These practices are simple, but not always easy—and over time, they can begin to create more space, more choice, and a deeper sense of coherence across your system.

There comes a point where understanding the mind is no longer enough. We can know how it works. We can see the patterns. We can even name the loops as they are happening…and still find ourselves caught in them. I know this well, and I’ve learned the hard way the shift doesn’t come from understanding alone. It comes from learning how to meet the mind differently in real time.

Not with force. Not with control. Not with judgment. But with awareness, presence, and relationship. Re-membering the mind is not about becoming thoughtless. It is about becoming less entangled. Creating just enough space to notice…and then gently, powerfully, choose.

This is when Life begins to open up in a new way as possibilities and potentials we didn’t even know were available, make themselves known in the pause, in the space between noticing and responding. And it takes practice and repetition to help the new patterns and pathways stick.

Below are several practices that have been incredibly helpful for me in my process of re-membering the mind. I’d love to hear what practices you use to help you become aware of thoughts, patterns, and loops, and what supports you to shift out of them.

Practice: Noticing Thought (Awareness Without Attachment)

One of the simplest practices—and often the most powerful—is this: Noticing that you are thinking.

Not what the thought is or whether it’s right or wrong. Just noticing that you are having a thought. There is a subtle but profound shift when awareness turns toward thought instead of being carried by it.

“I am noticing a thought.”

In that moment, something opens. You are no longer fully inside the thought, rather, you are in relationship with it. From here, you can gently return your attention:

to your breath
to the sensations in your body
to the space around you

to your feet touching Mother Earth

Not to escape the thought—but to remember there is more than it, and you are not your thoughts. You are the awareness behind them.

Practice: Interrupting the Loop (Body as an Anchor)

As I mentioned in the last piece, the mind is often in a loop:

sensation → emotion → story → reinforcement

And once that loop is running, we cannot think our way out of it. So instead, we can shift where we place our attention.

When you notice a loop, pause, drop into the body and ask yourself, “What am I actually feeling right now?”

Not the story. The sensation.

Maybe it’s tightness in the chest, heat in the face, or movement in the gut.

Let yourself stay there for a few breaths. This begins to interrupt the loop—not by force, but by bringing in new information.

Practice: Curiosity Over Certainty

Because of the mind’s role and responsibilities, it often moves quickly toward certainty.

“This is what’s happening.”
“This is what they meant.”
“This is how it is.”

But certainty, especially when rooted in old patterns, can be distorted and close down possibility.

So we practice softening certainty into curiosity.

“Is this the only way to see this?”

“What am I assuming?”

“What else might be true?”

This isn’t about dismissing the mind. It’s about loosening its grip on a single interpretation. And in that loosening, space opens, and we can begin to see beyond the “this or that”, “good or bad”, “right or wrong” narratives the mind likes to simplify our lives into.

Practice: Expanding the Space Between Thought and Response

Often, the mind moves so quickly that thought becomes action before we even realize it. But there is always a space, even if it’s small. And that space can be cultivated.

A single breath can begin to widen it.

Inhale–as deeply as you comfortably can.
Pause–hold for a few moments.
Exhale–slow and as completely as you can.

In that pause, something shifts.

The automatic becomes visible and the habitual becomes optional. This is where we begin to experience the present moment and choice—not as an idea, but as something real and accessible. This is where our truest power resides.

Practice: Bringing the Mind Back into Relationship

The experiences of colonization, patriarchy, and capitalism often force and reinforce disconnection, fragmentation, and isolation. But the mind was never meant to operate alone.

When we rely only on thought, we lose access to the intelligence of the body and the wisdom of the heart. So when something arises in the mind, we can gently ask:

What does my body feel right now?
What is my heart sensing?

This brings the mind out of isolation and back into relationship with the rest of the system. Over time, this creates a different kind of knowing. Not just mental clarity—but greater coherence across your systems.

Practice: Letting Thoughts Move

One of the deeper shifts is realizing we do not have to hold onto every thought. That every thought isn’t worth hopping on the through train to ride. Instead, we can practice allowing ourselves to notice and let thoughts move through. As we do this we’ll find,

Thoughts arise.
They move.
They dissolve.

Like breath. Like sensation. Like weather moving through the sky.

When we stop gripping or resisting them, they begin to pass more naturally. And the mind begins to feel less crowded…less urgent…less loud…less “us”.

Practice: Language as Practice

An important thing you can begin to notice is the language you are using—both internally and externally. The mind is constantly assigning meaning through words, and those words shape how we experience what is happening.

You might gently experiment with small shifts:

“This is bad” → “This is uncomfortable”
“I am anxious” → “Anxiety is here”

Moving from absolute to more curious, descriptive language can create space in the system. Nothing external has changed—but the body often responds differently, both viscerally and chemically.

As you move through your day, simply notice:

What words am I using?
And what do they create in me?

Closing Reflection

As we begin to work with the mind in this way, something softens. The mind is no longer something we are trying to control or escape, rather it becomes something we are in relationship with.

A meaning-maker.
A pattern-recognizer.
A powerful tool.

But not the sole authority on what is true. And in this, a different kind of clarity emerges. Not rigid, or absolute, but spacious, responsive, and grounded in presence.

We begin to experience life not just through prediction…but through direct relationship with what is here. And from that place, something new becomes possible.

As we continue this journey of re-membering, bringing our parts back into relationship, something begins to open beyond what we can see, name, or fully understand. We start to sense that we are not just body, heart, and mind—but part of something larger, something interconnected, something alive within and all around us.

In the next piece, we’ll begin to explore Re-Membering the Spirit—what it means to reconnect with this deeper field of presence, meaning, and belonging, and how we can begin to integrate that awareness into our everyday lives.

But over time, as I began to learn about and cultivate a relationship with the other parts of myself, I started to see that what we call “the mind” is only one part of a much larger system—and often, it’s not even the one in charge.

So before we talk about the mind, it helps to understand the brain. The brain is a biological organ and part of the larger nervous system. It is constantly taking in information, forming neural connections, and helping us make sense of the world around us. Through our experiences, it quite literally wires itself, shaping patterns and pathways that influence our lives, often outside of our conscious awareness.

What I’ve come to understand is that this wiring is not fixed. The brain has what is often called “neuroplasticity,” but I prefer what neuroscientist David Eagleman describes as “live-wired”, meaning it is constantly changing and rewiring based on the experiences we have. The more we engage with new experiences, new ways of thinking, feeling, and being, the more new pathways can form. Change is possible—but it requires our participation.

Spoiler alert—most of our foundational wiring happens at a subconscious or unconscious level, with the brain’s foundational patterns largely formed within the first seven years of life. These early patterns, shaped within familial and societal structures, are often reinforced throughout our lives by ongoing family and social programming. And much of the information that doesn’t align with our existing beliefs never even crosses into conscious awareness—it’s called cognitive bias.

What’s important to understand is that the brain is not a perfect truth detector—it is incredibly fallible and is tricked all the time. It relies on shortcuts, assumptions, and group patterns to make sense of the world. I remember during COVID the kids and I would watch a show that highlighted all the different ways the brain can misread, misinterpret, and be influenced without us realizing it. This isn’t a flaw—it’s part of how the brain works—but it’s important to remember we are not always seeing reality as it actually is.

Our brain is incredibly efficient at pattern recognition; it’s one of its superpowers. This is what allows us to learn, adapt, and survive, and it’s a major reason why as a species we’ve been able to migrate across the entire Earth and live in such diverse environments. Pattern recognition is what enables our brain’s “predictive” magic and automatic pilot mode, which both increase survival odds.

This efficiency matters, because although the brain only makes up about 5% of our body mass, it uses around 20% of our energy at rest. So it is constantly looking for ways to conserve energy by relying on patterns, predictions, and what is already known. This is where something important begins to happen.

Living from Prediction, Not Presence

It is also what makes it challenging for us to receive current information and make an accurate read in the present moment. When we are on automatic pilot, our brain makes predictions based on past experiences, and we experience our projection in the present moment, rather than actually experiencing it. This influences what we expect and therefore experience, whether it’s accurate or not.

The brain is also constantly tracking energy, both what is going out and what is coming in, and orienting us toward what feels safest and most predictable. At its core, the brain’s primary focus is survival. Not truth, not expansion, not even necessarily well-being or thriving—but survival.

Because of this, the brain often prefers what is familiar over what is possible—even if the familiar is painful or consciously unwanted. As a prediction machine designed to keep us alive, it will often choose known suffering over unknown opportunities. The brain is not wrong for this. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do. This is one of the reasons we can adapt quickly on the surface for survival.

I’ve found deeply ingrained patterns that keep us stuck in survival and make thriving conceptual at best, take more time, intention, and energy to shift—and often more support than we realize. Many of these deeper patterns have been reinforced not only over our lifetime, but through generations. Each thought, belief, and pattern we carry, individually and collectively, becomes the energy that sustains the systems we live within.

Meaning Making Machine–The Mind

But the brain is not the whole story. The mind is something different. I’ve come to recognize the mind as the collection of thoughts, beliefs, and interpretations that arise from our experiences. It is how we make meaning of who we are, where we belong, and what is possible for us within this Web of Life we are an active participant in, whether we remember or not.

Over time, these thoughts and beliefs form patterns. Those patterns become stories, and those stories shape our reality through experience. And something I’ve found incredibly important is that when we are able to create a coherent narrative around our experiences, to make sense of them without judgment—especially the painful or confusing ones—our system can begin to reprocess and integrate them. In this way, story isn’t just something that shapes our reality moving forward, it can also help us metabolize and release what has been held in the body from the past.

Together, our collective reality is co-created—made up of all of our individual experiences and stories, woven together into a shared field of consciousness. But our stories are not just individually created. They begin as inherited and socially constructed, passed down during our most formative years through our families, communities, cultures, and the systems we are part of. This can make it difficult to discern what is actually true for us, whose voice we are hearing, and who is really making our decisions.

Without awareness, the mind will continue to run these programs automatically—especially those that have been reinforced over time through repeated experience and emotional charge. What I’m beginning to see is that the mind itself is not the problem. It’s the way we unconsciously identify with it—believing every thought and story as truth—that keeps us caught in these patterns.

The deeper the pattern, the more invisible it can become, and the trickier to change. We cannot change what we are not aware of.

Re-Membering the Nervous System

But awareness is not just noticing our thoughts—it is also noticing what is happening in the body and the heart. It is somatic and interoceptive. Because when we lose conscious connection to sensation and emotion, the mind often steps in to fill the gap. It creates a story to explain what we are feeling, and that story can keep us in a loop—sensation to emotion to story to reinforcement—again and again, until something interrupts the pattern.

Part of what keeps these loops going is not just the thought itself, but the chemistry it creates in the body. As we explored in Part III: Re-Membering Emotions, emotions are not just energy and sensations, they are also chemicals. Emotions are associated with neuropeptides, chemical messengers that carry information throughout the body, and each emotional state has its own unique chemical signature.

Over time, when certain emotional patterns repeat, the body becomes familiar with, and even accustomed to, those chemical states. And when we are out of our typical state, the mind is more than happy to generate a story that brings about the emotional experience the body is used to. So what we think of as “just thoughts” are often part of a much deeper mind-body loop. And we can stay in these loops for minutes, days, years, even decades, and we cannot think our way out of them.

This is where I have found learning how to drop into the body, and work with felt sensations and emotions as teachers, to be incredibly helpful. The brain is part of a much larger nervous system, which has nerve endings throughout our entire physical body providing sensory data. And the heart, which also is comprised of neuronal cells which are part of the nervous system, sends and receives electromagnetic signals, communicating with the larger field.

Bringing awareness in this way allows the brain to shift its focus. Instead of reinforcing the loop, it begins taking in new information through the body. This is where the wisdom of the body and heart can begin to update and shift unconscious patterns, opening new possibilities within our individual field, which then ripples into the collective one.

Another piece that has been important for me to understand is that the brain does not experience something as “good” or “bad” in the way we often think. Rather, it is constantly scanning for threat or safety, and it doesn’t know the difference between a threat that will end your physical life versus your emotional or social one. In fact, the brain processes physical and emotional pain in the same part of the brain; medicinal pain relievers ease the discomfort of both.

Language is Powerful

Language is socially constructed and processed in the brain. Constructs and concepts in the mind, in its attempt to describe what is being experienced or imagined—it can’t tell the difference—become not just words we use, but spells we cast. And this matters a great deal.

The same physiological activation—an increased heart rate, butterflies in the stomach, clammy hands—can be interpreted as anxiety or excitement. The body may feel very similar. What changes is the meaning we assign to the experience. And the meaning we assign it will either release degenerative or regenerative endogenous, meaning naturally occurring, chemicals into the body. The meaning we give something literally makes it medicine or poison.

This is why language matters. It shapes our perception and how we experience the world, which in turn shapes our reality.

A major shift for me has been realizing that the brain is not “king,” as many of us have been taught to believe. Our society prioritizes IQ, test scores, grades, and mental achievement, but the brain is only one part of a much larger, interconnected system.

It is in constant relationship with the body, the gut, the heart, and the spirit. Important neurotransmitters associated with the brain, such as serotonin, are primarily produced in the gut, where “brain” cells called neurons also reside. The heart has its own neural network and electromagnetic field. Information is always moving in multiple directions. This is not a top-down system—it is relational. And when one part of the system is ignored or overridden, the whole system becomes less coherent.

Exploring the Myth of Separation

It is also important to remember that we don’t exist as isolated systems. So much of our current social programming pushes hyper-independence, fragmentation, isolation, and disconnection. We’re taught to believe if we aren’t doing well, it’s because there is something wrong with us personally, and if we only tried harder we too could do well...whatever “well” means.

But the truth is we are shaped by much larger systems—family, culture, and history. Some systems are life-affirming and regenerative. For much of human existence, societies were organized in ways that centered relationship, interdependence, and collective well-being. These systems prioritized right- relationship, interconnection, personal accountability, and collective responsibility.

Most of our collective systems today are built on control, disconnection, and survival. And the tactics used to shape those systems often work by limiting access to the body, the emotions, the mind, and the spirit. Control the body, emotions, mind, and spirit—and you control the currency and direction of a person and society’s Life-force energy.

