You have a caged genius that lives inside of you, inside of conditioning and “should”s and expectations and status games and all of the other bullshit that society tells you is important—when in reality: the path to success is a straight upwards vector of actual fun when you figure out how to be who you already are.

Have you ever heard of the quote:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” - Marianne Williamson

This is true: to behold your power in its fullness is insanely intimidating. It is confronting to accept just how boundlessly potent and powerful we truly are. So we avoid it, we shrink ourselves, we hide, we deflect, we block our own becoming. All to avoid facing the fullness of all that we could be.

Look at any “star” in any field. Anyone living at the maximum expression of their potential. Taylor swift. Dario Amodei. Larry Ellison. Zendaya. Michael Phelps. Whoever you want to pick. Their brilliance, their expansiveness, is confronting to others. To live in a full, embodied expression of your genius attracts all kinds of attention and success that are quite hard to metabolize. BUT with the right infrastructure internally, and a robust enough ego to handle it (while balancing detachment and not grasping onto what your talent is creating), you can enduringly stay at the top of your game.

the puzzle of greatness

It’s a hell of a puzzle to be a massive symbol of success, and to handle all that comes with it. But the greats embrace this puzzle, and they remain at the top of their game because of it. This is essential to understand: a core skillset of the best in the world at anything is simply that they allow themselves to be as great as they genuinely are. They do not self-sabotage. They do not shrink themselves to make others feel better or larger. They do not reject their talent or power. They do not force themselves to do what they think they “should” do. They do not try to be anyone else. They do not try to become someone others will like. They simply own and acknowledge their gifts and pursue the actualization of their potential without fear (the natural side effect of this is them becoming magnetic to others; because everyone ultimately just wants to feel safe enough to be themselves.) The greats simply embrace who they already are, and commit their time, effort, energy and attention to expanding into that. They do not try to fundamentally change themselves. They take advantage of what feels easy, and lean into it.

Taylor Swift recently mentioned in an acceptance speech how her whole life as a teenager was about getting home from school to write songs and play on her guitar. John Mayer said the same in an interview with Rick Rubin. The greats WANT TO BE DOING WHAT THEY ARE DOING. And they can continue to excel and grow in their craft because of this. They embrace their genius and allow it to shine through them, instead of stifling or rejecting it.

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How to liberate your inner genius

I sincerely believe that everyone has a thread of genius inside of them.

We have all been granted immeasurable potential, that we are capable of actualizing if we embrace it fully, get out of our own way, and allow our brilliance to come through us. Especially those on this app; there is a seeking here, a natural desire for the actualization of one’s potential. A reaching for something beyond the current circumstances, the present reality, the situation you’re in today.

But the only way to begin this process is to do just that: to start. To no longer accept whatever hollow excuses you have been using to convince yourself that you should not actually listen to yourself, that you should not trust what you feel. Greatness requires a willingness to confront what you’re avoiding and to take on the beautiful, wonderful, unfolding challenge of actualizing your boundless potential.

And when you DO lean into the *fun* of this process: the magical unfolding of discovering who you actually are, without all the beliefs and conditioning and preconceived notions that everyone projects onto you, that you have been absorbing for your whole life, there is no way to know where it will take you.

You have to leap onto the path—your path—to find out.

You have to actually have faith in yourself.

But when you show yourself that you DO have that faith in yourself, wonder and miracles and serendipity and abundance begin to emerge on your path in ways your conscious mind could never have predicted or anticipated.

The magic of trusting yourself.

You literally know something, at the deepest level of your being, that your conscious mind does not. That your conscious mind *cannot* know. You simply know what is for you. Your body is pulling you towards it, constantly. You can sense it, when you arrive at a place of stillness and ease that puts you in resonance with your own intuition. This defies the rational and the intellect and all of the other tools we have been trained to worship as the All-Knowing Powers, placed on a pedestal above everything else.

This subtle, quiet, calm inner knowing transcends those forces. It floats far above them, agnostic to the concept of needing to ‘prove’ itself to you.

Beneath all the mind games and distractions, a part of you *just knows.*

If this resonates, you already get it. You know this to be true. You’re reading this and recognizing that signal I’m talking about, that intuitive knowing you almost wish wasn’t there because of how scary and inconvenient and intimidating it would be to trust it. But alas. The rest of your life depends upon you trusting it. Upon you trusting yourself. It’s up to you: keep yourself small and legible and neat and tidy and safe, or: embrace the power that lives latent inside of you, free your inner genius, and become who you already are. This is what I help people do for for a living: I help you discover exactly what you are hiding from yourself, unlock your inner-knowing, and guide you onto the path that feels true and aligned for you. If this ideology resonates, and you are ready to become who you already are, apply to work with me 1:1 here.

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The only content I want to consume lately are the youtube videos of an audacious, grounded, creative young woman named Isabel Paige. Her youtube videos document her life living in the mountains, where she plants and harvests most of her own food, sews her own clothes, bakes abundant amounts of bread, desserts and other delicious goods, and ultimately just lives life on her own terms. The magic in her process, I believe, is multi-pronged. One: she is clearly, unapologetically devoted to the art of story telling and filmmaking. Her process is her craft. She seeks to learn and improve, and as a result, not only has her content radically improved in quality over the years to the point that it feels so effortless that it is completely intoxicating, but it has allowed her to grow so easeful in her creation, with so little effort-ing still present in her work, that it has come to feel like you are just watching someone exist in their beautiful, magical life, that you feel lucky to have the privilege of peering into.

art is about allowing

This process of existing she brings you into is so creative. There is no tension between her and her process. She has allowed her becoming, her own self-discovery and curiosity be the compass for her art. This is, I believe, exactly what makes great art: expressing oneself so fully that there is no trace of ego in the creation. No agenda or desired imprint on the viewer, just a truthful offering, available to be perceived however the viewer may interpret it. That’s what art is about: allowing the process to flow through you naturally, instead of attempting to force something you wish was there.

When I watch her older videos—it is very subtle—but I can detect the effort. I can detect the way she was learning how to be herself. And to follow the journey of someone who has remained so consistent, so devoted to her process, and to see her step into herself and allow who she already was to simply emerge through her art, is one of the most wonderful and expansive things I’ve ever found on the internet.

cyclicality

Another beautiful feature of her work is how in sync she is with nature, both as a function of her lifestyle (she lives deep in the heart of the mountains, an hour drive away from the town and three hours away from a big city), and is thus forced to face the limitations, cycles, and rhythms of nature each day in order to simply meet her needs.

But as a result, she has such a reverence for nature. Such a sensitivity to the way things move, grow, change, evolve, bloom, die, become. And as someone who lives most of their time in the city, with only some exposure to the deep, rhythmic cycles alive in nature at all times, it is such a joy to see what embracing these cycles fully looks and feels like.

we are nature, too

It helps to remember that we are also nature (see this video at 11:12). Spending enough time in nature reminds us of this. We also move rhythmically. We must also allow what is inside of us to bloom and die and be reborn, over and over, or else we distress ourselves, make ourselves sick, we refuse to let what is, simply be. But when we are in cities, when we are on the internet, both of which feel like they are ‘on’ 24/7, we forget what these cycles look like, we forget that we need to rest as much as we need to exert, we forget to surrender to the cycles of nature that pulse inside of us, too.

In the modern world, we make so many of our basic rhythms wrong. We spend so much time judging ourselves for simply being. For having the needs of fleshy, somatic humans in alive, evolving bodies. We expect ourselves to be on all the time—like the cities, like the internet, like the screens. Then, when we want to create or do something artistic, we want that to happen instantly as well. We want everything to be instant. We want action to be instant, producing results that are instant. We want to then be able to rest instantly, be rejuvenated instantly, and get ready to act again, instantly! We want inspiration to strike instantly, so we can create instantly, put it out there instantly, get validation instantly, and repeat the process. Instantly, on demand, as we so wish and please.

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life takes time

But this is not how life works, it is not how we unfold, how creations get made. Look at nature. Really look at nature; it is -2 degrees celsius out where I am, and it’s about to be April. Nature has been in the void of winter for about five months now here. I know that blooming does not happen instantly, because I look outside and am reminded of it every day. Rebirth does not happen instantly. The flowers do not bud, bloom or grow wild instantly. It takes time! Time. It all takes time. It takes time to come alive again, and to become full in the expression of your beauty and life force.

When something stops, dies, pauses — whether that is literally winding down from a day of work, or leaving a job, relationship, or chapter of your life that no longer needs you—that you no longer need—the thing to do is to let what is no longer aligned die off. Let it lay. Allow it to wither and dissolve, to not rush the process, to not force this part of the cycle away, to not instantly rush into the next phase, begging new life to rush in so you do not need to experience the discomfort or grief of loss, of stillness, of the gap between things you want arriving. You cannot force nature, just as you cannot force becoming, and you cannot force life to emerge when it is not yet ready (and why would you want to? It’s far less interesting when everything happens exactly at the time we want it to.)

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The beautiful thing I have found in Isabel Paige’s work is that you can see the fruits of this patient blossoming in her life over time. She has been posting her videos for 6 years. She has become proficient in so many crafts that take months and years to master. She has used the money she saved up from growing her audience on YouTube to build her dream home, to honour the visions she has cultivated as she has gotten to know herself deeper and developed her taste more fully. She now plans to open a bakery to share her amazing creations with others. She is writing books. She is, definitionally, on her own path. She does not look around (there aren’t many people to look at where she is!), and she has graced us all with the privilege of peering into her uniquely creative, organic, cyclical life.

The comments on her YouTube, which I eventually learned she does not read to protect her psyche from external opinions, are gushing with appreciation and freudenfreude for all of her success. She reaches the elderly, the youth, and everyone in between. She has inspired the masses, literally, to live in a completely different way than others do. And she has done all this by staying in her own lane, on her own path, chasing her own dreams.

I will occasionally get messages, reflecting back to me how what I have chosen to do, and the ways in which I have shared my learnings and journey on here have inspired someone to do the same, or has helped someone build up the courage and humility to even realize they want to. Above everything else that has come from my choices, I believe these messages are the greatest signs of affirmation that I am on the right path. When your mere existence and your willingness to share it inspires someone to meet themselves deeper, to express themselves more fully, and to pursue what they truly want, that is quite possibly the most expansive reflection that it feels like one, or at least I, could receive.

There is so much angst in the air these days; about timing, about the sInGuLaRiTy, about all of these things that make it feel like the power of your life is located externally to you, when in reality, the engine of your life remains inside of you, always inside of you. And the most abundant, generative thing in the world that you can do is be true to yourself, act on your inclinations, let your mind be quiet, stow yourself away from the constant noise and stimulus trying to push its way into your consciousness, and to remember that there is time. There is time to be who you are, follow your path, stop judging yourself, and let what is in you come through you… It’s all inside of you, moving at the patient, non-instant, cyclical rhythms of nature. And if it feels like ‘nothing is happening’, remember that you can also embrace and enjoy the void. Don’t force things to come through you just because it would make you feel accomplished. It’s okay to welcome an inner winter in yourself from time to time, to let nothing happen for a while, to let what needs to gently die off, to allow your energy to slowly flow towards something new, to rest, regenerate, nurture, cultivate, tidy up, and release the pressure for outcomes.

When we’re in month five of winter and it still looks like nothing is happening, the trees and plants and blooms are getting started underneath the surface, ready to burst back to life when the right conditions appear.

slowly, then all at once

Our own cycles behave the same; have you ever heard the quote ‘things happen slowly, then all a once?’ When it looks like nothing is growing, that is when it is most essential to keep the faith, to listen to what is happening inside of us, and to simply allow our magic to flow through us without force. That is when things unfold in what feel like surprisingly abundant and easeful ways. But the first step is trust; without it, the natural process gets interrupted, and we find ourselves constantly forcing, effort-ing, trying to will something into existence — just to leave us feeling stuck and dissatisfied.

On the other side of letting go of the need for everything to happen exactly the way we want it to, exactly when we want it to, we make the space to allow what is naturally emerging to blossom in our lives, and to wrap us in beauty and abundance we could not force into existence, no matter how hard we tried.

I’m taking on two 1:1 coaching clients in April—If you’re looking to balance surrender, action, creation and patience, while finding the right avenues for your skills and creativity, apply to work with me here. I primarily work with self-aware, driven executives, creatives, artists and skilled professionals who seek to clarify what they want and actualize their desires with ease.

1:1 Coaching Structure:

• Weekly 1:1 sessions to reveal clarity and dissolve blocks preventing action (or necessary rest).

• Integration assignments to consciously weave insights into your life.

• Async support to maintain accountability and structure between sessions.

If this resonates, apply below, and I will reach out if there could be a fit.

Apply here

Related essays you may enjoy:

• patience, pacing and persistence

• how to embrace the seasons of your life without guilt

• great art is about being seen while remaining invisible

• it feels easy to take action when you’re in alignment

• how good will you let it get

• it’s okay to want a beautiful life

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Resources: Daily Journalling Guide, Masculine Archetypes Summarized, Creativity workshop

Lately, one of the biggest lessons I’ve been learning is just how much more pleasant, easeful and light life is when I am in alignment, and I just allow myself to be where I am. Sometimes, complicated or painful things happen in your life and they will emotionally dysregulate you. And you don’t have the energy for work or creativity or all of the usual things you’d be ‘applying yourself’ to. There are two ways to respond to this:

One: force yourself to do everything you wanted yourself to do, or thought you needed to do, and suffer. Do it slower / less well, spend way more energy than you usually would just getting yourself to start, and resist the emotions your body is trying to slow you down to experience.

Or, two: just let it be. Go inwards, feel what you are feeling and then let it go. And when your energy returns, move towards what is calling to you, what is needed of you, and harness your now-recalibrated energy to do so.

