how many of you can relate to growing up in unpredictable environments as children?

and if you consider yourself to be sensitive, creative, or empathic, which as humans, it’s our birthright to be, it’s highly likely that these very human traits got dimmed, dulled, or even buried, the moment survival programming switched on instead.

we often learn as children, and especially as sensitive and empathic children, to feel everyone except ourselves.

we become fluent in every nervous system except our own.

we can read a room before we’ve even said hello.

and then we learn to know the emotional weather of a parent, a partner, a stranger, before we know our own.

it was a survival skill, learned young, always monitoring where the caregiver’s subconscious script was running. and this produces anxiety, self doubt, a constant static under everything said and done.

this isn’t a personality trait, this is a body that learned reading everyone else was the price of survival.

and there’s language for this now. i didn’t know it growing up, and i barely had it several years ago. but there are terms used by psychologists and common folk alike.

this is what happens to your nervous system under assault:

the fawn response — most people know fight, flight, freeze. well fawn is the fourth. it’s more commonly known as people pleasing. and it’s when a child’s environment isn’t safe. the strategy becomes to exquisitely attune to the moods and needs of the people around you, so you can adjust yourself before anything bad happens. it’s a nervous system that learned prediction was safer than reaction.

enmeshment— the family systems word for what happens with caregivers specifically. a child’s job becomes managing the emotional climate of the household, often without anyone naming it. the child’s internal experience gets absorbed into the caregiver’s, so there’s no clear signal left for what do i feel, separate from what does this person need from me.

hypervigilance — this is what happens when one 'jumps out of their body' to scan. a threat detection system stuck in the on position, exhausting because it never learned how to turn off, even in rooms that are actually safe now.

put those three things together and you get a person who can read a whole room in a second and cannot tell you what they, themselves, are feeling in that same second.

that was me. and it may have been you too.

and here’s the part that seems like a contradiction, but isn’t.

at the same time your sense of self gets built entirely from outside, from reading everyone else, something else happens on the inside.

you take what was never yours to hold, and you pull it inward instead.

you make it your fault.

because if it’s your fault, if the hard thing, the scary thing, the thing you couldn’t explain or predict or protect yourself from was somehow caused by you, then maybe you have some control over it, maybe next time you can stop it.

a child would rather be guilty than powerless.

guilt at least comes with a plan, while powerlessness doesn’t.

so you build a self identity out of other people’s reactions on the outside, and you build a cage out of self blame on the inside.

the thoughts that fuel you become—

if i can just read them well enough, if i can just be good enough, careful enough, responsible enough, then i can keep it from happening again.

that’s not logic. that’s a child’s nervous system trying to survive an unpredictable world the only way it knew how, by making itself responsible for the unpredictable.

shame is something you build, brick by brick, because it feels safer than chaos.

and we keep doing it as adults because of how the brain actually works.

every time you run a thought, a feeling, a reaction, your neurons fire together, and the ones that fire together, wire together.

the more you run a pattern, scanning the room, doubting yourself, bracing for impact, overriding your own feeling to track someone else’s, the stronger and faster that pathway gets.

until it goes from a dirt path, to a paved road, to a six lane highway.

the brain doesn’t care if the highway is good for you, it only cares that it’s efficient. and a well worn path is always more efficient than building a new one.

this is called neural pathway reinforcement, and your brain isn’t trying to keep you happy. it’s trying to keep you fast. it’s trying to keep you alive. you are wired for survival.

and under stress, under uncertainty, under anything that even smells like the old unpredictability, your brain doesn’t reach for the calm option, it reaches for the highway because the highway is what’s already built.

this is why we can’t heal from the mind alone and insight by itself doesn’t change you.

you can know all of this, name the fawn response, name the enmeshment, understand the whole architecture, and still find yourself back on the highway the second something triggers the old pattern.

knowing isn’t the same as rewiring.

what changes it is creating new repetition in the other direction.

every time you catch yourself mid scan and choose to stay in your body instead.

every time you feel the fear and don’t immediately assume it must be your fault.

every time you speak the true thing without leaving yourself to go check if it landed safely.

these moments are like a single footstep in the grass next to the road. but paths get built one step at a time, same as the old one did.

trauma changes the brain, but healing does too.

that’s not just a saying. that’s neuroplasticity.

the same mechanism that built the hypervigilance highway is the mechanism that builds the new path.

but it isn’t as simple as deciding to feel the fear instead of scanning the room.

the choosing comes after something else first:

safety.

the nervous system has to believe it’s safe enough to try a different road at all.

the brain doesn’t build new pathways while it’s in threat mode, it builds them when the nervous system is regulated enough to have bandwidth left over for something other than survival.

you cannot think your way out of a body that’s still bracing.

so what actually creates that condition?

nervous system regulation first, the actual physiological state.

there are many practices that can help the nervous system to regulate. breath work that lengthens the exhale, cold exposure, or temperature changes, movement that discharges the stored activation instead of just distracting from it.

in essence, whichever somatic practices that let the felt sense of safety register in the body, not just the mind.

and co-regulation, since your nervous system learned danger in relationship, so a lot of the repair happens in relationship too.

a felt sense of safety with another person, a therapist, a partner, a friend, someone who can stay steady while you’re not, teaches the nervous system something no amount of solo effort can.

none of it happens all at once. it takes sustained repetition, in an actual regulated state, over months, sometimes years, in doses small enough that the nervous system can stay online while it happens, before the new path is reliable enough to reach for under real stress.

this is why i couldn’t just decide to stop hypervigilance and people pleasing, even when i began to realize the slave i had become in the cage i had built for myself.

i had to build actual safety instead first, in my body, in my relationships, before staying present instead of scanning was even available to me as an option.

my youngest cries sometimes when we talk about her angry outbursts, and how we can work on controlling it.

she says, but mama, i can’t help it when i shout “shut up.”

and she’s right. she can’t. not in that moment.

when we’re flooded, when the nervous system is in fight or flight, we are not in a state where willpower lives.

the part of the brain responsible for choosing, for pausing, for thinking before you speak, goes offline under real threat activation.

it isn’t a character flaw. it’s our biology.

so we don’t get to walk in the front door and change it all there.

instead we have to go in through the side door.

because the side door is the parasympathetic nervous system, the state of rest, of safety, of feeling like the danger has passed.

that’s the only state where new choices are actually available.

we call the part of the brain that can choose the wise brain, or the prefrontal cortex. and the wise brain only comes online when the body feels safe enough to let it.

and in order to feel safe, we need our physical needs met. we need a roof over our head, safe, predictable people around us.

we don’t need overstimulation from chaotic screen filled environments, we need rest, food, nature, nurture, and care.

and the thing nobody talks about when we talk about healing, is that those same conditions are actually quite scarce on this planet for enormous parts of the human population.

there are countless children right now falling asleep to the sound of bombs, not lullabies, while there are also far too many children growing up in homes where addiction runs the household instead of a parent, where the unpredictability is the entire architecture of the home.

and this isn’t just a poverty story.

you can walk into the wealthiest homes, the safest looking neighborhoods, and find the same addiction, the same unpredictability, the same nervous systems trained young to scan for danger behind closed doors nobody else ever sees.

money doesn’t buy a regulated household.

abuse doesn’t check your income bracket before it walks in the door.

you cannot regulate a nervous system that is at war, whether that war is a country falling apart or a house that looks fine from the outside.

so when we talk about needing safety before the wise brain can come online, we’re not just talking about an individual’s inner work.

we’re talking about a set of conditions huge parts of the world do not have, in every class, in every zip code.

food. shelter. rest. predictable people, sober people, safe people.

these aren’t luxuries.

they’re the actual prerequisites for a human nervous system to do what it was built to do.

but this also doesn’t mean healing is impossible without perfect conditions.

it just means we should stop treating dysregulation as a personal failing when so much of the world is structurally denied the safety that regulation requires.

healing looks different for everyone and there’s no universal formula, no five step plan that applies to every nervous system and every history the same way.

but there is one thing that has to come first, no matter who you are or what you’re healing from.

we have to create the physical and emotional safety container before anything else can happen.

we have to put on our own oxygen mask first, as an actual sequence.

safety first, everything else after.

for me, that looked like walking away from toxic relationships, no matter who they were to me, no matter how close, no matter what role they played for my kids or for me.

toxic, to me, is anyone who won’t take accountability for their actions, anyone who won’t admit when they’re wrong, anyone who won’t be honest, and won’t honor your truth.

and i am not just talking on the surface, not just the version where they say the right thing to your face and do something else behind your back, because lip service is easier than actually changing.

i couldn’t build a regulated nervous system inside relationships that required me to stay hypervigilant just to survive them.

i had to walk from all the ones that thrived on me staying small. i have walked away from family, from life long friendships, from business partners, acquaintances…

and then i had to learn to listen to what my intuition was telling me, underneath the hum of anxiety i had learned to call my resting state.

i had to start spending hours at a time outside, when i wasn’t tending to tasks and kids were at school.

and i’m lucky, because for me, work is being a mom.

still, raising four kids by myself is a lot, mental and physical work that never stops, but so many people have to do this and hold down a job on top of it.

so i had the privilege of having hours to spend feeling what i was never allowed to feel.

i went on retreats, where i could be held in a safe container and do the deep dives into everything buried.

i let the house fall apart. food was mac and cheese, frozen pizza, rice and beans, some veggies or fruit eaten raw straight out of the fridge, for the kids and for me.

i forgot appointments and didn’t beat myself up about it.

i hardly socialized, barely went to gatherings. it was too hard, and i missed finn too much.

it meant going for walks to clear my head while the electronic babysitter played on and on and on.

it meant writing here, about all the messy stuff.

it meant spending a lot of money on therapy.

a lot of these things came with the privilege of being financially stable, from the foundation i received when finn died.

but i also did this exact work on food stamps, in a safe house apartment, when the girls were little and i fled their abusive dad.

that’s when i first learned many of the same practices. back then i journaled, i practiced gratitude, and i did what i could while broke and working full time too.

the bottom line is that healing looks different for everyone.

but if you get focused on putting your healing work first — the most important work that i believe we have as humans — it starts weaving itself into your work schedule, your caregiving, your real life.

that’s what putting yourself first means to me.

that’s what it looks like to start a self love revolution.

thanks for joining me for any part of it.

i love you.

if any part of this is your story too, i’d love to hear your thoughts.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. 💞

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we don’t always get to choose what happens to us.

as we are growing up and learning how to speak up and stand up for ourselves, things happen that are out of our control.

we come into the world at the mercy of it, and in the process we are violated in countless ways and our sovereignty is stripped, little by little, or in big gashes too.

and it isn’t always forceful or brutal. sometimes it is subtle and insidious.

our inner knowing exchanged for doubt.

our inner boundaries exchanged for permission.

permission for what we never asked for.

permission to carry what was never ours to hold.

permission to be complicit in a silence we never agreed to.

and who can honestly say they didn’t experience some form of this too?

think of all the cultures obliterated, massacred, destroyed, along with their elders, their traditions, their wisdom, their voice.

what got rewritten…

what record was allowed to exist, and what was silenced instead.

but this is the lifetime where we get to turn it all around. this is the lifetime we get to choose freedom instead.