Because when we are disconnected from our parts, we lose access to our intuition and deeper knowing; our inner compass. This makes it easier for us to be manipulated by outside expectations, voices, and demands. And in this way, we begin to unconsciously feed our Life-force energy to perpetuate the very programs and systems that would have us believe we are powerless to actualize the life our spirit most longs for.

But the truth is, it’s the belief we are powerless that is the chain keeping us stuck, and only we have the key to unlock it through remembering.

As we begin to re-member, bringing our parts back into relationship, balance and alignment, we begin to see and feel more clearly. We recognize the patterns, we more easily see through the illusion, and we begin to imagine—and live—something different.

Feeding Personal Sovereignty and Collective Liberation

For me right now I’m exploring and remembering a few important things. The first is recognizing who and what I am, so I stop mindlessly feeding the current systems, and begin to more consciously and intentionally direct my Life-force energy to the experiences, communities and systems I want to see. I am starting to become what I want–becoming the change, grounding the energy, holding the frequency. I’ve come to realize in a visceral way that we cannot co-create something different using the same energy, patterns, and programs we are unconscious of running on autopilot. Ever deeper personal sovereignty is critical, and it is always an inside job.

The second is that meaning itself is not fixed—it is constructed…by us! Which means we are not at the mercy of what happens to us; we are the meaning-makers. The story we give something can either create contraction and withdrawal in our bodies, hearts, and energetic fields, or it can create expansion, curiosity, compassion, and possibility. That choice belongs to each and every one of us, and it shapes our collective story. Whether we live in a collective loop filled with stories of victim-perpetrator, good v. evil, over/under, or we explore beyond the constraints of our current programming and engage in deeper meaning-making to generate new stories and narratives of what is possible for our collective liberation.

Awareness and Presence

And this is not about bypassing or pretending something is okay when it’s not. It is about becoming aware enough to notice when a meaning is no longer serving us and a story or loop is draining our energy. And it is in this energy of awareness, that we can begin choosing, intentionally, what we want to create instead. Not in resistance to, but for the love of.

Meaning can come from habit, fear, or conditioning. Or it can come from presence, love, and a conscious willingness to hold complexity—to allow more than one possibility to exist at once. To remember Life is birth, death, and everything in between. The more we can open to the full experience of Life, both heartbreak and ecstasy, the more possibilities open up.

Fear and meaning often run together, especially when something feels important. Part of this work is learning to be with fear, to feel it, without letting it decide the meaning or the path for us. To hold fear with enough presence to remember it is an energy of protection, and there is something important for us to reclaim behind the walls fear has created, if we are brave enough to step through it.

I don’t have this all figured out. But what I am learning to trust is this: anything—and in fact everything—I experience in Life can support learning, embodiment, and my becoming.

And the more I learn to work with my mind, in relationship with my body, heart, and spirit, the more space I have to experience and respond rather than falling into prediction, reaction, or illusion. This creates more freedom to choose. My relationships are more safe and generative. Life feels more vibrant and fulfilling. And I am better able to embody and support others in remembering the same.

Deeper Exploration & Practices

Whew, that was a lot, and there is even more to explore, especially when it comes to how we begin to work with the mind in real time. Not just understanding how it functions, but learning how to meet it differently when it’s looping, reactive, or pulling us into familiar patterns. How we bring awareness into the present moment, how we shift out of automatic thinking, and how we begin to relate to our thoughts with a little more space and choice.

In the next piece, I’ll share some of the practices I’ve been working with—simple ways to support awareness, presence, and a more intentional relationship with the mind in everyday life. In the meantime, I invite you to get curious and begin to bring awareness to the stories you find yourself and others creating and reinforcing. Are these stories generative and supportive, or degrading and constrictive? And as a meaning-maker, how might you adjust your stories to create greater coherence across your field?

We explored how emotions are not problems to solve, but information to notice. How the heart is not something we think our way into, but something we learn to stay with. And how, for many of us, this is not about learning something new, but remembering something we were never supported in developing.

And this is where practice comes in.

Not as something to get right or as something to master. But as a way of gently building relationship with the heart again. Because re-membering the heart does not happen all at once.

It happens through small, consistent moments of turning toward what we feel…rather than away from it.

Beginning with Gratitude

Gratitude is often spoken about, but less often felt.

Many of us have learned to think gratitude—to list what we are thankful for, to intellectually acknowledge what is good in our lives. And while this can be a starting place, the invitation here is something deeper.

To feel it as e-motion, or energy in motion, in the body.

You might begin simply.

Bring to mind something—or someone—you feel grateful for.

And instead of moving quickly to the next thought, pause.

Notice what happens in your body.

Does something soften?
Does your breath shift?
Is there warmth, expansion, or a subtle opening in the chest?

Let yourself stay there…even for a few breaths. Because it is the feeling of gratitude that begins to open the heart, not just the idea of it.

Over time, this practice begins to shift our internal landscape—not by denying what is difficult, but by expanding our capacity to hold what is also good, nourishing, and life-giving.

Loving-Kindness

Loving-kindness is a practice of gently extending care—first to ourselves, and then outward.

For many of us, offering kindness to ourselves can feel unfamiliar, or even uncomfortable. And that’s okay. You might begin with simple phrases, spoken silently or out loud:

May I be safe.
May I be well.
May I be at ease.
May I feel supported in my Life.

There is no need to force the words to feel true. Just notice what arises as you offer them.

Over time, you can extend this outward—to someone you love, to someone neutral, even to someone you struggle with.

Not because they “deserve” it, but because your heart has the capacity to hold more than we have been taught.

This practice is not about bypassing harm or difficulty. It is about remembering that the heart is capable of connection, even in a world that often conditions us toward separation.

Tonglen

Tonglen is a practice that invites us to work directly with the heart’s capacity to hold and transform. At first, it can feel counterintuitive.

Rather than turning away from pain—our own or others’—we gently turn toward it.

You might begin with your own experience.

On the inhale, imagine breathing in what you are feeling—grief, tension, discomfort—not to overwhelm yourself, but to acknowledge it.

Hold the breath, allowing the energetic alchemy to occur that can happen only in the heart-space.

On the exhale, imagine offering something back—softness, expansion, relief, compassion.

There is no need to visualize perfectly. Let it be simple at first, and over time, you can expand this practice.

You might breathe in the shared pain of others—knowing you are not alone in what you feel—and breathe out care, ease, or compassion.

This is not about taking on the world’s suffering.

It is about remembering that the heart is not only capable of feeling, but also of transformation and alchemy.

Creative Expression

Sometimes, the heart does not want to be worked with directly, or through words. It wants to be expressed.

Writing.
Drawing.
Painting.
Music.
Movement.

These are all ways the heart speaks.

You don’t need to be “good” at any of them. You don’t need a plan, and in fact not having a plan is best! You might simply begin by asking: What wants to move through me right now?

And then letting it.

Without editing.
Without explaining.
Without needing it to make sense.

Creative expression gives the heart a pathway. A way to release, process, and communicate what words alone often cannot hold.

Staying with What Is

Underlying all of these practices is something simple, but not always easy.

Staying.

Staying with what you feel. Even for a few breaths longer than you normally would.

Even when it’s uncomfortable and your mind wants to explain, fix, or move away from the discomfort.

Because it is in this staying that something begins to shift. Emotion moves, energy processes, and the heart softens.

A Gentle Invitation

You don’t need to do all of these.

You don’t need to do them perfectly.

You might begin with one.

Or simply begin by noticing what you are already feeling, and giving it just a little more space or tending than you did before.

Because re-membering the heart is not about becoming someone new.

It is about allowing yourself to be more fully who you already are.

And as you continue this practice, you may begin to notice something subtle, but powerful.

A growing capacity to feel…without being overwhelmed. To stay…without shutting down. To move…from a place that feels more true and integral for you.

In the next part of the Re-Membering series, we will begin to explore another layer of re-membering—how the mind fits into this system, and how we can deepen its relationship and integration with the body and heart.

In the first two pieces in this series, we began to re-member the body as the place of lived experience. We explored how sensation is the language through which Life speaks to us in the body, and how disconnection from the body shapes how we move through the world.

But the body does not exist on its own. It is in constant relationship and communication with the heart. So if the body is where we feel, the heart is where those sensations begin to organize into emotion, into meaning, into something we can relate to and be guided by.

More Than a Physical Organ

At a physical level, the heart is essential. It pumps blood, oxygenates the body, and sustains Life. If that was all it did, it would already be extraordinary. But the heart is so much more than a pump. It has its own neural network and is constantly communicating with the brain—often sending more information to the brain than it receives. It also generates a powerful electromagnetic field, measured to be up to 60 times greater than that of the brain, extending beyond the body and interacting with the larger field around us.

In a world that has taught us the brain is “king,” this is important to pause with. Because it suggests something very different—that the heart is not just responding to Life, it is participating in it in ways the mind has a hard time conceptualizing. Always sensing, sending, and receiving on our behalf. And the way we feel—our emotional state—has a direct impact on how the brain interprets and responds to our experience and reality.

The Language of the Heart

If the language of the body is sensation, the language of the heart is emotion. And emotions are often misunderstood. We are taught to label them as good or bad, to chase some and avoid others, to suppress, control, numb, or override what feels uncomfortable. And some emotions, such as grief, anger, and even extreme joy, can feel very intense and uncomfortable in our nervous systems.

But emotions and discomfort are not problems to solve. They are information to notice. They are energy in motion, and they are a vital part of what makes up the human experience. As Susan David shares in her TED talk, emotions are not obstacles to a meaningful life—they are the spice of it. They carry wisdom, point to what matters most, help us orient toward what is aligned, and allow us to feel what is not.

How We Learned to Leave the Heart

And yet, many of us were never taught how to be with emotions. In fact, we were often taught the opposite.

“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

“You’re too sensitive.”

“Big boys don’t cry.”

“Calm down.”

These messages, whether subtle or overt, taught us that our emotional experience was too much—that it needed to be managed, hidden, or shut down.

And often, the adults in our lives were not trying to cause harm; they were overwhelmed themselves, carrying their own unprocessed and repressed emotions, doing the best they could with what they had. But the impact remains on us, and unless we become aware of it, it continues on to our children and grandchildren.

When our emotions were not met with presence and support, we learned to disconnect from them, to override them, to close or armor the heart because it hurt too much. Over time, this creates something we rarely name—grown humans with the emotional capacity of children. Biology and nature makes sure we grow into adults with physically developed bodies and brains, but without nurture, we can’t learn how to be with and navigate the depth and complexity of our emotional world.

Not because something is wrong with us, but because we were never taught how.

The Courage of the Heart

The word courage comes from the root coeur—heart. To live from the heart is not to be without fear, but to feel the fear and move anyway. It is trusting there is something meaningful on the other side of fear, even if we don’t yet know what it is. There are always gifts for those willing to connect to the courage of the heart.

Courage is acting from what is true, even when it is uncomfortable. It is risking connection with others to live authentically as ourselves, and risking being seen. We can exist in a cycle in which we can deny our own authenticity for the illusion of connection, or we can honor our authenticity and allow true belonging to form from that place.

This is the work of the heart.

The Heart as Portal

I’ve learned the heart is also a kind of bridge—a meeting place between the physical and the metaphysical, between emotion and intuition, between the “self” and something beyond ourselves. When we are connected to our heart, we can begin to sense what our deeper self—our spirit—is asking of us, and how to bring that energy into the physical realm.

Not through logic, but through feeling.

A pull. A knowing. A resonance.

And when the heart, mind, and body begin to come into coherence, something powerful happens. We become more aligned, more clear. We are able to embody more of our spirit, allowing us to move in ways that feel more true to our inner alignment and integrity—not just for ourselves, but in relationship with others and the larger Web of Life we are deeply interconnected within.

Why This Matters

This challenge of re-membering our heart is not just personal, it is also collective. Because everything is a fractal and reflection, offering us opportunities to explore depth, layers, and levels to see how they fit together.

So for example, when we are disconnected from our hearts, we not only lose access to our own ability to feel, we also struggle to hold empathy and care for others. And when we cannot feel, it becomes easier to ignore harm, to disconnect from one another, and to participate without a second thought in systems we might otherwise question. This in turn shapes the systems we create and uphold, which become our collective reality.

But when we begin to re-member the heart, when we begin to feel again, something else becomes possible. We don’t just imagine a different world—we begin to feel it. And that feeling, held in the body and amplified through the heart, has the power to shape what we create through what we focus on and how we choose to move.

Returning to the Heart

Just like the body, the heart is not something we think our way back into. It is something we practice, gently and over time. We begin by allowing emotions to be present in our everyday lives. Not fixing or analyzing them, but truly feeling them. Interesting fact, when we can allow ourselves to be with an emotion without getting caught in a story about it, the emotion tends to process within 90 seconds.

We can also begin to notice where emotions live in our body, and we can consciously use the breath to stay with them, allowing them to move rather than get stuck or frozen. We bring in practices that open the heart—gratitude, loving-kindness, compassion practices like Tonglen, and creative expression through writing, art, or music. Each of these becomes a way of reconnecting, a way of softening, and a way of remembering.

A Gentle Invitation

You might begin with something simple.

What are you feeling right now? Not what do you think about it. Not what should you feel. But what is actually here, and where do you feel it in your body? Can you stay with it for a moment or two more than you feel comfortable with?

Re-membering the heart is not always easy. It asks us to feel what we once had to shut down, but it is also where Life becomes richer, more connected, and more real. And as we begin to re-member the heart, the invitation becomes not just to understand emotion, but to learn how to be with it…to move with it…to allow it to shape us in generative ways.

In the next part of this series, we will begin to explore what it looks like to practice this in everyday Life—through simple, grounded ways of opening and working with the heart, including gratitude, loving-kindness, and compassion practices that help us stay present with what we feel while expanding our capacity to hold it.

And perhaps this is the quiet truth underneath it all: to re-member the heart is to re-member what it means to be fully human in this beautiful Web of Life.

The other night I had a conversation about the power of language, and how it literally shapes our reality and therefore how we interact with it. And I began to think about a word I’ve been sitting with lately—conflict.

It’s a word I learned early on to associate with harm. Not intellectually, but in my body. Conflict meant something was wrong, something was breaking, or something unsafe was happening—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

So I avoided it at all costs.

