

Go eat, go outside, go live. And when you’re ready, part two will be served.

When you are ready, fix yourself up for Part Two: The Gap.

Crunching, munching, and drinking up the sunshine with you, SJT

What I remember first is that he was conscious and I couldn’t see any obvious signs of blood. He looked at me with huge, wild eyes and asked me where his phone was, as if this were the primary concern of the moment, slammed back into the hard mountainside we were sprawled across.

Once we located it, he insisted on getting up. My brain couldn’t process what my eyes had surely and clearly seen, but I wasn’t eager to interfere, indeed, I was afraid to touch him.

He was in shock. He managed to flat board to the chair lift, an effort which likely caused him the final ounces of his energetic capacity, and upon completion, he was promptly taken up by a ski patrol sled to the emergency hospital where he was placed on a spinal board.

After an afternoon of careful examination, we were congratulated by that the lifesaving grace of his Smith Mips helmet, this shocking experience would conclude as nothing more severe than a very bad shake up and a fateful evasion of what might have certainly been a life-altering injury.

Although the physical shock of his accident dissipated rather quickly, the psychological shock lingered almost two years.

Smith Mips helmets feature a technology called Koroyd: a co-polymer core structure designed to crush immediately and uniformly on impact. By deforming in this way, it absorbs force and reduces the peak acceleration transferred to the brain and spine. The helmet was crushed in the process because it successfully absorbed the shock exactly as it was designed to do.

My husband’s ability to absorb the shock of his own near-death experience was a much longer process as his entire body and nervous system needed to learn to slowly uncoil from its reflexive tightening and release the protective bracing.

It was a frustrating two years for him but we kept snowboarding. He regressed and retracted, often returning early and under such exhaustion from the energetic toll of basic effort. In that time, he often expressed his fear that he would never get over it and his discouragement that it was taking so long to recover.

Then one day, he was back and all his old ability returned with a new wave of enthusiasm, not only for the sport he so loved, but also for his capacity to enjoy it now with a reverence for what it really meant to be there.

The First Law of Thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or converted from one form to another.

In life, shock and impact is not only guaranteed, but it is inevitable. When this happens, the body receives it first. The nervous system begins absorbing impact long before the mind can name any meaning for it.

The energy of these impacts cannot be destroyed, but it also cannot stay in its original form. The dissipation and transformation of this energy is not a matter of if it happens, but rather of what? What will become of it and what will it become? The way that we absorb the great shocks of our lives determines the texture, the lens, the lived experience of how we relate not just to our pain, nor even to ourselves, but truly as a whole to our entire world.

For some people, the pain transforms into art, others into wisdom, some into strength, and still many more into numbness, shattering, and dissolution.

In Buddhism, the first noble truth is often quoted as “Life is suffering.”
The word ​​Dukkha is more accurately positioned to say that existence is characterized by fundamental instability, that nothing holds its position permanently.

The Buddha shares a parable of Two Arrows, meant to distinguish between unavoidable pain (the first arrow) and self-inflicted suffering (the second arrow). The first arrow is an unavoidable misfortune, while the second is our emotional reaction to it.

Everything will change. The question then becomes what is ours to change, and how will we change it or change with it?

Life is suffering; our job is to make our suffering beautiful, lest we allow it to turn ugly.

My favorite author, Dostoevsky has a famous quote which I think of often, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

Which to me serves as an invitation to treat pain as an opportunity for growth and to face hardship with dignity, courage, and purpose, rather than despair or bitterness.

The Stoics had a similar desire for equanimity, which is not practically the neat image of calmness and composure, but rather the condition of being undisturbed by things that don’t warrant disturbance.

There is a deep misunderstanding of the stoicism of those who ‘suffer in silence.’ The great masters of our lore are not unmoved by lack of feeling, as if to suggest an absence or separation from it, but rather a silence on speaking to their experience of suffering as a mark of wisdom in knowing the power of our words and attention to create reality.

The transformation of a great impact into something that eventually relinquishes its claim to power over us is first met with correctly assessing what deserves to move us, to what lengths, and for how long.

Simply put, we decide not only what matters, but what to make of what matters. Only so much is within our control; your opinions, impulses, desires, aversions, reactions, perceptions, and so forth.

Much is not; the fact that you will die, your reputation, much of timing and outcomes, and onward.

The dichotomy of control suggests that life falls neatly into two buckets of control: within or without.

