At the time, my belongings were in storage on the East coast, while I spent (what was intended to be) a final three months working in the Pacific Northwest. Connections and events that only make sense in hindsight led to a job, however, and a permanent (inconvenient, expensive) move back to Washington to follow some inexplicable string of magnetism.

I’d traveled through India before that final stint, offering my being at the altars of deities for clarity on wherever I was supposed to land next. When I came back, I wasn’t sure what any of it had meant. I kept chanting mantra to ask for the protections around my heart, which had begun to feel constricting and limiting, to be healed and opened.

I think of you and I as travelers across time and space with hearts cut from the same cloth. I like to think that you, a bit older than me, came to Earth first to learn to teach me how to navigate the roots and berms and climbs of life like you do on our bike rides. You’re faster, better, braver, and stronger than me, but soft with willingness, patience, and encouragement to help me believe I can stay on the trail and have fun doing it. You only see the capable rider in me.

I imagine before we parted ways from whatever planet we both came from, you told me “your heart is going to break until you’re thirty three, but it’s what leads you to back God and to me”, so I’d remember to keep searching until I found the mantras, and then found you, who allows the mantras to channel through your being and expand the Love within me that always was, and always has been.

I conceptualize our shared path as a symphony conducted by Love. Our harmony lies in the commitment to alchemize each of our individual, then shared stories, into a gift for each other and the world. When one of us falls out of pitch, our devotion is the force that carries a tune until we calibrate ourselves and each other to match it.

Now you have two indoor/outdoor cats. He and I are kindred spirits, we’ve learned. I love when he stomps on my face in the morning and nuzzles me sweetly during a show. I love the rest only you could have given us both to evolve from prominence of our skittish, combative, fortified parts into ones of expansive sweetness, and the grace you exercise while parts deeply buried within the protection of my tenderness emerge to be witnessed.

Last weekend, my mom told me over the phone that she has noticed my heart’s ability to rest since I’ve known you.

Also last weekend, your mom showed us an orchid she’d nursed to exquisite health, rescued from the bargain shelf of near-demise. A gift to me, she taught her son how to nurture beings back to their expression of beauty in the world, too. I didn’t ever know I was going to need that from anyone, but I think that’s how anyone feels when their protections slowly evolve to run the show. I didn’t notice the limitations of the fearful screen through which I had learned to project my experience until you offered an alternative of sweetness and helped me see how I deserve it, too.

Although distinct from before, I have noticed familiar inspiration bubble up in recent months: a flavor distinct from the expressions of heartache I have written about before.

Falling in love is a deeply personal process. Love, I’m learning, is a tended and protected garden. I’m navigating which parts of the garden are mine to be shared with my beloved vs. with everyone else.

Romantic love has been the central theme of my becoming, and it feels important to illustrate the path of my heart’s freedom through the process.

This process has been as much about becoming okay with a version of myself who perhaps wouldn’t find great, supportive love as it’s been about the great, supportive love I’ve found, after all. It’s all been about my heart’s freedom. Our heart’s evolution is the only control we have over anything at all, and within each choice exists an opportunity to open or close ourselves off more. No external circumstance can walk the path for you- the spectrum of density and lightness exists to guide you toward your heart’s center. Life asks us to muddle blindly through circumstances that break our hearts, and often we (reasonably) stop just short of expansion because the pain/isolation are intolerable.

At a certain point along this path, I noticed expansion which wasn’t there before. From the expansion, I would imagine the lighter version of myself reaching out toward the isolated, hurting versions of Emma, who cried in her car on her lunch break, pulled it together for an afternoon of work, then went home to cry on a yoga mat before she did that again the next day, for months in a row, wondering how long life could go on that way. Nothing about my life looked like it was supposed to. None of the deals I made with the devil or ways I compromised my Truth had paid off.

Consider me to be your friend from the future, extending a hand to help pull you through the density and toward a lighter heart. There are many different ways to skin a cat (open one’s heart), and my writing is a testament to one flavor of that process.

I have journals filled with the minutia of my day-to-day process. It only feels like a coherent process from this zoomed-out perspective, where it all led somewhere lighter and the synchronicities followed a logical progression.

It feels tone deaf to write about falling in love while there is so much collective suffering to grieve. My own grief has inspired my definition of and adherence to principles of equanimity, even when it means I have absorbed criticism, isolation, and cruelty for it. A status quo which requires a fragmented version of your Self is designed to be the path of least resistance within structures of oppression. Interrogation of systems that uphold or perpetuate your own pain disrupts a cog in the wheel that churns collective pain.