I became incredibly skilled at reading the room, adjusting myself, smoothing things over, becoming what I thought others needed me to be. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was trading my authenticity for a sense of safety. Avoiding conflict at the expense of actually living my life.

Nearly 25 years ago I took a conflict course as an undergrad. Two things my instructor said repeatedly were:

“Conflict is neither good nor bad, it’s how you deal with it.”

and

“Conflict can bring you closer together".”

I remember thinking…that’s BS! Because in my lived experience, conflict was harmful, every time.

It’s only now, after a decade of deep healing and integration work—reconnecting body, heart, mind, and spirit—that I can feel what she was pointing to. Not as a concept, but as something real and embodied.

And even now, I find myself wanting to set the word conflict down altogether. Because as I explored the roots of the word, I began to feel how it keeps us stifled, stuck, and unable to see or feel beyond the word to the potential that lies beneath much of what we currently call “conflict”.

I believe we’ve been collapsing a wide range of experiences into one charged category:

Tension.
Friction.
Difference.
Opposing energies.
Disagreement.
Intensity.

We call all of it conflict. And in doing so, we’ve trained our bodies to interpret these experiences as inherently bad…or dangerous. But what if they’re not? What if friction is not a problem but a potential? What if tension is not something to eliminate, but something to remember how to be in relationship with?

Re-Memberings from Life

If we look to the natural world, to living systems, to art, to music, to the body itself—we see something different.

• Friction creates movement.

• Tension allows bridges to stand.

• Light and dark create depth and image.

• Opposing forces generate structure, form, and possibility.

Even in the body, muscles grow and strengthen through resistance. The heart itself pulses through contraction and release. A guitar string must hold tension to produce resonance. Too loose, there is no sound. Too tight, it snaps.

Coherence is not the absence of tension, it is tension held in right-relationship.

And yet, many of us did not experience tension this way. We experienced it as harm, so our nervous systems learned:

Tension = danger
Difference = threat
Friction = rupture
Conflict = loss of connection

And from there, we adapted.

We avoided.
We appeased.
We over-accommodated.
We shut down.
We exploded.
We withdrew.

Not because something was wrong with us, but because our nervous systems were trying to keep us safe.

Generative Tension

What I am beginning to re-member now is something different. That not all tension is harmful, and not all friction is conflict. I’m beginning to recognize opposing energies, when held with care, intention, and enough safety, can actually become generative.

Creative.
Transformative.
Clarifying.
Even pleasurable.

There is a kind of tension that closes us down. And there is a kind of tension that opens us up.

When we perceive tension as conflict—something bad, something to avoid, something to win or lose—we constrict.

Our bodies tighten.
Our breath shortens.
Our thinking becomes closed and rigid.
We move into defense, protection, or collapse.

We lose access to curiosity.
To creativity.
To connection.
To possibility.

But when we begin to relate to tension differently,

when we can stay present…
when we can breathe…
when we can feel without immediately reacting…
when we can hold opposing energies with awareness and intention…

something else becomes available. We begin to work with tension the way a musician works with sound. The way an artist works with contrast. The way a creator works with raw material. Not something to eliminate…but something to feel into, and shape.

New Language, New Reality

I’ve been sitting with new language for this.

Because again, language matters. It shapes how we perceive, receive, and interact with reality. As we reconsider how and where we use the word “conflict”, here are some words that feel more aligned for me:

Generative tension.
Creative friction.
Relational stretch.
Integrative tension.

I’d love to hear what lands for you, or what other terms could better express this mostly unrealized potential we all experience nearly everyday in our relationships.

To me, each of these carries a different energy than conflict. They are less about war or clashing, and more about creation. They are less about opposition and more about interplay. They don’t push us into thinking something is wrong, but rather remind us something is emerging.

But this shift is not just conceptual, it’s deeply embodied. Because I’ve learned as we heal, as we come back into relationship with ourselves, something interesting happens. Life doesn’t become tension-free. In many ways, it becomes more alive.

More sensation.
More truth.
More honesty.
More differentiation.
More energy.

And without context, this can feel like things are getting worse. Like there is more “conflict.” But often, what is actually happening is that we are becoming more available to reality. More willing to feel, more able to stay, and more capable of holding tension without collapsing or needing to discharge it.

Harnessing the Potential

This is not easy, and it asks something of us.

It asks us to increase our capacity to be with:
difference
ambiguity
intensity
competing needs
emotional activation
uncertainty

Without immediately trying to resolve, suppress, or escape. It asks us to stay in relationship—with ourselves, with others, with Life—even when things are not perfectly smooth.

And perhaps this is part of the deeper re-membering. That Life itself is not meant to be frictionless. That growth, intimacy, creation, and transformation all involve a kind of tension. Not destructive tension, but generative tension.

The kind that, when held with care, can give rise to something new.

Invitation

As you move through the upcoming days, I invite you to begin noticing:

Where do you experience tension, and how quickly does your system interpret that as something “wrong”?

What happens if, just for a moment, you pause…and instead of labeling it as conflict… you become curious?

Can you feel it in your body?

Can you stay with it just a little longer?

Can you ask: Is this harmful…or is this energy asking to be worked with?

What might become possible if not all tension needed to be avoided…but could, at times, be engaged as part of the creative process of being alive?

We don’t need to eliminate friction. We may simply need to re-member how to be in right-relationship with it.

Much love relatives

But awareness is only the beginning.

Re-membering asks something more of us—not more effort, but more presence.

This next part is an invitation to begin returning…not through understanding, but through experience.

Because there is also immense possibility here. The body is not just where pain is stored, it is also where integration happens. Where healing happens. It is where we reconnect and begin to listen again.

It is where we begin to re-member.

Returning to the Language of the Body

When we begin to come back to the body, we are not learning something new. We are remembering an ancient and primordial language all our ancestors once knew.

A language of sensation. Subtle, direct, and honest.

A tightening in the chest.
A warmth in the belly.
A heaviness in the shoulders.
A softening. An opening. A sense of expansion or contraction.

These are not random. They are communication. Each sensation carries information about what is happening within us and around us—about what might be needed, what is ready to move, what is asking for attention.

And the invitation is not to analyze. It is to notice, and become curious.

To begin building a relationship with what has always been speaking.

The Breath as a Bridge

One of the most powerful ways I’ve found to return is through the breath.

The breath is always with us. Always moving. Always responding to and reflecting our internal state. And it is one of the few systems in the body that is both automatic and accessible to conscious awareness.

If you pause, even now, and notice your breath…What do you find?

Is it shallow or deep?
Fast or slow?
Held or flowing?

There is no right way. Just information.

And as you begin to gently bring awareness to your breath, perhaps something begins to shift. Space opens. The body receives a signal—however small—that it may be safe to soften, to return, or to feel.

The breath becomes a bridge…between where you are and where you are coming home to.

Reconnecting Through the Senses

Sometimes, especially if you have been disconnected from your body for a long time like I was, sensation can feel overwhelming, distant, or hard to access. This is where the senses can help.

A simple practice you might return to is 5-4-3-2-1.

Five things you can see.
Four things you can feel—inside or on your body.
Three things you can hear.
Two things you can smell.
One thing you can taste.

There is no rush, take your time. Let yourself land as fully as you can on each thing you notice. This is not about doing it perfectly. It is about coming back…into the present moment, through the body, again and again.

Feeling Emotion as Sensation

As you begin to attune to your body, you may start to notice something else. Emotions are not just thoughts. They are lived, physical experiences.

The next time something arises—anger, sadness, joy, fear—you might gently ask:

Where do I feel this in my body?

What does it feel like?

Is it sharp or dull?
Heavy or light?
Still or moving?

Can you stay with it…just for a few breaths? Without needing to explain it or change it? Just being with the sensation as it moves, shifts, or softens. Which, if given the time needed, only last up to 90 seconds. A gentle note, if an emotion lasts longer than 90 seconds, check to see if your mind is crafting a story holding your energy and awareness hostage. Then choose to come back to the present moment—again.

This is how energy begins to process. Not through force, but through presence.

Sitting in Relationship

Another way to return is through relationship with the more-than-human world.

You might step outside, even for a few minutes, and simply sit. Barefoot on Mother Earth, or leaning on a Tree relative.

Not to think. Not to figure anything out. But to notice.

The movement of the wind.
The sound of birds.
The feeling of the air on your skin.
The ground beneath your body.

Let yourself be part of what you are observing, not separate from it. There is a powerful remembering that happens here too as we get a felt sense of the interconnected Web of Life, and our place in it.

Life as Practice

Re-membering the body does not happen in a single moment. It happens in small, everyday returns.

Washing dishes.

Walking.

Driving.

Speaking.

As you move through your day, you might begin to ask: What does this feel like in my body?

And when your mind pulls you away—as it will—you gently return. Again…and again…and again to the felt sense. Not as a task, but as a practice of coming home.

A New Way of Navigating

Over time, as you continue to deepen in your relationship with your body and ability to “read” the language of the body, something begins to change. You may start to notice the difference between intuition and fear.

Both live in the body, and both are signals. But they feel very different in the body.

Intuition often feels steady. Quiet. Grounded.

Fear may feel constricted. Urgent. Activated.

Both are important and both deserve attention.

But as you begin to learn your own internal language, you may find yourself moving differently. Not from reaction, but from a deeper place of knowing.

Moving with Care

And perhaps most importantly…be patient with yourself.

If you have learned to leave your body, it was for a reason. Your body has been protecting you.

Re-membering is not about forcing your way back in. It is about creating enough safety, enough curiosity, enough care…that your body softens and begins to welcome you home.

An Invitation to Re-Member the Body

You might begin with something simple.

Right now…

What sensations are present in your body?

Where do you feel them?

And what would it feel like to be just a little more here?

Re-membering doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in small moments, small returns, and small acts of listening. Until one day, you recognize…in an embodied way, that you are not separate. You never were.

You are here, in your body, and this is your Life!

And as we begin to re-member the body—learning to listen to sensation, to breath, to the subtle language of what is present—we may start to notice something else emerging.

Beneath the sensation…within the experience…there is feeling.

Emotion.

A deeper layer of knowing that begins to give meaning to what we are sensing.

Because if the body is where we feel…then the heart is where that feeling becomes something we can relate to, respond to, and ultimately be guided by.

In the next part, we will begin to re-member the heart—the language of emotion, the courage to feel, and the quiet, powerful way it connects us to ourselves, to each other, and to something greater.

Much love relatives, and I’d love to hear anything that is landing or opening in you through the Re-Membering series.

“Remember”.

I had always thought of remembering as something that happened in the mind. A recall. A recognition. A mental process.

But what I began to experience was something entirely different.

I began to re-member.

Not as a concept, but as a lived experience. A returning and reuniting of what a part of me always knew. A bringing back together of parts of myself that had been separated, fragmented, or pushed away in order to survive.

And the first place this re-membering began, but has taken over a decade to more deeply attune to…was in my body.

The Place of Lived Experience

If we are going to begin to re-member our internal landscape, the body is where we must start. Because the body is the only part of us that is always here. Always now, with the potential to tap the power of the ever-present moment.

Our minds travel—into the past, into imagined futures, into stories and explanations.

Our hearts hold unprocessed emotions, sometimes pulling us anywhere but here, where things are actually felt.

But the body does not leave. It is constantly receiving, sensing, processing, and responding to Life. It is in direct relationship with Life, moment by moment. And yet, for many of us, it is also the place we have learned to first leave.

The Nervous System and Protection

Our nervous system is constantly taking in information and translating it into sensation. This felt sense in the body is how we experience the world—not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually.

When safety is present, the body can settle. It can open, receive, and respond with flexibility. But when safety is missing—physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually—the nervous system shifts into protection.

Fight.
Flight.
Freeze.
Appease.
Dissociate.

These are not flaws. They are intelligent survival strategies for our species.

And when we live in environments where safety is inconsistent or absent, and we don’t have the support or awareness to signal to the body when safety returns, these responses begin to shape how we experience everything.

They become our lens and personality. Our way of relating to ourselves, others, and the world. And often, without realizing it, we begin to leave our bodies…because feeling becomes too much.

The Pain Body

Pain—no matter what form it takes—is experienced in the body.

Physical pain shows up as an unpleasant and often intense sensations.

Emotional pain also shows up as sensation.

Mental pain is often reflected in the emotional and physical sensations tied to the stories we hold—evoking shame, guilt, sadness, and fear each time we replay the familiar narrative in our mind.

Spiritual pain can feel like heaviness, misalignment, something being “off,” even when we can’t logically explain why.

And what’s important to understand is that the brain does not distinguish between these categories in the way we might think. Pain is pain, and it is all processed through the same pathways.

Which means when we disconnect from the body, we are disconnecting from our ability to process the inherent experiences of Life.

And, over time, we become cut off from our ability to question the systems of harm we have inherited and continue to co-create unconsciously through giving them our attention and life-force energy.

Body–Mind Connection and Loops

When we begin to shut down from the body, the energy we are tuning out from doesn’t disappear. It either gets pushed down—held and frozen in the body…or it moves upward—into the mind.

When this happens, we begin to rely almost entirely on thinking, planning, and strategizing as our way of navigating Life. We overthink. We try to “figure it out.” We imagine many steps ahead and all worse case scenarios, attempting to create control in order to feel safe. In my experience, this is a fruitless use of precious energy.

At the same time, the body continues to hold what hasn’t been processed. This can show up as sleep disruption, looping thoughts, or a constant background hum of tension.

We may dissociate—daydreaming, numbing out, and disconnecting from the present moment in ways that keep us offline with the vibrancy of Life.

Or we may swing the other direction—feeling so depleted that we shut down, sleep excessively, or struggle to engage at all.

And because the sensations don’t go away just because we stop feeling them, without support and generative practices, we often reach for ways to numb or distract from the pain.

Substances. Food. Constant stimulation.

Again, this energy doesn’t disappear, it gets stored, and waits. Often for something outside of us to re-activate it—giving it another opportunity to finally be processed.

And, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep it at bay. Energy I’ve come to realize could otherwise be used to create, connect, build, and live.

Where the Physical and Nonphysical Meet

The body is where the physical and non-physical meet. It is not separate from the heart, the mind, or the spirit—it is in constant communion and communication with all of them.