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To resist or to allow

Most of us tend to take Path #1, because it’s all we know. It’s all we’ve ever been shown or pointed towards. Path One feels ‘normal’, maybe even ‘safe’ to us. Because we don’t realize that it is safe to pause—to slow down and feel what we are feeling. So we try to push through. In the end, we probably don’t do the thing we were pushing ourselves to do (or don’t do it that well, anyway). We feel drained, exhausted, emotionally dysregulated, and are left with a pretty bruised self image after all of the forcing and effort that was applied to just get ourselves to do the thing.

You can just not do things, too

But sometimes, it really is about the not-doing-things of it all! It’s about allowing, feeling, surrendering. And that core thread—the balance between doing and being, allowing and exerting, willing and receiving—is the key that unlocks life for us… Because our path is not meant to be 100% FORCE. It is not meant to be us just doing things all the time. (How do you know you’re doing the right things if all your time is spent doing, hm?) It is meant to be a balance of us letting ourselves become still enough to hear what we feel the need to do, and then taking action, doing those things in moments of clarity and energy.

Read that again: Stillness > Rest > Pause > Receive the inner signal of what to do > Then, act! Enjoy the doing, fuelled by life force, intention and ferocity.

But don’t do things just to feel good about yourself, if those things aren’t things that are actually helping you move towards what you genuinely want or need.

This subtle difference—of actually accepting that life is meant to be a combination of sprints and rest, of stillness and momentum, is SO liberating, precisely because we are creatures that are capable of, and require, both.

Act like a King

Lions lay around and rest, sleep, or peruse their environment for up to 20 hours a day, conserving their energy for decisive, quick, fierce bursts of action. Yet, they are feared and revered by most beings. Why is that? Because they act when necessary. They don’t force themselves into constant exertion such that they will be too drained to act with ferocity when the moment demands it.

We need rest to take action with our full energy.

We need to act with our fully energy to actually crave rest.

It is a balance. How much have we heard that word? Balance, balance, balance. Everyone talks about balance. But how often are we actually living it? Embodying it? True balance is about tuning in and noticing. Noticing what you need, and when. Then, listening. Without doubt, without negotiation, without persuasion or making what you need ‘wrong.’

Noticing what brings you closer to yourself. Noticing what your body and mind are bidding for. Noticing that you are here. Right. Here. And that if you’re willing to be a patient, humble observer—your body is telling you exactly what you need. And you might not like it. You might wish it was different. In your mind. But if you are willing to listen anyway, to allow it to be true anyway, you will find that simply embracing and surrendering to this moment, this feeling, will help you bridge your way to the next thing… The thing you want to just get to already, or feel ready for now.

There is no trick to make this process easier, no secret hack. Except the act of noticing > allowing > embracing > feeling > doing > releasing > noticing again. This sometimes means resting, baking four times in one weekend (who said that?) or, sometimes it can mean taking action on that big, scary task ahead of you that you have been avoiding, but finally feel that sacred tinge of readiness for.

We are complex, dynamic, ever-evolving creatures. But there is a way to make things harder than they need to be, and there is a way to make things only as hard as they need to be. And Path One (trying to force yourself past your feelings even when you don’t have the energy + capacity for the thing you are trying to force) is a sure-fire way to make things HARDER than they need to be. And surrendering to / allowing the feelings that actually need to come through, is the only way to make things exactly as hard as they need to be.

The more you do this—feel exactly what you are feeling and approach those feelings with a neutral curiosity that is not full of resistance—the easier it becomes to embrace even the hardest moments. And the easier it becomes to act, because you will be ready and charged up for action, by the time you turn your attention toward what needs to be done!

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This is a practice, it really is. And as you integrate it, you will still occasionally catch yourself forcing something, and that is okay. This practice is all about noticing, returning to what you are feeling, where you are, taking care of yourself the best you can, and not resisting or pushing down things that will leave you in more pain later on.

What if my urges don’t appear healthy?

You might be thinking: well, if I took Isabel’s advice, I would just want to lay on the couch all day and eat chips and watch TV. If that is the case, I would say, that is a very useful reflection for where you are at with respect to giving your body + mind what they are bidding for from you! The more you earnestly tune in, listen to yourself and remain in tune with your genuine desires, the more healthy and aligned your inner requests become. Just as it takes a bit of time and conscious intention to ‘crave’ working out, or eating healthy food, it takes time to show your body that you are granting it healthy ways of resting and recharging. Reading by candlelight. Creating a project as a way to recharge. Crafting. Cooking. Baking. Cleaning. These are things you will start to crave when you consciously make space for yourself to rest and recharge through aligned means. But if you never grant yourself time to recharge or rest, of course your body is going to ‘steal’ that rest from you in the most aggressive, self-numbing ways. You need to train your mind to crave aligned rest by granting yourself rest consciously, instead of waiting for yourself to burnout and then watching yourself feel drawn to the lowest impulse actions you could possibly reach for.

Rest feeds action, action feeds rest! They are equals; it is not a hierarchy

We glorify action/productivity, and antagonize/shame rest, but the truth is that they are both just neutral objects. Two sides of the same coin of existing. We need rest to act, we need to act to feel the satisfaction that lets us fully rest. It is not one over the other, or forcing / avoiding so much we cannot even detect what we need. It is about being a patient, clear observer, noticing what you need, and granting yourself permission to do (or be) without guilt.

Seasons come and go. So do emotions!

Most of all, the greatest comfort you can take in this process is that emotions, like seasons, come and go. Impermanence is one of the only certainties we have! We know that everything changes.

As a lifelong east coast dweller, I can tell you that every winter, I get so used to the cold that it feels like it is never going to leave. Not even in a bad way; it honestly just feels like it is going to be winter forever. And then eventually, inevitably, that first above-zero day emerges, and my serotonin systems reboot in a way inconceivable to my five-months-into-winter-mind, and I remember that the seasons come and go, actually. It is truly remarkable how much this catches me by surprise every year, every season. That they come, and then they go.

Emotions are like this too; they come and then they go. And yet, when they are here, it feels like they are going to be here for truly ever. Like, this is just life now, this is just how I feel now… perhaps, this is even who I am now? But it isn’t so. And one would think we learn this lesson quicker than we ultimately do. After all these years on earth, living in this body, I still sometimes feel like, when I am sad, I am going to feel sad forever. And same with feeling happy. But one thing we can rely on is the impermanence of our inner seasons. Just as the weather changes, no matter how convinced we are that it will be winter or summer forever (unless you live in California, I guess), the seasons come and go.

As I write this, large, thick, fluffy snowflakes are falling in sheets from the sky, covering the earth with a thick white blanket of fresh snow. Yesterday, everything was melting and the sun was out and it felt like spring had arrived. I like to laugh at these rapid changes, because they are a mirror. You might think you are through something, before it pulls you back in. And instead of trying to convince yourself it is sunny and warm out when it is actually snowing and the sky is an opaque white that shows no hint of sunlight, it is wise to let our inner state simply be instead of trying to convince ourselves it is not so. And just as when a snowstorm comes, what you want to do is stay inside and get cozy and enjoy the beautiful scene outside, tending to yourself and your home as you do, we can do the same thing with our ‘colder’ emotions. Instead of forcing action and exertion, we can just cozy up by the embers of our psyche and watch the fire crackle as we give ourselves an easier time on a day where we have less energy and need a little more self-tending. This is how to embrace the seasons of your life without guilt: let what you are feeling be true, don’t judge yourself for not having the same amount of energy and hunger for doing each day, you don’t force things too hard, and trust that, like the seasons, your inner life will bloom and die and be reborn, over and over and over again. And remember that even when a feeling seems permanent, fixed, just ‘the way you are’ now, it almost certainly is not. That if anything is certain, it’s that almost nothing is.

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If you want to cultivate the ability to relax and enjoy your life while becoming as generative, successful and creative as you’ve ever been, apply to work with me here.

1:1 Coaching Structure:

I offer 1:1 coaching to self-aware, curious, highly driven individuals—mostly investors, executives, skilled professionals, and artists—who wish to clarify what they truly want, get out of their own way, and actualize their desires.

• Clarity: 1:1 Sessions to clarify your desires, aims and ideas.

• Integration: Actions and prompts to build momentum and awareness.

• Communication: Ongoing support to clear blocks, identify breakthroughs, and re-orient as needed.

Apply below, and I will reach out with more information if there could be a fit.

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related essays you might enjoy

on being ready, reclaim your nature, becoming yourself is a process of reduction, just show up, don’t let your ideas rot

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The last couple weeks I have experienced a strange repulsion to the internet. Whenever I open one of my devices, and my fingers habitually drift towards the places where I tend to consume and share content, I feel a subtle internal flinch. It’s as though everything that comes through these slot machines of randomness and algorithmic optimization appear as a sort of beige paste, tugging at my consciousness but seemingly unable to grasp it.

I have remained curious towards this repulsion. I have let it guide me towards what bids for my attention outside of the screens: writing, walking, knitting, reading, baking, exercising, time with friends and family, dwelling more deeply in my own home, tending carefully to what is needed. I have noticed such joy, such relief in simply making things with my hands, returning to the raw materials of my own physical reality. It evokes this feeling of fuelling a fiery hearth inside of me that withers into no more than a flickering ember when I don’t give it its oxygen: solitude, quiet, time without screens.

I have also noticed another emotion that has intrigued me: a subtle but persistent grade of guilt for doing things that take a lot of time.

Am I really going to sit here knitting this hat that will take tens of hours when I could be doing X, Y, or Z productive thing?

This constant pressure to be doing more remains, humming with a persistence that is dulled but not eliminated by choosing to engage with slower ways of being.

the ceaseless pull towards More

I find it interesting how there lives inside me a constant engine, endlessly hungry for leverage and opportunity, quietly battling the part of me that needs space to feel, to be, to heal, and to return home to myself. As someone who generally tries to take life slower, to notice and create beauty, to connect to the raw materials of my life, it makes me wonder about the standard relationship we all have to this tension between urgent-intense-doing and allowing-relaxing-being.

Things you notice, reach for, and capture when you’re moving slower.

Tune into the season you are in

In a Rationalist’s Guide to Manifestation, I wrote about how getting what you want out of life is about striking a balance between action, doing, and leaning into momentum, while also relaxing enough to create the internal spaciousness to notice and allow things to happen, without your will.

The nuance here is that sometimes you don’t know why something is ‘happening to you’. It might feel misaligned with what you want, or at least it is hard to draw a linear connection between the event that is unfolding, or the feeling you are feeling and the desire you are trying to cultivate. In these moments, it is tempting to avoid what is happening, to force a different outcome or feeling into existence. But what I have learned is that the resistance we create by trying to force forward motion when our being is imploring us to slow down and rest—to simply experience what we are experiencing—creates more turmoil than just allowing yourself to pause for a moment.

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When we exert and force things too much, we get sick. Or we exhaust ourselves to the point of dysfunction. Or we create unnecessary conflict in relationships. We act out, because we are not listening. When we are listening, we know exactly what to do (and what not to do.) When we get too attached to what we think the process needs to look like—when we get too obsessed with our desires that we disconnect from what is happening in the present moment—we have gone too far.

How do you know when you have gone too far?

Well, how do you feel? Are you exhausted, tired, physically drained, resenting and resisting things in your life that you usually feel love or at least neutrality towards? This is often a sign you are thinking too much, doing too much, and not slowing down enough to notice what you actually need—and granting it to yourself with care.

yearning for the grandmother archetype

I find myself thinking of the grandmother archetype lately. The woman who moves slowly, who tends to her home, her projects, her loved ones. The woman who is not in a rush. The woman who is not trying so hard to make something of herself, who is willing to just be. The woman who lives with a certain devotion and appreciation for what she already has.

I feel remarkably connected to this energy lately. Perhaps it is because I had a couple of hard weeks emotionally. Waves of grief and loss rising in my emotional center for the first time in a while, making the typical high-stimulus materials in my life feel nauseating. My body physically reacting at the thought of engaging with them. All I wanted was to rest, walk, be alone, read, knit, bake, cook, and spend time with family. All I wanted was a hug from my grandmother.

But what is a hug from your grandmother?

What is this energy that these stewards of love, peace and seemingly infinite comfort appear to carry? To me, it is the stillness of pure presence, of wisdom, of deep understanding and a focus on what truly matters. That quiet, tranquil acceptance that creates a blanket of love around everything. The tender, abundant love that gives us permission to disconnect from the urgent, and to drift towards what truly matters.

Balancing ambition (reaching) with presence (accepting)

I saw this graph below, after watching this clip with founder of Whole Foods, John Mackey, on ’s podcast, saying he would trade his entire fortune to have just one more dinner with his parents.

This graph offers interesting food for thought, to reflect on where our minds go at the beginning and end of our lives, particularly around money, ambition, and material desires. Though there is something somewhat inevitable and un-opinionated about this graph (if I just stopped thinking about money, I might not be enjoying many of the great comforts I currently enjoy, such as the couch I am sitting on and the keyboard I am using inside of the warm home I am tucked into.) Generally speaking, I find this graph to be nothing but true. It doesn’t bother me that we need to think about money to generate it. It doesn’t bother me that I need to provide a beautiful life for myself in order to live one. I feel lucky, actually, that all of this opportunity exists for me to realize—that if I am clever and creative enough, I can have anything I want.

when progress is simply not the point

But there are these moments, like the ones I’ve had the last few weeks, where the thought of progress and ambition, and going full speed towards everything I want feels almost nauseatingly Not The Point. Moments where all I want is to cuddle into my grandmother as she kisses my cheek extra hard and tells me it’s all going to be okay. Moments where I want time to momentarily stop, to not have to turn on a screen, to simply bake and read and think and feel, as I turn my attention towards my internal world, and away from everything outside of it.