“resistance is her word. what does it mean to you?”

a line from my song i’ve included at the end of this piece.

what does resistance look like for you?

for me, this week, it looked like a circle. the one now sitting at the top of this very publication, my new logo, though it isn’t really new at all.

i saw the shape once on my son’s jiu jitsu pants and something in me just knew i wanted to use it for a logo one day.

the painted circle is called an ensō, a japanese zen symbol. it’s a circle painted in a single breath, one continuous brushstroke. in zen tradition it represents enlightenment, the void, and the present moment, imperfections and all.

the gap where the brush lifts is left open on purpose, as nothing is ever fully finished. the opening allows you to be a work in progress, still becoming.

and gold, to me, represents alchemy, turning pain into wisdom. the buried treasure we find when we are patient. gold is sunlight and heart frequency and the love from the mineral kingdom, all in one.

i had asked the photographer who did my branding photos, if she could help me build it out as my logo, but at that time i had no real business plan, and little did i know that our entire relationship would go up in smoke, just like the one with my producer, her husband.

but i have decided to use this logo for my substack publication anyway.

trusting that my dreams to one day be of service to humanity can happen bit by bit. and that the twists and turns and dead ends along the way were never the destination, they were part of the journey.

the next part of my journey is looking like starting a second master’s degree when i move to spain in a few months, a master’s in corporate communication and digital media, taught entirely in spanish.

new skills, a new community, and a language i’ve been reaching towards for years, finally becoming fully mine instead of just conversational.

just like i did with my italian when i got my first degree from the university of padua. it was over twenty years ago, but i have always loved being a student, it’s partly why i became an elementary teacher too.

with this new move and this new chapter i am writing, after losing my husband to cancer and all the rest that emerged during this time of healing, i am learning how to carry everything i've already built with my own two hands. the branding, the writing, the reclaiming.,so that one day i can help other people, other businesses, do the same thing for themselves.

helping people reclaim their truth and tell their story matters.

we need more authentic stories of triumph and struggle, not curated highlight reels.

we need to understand why we do what we do, and then find the courage to change course when it stops matching our own morals.

we need a new world, and more businesses and corporations with it, built on something more than financial gain.

we must build it on an actual code of ethics, on equity for all, on the same code martin luther king jr. spent his life demanding of a country that wasn't ready to give it, in his "i have a dream" speech and so many more.

king was just one of countless others throughout history. and for every name we know, there are thousands we don’t. for there have always been those willing to stand up in the face of injustice to tell their story.

just like we are doing here on substack. we are telling our stories, and using our collective voices to stand for our truth.

this is how we begin to change the narrative, one reclamation story at a time.

i have come to realize that for me, reclaiming this logo from a season of betrayal and heartbreak is how i do it for myself personally. i believe we can’t help others until we learn to help ourselves.

self love comes first.

this meant going back to the very beginning of this logo’s story.

around that time, i was working with my producer on my first album, birth of venus. his wife had already done the photoshoot for the album and the three of us found a studio space for sale that felt like a dream come true.

they were broke, so i was the one who put down the financial liability to buy it, paying for everything with finn’s life insurance payout, and asking only for a work trade of hours in return.

the first day we went to see it, before any of it started, there was a dead bird on the doorstep. a little yellow goldfinch. gold, like the circle we were about to design together. i didn’t think much of it then. just a small, sad thing on a stoop.

one of them looked at me, knowing i pay attention to signs, and asked if i thought it was a bad omen.

no, i said. birds are a symbol of hope for me. i have them tattooed along my neck. they represent finn, and how he visits me with birds of prey since he died. i think it’s a sign to move forward, i had replied.

but since it all crumbled, i’ve often thought back on that conversation. and how even they sensed the foreboding nature of it. how i turned it around anyway, into hope, into encouragement, the same way i have turned every hard thing in my life around.

always finding the gold in the rough. the lotus that grows from the mud. it’s my whole identity, really.

i wonder sometimes if that instinct, the reflex to turn every hard sign into hope, always find the silver lining, is a gift or a blind spot. maybe it was always both.

so when i began to wake up to the fact that the relationship was feeling very one-sided, i asked them to move things around in the studio space so i could have a desk there too. i thought asking for that one small, fair thing wouldn’t be a big deal.

i was wrong.

a few weeks later, a bird cage appeared by her new desk, a decorative figurine bird inside it, meant to look cute. it showed up right after i’d asked to make things more equitable, and they both got really upset about it. like who was i to try and make things feel fair?

chills went down my spine when i saw it. i had felt like a caged bird for most of my life, long before that studio, long before any of them, and there it was, arriving the exact moment i asked for a little more room of my own.

around that same time, he helped me produce one of the last songs we made together before it all fell apart. little did i know i was writing about the very thing happening all around me.

i called the song ‘her resistance.’

if resistance were a bird, i wrote, she’d fly right through.

i meant it as a wish back then, something i hoped for her, hoped for myself, without quite believing either of us could actually do it.

i didn’t yet know how to fly through anything.

i was still asking permission to leave the cage.

since i was getting nothing back but a work trade, i had started to wonder how i was supposed to receive any real value from this setup, if i didn’t feel safe emotionally in the space. how could i, once i started to sense i was being used?

in the end i chose to resell the studio. it cost me more than the financial loss on paper. it was a huge loss of so much, relationships with those i once trusted, the loss of a dream.

i lost a lot of money to people who were happy to take it, there and elsewhere, across those years, because i was still operating from the wound.

the people closest to me growing up had taught me that carrying someone else’s darkness was my job, that staying silent was my role.

so of course i handed my money and my power to whoever sounded confident enough to take it.

after it was all done, i still have my dignity and my creativity intact. i paid for those images and that music myself, in full. and in addition to this, i have the peace of mind that i own all the rights from that chapter, every last bit of it.

a cage is still a cage until you wake up and fly through the open door.

“she knows in her heart, it takes darkness to see the stars…”

another line from that same song.

i didn’t fully understand it then, but i understand it now.

it took darkness to find my light.

it’s the same phrase kamala harris used in her concession speech.

and it’s the same with my family, who i don’t speak to anymore.

i know what it is to have someone try to erase what actually happened.

“she’s got nothing more to lose. it’s a fight she can’t win, she’s at home in her skin. she can still sing the blues.”

at the end of it all, i am not comparing myself to king or anyone who has ever fought and lost everything for telling the truth.

i am still alive, and i have never been persecuted for the color of my skin. i am only saying i recognize the shape of oppression, because i have lived inside a small version of it.

i don't get to change anyone's mind who no longer walks beside me.

i only get to live my own version of my truth and i get to tell about it, out loud, on my own terms.

someone once tried to make me forget. but i went back anyway, for all of what once got left behind.

for all of the precious parts of that little girl who was me, before anyone tried to make her smaller.

i’d bet someone somewhere maybe tried to make you forget your truth too, somewhere along the way, just as the world’s empires have always tried to do, to anyone willing and courageous enough to take a stand.

“revolution is her fate. what does it mean to you? if revolution had a face, she’s smiling down from the moon.”

here is a recording of the song this piece kept returning to:

let’s start a self love revolution.

it’s my mantra, and my personal manifesto.

it’s also my call to action, for anyone else ready to take it all back, and never ever apologize for existing again.

if any part of this is your story too, i'd love to hear it. and if you're ready to start going back for your own pieces, i'd love to walk that path with you.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. 💞

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what our world would be

if we couldn't express ourselves?

if we couldn't dive to the depths of our souls

and then carry the gold

back up to the surface somehow.

what a hopeless place this world would be.

so many tied in knots…

so many knots.

all the suffering of all the innocent.

we all started out innocent at one point.

then the split.

it occurs for everyone.

a split that happens

when we very first learn to abandon ourselves.

in those early formative years.

we split from our source of innocence and wholeness

when we were made to feel we weren't enough,

or we shouldn't have done…

or that it's all our fault.

everyone experiences the split

and then the countless ones that come after.

and thus begins the years of not knowing.

of stumbling around in the darkness.

sometimes, if we are lucky enough

we get to hold a small candle.

but most of the time

we are completely blind

and sensing and crawling

stooped and hunched and stumbling

through the vast darkness of our lives.

feeling for all the dark shapes

that surround us.

having forgotten our own precious form.

such a tragedy you say?

but is it not a divine tragedy?

our very own chosen divine tragedy.

we forgot so we could remember.

what if source made us all

so she/he/it could experience itself

in a million billion trillion different ways?

some say that we each have a giant eye

an eye that is all knowing

an i that is all growing

i am that i am

looking out from the center of my being.

just for the thrill of it.

the joy,

the pain,

the heartbreak,

the ecstasy.

of being form who forgets

of being life that expands

of being light that shimmers

of being tears that fall

of being…

alive.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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i came on live almost at midnight, half expecting no one to show, still wired from a 2am online spanish exam the night before for my master’s application at a university in spain.

this live spirals through themes the way they always do: a jack canfield training i overpaid for years ago, the actual mechanics of the spain visa backdoor, kali yuga and the golden era we’re supposedly moving toward, what it means to build your safety on rock instead of sand, and why a quiet stretch on substack isn’t proof you’re doing something wrong.

a few threads worth tracking

the jack canfield lesson — if you’re not a little scared, you’re probably not dreaming big enough. the difference between healthy stretch and self-sacrifice, and why we were taught the second one instead of the first. [~0:00]

the visa backdoor — how “let’s move to spain” turned into an unexpected second master’s, a 2am online exam taken in spanish i barely speak, and why sometimes the plan finds you sideways. [~3:00]

the golden era — kali yuga, the great unraveling since covid, and why the world looking more chaotic right now might actually be the sign we’re closer to waking up, not further from it. [~9:00]

becoming a lighthouse — you can’t be a lighthouse for anyone else until you’ve built yours on rock instead of sand. what it means to get safe in your own body before you try to hold space for others. [~15:30]

the engagement lull — sitting with the fear that a quiet stretch on substack means i’m doing it wrong, and choosing instead to believe it has nothing to do with me at all. keep doing you, your people will find you. [~19:45]

the mask underneath the mask — what i’ve noticed dating again: how many of us are operating from an egoic performance instead of the centered place underneath it, and the ongoing work of asking what’s actually driving me versus what’s just an old wound talking. [~21:00]

sit with this

• where in your life are you choosing cold comfort over the discomfort of real growth?

• if the chaos around you right now is actually a sign of waking up, not falling apart, what changes about how you’re relating to it?

• what would it look like to build your safety on your own rock, instead of waiting for someone else’s?

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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dear finn,

i know it’s been a while since i wrote to you here, using this formal container to write of my love to you.

i chose this picture because, well, we just finally got your headstone up after almost four years.

i know the timing was perfect. it arrived just two days before your mom’s service.

you can even see the hole where we placed the ceramic stones the green burial service made from her ashes.

she wanted to be cremated. you ended up being buried according to your wishes.

i have spent so much time at your grave. it is such a peaceful place under the flatirons.

i think i may be buried there too one day.

i’m so glad you changed your mind at the end. you had always wanted to be cremated, but then you decided it would be important to have a place we could visit.

such a wise, thoughtful final decision you made.

just like you. you always were so wise and thoughtful.

i was speaking with the management at the cemetery before your mom’s memorial. they want to know if we want to buy more plots.

this led me to contemplating the whole thing, talking to the kids about it.

our son thinks i should be buried like you. there is something beautiful about having your whole body under ground.

and i love that we chose a green burial for you, placing your precious remains only in a box we lovingly painted before laying you in it. that way you go back to the earth in the most natural way, without any of the toxins.

there has been something so comforting about lying spread out on top of your remains when i visit you…

but then i found myself looking forward to the day when i can rest there with you too.

and this feeling brings up bittersweet, mixed emotions, to be honest.

how could i be so looking forward to being done?

it’s just that it’s been a long road of healing from all the things. and it feels like it will be peaceful to finally lie down and fly home.

one fine day when my life is over i’ll fly away… a hymn i have always loved.

it felt so natural to talk to the kids and your sisters about where we want to be placed, whether we want to be buried or cremated.

it made me wonder how death has become so taboo that most never speak of it until the hour is upon them.

and all this got me thinking about your mom’s ceremony.

she didn’t want anyone to speak at her memorial. so we were silent as we placed the ceramic stones into her plot.