The heart, in many ways, acts as a portal between these realms. Emotional energy often first arises as sensations in the body before they are named or understood in the mind. Each emotion carries a chemical signature the body processes. It is also an energetic frequency—something that can be felt, sensed, and learned.

But if we are disconnected from sensation, we lose access to that language. And over time, unprocessed pain doesn’t just stay as “energy.” It can become tangible and physical such as illness, disease, and chronic conditions.

As many have shared, including Gabor Maté, the experiences we carry—especially the unprocessed traumatic ones—live in the body as dis-ease and disease.

Where the Personal and the Collective Meet

And this is not just personal, it is collective.

Systems of oppression, trauma, and disconnection have shaped how we relate to our bodies, one another, and Mother Earth for many generations.

When we are disconnected from our bodies, we become easier to control. We stop questioning what doesn’t feel right. We override our intuition. We normalize what is harmful.

And collectively, this allows systems that harm people, communities, and Mother Earth to continue—often unnoticed or unchallenged.

At the same time, our bodies are under constant stress. From the poisons we consume or are exposed to in our food, water, products, and built environments. To the lack of strong social webs of support in our families and communities.

And when nervous systems are already taxed, this compounds.

Our Earth body mirrors our human body. And both, in many ways, are unwell.

The Potential and Gifts in the Unknown

And yet…there is also immense possibility here. Because the body is not just where pain is stored, it is also where integration happens. Where healing happens.

It is where we reconnect. Where we begin to listen again. Where we begin to re-member in an embodied way.

A Gentle Pause

Before moving on, you might take a moment here.

Nothing to do. Nothing to change. Just notice…

What sensations are present in your body right now?

Where do you feel them?

And what might they be trying to tell you?

This is where we can begin.

And yet…this is truly only the beginning.

Understanding the body—how it holds, how it protects, how it has learned to survive—is an important step. But re-membering does not happen through understanding alone.

It happens through experience.

Through small moments of return. Through learning to listen to sensation, to breath, to the subtle language that has been there all along.

In the next part of the Re-membering series, we will begin to gently explore what it looks like to come back, through practice…to the body itself.

Early in my healing journey, this word came to me—not just as a concept, but as something to be experienced and lived. Something to be practiced and embodied. And as I began to orient my life to re-membering, it began to change the way Life unfolded for me.

Like many of us, I had understood remembering as something that happens in the brain—a recalling or recognition. In my mind, it was a mental process alone.

But what I began to experience through healing, or more accurately, “re-integration,” showed me something different.

There are many ways of knowing or carrying wisdom. And remembering in the mind is only one of them—and it’s not even the most accurate one. It is dependent on incoming information and energy from our other parts.

There is also remembering in the body, remembering in the heart, and remembering in the spirit. And each one speaks a different language.

As I began to explore this, I started to re-member myself—not just as an individual, but as an integrated, sovereign being in relationship to all that is. In relationship to those who came before me—my ancestors—and those who will come after me—my descendants.

Re-membering became a way of coming back into connection beyond myself, within the larger Web of Life on Mother Earth, as Earth Kin.

Over time, I began to re-cognize the languages of my parts and have been learning to attune to them more deeply.

Re-membering the body, which speaks in sensation, brought me into the only place the body can be—the present moment—and into a more vibrant, embodied experience of Life. Like going from watching The Wizard of Oz in 2D black and white, to 3D technicolor.

Re-membering the heart, which speaks in emotion, opened nuance, depth, and texture in my life—expanding my capacity to feel and to relate. It like moving from 3D movie to VR; the experience opens up in a more real and noteworthy way.

Re-membering the mind, which speaks in thought, created space for awareness, metacognition, and intentional choice in ways I had never known before. It’s not just seeing the code, recognizing the programmer behind and inside the original source code.

And re-membering the spirit, which speaks through intuition and awareness, reconnected me to something deeper—something that continues to guide me with a steadiness I have learned to trust. Like feeling the nudge that makes taking the next “right-for-me” step simple, even if not yet easy, allowing me to engage the Universe in a full-on game of “Trust.”

This has not been a quick or linear process for me. I often found myself muddling my way through the dark, toward alignment with my highest path as a singular relative within a much larger relational Web of Life. And it has been years of practice, commitment, and a willingness to meet what arises in me—again and again—trusting everything is a teacher, lesson, or gift—and often all of the above.

It has also required releasing beliefs, patterns, and ways of being shaped through survival, through intergenerational trauma, and through systems of disconnection. This has opened possibilities and potentials in my energetic field that I wasn’t able to access or hold before. Magic becomes a regular occurrence when all of Life is embraced with gratitude and deep reverence, yet held lightly.

And I can say with clarity—I will never go back to “living” in 2D black and white.

As these relationships within me have become more grounded, balanced, aligned, and integrated, something else has shifted as well.

My connection to the more-than-human world and Mother Earth…to the unseen…to the subtle layers of Life…has moved from something unknown or conceptual into something I can feel, sense, and relate to with curiosity and care.

Re-membering has also reoriented me in time.

Standing in the present moment, feeling myself as the bridge between those who came before and those who will come after, has brought a deeper sense of responsibility—not as a burden, but as a promise. A promise to be a good relative.

Because re-membering is not something that happens once. It is not a single realization or insight. It is a way of orienting to Life—one that grounds, opens, and aligns us in ways that purely conceptual understanding cannot.

I believe this is what many of us are being called into now.

A movement from forgetting…disconnection…discord and chaos…into remembering— interconnection—harmony and balance.

And this is something we participate in—moment by moment—through how we notice, how we choose, and how we show up.

Mapping the Landscape

So, I will start a series on re-membering, and would love to hear as the series unfolds, what is helpful, what’s unclear, and where you might like deeper exploration together. If so, I imagine dropping two pieces a week under the “Re-Membering Series”; one more conceptual and one more practical and embodied. The series would run as long as it feels alive and compelling.

To be clear, I am an expert at no-thing, but rather an avid student of Life with a strong ability to pick up patterns and energetic frequencies that help me make sense of new and complex concepts. I then love sharing back what I’m learning and integrating in my own life, knowing it could support others on their journey. We don’t all need to muddle our way through. And, there have been—and continue to be—many who help light potential paths for me too.

So, I was thinking about starting with re-membering our internal landscape—the body, heart, mind, and spirit. We will explore each part, and examine how trauma, passed down through systems of oppression, has interrupted our connection to these parts, and how we can begin to listen again…to their language, their wisdom, and their guidance.

From there, I imagine we could widen the lens and re-member our relationship to lineage, place, and time—exploring the ways we are shaped by the past and our ancestral experiences, recognizing the potent power of the present moment and living in it, and feeling into the energy we are uniquely called to seed for the future and the Dream of the Descendants.

We will gently inquire into what it means to live in right relationship with those who came before us, and those who will come after. And where our attention, energy, and presence may have been pulled away from what is most alive and essential.

In the closing piece(s) in the series, I would love to have us open into the unseen—exploring our connection to the subtle and energetic realms, and how we can reclaim our relationship to them with intention, integrity, and discernment.

This series would only touch the surface in each of these areas, but it could be a collective exploration and deepening into the concept and embodiment of “re-membering” at many important levels and dimensions. And I am holding how this series wants to emerge lightly, and trusting what comes through and when it comes through.

The invitation for you, dear relative, is not to take in more information, but to enter into your own exploration and process of re-membering. To notice what resonates. To feel what comes alive in you. To follow your own curiosity.

What is most calling your attention? What alignments are you feeling called to make in your life? What is asking to be remembered through you?

Only you can know that.

And I trust that, within the larger Web of Life, each of us will engage this in the ways that are most aligned for us.

So, if you’d like to continue to see pieces posted in the Re-membering Series, please drop a note and let me know.

Miigwech for being here. For walking this path. For re-membering together.

These emotions haven’t been showing up as separate or isolated experiences. They’ve been weaving together, and often existing at the same time.

Gratitude bubbling up for both the big and the small—my family being provided for and held, despite very little “solid” in the traditional sense underneath us…the warmth of the sun on my face…the richness of my mushroom coffee in the morning…my son’s small hand in mine.

And grief surfacing just as strongly—walking this physical life without my beloved sister…
seeing an animal on the side of the road, its life taken by a passing vehicle…driving past the prison in St. Cloud and feeling the weight of all the hurting humans inside, separated from those they love…heading through the mining areas in northeast Minnesota, where huge chasms in Mother Earth lay bare for all to see—evidence of our deep disconnection from her.

Life is so beautiful. So intense. So complete. So complex.

Learning to hold it all has been one of my greatest challenges—and one of my greatest gifts. Not resisting, fighting, or hiding from the hard. Nor grasping, clinging, or trying to make the beauty stay. But beginning to recognize it all as part of the same movement—the ebb and flow, the rise and fall, the inhale and exhale of Life itself.

And something in me is shifting.

From feeling like I am just trying to stay afloat or riding the waves…to sensing that, somehow, from deeper within, I am also co-creating them. Remembering everything has a cycle, a season, a time. And nothing in this physical realm lasts forever.

Impermanence

My first real lesson in impermanence came when my dad passed in January of 2021.

A grounding force in my reality for my entire life—gone. Or at least, that’s how it felt at first. There was nothing tangible left of him to hold, smell, hear, or see. The fabric of my life tore open in a way that would never fully mend back into what it once was.

I didn’t know how to be with this new reality—one where he was no longer physically here. And yet, it was also one of the first times I remember my intuition, what has become my new grounding force, speaking clearly…and me listening.

About a week after my dad passed, I was going through my email, deleting what I assumed was junk. I clicked on an email from a meditation center I had attended a few years prior. I almost deleted it without reading, like I usually did.

But I felt something in my body say, “unclick that.” Not loud. Not forceful. Just certain. So I did.

Later, I came back to it and read the headline—it was for an online meditation retreat on illness, grief, and death.

Within a week or so, I was sitting in front of my computer at an Airbnb, committed to giving myself the space to sit with what was moving through me as I went through the retreat. Sitting with such fresh grief offered no shortage of material to explore. And one of the deepest takeaways from that time was not just the pain of impermanence…but also its beauty.

I wish I could say that after that experience, I no longer struggled with change. Or that I never take anything for granted anymore. But that wouldn’t be true. And honestly, it wouldn’t be human.

Our minds are wired to seek and find refuge in the familiar. To look for patterns and create a sense of safety through what is known. But I’ve learned that without grounding ourselves in something deeper—in the courage of our heart, the steadiness of the body, the knowing of the spirit—we will choose the familiar every time.

Even when the familiar is painful or harmful. Even when the unknown holds something far more aligned and wonderful.

Feeling the Edge and Softening

The years since my dad’s passing, and the intensity of my sister’s transition from this physical reality last November, have given me many opportunities to see this clearly in myself. To notice how tightly I can grip what I know—in relationships…in roles and identities…in ideas of what security is supposed to look like.

Even in the systems we are told we must rely on—jobs, titles, bills, taxes, debts—all framed as the path to safety for ourselves and our families.

And slowly, sometimes reluctantly, I have been loosening that grip; letting go one finger at a time. Releasing what I thought I needed to hold onto in order to be okay…and stepping into something much less certain.

At times, it has felt like being dropped into white water rapids—with no clear map, no guarantees, and no way to control where I am being taken. It has been terrifying. It has also been exhilarating and life-affirming in ways I didn’t know were possible.

Because again and again, as I’ve let go…Life has met me. With people. With experiences. With opportunities, support and resources that I could not have planned for, imagined, or even known to ask for. And something deep within me is learning to trust that. I am remembering.

Not as an idea or concept, but as a lived experience.

I don’t know what lies ahead. But I know this—I will continue to feel for the edges of what I know, orient towards alignment within myself and with Life, then step and breathe my way into the wild and beautiful unknown.

Because there is something in me now that recognizes the cost of resisting impermanence.
The cost of falling back asleep inside systems that ask for my life force in exchange for the illusion of security.

That cost is too high, and I refuse to continue to pay it.

So I walk forward—not without fear, but with a growing willingness to meet Life as it is. In its beauty. In its grief. In its constant becoming.

Closing invitation

You might pause for a moment and notice…

Where in your life are grief and gratitude both present right now?

Where are you being asked to let go of something known…and step, even slightly, into something unknown?

And what would it feel like—not to need an answer or to see the whole path laid out before you—but simply to stay with the breath…and listen?

Although I don’t remember much of the things that happened in my childhood, I remember often feeling overwhelmed, scared, sad, and mad. With no one in my life who knew how to work with or process emotions, my emotions often shut me down, or came out as tears. And those tears brought up uncomfortable emotions for those around me, causing them to shut down, lash out, or make fun.

This taught me that emotions were “bad,” and something to manage, bury, and distract from. I spent so much energy suppressing, repressing, and ignoring my emotions. Eventually, these intergenerational patterns and strategies led to depression in my preteen years and chronic anxiety for most of my life, though I didn’t realize it was anxiety until I was in my 30s. I spent the first 35+ years of my life in a straight-up war with my emotions.

I had no idea that my sensitivity, and my ability to feel deeply, was actually my superpower. That emotions were not the problem, but the key to really living.

About 10 years ago, I stepped in and deeply committed to my healing journey. At first, I thought healing was about fixing myself, learning how to finally deal with those pesky emotions so life didn’t feel so hard or hurt so much. I had no idea this journey would bring me to my knees again and again, and teach me how to welcome it all.

We tend to think of emotions as intangible, but over the years I’ve learned how important it is to understand what emotions actually are, and how they move. Emotion literally means energy in motion. So like everything in this Universe, emotions are energy. And like stagnant water becomes toxic, so do stuck emotions.

When my sister was in the hospital this past November, the words “emotional constipation” kept coming in. She, too, had learned to stuff her emotions, rarely letting herself cry or express in ways that would allow that energy to move again. We tend to carry stored emotions in our bodies, in our gut, our intestines, our hips. These can show up as all sorts of issues, from digestive issues to chronic tension. Many of us also use food, substances, or distraction to soothe ourselves and keep repressed emotions at bay.

In The Myth of Normal, Dr. Gabor Maté shares study after study showing how unprocessed emotions from traumatic experiences, fear, anger, shame, sadness, and grief, can manifest not just dis-ease in the body as, but chronic disease. Everything from inflammation to heart disease and cancer. Energy that can’t move becomes toxic.

