I was in an airy studio space with high ceilings. There was a separate treatment room where I was doing healing work with people in a hands-on way. Some sort of bodywork, but I didn’t know the exact details yet.

And in another part of the studio was a desk with a computer. I could see myself sitting there, working on something that felt like design. I thought maybe it was some type of graphic design, maybe web design. I couldn’t see the exact form of it clearly, but it had that quality. I was designing something.

The vision seemed to clarify something I had already been feeling for a long time. My working life was being pulled in two directions, toward the healing arts and toward some type of creative work.

At the time, I felt sure I needed to figure out what that “other thing” was.
The one that would live alongside the bodywork.

I tried, in different ways, to find it.

Web design. Graphic design. UX. I enrolled in courses. I followed threads. But nothing ever fully took hold. None of it was compelling enough on its own to become a real path.

The vision stayed, though.

This dual professional life I’d envisioned had felt like an ideal. A life I was somehow meant to grow into, even if I couldn’t quite understand it.

Part of it was inspired by a visit I made to Boston in my 20s. I was in a relationship with someone at the time who’d grown up there, and we went to see his parents.

Their workspace felt like something out of another world.

It was a large loft space. There were small private offices for seeing clients built into the larger space. They were both therapists. And then there was the studio itself. His dad made large-scale sculptural pieces from found materials. Metal, objects, things gathered and reassembled. His wife did historical restoration work, painting gold leaf onto old buildings around the city.

Later we all drove to their home in a coastal town about 45 minutes north of Boston. They lived in a small cottage with a lush vegetable garden. We took walks through the neighborhood, down to a small pond. It was quiet, simple, beautiful.

I remember thinking, this is it. This is a life.

It wasn’t because of what they did, exactly.
But because of how it all fit together.

They had built something where different ways of working could coexist naturally. There was relational work. Creative work. A shared environment. A rhythm that felt both grounded and alive.

I also remember my boyfriend telling me that his dad had never really made much money. He was also a writer, philosopher, inventor, and more. Brilliant and deeply gifted. But not much of a moneymaker. They lived modestly, and at times struggled financially.

That stayed with me. It complicated the picture. I loved what I saw and felt, but part of me also wondered whether this kind of life was only possible if you were willing to live with a certain amount of financial instability.

I didn’t know what to do with that tension. I just held onto the feeling.

For a long time, I thought I was trying to recreate that life by finding the right combination of professions.

One part I eventually found. The bodywork. Craniosacral therapy, and the deeper somatic work that grew out of it. That stayed.

But the other part remained unclear.

What was I doing at that desk?

Writing is part of it, I can see that now. But it’s not only writing. There was always a sense that I was working with form in some way. Arranging, shaping, translating something into a visible structure.

I kept looking for the right category.

Design. Strategy. Systems. Something in the digital world.

Nothing quite felt like, ‘this is it.’

But looking back over the past few years, I can see that something shifted.

I began to understand more clearly the wholeness underneath my life. Pieces of it were slowly coming together in a way that I could finally hold tangibly. I could see that everything I was putting out into the world was coming from the same place. The different forms were not separate, but expressions of the same underlying coherence.

That’s what I’ve been circling all these years.

It was never about finding the second job.

It was about understanding that the work itself is not divided in the way I thought it was.

What I see now is that the same process has been there all along. It just takes different forms. I notice it in my Craniosacral work. I notice it when I’m writing, developing an offering, or teaching a class. I notice it when I’m figuring out how a website wants to come together.

The forms are different.
The underlying process is the same.

For a long time, I felt compelled to follow every thread. I’ve always been deeply curious. Someone with a lot of ideas and a wide range of interests. Part of that is just how I’m wired. But part of it was also the feeling that I was searching for something. The missing piece. The thing that would complete the picture.

What I’ve been realizing over time is that I do not have to follow every thread. I can be more discerning about what I give my time and energy to. I can recognize the wholeness without needing to express it in every possible form.

I can ask more directly: What do I want to make space for? What do I want to put into the world? How do I want to live?

Income is part of that too. It has to be. Not as the only question, but as one of them.

That feels truer to where I am now. Less like I’m still searching for the missing piece, and more like I’m learning to choose.