and i’ve been pondering how, even though i had a hard time with your mom and her bipolar and narcissistic ways, as did everyone who was ever close to her, i love how soft she became at the end.

i love how i was holding her hand just hours before she passed, how i could feel, with my growing psychic capacities, her fluttering fear as she felt the hour of her death approaching. she couldn’t speak at that point, only lie there with that rasping breathing that happens towards the end.

i remember when you were there too.

we didn’t know she would go just a few hours after we’d all gone home to sleep.

but that night i couldn’t really sleep.

i tossed and turned for hours. and in that early morning quiet, lying in the liminal space between sleep, she came to me so strongly.

she was afraid, and i told her not to worry, for she would be with you, that you were waiting for her, i was sure.

and then, just like that, i felt her woosh away into the great yonder.

i remember how teared up in my half sleep, half wakeful state.

a part of me wanted to go with her. and then i finally fell asleep.

i probably would have forgotten about the whole visit, but i woke up to a phone call from your sister. your mom had indeed passed, right around the time i finally drifted off.

makes me wonder about the nature of life and death, what it means to be a walker of the veil.

ever since you died i feel i live with one foot here and one foot beyond.

your dad has visited me too, from the other side. and i really appreciate how both your parents, from the living realms and from beyond the veils, have always welcomed me and our two girls into the ingalls clan.

especially because we have become estranged from my own family.

finn, i’m so grateful you had a family i could call mine. they weren’t perfect, by any means. none of us are.

but at the end of the day, your mom always told me and my girls that we were family, just like you.

you always loved the girls just like our own two, with such gentleness and steadfastness. that’s why they both legally changed their names to ingalls.

and finn, i have to tell you something else too.

for the first time since you got sick, i have something real to look forward to.

i can feel an appetite for life coming back in me, a hunger i thought i might have buried with you.

and i have to tell you something else too. i am putting myself out there again.

i am moving to seville, applying to a master’s taught all in spanish, in corporate communication and digital media, building something new for myself and the kids.

and since i got my undergrad from the university of padua in italy, it feels like full circle in a way.

i am not accepted yet, and the whole visa and move depends on it, as i put the cart before the horse and rented a house and committed to the kids’ school before realizing the nature of immigrating to spain.

but that’s ok. because i am coming to trust in the process. and trust that all i can do is my part.

effort and grace, two wings of a bird.

sure, i still feel that pull toward peace, toward one day lying down beside you.

but it lives alongside this other thing now, this wanting to live.

i am not in such a hurry anymore.

i am just grateful to feel both at once, the missing you and the wanting more, without one canceling out the other.

life is beginning to feel more solid again. foundations are being laid, just like the solid headstone that now rests where you lie still—

steadfast and true, just like you.

i love you.

always and forever.

venus

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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i’ve been writing about the healing journey for a while now.

because i am still on it, and because, well, are we ever not?

but in all seriousness, as i continue to do so, i feel there’s something most of us are still living inside and learning how to name out loud.

and that is what it’s actually like to try to love someone else, and also, maybe most importantly, how to love yourself when you are a survivor of anything.

it’s been almost four years since finn died. and four years since i lost my anchor.

the one romantic relationship in my life where someone loved me truly and completely without an agenda.

if you follow my work you know that we met at the dog park one evening and i still believe it was a destiny encounter. his voice sounded like home.

and then, the world being the sick place it is, eight years later he got cancer and died. and i have spent the past four years figuring out how to be alive without him.

and as many of you know from reading my work, recently i began to feel ready to try again. i thought that maybe this time i was finally ready to dip my toes back in.

but here’s what i’ve come to understand about the nervous system of a survivor.

when you grow up in an environment where chaos was the norm, where being unseen, loved in unpredictable ways, emotionally abandoned, or outright harmed was just another day in the life, your internal compass doesn’t get calibrated toward safety.

instead it gets calibrated toward what’s familiar.

and familiar, for a lot of us, feels like danger and self abandonment.

i have come to think of it like this:

a compass is supposed to point north. it’s supposed to point toward your higher self, your true signal, your soul’s actual direction.

but if the compass was broken early, if the first people who were supposed to love you were also the ones who taught you what love feels like, and it’s full of pain, then that compass doesn’t point north. it gets bent out of shape.

and for survivors of early trauma, especially sexual abuse, this is even more literal.

sexuality gets activated young, in ways that weren’t chosen.

so later, when that same charge shows up in an adult relationship, it doesn’t feel like a red flag.

it feels like everything you have ever associated with being loved and nurtured.

because your survival brain got wired with both intertwined.

so the body recognizes it before the mind can catch up.

oh, i know this. this is how love and attention has always presented itself.

i know this script, your body says.

and then you wonder why you keep ending up in the same situations, with the same wound wearing a different face, again and again and again.

this is where ayahuasca comes in, because it changed something in me i couldn’t reach from therapy or going in through the mind alone.

if you’ve seen avatar, you know the mother tree. she is this vast, ancient intelligence that holds the memory of everything.

the mother tree holds every ancestor, every wound, every truth that was ever lived. that’s what ayahuasca is for me.

when you plug into her, you don’t just learn something new, you remember what was always already there.

and then you purge it.

because ayahuasca is first and foremost a purgative.

and that’s not a side effect, it’s the point.

there is something almost miraculous that happens when you are on all fours throwing up in the dark.

you are not just eliminating physically, you are regurgitating what was never yours to carry. the false beliefs, the inherited pain, the stories that got lodged in your body before you were old enough to question them.

sometimes the purge comes as yawns, sometimes as tears, sometimes it comes as something that moves through you so violently you wonder how you’re still existing.

but it always comes, for you cannot drink this medicine and stay the same.

she won’t let you.

and in a place like where i went, you don’t do it alone. you are supported by doctors and nurses and countless employees. the days are filled with workshops and speakers who help you follow the threads of what the medicine is showing you.

you learn to ask: where did this come from? when did i first start feeling this way? whose is this really? who have i become by carrying it?

and then the night comes and the medicine takes you deeper than any question you could have thought to ask yourself.

that’s what ayahuasca did for me. and this was my second time there.

the first time i was drawn there through what i can only describe as an inner nudge. i had become interested in sacred geometry and i was following a rabbit hole online, when i clicked a link, and suddenly i was reading about this place.

that’s how spirit tends to work. it is always dropping breadcrumbs, like hansel and gretel finding their way home.

what resurfaced, shortly after i came home the first time, was a memory i had buried so completely i didn’t know it was there. it is what the medical community calls dissociative amnesia. and what returned, in clear, somatic detail, was that i was also a child survivor of sexual abuse.

i have written much on this before now. about how i sat with it for a long time before i could tell my therapist, my closest people, and eventually begin to write about it here. how over time more things arose, and not only for me. how they shook our world like a 10 on the richter scale, breaking my family apart and in doing so, ultimately saved me and my children.

what i can say with certainty now, is that the medicine has given me the skill of asking within.

of getting quiet and saying: why are you showing this to me?

of learning to meet what was living underneath the activation instead of outrunning, dissociating, numbing, distracting, or burying it.

i do it now whenever i feel flooded, overwhelmed, or deregulated and it has been everything.

but back to dating as a survivor.

i have written about elements of this elsewhere, and still i am unpacking it.

the first handful of situations, all online, nothing in person, turned out to be exactly the same lifelong pattern repeating.

with my bent compass i kept finding people who were unavailable, chaotic, who swooped in fast, because dopamine and adrenaline don’t distinguish between pleasure and fear. they just flood the system all the same.

and when the two get tangled together early enough, that cocktail starts to feel exactly like desire, like chemistry, like the real thing.

there was a scary stalker situation, genuinely scary, and i almost filed a restraining order. it wouldn’t have been my first, as many of you know my first husband went to prison for attacking me.

and now i can see exactly how i always got there: love bombing in the beginning, words that matched the mirror i’d always been looking for, and my body screaming danger danger danger while my mind was busy believing the story i was being told.

because i was trained to trust the words over what my body knew.

to trust the mask over authenticity.

that’s how survival wiring works. you learn to read the room, not your own internal signal.

i put my intuition to sleep so i could survive my childhood and then i got addicted to the hormones that flooded in this constant state of arousal.

and then there was the 22-year-old i dated recently, and i’ve written about him as well.

he was genuinely sweet, but with an age gap of 48 and 22, and the push-pull of it, and him going m.i.a. for a day or more at a time, and the way my whole system would crash.

eventually i began to understand exactly what was happening.

when he would disappear into silence, my body went straight to finn.

to finn in his office during the year-long battle with cancer before he died.

the illness building a wall around him, his mind wanting to protect me from the weight of his own dying.

he didn’t do it to hurt me, but it hurt like abandonment every time.

it felt like being burned alive.

the pain of losing your true love and being able to do nothing about it. not even to comfort him.

because the trigger isn’t about the person in front of you. it’s about the one behind them.

then right after the 22-year-old, i went straight for another who was cut from the same trauma cloth.

because i kept thinking, maybe this one, this time, maybe he was the answer.

he was a fellow survivor, another writer here, another on the healing journey, someone who said all the right things about growth and love and doing the work.

note to reader and to self: we don’t do online dating in any form anymore.

especially not on substack, and not anywhere, really. it’s just too much. and i’m not here to date. i’m here to write and heal and be witnessed and to witness.

it’s just that until i had healed the wound, i couldn’t help myself.

and so the first night of ceremony in costa rica, the medicine showed me the difference between someone who has done the work and someone who has only learned the language of it.

in this case i was shown just how much he was performing. but the thing is, he wouldn’t even know he was doing it. and if i hadn’t unlocked my subconscious that could finally feel what was underneath all of it, i wouldn’t have known either.

so when i ended it in a text the next morning, his first response was to tell me he deserved a conversation.

and normally i would have been the first to say, yes, of course you do.

because conversations are the natural thing that two emotionally responsible humans do right?

but this time i listened inward. and my whole soul said,

no. the fuck. you don’t.

because a conversation requires two people who are actually there.

and the person i had spent eight months building what i thought was a friendship with, and then a month inside something that felt like love, turns out that person was following their own wounded script. and only throwing it all up all night long during ceremony showed me what was under the mask.

because underneath all the writing and speaking of healing and growth and doing the work, two broken nervous systems were feeding off each other.

and the currency was sexual energy.

but how do you tell someone who is too fragmented to hear it that they were performing?

that you were too, in your own way?

that neither of you was really there?

you don’t. you just go.

because here’s what nobody talks about.

so many of us are swimming in the soup of sexual energy, calling it connection, calling it chemistry, calling it finally feeling something.

and it moves through us like a virus.

it feels like aliveness. it feels like the real thing.

and for those of us whose nervous systems were hijacked early, whose sexuality was activated before we could consent to it, that soup is the most familiar water in the world.

we don’t even notice we’re drowning in it.

that’s how unconscious patterns operate. and that’s how i could move without even a pause straight onto a new connection, highly charged from the beginning, moving fast to whatsapp, to sexting, to phone sex, to all of it.

right to another person fluent in the language of recovery.

my life was a broken record and i couldn’t even hear it playing.

because when a nervous system hasn’t healed yet, it doesn’t rest. it seeks and it finds the next version of the same thing and calls it love.

until the medicine shows you the whole architecture in one night.

and you finally go deep enough, purge enough, heal enough to see it clearly for the first time.

and you go. no. the fuck. you don’t.

he was an admitted sex addict who said he had healed. and i truly believe that he believed that for himself. but what i felt, in the deep quiet of that first ceremony, was the same pattern i had known since childhood. unhealed sexual wounding masquerading as care.

those who had been tasked to protect me had warped and twisted the most sacred thing, saying one thing and doing another.

and so my compass had kept pulling me back to that same archetype, again and again and again.

finn was the only one who broke the pattern. he was whole and pure and good in a way i hadn’t known before and haven’t found since.