Another thing I’ve learned is that emotions are not abstract, they are chemical. Fear floods the body with adrenaline and cortisol, while compassion and love create dopamine and oxytocin. Emotions are literally chemical messengers moving through the body, guiding us toward either protection, projection, and defense, or curiosity, compassion, and connection. In fact, tears of joy are chemically different than tears of anger, or tears of grief.

In her TED Talk, Dr. Susan David describes emotions as the “spice of life.” They move and motivate us in ways nothing else can. When we begin to understand emotions as important data, they feel less threatening and more essential. Because the truth is, we don’t get to selectively choose which emotions we feel. They more open we want to be for love, joy, and gratitude, the more open we will be to grief and anger. To be human is to feel.

And yet, our society offers countless ways to avoid feeling. High fat and sugar foods, porn and sex, gambling, social media, shopping, entertainment, alcohol and drugs, overworking. I don’t believe any of these things are necessarily inherently bad, but the frequency and intention with which we use them can reveal whether we are using them to avoid feeling, and in doing so, creating harm.

Busyness and speed are another way we avoid emotions. When we are moving too fast, or doing too much, there is no space for emotions to rise and be processed. They don’t just disappear, they backlog. Time alone does not heal wounds, intentional tending does. And this requires slowing down, and it requires presence.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is that emotions show up in the body before they ever become conscious thoughts. Before we can name what we are feeling, we often experience sensations such as temperature changes, expansion or contraction, tingling, tightness, or a rush of energy.

About a decade ago, early in my healing journey, I had a powerful insight into the connection between emotions and sensations in my body. I had recently started practicing body scans through a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course I was taking at the U of MN. After decades of dissociation, this practice helped me begin to reconnect with my body in surprising ways. It was both incredibly uncomfortable and fascinating. For the first time, I was becoming aware of sensations in parts of my body I had never consciously connected to, from the top and back of my head, to my wrists and fingers, to my hips, legs, and toes.

I didn’t realize at the time how important this practice of tuning in and listening to my body would become in recognizing my emotions.

One evening, while standing at the counter chopping vegetables and chatting with my partner, I suddenly felt an energetic “punch” in my gut. Heat began to rise from my core into my chest, neck, and throat. I was surprised by both the sensation and the intensity.

Instead of reacting, I got curious, and tuned in. I quickly realized I was upset. In fact, I was really pissed off. And I had no idea why, because what was was coming up seemed incredibly out of proportion with what he had said.

Now, I don’t even remember what he had said, and it doesn’t matter. What I recognized in that moment was that whatever had been said had activated something much deeper in me, an emotion that had likely been stored in my body for years, if not decades.

I began to breathe deeply, allowing the emotional energy to keep moving. With each breath, I could feel my body begin to settle. We continued making dinner together uneventfully, without a fight.

But what stayed with me was this. Had I not noticed the sensations in my body, something I had spent most of my life disconnected from, I would have likely spewed that repressed rage onto him with biting words, and it would have started an argument. And neither of us would have understood why.

What’s also interesting is that my partner had no idea any of this had happened in me until years later when I told him. The fascinating thing about deep presence is it can elongate time; creating space to choose breath instead of reaction. Space to stay connected instead of creating rupture.

It was such a profound “aha” moment for me, and I knew then that practices like body scans and conscious breathing would continue to be important, not for controlling my emotions, but for learning to help them move through me.

I’ve also learned that emotions are not “good or bad”. They can feel comfortable or uncomfortable, and they can be generative or degenerative for the body. Research from the HeartMath Institute shows that the chemical makeup of emotions like joy, love, compassion, and gratitude support the body in resting, digesting, and repairing, while the chemical makeup of emotions like anger, fear, and shame, especially when prolonged, can contribute to inflammation and breakdown in the body.

Emotions also shape how we perceive reality. For many years, when I felt overwhelmed and disconnected, my options felt incredibly limited. Everything became binary. This or that. Right or wrong. Good or bad. Black or white.

Unrecognized and unprocessed emotions keep us stuck in this kind of binary thinking. When challenging emotions arise, we often unconsciously contract around them to protect ourselves from the perceived threat. When the threat is external and physical, this kind of rapid response can be life-saving. But when the threat is internal, emotional or mental, and we react from that contracted state, we often create fractures within ourselves and ruptures in our relationships.

When we become conscious of our emotions, something begins to shift. Our options expand. We gain the ability to choose how we want to respond, both to what we are feeling, and to the situations that evoked those emotions in the first place.

There are many more stories I could share about how learning to feel, witness, and tune into the wisdom of emotions has shaped and shifted my life in truly transformative ways. I would never willingly go back to a life of non-feeling, shut down, or disconnection.

Emotions and feelings truly are the “spice of Life,” and every day I choose to increase my spice tolerance.

My own experience has shown me that the heart is a portal to a new reality and experience of Life, one far more magical and beautiful than I could have imagined. Both the wonderful and the challenging. And learning how to navigate and express emotions in supportive ways is the key to it all.

Invitations

Remembering how to work with emotional energy is like everything we learn—it is a process and a practice. If you feel called to begin, or to deepen your relationship with your emotions, here are a few places to start.

What emotions have you been taught to avoid, suppress, or fear? What might become possible if, instead of pushing them away, you began to listen, even just a little?

You might begin by tuning in and noticing what sensations arise in your body when you are feeling different emotions. Where do you feel them? What do they feel like? Tightness? Tingling? Heat? Expansiveness? Something else?

What might you discover if your emotions weren’t something to manage, but something to learn from?

Much love to each of you relatives, and may you have a weekend filled with moments of deep connection, and rest.

And yet it was nearly 3 weeks between posts. My former self would have felt the need to digest and get moving more quickly. My expanded self felt the nudge, tug, then push of discomfort as I let go of what I think others think and expect of me, and tuned more into what energizes and feels good to me.

What do I truly want and need?

That is a question I believed most of my life was incredibly selfish, and like many others, was taught not to ask. Instead we were told to set aside what lit us up, and pour ourselves into one of the boxes our family, society, or systems had lined up for us to live within.

I’m done conforming. I’m done contorting and shrinking myself to fit what is expected, either by others or my own human and socially programmed mind. I’m tuning into what expands my chest and makes me feel alive, and I’m committed to continue do more of that to navigate my life.

And, sometimes this practice is really hard! When there is a lot going on, whether it’s challenging stuff, heavy energy, joyful things, exciting opportunities or all of the above and everything in between, our current collective programming doesn’t invite us to make room in our day for “do what lights you up”.

So over the last few weeks since returning from our trip, in addition to trying to ground myself and catch up a bit, I filled my plate with way too many wonderful conversations, connections, and just “things” going on in general. I’m coming to recognize in an even deeper way, I do this to myself.

Before when I felt overwhelmed by life, I had a convenient excuse with school, work, school and work—in addition to being a mom of kiddos spanning 19 years with my oldest being 27 and my youngest just over 8. I used to easily point to all those things and say, “That! That is why I’m so busy and exhausted all the time!”

The thing is now, although I’m still a mother with 4 kiddos at home, I am done with formal education, my kids are all school age and going to school, and I haven’t had a socially-legit “job” in about 9 months, I have been busy! I’ve been giving a good deal of my energy during the day connecting and dreaming with resonant others, writing, supporting others when and how I can, and picking up extra gigs as they come along. I’ve also been lucky enough to have resources come in that allow me to continue to do all those things and pay the main bills without needing to get a “real” job.

I am incredibly fortunate.

Yet in the weeks since landing back at home, I am also finding my calendar and nervous system overwhelmed with all the wonderful things I get to juggle. From caring for and connecting with my kiddos, family, friends, Mother Earth and more than human kin, to expanding and deepening my resonant web of folks, to finally starting to cultivate relationships and community in the town I only thought I’d live in for 1 year but have now been here 21!

I also had an important learning during our 3 week family trip; my alone time to recharge is essential. When I don’t build it in and hold the boundary to support it, it doesn’t happen and I get wiped out. I knew it was important before, but getting so little of it during the weeks we were traveling and the first few weeks after returning, showed just how necessary it is for me to show up as my best self for others.

It’s been about a year or so that I’ve been leaning into and exploring what balancing these most critical aspects of my life are, those things that mean the most to me. It’s all important, and wonderful, and necessary. And the program and wiring that told me to keep giving at all costs, to quiet my own inner voice and needs, and to run the rat race to stay alive, runs DEEP! It’s a program I’m certain many of you recognize if not in yourself, in others you care deeply about.

It has been a challenge for me to tune into and attune to the balance that feels right for me, as it is not a still point. It shifts month by month, day by day, moment by moment as my capacity and what is going on in my life meet. But I can feel I’m getting closer.

Last Monday, after 3 wonderful calls in the morning, rather than push myself to do two really important tasks first (one was writing and posting a Substack), I allowed myself to sit on the back deck, close my eyes, allow the sun to warm my bones, breathe, and listen. The birds were spectacular!

A chorus of whistles, shrills, trills, and squawks hit the air and sent the vibrations rippling through the breeze straight to my ear canal and eardrum. From Dark-eyed Juncos to Blue Jays and House Finches, to the Common Grackle, Yellow-Rumped Warbler, American Robin House Sparrow, and even a Merlin! (The Merlin app is free and wonderful for identifying birds and learning their songs, calls and more!)

It was pure medicine listening to our bird-relatives singing their songs, communicating across the trees, and warning each other before going quiet when the Merlin, a small but fierce falcon, arrived, perched in the giant White Pine behind me on the north side of the house. They helped me slow down, feel their music in my body, and open to pure gratitude.

As I sat listening to the birds singing their hearts out, I was aware that I have no memories of hearing birds like this when I was young. Yet weren’t they singing magnificently then too? The truth is, these magical moments to connect with our more-than-human relatives that help ground us and tap into the beauty of Life, are always there and available to us. Unfortunately, so often in the hustle and bustle of our lives, we miss them.

There are many moments I still miss, but I’m catching more than I ever have before because I am committed to slowing down to tune in. It’s definitely been and continues to be a process.

Making time to pause, notice, and take in Life on the back deck in the full chorus of our bird-relatives helped me easily attune to the frequency and energy of gratitude. The energy of gratitude woke my body and system up in a fresh way. So after allowing myself the time that felt right outside, I thanked my bird relatives for their medicine and reminders, and came in and started writing this post—which then didn’t get posted until a week later. I’m also learning to trust the timing.

So miigwech to you for your patience with my posts as I took the time I needed to digest and slow down a bit so the energy could start flowing again. Miigwech to all our more-than-human relatives who offer us daily teachings, reminders, and medicine should we honor our need to pause, notice and take Life in. And chi miigwech to all that Life has been bringing into and weaving together in my field. It’s been incredibly exciting and I can’t wait to continue to share this journey with you all.

As your days and week unfold, I invite you to pause, notice, and see what your body, heart, mind, or spirit might want and need in any given moment. How can you honor what they share with you? How might our more-than-human kin and Mother Earth support you in that, especially given all the signs of Life spring brings?

May you each find many moments of pause, deep connection, and rest this upcoming week as the days continue to get longer, and the seasons begin to shift in all the ways.

Much love and deep gratitude,

~Susan

In the last 24 hours, two different friends shared with me things I had done, or rather not done or said, that caused harm for them in some way.

For those of you who know me, causing harm to others is the very last thing in the world I want to do. In fact, much of my initial healing journey began from a deep desire to interrupt patterns of harm, especially within my family and with my children.

Through years of intentional work and reflection, I have grown in my awareness of many patterns I carry. I’ve learned how to interrupt some of them, and in some cases, halt them altogether. And if I’m being honest, I think a part of me had started to believe I had figured much of this out. But these recent interactions reminded me—there is still more here. There is always more here.

In one case, I didn’t express what I subconsciously wanted and needed, so it remained unsaid but felt, creating a dynamic where the other person felt like they had to “walk on eggshells” around me. In another, not reaching out for support when I needed it, when someone was willing and wanting to show up, left them feeling hurt and shut out. In both cases, as they shared their experience, I could feel a familiar contraction rise in my body…an internal alarm.

My chest tightened at the thought of causing harm to another. And almost instantly, my mind began constructing a narrative, something that could explain why I hadn’t meant to, why I didn’t know, why it made sense from where I stood.

And the truth is…I followed that instinct. After a brief pause and thanking them for sharing, I jumped to explanation, justification, and context for my experience. And while what I shared was true for me and they graciously understood, I can see now, in reflecting back, that moving there so quickly, even partially, pulled me out of fully being with them.

I could feel another part of me, quieter but present, wanting to stay. Wanting to listen more deeply. Wanting to not rush to make sense of it or shift out of the discomfort. And I did that better than I have in the past. But I didn’t fully stay, because it felt too intense, and too personally risky.

It wasn’t until later, through reflection and writing, that I could more clearly see the pattern. That familiar pull to explain and make myself understood. The urge to reduce the discomfort in my own body. And I’m beginning to recognize that while those impulses make sense, they can also keep me from fully receiving what’s being offered in moments like this. Because the truth is, there was no real threat in those moments. At least not anymore.

The alarm that went off in my body is an old one. A well-worn pattern that has helped me survive in relationships where it wasn’t safe to be fallible…to be human, or where relationships were tenuous. In those earlier dynamics, projection, blame, and unspoken expectations filled the space between people…including from me.

The parts of me that move to defend are the parts that remember those environments, and even some relationships I still find myself in from time to time today. The parts that learned to explain, justify, or make sense of things quickly in order to stay safe or in connection.

But now, in many of the relationships with those in my inner circles, something different is happening. Being called in by people I know love and care for me is showing me that those parts don’t have to stay on high alert. They don’t have to lead. And I’m being invited into something else.

The invitation now is to notice what arises in me, without needing to override it. To stay present with the discomfort, without rushing to resolve it. To recognize I can hold my own feelings and truth, while also making space for theirs. Not as right or wrong or something to fix. But as something to witness and be with.

Becoming a safe place for honesty to land in my relationships is a core value I hold. And I’m realizing that doesn’t mean it’s always comfortable, or I never cause harm. Afterall, I am human. What it means is I’m learning how to stay when it’s revealed.

I’m truly grateful for the people in my life who are willing to share honestly with me, who are willing to risk discomfort in service of something more real. And I’m beginning to recognize these moments not as failures, but as gifts. Mirrors that reflect what I cannot yet see on my own. Invitations to meet parts of myself that are still in the shadows. Even when those invitations are uncomfortable as hell.