The thing is: I can have that, if I want it. I can more or less make time stop—not all the time, but occasionally, for a little bit of time, if I want to. I can log off of the digital world and log back onto my real one. Replacing the screens with what takes time, attention and energy to create.

We remember ourselves in the pause

And in these acts of making something, of knitting my hat, of baking my pistachio buns, of producing yet another loaf of sourdough, of lighting my candles and filling my home with flowers and doing yoga in my living room, I remember my humanity. I remember my heart beating loudly, fiercely in my chest, always there for me to listen if I choose to tune into it. I remember my own mind, my own thoughts, my own indifference to all the bullshit I read on the internet. I remember my body. It’s constant willingness to move, walk, dance, stretch. And, of course, I remember to rest. I remember how to rest. I remember what true rest feels like. Not the kind where you are pulling the screen away from your eye balls and feeling zapped after, hardly a spark of life force still kicking. Not that at all. I’m talking about true rest. Real rest. Where you have gently wound your energy down, where you can think your own thoughts, hear your own breath. Where you have given yourself what you need. That unique kind of rest that comes from truly taking care of yourself.

We are cyclical beings; we don’t always need to rest like this (the fear that if we let ourselves fully rest, we may never not want to get back up is, ironically, what keeps us from ever feeling fully energized). But when we do require this deep rest, a hearty pause from the noise of modern life, we must grant it to ourselves. Else, our energy never fully crests into its peaks again. We never fully reclaim that ferocity and hunger and the drive we love to occupy. The rest, the pause, the offline, grandmother archetype acting out her wisdom within all of us, knows what we need when life gets too noisy.

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Notice the pull towards a pause, and allow it

When we feel ourselves flinching at the screens, retreating from symbols of ambition and progress, it is often just a sign we need to step away. To swim in the ocean or hike in the snow or climb a mountain (or bake pistachio cardamom buns a la .) A sign that we are forgetting ourselves, and that we would like to return to ourselves, away from the screens. Away from the constant engines of randomness that wish to make us increasingly dependent on them, and less dependent on ourselves.

the pause reveals what comes next

Here’s what I’ve learned about these moments of slowness: if I let them through, if I pause the Doing and let the Being take precedence, even for a short time, I can reclaim my peace quite quickly. I can feel what I need to feel, and move forward. I can notice what I am resisting, and face it. I can see what I have been rushing past, annd accept it. And then, I can let it all go. When I resist the pause, however, I send myself in circles: never feeling fully rested and never feeling fully energized. Never quite unlocking the productive energy that feels rewarding, and never quite slowing down enough to properly recharge. When I deny the pause, I keep myself from blooming.

The medicine of dwelling deeply in your own life

We are being swept into a rapidly changing world, with plenty of factors outside of our control. To focus ceaselessly on these factors over which we have no influence, is to willingly surrender our power over what we can control. The more we dwell in our own lives, letting our needs, desires, and feelings be our compass, the greater the well-being we can reach within ourselves, and the more we can be of service to the world.

If you have a moment to pause after reading this, perhaps you put down your screen for a moment. Perhaps you can look around and ask: What needs tending? What demands to be picked up? Used? Thrown away? Made into something? Created? What exists in your life that you genuinely want to get to, but ‘haven’t had the space for’ because of how all-consuming life can feel? Can you pause and face these bids for your attention? Can you look away from what is far beyond you, and return to the present? Can you reconnect with the raw materials of your own life? Can you take a deep breath, and place your attention softly on what is right under your nose?

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Related essays you might enjoy:

slow down, one thing at a time, take care of yourself (actually though), on self-trust, on slowness, taste & living well, on being selective, the mind is a trap

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A rational explanation of how to ‘attract what you want’

I’ve been helping my hyper-rational clients and peers manifest what they want for a number of years now, and I finally feel ready to articulate how this process works in the most logical, straight-forward terms possible. My goal is that this essay makes ‘manifestation’ make sense to anyone, and to explain it in a way that feels approachable for you, dear reader, to begin doing, today (and what better day to begin than the first day of a new year?). All I ask is that you set aside your priors associated to the word ‘manifestation’ before we begin, and open your mind to the possibility that you really could get the things that you want much more effortlessly—and perhaps even magically—than you’ve let yourself believe before. What you will see from reading this is that while there is some whimsy to this art, there is also a lot you can influence consciously when you actually understand how your mind works. That’s right: you’ll get to use your agency as well as your third eye, I promise. Now let’s begin.

Two key learnings to start.

The first thing I’ve learned is that despite the controversial reputation of the word ‘manifestation’, the process it refers to is actually incredibly logical, and when the rational mind comprehends the effectiveness of simply aligning your mind towards what you want, it becomes much more willing to do so.

The second is that once you understand the basic mechanics of manifestation, you become a weapon at rapidly up-levelling your life.

I’ll start with some friendly, approachable examples for how I think about manifestation in my life—which is, broadly speaking, that I think of it as cleaning up your inner world, identifying what you truly want and giving yourself full permission to pursue and receive it, effortlessly. Also, to embrace the part of it that really does feel like magic—which often looks like being given, offered, or invited to almost eerily aligned opportunities and moments that you have previously held in your mind’s eye.

Example 1: How I started manifesting fur coats.

Note: You do not need to want fur coats for this example to be useful. It is the arc of how the fur coats started appearing in my life that is relevant.

When I was dreaming up what I wanted my outer world to look like in 2025, I put two fur coats on a vision board. Before that, I don’t think I had even realized I liked coats like this, let alone acknowledged that I might want one in my wardrobe. Shortly after I did this, I found a fur coat in a vintage store that looked almost identical to the light brown one I had placed on my vision board, and I purchased it immediately—my intuition recognized it as the one I had already identified I wanted (or in manifestation-speak, I found the thing externally that I already believed was mine internally). I wore it anywhere it was reasonably appropriate to, and people started to notice.

Eventually, my nana (a very classy British lady who is definitely reading this) started to notice. She told me *she* also had a fur coat she had bought years ago that she wasn’t using that she thought I would like and wanted to give me, because she noticed I liked fur coats. For emphasis, let me repeat that: because the world saw me exuding the desire externally that I once held internally, it was now giving me what I wanted without my request. I met this gift with openness—I willingly received (instead of, say, resisting the gift or insisting that I did not deserve this beautiful coat, that really she should keep it, etc…) This second coat looked just like the second one I had put on my vision board—long, dark, luxurious. A gift I cherish (and am wearing as I write this!)

As I said, you might not want to start manifesting fur coats yourself. But the actual desire you are in pursuit of does not matter. It is the arc of:

>Identifying the desire

>Visualizing yourself already having it (i.e. placing it on a vision board, visualizing your desired object in your home, visualizing yourself in the place you want to be, etc)

>Updating your self-image to be the person that already has this desire, acting like you have it, being fully open to it finding you

>Acquiring it effortlessly / receiving it as a gift / finding it in the world without explicitly ‘looking for it’

>Openly & willingly receiving (say yes!)

This is a simple example to display how a desire that you hold in your mind, goes from a wispy idea, to something you start believing you deserve, to something you straight-forwardly claim you want, to something you reach for, until you actually make it yours. Then, the world catches on and gives you even more of it. The fur coats are a literal expression of this, but it applies to much more meta things than just luxury objects on a vision board.

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Example 2: Attracting the community I craved // Being given experiences I was writing about wanting to experience.

When I first admitted to myself that I wanted to try writing seriously, I committed to publishing once a week. I eventually gained enough confidence to quit my job and start writing full time (that whole journey belongs in another essay). I wanted a life of freedom, that aligned with my beliefs and values, and that felt effortless to show up to every day.

I was far from living out this full vision embodied, but I was putting in the work and doing my best with the raw materials I had. Eventually, a friend of mine who had ‘broken containment’ on the community / world we grew up in, invited me to join him for a week in Mexico to immerse myself in the people, ideas, and energy that were flowing there. Without me asking or even saying it out loud, he had picked up on the new identity/frequency I was stepping into through my writing—and he reached out to offer me a highly aligned experience that matched this energy shift.

Without giving my rational mind the opportunity it so desperately craved to control the situation—to evaluate whether I really should accept this invitation, if I really could get on a flight tomorrow morning, if I really was worthy of this seemingly magical opportunity—I simply said yes (something I will repeatedly emphasize in this piece: willingly receiving is an essential part of manifestation). That week was more expansive experientially, than probably anything I had experienced in my life prior. It imprinted on me a greater sense of what I actually wanted—desires that would eventually be actualized in a similar effortless and serendipitous fashion later on.

Again, the simple process of ‘manifesting’ this was:

• State the desire: I wrote about what I wanted to see and experience more of in the world.

• The desire gets noticed by others: I was sharing my writing publicly, including with my existing community. The result of this was that anyone reading my work was becoming more aware of what I wanted, and could help me actualize it, if they wanted to help me.

• Its consummation is offered by someone with the capacity to provide it: Someone who had experienced more of what I stated I was craving noticed my desire, and offered the experience to me. (Note: this step sometimes will be less of a give-receive dynamic, and more of a notice-and-ask, or a notice-and-take dynamic, depending on the context)

• Willingly receive: I said yes.

• Effortless actualization: I got what I wanted without ‘trying’ or ‘forcing’ it.

How magic actually works

I could go on with more examples, but hopefully these fairly novice ones illustrate the core thrust of this process. The arc that desires follow when you fully own them is essentially why words are magic and clarifying your mind so you can truly know what you want is one of the most powerful skills you can hone.

For modern cultural examples, see the current wizard of the moment: Timothée Chalamet. He understands that to get what you want, you need to repeatedly speak it out loud into the world (“I want to be one of the greats”), cast spells on others with your own enthusiasm and drive (“Marty Supreme, Christmas Day” is a mantra ringing through the skulls of millions around the world thanks to Timmy’s insane promo efforts…), and let the energy of your desires flow into others—owning what you want proudly, and acting in alignment with them (delivering a great performance, speaking shamelessly about it, making his bid for your attention worthwhile). He is becoming exactly who he said he will be. And we are all watching this process of his self-manifested greatness unfold live. What a privilege!

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Name what you want. Proudly.

Putting words to your wants, to what you want to do, to where you want to be, to what you want to experience, is so important, because it tells you, and the world, what you are looking for and allows others to reach out and give you what you want.

If you want things to be given to you with ease, you need to at least know what you are looking for. If you want to increase the chances, you should probably state what you want, or even ask for the things you want explicitly (scary, I know! But shockingly effective!). And if you want to exert max agency over obtaining these things, you should go out and try to get them to the best of your ability yourself, while also accepting help from willing parties who want to help you.

Aligned action + willingly receiving is how you ‘manifest’ your desires.

It is not by chanting them loudly in a trance-like state inside an empty apartment, but by getting REALLY clear on exactly what you want, and going out into the world with shameless openness about your desires, a willing attitude towards receiving help, even asking for help when appropriate (I’ve written about how to gracefully ask & openly receive), and showing up in the world congruent with the person that already has them in the future.

This is how things seem to magically ‘be given’ to people who know what they want. They ‘manifest’ their desires effortlessly, because when you know what you want, you accept it when it is offered to you, and you reach out for it when opportunities related to it appear. Your desires come to you effortlessly because you believe you are genuinely worthy of these things.

This is the premise of ‘you attract what you are’. A more accurate representation of that statement is something like, you attract what you think you deserve [and you repel what you do not think you deserve].

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If you want to begin getting what you want, you need to perceive yourself genuinely worthy of it. This will lead you to act like you are worthy of what you want, and when you act like you are worthy of something, it tends to be given to you with a lot less friction and hesitation. If your identity lags behind what you say you want, you will continue to energetically repel it, even when it is right in front of you.

You need to believe you deserve the higher salary. To be with the girl you have a crush on. To own the dream home. To live in the city you say you want to live in. To have written the books. You need to see yourself in these places, with these things, and you need to genuinely believe you belong there.

Because when you arrive at that internal knowing, that sense of genuine worthiness for these things you claim to want, they will start to find you with more ease. And you will know how to receive them. Because you have already accepted them as your own internally.

Don’t let your self-image lag behind your reality.

If you do not know what I mean by any of this, I encourage you to genuinely pay attention to the next time you have any sort of ‘levelling up’ experience organically occur in your life; look backwards and notice when your mindset shifted to perceive yourself as worthy of reaching that next level. Whether it was getting fit, connecting with someone who previously felt out of your league, charging more for your work, getting a better job, having a hard conversation that freed you, or any other ‘new level unlocked’ in your world. Look before the moment it arrived in your life, and ask yourself when you officially let yourself have that. You will likely see that there was an internal shift that preceded the external shift which made receiving this much easier.

Maybe you got fed up with a pattern that was no longer working, or finally snapped in a bad relationship and left, or had an epiphany that you needed to move out and get your own space. Whatever it was, something often clicks inside of us first that frees us to go out and get the thing we want in full alignment. Manifestation is simply making this process conscious, and doing it on purpose.

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Your self-worth determines what you will let yourself experience

Sometimes, if you’re not yet caught up to your own worthiness and how the world perceives you, the world will force a ‘levelling up’ experience on you: giving you something you do not yet feel you deserve, or do not feel worthy of. If this happens to you, pay very close attention to the gap between your own self-perception and how the world is seeing you. Because that is the precise invitation for growth and expansion. And if you close that gap, you can get even more of what you genuinely deserve. This will ultimately calibrate yourself to where you ‘should’ be—as in: where you genuinely deserve to be!

It is humble to accept what you deserve.