But life isn’t binary. It lives in the middle ground where your choices, your discipline, your effort partially shape outcomes without determining them. The middle ground where our human agency actually lives.

This is shock absorption.

We cannot prevent the impending forces of life, indeed we all face the same inevitable ending. But as the comets of impact loom and threaten, we can do our best to direct them, and when they do make contact, to transform them into something that serves us instead of splinters us.

A good life is not one without shock, as certainly a life without friction becomes exceedingly vulnerable and fragile, but one with a well-designed system for shock absorption, layered, receptive, able to respond.

Here’s what I think that looks like…

Nietzsche once famously wrote, “What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” Often applied as a powerful motivational slogan for virtuosity or endurance in the heart of adversity and suffering.

It is an admirable ambition to strive for growth and resilience when confronted with pain. Yet the reality is that it’s not in everyone’s nature to be transformed by the unforgiving forces of life in a positive way. Many are left damaged, weakened, or broken instead.

What is very true is that we as humans have enormous range to be strong in some experiences and completely decimated in others, but our society, culture, and psyche alike are not keen to admit this paradox. Some are strengthened, some are broken, many are both, not only in the same lifetime, but even in the same year.

The gap in between is where enormous damage gets done because we have engrained a set of expectations onto our subconscious that strength is the only acceptable outcome of suffering. What is worse still is the unspoken anticipation for when this alchemy is called to its required completion and a certain return to self is sought.

We call it resilience. We applaud the perseverance, but we never talk about the cost.

The cost is something we practice on each other constantly, and almost always with the best of intentions. I noticed this recently in the most ordinary way.

We recently helped my grandmum move. For the occasion, my aunt baked some cupcakes for the new neighbors as a gesture of welcoming. My aunt is a fantastic baker and an even better artist. Her baking doesn’t just taste incredible, but it is also aesthetically precise and carefully considered in its presentation, a signature of the love she’s poured in.

In the bustle of moving, the cupcakes sat neglected in the elements all day. When we finally noticed them, the icing was slumped around disproportionately and the effect of their effort was greatly altered. Naturally, my aunt was upset, and naturally, we all rushed to assure her that no one cared and that it had no effect on the way they tasted.

Even subconsciously, we would be apt to acknowledge that this is not true. We love beautiful things, we enjoy them more, they factually taste better when we anticipate them to taste good because we can see how good they look. The overall impression of her cupcakes was diminished as was the full realization of her expression of love. It was not able to be fully seen, appreciated, or received the way it was intended.

What might have been a more loving response from us was a moment of allowing. The space where the energy shifts from one form to the next is often rushed or squashed in the immediacy of an explanation or resolve. But the body absorbs impact first. We need space to allow the flow of feeling to release it so that we might see it outside of ourselves, from a distance large enough to give us the correct perspective to decide what to do with it.

This example is a relatively trivial example of the simple ways in which we impose our collective expectations upon one other, insisting that people bear the impact exactly as we expect them to. It dissolves space for authenticity or even personalized growth as we funnel each other through the ‘stages of grief’ we’ve deemed appropriate for the terms.

This is not abstract to me.

A few years after my dad died, my first boyfriend broke up with me. I was 16. Hormonal changes aside, I was outwardly more devastated for the loss of a relationship than from the loss of a life. I remember my mum being very mad at this contrast. But to me, it seemed obvious.

One was acute and immediate in a context that I could navigate and understand. My heart was broken from the pain of unrequited love. I could easily find my orientation in a break-up. I was now an ex-lover.

But the vast implication of being without my dad was too broad and its consequences too layered, for me to begin to understand the complexity of the wounds as they would come to emerge and re-emerge across different contexts and environments, as someone navigating how to move through the world as a girl without a dad.

When I was 18 and graduation loomed, the reality of all the firsts that would come to pass in my life without a father began to agitate my psyche. I’ll never forget the school bully, so keen to ask, “Shouldn’t you be over it by now?” As if the expectation to just spring back to the threshold of puberty, with all its innocent ideals intact, were an obvious default, and my inability to do so a kind of deliberate rebellion.

The unspoken social layer is that we don’t just expect resilience, but we actually celebrate the speed of resilience as much as its conclusion. This is the quiet impatience and subtle intolerance that divides us not only from those we love and the world, but most dangerously, from ourselves.