As I continue to sit with these experiences, I find myself not with answers, but with a deeper, more honest question.

What does it look like to truly hear someone else’s experience, to let it fully land in the body, discomfort and all, without immediately reaching for explanation or justification?

And at the same time, what does it look like to honor my own experience, without abandoning myself in the process?

I’m beginning to sense that this isn’t a question of choosing one or the other, but of learning the rhythm of relationship. The timing and sequence. The capacity to stay present long enough for another to truly feel met, and trusting that my own experience can be shared, once that ground has been established.

I don’t have this figured out yet, but I am paying attention. And I’m beginning to wonder…What might become possible in our relationships if we learned how to stay open in these spaces long enough for something deeper to emerge?

And yet here we are—nearly three weeks since my last post. My former self would have felt the need to digest and get moving more quickly. My expanding self feels the nudge, the tug, then the push of discomfort as I let go of what I think others expect of me, and tune more deeply into what actually energizes me and feels good in my body.

What do I truly want and need?

That is a question I, like so many others, once believed was incredibly selfish—one we were taught not to ask. Instead, we were taught to set aside what lights us up and pour ourselves into one of the boxes our families, society, or our existing systems had lined up for us to live within.

I’m done conforming. I’m done contorting and shrinking myself to fit what is expected—whether from others or from my own socially programmed mind. I’m tuning into what expands my chest and makes me feel alive, and I’m practicing doing more of that.

And sometimes, this practice is really hard.

When there is a lot going on—whether it’s challenging, heavy, joyful, exciting, or all of the above—our current collective programming doesn’t make much room for “do what lights you up.”

So over the last few weeks, after returning from our trip, in addition to trying to ground myself and catch up a bit, I filled my plate with too many wonderful conversations, connections, and just…things. I’m coming to recognize, in an even deeper way, that I do this to myself.

Before, I had a convenient excuse—school, work, school and work. In addition to being a mom of kids ages 27 to 8, I could easily point to all of that and say, “That! That is why I’m so busy and exhausted all the time!”

The thing is, now… although I’m still a mother with four kids at home, I am done with formal education, my kids are all school-aged (for now), and I haven’t had a socially-legit “job” in about nine months, my calendar remains more full than my nervous system would like. Sure, outside my responsibilities to my family, friends and community, I’ve been giving a good deal of my energy during the day connecting and dreaming with resonant others, writing, supporting where I can, and picking up extra gigs as they arise. I’ve also been fortunate to have resources come in that allow me to continue doing these things while paying the necessary bills. I am incredibly fortunate.

And I am also finding my calendar—and my nervous system—overwhelmed with all that I am still holding.

From caring for and connecting with my kiddos (27-16–11–11–8), to other family and friends, to Mother Earth and our more-than-human kin, to expanding and deepening my resonant web, to finally cultivating community in the town I thought I’d only live in for one year—but have now been in for twenty-one.

And an important takeaway from our three-week family trip was just how essential my alone time is for recharging. I knew it mattered before—but experiencing so little of it during those weeks showed me, in a visceral way, how necessary it is. When I don’t intentionally build it in and hold that boundary, it doesn’t happen—and I get wiped out.

For about a year now, I’ve been leaning into what it means to balance the aspects of my life that matter most, while also trying to find ways to weave them together so they aren’t fragmented threads I tend. It’s all important. It’s all beautiful. It all connects. And the programming that taught me to give at all costs—to quiet my own needs and run the race just to stay afloat—runs deep.

I know I’m not alone in that.

It has been a challenge to attune to a balance that actually feels right for me—one that shifts month by month, day by day, moment by moment, as my capacity meets what life is asking of me. But I can feel that I’m getting closer to learning how to energetically surf.

Today, instead of pushing myself to complete two important tasks first (one of them being writing and posting this Substack), I chose something different.

After three wonderful calls this morning, I went out to the back deck. I closed my eyes and let the sun warm my bones as I breathed, and listened.

The birds were spectacular.

A chorus of whistles, trills, shrills, and squawks filled the air, sending vibrations through the breeze and straight into my ear canals and body. Dark-eyed Juncos, Blue Jays, House Finches, Common Grackles, Yellow-rumped Warblers, American Robins, House Sparrows—and even a Merlin. (The free Merlin app is great for learning to identify birds through their songs, tweets, and more!)

It was pure medicine.

I listened as they sang to one another across the trees—communicating, responding, warning—until they suddenly quieted when the Merlin, a small but fierce falcon, arrived and perched in the giant White Pine on the north side of the house.

Everything in me slowed. I could feel their music in my body. I could feel myself opening.

Gratitude moved in. And I realized something.

I have no memory of hearing birds like this when I was young. And yet—they must have been singing just as magnificently then, too. How did I miss it? I know why.

But still… the truth of it lands deeply. So much of the magic available to us through connection with our more-than-human relatives is always here. Always accessible.

And how often do we miss it?

I still do. Too often in fact.

But I’m catching more than I ever have before—because I am remembering to slow down.

To pause long enough to actually receive what is here.

Making space to sit on the back deck today, immersed in the chorus of our bird relatives, helped me attune to the frequency of gratitude. And that frequency woke something up in me.

After the time outside felt complete, I thanked the birds—for their songs, their presence, their medicine—and I came back in and began writing this.

So chi miigwech.

To you—for your patience as I’ve taken the time I needed to slow down and allow the energy to move again.

To our more-than-human relatives—who offer us daily teachings, reminders, and medicine, if we are willing to pause long enough to receive them.

And to all that Life has been weaving together in my field. It’s been incredibly alive.

And I’m grateful to be here, sharing this journey with you.

I’d like to offer an invitation to pause for a moment.

To notice what your body, heart, mind, or spirit might be asking for right now.

And to gently consider—how might you honor that?

How might Mother Earth, and our more-than-human kin, support you in doing so?

Especially in this season of new life emerging all around us.

May you find moments of pause, deep connection, and rest in the days ahead, as the light returns and the seasons continue to shift.

With love and deep gratitude,

~Susan

I failed.

Well… not exactly. But I have used it. Less than last time, more than I’ve wanted. Forcing air out in Trader Joe’s to tell my family to pick what they wanted for supper as they wandered the store like they were lost. Pushing air up from my diaphragm to say something to the kids while driving. Small things. “Necessary” things. Habitual things.

Losing my voice has been especially hard on this trip. I’m the main driver, which means I can’t easily write or type while moving. And the people who know me still talk to me and ask questions like they normally would—as if I can respond, explain, or elaborate. But I can’t, so I don’t. And it’s been frustrating for all of us.

Now I find myself in what feels like Ultimate Charades. No categories. All categories. Simultaneously. Expert level. And I have to say… I’ve never really liked charades.

I’ve always been good with words. People have told me that for as long as I can remember. Whether it was writing notes and cards to loved ones, elaborate stories as a girl, school papers, or speaking into complex, interwoven topics—trauma and healing, neuroscience, body systems, emotional alchemy, plant medicine, community building, energy, intuition—I’ve always had a way of making connections and meaning through language. Words have been one of the primary ways I understand the world and connect with others.

Without them, I feel slowed, and handcuffed.

What I didn’t realize—what I’m beginning to see now—is how often I speak a thought before I even know I’m thinking it.

“Look at that…”
“Do you think…”
“What about…”
“Can you please…”

I can’t say any of it. And because I can’t say it, I’m forced to pause and notice the thought before it leaves me. Because it can’t leave me.

It’s been a masterclass in metacognition.

I’m noticing the sequence shift. What used to be thought → speech has become thought → awareness → choice. I find myself asking: Does this need to be said? Does it need to be said now? Can it be expressed another way? Or does it simply need my attention?

It’s exhausting. And also invigorating.

Because I’m realizing how much my mind has been thinking—constantly, rapidly—just beneath the surface of my awareness. The gap between what I thought I was conscious of and what was actually happening is far wider than I ever realized.

And as I’ve watched my thoughts more closely, I’ve also begun to see why I speak. For connection. For approval. To be understood. To be heard. To fill space. To make noise.

And yet… the communication that actually matters is still here.

The moments that land deepest don’t require words. Sitting with my son this morning, smelling his hair as he listened to my heartbeat and we rested together on the couch. The shared glance with another person when their eyes carry gratitude, joy, or compassion. The felt sense of connection with Mother Earth as the waves washed over me, the sand grounded me, the sun strengthened me.

These moments are more potent than anything I could say.

I can still hear others. But they cannot hear me, because we are used to listening with our ears, not our bodies. Without my words, many of my attempts at connection fall flat—not because connection isn’t there, but because we aren’t practiced in attunement.

And yet, I’ve noticed something else.

Two of my daughters seem able to feel me. To tune into my energy, my needs, my presence. When I’m with them, my body softens. I can literally feel it relax. And that has made something else visible—the amount of bracing I carry when I expect I won’t be understood.

In my family, I am often the “go-to.” The one who plans, decides, communicates, organizes, and maintains. And I can see now that I’ve played a role in creating that dynamic over time.

Without my voice, that role doesn’t function the same way. And it’s been hard.

There has been frustration. Lashing out. Shutting down. Spiraling into shame. And then breathing. Returning. Trying again.

I’ve been so grateful for the grounding presence of sun, ocean, sand, and breeze over these past few days. They’ve helped calm my nervous system, center my energy, and open me to what is here—beyond the frustration, beyond the disruption. They remind me that there is something else unfolding, something I might not yet fully understand.

There is a part of me that is also coming to terms with the possibility that I may not have my voice for important connections and introductions this week. That I may not be able to speak in the ways I expected, or others expect. That I may need to rely on other ways of sensing, connecting, and communicating.

Deep breath in. Big sigh out.

I can do this. I am doing this.

And I’m beginning to feel that this is not just a lesson for me. There is something collective in this.

We are living in uncertain times. And perhaps we are being asked to learn how to navigate differently—to read the waves, to feel the timing, to know when to dive, when to float, when to stand, when to move. To “play with the waves,” as my son likes to say.

To meet each moment not with force, but with awareness. Not with control, but with responsiveness. To trust that when we loosen our grip on how things should be, Life might meet us with something we couldn’t have planned.

I’m figuring this out alongside you. And I am grateful for your presence, your witnessing, your reflection. As a social species, we learn faster and more deeply together.

So, as my daughter says, “Let’s do this!”

The first time, it came after a week-long healing process—unearthing and releasing family patterns that had lived quietly in my body for decades. My voice left through overuse. Through eruption. Through rage and grief-filled screams that finally had somewhere to go. It lasted a few days.

The second time, it came the morning my sister transitioned. I had been holding so much—emotion, responsibility, presence—and my body had also been working through a sinus issue. But that morning, something shifted. My voice disappeared entirely. It lasted five days.

This time, I’m traveling with my family for nearly three weeks, heading into a gathering I’ve been looking forward to—Bioneers. For the past few days, I’ve felt it coming. The familiar scratchiness. The extra effort it takes to make sound. And then, on the spring equinox, as we were leaving the beach, it went.

Gone.

This time, I am choosing something different.

The Pattern Beneath the Pattern

The last time I lost my voice, I didn’t listen.

Even though I could feel what my body was asking for, I pushed through. I spoke when I shouldn’t have. I overrode the signals. I told myself I didn’t have time to rest—that I was needed, that there were things to manage, problems to solve, people to support. Eventually my body won out—I couldn’t make a sound. And my voice stayed gone longer than it needed to.

This time, I’m choosing to listen.

Even when it’s inconvenient.
Even when others don’t understand.
Even when there is pressure to “just try” and speak.

Because I’m starting to recognize something deeper: My body is not interrupting my life. It is guiding it.

The Ways We Speak Without Needing To

Losing my voice is beginning to reveal something uncomfortable and honest to me: How often I speak when it isn’t actually necessary.

How often I:

• step in to answer questions that don’t need immediate answers

• fill space that could hold silence

• take on responsibility that isn’t fully mine

• speak to manage, organize, or direct

Without my voice, those patterns are visible in a way they aren’t when I can just… talk. There is a kind of stripping that happens in silence. A clarity, and an invitation to ask: What actually needs to be said? And what is habit?

Ocean Medicine: “Then We Go Deeper”

Before I lost my voice, we spent several hours at the ocean.

The great waters—lifeblood of Mother Earth. There is something about being near the ocean that regulates my entire system. The sound, the smell, the color, the vastness—it feels like home.

When we went to a new beach for sunset, the kids ran toward the waves. I saw them and thought, nope. I don’t like when waves crash on me—when they push me down, force water up my nose, into my throat. I had every intention of staying safely on the shore.

But my kids had other plans.

“They want you to come out,” Troy said returning to our towels from where he had been out with the kids.

I hesitated. Not now. I don’t want to. All the familiar thoughts went through my mind when I was content where I was. I’m not sure if I felt their energetic pull, or that of Ocean, but I got up and walked to the waters edge.

The water was cold, and vibrant. Each step, I thanked the Great Mother—for her beauty, her power, her medicine. For the exchange of salt and negative ions meeting my out-of-balance, over-stimulated system. I made my way out to them.

The first wave hit hard. It knocked me down, slammed my left knee into the ground beneath me. I came up coughing, limping, immediately confirmed in my belief: This is exactly why I didn’t want to be out here.

“Come on, mom!” they called, waving me over.

I told my middle daughter, Lydia, what happened—why I didn’t like being out there.

And without hesitation and in complete certainty, she said: “Then we go deeper!” My body felt the ring of deep truth in her words. Her big childlike smile beckoned me as she walked further out, waving me along. I followed.

We moved into chest-deep water. When the next wave came, I closed my eyes, held my breath, and dove underneath it.

Calm.

I felt the pull and release of the water around me. I came up for air. That felt… good. And so I did it again. And again. And again.

For nearly twenty minutes, we played in the waves—not fighting them, not bracing against them, but moving with them. Diving under when they broke. Letting them lift us when they hadn’t yet formed.

The cold disappeared.
The fear disappeared.
The pummeling stopped.

Nothing about the ocean had changed.

But my relationship to it had.

Going Deeper

Her words stayed with me and I turned them over in my head that evening. “Then we go deeper.”

How often is this the invitation?