It is worth noting that it is not egoic to accept what you deserve. In fact, it is quite humble, to actually allow yourself to be seen and rewarded for what you are worthy of. Denying blessings, gifts, invitations and offers is a sign that you have not yet allowed yourself to receive what you deserve. You are making things harder for yourself, for no good reason. Keeping yourself small, keeping yourself stuck. Because it is scary to take up space and be powerful, but if you want to actually taste and experience what you are capable of - it is entirely necessary. You won’t know what you can have until you allow yourself to receive what you are currently worthy of. This is how you ascend!

You grow by letting the world help you, by willingly receiving, and by becoming open to being worthy of even more. How do you become deserving of even more? By working on yourself, growing internally and meeting yourself even more honestly, so that your outer world can reflect the expansion and enhancement of the growth you have done internally.

It’s simple, really. I’ve written about how your self-image is the lens through which you experience reality, because we allow into our world only what we believe we are worthy of. I’ve also written about how to ask for what you want, and willingly receive it when it is given to you. Put these two ideas together, and you basically have manifestation, explained.

If you want your outer world to change, change what you believe you deserve!

And if you want to change what you believe you deserve, change your behaviour. Treat yourself like you deserve better. Some questions to ask yourself on this front:

• Are you taking care of yourself the way someone worthy of what you say you want would take care of themselves?

• If not, where is the incongruence? What is causing it?

• Where are old patterns and habits playing out that are keeping you from getting what you want?

• How can you align your actions more seamlessly with what you want?

• Where might you be denying blessings / gifts / opportunities / generosity that could actually help you on your path?

• What are others seeing in you that you are not yet seeing in yourself?

• How can you soften your resistance or release any self-judgment around accepting this next level of what you desire, or what is being offered to you?

Tangibly, let’s say you want to get more fit. Great. Now, you need to actually become the fit person in your mind. This will change what you accept from yourself, and the world. You need to become the fit person in your mind. And you will begin to act like it, both in what you do, and what you do not do, in the world. For example:

• You will no longer impulsively eat things that make you feel bad, because the fit person would not do that.

• You will no longer skip the gym because you don’t feel like it, because the fit person does not do that.

• You will no longer eat whatever is given to you at the function, because the fit person would not do that.

• You will do what the fit person would do. Because in your mind, your identity has leapt towards becoming them.

When you change how you see yourself, you change how you act and the treatment you will accept from yourself and others.

When you start to see yourself as the fit person, you start to act more like the fit person, and those actions start to stack up to actually becoming them. By changing who you identify as, you create the conditions for you to become this new person. When you do this consistently, people adjust to you as this new version of yourself. The world starts to see you as them, and you see yourself more and more as them. You start to literally become this person externally that you first gave yourself permission to be internally. Do you see?

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We shift our outer reality by changing our inner reality

This is how ‘inner work’ works. You clean up your inner world. Take out the trash. Release old beliefs that are keeping you stuck. Face what you are avoiding or in denial of. Own the bad habits you want to break. Claim desires you haven’t yet let become conscious. Unravel patterns you need to admit are no longer working for you. Let go of relationships that drain you. Let yourself yearn for the ones that you actually want to be in. Acknowledge your resentment for work that drains you. Own the magnificence and magnitude of your own potential. And slowly become the person on the other side of all of these acts, stepping into greatness and freedom, by first believing you deserve it.

When you change how you see yourself, your behaviour changes.

When you change what you believe you deserve, you create the opportunity for you to actually become the person with the aligned, meaningful work, the hot, kind, intelligent romantic partner, the fit body, the refined attention span, the consistent writing practice, the strong friendships, the healthy boundaries, the self-respect, the whatever-it-is-that-you-uniquely-want. If you want to be a certain way or have a certain thing that you do not yet have, ask yourself: why aren’t you letting yourself have it?

You change who you are by:

First: admitting who you want to be (i.e. admitting the identity you want to step into).

Second: acknowledging what you are doing or not doing that is keeping you from becoming this evolved version of yourself.

And third: taking seriously your responsibility to change your behaviour and self-image, and to act in alignment with who you want to become.

When you do these things, the world responds to you differently. It gives you more of what you want, because you know how to ask for it, reach out for it, take it, and receive it when it is given to you. (And because you know how to say no to what you do not want.)

“You attract what you are” is just another way of saying that your outer world will start to reflect your inner world if you have done the work to clean up what no longer belongs there. Clean up your psyche, and your life will start to reflect that cleanliness and clarity.

Simple rules of manifestation to remember:

1. If you don’t know what you want, the world does not know what to give you.

2. When you state or ask for what you want, the world knows what to give you.

3. The world cannot always give you what you want, but at least when it can, it will likely try.

4. When it does try, willingly receive; do not deny your blessings.

5. When what you want is in front of you but has not been offered to you yet, ask for it. Make it clear that you want it.

6. If you are falling into old patterns that do not align with who you want to become, reflect on what you still believe about yourself that is allowing you to act this way. Clean up this misalignment internally, then re-align towards what you believe you deserve.

7. Take action that brings you closer to what you want. Act like you are the person you are trying to become.

8. Practice seeing yourself as the person you are trying to become. Practice experiencing the feelings (literally close your eyes & fill your body with the feelings) you expect to have when you get what you want / you make the changes you are trying to make.

9. When you get what you want, humbly accept. Do not be overly surprised. Do not reject it. Do not listen to thoughts that say you are not yet worthy of what you are receiving (you receiving it is proof you are worthy!)

10. Self-doubt lowers your status & self-image internally, and will keep you stuck. Self-belief is how you ascend. Notice thoughts of doubt, and release them. Do not attach to or identify with them.

11. Focus on expanding thoughts associated with self-belief, write them down, practice thinking them, and start to believe them.

To manifest anything, you need to perceive yourself as worthy of what you want. This is how it all starts to find you, and how you start to find it: when you change what you believe you deserve, you change what can belong to you.

Without that internal calibration of believing you genuinely deserve it, you will find ways to avoid obtaining what you want that puzzle even you.

How to get anything you want:

In short: if your outer world does not look the way you want it to, turn inwards and ask yourself: what do I believe I deserve? If you don’t like what you find there, clean up your inner world, and show up to your outer world with a new self-image that attracts only what you genuinely want.

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What I’m manifesting in 2026: Writing for external publications.

If you can connect me with someone at one of the publications below, reach out to me here, on X, or by email. Thank you.

Publications I want to write for (not an exhaustive list):

WSJ, GQ, Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Vox, Elle, Wired, the NY times, NY Post, The New Yorker, NY Magazine, Psychology Today, Palladium, The SF Chronicle, The Atlantic, The Spectator.

Happy new year! What are you manifesting? What other cosmic interior phenomena do you want to see explained? Tell me below, and let me know what you absorbed from this essay that you’ll take into the new year.

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Related essays of mine you will enjoy: you’re allowed to want a beautiful life, how good will you let it get, comfort, on self-trust, on slowness, taste and living well

You can learn more about my work, and access the bonus resources I’ve created for you on my website, like my free daily journalling guide. You can also find me on TikTok and X for daily insights on how we can align ourselves, reconnect to our intuition and embody the lives we want to create.

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For a long time without realizing it, most of my winter rituals have been about returning to the pace of reality by making things with my hands. It is a time where I start knitting again, baking more, and adorning my space much more thoughtfully and carefully than I seem to have the mental spaciousness to do in the summer. It isn’t something I am forcing myself to do, or even consciously wanting to do. It is just something that I do. Naturally. And lately I’ve found myself reflecting on why.

The winter, a season which gets an unfairly harsh reputation in my view, is a time where we are meant to slow down, retreat inwards, and let whatever is no longer vibrant and alive die off in our lives. It is a time where we have full permission to tend to ourselves. To prioritize the stewardship of our inner worlds, because there isn’t nearly as much happening in our outer worlds (largely because it is too cold to make anything happen!)

This spaciousness gives us permission to turn back to the raw materials of our lives, which often lay a little messy and unkempt after the consecutive seasons of doing and extroversion we are now landing from. Winter, in its harshness and persistent cold that send you back inside, gets to be this divine season of care for self. It is a season of slowness, a time where an ideal day might be simply staying inside and baking cinnamon rolls, or preparing a loaf of bread, or knitting a scarf, or rearranging all the furniture in your home, or reorganizing your book collection, or doing your end of year planning and reflecting, or whatever else might return you to the frequency and pace of your own internal life, instead of distracting you with what is happening outside of yourself.

Although it makes rational sense that I feel more called to do things like baking and knitting when the air gets cooler and we crave more warmth and coziness, I also think there is a symbolism in the pace these activities invite me to move at that aligns so seamlessly with this season.

If I decide to make a loaf of bread, I am also committing to babysitting this pile of dough for about four to five hours to carry the process to completion. If I want to make a scarf, it might be weeks of putting a little bit of time into it each day before I have a tangible creation I can use. This is, I think, a slightly lost art in our world of never-ending speed and acceleration. The pace that we need to move at to make things with our hands is humbling. It is a reminder that it takes time to create things. And that the most meaningful creations often were often stitched together with deep, intentional love and energy.

And that, when someone goes out of their way to make something of substance and conscious effort, you can feel the infusion of care devoted to it.

Winter gets to be this beautiful time of regulating back to these slower, softer, more reality-based speeds that it takes to make things like this. It is easy to spend winter on your devices, getting swallowed into more stimulus and chaos, while your inner self withers. But if you take the time this season to return to the things that ground you—whatever those practices are—it can be harnessed as a time to recharge and recalibrate, to return to what truly matters to us and align ourselves before the seasons of expression and action come again. Not every moment needs to be one rich with doing and speed and haste and colour. Embracing this season of pause, of death, of inwards time, is a wonderful reminder to practice letting things simply be. It is a time of taking on longer-term, more patient projects that invite you to return to what matters most to you, at a pace that lets you devote yourself to what you are doing wholeheartedly. There is no rush in the winter; that is its medicine.

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Don’t let winter be a season you just white knuckle through, numbing this slower time with withdrawal and avoidance. Sink into it. Allow the slower pace to seep into you. Make things with your hands; let this remind you of the time it takes for change to unfold in reality. Place your attention on what you want to let go of, and simply let. it. go.

This is a time to tend to and polish yourself, preparing your energy for the year ahead. Don’t resist the season’s medicine—drink it up! (Best consumed as hot chocolate paired with cold toes after skating.)

As a little winter treat for all the reading I know you will be doing this season, enjoy 40% off of annual paid subscriptions for the month of December:

DECEMBER DISCOUNT: UPGRADE @ 40% OFF

If you want to use this inwards time to distill where your inner wisdom is orienting you, and align your work with your intuition to create a life that feels effortless, generative and aligned—apply to work with me 1:1.

related essays you might enjoy: an ode to winter, slow down, embrace the exhale, one thing at a time

You are welcome to share this post with winter-appreciators, or those you wish to convert to winter-appreciators who need this reminder:

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I wrote this essay very intuitively right after posting this tweet. I was planning to edit and share it this morning, and woke up to see the tweet had been liked by over 20,000 people! I guess this reminder was really needed in the collective. Sending you all the soft, relaxed feeling that follows a cozy, winter afternoon spent creating something slowly :)

Reminder: if you will be in SF on Saturday (tomorrow), sign up here to join the meet up I am hosting. It will be fun and cozy. Sending location out today!

Sometimes a thing demands to be felt before it is fully known. This essay is about something I have known for a very long time, but only recently came to capital-K-Know. This insight continues to reveal itself, in new and dimensional ways, imploring me to write this piece and say exactly what I am coming to know, or be forced to learn this lesson in new and painful ways. So alas, allow me to tell you about a lesson I thought I knew, but have only recently come to viscerally understand.

What is this dreamy new knowledge I have downloaded into my flesh, you may ask?

Well, dear reader, it is the importance of simply taking care of yourself.

what do you do when you return from the void?

A few weeks ago, I got back from a nearly month-long trip, and found myself with 3 to 4 days of mostly unstructured time, entirely to myself. Instead of rushing to get back into routine, I found myself approaching this re-adjustment period differently. I noticed there was no rush. And that no one needed me all that badly! I noticed that if I would just listen, I would see that I needed quite a lot from myself before I was ready to turn towards the world, offering up my attention and energy somewhat recklessly to others, before recalibrating to my own grounded state first.

Instead of thrusting myself at the requests that life makes of you when you signal to others that you are highly available, I decided to drag my residual-heightened-presence-from-being-away on a little longer. Quietly returning to my routines and rhythms without announcing myself to the world. This became an exercise in noticing what I needed and wanted, in the absence of external influence. I was waking up early, lighting candles before turning on the lights, getting ready slowly, showering in candlelight, lathering myself with body oil, dry brushing my limbs, dressing myself carefully, slowly, putting on layers and jewelry and accessories just for fun… all very Jasmine-in-the-header-image-coded. I was polishing and tending to my energy before stepping out into the world. The way that I felt when I finally left my abode and entered the chaos that lies outside of it was a feeling of having taken care of myself. This sense that I had sewed myself up, knit my energy together and was prepared to bring this bubble of well-being that I had created into the world without it being so permeable to the demands and expectations outside of myself.

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aesthetics vs. reality: self-care edition

Some of what we are nudged towards doing — aesthetic acts of ‘self care’ — do point you in the right direction, but until there is an authentic vector within yourself, orienting you towards taking care of yourself for reasons that stem from within you (i.e. until the acts are coming from your heart and not your head)… the true importance of tending to yourself before you turn to the world will not click.

Because true acts of self-care need to be an actual reflection of your priorities for them to work. Not something you are doing because you think you should, or because it is chic to do so, or because an influencer told you this is how you get hot and become successful.

But because it is a principle of yours to take care of yourself.

Taking care of yourself isn’t self-absorbed or self-centered. It is how you give your best to the world. How you discover what you can uniquely contribute.

dysregulation is a form of avoidance

With my energy centered, I can also see the subtle ways that I will keep myself dysregulated and ungrounded when I haven’t tended to self, by continuing to offer myself up to others’ needs. That is the generous perspective. The less flattering one is that I keep myself stimulated and feel useful by paying attention to others’ problems and stories instead of focusing on resolving and releasing my own.