Just last year, my mum herself alluded to the fact that “we’ve moved on from that.” Truthfully, I’m not sure that I will ever be ‘over it’ or fully moved on, nor that I want to be. True, I’ve chosen not to be shaped or defined by it, but there is a real and tangible loss which I do not feel the need to transform into anything other than what it is: a significant impact in my life that left a little dent. And I’m okay with that.

For a long time though, and sometimes even still, I hesitate on these wounds with an erosive feeling inside that I do well enough to slough off quickly and thoroughly, lest it claim any space of its own within me.

A failure to perform or a push against the cultural patience of what is considered a ‘normal’ and acceptable reaction introduces quiet judgment and withdrawal that internalizes something far more toxic: shame.

Shame is the gap between who we are and who we believe we are supposed to be. Who the world wants us to be. Who we think we need to be in order to belong, to be accepted, to be loved.

Shame is the Buddha’s second arrow that convinces us that the reason you are not yet restored is because something is wrong with you.

Not that the load was too great; not that the recovery time is appropriate to the impact, particularly given the landscape of skills and tools available; not that the cellular structure was genuinely destroyed and what comes from that takes time, resources, and intention to rebuild.

Shame is the voice that says YOU, specifically, are the problem.

And truthfully, you might be.

A flower potted and a flower in the wild are both equally beautiful, but they are destined for two very different lives.

My favorite line from Pink Floyd’s iconic song, Wish You Were Here is “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

To me, this line asks whether you traded an authentic presence in the world, even a dangerous, marginal one, for a comfortable but imprisoning performance of life.

It’s a question about the seduction of containment; how suffering, when it becomes familiar or something we’ve gotten used to and accepted, can convert from something that happened to you into the walls you live inside.

Some people are so addicted to their suffering that they make it their entire identity.

Living within the limitations of their labels and siphoning their whole life force to maintain a victim story. The cage is reinforced by every retelling of the story, encouraged by an identity built around the wound, and bound by every refusal, conscious or not, to let the energy move through and become something else.

Such people were impacted, no doubt, in a way that overwhelmed their belief that they might have the capacity to overcome it. Not only have they been broken by it, but they have become it; dissolved into and seemingly inseparable from it.

Through this lens, how we fail becomes perhaps of more importance than how we succeed over the great impacts of our lives.

The period of deformation is crucial. In this space, a new orientation toward oneself and the truth about it now, after impact is delicate. It is an opportunity for reformation, to absorb what has happened and reshape it into something better, stronger, more resilient, more robust - if we want to.

But here’s the thing we get wrong in our modern lives: Absorption requires rest.

This is a direct rebuttal to the always-on, high-performance “ideal” that society has raised us on. We are mistaken to forget that our capacity to handle impact is not fixed but rather it is cyclically renewed, or increasingly depleted.

In mechanical engineering, springs deform under load. Their strength is in their rigid and steadfast commitment to a certain form. When they are struck impact they bounce back.

Human identity is much like a spring. It is the part of you that knows who you are beneath what happened to you; the capacity to recall your own shape regardless of the force felt. The error occurs after impact in striving to attain similar composure to the spring, but is this true groundedness or is it a refusal to grow?

A dashpot, on the other hand, resists motion proportional to speed, where the rate of change matters as much as the magnitude. A dashpot can bleed excess energy off slowly as heat rather than sending it back as an endless oscillation.

As humans, we are capable of absorbing enormous change if it happens gradually, but change that happens suddenly and fast can often shatter us. In an idealized expression, we have the capacity to let go and to process the impact effectively.

The spring and the dashpot together are able to absorb impact quite differently than they do alone. They neither oscillate nor shatter, but produce a system that absorbs a shock, returns toward its original form, and settles.

This is the difference between someone who has been through difficulty and integrated it versus someone who either never recovers their sense of self or someone still bouncing between the same two states years later.

This is psychological maturity: remembering who you are and being able to let go of what no longer serves you.

And part of where we get stuck is that impulse, change in momentum, is force multiplied by time. More practically, that means a small force over a long time produces the same impulse as a large force over a short time.

There is the same total effect on the system, but a totally different experience of it.

We have emergency plans for what is fast and sudden. We built a world equipped with seat belts, airbags, emergency rooms, crisis hotlines, first responders and fire departments.

We have culturally agreed upon timelines for acute impact. We factored in bereavement leave, insurance claims, disaster relief, trauma counseling.

We know what to do when the shock is obvious.

But we have almost no framework for the slow accumulation and it’s impact over time.