why do the good die young?

until recently i used to ask this like it was a real question.

but now i know it was never the right question.

finn didn’t choose cancer, but his death forced me inward.

and what surfaced during my recent pilgrimage into the mother and father wounds that formed me, is that finn died and in doing so he saved us.

a better question would actually be: what is living inside us that we must have tremendous courage to see once we have been broken open?

finn’s death cracked me open to the realization that my nervous system was still running the old codes.

still dressed in the old wounds, wearing them like a well worn and deeply familiar coat, still pulling in the same frequency because that was the only frequency it knew.

yet by gifting myself this retreat, i was finally ready to go to the root.

and during one of the ceremonies i chose to work on the fear that had been living inside me as long as i could remember.

not fear in the abstract. but the actual physical fear that had lived in my belly my whole life. the tangled knots of anxiety i had always carried, always managed, always learned to function around.

as i lay there feeling sick, i let it come to the surface. i stopped trying to think my way through it. and i let it rush through my whole body.

and then i threw it up. and i cried and i cried.

and in the calm that followed i had a vision.

my belly was the ocean. i dove down to the bottom of it, and at the bottom there was a giant oyster, sitting among everything else that had been littered there over the course of a lifetime.

inside that oyster was a pearl. so i dove down and i grabbed it, and swam back up to the surface.

that is what reclamation can look like.

i went into the fear instead of away from it, and on the other side was something that had always been mine.

that’s what i mean when i say the mother tree.

whether it’s plant medicine, or meditation, or deep somatic therapy, or even a deeply healing conversation with the right person at the right moment, when you go to the root, something in the nervous system finally lets go.

and when this happens, you don’t just think differently, you come back different.

the old wiring that kept recreating the same chaos, pulling in the same wound wearing a different face, it starts to unravel.

that’s not metaphor. that’s what happened to me.

and what i found on the other side wasn’t a new set of practices.

it wasn’t a morning routine or a framework or a list of green flags to look for in a partner.

it was a question i had never honestly asked myself.

what if the longing was never about another person at all?

i had spent most of my life feeling that same damn ache.

the same reaching.

that same sense that something essential was missing.

that if i could just find the right person, the safe one, the whole one, i would finally feel complete.

i called it loneliness. i called it the search for love.

i built entire chapters of my life around the hope that someone would arrive and make the missing thing stop missing.

what every tradition has always been trying to say, what rumi was writing toward in every single poem, what the medicine shows you when you finally stop running, is that the love you have been searching for outside yourself is a signal. it is your own soul, calling you home.

the soulmate was never out there.

i searched for him in every person who felt like home because home was the first place i learned to disappear. but he was never outside. he was the part of me that had been waiting to come home to herself all along.

and when finn came and showed me what unconditional love can feel like, and then died, it was in the dying and afterwards that he came through holding a mirror.

your next great love is yourself, he said.

i thought he was being poetic.

he was being literal.

and i am finally now, after all of this, beginning to understand what that actually means. not as a concept, not as something to put on a vision board, but as a lived, cellular, hard won truth. one i threw up countless times across four ceremonies at a licensed medical retreat center in costa rica to finally embody.

i am the one i have been waiting for.

and every person, every connection, every love that finds me from here, will be an addition to that. not a replacement for it. not a rescue from it.

just more love, flowing toward someone who finally knows she deserves it.

i love you guys so much. thank you for being in this with me.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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this one is a real-time reflection, recorded after returning from a retreat in costa rica. we move through ancestral patterns, the cost of cycle breaking, and why showing up imperfectly is still showing up.

a few threads worth tracking

the initial split — what jungian psychology and retreat work both point to: something happens between ages two and five that creates a fracture between who we are and who we learn to be to survive. this isn’t pathology. this is being human. [~7:00]

the baggage — we’re all carrying it. the limiting beliefs we absorbed from parents who absorbed them from theirs. not our true essence, but packed in so tight we mistake it for ourselves. [~10:00]

separation as the wound — how centuries of materialist thinking, organized religion, and systems of power cut us off from the understanding that everything is alive, everything is connected, everything is energy. and what that disconnection does to a nervous system over a lifetime. [~13:00]

cycle breaking — as a practice with a real cost. being the one in your line who stops, turns around, and says: no further. what that takes. what it makes possible. [~20:00]

self care micro doses — because not everyone can go to costa rica. what’s available to you right now: the breath, five minutes outside, the small decision to go in instead of numb out. [~24:00]

showing up anyway — i talked about the substack numbers, about wondering if anyone cares, about doing this for five people on a thursday from a car. because doing it for yourself first is the only thing that’s ever sustainable. [~27:00]

questions to sit with

— where in your life are you waiting for conditions to be right before you show up?

— what patterns are you carrying that were never actually yours to begin with?

— what would it feel like to give yourself one hour, or five minutes, just to go in?

if any of this resonates, share it with someone who might enjoy it.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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there is a longing many of us carry so deep it is often mistaken for the hunger to be loved by another person.

we call it loneliness, we call it the search for a soulmate, we call it finding our twin flame.

and we build entire lives around the hope that someone will arrive and finally make us feel complete.

but what if that longing was never about another person at all?

what if it was your very own soul, calling you home to yourself?

carl jung spent his life studying what lives inside us. and his conclusion was that the psyche is not unified by nature, but it contains opposites:

masculine and feminine.

light and shadow.

conscious and unconscious.

psychological maturation is bringing those opposite forces into relationship.

the work becomes holding the tension created until something new can emerge.

jung called that new thing the ‘Self’ with a capital ‘S.’

distinct from the ego, which we could think of as the ‘little self.’

this ‘Self’ is what becomes possible when the opposites stop fighting and start integrating.

the sufis built their mystical tradition around it.

the soul’s longing to return to union with god, they described it not as doctrine, but as love, eros, or the beautiful ache of separation seeking wholeness.

rumi is the most famous voice of this. but his poetry is almost universally misread in the west.

we put it on greeting cards as romantic love poetry.

yet what if the beloved he is writing toward is not a separate person at all?

what if it is actually the divine within and beyond us all, the source the soul recognizes and cannot stop reaching for.

in this way, rumi’s poetry can be seen as an endless love song to the divine beloved within.

this becomes the inner teaching.

this teaching is the same one taught by all the mystics, yet it became flattened into something easier to sell and easier to co-opt to create a feeling of powerlessness.

the mystic’s union with the divine became the romantic’s search for a soulmate.

just like in the radical inner gospel of mary magdalene, where she spoke of a journey through inner powers toward wholeness.

mary magdalene’s gospel got buried under two thousand years of her being cast as sinner or consort. but in reality, and according to other gnostic gospels, she was one of jesus’s closest disciples. she and jesus spoke of finding heaven within.

i believe this understanding is what they were pointing us towards.

another example of this can be found in our classic fairytales.

tales such as cinderella, sleeping beauty, beauty and the beast, were never just instructions for finding one’s ‘true love.’ they were maps of an interior journey.

the prince and princess always two aspects of the same psyche moving toward union. but somewhere along the way, every single one of these teachings got turned inside out.

we hand children fairy tales and tell them to seek the one who will complete them.

this is the false matrix at its core.

the systematic externalization of everything that was always meant to point within.

look for it ‘out there.’

find it ‘out there.’

chase it ‘out there.’

always just beyond reach, dependent on another person’s arrival.

in my own life, since finn died, i’ve been dreaming the same dream for years now.

in them, a dark haired man, who is maybe indigenous, and who has a wise and grounded shaman energy... he arrives each time and there is always an intense attraction.

in my dreams he is kind, capable, protective, oriented toward me specifically, and always working to find me.

he appears in forests, dancing with me, or as a competent doctor in a dreamlike hospital corridor, as a man standing watch as i lie on a massage table. or he appears as a presence above me sending me a message through a shaft of light.

always the same presence wearing different forms.

and so it took me this long to finally ask the question:

what if he is a part of my soul, instead of a vision of a future person?

what if he is, at its essential nature, the part of my ‘Self’ that carries this divine masculine quality?

and what if this feminine life i inhabit, as a body, as a mother, as a teacher and a writer, and as the one who feels everything all the way down, what if she has just been waiting to be found by her own depth, her own sovereign, protective, powerful and luminous interior masculine?

we seek our own completion in another person’s face and mistake it for destiny. and sometimes the outer person is real and the love is real.

but the projection is still happening.

and when that person leaves, through death, through ending, through the slow erosion of what was, the wholeness seems to leave with them.

hence the heartbreak.

oh, do i know about heartbreak.

i’ve been so deeply heartbroken in this life by all the men i truly loved.

my daughter is actually going through an intense breakup right now.

finn was my soulmate and before he died of cancer, he held that energy for me.

but when he died i thought i’d lost it with him, and so i went looking in the wrong places, in the wrong people.

i searched in connections that were more about filling an absence than genuine recognition.

i have had visions of people i briefly dated, and in them i could see clearly what i could not see in real time. someone standing in front of a golden light, blocking the view of something radiant behind them. i could feel the hunger underneath the charm. the taking dressed up as giving.

after one such vision the spell was broken.

what i’m understanding now, slowly, in grief, in the particular devastation of losing finn, my beloved and the person who felt like home, is that the union was always the point.

not the person, not the partner, but the union itself.

and every tradition that ever tried to point us there kept getting turned into an instruction to look outward.

because a humanity that knows how to find wholeness within is much harder to sell things to, to control, to keep hungry and searching.

so i’ll say it plainly:

what if you are the greatest love story you will ever live?

what if you are your own twin flame?

what if the answer was always you?

the longing is real, the love is real, and the soulmate is real.

it’s just that they have been inside you this whole time, working to find their way home to you and you to them.

finn visited me through the veil one time and he was showing me myself, holding up a mirror to gaze into.

your next great love is yourself, he said.

i thought he was being poetic. but he was being literal.

so here is your invitation:

begin the greatest love affair available to you,

the one with your own soul.

who knows where that love story will take you?

thanks for being here.

i love you.

if this landed for you, share it with someone who needs it.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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i didn’t set out to talk about manifestation in a straight line. that’s not how it works… it’s not how healing works either. so this one spirals, the way all real stories do: recording from my car, i take us on a journey, moving through my first marriage, a safe house in north boulder, a pile of gold on a debt folder, and the moment i heard finn’s voice at the dog park and felt something my body had been waiting to feel for years.

this is about what has to break open before anything good can get in.

a few threads worth tracking

the script — from disney princess to match.com, how so many of us followed a program we didn’t write and didn’t question. what it means to finally notice you’re on the rats’ wheel. [~4:00]

danger equals intimacy — the wiring that draws us toward what’s familiar even when familiar means unsafe. not a character flaw. a nervous system doing exactly what it learned. [~10:00]

the secret left something out — the part about picturing the red car is only the beginning. the real work is what you find when you ask yourself why the red car feels out of reach. the limiting beliefs. the interference. [~17:00]

the safe house — government food stamps, whole foods two blocks away, two little girls, a debt folder with a gold icon. this is the actual origin story of manifesting wealth and i want you to feel how unglamorous it was. and how real. [~24:00]

root to rise — going all the way down before you can go up. the chakra framework that makes sense of why manifestation requires embodiment, not just intention. [~30:00]

finn — the dog park, the voice, the recognition. and then the student loans he paid off without me ever telling him i’d been wanting to pay them off. that’s the part that still gets me. [~38:00]

questions to sit with

— where in your life are you following a script you never consciously chose?

— what does “danger” feel like in your body — and where did you first learn that feeling?

— when you imagine the thing you most want, what comes up in between wanting it and believing it?

— what’s the next better feeling thought from where you are right now?

