the pressure chamber

on what the body carries, what the heart knows, and why evolution cannot be stopped

painted by my son, tobin. age 10.

what if you came here knowing?

that on some soul level, the pain was coming and that your whole mission was to move through it without fragmenting and becoming part of the pain cycle.

what if that was the mission?

to move through the pain, the abuse, and the suffering without being destroyed.

to hold enough of your original light, the warm, trusting quality that children carry before the world teaches them not to, so that when you came out the other side of life’s pressure chamber, you came out shining like a diamond.

those of us on a healing journey know something about pressure chambers.

i spent years carrying things i didn’t have words for yet, patterns repeating until i was finally ready to see them clearly.

the wound repeats until it is witnessed.

this is a phrase i like to say lately.

and witnessing is rarely clean or convenient, it comes on when a trigger ignites it. on planes, on morning walks, in conversations, and right in the middle of all the ordinary life moments that refuse to pause for our revelations that we carve out from our suffering.

i’ve learned that the body remembers long before the mind catches up, and that what we can’t see in ourselves, we cannot protect against.

this reckoning has been the most costly and the most clarifying thing i’ve ever walked through. and i’ve even walked over hot coals as part of this healing journey.

yet i believe it’s not the mind where that light lives anyway.

though we live in a society that prizes knowledge above all else, where extreme ideas are allowed to dominate because humans have been encouraged to live from our heads and not our hearts.

why?

because it’s easy to control a population cut off from their empathy. if you can’t feel what another person’s suffering means for them, because you’ve never learned to feel your own, you become easy to manipulate.

we can’t escape emotions, but when we’ve been trained to feel shame around them, or to ignore the inner stirrings of our own heart, how can we possibly recognize or tend to another’s pain?

a person who has buried their own wound will either weaponize yours or walk right past it.

so i tend to think of the mind like the moon: a reflective surface, a categorizing machine, a camera that files experiences into a library we call memory and identity.

it’s brilliant in its way, and necessary for how far we’ve come.

but you can’t get warm from moonlight, no matter how much you might admire its radiance.

the heart is where the sun is.

the heart is a portal to your soul and all that lies beyond.

it’s both a furnace and a bridge, like a golden thread that when you travel down its shimmering depths, you find it’s a journey that has no end.

however, with our human evolution and around the time the printing press arrived, around the time knowledge moved out of monasteries and into individual hands, we began living almost entirely in our heads.

it was part of our development as a species. and we needed to evolve in this way.

with the capacity to read alone in a room, to think abstractly, to build the technology that lets me sit here and talk to people i’ve never met, all of that came from the mind’s great ascent.

but the price was also steep. we started stomping down the intuitive, embodied, dreaming parts of ourselves. the parts that indigenous cultures and older ways of being carried so naturally, with their attunement to the seasons, to their bodies, and the collective soul.

we called it primitive and buried it under centuries of doctrine, empires, and the worship of pure knowledge.

and now we live in an age where the mind is king and the heart is barely consulted, and we wonder why everything feels like it’s coming apart.

here’s what i think though: the chaos is real, but it’s not the whole story.

those forces that would flood you with darkness until you surrender your agency, they’ve always been a part of this play of consciousness.

the roman empire did it.

the christian church did it.

the baby boy billionaires are doing it now.

it’s the same pattern, dressed up in different garments.

absolute power corrupts absolutely.

it has always corrupted absolutely.

this is not new.

what is new is us, who we have become, and who we are becoming.

evolution is a spiral.

those of us here, who are writing, sharing, doing the excavation work on ourselves in public, we’re not here by accident either.

we’re the ones who got handed the hardest experiences, and instead of being destroyed, did something stranger and more difficult: we alchemized them.

a little of this, a little of that, all the grief and the abuse, and the learning differences, and the losses, and the years of not being seen, poured together until something entirely our own emerged.

and i’ll tell you right now: it is not weakness.

it is inner strength, forged in the hellfire of your pain and suffering.

we have been alchemizing pain into power.

it’s probably the most sophisticated thing a human being can do.

my daughter’s been through so much, learning disabilities we didn’t have the resources to diagnose for years, trauma she’s been patiently and courageously unwinding.

i was her teacher long before i could afford to get her tested, a waldorf teacher trying to reach her own child across a distance neither of us had words for yet. we hadn’t remembered the trauma. and what we couldn’t remember we couldn’t touch to learn and heal and grow.

it wasn’t until finn died and the resources finally came that we got the answers we needed. through a painful and breaking open process that i have described elsewhere.

and then she took those answers and did something extraordinary with them. melody just got into NYU and she wants to be a lawyer. she wants to help others not feel so alone.

she has taken her pain and alchemized it into power, the power to help another.

and that spiral from wound to wisdom, that’s the whole point.

that’s what we’re all doing, or we should be.

the tools they built to cage us, the platforms, the technology, even the pace of information overload, we can use those to our own benefit.

we are and we will continue to do so.

the printing press wasn’t created for liberation, but it liberated.

the internet wasn’t created for community, but here we are.

we take what we were given, including everything that almost broke us, and we make it into something that could actually help.

nothing can stop evolution.

that’s the thing we keep forgetting. and those that would keep us small want us to keep forgetting.

but the truth is, you can slow it, suppress it, flood it with noise.

but a super bloom doesn’t ask to bloom.

it just bursts forth when the conditions are right.

and i believe we have been incubating in a pressure cooker creating the perfect conditions for a superbloom.

because the conditions are finally ripe for an explosion of colorful healing expression from the intensity of the pain.

equal light to equal darkness.

i’ve been feeling this in my bones lately.

it’s go time.

we have what it takes.

so much so that this fall i’m packing up my four kids, two dogs, two cats, and whatever great courage i have left, to cross an ocean and build a new life in seville, spain.

and it’s not because everything is resolved and figured out. we are still giant works in progress. i will always be the first to say so.

but my intuition has been insisting on it, at first as a whisper nudging me quietly, but my inner voice has now gotten so loud and powerful, in large part thanks to you all here at substack loving me back to wholeness, and now it shouts loudly.

i am finally ready to start living a life lived more from the inside out.

and we are at a threshold as a human race.

it doesn’t look elegant from the inside. right now it feels more like a world spinning chaotically fast and out of control.

but i know, and you know too, if you quiet the inner storm enough to listen to what’s rising underneath all of that, something is being woven, created and forged in fire.

like the plate featured above that my ten year old son painted recently, we are each the master painters of our own beautiful canvas.

it’s his tenth birthday today. and it’s also the day his grandfather died.

portals of death and rebirth.

finn, tobin's dad and my beloved husband, died on his mom's birthday.

cycles of coming and going from this beautiful and painful planet.

earth school is what i like to call it. and my essays that form this series i call my lessons from earth school.

for that is what is happening here.

i believe we come knowing it will be extremely trying. and that no one signs up for this difficult of an assignment without knowing how intensely challenging it will be.

but we come anyway. we come for the thrill of it.

for the chance to learn and grow.

to not become broken in the process.

broken open maybe, but not broken apart.

for we may have been formed in darkness.

yet we won’t stay broken in the dark.

we came to shine.

we came to create.

we came to make a difference.

they aren’t going to know what hit them.

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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. 💞