There are forces small enough to go unrecognized in the day-to-day but consistent enough to compound. The fatigue loading, unfathomed grief, erosion of self, unnamed loss, buried dreams, incessant production - all inflicting tiny incisions so small they go unnoticed until we are nearly evaporated shells of our former selves.

We have no protocol for that.

Only the unspoken expectation that you will continue to perform while the load increases and the capacity incrementally depletes. The shock that is absorbed without acknowledgment is the kind that is most erosive.

In all scenarios, shock absorption requires a system.

The Stoics had a practice called Premeditatio malorum, a premeditation of evils, a deliberate negative visualization. Although it sounds morbid, the practice is almost the opposite of positive thinking, which leaves you vulnerable to disappointment and fixated on the gap of unrealized outcomes.

The concept is to prepare for shock. To ready oneself in knowing that impact is inevitable, that pain and loss and suffering awaits us all. That none of us are immune to the potential for something devastating to affect us at any time. Contemplating this not only diminishes the shock of impact, but it also offers a unique reflection to appreciate with sincere gratitude what exists here, as it does now.

True strength is not singular, it is robust.

Homogenous material is one thing, purely. Concrete is a classic example of incredible compressive strength. You can stack enormous weight on it and it is extraordinarily strong along one axis but if you apply tension such as pulling or bending force, it cracks.

This is why there are steel rebars inside to handle force concrete alone cannot, making the combination robust.

Sidewalks are a testament to this also. Concrete expands in heat and contracts in cold. The spaces between slabs allows capacity for force to go somewhere other than into the concrete, where of course, it would crack.

As a professional bodybuilder, I am careful to train dynamically and often outside my sport because I know that maximizing size comes at the expense of a body that is more functional.

I have learned that muscle that is only ever loaded in one plane, one range, one pattern becomes highly capable in that specific context but also much more prone to injury.

Real physical strength comes from varied load, different direction, alternating speeds and application of force. Beyond the beauty of muscles, the connective tissue, the stabilizers, the small unglamorous muscles that never show on stage but hold everything in proper place are necessary for not just peak aesthetics or even performance, but for how my body, brain, nervous system and capacity to absorb better functions as a whole.

True strength then is not the dogmatic, often lauded, application of going all-in on one thing but the deliberate cultivation of capacity across the full range of what life might ask of you.

Homogenous strength leaves a person catastrophically exposed when a force arrives from a direction that single strength doesn’t cover. Diversity is what survives impact with reality.

True strength is knowing where to leave space as much as where to fill it.

We are almost never taught to protect the space itself but you cannot use that space if you have filled it with reaction, shame, cultural expectation, or a rush to resolve.

We think of resilience as the ability to endure, overcome or to alchemize something painful into something beautiful, wise, or useful. But rarely do we talk about how to build resilience.

Resilience comes from building multiple spaces for the self. It comes from cultivating robustness in our relationships, our identity, the roles we play, how we contribute and where, the communities to which we belong, and in our beliefs system, too. It’s giving ourselves permission to be more than just one thing, one person, one way.

It is structurally dangerous to be homogenous.

A single label of identity, however hard earned or deeply felt, is a single load bearing wall doomed to collapse.

I am a professional athlete, and a coach, and a wife, and a daughter, and a neighbor, and a client, and I am from here, I live here, I believe this, I belong there.

Each one is true but does not exist alone as an architecture of my entire identity. If it did, the loss of one, the injury, the heartbreak, would mean the collapse of me. But together, I have enough to withstand substantial shock absorption.

A self that is not rigidly singular cannot be shattered by the loss of one thing. But what happens when you lose everything?

I’m glad you asked.

Recently, the past year of my life has become somewhat of a moral reckoning. Without going into the specifics, a cataclysmic domino effect, increasing in velocity and momentum, landed with such ferocious impact that it completely destroyed my life as I have thus known it.

This is known as cascade failure, where the shocks arrived faster than I could recover. Time compressed such that I didn’t just lose a few elements of my structure, the entire matrix of my identity was engulfed by it.

The other day I was walking in new woods and I looked down at an opportune time to observe an acorn. An acorn is no longer a seed, but not yet an oak.

Aristotle used the acorn and oak as a classic example of potential becoming actuality: the oak is already “inside” the acorn in essence, even if it has not yet appeared. Underground masked in the darkness of unknowing, the acorn is doing the invisible work required before anything visible can emerge. Such is my world at this time.