I believe that opening your heart, even and especially when it’s hard, especially when it requires bravery, when it requires you to tune in to your intuition without necessarily the logic to back it up, is the origin of anyone’s ability to change the world around them. Beyond reposting a tweet is one’s agency to create change within their immediate environment, consciously in the direction of love and connectivity, which is often more challenging than self-righteously adding to the noise. Actionable internal change requires a difficult interrogation of internal divisiveness and how a closed-off heart perpetuates more of that externally.

I honor this stop along the path where I have found another heart who supports a path of alignment, because it has required me to say “no” to lots of misaligned experiences I’d been socialized to accept, more recently with men who are mostly “good”, but not good for me or for my open-hearted contribution to the world. Whether or not someone is “right” for you is easily answerable according to the question of whether the connection asks for more or less of your Truth. It doesn’t mean someone comes ready-made to validate you, but it does mean their heart is open enough, a product of their own path, to receive and hold your Truth.

It used to feel insufferable to hear my friends, happy from within the warmth of partnerships, tell me it’d happen for me, too, because no experience on my path lended to my brain’s ability to imagine what that could be or feel like. I wanted to be safe, held, and supported, but thought I needed to “fix” something about myself to deserve that. It turns out, I only needed to “fix” the belief, reinforced by unconscious patterns, that being loved requires effort. The process has been about expanding my heart so it could safely reach others (vs. closing off the channels that had historically resulted in painful connection).

From my current perspective, experiencing Love through another feels like: I could do anything and he’d still see the best in me. The reciprocal channel of energy we cultivate means I don’t want to do anything that could compromise his beautiful, open heart. In that way, Love brings out the best in me. I am inspired by my adoration to step into a version of myself who receives and protects the gift of his heart.

Some people move through the world without the experience of cruelty or betrayal or inter-relational trauma- their stories are different from mine, and maybe yours, if my writing resonates with you. I believe that once we can articulate what our heart desires, life creates a way for us to experience it. Relational trauma makes it difficult to imagine or engage with a reality in which love is safe or nourishing, but no one is exempt from their deserving of it. Life may require your heart to break a bit before that evolves to make sense in your story. Please don’t mistake your broken heart for your Truth, but instead, recognize it as information. Love is always more true than fear. Figuring out how to orient yourself toward Love (not in the romantic sense, but in the expansive sense) is always the right place to start.

I have learned this path is about your own access to the belief that you deserve to be cherished before you are able to believe someone else when they show up and cherish you. It’s the work of the divine, because the world will break your spirit in every way it can until you consciously decline to engage, in favor of indignant alignment with your own sanctity (which lends to upholding the sanctity of others).

I wrote this down yesterday:

Love only wants more of You: your indulgences, your giggles, and childlike wonder. It has no need for the parts of you that were built for adaptation and survival, but it allows them space to exist while it homes in on your essence. There is no trying. What a gift, to delight in Love with another person, against all odds, and across time and space.

Allow life to distill you down to your center of Love, and trust that it upholds your Truth.

Someone said to “make sure your friends eat”. They were talking about how, anywhere we look, we see people behaving strangely. Most of us are actively confronting individual and collective shadows which have laid dormant for generations. I see it in my friends, in traffic, at work, at the grocery store, only more and more, all the time. The water is boiling.

Recently, I feel an emergence from my own season of shadow work. I didn’t see it as that while I was in it. The chaos just felt subjective. Many connections fell away because they were repelled by my process and the layers of me it exposed.

Some stayed, though, to reflect my lovability back to me, reinforcing love as the path back toward center. I am grateful for those who didn’t expect a performance in exchange for their care. They kept me breathing while I moved through the process. They didn’t shame me nor did they look away. They didn’t engage my shrouded perspective, my ugly behavior, my volatility, the parts I’m ashamed of, nor did they take any of it personally. They didn’t require an outcome. They just made sure I ate until I could access relief from my pain to feed myself.

I couldn’t have appreciated it from within the process, and they didn’t need me to.

I lived through it to remind you to make sure your friends eat.

At a certain point, books/learning/intellectualizing became work with a therapist/with psychedelics to “feel” into my experience with my body, out of my head. On this path, one thing has always led to the next by saying “yes” to what feels good and right in my body at each step.

I dabbled in “healing” modalities until my mental health bottomed out in 2021, which felt like a season of darkness I would never escape. Life left me with no option but to heal. I look back on the season with gratitude from where I am now. (KEEP GOING.)

I’ve made this disclaimer somewhere before- some of these authors have problematic corners of their lives, but so do I, depending on who you ask. A good rule for interactions with other humans is to take what resonates and leave the rest.