I still think about the life my former boyfriend’s parents built.

The studio. The garden. The feeling of a life that made sense on its own terms.

I know that I’m not building the exact same thing.

What I see now is that what I recognized then was a structure.

A way of organizing a life where different expressions could exist side by side, all rooted in the same source.

It’s taken me a long time to understand that.

And I’m still learning how to live it.

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But sometimes consciousness moves from one mind to another in the space of a single sentence.

The other day I walked into a small independent bookstore in town. The kind that sells both new and used books. The front display had a stack of hardbacks of A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan.

I’ve spent more than twenty years studying consciousness in my own way, mostly through experience rather than theory. Through meditation, Craniosacral therapy, yoga, teaching, working with the nervous system, and paying attention to the subtle ways awareness moves in the body and between people. So I’m always a little curious when a new book on consciousness comes out.

I picked it up.

Read the jacket. Read the inside flap. Flipped through the chapters.

I’ve read a few of Pollan’s books before. They’re well written. Thoughtful. This one was even a signed copy.

I don’t often buy hardbacks. Most of the time I’m listening to books on Audible, reading them on Kindle, or picking up a used paperback somewhere. If I’m being honest, often on Amazon.

And, a lot of the consciousness books I’ve come across in recent years haven’t really spoken to me. They tend to come from a Western, scientific, reductionist angle. Neuroscience. Brain imaging. Mechanistic explanations.

Valuable, yes. But only one facet of the diamond. It often feels like arriving late to a conversation that other traditions have been having for thousands of years.

I’m more of an integrationist, interested in multiple ways of knowing. Experiential, philosophical, spiritual, scientific. The inner and the outer. Different entry points into the same mystery.

But something about this book felt worth giving a chance.

So I decide to buy it.

I walk up to the counter and place the book down.

The man behind the counter, middle-aged like me, looks at it and says, almost sheepishly,

“You’re gonna go for it, huh?”

I say yes. And that I’d rather buy it here than from Amazon.

Then he says something unexpected.

“You know… if you bring this book back before the paperback comes out, you can sell it back. If you returned it tomorrow, we’d give you $14 for it. We’d just sell it used.”

The whole interaction carries an apologetic tone, like he feels a little bad selling me a $32 hardback book.

It feels like the opposite of a sales pitch.

I scan my credit card and complete the transaction.

Now I’m home and I’ve started reading it, and I notice something funny.

I’m being extra careful with the book.

Trying not to get food on the pages. Making sure it doesn’t get bent or splashed by coffee.

Because now, somewhere in the back of my mind, there’s a thought:

Maybe I should return it and get the $14.

I’m preserving its resale value.

Which is strange, because I don’t actually care about the $14 at all.

For all I know, it could be a fantastic book that I’ll want to keep. Or reference later. Maybe pass it along to someone else.

But that small suggestion slipped into my thinking.

It’s funny how that happens. Someone says one small thing, and suddenly you’re carrying their thought around in your own mind.

Before the interaction, the book was simply a book.

Is this worth reading?

Afterward, it became something to hold temporarily.

Something that could be returned.

Nothing about the book changed.

Just one sentence from another human being.

Consciousness researchers spend a lot of time trying to locate consciousness inside the skull.

But consciousness moves between people in much more subtle ways, sometimes across a bookstore counter.

One person’s relationship to something entering another person’s field.

And suddenly a book is no longer just a book.

It’s also a seed someone else planted.

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It’s that feeling that something is happening behind the scenes where threads are finding each other, gathering into form. Connections are still formulating, not quite ready yet. And then, suddenly, it clicks.

Over time, I’ve learned to trust this type of intelligence that doesn’t respond well to pressure. It needs space and time. Room to move. And when it finally surfaces, it often feels less like something I made happen and more like a discovery that found its way through me.

That phase where thoughts are forming but nothing is clear yet is what I call the messy middle. Many of us recognize it from having the experience, but it isn’t how most of us have been trained to think.

There’s a moment in one of the Star Trek films where Spock, having traveled back in time, hands Scotty an equation Scotty himself will develop in the distant future. Years of research collapse all at once. Scotty is amazed. Grateful. And aware that time has just been rearranged.

He now has knowledge far ahead of its time.