Whenever I find myself talking too much about my friends’ lives, scheming and solving for other people instead of facing the raw materials of my own life, I now know that I am avoiding something. This pattern is so subtle, so deeply practiced and unconscious, that only with this ‘veil’ recently lifted on my behaviour after several weeks away making the space for many of my relational dynamics to dissolve and patiently wait to be resurrected, was I able to see this clearly.

watching the ego at work

As I returned home, a remarkable thing happened. I watched myself architect all of the suffering I had felt like I ‘escaped’ from when I had been away. One by one, I recreated every pattern I claimed to resent. Then I would claim I was trapped, internally blaming others for putting me inside of this cage. A cage that I not only had the keys to, but had constructed myself! And implicit in my constructing the cage, I also had the disassembly map if I wished to use it. It was humbling to realize that I was responsible for the conditions in my life that I claimed to resent.

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visceral awakenings

I cannot overstate how much this realization evoked a felt sense of awakening. One I’m not sure words entirely do justice to. It felt like I could truly step outside of myself and observe how I was acting in a way that created these circumstances I did not enjoy being in. I was no longer trapped behind by my eyes, but patiently and thoughtfully noticing my actions from beyond them.

This pattern I was now seeing so clearly had previously felt so challenging that it would occasionally drive me to consider leaving my environment entirely… convinced that if I did, somehow everything would be fixed. But even in my heart of hearts, I knew that my environment was not the problem, that I would inevitably recreate the dynamics I felt plagued by elsewhere. I knew I needed to dissolve these patterns at the root, or chase internal peace externally in futility, demonizing every beautiful place I love in the process… believing it was the perpetrator of my suffering, while I was the one pulling the strings behind the scenes of what I claimed to be a victim of.

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time warps when you’re taking care of yourself

When you are truly calibrated (not performatively taking care of yourself, but actually taking care of yourself in a way that reflects your genuine needs and desires)—time starts to feel like it is emerging from you, instead of passing by you, slipping through your fingers elusively, impossible to grasp.

When you are genuinely taking care of yourself, you can do hours of work in minutes. Days of work in hours. You can spend a whole day with a challenging friend, and find that the time with them passes effortlessly, full of laughter and joy. Because you can be genuinely present. Because you are not subtly, unconsciously trying to escape. Because you have taken care of yourself. Which lets you show up for them from a genuine place of wholeness.

When you have truly tended to yourself, the things you typically have to ‘exert’ yourself to do or make happen start to feel easy… and you realize that those things only feel hard when you are NOT taken care of, when you are forcing yourself towards something, even though it feels wrong.

Taking care of yourself should feel inconvenient to your obligations and the demands on you from the outside world. Because those things are not responsible for prioritizing you! Everyone is going to ask of you what they need from you (such is our nature), and you need to know when to prioritize yourself, even if it is painful, inconvenient, or uncomfortable. That is your responsibility. That is how you show up authentically. That is how you protect your precious, one-of-a-kind energy.

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And yes, you can do this and still be an amazing friend, lover, sister, daughter, son, brother, partner, grandchild, employee, leader, founder, artist, whatever role you are engaged in. In fact, you can be a much better version of all of those things when you have genuinely tended to yourself.

try to actually feel these words, not just read them

I know this may sound like just words; a cliché you’ve heard a thousand times. ‘Put on your oxygen mask first’. ‘Take care of yourself before you take care of others.’ But I am here to tell you, after having this viscerally click, that all of these phrases now ring with a certain lucidity and honesty that is almost comically undeniable to me. Like: of course we cannot be good agents for others in the world when we have not taken care of ourselves! Because our energy is uncalibrated! We are not a grounded tool of attention and care, because we haven’t tuned our own instruments. We are messy, energy-leaking, uncared-for-balls-of-consciousness, oozing our un-looked-at needs and desires out onto others ways we cannot even recognize. Because we are not genuinely grounded and centred when we have not tended to ourselves. And if this continues, our un-cared-for selves start to wither, becoming harder to reach, reducing our glow and radiance, distancing ourselves from our own creativity, intuition, and magic.

It is all just one cycle of over-extending, then blaming, then resenting self/other UNTIL you remember to take care of yourself. And then you’re like ohhhh that is all I needed. To say no until I felt well and whole enough to turn back outwards and pour from a full cup.

What used to feel frictional may now feel easy

When you have taken care of yourself, what once felt hard, tense, frictional, or abrasive suddenly begins to feel effortless. Simple things, like cleaning, ordering things you’re out of, emptying a closet, doing life admin, arranging and planning things for the future, getting to the long list of errands that keep compounding in adult life when we are not well-cared-for… All of this suddenly starts to feel easy, frictionless, and obvious to do.

develop your own language of self-care

When you truly integrate this insight into your life and understand that self-care isn’t some performative aesthetic to signal outwards, but a ritual that will be completely unique to you, depending on what you need and feel nourished by… Everything starts to shift.

Yes: it may involve dry-brushing, and saunas, and face masks, and red light or whatever the current trend is. But it might also be much simpler than that. You might just need to slow down a bit. Literally: walk and move slower. Take your time. Arrive early to things. You might need to burn extra energy through exercise to keep you grounded. You might need to bake, to clean your home, to not talk to anyone for two days as you do nothing at all. It might be all or none or some of those things. Only you can figure the ‘what’ of your unique needs by actually listening to yourself.

If you need ideas, I’ve written a piece about what returns me home to myself, which includes some of my favourite rituals that help me cultivate my own energy when I feel depleted. But I really encourage you to make your own list and practice it! It is so grounding to know and reach for what returns you home to yourself.

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If you want guidance in understanding what feels off and how you can recalibrate to a place of grounded, nourished, radiant, effortless flow, DM me with a one-sentence-version of how you wish to feel differently right now.

related essays you may enjoy: embrace the exhale, slow down, one thing at a time, on slowness, taste and living well,

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One of the most pleasant and surprising elements about pivoting my entire life to be a reflection of what it is that I actually want to do is how easy things are now that used to look like work. When I was still in a place that I didn’t want to be, my body/mind/spirit writhing against the cage I was trying to shove myself into and lock the door on, even the smallest, ‘easiest’ tasks ended up feeling super frictional and laborious. Things that should have taken no effort at all felt so hard that they would sometimes make me feel physically sick to do.

I have many thoughts about the state of modern well-being (or lack thereof) and the conditions that drive people to seek help, support, and sometimes even numbing agents to be able to become more tolerant of their internal state. And while these tools may sometimes be the correct things to reach for, I think that there are some much easier, more low-hanging-fruit ways to treat ourselves when we do not feel Good. I think our lives get dark and our bodies start to shut down when we put ourselves in situations we don’t want to be in, repeatedly.

For me, towards the end of working the job I was working before leaning completely into writing, self-trust and crafting my own path from scratch, I remember feeling so nauseous and drained I could barely focus at the office. And I was barely even doing anything! It was not like I was over-working myself or burning myself out in any kind of obvious/visceral sense; it was simply that I no longer wanted to be doing what I was doing. I felt called to something else, and my body was sending me increasingly loud signals that this was the case. It was asking: will you listen? Will you change where you are?

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As soon as I listened to these signals (which did take a while!) all of these symptoms went away, and I started feeling more alive again. I literally started feeling more sentient. Colours looked brighter. Life got more vivid. I became more sensitive. That one is big, actually. Sensitivity. As soon as the full breadth of my sensitivity came back online, it was obvious why I was not feeling it before: of course, I would eventually numb myself out if what I was experiencing was so misaligned that I could barely sit through a day of my life. Imagine doing that for years! Decades! Herein, you have much of the standard experience of modern life.

Note: I want to once again emphasize that there was nothing aesthetically ‘wrong’ with my life. In fact, I was practically living the ‘dream’. A great job, good work-life balance, prestige/status/desirable life path, solid trajectory to financial security, etc. But it did not feel right to me. And as much as I wanted it to (because it would have been so easy and simple if it did!) I could not convince myself out of the somatic reality that it was just not. right. for. me.

It does not need to be this way, though. There is a way to actually notice when something feels wrong and listen to it, instead of blunting it with whatever powerful, emotionally overwhelming stimulus is most convenient and easy to access. Of course you would not want to live in a reality every day that your whole body and being is resisting. Of course the natural thing would be to do whatever you can to not feel it. Of course that would result in poor well-being because when you numb out the bad you can no longer experience the good!!!

denying your intuition = living in a lie

I’ve written about how the only shortcuts to life that I am genuinely concerned with are trusting yourself before it ‘makes sense’, and telling the truth. Staying in a life where you need to performatively participate snd appear happy and engaged when ultimately you are neither, is a way of lying. To yourself and to the world. Daily.

If you want a radically alive and abundant life, the only real way to get that is to stop lying to yourself, and begin acting on what feels most intuitively aligned… You don’t know the life you are meant to have until you are willing to disappoint others, break whatever mold has been imposed on you, and become who you genuinely are. Without effort, force, or conditioning.

There is something inside of you that is fighting to get out; everyone has it. The inner voice that is nudging them towards what is genuinely true to them. So many of us have gotten so good at muting it, at beating it out of ourselves and telling it to sssshhhhh that we do not even recognize it anymore.

But there are ways to return home to yourself, to develop a practice of listening, to do what you want even when others expect you to do something else. There is a way to attune yourself again to your inner voice. Even if it has been a very long time since you were fused with it.

But it requires a willingness to feel all of the things you numbed out along the way. Which can be painful! But worth it, because in feeling them, you will become unburdened by them, free to be present, free to listen to yourself.

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I feel so strongly about liberating people to be on their path. On the path their intuition is nudging them towards, on the path that would maximally harness exactly who they are and actualize what their gifts are trying to take them towards. I do feel we all have a path, an organic one, an effortless one, that is trying to rise up and push itself out of us and into the world, naturally, playfully, effortlessly. A path where the hard stuff feels easy, what looks ‘impressive’ to others feels like a privilege to do yourself, and where there is no need at all to cultivate any numbness inside of you. A path where you are willing to feel all the things, because they are mostly positive! And when they aren’t, you have a supportive, aligned structure in your life to catch you and hold you through what is hard. We all have access to that life, that path, that unfolding, if we wish to reach out and grab it. Or more accurately: allow it to happen by simply tuning in, and listening to our intuition whispering to us.

I’m currently taking on 1-2 clients to work with 1:1. My coaching methodology helps you do exactly what I describe in this essay: tune out the noise of your conditioning, environment, and any false narratives you are still attached to, and listen to yourself confidently and freely. Ideally, you are reaching out to me if you have a fairly high degree of agency/autonomy in your life or are trending towards it. You either own/operate your own business, are working towards that, or are fairly advanced in your career in a way that allows a strong degree of freedom to be exercised in your life. You feel like you’ve done ‘everything right’ and should be satisfied, but feel called to something more. You want to know what a fully aligned, free and effortless life could feel and look like for you. Together, we will extract and enact the signals you are getting from yourself and begin shaping your life in the image of your intuition in a way that feels safe, steady, abundant, and generative. Send me a DM with a sentence on how you’d like to feel after working together if this resonates with you.

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related essays you may enjoy: a return to soul, on self-trust, on slowness, taste and living well, shrinking hurts, unblock your mind

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Lying is dysregulating. That would be the summary of my most recent experiences of making a conscious effort to tell the truth. Any time I find myself holding something in that I really want to say, agreeing with something I don’t actually agree with (or even just letting something float by me that I adamantly disagree with without saying something), my heart rate spikes, my body starts to shake, and I feel a little bit nauseous.

These are my tells that I am telling (or living in) a lie. When I tell the truth—even if I do it imperfectly, but simply honour the effort to tell the truth—I find it to be a radically liberating experience. It’s like this fiery ball of energy that is building up inside of me, begging to be released, finally gets to be free.

Like a dragon recoiling softly into itself after releasing a bellowing stream of flames, releasing the truth I’m holding onto seems to instantly ignite a wave of calm that rushes over me. After expressing myself, I feel light again. Clear. Calm. Regulated. Ready to observe what emerges without the impulse to extinguish it.

And when I don’t tell the truth, it’s like this uncomfortable suffocation of flames occurs internally that dissolves into soot and smoke and hot coals, eroding me from within. All of this discomfort and dysregulation can be avoided, I’ve learned, by simply letting the flame of truth come through me without suppressing it. Using it as fuel. Speaking without censoring myself to optimize for what others want to hear vs. what I want to say.

move slower, tell the truth

I used to wonder how some of the most disagreeable, truth-telling people I know also seemed the most calm and regulated. How do they stay so grounded when they are causing energetic rifts to those around them?

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So many insights I once thought in my mind have now landed in my body. People tend to critique the idea of trying to ‘figure things out’ in the mind when they just need to be ‘felt in the body.’ While that is valid, I do think there is something frictionless that happens when you’ve thought about something for a while, and it finally does click in your body. It lands smoothly, because you have laid out the mental terrain to integrate it with ease.

For example, today I was doing a lot of writing and tweeting, practicing saying what I mean without inhibition. I then went to yoga, and felt a bit frantic and high energy, still charged with the energy of all of the ideas I had been stewing on and shooting out into the world. But over the course of the class, the pace of my mind slowed, and eventually stopped, and I could just focus on my breath, be in my body. I started feeling much better, my energy slower, softer, more tender, because these insights I had been accessing in the mind were finally being integrated. They just landed, quietly, softly, without announcing themselves. It was as though I did not need to think about them anymore, because they had arrived. I had arrived. To the place where I now knew these things, viscerally. A place I didn’t need to keep re-learning them from, and investigating them, and finding better words to describe them, and trying to see them from new angles. I just felt them now. They felt obvious and simple. They had woven their way into me. They were part of me.