When life feels like it’s crashing into us—when we’re being pushed down, overwhelmed, destabilized—our instinct is often to brace, resist, endure, or retreat. But what if the invitation isn’t to fight the wave…or to avoid it entirely…but to go deeper?

To move beneath the surface of reaction. To access the calm that exists within the movement. To let the energy pass through us, rather than overtake us.

Silence as Calibration

Losing my voice—again, and again, and again—doesn’t feel random anymore. It feels precise.

As if my voice is being re-patterned each time—not taken away, but refined for the moment and what’s needed now. This time, it’s the voice that:”

• responded quickly

• filled space

• carried responsibility for others

• spoke even when my body said no

the voice that is no longer sustainable— asking to stop being noise.

What’s emerging feels different. It feels slower, more intentional, less frequent…but more true.

And the space in between, this silence, is not absence. It feels like calibration.

Bioneers, Without a Voice

I’m heading into a space I’ve been beyond excited to attend, a space that centered on ideas, connection, and expression…without my primary way of participating. And yet, something in me knows: Maybe this is exactly how I’m meant to be there.

Not to speak, but to listen.

To sense and feel into resonance without shaping the interaction through my words.

To notice who I’m drawn to—without needing to explain why.

To experience connection without performance or justification.

To let others meet me in a different way.

Redistributing the Field

There is also something relational that is slowly beginning to happen. When I don’t speak:

• others have to step in, or they don’t and the things don’t get done

• space and expectations reorganize

• the communication and relational patterns we’ve held in the family are making themselves known

The absence of my voice creates a kind of gap. And that gap, I’m learning, is not a problem to fix. It’s an opening into a new way of being.

Trusting the Unfolding

I don’t know exactly when my voice will return.

I hope it comes back soon. And I’m also learning not to grip that outcome too tightly. Because what I’m beginning to recognize is this: I am not losing my voice. I am being initiated into right relationship with it.

So, for now, I rest. I listen. I honor what my body is asking for. I attune. And I trust… that there is something here for me—and perhaps for others too.

And maybe, just maybe… what we are being asked to release is not our voice—but the ways we’ve learned to use it.

Questions to Sit With

Where in your life are you being invited to go deeper—not by pushing harder, but by releasing the need to stay at the surface?

Where in your life do you feel unheard, misaligned, unknown? What thoughts and emotions come up for you in this experience? What gift or insight is this offering you?

In those moments when I really let myself feel it, the whole thing is awe-some in the truest sense of the word. Not perfect, or easy, but truly awe-inspiring. Because to be alive here, at this moment in history, is to participate in one of the most profound chapters of human evolution.

And I feel incredibly grateful to be part of it.

The Pain We Inherit

Over the past decade of my own healing journey, I’ve come to see something clearly. Much of the pain we experience as individuals is not just ours. It lives in our families, in our communities, and in our cultures. In the systems and stories we inherited long before we were born.

We carry in our energetic field and DNA grief that was never processed, fear that was never spoken, trauma that was never integrated. And without awareness, we pass those patterns forward — often unconsciously — to our children and the generations that follow.

This is not a failure of humanity. It is simply what happens when pain has nowhere to go, and in the overwhelm of the experience, we go unconscious. Yet something remarkable happens when we begin to turn toward that pain with awareness. Healing becomes possible.

The Medicine We Carry

What I’ve learned along the way is that humans carry far more potential than we have been taught to believe. Each of us holds gifts, wisdom, and medicine that are uniquely ours to bring forward. And when we begin to heal — even a little — that medicine begins to surface. Not as something grand or heroic, but often it shows up quietly:

In how we listen and sit with someone who is hurting without trying to change or save them.

In how we regulate our nervous system and chose response instead of reacting.

In how we speak our truth with compassion while honoring the unique journey and experiences of others.

In how we show up differently for our children and model healthier relationships than the generations before us were able to.

When one person does the work of processing pain and reclaiming their wholeness, it doesn’t just change their life. Healing ripples outward, changing the web of relationships around them. And over time, those ripples expand.

Attention Shapes Reality

Another thing I’ve come to recognize in a deeply embodied way is that where I place my attention matters. The stories I let run on repeat in my mind shape the future I experience. The emotions I suppress or avoid don’t disappear — they accumulate and fester.

Unprocessed grief becomes heaviness and shutdown.

Unspoken truth becomes tension and resentment.

Ignored fear becomes anxiety and control.

But when I bring awareness to what is happening inside of me, and ground my energy with breath and connection, something shifts. I gain the ability to respond rather than react. To feel deeply without overwhelm. To witness what is present instead of becoming consumed by it.

Presence Is Power

The single most powerful thing I’ve learned is this: the present moment is where our power lives. Not the past we have on repeat, or the future we spend precious time worrying about. Right here. Right now.

Learning to be present with whatever arises — grief, joy, fear, excitement, awe — has been one of the most transformative practices of my life. Presence doesn’t eliminate pain, but it allows us to experience life without being overtaken by it.

And when we practice presence consistently, something remarkable happens: Our body, heart, mind, and spirit begin to come back into relationship with one another. We become more coherent, grounded, and able to meet Life as it unfolds.

We Are Medicine for Each Other

Another great lesson my healing journey has shown me is this: We were never meant to do this alone. Humans are relational beings. We regulate each other’s nervous systems, reflect truth to one another, and carry medicine for each other in ways we often don’t even realize.

The inherited systems many of us know as reality today encourage separation and competition. But our biology — and our spirit — tells a different story. We are stronger together. We heal in relationship. And when enough people begin doing this work, families and even entire communities can transform.

A Different Future Is Possible

The unprocessed pain and oppressive systems we inherited do not have to define the future. They do not have to be our children’s or our grandchildren’s inheritance. We are living in a time when many of the old structures of our world are being questioned and challenged.

This moment can feel chaotic, uncertain, even frightening. But it is also full of possibility. And where we place our attention and energy during these times matters more than anything else. Because the unraveling of old systems creates space for something new to emerge.

The Great Re-membering

As I begin another turn around the sun, I find myself reflecting on what feels most important moving forward. And what continues to rise for me is this: We are in a time of great Re-membering.

Not remembering as an intellectual exercise. But re-membering in the sense of putting the pieces back together again. Body-Heart-Mind-Spirit. Self-Community-Humanity-Earth. So much of modern life has pulled these parts apart. The invitation now is to weave them back together. To return to ourselves, to each other, and to Mother Earth.

This Moment Matters

Many Indigenous teachings speak of this time as one of prophecy — a potential turning point in the human story. A moment when humanity must choose how we will move forward.

To continue down the path of fear and control or shift back towards healing and relationship.

To perpetuate extraction and a scarcity mindset or move towards reciprocity and remembering abundance.

To deepen our separation and isolation or returning to the felt sense that we are part of a much larger living web of life.

To live unconsciously in the stories of the mind or liberate our minds through the connection with our hearts to reclaim our sovereignty.

The good news is that the future is not predetermined. It is shaped by where we place our energy and the choices we make every day. And those choices begin with something incredibly simple.

One Practice

Presence.

One breath at a time.

One moment of awareness at a time.

One decision to respond with care instead of reaction.

One moment of listening.

One moment of truth.

From there, everything else becomes possible.

So, as I begin this next turn around the sun, I invite you to join me in the great Re-membering. To come back to ourselves — body, heart, mind, and spirit. Back to each other and back to Mother Earth.

We can do this. Many of us are doing this. And perhaps that is exactly why we are here.

Much love, relatives.

I’m so grateful to those of you who have been on this Substack journey with me. It has provided an unexpected outlet that I’ve felt—and known—I needed for decades. These posts allow me to pull together ideas, patterns, and experiences I’m thinking about and discussing with others in my life, in ways that help deepen my own awareness and re-cognition of “reality.”

This, of course, makes it possible for me to share those reflections back out with others.

The truth is, after experiencing the benefits I’ve felt since I started publishing, I would continue to write and post even if no one read my Substack. Writing has been a reflection practice for me my whole life, with an especially large outpouring over the past three years. Substack is the first time I’ve really shared my written reflections publicly, so it has been quite a leap.

So whether this is your first time visiting my Substack, or you’ve read every article since I started a few months ago—or you fall somewhere in between—I’m grateful you are here.

Each time I hit “publish,” my hope is that something in what feels resonant and alive for me might:

1. Affirm your own experiences

2. Help you re-cognize something meaningful for where you are right now

3. Plant seeds of re-membering that may nourish you in the future

Since I began publishing a few months ago, most weeks I’ve followed a Monday–Wednesday–Friday cadence.

Some pieces have connected across the week. Some have unfolded as weekly series over several weeks. At times I’ve brought forward writing I created earlier, and other times I’ve shared reflections emerging directly from my current experiences, conversations, and observations.

This month will be a little different.

Starting today, my family is heading out on a road trip—a pilot, so to speak.

I’ve been dreaming about traveling with my family in extended ways for over 20 years, and this dream is finally beginning to take form. We’ll depart on March 12th and return on April 1st.

During this time we’ll travel through several states, making a large loop through the Southwest and out to the West Coast before heading home and reconnecting with family—both blood and chosen. Our route will take us through Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, eventually ending with a week in the Bay Area for Bioneers. From there we’ll make a quick push back to South Dakota on the 31st before landing home again on April 1st.

We are very excited.

I call this trip a “pilot” because while I’ve carried this dream for more than two decades, what I envision moving forward in future trips includes:

Traveling for longer periods of time.
Ideally we would travel for two to three months at a time, allowing more spacious opportunities to connect, learn, and experience places more deeply.

Doing different loops across the continent.
The Southwest/West Coast loop will be one. A Midwest/Southeast/East Coast loop will likely be another. Others may emerge over time, shaped by relationships, invitations, and the people I feel called to dream and co-create with.

Connecting with others within my resonance web.
I feel increasingly called to spend time with individuals who are committed to personal sovereignty, right relationship, community, and collective liberation. Over the coming years, I hope to help weave together an ever expanding but always highly coherent, network of people from diverse backgrounds who are committed to this work.

I believe a small group of deeply coherent individuals can have a greater influence on the direction of humanity than millions moving without coherence.

Eventually traveling by RV.
An RV would allow us to move at a pace that supports our bodies and our kids’ needs for movement, as well as allow our fur baby, our almost 4 year old husky Loki, to come along with us. It would also help us avoid the long 9+ hour driving days that are unfortunately part of this particular trip. Having that flexibility would allow us to respond more easily to weather, opportunities, and unexpected connections along the way.

So, I’m putting that possibility out to the Universe. For now, we’ll be traveling in a mini-van. And we will have an incredible time.

Because there will be a lot of travel in a short amount of time—with four kiddos, a mini-van, and me as the primary driver—I honestly don’t know what my posting cadence will look like during the trip.

I will continue sharing what feels most resonant and alive for me, but it may be a few posts a week rather than three, or perhaps several shorter reflections instead of longer pieces.

Thank you in advance for your flexibility and willingness to travel alongside me as I tune into my own needs, my family’s needs, and what unfolds along the way.

In many ways, over the next few weeks you’ll be coming with me—meeting some of the people I meet and visiting some of the places we encounter.

I’m excited to see what unfolds, both within the journey itself and within what wants to emerge through the writing.

Reflection in your own Life-

Who are the people in your life that form your own “resonance web”, and what is one small way you could build or strengthen connections in your web this week?

As I come to the end of this series, what I feel most clearly is that nothing here is finished. The Five Compassions were never meant to be completed, mastered, or checked off. In contrast to our collective programming, they are not a ladder to climb or a framework to perfect. They are a living ecology — something we move within, return to, and deepen over time.

If there is a through-line running beneath all five, it is this: compassion is not an idea we hold — it is a capacity we inhabit. That capacity is shaped by our nervous systems. By our histories. By the support we have — or didn’t have — when we first learned how to feel.

Ordinary Compassion reminds us that we are wired for connection, and that feeling with others is natural — but not always easy. Compassion of Curiosity and Understanding create space for meaning to replace shame and judgment. Compassion of Recognition restores dignity and reminds us who we all are beneath survival. Compassion of Truth brings clarity, boundaries, and coherence to our care. And Compassion of Possibility emerges not from optimism, but from embodiment — from being grounded enough to stay present with what is.

What has stood out most to me as I’ve explored these compassions in my own life is how deeply relational they are. None of them exist in isolation or can flourish without support.
And none of them ask us to do this work alone.

In fact, the deeper I go into my own healing, the clearer it becomes that personal healing and collective healing are not separate processes. They are different expressions of the same movement that are deeply interconnected, and interdependent.

We regulate together.
We co-create meaning together.
We remember together.

And often, it is not the grand gestures that shape the field, but the quiet ones. It’s what happens in conversation where we slow down enough to listen beyond responding. Or a moment when we notice our body tightening and choose to pause and breathe. They occur when a boundary is spoken with care instead of carrying unspoken expectations and building resentment. They are the shared moments when our own personal reflection helps someone else feel less alone in their experience.

These are the places where the Five Compassions come alive.

So rather than offering a conclusion, I want to offer an opening. A few gentle invitations you might sit with — on your own, or with others who feel resonant.

You might reflect on which compassion feels most present for you right now.
Not the one you think you should be in — but the one that’s actually alive.

You might notice where you tend to enter the spiral dance of compassion, and where you resist or linger. Beginning to pay attention to where things feel familiar, tender or challenging.

If you’re sitting with others, you might explore questions like:

• Which compassion do you find easiest to embody? Which feels most difficult?
• How does your nervous system respond to intensity — and what helps you stay present?
• What shifts when curiosity replaces judgment, even briefly?
• Where have boundaries helped your compassion become more sustainable?
• What does “possibility” feel like in your body — not as an idea, but as a state?

There is no need to resolve these questions, or come to agreement. There is no pressure to arrive anywhere specific. The invitation is simply to notice — and to stay in relationship.

With yourself. With one another. With the larger web of Life you’re already part of.

The spiral doesn’t end here. It continues each time we choose presence over urgency, honesty over performance, and grounding over collapse. And if this series has offered anything of value, I hope it’s this reassurance:

You don’t have to do all of it.
You don’t have to hold everything.
You don’t have to know the way forward.

You only have to stay willing to pause, notice, and listen — to your body, to your experience, and to the quiet wisdom that emerges when compassion is lived rather than imagined. That, in itself, is a meaningful contribution. And it is enough for now.