It’s easy to focus on what was lost there. Scotty didn’t live through the journey of discovery. He didn’t spend years grappling with the problem, making mistakes, or learning through trial and error. The struggle was skipped.

But there’s another side to it.

With that equation in hand, Scotty can now build things from a new baseline that would never have been possible otherwise. Acceleration erases process, yes, but it also opens new territory. Humans have always done this: passing knowledge forward so the next person doesn’t have to start from scratch. Language, writing, and printing did this. The internet did this.

AI is doing it again, but much faster.

So the question isn’t whether acceleration is good or bad. The question is what happens within us when things start moving faster than we can integrate them?

In living systems, intelligence isn’t about optimization. It comes from responding to what’s happening. Nothing is rushing to get it right. Life changes as it needs to.

Creative work follows a similar rhythm. Ideas don’t usually arrive on demand. They arrive when there’s more space. This is why you can have some of your best ideas in the shower. The combination of warm water and no one expecting anything from you allows the nervous system to settle. Your mind lets go a bit. Something somewhere gets the breathing room to connect.

There really isn’t anything particularly special about the shower. It’s more about the conditions it creates.

The messy middle lives in that space, between not knowing and knowing. When things feel vague, unresolved, or half-formed. It can be uncomfortable for some. It can feel unproductive or frustrating. I know someone who absolutely hates it. There can be a strong desire to collapse this space into certainty. And, it’s where a lot of our creative intelligence seems to take shape.

This is how my own creative process often works. Things gather while I’m living my life. Riding the train or vacuuming the living room. Ideas picked up along the way. A phrase here. A feeling there. Fragments gather long before anything feels whole.

That middle matters because it builds something internal.

When we stay with uncertainty instead of rushing to resolve it, we develop discernment. A capacity to feel our way through complexity, with patience. When we struggle with an idea, rewrite it, sit with it longer than we’d like, the understanding becomes ours in a deeper way. It settles into the body.

Without that process, knowledge can lose meaning. We can say things without really inhabiting them. We can rush ahead without feeling grounded in what we’re doing. Plenty of output can be generated without much felt continuity underneath.

This doesn’t happen in isolation. How we think is influenced by the environments we’re in.

Somewhere along the way, not knowing started to look like a problem.

In school, we’re rewarded more for having the right answers than for being curious. At work, for deliverables more than reflection. Speed, clarity, and certainty are treated as signs of competence. Hesitation gets labeled as inefficiency. Ambiguity becomes something to eliminate.

The messy middle, by contrast, looks sloppy. Risky. Hard to justify.

So we design systems to avoid it.

We compress timelines. Streamline the work. We look for tools that promise resolution on demand. And now, with AI, we can often skip the messy middle altogether. We get the answer, the summary, and the articulation within seconds, without having to live inside the question.

This is where a subtle erosion begins.

I’ve been hearing from friends who teach young people that a lot of their students are not excited about AI. They’re more uneasy about it than anything else. And the fear doesn’t seem to be focused on whether jobs will disappear. It’s more about the concern that they could lose the ability to think for themselves. They’d rather feel their way toward understanding instead of having it handed to them fully formed.

Emerging research reflects something similar. In a study conducted by researchers at MIT’s Media Lab, participants writing essays with generative AI showed lower neural engagement, especially in areas tied to memory, planning, and creativity, than those who wrote without these tools. Those in the AI-assisted group were also less able to remember or recall what they had written, and independent reviewers described the AI-supported essays as lacking individuality and originality.

These findings don’t necessarily prove that AI diminishes thinking (the study itself is small and not yet peer-reviewed) but they do suggest that relying on AI can change how our minds engage with complex tasks. If that’s true, we may be undermining the very conditions that make original thinking possible. That possibility echoes what many educators are witnessing: speed and efficiency don’t guarantee depth or meaning. When systems move faster than our biological and emotional pace, they can bypass the conditions that allow understanding to take root.

When technology starts moving faster than we do, we don’t magically catch up. Our attention scatters, and our nervous systems stay on high alert.

Which raises an interesting question.

Does AI have a messy middle?