One of those insights was about my name, Isabel. I thought about how my parents had no real reason to name me Isabel except that they just loved the name. Not only did they love the name, but they felt incredible strongly about it (you should see my dad, in his full embodied emphasis explaining just how much he loved my name.) They immediately knew it would be mine. There was no thought, just knowing. In the end it wouldn’t be so easy to give me this name, though. They faced some resistance with it.

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For one of the first times in my life, I was having trouble sleeping and consistent nightmares for about a week. This is extremely unusual for me. I’ve always been blessed with easeful sleeps and rather pleasant dreams. Any time my dreams turn on me, it is usually a sign I need to face something I have been avoiding in my life.

The emotions I would wake up with were so intense that my first instinct was typically to reach for my phone, and scroll away whatever intensity was bubbling up inside of me. This would eventually turn into a little Pavlovian cue, where any time I felt off, I would reach for my adult pacifier next to me, the screen that would numb out whatever deep, dark emotion (or even the shallow, mildly unpleasant ones) that could be rising up in me, asking to be looked at.

As I was falling asleep, one of the nagging thoughts that would keep me up was my own awareness of the unsustainable nature with which I was using my phone. And how it was most definitely blocking me from figuring out what was keeping me up and infecting my consciousness at night.

This loop ceased with one especially tough night where it was clear to me that something needed to change. I spent the next day journalling, trying to tease out the emotional block I had been avoiding. With one simple, deep journal session—where my phone was not on-site, though my hand still found itself searching for it like a phantom limb I had grown accustomed to leaning on when I didn’t feel like being in the moment I was in—I was able to piece together what this block was, and move through it. One simple journal session was all it took to solve several consecutive nights of horrible sleep.

It really made me think: what the fuck are these things doing to our consciousness?

Since this nightmare-dense episode, I’ve had all the addictive apps on my phone blocked, and my phone mostly off my person and out of site. The waves of emotion that have come up and forced themselves into my awareness, rolling through me like waves, crashing onto the shore of my mind without the insulating safety blanket of my phone to orient me away from them, has been quite humbling.

The emotions I am processing do not always explain themselves to me; they do not always tell me what they represent or what they have arisen from or as a result of. But they do demand to be processed. They do demand to be felt. And as a dutiful steward of my consciousness, I have been feeling them. Fully. And it has left me truly humbled. Humbled by the amount that there is in me to feel when I am not pulling myself into a portal of distraction. A portal that reliably regulates me to any experience other than the one I’m having in that moment.

screens and dysregulation

Many people rightfully argue that screens can be used for your own good. Consume information you actually like! Learn about things you’re interested in! Read fun and interesting substack essays ;)! Take beautiful photos of your beautiful friends! Yes! All wonderful activities worth indulging in.

But these screens, ever so subtly, can become a very convenient tool of emotional numbing, dysregulation, and systemic distraction that takes us off our path and away from the opportunity to receive our inner signals. They are unbelievably effective and instantaneous portals into endless experiences that do not belong to us. Diverting us away from the natural course of our emotional flow, enabling us to postpone the inevitable but uncomfortable act of feeling our own (sometimes unpleasant!) feelings.

If you want to work with me 1:1 to gain clarity, face your blocks, identify your patterns and begin acting in seamless alignment with your values, apply here.

I know we all know this, but when you go through such a stark phase as I just have of using the emotional pacifier and then abandoning it, the contrast of what it is like to feel your emotions as they come up without a tool to divert your attention away vs. what it is like to persistently avoid them really is rather revelatory.

It made me wonder: what are the implications of most humans having done this for years now, with no end in sight unless you consciously opt out of it? They certainly can’t be good! It’s why we’re all yelling loudly into the void about things we have never personally experienced. Telling the stories of people we have never met. Commenting on the politics of places we have never been to or lived in, assuming we are the arbiters of what everyone else should say, think and do on those matters.

The internet has made everyone into an authority on some situation happening far away from their lives, and pretty well numb to what is actually happening right in front of them.

There was an interesting reflection I wrote in my notebook after one particularly distracting phone use episode, where I started taking myself down a mental path of this other person’s life and all the little decisions they had made that I would have hypothetically done differently… until I realized I had spent the better part of an hour thinking about someone’s life who I’ll never even speak to, and thought: what am I even doing here? The honest answer: distracting myself from the uncertainty in my own life, by playing God in someone else’s life. Someone’s life who not only am I not God in, but where I have literally no power to influence anything at all.

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And herein lies the central vice of the screens, of social media, of the never-ending portals of distraction, into worlds that are not ours.

The Internet takes us away from real life.

Viciously, instantaneously, unconsciously. It takes us away from what we can control, into a massive sea of uncontrollable forces that lie far beyond us, beyond our direct circle, beyond anything our actions can tangibly, immediately impact. And it convinces us that we are somehow being responsible or righteous or noble for having informed ourselves about these stories that involve people we’ll never meet. When often all we are doing is shrugging off the responsibilities we have in our own life, to play God somewhere else. To tell everyone what we know best about. Or, to simply distract ourselves by stifling our own awareness with the stimulus of what is happening elsewhere so intensely that the world on the screen starts to feel more real than the one our feet are planted in.

how to have Good ideas

If you are someone who values truth, who values having your own ideas, who values your creative essence and power — there probably is not a more important relationship in your life than the one between you and your phone. Without intentional regulation, the screens rob you of your own creative power and the curiosity that can animate your own life. This essay is titled you have novel ideas by being present in your own life, because the ideas you have (and passionately espouse) from scrolling on the internet, are most often a reformulation of someone else’s ideas that they have made you a vessel for.

But if you want to be your own vessel, if you want to harness your own creative power for your own vision of what the world could / should be, then you have to limit the time you spend on these highly dysregulating devices and sit (or stand, or walk, or run, or swim, or dance, or do anything with your body really) presently in your own life. That is where your mind and your creative center become most active. That is where your emotions get to genuinely teach you. And that is where you tap into the fullness of your experience being a human, here on earth, breathing the air in front of you, living inside of the real world and outside of the little glowing rectangle that you are reading this off of.

Stop over-consuming other people’s ideas and start noticing and acting on your own with my online course: Creative Liberation.

So, let this be your cue. Stand up. Comment what you are about to DO in your real, human, offline life. Beyond this 2D glowing surface. Tell us how you are going to go feel alive. And let us feed off of each other’s willingness to exist, to think, to imagine, to live, to move, to ask, to feel, and to be present in our lives. To dream up our own ideas and have the strength, focus and will to actually act on them. To affect change in places where we have the capacity to do so. To talk about what we know and have experienced directly, instead of what we heard someone say on The Internet.

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Let us all begin to have our own thoughts, feel our own emotions, and start genuinely living our own lives, drawing upon the materials of our environment. And through that process—of paying attention to what is right in front of us—I sense we will find ourselves feeling more inspired, grounded, satisfied and calm than any time we’ve picked up these devices to try and turn away from what we were feeling.

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My 6-Part Self-Expression Course: Learn how to use this magical glowing screen to stop over-consuming content and start creating your own. My online course, Creative Liberation, teaches you how to harness your natural gifts and unique intelligence to create what only you can share with the world. Enroll here.

related essays: my phone is making me dumb, reclaim your attention, what brings me home to myself, just show up, unblock your mind

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I’m hosting an in-person meet up in Europe!

I will be travelling to Europe in October, and am planning to do an in-person meet up in either Paris or Lisbon for my readers. If you’ll be close by and want to join, share your info here, and I’ll send you more details.

Time stamps & themes discussed:

0:45 — staying grounded while sharing on the internet

1:45 — wanting to see and read more hopeful books

5:20 — being at the eye of an internet storm

7:38 — the world I want to live in

9:05 — speaking as potently as you can when trying to share your message

11:57 — motherhood as the greatest creative act

21:18 — the ‘larry ellison paradox’ (also the richest man in the world, as of yesterday!), or: why super successful people often struggle with love

If you enjoyed this episode and want my guidance navigating the terrain of your inner world to achieve what you want while cultivating balance, connection and alignment, apply to work with me 1:1.

1:1 COACHING APPLICATION

Tell me how you liked this format or leave a question for my next Q&A episode in the comments below or at this anonymous link.

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My next podcast episode will dive into the background of my personal journey leaving the default path and what I learned about how to find yourself and create a life that is true to you after leaping into the void.

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Act on your ideas, self-express freely

To unearth your creative gifts and learn how to get out of your own way and begin sharing freely on the internet, enroll in Creative Liberation, my 6-week virtual course. My distilled insights on creativity, self-expression, introspection and cultivating a lasting, effortless creative practice are captured there, in a way that weaves them intentionally into your life.

My Twitter. My TikTok. My Website. My Free Journalling Guide. My 1-1 work.

If you liked this, you may also enjoy episode 001, or my Countryside Q&A.

related essays: let yourself be loved, find novelty through commitment, commitment is the only secret knowledge, want what you have

I love being in a big, sweeping abode that does not belong to me. In this particular case, I am writing from a friend’s uncle’s cottage—a perfect degree of familiarity and anonymity to create this sweet, blissful sense of intrigue. The walls are adorned with sweeping stacks of books. Rugs of bright colours and tribal patterns lay abundantly on the ground. Delicate pieces of china — tea cups, saucers — are stacked gracefully in the cabinets in the kitchen. The style is unique, eclectic and a touch eerie. There is a lack of cohesiveness that intrigues me. Something tells me that this person picked out exactly what he liked, and paid no attention to what others would think of it.

It is his home after all… what else is there to do?

I am comforted somehow by how many books are present here. His book collection is wide-ranging. Mystery fiction. George Orwell. Old poetry. Classical art. Learning Italian. Impressionists. I have always loved getting to know someone through the books on their walls. Books always make me feel safe. Held by knowledge and ideas, I feel at home. I have always thought that maybe I was a librarian in a past life. Books enchant me; I love to index them, to know what they are about, who they could speak to, what is inside them. I like knowing what others like to read, what book to recommend to someone that would tickle them perfectly in the moment they are in. You can learn a lot about someone by knowing what books catch their eye, what they value on those pages that exist between the bindings. Books show us who people are. I’m finally starting to think I could write one of my own.

I read a book this year that “changed my brain chemistry” as they say. I wrote about it here. The gist of that post is that this was the first novel where I felt genuinely seen by an author. I could feel that her mind and mine worked similarly, non-linearly. That she had managed to wrangle unlimited ideas and lines of thinking into a solid story with clear form. A task that, with a mind like mine, I can only imagine how much patience, discipline and devotion the feat might have taken. I was comforted to hear that it took her 7 years to write this book. When I read it, I could feel how deep she had gone into her own inner world to access these stories.

My problem with so many of the books published today is that they feel like they were created as soon as they were conceived. What I loved about Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein is that she let the story ripen to its juiciest possible point — then she completed it. That kind of patience and commitment takes time! Devotion! Stillness!

As I sit up here, in this cozy cave of a cottage, I can finally see myself being quiet and still enough to write a book. To stay with the process long enough to finish it.

Stowing oneself away to Make The Thing

The other day, deep in my fantasies, I tweeted that I would like to write my book from here:

A few days later, I found myself writing at the table you saw in the header image of this essay, which felt about as close as I could have come to this picture above with no effort at all. It makes me wonder how much you can pull your desires towards you by simply naming and knowing what you want.

When I close my eyes and tune into the vision, I can really see it. This life of thinking and writing about a story beyond the realm of everyday reality. I can see the days roll by: waking up early, gently finding my way towards the coffee maker, the kitchen, the couch for some reading, all before stationing myself on a chair like this, in front of a desk like this, and letting my imagination begin to unfurl on the page.

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It is funny because even writing this now feels a lot less “taxing” than sitting down to write in the city normally does. Usually, I’ve got all these different attention hooks snagging my attention, tugging me away from the still, easeful place inside me that allows me to write work I feel genuinely proud of.

seasons of Socializing, seasons of Solitude

I’ve been feeling more than ever, especially as the season changes, that what I need is to be alone — very alone and very undisturbed by my environment. Maybe that is always how I feel by the end of summer, but this time it feels especially ripe.

I can sense that when I let my internal momentum build up and expand into whatever creative expression is trying to poke through, I tap into things I otherwise did not think were possible and did not “know” were coming. That’s the interesting thing about writing; you are often discovering these ideas at the same time as me. I learn what I think by doing this. I am not always sure what will come out; I only “get” to discover if I fully surrender and allow myself to be as truly alone and focused as possible.

Creation isn’t just about “time in” — it’s about where you are during that time

It always amused me when I told people I quit my job to focus on writing, how they would often ask why I couldn’t have just done that on the “evenings and weekends.”

The missing piece in that question, of course, is where good work actually comes from. Creation is not just about time in; it is about being clear and humble enough to be able to write from a true, raw place. It takes more than just time to create something you can be proud of—something that might last years, or even decades… it takes pretty much everything you’ve got.

Writing has never just been about forcing myself to spend hours with pen to paper. That isn’t interesting to me — and it’s certainly not where my best ideas come from.

The kind of thinking I do now required years of scooping out conditioning and thoughts that were not my own, so I could finally think clearly enough to hear my own inner voice.That process took not only time, but SPACE, too. That space was more important than any amount of time I put into the process. And you certainly could do it in ways that are more humble and cautious than clearing out pretty much all the current structures in your life to make the space for your ideas. But that is what worked for me. Making that space is what allowed the ideas that were emerging to fully ripen and be expressed.

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No one could have “given” me the answers, or showed me the way, or told me where to look. I needed to make that space and retreat into myself to discover them.