Yet there is a particular loneliness in being between forms, in having left one life but not yet embodied in the next version of yourself.

Truthfully, my body is still oriented toward the old. I wake up wet from the vivid dreams of what is no more and I have shed more than an ocean of tears on all that was lost. There are no mountains strong enough to bear the fury of my frustration for not being ‘better by now’. Frankly, I have days where I oscillate from pain to power, from loss to hope, from rage to peace, and back again.

I pour my mind over all I did, all that I could have done and if in any world it could have been different. I find myself resting on the singular truth that yes, it could. It could have been worse.

Amor Fati is a latin phrase that means “love of one’s fate”. This is far beyond the mere acceptance or resignation of what is but the deliberate wanting of it. It is the perspective of loving our fate as necessary to who we are. It is the full investment into our life, exactly as it is, no revisions.

In real time this might look like embracing the impact as more than just an opportunity to grow and improve but also with joy and gratitude that this too, is an essential part of our becoming.

Amor fati is more than just an attitude, it is an orientation to which we align ourselves in celebration of a life gladly lived exactly as it is, over and over again.

As I reflect on this, I am struck with a beautiful realization. The immensity to which I am experiencing my grief is in proportion to which I have experienced its joy. The depths I know now are only made possible by the peaks which preceded them.

Newton’s Third Law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Whenever one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object simultaneously exerts a force of equal magnitude and opposite direction back on the first. These force pairs always act on different objects.

All I loved and all I lost are not separate but of the same force, observed from two different moments in time.

How lucky am I to have known something so great and true and real that I notice its absence so profoundly and painfully?

How brave I have been to subject myself to love so deep and complete that its absence now instructs me in the full dimension of what I am capable of feeling?

The very fact that I could be moved to such heights of love and appreciation means I am capable of great range, where these depths but confirm that it was in fact, real.

And where in my life, as it exists right now, is the goodness that I will someday mourn, too? That’s what I need to notice and give life to, while I still can.

Most people live a life close to the middle. Compressing peaks and valleys into the same flatline existence. Why? Because loss hurts. But in every loss lingers the energetic potentiality for equal and opposite, if not often greater, joy and love again.
I want that.

Here I find myself, in all the wreckage and rubble, uncovering a more persistent truth that is sincerely my own.

So much of our lives we live under the burdens of what we think the world expects from us. What is ‘good’ and ‘just’ and ‘admirable.’ I find myself in a strange space of freedom. Unshackled and unbothered how it all appears to someone on the outside. For how can I possibly bring consciousness to the loose and tainted opinions of anyone who has not lived a moment in my mind?

I can only afford to give energy to what is my own. To rebuild deliberately, with discipline and through resistance, knowing everything I endured and experienced and alchemized before this brought me here: to the knowledge that I can transmute stress into capacity.

There is no benefit to adding more demands of myself, or timelines or ideals about what I should do. I have painfully discarded such false narratives of meaning or expectation.

What’s left is the simple and honest experience of the self, as it is right now.

As I am now, I am someone who misses her trees. The comforting, sometimes eerie energy of being among an army of quiet giants that have been there before you and will be there long after you are gone. Many times among their formidable presence have I found myself screaming or laughing or prostrating at their thick trunks imploring them to impart me with their wisdom and strength.

Every so often a great storm arrives with its roaring and violent winds beating mercilessly upon the branches of the defenseless forest. Here, the trees do something quiet phenomenal. They sway with the incessant wind.

The roots hold, like springs; the memory, the identity, the return to form.

The trunk and branches yield like the dashpot; the dissipation, the managed movement, the bleeding off of force.

The trees that survive even the most malicious storms do not snap or uproot. The trees that remain are the ones that bend without breaking.

I am fortified by my memories of watching the great giants sway and reminded that the storm is never the end of the story, but a necessary chapter in the fortification of the forest as a whole.

The storm will claim some trees and in their destruction, light reaches new places for new seeds to grow. The trees that fall decompose and support new life and the roots, a vast mycorrhizal network of underground communication for the whole forest, observes it all and adjusts its wisdom for future storms and growth alike.

The Buddhists have an idea about the self known as Anatta. It says there is no fixed thing at the center of you, which is both unsettling and liberating.

They believe that form, sensation, perception, mental formations, consciousness all arise together to create the experience of a self. But none of them individually is you, and the collection of them has no permanent owner.