Phase 1:

Why are my intimate relationships so painful in the same way? Why am I repeating the same patterns? Ultimately: how do I step out of a “victim” identity and assume responsibility for my role in the redundant equation?

This was the longest phase, through my whole 20s, while I vaguely knew about codependency but kept trying the same thing in different relationships. When one relationship ended, I’d read about codependency, then find another relationship to quell my sadness, stop caring about reading about codependency, til I did the same pattern again. Eventually, it was no longer sustainable, which led to the next phase.

In my original post, I accidentally left out this piece. When failed/traumatic relationship experiences in my 20s bottomed out my mental health, I became familiar with my experiences of depression and neurodivergence (whatever “neurodivergence” means). Along with it I developed a working definition of what is considered to be “normal”, characterized by who benefits from that definition, which is unrelated to my actual, inherent worth.

Additional to relationship stress around this time was the stress of my first job as a nurse practitioner, serving the underserved during COVID and being entirely taken advantage of by a toxic, dysfunctional administration.

I woke up suddenly and angrily to my own exploitation, which trickled down to the exploitation of my patients I witnessed continually. I was woken in a jarring, uncomfortable way, which I met with a lot of resentment, bitterness, and anger.

This densities carried me through a phase of disillusionment which were not without personal consequence. I have since learned how to more productively balance and channel my righteous rage, striking the balance between living my ideals and surviving within systems I seek to dismantle.

Noticing how society stratifies privilege and exploitation according to race, gender, class, etc helped me recognize my position in the system, both advantageously and disadvantageously as it pertains to my Appalachian origin, my gender, my whiteness.

Thus, I couldn’t continue to scapegoat men or my work as the cause of my pain. The things I hated about my life were informed by layers of belief rooted somewhere in my development. Personal responsibility eventually evolved to take precedent only after a period of disillusionment, anger, and resentment toward my family of origin.

Spoiler alert: everyone is a wounded child walking around defensively until they consciously identify, recognize, and heal their wounds, which is the work of life, and is never complete. Your parents are humans, too, who operate within systems that exploit them, too, more or less, depending on their own set of advantages/experiences.

Fuck James Dobson, in particular, though. It’s not available yet, but someone will write a book about the devastating impact his white nationalist propaganda on a generation of individual white evangelicals (therefore the rest of the country and the world), and I will be first in line to co-sign it.

Your parents are humans and you can love them more for it, once you stop giving it power over you.

Somewhere in all of this was an awareness of my position in every system as a woman. There is more to say about the additionally stratified exploitation faced by women who aren’t cis or heterosexual or white, like I am.

Finally, my energy shifting from anger toward the external toward reclaiming power within myself. This is where the work became a spiritual process.

Finally, my experience became more experiential than theoretical. Reading and learning took up less space, meditation and spending time outdoors took up more. Intentional engagement with psychedelics played a role in this shift because that was the right path for me. I don’t think it’s the only path or the right path for everyone.

Hard work with a gifted therapist has also changed my life very much. It took me years to find a therapist with whom I resonated, and I still often dread the work we do together, but cumulatively, it has cleared densities so that I walk through life more sustainably and with less weight.

My ongoing yoga practice exists in this same vein and has deepened over time. I experienced a period of disillusionment with it, too, while I sat in my $20 class after a day of caring for patients who maybe wouldn’t eat dinner on the eastern margin of the same city. My practice now looks entirely different than it did 10 years ago, but it’s a modality I recognize now evolves with me.

We are all walking each other home.

An edit after my original post: larger structures of exploitation reflect structures of systems exploitation (work, family) which reflect interpersonal structures of exploitation (relationships) which reflect one’s personal, internal structures of exploitation (rooted in development).

Your only power within any of it is to start by recognizing what you hate/can’t live with about the world around you til you trace it back to the structures within yourself. Then you dismantle them in yourself and watch the world around you change for the better.

With love,

Emma

“Your healing journey (in all expressions) has been such a blessing to follow and such an incredible gift. Everything you’ve shared has been a vital resource for me doing my own emotional work. I hope you know how profound and comforting your writing is, both the perspectives of grief and loneliness and the perspectives of joy and connectivity. Also the earlier perspectives of anger and resentment were just as important and it was just as healing to see someone else on a similarly messy but realistic emotional path.

I hope 33 is another year of experiencing everything life and love have to offer ✨”

I feel like such a vastly different person here and now in 2025 than I did in 2021 when I started healing intentionally and became known for it by the internet. When I meet new people now, it’s a tricky thing to summarize. “No, I don’t have any socials. I was internet famous til I realized it was leaking my energy. Now I spend a lot more time meditating than being virtually connected to others” is too much to explain in a surface-level interaction.