I sense the same sort of “emptying” that I did to begin my process of writing is needed for me to write this book. It again will not just be about “time put into the process” — it will be about space made for it to unfold organically.

It will be about saying no, protecting my space and energy, retreating into places like this cabin, not just physically but energetically, too. I am a strong believer that to create something that has never existed before, something that goes deeper than most creations, something you can feel genuinely proud of, you are going to have to be pretty disagreeable, protective and selective with how you spend your time. You have to become, dare I say it, a little more self-centered to live in complete alignment with your own inner compass, to honour what you need above what others want from you. Otherwise, those ideas stay buried inside of you, unseen and unknown to the world—but more importantly: eternally invisible to you. Unless you make the space for them to come through.

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Time stamps and questions discussed:

2:42 — Q1: how to stay magnetic, calm and centered amidst chaos?

11:00 — Q2: Dating advice for women?

18:32 — Q3: Advice on leaving the default path and pursuing a life rooted in your own interests?

26:06 — Q4: How to know where to start?

29:27 — Q5: How to have glowing skin?

36:20 — Q6: What is a big giant vision you have?

43:35 — Final thoughts & Conclusions

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seasons & cycles

The first signs of fall have been arriving this week. Cooler mornings, crunchy leaves on the ground, finally some rain, a gentle breeze ripping through the trees, yet all the flowers remain in full bloom. It has been reminding me just how much I enjoy this season—how much I adore all seasons—and the longing I have for the coolness and quiet of the ones flanking summer.

Everyone loves summer, which is reasonable enough. It is easy to love: there is always something happening. A plan to make or cancel. A friend to see. A sunny day to bask in. I love it, too. But I find that its edges rub up against me in the same way that the edges of modern life, decision fatigue, and over-stimulation do: an excess of inputs without enough down-time.

I used to declare myself an extrovert, always needing to be around people, preoccupied, ‘busy.’ But the more time I’ve spent with myself, the more I have come to realize just how much I need space. Quiet. Solitude. Ease. Peace. The absence of pressure to be anywhere. The cooler seasons offer this quality of alone time in droves (which is probably why I love winter so much, too.)

I’ve written about my tendency to romanticize the season that gets some of the most flack, but the gist of it is: winter gives me permission to be myself, in the absence of any pressure to do anything else. I could disappear into books and notebooks and cafés alone for weeks and no one would really notice. There is such an allure about that to me; such a draw to the privacy of the quiet months.

But here we are, still in August. I am grateful for all that this summer has been. Despite the way these words have made it sound, it has been a relatively quiet and peaceful one. A grounded one. One spent between parks and this keyboard and the familiar trees and lakes that have held me since I was young at this time of year, reminding me to slow down and take a deep breath (hey, why don’t we both take one right now, while we’re at it?)

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I am grateful to solidify just how nourishing a summer of stillness can be. This one has brought me back into resonance with all of the routines I usually avoid and betray when I get caught up in a swirl of travel, jumping from one thing to the next. It has been really pleasant to bring some of the anchored, grounded energy to summer that I usually allow to be swept away and return only in the slower months.

I’ve noticed that during this season, often full of stimulus and excitement and joy, if you stay consistent with a few things that make you feel at ease, you can experience all of the oozing sparkly summer abundance with even more presence.

what is your spiritual practice?

I was recently asked if I have a spiritual practice. My honest answer was that it would feel performative to say yes, given that my ‘spiritual practice’ and my life just weave their way into each other these days. I essentially stated that as long as I am going on many walks (ideally sans stimulus of any kind), writing almost every day a la pen & paper, spending time outside, cooking/baking, going to cafés, spending time alone, finding my way into nature every so often, I feel quite ‘plugged in.’

Do I meditate? Occasionally.

Do I focus on specific desires that I want to actualize? Sure, sometimes.

But to me, the crux of what it means to ‘live spiritually’ is to stay connected to yourself and bring yourself as close to the vibration that you want to live in as possible.

The generic advice about how to be spiritual is good, in offering up a starting point. But ultimately, I do believe that all of our respective spiritual practices should be a reflection of what brings us uniquely into resonance with ourselves. Anything else is more or less just a distraction.

There is so much noise, so much instruction, so much assertion about how to be spiritual and what it looks like when you are. Ultimately though, the only question truly worth asking is: do you feel connected to yourself (and/or God/source/spirit/whatever your higher-force of choice is)?

If not, do what brings you closer to that sense of connection. Put simply: do what fills you with LOVE.

If that means going wild during the summer and resting decadently during the winter, great. If that means having the same routine every day year round, great. No one really knows what will bring you into that unique sense of resonance with the still, content place within that we all crave—except you. There are many tips and starting points and prompts in circulation and some will be more useful to you than others. All, I believe, are meant to lead you to the path where you can walk yourself back home. If you are someone with loads of energy who feels most themselves when moving and singing and being loud and expressive, then stillness breath meditation might not be your Act of Communion. And vice versa. Your only task when trying to ‘cultivate a spiritual practice’ is to embrace your own spiritual idiosyncrasy and flow towards the practices that genuinely serve you.

being spiritual does not need to sanitize your life of Pleasure

One of my least favourite parts of modern culture is how much it has sanitized the earthly of the spiritual. To some, an espresso and a cigarette in Paris is spiritual. A cigar and a glass of wine in Italy might bring people closer to God… the optimization-heads always wonder how these centenarians live long, healthy lives while communing with the vices that many claim will destroy us. There is a key factor missing though, when anyone attempts to aesthetically evaluate these acts: what was the place you approached that moment from? Did that moment fill you with love and closeness to those around you, or did it stem from loneliness and impulse? Did you reach for that out of such oozing abundance that it only added to the magic of the moment you’re in, or was it used as a tool to escape from it?

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All vices hold the potential for harm, of course, but it is the way we relate to anything—the reason for its use—that most affects how it will impact us.

When we move towards pleasure from a grounded, spiritually sound place — we are able to enjoy it, and feel free afterwards. We are able to see it for what it is: a heightened state of being that is delicious to experience, but not superior to the rest of our lives. But when we pedestal experiences like this and seek them out incessantly, the spirituality evaporates, and they start to hold a different charge entirely.

Just like summer, they will get worshipped and treated like they are the only source of joy, when in reality, summer is much more enjoyable when you can experience it from an abundant place of knowing it will come around again, and again, and again. And that the other seasons—even if they are sometimes cold and grey!—have their own magic to offer.

This is, I think, what it looks like to live a truly Spiritual Life. When every moment feels like a treasure in its own way, and even the ones that are objectively treasures don’t enchant you too much that you forget to pay attention to the others.

Any good spiritual practice should train that sense of appreciation, joy and faith into the fabric of how you relate to the world. Knowing that peak moments are wonderful, but not to get lost chasing (or avoiding) them is essential. And remembering that at the end of the day, the only mark of a successful spiritual practice is that it makes it easy for you to be where you are, in whatever moment—or season—you might be in.

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related essays: on self-trust, how to be cool, just show up, unblock your mind

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The way we show up in the world is a direct byproduct of the way we take care of ourselves. That elusive thing we call confidence or charisma or ease, is essentially an unspoken answer to the question of: Have you prepared enough for this moment to not think of yourself at all during it?

Have you taken good enough care of yourself such that you can simply show up and enjoy yourself?

When I wasn’t writing—but wanted to—one of the most painful things for me was to introduce myself and say what I do. I could feel deep in my body, on a gut-level, that this was no longer what I wanted to be doing. It was so obvious; so evident, that I was not listening to myself. Not taking care of myself, my needs, my intuition.

So, all of the moments where I was asked to take up space, to lean into the opening that was created for me, I would contract. Ridden with tension and the absence of ease, I would try to push the spotlight away from me. I would do anything to get away from my own existence in that moment. I was essentially experiencing the effects of not fully taking care of myself. I was (I’m sure) exuding the opposite of confidence.

Contrast that with my presence once I was actually living in alignment, where it was much easier to speak, to express, to be present, and to pay attention to what people were saying in front of me. To not get stuck in my own head.

Why? Because I was taking care of myself, and when we take care of ourselves, we don’t need anything from anyone in any moment. We exude peace, because we are at peace. We exude confidence, because we have tended to the parts of ourselves that would otherwise be seeking from someone else if they were not acknowledged by us directly.

When I am taking care of myself, I am simply interested in who is in front of me, happy to engage with ease, not hiding from anyone, but not needing them to see me either. Calm, relaxed, present. Confident.

That level of ease and peace is not something you can fake. It is something that comes from genuinely tuning in, and tending to yourself.

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This is also why it is so humorous and futile to incessantly consume content about how to convince everyone else that you are confident. Charismatic. Large. Persuasive. It isn’t an inherently bad thing to learn some of these principles (it also helps you spot when someone else is performing all of the ‘marks’ of confidence, without actually embodying the Real Thing). But it is not a replacement, or really even an effective supplement, for genuine inner ease.

The truth is: nothing replaces taking good enough care of yourself enough to genuinely project a sense of peace, not get in your own way, and be effortlessly present.

This is what confidence is, ultimately: the capacity to project love, peace and curiosity at once, without effort. The capacity to be exactly where you are, without yanking yourself out of the moment, without trying to escape, without seeking anything from the person in front of you, without trying to convince them of something or contort yourself unnaturally to get them to see you in a certain way.

Confidence is the ability to be still in any situation. Confidence is presence, unencumbered by insecurity or attachment to outcome.

From what I’ve seen, the only way to consciously get there is to tend to your inner world. To do the hard things you are avoiding. Have the hard conversation. End the relationship. Ask the person out. Exercise. Clean up your home. Quit your job. Apply for the job. Do the creative thing your soul has been nudging you towards. Take the risk. Choose your gut instinct over the Rationally Correct thing. Trust yourself. Stop waiting for approval.

Confidence arises when you’ve allowed your inner world to express itself outwardly, without hesitation. Confidence happens when you face what you are avoiding, consciously. Confidence happens when you make the space to tune everything else out, and take care of yourself.

I’m sending out a very important email very soon to this email list. If you are interested in learning how to trust yourself fully, identify your inner signals and natural gifts, leverage your unique genius and embody your deepest desires, sign up here. You will get an important announcement this week, crafted with care by yours truly. Excited to share this with you.

related essays: on self-trust, how to be cool, just show up, unblock your mind

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I spent the entirety of yesterday without my phone; it wasn’t wholly intentional. I usually try to go without my phone in the morning as I go to the café I write at, to see what I can tap into within my own mind in the absence of stimulus.

But I got too close to an appointment I had scheduled in the afternoon, and did not have the time to go home. I walked to the closest public transit and departed to the appointment, which lead to a multi-hour journey that felt more vivid and alive than anything I’d experienced in quite a while (which, admittedly sounds rather disheartening). I noticed myself seeing and observing things I had not seen before, never looked at or for, never noticed, right before my eyes in a city I’d spent decades in.

One interesting observation from the day was about posture; in the absence of a device to curl my body over, I felt more aware of my posture, of the way I was sitting than I had been in a very long time. I had nothing to hover above, funnelling stimulus into my brain like I needed it to survive, so my shoulders were pulled back, my head sitting squarely above them, my eyes looking up, forward and around me, attentive yet relaxed.

Conversely, I noticed that, aside from me, everyone was absorbed into their devices. The word I choose here — absorbed — is intentional. They were not just using their devices. They were being swallowed by them. Their posture hanging over their devices like they were using a drug they needed to get as physically close to as possible to get the strongest effects from. Completely absent-minded to the sights, sounds, stimulus of their environment. Barely aware of when they needed to get on or off the vehicle, or where we were, what was outside, what was being said on the sound system.

I noticed myself feeling bored—truly bored—in a way I haven’t felt in a while. Usually I will allow myself to feel some degree of boredom. I often walk without stimulus to and from wherever I am choosing to go, I almost never use headphones, instead paying attention to the environment around me. I try to prioritize meditation. Lean into quiet at home. But to be in an environment that was not particularly comfortable or enjoyable and to be sitting there with no source of stimulus or distraction was quite humbling. It was a different form of boredom, one I actively wanted to numb, to escape from. It wasn’t even particularly uncomfortable or unpleasant. It was fine, really. But my tolerance for being in a situation I did not particularly want to be in and staying there before hitting the metaphorical eject button by immersing myself in my stimulus of choice through a device is, I learned, pretty much zero. So staying in this state for some time was a fascinating internal experiment.

Another thing I noticed: while initially, my instinct was to escape and numb out, over time I grew much more equanimous to this environment and to my inner state. I took some comfort in knowing that it would eventually end, that I was headed home and this would be a reasonably short journey of grappling with this boredom and less-than-ideal stimulus in a very controlled, temporary way. Suddenly I was actually feeling gratitude; for the home I was headed to, for the transit that was taking me there, for the impermanence of this moment. I let the gratitude fill me up, welcoming the shift away from the negativity that had been tugging at my consciousness prior.

In that period between feeling frustrated at my inability to numb myself out with my device-induced trance, I began to feel curious about what was around me, and ultimately incredibly excited to soon be arriving at home. To be in the comfort of my air conditioned (sorry to my European readers) comfortable home, where I could amuse myself in any which way I pleased.

Initially I was expecting to get home all torn up about how inconvenient and BORING my afternoon was, but I actually got home full of peace, and genuine appreciation for the access I had to all my typical comforts.