— what would gratitude feel like in a situation that doesn’t look like abundance yet?

references from this live

• the secret — the book/documentary that started the unraveling for me in the safe house years

• esther hicks / abraham hicks — “choose the next better feeling thought”

• eckhart tolle — the pain body and present-moment consciousness

• lee harris — the $100 bill exercise: hold one and notice what comes up

• joe dispenza — healing and visualization studies (basketball/mental rehearsal research)

• rhythmia — licensed plant medicine facility in costa rica; i go back next week

  ---

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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well, let’s give it a go.

write uncensored.

even though there is a always a part that holds back, even from one’s conscious thoughts of holding back...

it’s kind of trippy how that works.

you think you are unleashing from the belly of the beast,

but the part of you tasked with keeping you alive is not going to give up the fight just like that.

i have been writing without a filter for a while now.

in fact, i’ve never really been able to filter in my life.

it was always a liability, until it became my superpower.

learn to show up naked.

as we evolve, we become less censored about what we want to express.

we stop giving so many fucks.

hence the very popular phrase, especially here on substack:

i’ve got no more fucks to give.

go on, say it again…just because you can.

no. more. fucks. to. give.

that’s more like it!

so i look over the ledge of sanity and i decide that it can’t be that bad to jump.

just jump, venus. do it…

like i haven’t done it a million and one times before now.

but you know, just like slaying the demons, it’s a job that only gets better the more times you do it.

so i’m diving off.

like the meme i just posted in notes:

sorry (not sorry) i only know how to be passionate and intense and insane.

because isn’t that us?

we’re the ones who admit to being this way, who are actually the sanest ones around.

and actually, the most insane are the ones walking around with the biggest masks, pretending they have it all figured out.

life is too fucking messy to not be a hot mess at some point.

or many some points…many, many, many some points.

so anyone who tries to look like they have their shit so together, that in and of itself has become a red flag for me.

unless i can feel they are genuine.

and that’s a whole other story.

the B.S. radar.

once it’s installed, you realize you can call B.S. on people.

on all the guests at the masquerade ball…

that is our world.

that is our political leaders.

that is so many of our influencers.

and that also goes for anyone who is so interested in appearance.

i’m sorry, not sorry.

just keeping it real here.

take my own family for example.

i was always the one seemingly floundering in the muck, and not ashamed to be doing it either.

i bet you are too. the black sheep. the misfits.

misfits unite!

that’s why i love it here so much.

all the deep feeling, wildly creative, unfiltered humans have been finding their way to each other.

i’ll admit there were decades where i wanted to seem as put together as the ones around me.

but then when the going got real, when it was time to put the rubber to the pavement, that’s when i realized it is so much better to show your mess, and play in your mess, and dig for gold in your mess, than to walk around with a secret life, saying one thing and doing another.

i’d take the mess any day.

because this is a messy planet.

there is no way around it. being human is messy work.

and we have to be willing to be naked and unapologetically ourselves.

otherwise what are we?

a shell trying to be something other than what we are.

after i took the picture above, i danced around my bathroom naked.

why?

because i could.

because i’m free.

because finally, after a lifetime of trauma,

it’s time.

but free doesn’t mean having it all figured out.

i recently online dated a 22-year-old who i met here.

my teenage daughter looked at me at one point and said, mom that's kind of insane. and she wasn't wrong.

in all honesty, since he was the one who pursued me, i was flattered and enthralled, and we shared a genuine connection, until the chaos that comes with being 22 was more than i wanted to hold.

but that's the thing about being unhinged and honest about it, you can look at your own mess without flinching.

you can say yes, that happened, here's what it taught me, and keep moving.

and i still have plenty of other moments.

like where the actual real mess of my house and raising four kids alone gets so overwhelming i want to crawl into bed and never get out again.

but that would be giving up.

and i am not a quitter. and neither are you.

you wouldn’t be here reading these words if something in them didn’t resonate.

so here we are.

the weird, wild, wacky, intense, overfeeling, ones.

with all our half-baked parts.

with all our scars and jagged parts.

the glorious unfinished works in progress that we are.

and i know i’m preaching to the choir, because all you beautiful readers and writers are living your own version of this too.

crumbling and cracking open to be even more raw and radiant and truly yourselves.

let this be our fight song.

our sacred mess song.

our i have been through the fire and i am still here song.

we are not giving in.

we are not giving up.

oh no…

we’re just getting started.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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in this week’s live session, i open with something i’ve been sitting with what it actually looks like to re-enter dating after profound loss, four years after my husband and soulmate finn died of cancer. but i don’t start with romance. i start with the root.

i trace the through-line between early childhood wounding, insecure attachment, and the way we unconsciously seek out what’s familiar rather than what’s good for us, what i’m calling the broken compass, pointing not toward our north star but toward more of the same. the hurt child at the wheel. the subconscious driving the bus.

from there, i weave together threads from my own life: my recent essay on self-love, the dream of the iron rod and conformity, my art therapy practice, my experience at rhythmia (a licensed plant medicine retreat center in costa rica i’m preparing to return to), and the way ayahuasca opened buried memories and reconnected me to my body. i talk candidly about the difference between mindfulness as performance and the deeper, messier work of actually feeling what’s underneath, healing in the body, not just the mind.

the conversation turns honest about my recent forays into dating: a 22-year-old, a love-bombing stranger who turned frightening, the pattern of hearing words but not believing my own nervous system. i keep coming back to one phrase — danger equals intimacy — and how the body’s signals, when we’ve been conditioned to ignore them, become the very information we need most.

i close with what i’ve learned: that healing isn’t linear, it isn’t tidy, and it doesn’t require getting it right. it requires showing up, in the mess, in the recapitulation, in the micro-moments where you choose differently. you can be messy and healing at the same time. that’s the work. that’s the point.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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did anybody ever tell you that learning to love yourself would require grieving every version of you that must now disappear?

i bet not…

instead you were most likely handed the affirmations and the morning mindfulness routines, told to put on your own oxygen mask, fill your own cup…

as if you hadn’t already been abandoning yourself for years just to survive.

the solution was never going to be that simple.

because we are born into this wild and cruel world so vulnerable and completely helpless, one hundred percent at the mercy of whoever is tasked with keeping us alive, and most humans are so wounded they can barely show up for themselves, let alone a child.

so more wounding occurs.

you know exactly what i’m talking about because you have experienced it as well.

we all have.

shit tons of baggage… from a shit ton of trauma.

it’s the generational trauma that has become such a buzzword lately.

rightly so. we are all wading up to our eyeballs in the shit passed down from our parents, their parents, and their parents before them.

and still, like you and i — since i assume you wouldn’t be reading my words unless we had some resonance with each other —

some of us try our very best and still we cause harm.

not because we, in any way, wish to cause harm.

but because we are still blinded by our own unhealed wounds, our own unhealed shadow.

and the shadow doesn’t disappear just because we don’t look at it.

so the healing journey is the long journey of integrating our shadow.

it is the long journey back home to ourselves.

and then there are others who have abandoned themselves long before they abandoned us, and they hurt us because, well, that’s exactly what hurt people do.

either way, a message forms. not just in the mind, but deep in the nervous system itself:

something must be terribly wrong with me to have been treated this way.

i am not enough. i am not worthy. i must be unlovable.

and the body responds accordingly.

hypervigilance becomes our resting state — (not that this is restful at all!)

while people-pleasing becomes the strategy.

we scan every room we walk into, contracting our inner wisdom, adjusting to become smaller, dimming our light, doing whatever it takes to not be rejected or harmed.

survival becomes self-abandonment.

and it gets hardwired in.

i had a dream recently where i was in line — it happened to be in my old high school cafeteria.

we were all lining up to have an iron rod inserted into our heads.

and everyone just… shuffled forward like it was normal.

but something in me saw it. and i stepped out of line just in time.

i woke up knowing exactly what my body was telling me.

this is what happens to all of us.

especially in those formative years, when we are just beginning to become ourselves — when something sovereign is trying to emerge — and instead we get handed the program. the false matrix is the term i resonate with.

find a job. find a spouse. be enough. need less. want differently.

keep moving. don’t look up.

they must keep the rats racing in our cages.

and most of us stay in that line for years, or dare i say, our whole lives, before we even realize we’re in it.

so when someone simply says, “just love yourself” and this includes me.

because if you’ve been following my work, you know i am a love junkie.

i won’t ever get tired of pouring love out into the world.

and i’m simultaneously learning, little by little, how to fill my own cup first.

even with all the b.s. being pumped straight at us from every source — here on substack, we have escaped to love each other, to be courageously honest, and to shine regardless of the dark oppressive clouds and the iron rods being inserted in our minds all around us.

the thing about self love i have come to learn, is that if you learned to survive by leaving yourself, self-love doesn’t feel natural.

it feels foreign.

sometimes it even feels dangerous.

underneath the toxic positivity culture and the heart-warming affirmations and the morning routines, there’s still a quiet question humming:

am i worthy of love?

and when that question lives in the body, we go looking outside ourselves to answer it.

we seek it in belonging, in romance, in recognition, in someone who will finally stand beside us and say you are enough.

there are entire spiritual spaces built on bypassing this wound.

people learn the language of awakening and speak beautifully about consciousness and healing.

but if they haven’t sat with their own wounded child, the lonely one, the scared one who just wanted to be loved, it eventually all comes crashing down.

you see it when people preach integrity but live in contradiction.

take deepak chopra for example… how many millions has he helped while secretly befriending a child sex trafficker, asking epstein to “bring your girls” on trips, and expressing relief when one of his accusers dropped her lawsuit?

the wound doesn’t disappear when it’s skipped and bypassed.

it always leaks out.

sometimes subtly.

sometimes super destructively.

when power replaces empathy and when importance replaces humanness. because the wound was never integrated.

i’ve lived my own versions of this too.

being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and even all of us who endured more subtle damaging programming —

all the seasons when we believed someone else could finally meet the ache in us.

and when they couldn’t, it hurt. it always does.

not just because of the lack of love and care, but because it touched the original wound.

but recently i’ve been learning, as have you, through countless trials and errors:

if someone cannot love themselves, they cannot truly love you.

the other day i posted a note:

you don’t see people’s true colors when you’re a yes.

it’s the no that brings out the truth.

and often that’s when you see it…

you were fuel for an ego. not love for a soul.

because self-love is not a slogan. it’s a confrontation. and when you learn to love yourself you must also confront all the hurt humans who you have allowed to hurt you because you didn’t believe you were good enough for better treatment.

and then, once you walk away and burn the bridges down, it’s sitting in the loneliness without reaching for distraction.

learning the difference between solitude and isolation, because solitude is chosen and sacred, and isolation is just survival dressed as independence.

the turning point is when you’re willing to feel the anxiety, feel the longing, hold the little child inside and say:

i am here. i am never leaving you again.

it burns to feel their tender pain from so many years of self abandonment.

but there is something on the other side of that fire.

i once did a firewalk on the summer solstice, hot coals raked into a glowing path, walking over them barefoot.

it sounds impossible, and yet when you are centered and fully present, your body can do extraordinary things.

self-love is like that.

not about becoming indestructible, more about becoming aligned.

when you stop abandoning yourself, you move through the world differently.

you stop chasing love and start recognizing it, because the love you were seeking outside was never separate from you.

the journey isn’t about becoming superior, it’s about becoming integrated.

and somewhere in that process you realize: you are not powerless, you are not broken.

another note i recently posted from my own growing pains and self discovery:

living in alignment means listening to your body.

every. step. of. the. way.

it’s a new way.

it’s the only way…

to be.

because you — beautifully radiant and flawed you —

you are the one you’ve been waiting for.

and from that place, not a fantasy, but one forged through actually sitting in the fire, you stop forming relationships out of survival and start choosing them consciously.

that is the real self-love journey. and it is anything but easy.

but i’m here for it. and i know you are too.