Sometimes, I meet new people who ask why I look so familiar and I let them wonder because I don’t know where to begin and it doesn’t feel important.

I don’t know how to conceptualize or summarize any of it. Parts of me are so different now, but other parts of me do still live in 2021 some of the time. Or back in 1998 or 2004, for that matter. None of my grief is “gone” or “fixed”, my perspective is just shifted or zoomed out, I think, in favor of experiences I consciously prefer.

These days, I’m mostly very happy, with a lot of gratitude for the years of density that led here. If I live more life, more densities will come, but I think they’ll be different densities than the ones I’ve worked through in recent years. I feel a sense of completion, which is an interesting place to be because I struggled with so much of the same kind of pain for so long. I maintain curiosity about all of it.

Of course, I don’t prefer to be uncomfortable, but now I recognize discomfort as information. I ask it questions and I trust its temporary nature. I know that sitting with discomfort clears space for something else, and I know it’s all here for the sake of experiencing.

I moved recently and unpacked/leafed through the 5 journals I’ve filled since 2021. In conclusion, all paths lead to God, and I don’t know how to write that sentence in a way that satisfies me without sounding woo-woo or exclusive or bypass-y. I don’t know how to explain that I don’t mean “God” in the sky-daddy sense, but I don’t have a better word yet for what I do mean, and I don’t know if words exist to explain what I mean.

Carl Jung said “all addictions are a low level search for God” and I recognize now the hole in my own heart took/takes the form of connection to others, which assumed its loudest and ugliest expression through my intimate relationships. It was all just information, but felt like death from the epicenter. That core part of me was doing its job to keep me alive according to its developmental perspective.

“I am going to heal from codependency” is how the first journal starts. I think I have fulfilled that intention, but not in the way I expected. I’ve arrived at a destination I couldn’t have imagined then. Someday I hope to be able to neatly summarize it all, but I really am without the compulsion to process or intellectualize or write for now, and I honor that distinction from how I felt in 2021/22/23 and parts of 2024.

The thing that feels important to share right now is the shift in my energy since getting off socials in January of 2025. There was a time I didn’t know how I’d live without that form of connection, but now I wonder how it ever took up so much space in my life. Last week, I felt energetically depleted from work and caught myself scrolling on Reddit to dissociate. I recognized I used to live there so much of the time before the last few years taught me to reign my energy in rather than outsource it.

I don’t have big sweeping theories like some people articulate well about the effect the internet’s had on humanity as a whole. I can only narrate what my perspective has been. I don’t feel left out and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything without an Instagram/TikTok. I feel like I have more space in my day and my life to notice the things our human brains have evolved to receive gratification and connection from noticing- a bird singing, the scent of pine needles in the wind, a kid’s unbridled laughter a few houses away. I am deliriously joyful so much of the time because I take notice of these things I took for granted when my brain was on an endless loop of addiction.

My dopamine is so much less fucked than it used to be. I don’t need to compare my process to that of a coworker I knew for three months twelve years ago.

I need to know what the handful of people I love are up to, meaningfully and intentionally, where I take an hour out of my Sunday afternoon to hold them in thought while I write them a letter in which I outline any information they would have otherwise passively received from my Instagram stories.

Shitty day at work? Coming home to a letter from a friend in your mailbox is a great reminder you’re not a piece of shit and there are people in the world who hold you in high regard. Social media, conversely, a tool for comparison, will keep you distracted and dissatisfied as to further reinforce whatever negative spiral your stressful experience at work tapped into, so you will be incentivized to buy things to “improve” yourself.

I don’t need to know what an ex-boyfriend is up to. We shared something impactful, it influenced me, and now I need to feel what I’m feeling, ask it questions, then learn how to shift into my power, a perspective from which all the goodness of life is mine for the taking, too. It’s all a practice, right? It doesn’t happen in one fell swoop, but in increments, where you allow the things that feel good in your body to guide the next right step.

You’re entitled to joy. Find out where to access it then learn how to live there. I’m pretty lazy. I have a reasonable amount of discipline, but if I can figure out how to live sustainably joyfully, anybody else can, too.

I do not know how to resize this photo, sorry. Deliriously joyful in the backcountry, though:

Mis estimados queridos, My Esteemed Ones:

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for “good” in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, “the new normal,” the grotesquerie of the week.

It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

…You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking.

Yet … I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is – we were made for these times.

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised, since childhood, for this time precisely.

…I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in arighting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource, you are not alone.

Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so.

Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a forest greater. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

… We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over — brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme.

We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially … we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered – can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.

…Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say “fat chance,” and “management before mercy,” and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been ‘to Hell and back’ on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are.

Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, the smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times. Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like “barely” are allowed here). If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy.

…In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the Voice greater? You have all the resource you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough.

…In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more rapidly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core – till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again.

One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair – thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely.

It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts – adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

…One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires … causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these – to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

…There will always be times in the midst of “success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen” when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my uttermost bones I know something, as do you. It is that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But … that is not what great ships are built for.

…This comes with much love and prayer that you remember Who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth.

CODA

In 2021, I decided to heal from my undesired relational patterns and began sharing revelations about it on TikTok. The middle child inside me was delighted that there were people who wanted to hear what I had to say. The community of ultimately 109 thousand helped me grow as a person and into myself. Sometime after October 2023, the platform stopped appealing to me. I woke up to its toxicity. As things in the real world became more and more scary and divisive, I wanted my energy to be directed toward less of that. I don’t like to feel like I’m “addicted” to anything, and I recognized the app was working through the addiction circuit in my brain.

I’ll be always be grateful to TikTok for helping me find my voice and for connecting with folks who experience the world similarly to me. Whatever in the hell is happening with Trump and Meta, I don’t want anything to do with it. I deleted both my TikTok and my Instagram today.

October 2023 really was a turning point for me in general- since then, I’ve gone inward because there’s been nowhere else to go. I plan to move through the rest of my life with this intention, with focus on my immediate surroundings and interactions. I plan to use those interactions as a mirror to address beliefs and patterns of disconnect within myself. It’s the only control I have in any of this.

I’ll plan to connect with folks here while a lot of my time is spent turning my energy intentionally inward. If you followed me from TikTok, the sentiments I want to express right now are these:

Love is always more true than fear. Love isn’t an aspirational thing, it’s just the true nature of things. When you’re fearful- which shows up also as anger, antagonism, competition, vitriol, all sorts of things that feel dense— it’s just an indication you haven’t arrived at love which is always the final destination. It just means there is more of a path to explore. Be curious. Try not to get stuck for too long in the densities. There are resources and pathways out of the fog if you allow them to come your way.

For me, especially, accessing quiet enough to hear and recognize my own voice is one of the most important practices I’ve accessed. I always think of these Fiona Apple lyrics:

“And I listened because I hadn't found my own voice yet
So all I could hear was the noise that
People make when they don't know shit
But I didn't know that yet”

When I meditate, I envision I’m meeting others on a frequency of love. I think that’s how it works. I get myself there through my contemplative practices where I’m able to share community with others who are doing the same thing with their energy. There is peace to be accessed beyond time and space. It’s never separate from you.

I wrote that quote down in my journal, then I wrote:

“Love them even when you shared a truth they can’t tell” while I thought of all the people by whom I have felt disconnected (abandoned) because they’ve chosen a sense of safety over a truth we shared, sometimes to the detriment of my wellbeing.

The past few years has prompted painful, messy inventory of my relationship patterns which brought my developmental influences to the surface of my awareness. On the other side of all this work, I understand the experience of life as a projection of my conditioned beliefs.

Pathways of wounding (my relational patterns) have shown up over and over, through different experiences, to draw my attention to the untruths that inform my beliefs about myself, about others, and about life. Curiosity about the pain has led to my understanding that a story of unworthiness or unlovability (mine, or anyone’s) is simply an untruth. If you haven’t arrived at peace, there is just more to learn.

There’s no destination, just an allowing of and surrender to wholeness.

Next I wrote:

“It doesn’t diminish my truth.”

Sometimes, another’s need to feel safe supersedes their ability to maintain connection to me. It doesn’t mean the truth we shared is untrue, it means our egos have stepped in. Our shared truth isn’t voided, but perhaps becomes less applicable to ever-evolving material conditions.

The ability to feel soul resonance is a gift of life. When people feel safe enough, even if it’s temporary, to love each other and tell the truth, we get to be reminded of the light in ourselves, through another.

“There are truths I can’t tell, too.”

Life is a continuous unraveling of the conditions we have adopted to stay safe in our material bodies. There will always be a truth I can’t consistently tell, no matter how long I live. Sometimes this will occur to the detriment of someone else’s sense of wellbeing.

Grace is the product of an ability to recognize that capacity in yourself. With practice, forgiveness becomes your instinct when conditions no longer allow for shared truth with another, and gratitude for the miracle it is to be able to love someone and tell the truth with them at the same point in time and space.