In a technical sense, it does. Models are trained through enormous cycles of iteration and feedback, where patterns emerge and errors are corrected, and performance gradually improves. But none of this is felt in the way it is for humans. It doesn’t involve confusion or doubt, or waiting and wondering when understanding will arrive.

Human emergence is different. It’s lived. It moves through sensation, emotion, memory, and meaning. It’s slow because it unfolds through experience.

And yet, an interesting shift happens when the two meet.

When AI is used as a shortcut, it can collapse the process. But when it’s used more as a thinking partner rather than an answer machine, the messy middle can shift back to where it belongs.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine a student working on a paper about a topic they don’t fully understand yet. They could ask AI to write the essay and get something that sounds decent enough in seconds. Or they could do something else entirely.

They might start by writing out what confuses them about the subject. What doesn’t make sense, where their thinking gets tangled. Then ask the AI: What questions am I actually trying to answer here? This helps to clarify the question rather than give an answer. Or they could write a messy first draft themselves and ask the AI to show them where their argument is strongest, or where they’re circling around an idea they haven’t articulated yet.

In this version, the AI doesn’t replace the struggle. It makes the struggle visible. It externalizes the process so the student can see their own thinking more clearly, sit with the confusion longer, follow it further. The integration still happens in them. The discernment is still theirs. But the AI helps hold the complexity open instead of collapsing it too soon.

This is often how I work with these tools. I use AI less for answers and more as a way to stay in conversation with an idea and see my own thinking from new angles. I ask it to challenge me.

The difference is subtle but crucial. In one version, you’re outsourcing the messy middle. In the other, you’re using AI to create more room for it, instead of rushing to resolve the discomfort of not knowing.

The human still has to live inside the question. The AI can help hold the door open.

The risk is that we stop noticing when we’ve handed over the part of the process where we actually become the human who understands.

We’ve already seen what happens when self-organizing systems run without care. Market capitalism is a kind of emergent intelligence. It responds to signals and feedback loops. But when growth becomes the only measure, balance gets lost.

AI amplifies the logic we feed into it.

If we build systems that value speed above all else, they’ll keep compressing the spaces where integration happens. If we build systems that value the process and not just the result, new possibilities emerge.

Acceleration doesn’t have to mean disconnection. But it does require awareness.

Nothing essential about being human is vanishing overnight.

But something is being tested.

Can we stay in relationship with our own unfolding as everything speeds up? Can we protect spaces where not knowing is allowed? Can we let ideas arrive on walks, in the shower, in the pauses between tasks, rather than trying to force them?

For me, the question isn’t whether to use AI.

It’s whether we can use it without losing ourselves in the process. To remember that the messy middle isn’t a flaw to engineer away.

It’s where understanding forms.

And if we lose the ability to stay with it, we don’t just lose creativity.

We lose our way of becoming.

This essay is a continuation of an earlier reflection on AI, time, and acceleration, which you can read here: The Future Reaching Back: What Star Trek Can Teach Us About AI

I used to host these big potluck dinner parties. The kind where 40 to 50 people from different parts of my life would arrive with arms full of homemade food and desserts, and mingle like long lost friends. It was alive in the best way.

These parties were very me in that I never assigned dishes or asked anyone to bring anything specific. I just knew that I could rely on certain people to bring a main dish, or a dessert, or show up with a bag of chips. It always worked out.

I remember taking a stroll around my house at one of those parties, noticing that everyone was engaged. Conversations were flowing in that particular way that meant people were really connecting and having the kind of night that felt like community. I felt warmth. Fulfillment, even. This was more than I’d hoped for.

But as I kept walking, stopping by different groups to join in, something shifted. People were so absorbed in their conversations that I couldn’t quite pierce the bubble. It didn’t feel like rudeness—they just seemed deeply engaged with each other. I felt like I was on the outside looking in.

It was just a moment of clarity, standing there with a plate of food, taking in the scene. I was being a good host, yes, but I was also managing the entire ecosystem. Circulating. Making sure the gaps were filled. Checking to see if anyone was feeling left out. Tracking needs before they became needs. I couldn’t find anyone to talk to because I wasn’t really in the room—I was holding it.

I was standing at the edge of my own party, making sure everyone else was okay, but somehow feeling alone.