thanks for being here with me.

i love you for being you.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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this week's live happened in my car, i wanted to talk about the courage it takes to keep showing up in a world so full of pain and suffering.

because we all start out treading water, floating along on our little life rafts, just doing our best to stay afloat, and then something happens that blasts you off entirely. and that's actually the point.

i talk about the iceberg, the buried treasure, and how much we are afraid to look at that exists below the surface.

how to find your people as a 200-watt bulb in a 40-watt world, where healing is always a choice.

why you can't do the real alchemy, can't make meaning from madness, unless you first build a container of safety.

and what it looks like when you finally stop white-knuckling the driftwood and learn to dive. because once you learn how to swim in the storm, nothing, and i mean nothing, can stop you.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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it’s time to write you again my loves.

why? because life is a veritable shit show.

full of beauty and pain and laughter and joy all bundled up together.

and because i’m all spun around and it’s midnight.

today mel graduated.

on the same day she walked across that stage, her boyfriend — the one she spent the whole year with, the one she took a senior trip to japan with — broke up with her.

two things can be true at once.

so she was very sad. instead of going out to brunch she just came home and cried.

and i sat with her. because i know something about that.

about loving someone and having the floor drop out on the same day you were supposed to be celebrating.

the surgeon calling me as i sat to have lunch in the hospital courtyard in the sun.

no, it wasn’t scar tissue from the first operation.

every inch of finn’s colon was covered in cancer nodules.

that’s why he was throwing up nonstop.

that’s why.

he was dying. not healing.

and then there’s the estrangement from my family.

the family we no longer see.

but they see me.

or they see my writing.

but that’s it.

roses. dropped off at the end of the driveway.

roses for mel.

but roses mean nothing

when underneath

lies betrayal.

and betrayal doesn’t just show up with thorns.

sometimes it shows up with flowers too.

that’s what people don’t understand.

but i don’t do that.

i don’t pretend to be on someone’s side and then quietly not be.

homey don’t roll that way.

and then there's the other kind of loss.

the heartbreak kind.

but aren't they all heartbreak, after all?

someone i somehow fell for because he first swooped into my dms here. i wrote about him in a recent post.

and i want to write about what happens when you feel so drawn to someone that age doesn’t matter. that their unhealed wounds don’t seem to matter.

until they do.

because while he future-dreamed with me and said i love you and babygirl and all the rest — he was also very conflicted about so much.

and my nervous system picked up on this.

it always does.

i watched mel cry today and realized i felt neutral about my own situation.

neutral? or maybe it’s dissociated.

like my body had already done the math even before my mind caught up.

the push pull. the familiarity.

to that same damned cycle my whole damn life.

i didn’t just fall for someone so much younger than me. i fell for a soul that moved me. the age was just a number.

until it wasn’t.

he is still becoming himself while i am already fully myself.

i just wish he didn’t swoop back in all drunk and sweet after pushing me away tonight.

and, and, and…yada, yada, yada.

you know how it goes.

it’s not his fault. and it’s not mine either.

why do we fall so hard for the familiar?

why am i only attracted to the ones who bring me right back to the inconsistent love?

why does my oldest go through everything i do, every single time?

fuck. fuck. fuck.

sorry to swear. it just feels so good sometimes to use the fucking words that give a little more weight to what we all feel. does it not?

i feel like screaming from the top of a mountain sometimes.

some things just need to be said out loud before they can move.

i lit a candle to write tonight.

it is oddly comforting.

sure, i have some of the house lights on too. and i am typing on a computer not writing with a quilled pen.

but still — i get why people could get into a sweet flow back when the candle was the only light after dark.

the old world.

i am so ready to move back to the old world, to southern spain.

i am ready for a change.

i am ready to spread my wings.

i am ready to not be thankful for the gate at the end of my driveway keeping out the ones who should have had my back all along.

thank god that gate won’t be coming with me.

it’s all ok though.

oh how i miss the sweet young human who swooped in and showed me raw love though— even if he has to move on now.

love doesn’t care about age or timing or how ready someone is.

love doesn’t understand such silly matters as that.

only father time helps heal the wounds of love and heartbreak.

father time.

i guess it’s time for bed.

i’m so tired lately.

so many of us are.

it’s not just the constant screens.

it’s not just the running ragged at the seams.

it’s a deep soul tired from these times.

birthing is tiring.

and that’s what we are doing as a planet — whether we realize it or not.

we are birthing a new earth.

and it fucking hurts in the birth canal.

ok. enough said.

i love you.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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i just got home from taking my son to his physical and dropping him at school.

feeling spent.

slightly depressed.

bone tired in the way that lives below exhaustion.

so i lay down on my couch in my wrecked house and just… stayed there.

until the tears began to stream.

it’s been four days of non stop.

and two decades of the same, if i’m really being honest here.

which, if you know me, i always am.

my two oldest daughters just back from high school trips.

my oldest one graduating this week.

and then her boyfriend drama. and my quiet terror of realizing the spanish visas may not come through in time. if we can even get the appointments for them…

even though i already signed a lease and enrolled the kids in school in seville.

and then my recent decision to go back and do a retreat in costa rica.

which is very loaded for me at the moment.

because that’s where the dissociated memories of my childhood first began to surface, the ones my body had kept locked away for decades, until it decided i was finally ready to remember.

even though they didn’t fully arrive until i was home again. safe at home and resting in that liminal space my bed is when they arrived. just like so many other memories, sensations and aha moments for me throughout my life.

with the support of the safe container on this healing retreat in costa rica, something had cracked open that couldn’t be closed, couldn’t be shoved back down from where it emerged out of the depths, even if i had wanted it to.

like pandora’s box.

and once it opened my whole world shattered.

more than it already was with the death of my beloved finn, nine months before that.

and in all transparency, closing that box would not have been at all in my nature.

unlike so many in my life, who would rather bury it all under and pretend nothing happened, i don’t operate that way and never have.

my name was verita, meaning truth in latin.

before it became venus, it was verita for most of my life.

and i believe that was for a reason.

so when these long buried memories did finally resurface, they brought everything with them.

the realization that i wasn’t alone in having survived them.

that my children needed to be saved.

the legal processes that followed.

the boundaries that had to be drawn in places i never imagined drawing them.

the relationships that fragmented.

the family that chose sides.

the before and after of a life split in two by something that happened long ago but landed in the present like a meteor. like a forest fire. like a flood.

i almost didn’t go on the healing retreat then.

i almost didn’t go now either.

both times the trip planning started as something social, the momentum of planning a trip with friends that slowly shape-shifted into something else entirely.

both times, once the trips with friends were planned, something underneath the noise began to speak, and i knew i need to shift course.

i don’t know what to call it.

finn on the other side.

my guide team.

my higher self.

my own deep knowing.

but it came, both times, the same way, a whisper underneath the noise:

venus. you found the childcare. now go into the wilderness of your own precious being. into the holding of mother gaia in her radiant jungly green splendor. go to this place that is a held container and safe for your unraveling. and finally give yourself what you so easily pour forth for others. go. it’s time to drink from your own spring.

i have only taken two solo trips in two decades of parenting.

two.

and both times i had to be coaxed by something larger than my own permission.

but luckily for me, i am getting really good at listening to the inner nudges. i almost died by not listening. now i’m getting better at it.

at this healing retreat center, they take a before and after photo of every person who comes through.

they know what happens there. they know you will not leave the same.

so i’ve decided it is time to make the pilgrimage back to myself and i am going back less than two months before we hopefully make it to spain. before the biggest leap of my life.

truly, loaded doesn’t even begin to cover it.

so lying there on my couch this morning, i could feel the pull to reach for my phone. to fill the anxious fluttering in my chest and to float back up to the surface where things are manageable and scrollable and distracting.

but i didn’t.

because what i have come to realize, after four years of loss and rebuilding, is this:

most of us have been coping our whole lives and don’t even know the extent of it. how disconnected we have become from what is truly living underneath in our depths.

we’re all just treading water and calling it living.

and then something catastrophic happens and it’s like we’re thrown off our life raft, and down, down, down we sink to the bottomless depths below.

and meanwhile it’s like an enormous flashlight the size of the moon gets shone down on just how much we have avoided feeling just to get by.

the contrast gets so huge between what we were avoiding and what’s underneath.

that’s why the tip of the iceberg is such a great metaphor.

because the feelings are so huge you can’t do it the way you learned to cope and survive any longer.

it all becomes shattered in the storm, and you’re lucky to cling to any driftwood pieces you can find and hope to not drown in those towering waves.

in essence, it all breaks down.

and then, because we are such creatures of habit, us little humans, as soon as you start to feel a bit better, you go right back to it. right back to floating on the surface.

because the depths are fucking hard to sit in.

but the depths are also where all the gold is.

the buried treasure, right?

so instead of reaching for my phone i dropped in.

i let the feelings swell. i cried for all the hardship of being a human in a broken world. and then i felt a little better.

a little lighter, a little safer in this dangerous world of tidal waves and surrounded by those who hurt because they were hurt.

and then i did decide to get out my phone, but this time to record the process.

i am learning to make meaning from the madness.

so i came here and wrote to you.

and that’s it. that’s the whole practice.

try it. maybe you already do. or you have your own way of diving in and retrieving gold. of letting go of your raft to really ride the waves and dive under the surface.

we must learn to dance like dolphins in the ocean of our becoming.

and it doesn’t have to be every day.

maybe just once a week even.

but when you finally get a pause from the chaos and the busyness that’s running us all ragged, lie down. give yourself a second. and say in your heart:

i’m ready to feel what needs to rise.

because even as you will inevitably be cracked wide open, the tears and the grief will feel better than the frantic avoidance and the fluttery attempts to keep the flood at bay.

you might just find your heart has a lot to say and that spring that wells forth is like drinking from an oasis after wandering alone through the dry hot deserts of your mind.

and you are safe enough, strong enough, and eternal enough to drink deeply and feel all there is to feel in your one precious soul that makes you so beautifully and uniquely exactly who you are.

this life, these experiences, these tender moments, in all their broken open painfulness, are exactly why we came.

i love you. thanks for being here.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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once upon a time there was a sad little lump. she had always been this way, or so it seemed to her. and she felt, in the way that sad little lumps do, that she would never be anything different.

all she had ever known was sadness, and all she could ever imagine was sadness too.

one day a little dapple of sunshine, making her way across the sky with her friends, happened to see the sad little lump sitting all alone in what had become a wide, dark moat all around her.

she appeared as a small stone castle, surrounded by water so dark it wouldn’t reflect the little sunbeam no matter how hard she tried to make it sparkle and dance.

soon her sunray friends began to call her back up into the air to continue their journey across the sky. not wanting to be left behind, the little sunray swooped up to frolic with them, dancing and soaring onward.

as she flew off, she looked back one last time at the sad little lump. and the sad little lump looked up, for the first time in what felt like eternity. for one small moment, something fluttered and stirred through the wet and heavy strands of her being.

but soon the sunrays were gone from sight. and as the sad little lump stared into the dark water around her, she felt herself sink deeper and deeper still.

a tear trickled down her cheek. she let out a soft sigh.

all she had ever known was a sadness so deep and raw it spiraled down down down a bottomless well.

oh well, she thought.

was there ever a time when i wasn’t a sad little lump?

she sat and thought and thought. the sky turned from day to night and the seasons folded one into the other. and still she sat. and still the dark water held its silence around her.

one day, while the sad little lump was busy feeling as hopeless as can be, the same little sunray swooped back down. but this time she brought many friends. they were laughing gaily and dancing in a fairy ring.

as they landed on the little lump, their laughter and dancing began to wake her from her long sleep. she felt a tickling and a tingling all along her surface.