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While on the bus, the only stimulus I had access to was my kindle which I read from on and off throughout the journey. The book I am reading is written by a woman who was an extreme drug-addict-turned-neuroscientist studying the effects of addiction on the brain (the book is Never Enough by Judith Grendel). One of the insights she presents in the book is how when you take any kind of drug, your brain compensates by creating the opposite effect within itself to bring you back to homeostasis. Think: drinking alcohol makes you feel relaxed and free, a hangover makes you feel tense and anxious… The inverse effect, often known as the ‘come down’ or the ‘hangover’ is your brain’s effort to bring you back to equilibrium. If you use any substance enough, your set point changes so drastically that you eventually feel the need to use the drug just to escape the ongoing ‘rebalancing’ effect of your brain, where your sober experience starts to feel like a nightmarish cacophony of uncomfortable inner sensations that you want to escape, which brings you to use more, which worsens the after effects, which brings you to… you get the picture.

The flip-side is that when we expose ourselves to negative experiences like pain or discomfort, our brain rebounds by creating the positive effects that are necessary to get back to equilibrium. So, in my hours long journey of boredom and direct exposure to a less than ideal set of stimulus, I could feel my brain climbing upwards back to equilibrium when I got off the journey and began to come back into a state of access and control. In other words, I had “earned” the positive set of emotions and inner sensations by enduring a less than pleasant set of emotions and sensations beforehand.

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Scrolling on our phones or doing anything that is essentially the human version of hitting the positive stimulus refresh button like a coked-up rat leads us to have the opposite arc. We are flooding our mind with what it finds pleasure in seeing: a funny joke on the internet, entertaining media, sensationalized news. And when we withdraw from this stimulus, we feel this steep decline in our inner state, as if we tapped our “joy” reserves dry and are now sliding down a slope of negative emotion, just to get back to baseline, because of the stimulus we’ve been mindlessly indulging in!

The “addict” reaction to this sensation is to (unwisely) reach for more of the stimulus to numb out the “come down” (think: having a drink to get through a hangover, or: reopening Twitter or Instagram when your brain is feeling drained and dry after you just closed it upon scrolling yourself into oblivion.

The problem with this reaction is that you simply make the “come down” or recovery worse every time you re-expose yourself to the stimulus.

I know this to be true from the near-nirvana levels of consciousness I have hit from days without my phone. A few weeks ago my friends and I went on a canoe trip. This meant four days in the woods without any reception or technology. We were humbled by the reality of this disconnect when we were rained out ruthlessly on our last day and desperately tried to salvage a satellite phone connection, which, when it failed, resulted in us having to beach our canoes on the shores of a summer camp we had never been to and humbly ask them to use their phone. Real old school type shit! (The camp ended up welcoming us warmly, allowing us to warm up and change, giving us tea and tiramisu(?!) and overall providing us the most climactic psychic experience of relief after being freezing from paddling in the rain all day).

It was amazing to see the range of emotions we experienced through these few days. Genuine peaks. Genuine lows. When we finally got to a warm hotel room that night, we were all feeling like we had just done the most powerful drugs in the world, so high on the simple comforts of daily civilized life that we couldn’t stop giggling and worshipping each tiny pleasure. The beds felt like clouds, the showers felt like magical holy waterfalls, the coffee prepared without periodic strolls to and from the lake to collect water felt luxurious.

We had a completely renewed appreciation and humility for the things that we had previously taken for granted. So much so that we (or at least I) had become completely ignorant to the blissful comforts of daily life until returning to them. The emotional low—the sense of genuine scarcity that we were in with respect to these luxuries in the woods—brought a heightened sense of awareness and appreciation for these things when we finally regained access to them upon our return.

(This sense of appreciation fades rather quickly though, which is why I went on another canoe trip this past weekend :-)).

before continuous tech consciousness

I recently watched the movie Before Sunrise for the first time. I loved it, of course. A movie full of witty dialogue and slow-moving, easeful romance? Right up my alley. One thing that stood out to me was how genuinely present and un-self conscious the characters were. When being asked intimate questions, they did not recoil in the awareness that what they were saying could be somehow shared to millions of people on social media. They didn’t have all of the typical mind viruses installed from the never-ending stream of stimulus we are all usually consuming, that then clouded their own ability to thinking independently. They didn’t get bored or distracted when faced with long stretches of time where there was nothing to do or say, and nowhere to go. They were just Being, effortlessly. They were making full contact with the moment. They were surrendering to where they were and allowing where they were to delight them.

This level of presence, surrender and raw interesting-ness as a function of a time where there was clearly much less thinking done on your behalf by a device that was practically attached to your limb was humbling to see play out on screen.

And as I sat on the bus that morning and allowed the waves of out-of-my control stimulus and sensations to flood in and out of my awareness with nothing to take me “out” of the moment, I considered it a grounding reminder, a nostalgic reboot, and a gracious gesture from the universe to remind me just how magical and wonderful our minds are when we leave them with the space to arrive at their own conclusions. The open loops get closed, the creatives ideas get synthesized, and the good feelings rush in naturally, slowly and organically — instead of harshly, abruptly and synthetically as we hopelessly refresh our phones to find joy in the pixels that stare back at us, only to subject ourselves to ride the emotional wave downwards after we put it away.

Let your mind be bored. Do your own thinking. It’s a new age and the addictions we are most vulnerable to are stealthily concealed, beckoning our fingertips to refresh them just oneeeee more time, because surely that will be when we find the satisfying thing that makes us want to put our phones away… somehow it never does, though, does it?

We must take technological discipline into our own hands, and take seriously the capacity we all have to succumb to our wired-in addictive impulses. For we are not much stronger than those slouching ungracefully over the more explicit addictive substances that we recoil from, so convinced that that ‘could never be us’. Our substance of choice is just a little more socially acceptable and aesthetically benign. But our posture slouching over its source, incessantly pressing the administration button, just to get ONE MORE HIT of that delicious informational injection, gives this ruse away.

May you have the strength to resist the impulse to ‘use’, and the resolve to let yourself be bored. You wouldn’t believe how interesting your own imagination can get. I’ll be attempting to do the same.

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related essays: my phone is making me dumb, reclaim your attention, on self-trust, comfort, get out of your head, have you noticed that rule is arbitrary, becoming yourself is a process of reduction

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Bonus photo for your enjoyment:

I enjoyed creating this, and I hope you enjoy listening. I intend to follow this up with a part 2 for the ideas that I did not get to cover before the sun set.

I would also like to do a long Q&A episode. I invite you to ask any specific questions about the topics I talk about here, things I have written about or personal questions you have from the context of your own life that you want my thoughts on, and I will pick some out and answer them in a style like this. Drop your questions here:

Ask me a question

1:1 coaching details

In this episode, I discuss my 1:1 coaching structured to help individuals untangle bad narratives, reclaim their agency, accept personal responsibility, and embody their inner wisdom through conscious reflection and action. If you are interested in working with me 1:1, send me an email (or DM) saying ‘Next Step’, and I will reach out to you directly.

time stamps & themes:

1:47 — theme 01: entropy & order

6:00 — theme 02: karma & closing loops

13:22 — theme 03: being honest with friends while still being a safe space

19:49 — theme 04: boundaries

24:09 — theme 05: victimhood & agency

40:38 — theme 06: writing & 1:1 coaching as narrative cleansing

Feedback, thoughts, and insights on this new project are welcome. Please share your reflections by replying to this email, in a DM (here or on X), or best of all—in a comment below:

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Thanks for listening!

Disclaimer: I recognize that my technical execution in this medium is not yet perfect. If you are experienced with audio and video content and you want to help me improve my production quality, shoot me a DM/email and let’s chat.

related essays: have you noticed that rule is arbitrary, why i quit status games, just show up, commitment is the only secret knowledge. I also share my thoughts on X/Twitter and occasionally on TikTok.

Some episodes may be paywalled, but for this first one, I wanted to make it available to all. Happy park-podcast season! You are welcome to share this with anyone who might enjoy or resonate with the themes discussed:

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If you enjoyed this episode, you will like my frequent writing and reflections that dive deep into these themes and much more. I will also be sharing future podcast/video style content to this platform directly. Subscribe for more:

When I was young enough to understand what it meant to be desired but not yet old enough to be desired, I remember wanting so badly to be noticed, to be seen for my beauty. I didn’t have the “raw materials” to get this attention early on; I was very small for my age, late to puberty, cute but not especially pretty—and dangerously smart. This cocktail did not exactly place me at the top of the social hierarchy in the ninth grade.

It was as though I needed to tone down my mind to fit into the scenes I wanted to be a part of. Being perceptive, quick-witted and well-read wasn’t particularly “cool” back then. Having boobs and dressing a little scandalous was quite the currency, though. But nature was working on her own timeline with me, and some things you simply cannot rush.

In hindsight, I’m grateful to have yearned so deeply to be in a phase that I was just running late to. It forced me to learn the game without really being able to play it yet. This was a prophecy of sorts for how my life would unfold later, where my ability to study a game and understand its mechanics even if I wasn’t allowed to play became one of my greatest assets—something I would eventually do in my writing for thousands of people. I have spent a lot of time observing games, learning their rules before my entry token appeared, much like my delayed onset into womanhood gave me the chance to understand what it would be like for me there before I arrived.

There is a phenomenon I’ve observed many times: that the thing comes to you when you stop explicitly seeking it. I wanted to be noticed, but the way I ended up getting noticed was not how I imagined I would be. Essentially: I was noticed by giving up on the desire to be noticed. I was noticed by decidedly not contorting myself into the current Desirable Object—sacrificing my nature for what I thought others would like. I was noticed by simply being myself, expressively and openly.

It is interesting to reflect on why this happens, this arriving-when-you-stop-trying-to-get-there-phenomenon… In a social setting, your magnetism is at its highest when you are not chasing the approval of others—when you are present and grounded in your own energy. When you are simply looking at the person in front of you, instead of looking at the person in front of you for their approval. You can only truly hear someone when you’re paying unconditional attention to them. When you are seeking their approval, your attention is confined to only the paths where the possibility of their approval resides.

the insatiable seeking

It is fairly evident that we spend our entire lives looking for whatever we did not get in childhood. Often, we fail to recognize that we ever do get what we’ve been looking for, long after that desire has been consummated.

After all of these years of being a woman, I swear I still sometimes look down and expect to see the body of my flat-chested 14-year-old-self staring up at me, waiting for my womanly genetics to kick in. I still get shocked when I am noticed me for my beauty before my mind. I sometimes forget that I am bearing the body of a young woman as though it’s a clunky accessory I have just realized I’m wearing. I wonder when these side effects of its late arrival will fade, if they ever will at all. It strikes me that I need to place the awareness in my psyche consciously that this thing I once wanted is now here, that its absence was only temporary, that I can stop waiting around for some seismic internal shift that may never come. That the ease and awareness around its presence will come from me consciously recognizing it. From me reminding myself that I have it, from me accepting it fully.

It makes me wonder what else we are endlessly searching for, even though we received it long ago. What are we trying so desperately to become, even though everyone else already sees that we are that?

It’s all so personal, so dependent on the initial conditions of our lives, our childhoods, on what drew people towards us or pushed them away from us. And when we notice these things, we are able to loosen our grip on how tightly we cling to them, how fiercely we reach for them when they appear.

What I am now describing is the foundation of feeling safe and secure in oneself: to no longer feel the need to reach for affirmation from the world that you do now have what it once felt like you would never get.

It takes a lot of patience and reflection to realize when you’ve obtained something you once wished for—something you might even still be wishing for, despite your wish being granted long ago.

Financial security, health, beauty, success, recognition, close friends, achievements… might there be something in your life that you are endlessly seeking that those who know you well would claim you have an abundance of?

You might want to do your own version of this reflection: take a step back, glance at your life, and not just see, but really look for, what you now have that you once wished for—that you might find yourself still wishing for from time to time—even though it already exists, waiting for you to notice it, resting quietly right under your nose.

Journal prompts to integrate this:

• What do you have now that you once fiercely wished for?

• What are the ways in which you are—consciously or unconsciously—still looking for or seeking out this wish, even though it has already arrived?

• How can you ground or root more deeply to what feels like it is lacking in your life even though it is tangibly present, to create a stronger sense of security and awareness that it has arrived?

• If what you are seeking has not yet arrived: Can you practice filling yourself with the feelings that would come with this desire coming true (perhaps by closing your eyes, visualizing your life with this thing you want), and stew in those feelings until you can feel the seeking/hunger for the desired object loosen its grip on you? Can you do this a few more times throughout the week and notice how it shifts your energy throughout the day?

I am taking on one new 1:1 coaching client. If you are interested in harnessing your agency and creativity to create leverage in your world, identifying your patterns and blind spots, and investing in a 1:1 container that will bring you to your highest level of confidence, clarity and action-oriented momentum, reply to this email with the words ‘Next Step’ (or via DM on substack or X), and I will reach out to you directly.

related essays: how to be cool, have you noticed that rule is arbitrary, why i quit status games, becoming yourself is a process of reduction, on self-trust, comfort, get out of your head

+ A tweet of mine that people enjoyed this week. Thanks for reading—please comment below if this sparked anything for you, or if the prompts helped you see anything in your life more clearly. I’d love to know what came up :)

Leave a comment

• Long slow walks through a combination of city streets and large, lush parks.

• Indefinite café sits, where I allow my brain to PRODUCE WHAT IT WANTS, when I do not judge what comes through.

• Finding a special object (book, clothes, card, jewelry) that feels like a unique expression of me, and acquiring it.

• Reading a book that I lose myself in.

• Lighting all of the candles in my home, some incense, and making a loose-leaf tea with honey and sitting down to enjoy it with a piece of dark chocolate.

• Baking; especially a recipe that takes multiple days of effort or planning.

• Cleaning my space. Putting away clothes. Reducing clutter. Organizing a set of objects.

• Looking at the day/week/month (but not year) ahead. Feeling into the events that are coming. Feeling prepared and excited for them.

• Giving a gift or writing a card for someone I love.

• Receiving a gift or card from someone I love.

• Buying flowers. Rearranging flowers. Finding new and creative ways to distribute flowers all over my home.

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