At first this feels a little uncomfortable until it suddenly feels very familiar. Aren’t we all endlessly searching for our own centre, only to accept the perplexing nature of its complete mystery?

For me, this lands much more true about who we are, and surely about where and as I find myself now.

A process. Not a place.

There is continuity in the imprecise centre. Shock absorption is proof of this. There is no rigid core that can crack, because there was never a rigid core to begin with. Everything is energy transmuting from one form to another.

Our job then is not to resist it or contain it but rather to absorb with the full force of its impact and allow it to carry on as a ripple of energetic experience that makes us exactly who we are.

Amor fati, indeed.

In addition to my passion for writing, I am a voracious reader of classic literature but I confess I came to Dickens reluctantly. It was not a flavor of literature I had ever found particularly appealing and I had resisted it in a series of failed attempts and restarts longer than I might admit.

In my current space of non-form, however, the title, Great Expectations became increasingly irresistible.

To my usual form, I found the start quite a slog, but eventually, the clever plot twists and turns delighted and engaged me wholly, reminding me that life, much like the book is full of no end of serendipitous surprises, if we stay open to living them.

I turned the final page of Great Expectations on the same day that I found the acorn, and the parallels felt profound. The unraveling of the belief that if I become this, then I will finally be enough to belong, to have, to be what I think is expected of me.

Pip spends the entirety of his story chasing a version of himself he believes will finally be enough. He exhausts himself becoming someone else’s idea of who he should be, only to discover that he belonged most fully to himself exactly as he began. In confirmation, the acorn does not strive to become the oak. It either does or it doesn’t, but in the meantime, it’s an acorn of its own measure.

The acorn, Pip, and I need only carry our potential until the conditions are met to realize it, and that is surely enough in itself.

This day, heavy in its symbolism, reminds me not to rush toward an imagined version of myself, but to honor what is present in this space, now.

We have been speaking of impact as force to be survived, but there is also the resonant complement, the opposite and equal impact of beauty, of art, of a story or an acorn that finds you exactly when you need it.

These too are energetic transmissions. These too change the structure of what receives them.

Perhaps this is the whole point: we build our capacity to absorb the hard impacts not only through resilience and rest and robustness, but also through intentionally and deliberately seeking the kind of impact that invites us to stay open to the wonder of life itself.

So on an ordinary Sunday did I settle, neither to oscillation nor dissipation, but an enduring ripple, ever in process, prepared for anything, expecting nothing, being everything; whole, as I am.

Such marks the end of my great expectations. And the beginning of my great experiences.

𓇗 As an acorn of my own measure, becoming alongside you — SJT

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Be a paradox, because a life that contains only one thing is a life living in a fragment of its full potential.

Most people spend their lives trying to become someone a room can hold. Someone clearly defined and clearly legible. Someone whose edges don’t spill past the border of whatever world they have worked hard to enter.

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You study what the room values, you raise yourself to meet it, you earn your seat. And then you sit down and feel it; the deflation of not quite feeling right, the disappointment of not fitting, the disillusionment of this being a place you might finally belong.

But beneath it, there is something stranger and more surprising. A spaciousness. The quiet realization that you are not tethered as tightly as you had hoped, nor as you might come to fear, and maybe you never needed to be.

This space is not a gap to be closed in strained effort to finally fulfill a seamless and comfortable position there but a mark of freedom there is more to you than what is here. This space is a reminder of the honest and beautiful other things inside of you that are not expressed at other people’s tables.

The unspoken contract of every room you will ever enter is this: to belong here, you must only belong here. Commitment means reduction. Depth means specialisation. You earn your place by becoming singular, predictable, legible enough for people to know what to do with you.

And so you exaggerate the parts of yourself that fit and set aside the parts that don’t, subtly, over time, until you have curated yourself into something the room can accept. The problem is that you are not curated. You are not singular. And no matter how hard you work to make yourself fit, some part of you will always know it.

What nobody tells you is that this is not a flaw nor a weakness in your character; you are not the problem. It is information about the size of your life. It is an invitation to let it be big.

Your life is not a line. It is a spiral. And a spiral requires movement and momentum to continue, lest it collapse back to its core. You are not meant to expand in every direction at once. You are meant to go deep in one area, then shift, then go deep somewhere else, carrying everything you learned forward with you.