she couldn’t help but feel a lightness settle into her being, a gentleness she had almost forgotten. and before she knew it, more sun sprites arrived, and with them came merry little breezes dancing so happily, singing the softest melodies, touching the sad little lump in a place deep inside she had forgotten existed.

it was as if from the bottom of that endless well, something soft had begun to rise.

slowly. tenderly. up and up it came.

and as it rose, so too did a great sob. it gathered in her, growing stronger and stronger, trembling through her like something long held. she felt it before she understood it. she felt it the way you feel a storm before it breaks — that stillness, that held breath, that terrible gathering.

and then she cracked.

the sob broke free, immense and total, and the shaking grew so wild that pretty soon the little lump was no longer a lump at all. she was a million pieces. the dark moat that had surrounded her scattered far and wide, swept away by the force of that cracking open.

all at once she began to feel for her old form, to search for the well at the center of her being. but there was no well. there were only pieces.

for an instant she panicked. what did it mean to be a million pieces strewn in every direction? did she even have a self anymore, or would she simply dissolve?

she sobbed again, deeply, from somewhere among the wreckage. and in that sobbing she realized something: letting the sadness go was the scariest thought she had ever had. but she had no choice. all she could do was sit with all her pieces and gather herself back, in whichever way she could.

and then, all at once, the merry little breezes and the gentle sun sprites began to move around each and every piece, and ever so tenderly wove them into their dance of soft radiance and quiet breeziness.

and she realized she had transformed.

she was no longer on the ground. she was stitched together with a soft radiance all her own. and though it felt like the sunrays’ light, it was also clearly shining out from within her, from the very places where she had been woven back together. this lightness lifted her, and she floated freely along with the breeze and the sunshine.

she looked down at the place where she had spent what felt like eternity, and saw that it had passed like a dream, in the blink of an eye.

with one last gaze below and a gentle sigh that rippled outward from her being, she floated up up up toward the light.

sadness was just a different way to hold the light. she understood that now. a heavier way, yes. but still hers. still part of her, and always would be.

and then she smiled. a smile so large it made a rainbow across the sky.

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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think for a moment about what it actually means to be a human being on this planet.

the waterfalls, the forests, the wind that rages, the fire that burns.

the juicy fruit we pick right off a tree, still warm from the sun.

that awakened feeling of being an alive being who can experience ecstasy.

that is the upper range of what being here can feel like.

that is what we signed up for when we came into these bodies.

but almost all of it has been co-opted.

so we rarely get a chance to feel this free.

mostly we feel stress.

mostly we feel fear.

mostly we feel lost.

so i’ll start with the most obvious and the most loaded one:

sex.

we live in a world absolutely saturated with sexuality. and yet most people feel cut off from their own erotic life, their own body, their own pleasure.

the porn industry has sexuality all ensnared.

we’re still having orgasms, sure we are.

but they have been smashed down into our reptilian brain.

just fucking, basically.

and i’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that raw desire and innate pleasure of fucking. i’m definitely not.

but when that’s all we have, when that has been made to seem like the whole story, we are being cut off from something way more powerful, way more enlivened, way more divine than what we’ve been handed.

our sexuality in its full expression is not separate from our spirituality.

it never was, and every ancient tradition, that hasn’t been scrubbed clean by the empire, knew this.

the body in ecstasy is the body in prayer.

they are the same frequency moving through different doorways.

what happens when you smash it down to just the one note is that you lose the whole song.

and then there is the matter of how we have been so deeply conditioned to override our own knowing.

to consume what we are told to consume, feel what we are told is appropriate to feel, want what we are told is worth wanting.

from the food we eat to the news we absorb to the beauty standards that make us strangers to our own reflections, we have been taught, methodically and for a very long time, not to trust ourselves, not to listen inward.

not to ask: what does my body actually need right now?

what feels nourishing and what feels like it’s slowly making me sick?

what do i actually desire, underneath all the noise?

i think about roundup being sprayed on the land right next to my property line. agent orange, rebranded. a known neurotoxin, still being sold all over the world, applied to the ground we grow our food in.

i live on acreage in what is supposed to be a liberal county and i watched it happen in my backyard.

i think about my husband dying of cancer.

i lost my true love to cancer because of how sick this world is.

sick in terms of all the different layers.

and this is not abstract. this is what it costs when we stop listening to the body. when we let the systems that profit from our sickness tell us what is safe.

keeping things sick allows the warped system to continue.

a body that has been cut off from its own pleasure, its own wisdom, its own sovereignty is a body that is very, very useful to the people and powers that need us small.

the baby boy billionaires, the world leaders, and the ones behind them all are all part of the power structure that feeds off us.

it behooves them to keep us afraid and to keep us sick.

and most of us, a good majority of us, in fact, have also been abused.

as children, as women, as bodies that have been treated as objects, as property, as something to be used and managed into silence.

and abuse doesn’t just leave a psychological and physical mark, it changes our frequency. it leaves a story running underneath everything that says:

my body is not safe.

my desire is dangerous.

my full aliveness is too much.

and it is really hard to free yourself from that.

it is fucking hard.

i know because i am in the middle of freeing myself from it all. and the first step, the one we maybe don’t talk enough about, is just to open our eyes.

eyes wide open.

eyes wide shut.

we have to open our eyes first.

because once we can see it clearly, the shame and the smallness and the numbness and that they are not ours, they were put there, they were installed by a system that needs us disconnected from the full force of what we actually are, it starts to lose its grip.

what i feel like i came here to question in a thousand different ways this lifetime, is this:

what do we allow and what do we not allow in our sacred, divine space?

what is feeding our growth, and what is slowly killing us?

be it people, places, or things…

and once we start to awaken, the real trick is how do we get back into our own bodies?

how do we become sovereign beings?

because that is what it’s all about. the whole entire point of earth school is to become ourselves.

fully, unapologetically.

our full aliveness that got co-opted, is still very much ours.

it didn’t get destroyed, it got buried. and there is a difference.

because what gets buried can be found.

and what gets found can be reclaimed.

and what gets reclaimed becomes ours in a way that no system, no power structure, no amount of carefully engineered shame can ever take from us again.

the waterfall.

the wind.

the fruit warm from the sun.

our own bodies,

finally…

become home.

a friend here recently wrote the sweetest note about me.

she called me a sassy saint.

let’s all be sassy saints together.

we can be both.

we already are.

we just forgot.

and the forgetting allowed others to profit off our amnesia.

not anymore.

we are waking up to our fire, to our birthright, to our sacred sexuality as a choice to embody…

while we are still living, breathing humans on this beautiful planet we call home.

thank you for being here, it truly means the world. i love hearing your thoughts, if you feel called to comment.

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i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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i'm still working out some streaming connection issues. the wifi booster did not fix it, lol. but the audio is clean — if the glitches bother you, just close your eyes and listen.

what does it mean to be a sovereign being on a planet that’s been designed to keep you small?

in this live, i dive back into the architecture of power: how it was built, who it serves, and how it lives not just in governments and systems but in our bodies, our nervous systems, our sexuality, our desire, our food.

i move between the personal and the cosmic: from the pecking order in my backyard chicken coop to the roman empire, from the prefrontal cortex to the pineal gland, from losing finn to cancer in a world saturated with neurotoxins, to what it actually looks like to rise.

this is a conversation for the heart warriors, the ones who showed up anyway, who are writing and channeling and healing and still choosing to be boots on the ground. if you’re here, you’re already part of the change wave. welcome.

maybe just have a listen for this one…

i started by circling back to my latest piece on the reptilian takeover, because writing it felt like crossing a threshold. it was the most of my spiritual self i’ve ever put on the page: the hindbrain, the false matrix, the way we’ve all been kept in survival mode so long we think that’s just what being human feels like.

i discuss how we are actively encouraged to stay silent, to stay in consumption mode, to feed a wheel that was never built for us, school, job, retire, die. and the resistance you feel when you go to speak your truth, that’s thousands of years of cellular memory, of ancestors burned at the stake, driven from villages, and killed for the wisdom they carried.

your body remembers even when your mind tries to forget.

but now it’s go time. i’m 48, i’ve healed what was making me small, and i’m done dancing around it. no more fucks to give.

so if you can relate to any of this: welcome to the club!

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

Subscribe now

write like your life depends on it.

that phrase. swirling in my mind.

i have wanted to write in an open journal style for years.

i didn’t think it was possible.

until here.

yet i wonder sometimes that it took me so long to get here. that it took any of us, here, reading each other’s words, pouring our hearts out onto the open page, this long.

and sure, we would love to get paid for it. sure, we would love to become known for it. doesn’t every human long for recognition?

but don’t get me started on the matrix and pop culture and the way we idolize humans.

we have transferred our longing for the sacred onto celebrities.

we worship people who are just as lost as we are, just more visible.

a substack writer recently wrote about what it means to live in a motherless world, and then followed it up with what it means to live in a fatherless world.

thousands read it and wrote comments. it struck a nerve.

what she wrote about is how ten thousand years of a patriarchal world has affected our species.

because we have been stripped of our own agency.

once disempowered, we project our power onto lovers, onto systems, onto religions, onto anything and everything, as long as it isn’t our lowly selves.

be selfless, right?

isn’t that the motto of every great religion and ideology?

because no one wants to be selfish. and if they have quietly become this way, if selfishness or narcissism has taken root, they would never admit it.

they know it isn’t how they are supposed to behave.

so they mask. everyone masks.

unless you're neurodivergent, highly sensitive, or an empath, like so many of us here, who have spent our whole lives trying to figure out how to fit in, and finally made it here and stopped giving any more fucks about it.

because we have each other now.

and then there are those at the top, who do all the crazy and horrific shit they want and call it leadership.

but before any of this, before the systems, and the hierarchies, and the lords with their servants, there was a mother culture.

not a matriarchy as we have come to understand the word, not simply a reversal of what came after, but something older and more whole.

a culture that understood the feminine as the living principle of nature itself.

gaia. pachamama. isis. shakti. she has been called by a thousand names. the living principle of nature itself. the earth that receives the seed, and grows the child, and feeds the village, and holds the dead.

the original mother— sacred, embodied.

and alongside her, the masculine — protector, initiator.

two forces in conversation.

yin and yang.

the breath in and the breath out.

the elders held this truth as they were the living library. they were the ones who remembered how the world worked when it was still whole. and coming of age was a rite of passage because the elders knew that a human being needs to be initiated into their own sovereignty, needs to be witnessed and named and sent into the world knowing who they are.

when you strip all this from a species, when you sever them from the mother and the father that held them in this deeper sense, you don’t just create orphans.

you create a people who don’t know what they’ve lost, who spend their whole lives reaching for something they can’t name.

that is what it means to be motherless and what it means to be fatherless.

but humans were enslaved into a system slowly over time. and it wasn’t just what humans did to each other.

that’s the part we see.

but we are waking up.

it’s a collective remembering.

for those who don't know my writing, i have clairvoyant, clairaudient and clairsentient senses.

i have the claires, as they are sometimes referred to.

we all have the capacity for these, but in a world that only allows us to name what science or religion allows… well, you get the idea.

but for me, because i was so shut down in certain ways because of childhood sexual abuse, dissociative amnesia created a child who was both hyper-aware and also escaping to somewhere safe, somewhere else.

leaving her body for survival.

it’s just that my dissociation sent me into a land that was always more home than here could ever be: my imagination became a gateway to the spiritual world.

einstein once said knowledge is limited, but imagination embraces the entire world.

i believe he was pointing to imagination as that same threshold to something larger, more universal, more whole.

i have had past life memories arrive during hypnotherapy sessions, dreams, and visions — all when i least expect them.

but they mostly didn’t come until my beloved husband finn died in 2022 and i was cracked open.

the first big one shook me to my core. i was a young british woman in love with a pilot who died in wwi. that pilot was finn. and i couldn't tell if i was sobbing for having lost him then or now.