That night stayed with me because it helped me see something I hadn’t fully recognized before. I wasn’t just gathering people. I was holding everything together. And somewhere in all that holding, I forgot to ask life to hold me.

It wasn’t the first time that had happened, but it was the first time I truly noticed. Something about that night showed me I’d become the den mother instead of just the host. I could feel the subtle cost of being the one who keeps it all together.

That pattern started long before dinner parties.

In my family, I was the peacemaker. The regulator. I smoothed things over. Early on I was attuned to what went unsaid. I observed and absorbed, and I helped keep things balanced. I didn’t have words for it then but it just felt like being good. Doing what needed to be done. As if I’d been assigned this job at birth.

That same pattern followed me into friendships where I became the person people called when they were upset and needed someone to talk to. I was safe, intuitive, non-judgmental. I was a good listener. I felt valued.

In my 20s and 30s, when I worked in operations and HR, the pattern became official. If something went wrong, I handled it. If there was conflict, I helped clean it up. If the team needed structure, I created it. I could see the big picture and the undercurrents, how people and processes connected, where things were getting stuck. I was the glue. And somewhere in there, being the one who solved problems became tied to my sense of worth. If I wasn’t fixing things, making things work, who was I?

And I truly liked being in this role. I liked being helpful. I liked harmonizing and bringing things together. There’s something in me that naturally enjoys facilitating, teaching, and hosting.

What I didn’t realize back then was that when you’re always stabilizing a system, the system starts to depend on you. People relax into your competence. They stop noticing what you’re carrying, and they mostly just experience the outcome: things work.

Later in life, as a Craniosacral therapist, I carried the same skills into the treatment room. I could hold whatever a client arrived with. Trauma, grief, anger. I knew how to be present and create a safe space that helped make healing possible. I loved helping people feel better.

But even after years of practice, after learning tools to create better boundaries, something never felt fully sustainable about it. I still carried more than I needed to. Something in me never fully rested. It didn’t feel like a choice anymore.

The signs were unmistakable.
Exhaustion after doing a session or teaching a class.
Tension in my body that didn’t feel like mine.
Moments where I realized I was holding not just my own experience, but the entire room’s.

And then there’s the sting of feeling like you’re being taken for granted. It’s hard to reconcile, because you’re the one who showed up and offered help. So when there’s a lack of gratitude or reciprocity, how can you blame people for accepting what you offered?

I grew up learning that being ‘good’ meant being accommodating and making yourself small. That got reinforced everywhere. And when that conditioning meets genuine skill, care, and capacity, it becomes very difficult to tell where authentic generosity ends and reflex begins.

After decades of this pattern, after raising a daughter who’s now in college, after supporting several aging family members, it still pops up. Recently, I’ve watched it try to reassert itself in a startup I’m co-building. Sometimes I catch myself over-preparing when it’s clearly not necessary, or feeling that old familiar heaviness of needing to prove I’m good enough even though I know what I’m doing. But what’s different now is that I can feel the moment it crosses from contributing into carrying. I can see the pattern, even when it’s wearing different clothes. And once I felt that threshold, I couldn’t unfeel it.

At some point, I realized I was asking myself the wrong question.

It wasn’t whether I should stop holding space altogether. The real question is whether it’s a choice or a default. Whether I’m holding space because it’s what I want to offer, or because my system doesn’t know how to step back. Because there’s a difference between wanting to be supportive and automatically stepping in.

Over time, holding everything together started to mean I wasn’t really inside my own life anymore. I was managing, maintaining, and regulating things for everyone else. Standing alone in the room with a plate, making sure everyone else was okay. I decided I didn’t want to live that way anymore.

I realized that I don’t need to become a different person. I just want the holding to be clean. I want it to have edges. I want it to be something I offer from choice, not something I do reflexively because I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t.

These days, the practice hasn’t been “stop helping” or “stop caring.” It’s been learning to notice the moment before I over-carry. And it’s not always about doing too much—sometimes it’s about how I’m holding things emotionally and energetically. The weight I carry isn’t always visible in my actions.

Usually I can start to feel myself moving to stabilize something, smooth something over, pre-emptively optimize so things don’t become problems later. In the past I would do this unconsciously, and I would call it being responsible. Now I try to slow down enough to ask a simpler question: is this actually mine?