The parts of you not currently in focus are not forgotten or dismissed.They are waiting, still active, still present, for the spiral to come around again upon their turn. The mistake is not that you have many parts. The mistake is believing you have to tend to all of them at the same time or risk losing them forever.

You don’t. You need only know which ones require your full attention right now, and what the minimum is that keeps the others alive until it is their turn. But to fully activate the parts of you to the highest expression in their moment of focus, you need to unbind yourself from the belief that it’s desired, required, or even possible to be perfect in all areas at all times. And as well, you must learn that attention over here does not mean regression over there.

There is a minimum effective dose for every part of a well-lived life, and when you learn to apply it consistently, something unexpected happens: you go further in your area of focus than you ever did when you were trying to hold everything at once, because you are no longer afraid that everything else is falling apart while you are looking away.

What it costs you to learn this, you will pay in real losses. You will drop things, you will be derailed, you will regress and you will fail. You will have chapters where you spread yourself across everything and try so hard, harder than you ever have, and still, you will arrive nowhere. And though this will cost you dearly, you will learn more deeply through lived experience than for all your idealized planning alone, not what is supposed to be important to you, not what looks nice on the transcript of your life, but what actually matters in feeling. Through a great deal of honest communication with yourself, you will eventually discern which things were glass and which were rubber, and which were never yours to carry at all.

This same practice extends to everything you believe, everything you read, everything that presents itself to you as the whole truth.

When something feels intensely convincing, your first question should be what the other side looks like, because you have learned by now that excitement is a sales tactic as much as it is a signal. You do not accept things wholesale because they move you. You try them on. You live with them. You keep what holds up in the actual experience of life and leave the rest without needing to condemn it.

This is how you end up reading Nietzsche while deepening your relationship with God, and feeling no contradiction in that whatsoever. They do not need to agree. You do not need the things you love to form a neat and coherent coalition. The truth, for most people who have done the work of finding it, lives in the unsexy middle; the part that does not spread like wildfire, because it is not trying to convince anyone of anything. It is simply what remains after the excitement settles and the real questions begin. The embers that linger to light the flame inside the one who stays to watch it rekindle into something real.

Your interests are not contradictions to be resolved. They are the actual shape of who you are.

The harder you try to belong somewhere completely, the further you get from the only place you have ever been able to find real peace; within yourself.

You have spent enough time performing for belonging, editing yourself into whatever version you believed would finally be enough to earn a seat at the table, a place in the family, a role in the community. What you understand now, and what cost you years to understand, is that none of those things were ever actually conditional. The love was never something you needed to earn. The worth was always already there. The performance was something you learned, not something you actually were or needed to be.

Belonging to yourself looks like this: knowing you are misunderstood, misperceived, that you draw negative reactions from some people as easily as you draw positive ones, and being at peace with yourself in both cases.

When you belong to yourself you can see criticism and praise as information as much as inconsequential collateral rather than verdict. It’s about trusting your own ability to examine ideas and opinions and knowing where to think twice, and where to release what’s not meant for you. You’re not unmoved or unaffected but you are sure in your singular authority whether or not to make it your own.

When you belong to yourself you regularly seek to challenge what you have always believed and turn it over for truth as you exist today, to update it, expand it, rewrite it if necessary so it more deeply reflects who you actually are now, not who you have always been or who you might expect yourself to become.

It is neither living as the person you were nor performing as the person you hope to be. It is opening up to who you are right now, and accepting that with love.

You will not belong everywhere. You were never meant to. And what a relief, as everywhere is a very difficult place to be. You contain too much depth just to skim the surface, you are too layered, too much a product of genuine curiosity and real living to be contained by any single room, label, or version of yourself that others can easily file away and understand.

And the sooner you stop trying to make yourself fit, the sooner you get to experience what it actually feels like to be whole. Free to explore what depths, what height, what breadth, what fullness life might offer you once you release yourself from the expectation that you must be and remain as any one thing in any such way for too long.

Remind yourself as often as you need to, daily if you must, that you are not a fixed point. You are a spiral in motion, and every cycle of focus, every turn toward something new, every season of expansion in one direction and patient tending in another, is not a contradiction or regression of who you are, but the evolution of it. You are not becoming someone ‘different’. You are becoming more fully yourself, again and again, in ways you could not have predicted and do not need to control.

So be a paradox. It is the most honest thing you can do.

꩜ Spiraling upward, outward, onward with you, SJT

Written for those who don’t belong and don’t want to.