it was only six months after losing him and the grief melded into a giant tidal wave of remembrance and sadness.

since then, the visions arrive like a breeze that blows through and is gone again.

one of the agonizing pain of being burned at the stake.

another of being forcefully driven from a village for speaking knowledge i wasn’t supposed to have.

once i was a young beggar girl, going door to door with a wooden bowl alongside my closest friend, who was a sister to me in that life.

and one time a dark skinned general on a sun scorched shore lined with palm trees, shouting orders to my men as greek ships kept landing on the beach.

and yet another i was a warrior priestess with tattoos running up my arms, with designs i’ve never seen in waking life. the feeling of power and invincibility after that one lasted almost a week.

and then the ones where i am not from here. a winged blue being leading a legion of light warriors from somewhere else.

a being made of white light, holding a white staff, surrounded by others like me, a council of light, in a place in the galaxy where the most poignant and beautiful music was felt rather than heard, and i started sobbing with a homesickness i can't explain.

once i transformed my body and became a dragon made of millions of scales that were actually eyes, each one blinking with soft radiant light. i remember feeling a steady power that made me so happy and confident while the vision lasted.

and yet another of lying in a beltane meadow and having a horned man arrive in my animal skin tent, where we create the sacred union the way it used to be done.

i could go on…

my dreams and visions usually come when i am meditating, or in water, as the ancients knew that water is a conduit. in the shower or the bath is where i have had many a download.

that’s what i’ve come to call them.

or sometimes they come as i am lying next to my sleeping children, when i tuck them in at night. something about their peaceful breathing and already being on the other side…

and some of what has come through i have never spoken out loud or written about.

until now.

when finn died in 2022 something else opened alongside the grief. i began to receive him.

not as memory but as an unmistakable presence.

in my dreams, when i was sad and crying, through song lyrics at grocery stores, through words i heard in my mind, and much more.

and once that doorway opened, others stepped through too. mostly loved ones i have met, or whose family members i have met.

besides one time, when i was following an exercise in a book about becoming your own medium, and a flamboyant black woman, wearing a pink frilly dress and a big hat, came in and did intense energy work, repairing my neck to my body in what felt like had been a decapitation wound i was still carrying from another life that was blocking my throat chakra.

i know it sounds crazy, right?

but when she flowed in the force was so strong my neck tilted back while i was sitting on my couch and my dog jumped up beside me and wouldn’t stop barking. she told me her name was grace. and that she was working with two friends.

but mostly i hear them speak to me in my mind, but they send images too.

if you’ve ever spoken with a medium you know our loved ones communicate using symbol as a form of language, as much as the spoken word.

and then there is the feeling. i always know it’s not just in my mind because my chest becomes flooded with warmth and love.

i become filled like a helium balloon with their soft tender regard.

i believe this is something we all can do. it is not a special talent and once you are open you cannot always choose what comes through.

in my research to understand what i was experiencing in my visions, i began to google search key words or describe what i had seen and look it up on the internet.

just a woman googling her visions at midnight.

and that is how i found the ones who were mapping the same territory. those who speak of starseeds, of galactic federations, of ancient consciousness wars playing out across dimensions and through human history.

and of a reptilian consciousness.

a force of lower vibration that feeds on fear and has had a hand in the trajectory of our species for a very long time.

it just so happened that i encountered these ideas in my visions, before i ever found them on the internet.

that’s what i need you to understand, that the words, images, and felt sense always came first and the confirmation came after. and while i am not asking you to believe what i believe, i am asking you to stay open.

because whether you receive this as metaphor or literal, truth has a way of landing in the body, whether the mind agrees or not.

and as i begin to refer to a ‘they,’ i want to be clear about who and what i mean:

not a single group or a single face, but a force, a consciousness.

those who track ufo phenomena call it reptilian.

religious traditions call it fallen angels.

some ancient gnostic traditions spoke of a lesser consciousness that constructed a false reality to keep souls enslaved and unaware of their true nature.

the jungians called it the shadow.

and the neuroscientists mapped it onto the oldest part of our brain.

different languages, different centuries, different frameworks, all pointing at the same thing:

a consciousness that feeds on fear rather than generating light.

i have known their influence in my earliest experiences with my own kin.

darkness that feeds on the innocent.

we see its fingerprints in the epstein network and the cult worship that surrounds the most powerful people on earth.

in the rituals hidden in plain sight.

in the symbols worn by those who have traded sovereignty for power.

it moves through humans who are wounded enough or willing enough to let it in.

and it does not create, it consumes. it does not love, it harvests.

and ‘they’ have been very, very good at making us believe they don’t exist.

reptilian consciousness.

neuroscience calls it the reptilian brain.

i have dreamed of it and i have read others describe it in the same words without ever having spoken to each other, and, unfortunately i have seen it up close.

i have looked into eyes and watched something behind them that was not human. not the person i thought i knew.

something older, hard as stone, that could not care. something that fed on fear.

the brainstem, which is the oldest deepest part of the human brain, and it is structurally almost identical to the brain of a reptile.

it governs survival. territory. dominance. hunger.

it does not feel. it does not love. it only wants, and it only takes.

above it sits the limbic system, the part that bonds, that grieves, that nurtures.

and above that, the prefrontal cortex, where imagination and compassion live. where we have the capacity to choose.

where we can choose love.

the question is: which one is driving?

what i know to be true, is that there are forces beyond human that thrive on keeping us trapped in this lower part of our brain.

because here is what trauma does, and what systems of control have always known: when a being is kept in chronic fear, in scarcity, in fragmentation, the higher brain goes offline.

and when the reptilian brain takes the wheel, you can only react, consume, comply or abuse.

i often call them the five ‘f’s in my writing: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fornicate.

but a traumatized species doesn’t know it’s been hijacked.

it just thinks this is what being a human feels like.

yet it isn’t the whole sovereign self.

this is a human who has forgotten it was always a ‘being’ first and foremost.

and this is why healing is not self improvement.

it is reclamation.

the slow, mostly brutal work of regaining control of the part of you that was always meant to be in charge.

and we do it by witnessing and holding the pain of what forced us into submission in the first place.

because here is what most people don’t know about trauma: the amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, cannot tell the difference between past and present.

it doesn’t know the threat is gone, it just knows it happened. and so it keeps firing, flooding the body with cortisol and adrenaline as if the danger is still right here, right now.

this was once a survival strategy. it kept our ancestors alive.

but it has been hijacked to the highest degree.

because a body that is constantly flooded with stress hormones cannot heal.

cannot think clearly.

cannot access love.

and they know this.

it is why we are bombarded daily with news cycles and images designed to keep the alarm bells ringing. to keep us swimming in our own stress chemistry. to keep us, as ever, in the oldest part of our brain.

and here is what they don’t want you to find:

right inside the very brain they have been using against you, there is a gland that connects you to everything they have tried to sever you from.

the pineal gland.

it sits at the center, directly behind the point between your eyebrows.

the third eye.

descartes called it the seat of the soul.

the ancient egyptians encoded it into the eye of horus.

every major spiritual tradition on earth located their highest vision exactly here.

science calls it the most mysterious gland in the human body.

and what they do know is this: it responds to light, it governs our dreams, and our ability to restore.

some researchers believe it produces dmt, the same compound that floods the body at the moment of birth and at the moment of death. the chemical of crossing over.

and it works in conversation with the heart.

not the heart as metaphor, but the actual heart has its own nervous system, its own forty thousand neurons.

scientists know the heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the human body, extending several feet outside you in every direction.

your heart is broadcasting constantly.

fear sends one signal, love sends another.

and when the heart opens, the higher centers follow.

the sufi poets knew this and so did the egyptians.

they weren’t speaking in riddles, and this is the circuit ‘they’ have been trying to break.

and it isn’t only the pineal under attack.

it is the gut.

hippocrates said all disease begins in the gut.

two thousand years ago. and now science is catching up.

the gut has its own nervous system, its own neurons. researchers call it the second brain. and what lives in your gut affects your mood, your cognition, your clarity, your capacity to feel joy.

and what have we been fed?

processed food stripped of its living intelligence.

water laced with chemicals.

screens designed to addict.

environments saturated with toxins we didn’t consent to and mostly can’t see.

brain fog isn’t weakness and it isn’t laziness.

it is what happens to a human being who has been slowly, systematically disconnected from the conditions their body needs to think clearly, feel deeply, and perceive truthfully.

they didn’t need to lock us up.

they just needed to keep us foggy and disconnected.

the loneliness epidemic is by design. and they have always known this.

fear in the media.

manufactured scarcity.

the severing of community, ritual, and rite of passage.

a species living in its reptilian brain is a species that is very, very easy to feed on.

harvesting our life force, our sexual energy, that was supposed to bring us closer to our divinity, to mother earth, to each other.

the porn industry + the media = fear. sex. power.

feeding. always feeding.

entering humans who are too wounded and fragmented to keep them out.

doing evil through them.

darkness that feeds on the innocent.

just as we see this same darkness weaving through the epstein scandal and the thousands who have suffered.

the millions around the world who suffer at the hands of abusers.

is venus just lost down the rabbit hole of conspiracy?

i would have thought so too.

but the visions came before the internet searches. the words arrived before i knew what they meant. sometimes they were persian in origin. sometimes old gnostic terms found in ancient texts.

and when you find that others have written about the same thing, in the same words, across centuries, without ever having spoken to each other, it feels less like conspiracy and more like confirmation.

it’s dark and scary and i still don’t have the full picture. so i stay curious.

i receive pieces like a jigsaw puzzle and piece it together bit by bit.

but now the process is accelerating, and it becomes easier to read the same knowledge from all sorts of different places.

remembering. unravelling. reclaiming.

people are writing their own experiences and comparing notes, just like i am.

we aren’t alone and never have been.

and symbols hold power.

jung knew this and the mystics knew this. the elite never forgot it.

you see power symbols everywhere, co-opted and hidden in plain sight, because they kept this knowledge while the rest of us were taught to distrust anything we couldn’t measure or explain.

but we all have access.

the part of us that speaks in dreams, images, and metaphor is not primitive.

neuroscience is now confirming that the brain’s capacity for symbolic, imaginal thinking is not lesser than logic.

it may actually be the deeper intelligence, the one that holds the bigger picture.

the one that was always meant to lead.

but we built a civilization that called it madness and this is where it got us.

because nothing is even truly material to begin with.

the device you’re reading this on, the chair you’re sitting in, your entire body, at its smallest level, it is moving energy.

quantum physics is finally proving this.

and behind the many masks there has always been a system.

a system for keeping us from remembering who we actually are.

but the reptilian brain can be metabolized.

meaning: the trauma that keeps us locked there can be moved through the body, processed, released. the alarm system can be retrained. the higher brain can come back online.

trauma changes the brain. healing does too.

that’s what true healing is.

not the performative type which is its own kind of epidemic.

when you do the work of moving the trauma through your body, when you crack your heart open and learn to live from there, you are literally rewiring which part of your brain is in charge.

you are evolving in real time.

and that terrifies a system built on keeping you frozen.

at the end of the day, it doesn’t actually matter whether you believe this or not.

what matters is that you embody.

what matters is that you heal.

what matters is that you find your way home.

and at the same time, all of this is to say: don’t get lost in it.

then you will just be giving your power away.

the only way through the storm is to become your own eye of the storm.

and you can’t get there through your mind.

you must enter through your body and through your heart.

and the doorway opens through pain.

because pain is an initiator.

and love, with pain as its twin sister, must break you open.

that’s how you fortify against the evil of this world.

because evil is just unevolved consciousness that forgot it was also source light.

and so did we for a while.

but remember you will.

you are the light. you are the warmth. you are the flame.

you are the child leading the giant lizard by a leash.

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞

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