If you would like to go deeper personally or with a group of trusted others into the five compassions, I have posted to Substack The Five Compassions: A Reflection & Discussion Guide for Circles & Small Groups. May we together seed a new humanity, one practiced compassion at a time.

This series was inspired by the Five Compassions as named by Dr. Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal, and is an embodied exploration of how these compassions move through my own healing journey and relationships.

Move slowly. Pause often. Let the body be part of and help guide the conversation.

Opening the Circle

Begin by inviting everyone to arrive fully.

You might offer a brief pause for grounding — a few breaths, feet on the floor, a moment of silence — or simply invite people to notice how they’re arriving today.

You may wish to name a few shared agreements. For example:

• Speak from lived experience (“I” statements)

• Listen to witness others lived experiences, not to respond

• Allow space for silence and notice how much space you and others take up

• Share only what feels resourced and appropriate

• Honor confidentiality within the group and specify what confidentiality means

• There is no expectation to speak. Presence alone is participation.

• Other? (Open it to the group to create your own or add)

Orienting to the Five Compassions

You may briefly name the Five Compassions explored in the series:

1. Ordinary Compassion

2. Compassion of Curiosity & Understanding

3. Compassion of Recognition

4. Compassion of Truth

5. Compassion of Possibility

You might remind the group:
These are not steps to complete or qualities to perfect. They are interwoven expressions of compassion that we cycle through and deepen over time.

Reflection & Dialogue Prompts

(Choose 3–5 that feel right for your group)

You may invite people to reflect silently first, or even do a written reflection, then share if they wish.

Entering the Spiral

• Which compassion feels most alive for you right now?

• Where do you notice yourself entering the spiral most often?

Ordinary Compassion

• When does compassion flow easily for you?

• When does it feel harder to stay present, and how does your body respond?

Curiosity & Understanding

• What shifts when curiosity replaces judgment — even briefly?

• Where has re-cognition and re-membering (aka “understanding”) softened shame or self-blame in your life?

Recognition

• When do you feel most like yourself, beneath roles or coping strategies?

• What changes when you see others through the lens of re-cognition rather than behavior alone?

Truth & Boundaries

• Where have boundaries helped your compassion become more sustainable?

• How do you discern what is yours to hold — and what is not?

Possibility

• What does “possibility” feel like in your body, not as an idea but as a state?

• How do you notice the energy you bring into relationships or shared spaces, and how does your energy impact others?

Optional Group Practice (5–10 minutes)

Invite the group to sit quietly and reflect on this question:

What support helps me stay present — with myself, with others, with what is true?

Participants may journal, sit in silence, or share a single word or phrase if they feel called.

Closing the Circle

You might close by inviting each person (if they wish) to share:

• one word they’re leaving with, or

• one compassion they want to listen to more closely in the coming days

End with gratitude — for the group, for the shared presence, and for the ongoing unfolding of this work.

A Final Note

The Five Compassions are not meant to be “used up” in one conversation.

You are welcome to return to this guide multiple times, going deeper into the compassions as individuals or as a group. Trust that whatever emerges is enough for now.

Presence is the practice.

Relationship is the teacher.

Presence in relationship is the medicine, unlocking Life’s potential and seeding a new humanity.

Not just as cultural artifacts, but as living structures that supported change.

What keeps returning is this:

Ceremonies, practices, and rituals were never peripheral to human life. They were the relational architecture that helped humans live in right-relationship.

Throughout this piece, I sometimes use the shorthand CPRs to refer to ceremonies, practices, and rituals. The parallel feels meaningful: physical CPR restores breath and circulation when life is threatened; relational CPR restores meaning, connection, and coherence when rupture has occurred.

Ceremonies, practices, and rituals existed across scales of Life:

• personal

• interpersonal

• ecological and biological

• ancestral and communal

• cyclical (moon, seasons, life stages)

These relational forms helped humans mark time, metabolize change, and recognize our place in the larger web of Life. They taught us how to be a good human in a good way, living a good life, in right-relationship with all that makes life possible.

But for thousands of years now, colonization has spread across Mother Earth—reaching nearly every culture and ecosystem. And colonization did not only take land. It took relationship.

Colonization as rupture of relationship

At its simplest, colonization means taking over and settling in a place. When people arrive in a place already inhabited, relationship can unfold in different ways—mutual adaptation and coexistence, or domination and displacement. In many parts of the world, colonization took the latter path: force, exploitation, and systems that reinforced hierarchy, dependence, and scarcity.

We often think of this geographically—and rightly so—but colonization to various degrees has also occurred across the inner landscapes of human Life.

We see it in symptoms and rippling across:

• the gut — shaping the microbiome through diet and industrial food and chemical systems

• the mind — through installed narratives, paradigms, and belonging codes

• the heart — through trauma and emotional suppression

• the body — through labor, schooling, and norms of acceptability

• the spirit — through institutions severed from lived sacred experience

• the Earth — through extraction, exploitation, and enclosure

Colonization ruptured ancestral continuity. It broke the relational threads connecting people to ancestors, land, and more-than-human kin. And with that rupture, many of the ceremonies and practices that maintained right-relationship were shamed, outlawed, or forgotten.

Yet every human alive descends from peoples who once lived in reciprocity with Mother Earth. It was the only way to survive and thrive. It will be the only way to survive and thrive moving forward.

What CPRs actually did

Ceremonies, practices, and rituals were not decorative traditions. They were relational technologies that continually reminded people:

• who they are

• where they belong

• what they are responsible for

• how to move with change rather than against it

They trained humans to track rhythm and pattern—the cycles of moon, season, life stage, and community flow.

They helped people stay synchronized with the dance of Life so they would not be overwhelmed by it—or naively trample the delicate interdependencies that sustain ecosystems and societies.

At their core, CPRs are about relationship:

• interconnection and interdependence

• witnessing and being witnessed

• metabolizing transition

• acknowledging pain and possibility

• expressing gratitude

• recommitting to right-relationship

• closure

These are not obsolete human needs. We still live within an interconnected web of Life on a planet of profound polarity. Life still includes pain, suffering, death, transition, complexity, duality, and change. Yet in much of modern society, the CPRs that would have helped us meet them have been lost—or hollowed out.

Our needs haven’t changed, but our ability to access CPRs has.

The hollowing of modern rituals

In “western” culture, many rituals still exist—graduations, weddings, holidays, birthdays. But most have been co-opted by consumer culture.

The emphasis shifts from meaning to consumption: food, gifts, decorations, status, performance. The relational and developmental function fades or gets taken over by the stress of the performance.

When rituals lose meaning, they no longer help humans metabolize transition or anchor belonging. They become events that primarily serve consumption and social expectation, rather than thresholds that help us navigate life.

Returning to biological time

Another layer that feels important is how CPRs re-anchor humans in biological and ecological time.

Many ancestral ceremonies followed moon phases, seasonal thresholds, and rhythms of day and night. Women’s cycles and Earth’s cycles were understood as expressions of the same living system—both moving in roughly 13 lunar cycles across the year.

Time was not primarily measured. It was sensed, read, and lived.

Our ancestors knew when to plant, harvest, migrate, rest, prepare, or gather because they were in relationship with land, water, sky, plants, and animals. Their lives depended on their ability to read, attune to and align their actions with these relatives.

And crucially, they did not read these rhythms only to benefit themselves. They aligned their actions in ways that supported the thriving of the larger web. Reciprocity was survival intelligence.

When humans act in ways that allow our relatives—soil, plants, animals, waters—to thrive, those relatives in turn sustain human life. Mutual thriving emerges from right-relationship.

Modern societies operate largely within constructed time—calendars, clocks, productivity cycles. This abstraction enabled coordination across large populations, but it also separated human activity from biological rhythms.

We move by schedule rather than season.
By deadline rather than readiness.
By productivity rather than ripeness.

Ceremonies, practices, and rituals aligned with natural cycles gently re-entrain perception—helping humans again sense light, season, body rhythm, and ecological timing.

This is not regression, it’s recalibration.

Decolonization, reprogramming, and integration

Decolonization often focuses on removing what was imposed. Reprogramming focuses on installing something new. But human change rarely happens through removal or replacement alone.

Integration acknowledges what exists while intentionally wiring in new patterns through lived experience. This is where CPRs become essential again. Because when relational circulation falters, CPRs help restore flow.

CPRs are repeated relational experiences that reshape perception, emotion, and identity across time. Some rhythms are daily, weekly, lunar, seasonal, annual, or life-stage thresholds. When practiced with awareness, CPRs become integration pathways.

What makes a CPR meaningful

I’d love to hear from ceremonialists, but as I’ve been reflecting in my own life, certain anchors seem essential to any ceremony, practice, or ritual:

Intention & Grounding
What transition or relationship is being recognized?

Connection & Tending
To self, each other, Mother Earth, ancestors, descendants, cycles, the sacred.

Witnessing & Recognition
Being seen and seeing others within change.

Realignment & Recommitment
Returning to right-relationship.

Gratitude
Acknowledging what sustains life and relationship.

Closure & Integration
Where needed, sealing, releasing, or transitioning out of the CPR space so the experience can settle and integrate.

These elements transform gatherings from events into relational thresholds. Not every CPR must include all elements. But together they form a relational arc.

Co-creating new CPRs

Given how deeply colonization disrupted ancestral ceremonial lineages, many people today no longer carry intact cultural CPRs. This raises an important question:

How do we re-enter meaningful ceremony without appropriation or empty imitation?

One possibility is consciously co-creating CPRs within our actual lives and relationships. We can ask:

• What practices, gestures, objects, or rhythms carry meaning for us?

• What helps us feel connected, witnessed, or realigned?

• What is accessible within our capacity and context?

CPRs do not need to be elaborate. They can be scaled and customized.

A personal full-moon pause.
A family threshold ritual.
A neighborhood seasonal gathering.

Using the anchors of intention, connection, witnessing, realignment, gratitude, and closure, people can weave CPRs that fit their place and relationships. Resonance, timing, and capacity can guide what is included. In this way, CPRs become living relational practices rather than fixed inherited forms—restoring ceremony not through replication, but through conscious relationship.

Reclaiming ritual accessibility, authority, and shared capacity

In many modern contexts, there is an implicit belief that meaningful ceremony requires formal authorization—that one must be trained, certified, or sanctioned to hold ritual.

This belief has understandable roots. Some ceremonies do require deep training, lineage knowledge, or specialized skill. Safety, cultural respect, and accountability matter.

And at the same time, many everyday CPRs historically lived within families and communities. Ritual literacy was once a widely shared human capacity, not only a specialist role. People marked transitions, seasons, and relationships together without needing institutional or outside spiritual permission.

Today, many CPRs have become either hollowed out or overly complex and restricted. When rituals lose meaning, they fade. When they become inaccessible, most people simply opt out. Ceremony then appears reserved for experts, and ordinary people may feel unqualified to hold even simple, relational practices. This outsources and externalizes our power to be in relationship with Life itself.

Re-weaving CPRs into Life today may involve restoring this shared capacity—while still honoring safety, consent, and appropriate accountability.

Accessible CPRs are not careless CPRs. They are relational, contextual, and scaled to the people and purpose they serve. A family blessing, a friendship threshold ritual, or a neighborhood seasonal gathering can be held with integrity when grounded in intention, connection, witnessing, realignment, gratitude, and closure.

In this way, authority becomes shared rather than centralized—rooted in relationship rather than status. Communities regain the ability to mark meaning together, while still recognizing that some forms of ceremonial work call for deeper training or cultural belonging.

Restoring ritual accessibility does not diminish tradition. It restores access and participation.

Safety, consent, and choice

For CPRs to be supportive or healing, safety, consent, and choice are essential.

Ceremony without consent can replicate harm.
Ritual without choice can become coercive.
Connection without safety creates a pathway for exploitation.

CPRs are meant to restore relationship. Where safety, consent, or autonomy are absent, rupture deepens instead. This is especially important in a world where many people carry trauma from imposed spiritual belief systems or forced participation.

Relational CPRs must be invitational.
Participation must be voluntary.
People must be able to step in, step back, or abstain without pressure.

In this way, CPRs remain aligned with healing rather than domination or the relinquishing of our own inner authority and power.

Learning from old, creating for now

There is much to learn from ancestral ceremonies, practices, and rituals. They carry deep wisdom about relationship, rhythm, reciprocity, and belonging. If we already have connections already to meaningful CPRs, we do not need to reinvent the wheel; we can reconnect to our ancestral roots and their cultural practices.

And at the same time, creating new CPRs allows ceremony to meet the cultural and relational realities of our time with all its nuance and complexities. Our ancestors did not have to navigate the technologies and systems that have created the global threats we face today.

We live in unprecedented and chaotic conditions—ecological disruption, social fragmentation, rapid change. In such times, rigid forms often break. Flexible and relational forms adapt.

CPRs that are fluid, responsive, and collectively grounded may help humans navigate our current transitions with greater coherence.

The field I’m exploring

What feels alive for me now is this wondering:

How might we remember and re-create CPRs in modern life—within families, friendships, communities, and organizations—so transitions are held rather than rushed through or ignored altogether?

How might ceremonies, practices, and rituals support:

• personal change

• relational repair

• ecological belonging

• intergenerational continuity

• community coherence

Not as nostalgia or performance, but as living relational infrastructure. Because of the ways our brains and nervous systems work, as humans we still need help moving through change. We still need witnessing. We still need rhythm. We still need belonging rooted in relationship rather than consumption.

And perhaps remembering and re-weaving CPRs is one way we begin to restore what rupture fragmented—returning, step by step, to right-relationship within the web of Life through lived ceremony.

An invitation

Take some time to reflect on what CPRs are deeply meaningful and supportive for you in your life?

Where might more integrated CPRs in life feel supportive?

Where in your life do transitions already live—quietly or unseen?

A change in season.
A child growing.
A relationship shifting.
A threshold approaching or closing.

What might it look like to pause and mark one of these moments with intention?

Not perfectly.
Not elaborately.
Simply and relationally.

Perhaps a few words.
A shared breath.
A gesture of gratitude.
A moment of witnessing.

CPRs begin not in complexity, but in attention and the recognition of a need.
When offered with care and intention, this is already ceremony.