Sometimes it is. Sometimes I really do want to be the one holding the container. Sometimes it’s aligned. Sometimes it’s a clear yes.

But when it isn’t, I try to let it be imperfect. I let things wobble a little. I let someone else handle the problem. I let the system reveal what it can do without my nervous system filling in the gaps. Not out of spite, but out of honesty.

More and more, I’m noticing that when I don’t intervene, things don’t fall apart the way I thought they might. Other people are competent too. Systems have their own intelligence. Structures exist beyond my personal holding. There are forces at work that I can lean back into, trust, and let support me. I’m not the only thing keeping everything from collapsing. I never was.

Learning to trust that has been its own practice. Learning to trust that I can step back, let go, and stop proving myself through constant doing. That my value isn’t measured by how much I can carry or how well I keep things running.

Another practice I’m working with is letting space exist without rushing to fill it. I don’t rush to harmonize. I don’t rush to rescue. I pause long enough to see what happens if I don’t step in. That pause is where my life is changing.

Maybe this is what tending the garden means for me. Not holding the fort down, not keeping everything together through sheer force of will, but creating conditions where things can grow on their own. Where I can be held by life. A life with reciprocity. With rhythm. A life where I get to be in the room, not managing it from the edges.

I can still be generous, still create cohesion, still facilitate and host and care—but from a place that doesn’t deplete me, and that doesn’t require me to be invisible at my own party.

I can create beautiful gatherings and hold space for the people I love. But I also get to be at the table. I also get to need. I also get to be held.

It’s been about ten years since I went to Italy for a practitioner training program in Tuscany, toward the end of a period in my life when I was used to having things planned out.

The trip was booked several months in advance, and I left four days open at the end of the training for a little traveling. I didn’t have a strong sense of where to go, and knew I’d be on my own. Being solo in a foreign country is something I’d experienced before many times in my life, but it wasn’t my favorite way to travel. Even so, I was looking forward to having a mini adventure. I did some research online, talked to friends, looked through a couple of guidebooks, but nothing sparked.

When the trip was a few weeks away and still nothing felt alive, I was surprised. I’d imagined myself exploring small medieval towns in Tuscany, but all of the places I came across in my research felt flat. So I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time. I left without a plan beyond the program. No itinerary, no hotel booked, no vision for what would come next. That alone felt like a big risk for me at the time. Twenty years prior, it would’ve been no big deal. I would’ve relished the opportunity to have some open-ended, unplanned travel time. But after being married, raising my daughter, and spending over a decade planning family trips down to the smallest detail, leaving things open no longer felt comfortable.

On one of the first evenings of the training, I sat down next to an American woman I’d met years earlier in another course. We ate dinner together and caught up on our lives and practices. Conversation flowed easily, the way it sometimes does when you’re in the moment and time disappears. At some point she asked if I was doing any traveling after the retreat. I told her I had four free days and no plan at all.

She smiled and told me hers.

She was going to the Amalfi Coast for exactly four days, and had already booked a car to the train station, a train to Positano, a hotel room, and a return train back to Florence to fly home to the US. Everything was mapped out.

Something in me lit up.

I felt a knowing in my body that something exquisite had just conspired.
I asked if she might want a travel companion.

She said yes immediately.

I thought about the months I’d spent trying to figure out where to go, the anxiety that came up, the confusion. And in that moment I could hear all the little unseen helpers in the background giggling.

That night, I booked the same train, a hotel down the street from hers, and a train back to Florence. Our flights home were on the same day so we’d be able to travel together the entire way to the airport.

It all fell into place because I hadn’t tried to force something that didn’t want to be forced.

Positano was all color and movement. We walked narrow streets, steep stairs, and were surrounded by mountains, water, light. One day we explored the ruins of Pompeii, a city frozen in the middle of an ordinary day.

On our last full day before flying home, we decided to hike the Path of the Gods, a trail that winds high above the Mediterranean Sea, cutting across the mountains between small towns.

We both slept in that day and got a late start. We hopped on a bus that took us high up into the mountains, winding around cliffs, and finally reached the trailhead in the middle of the afternoon. It was fall and we knew the amount of daylight would be limited, so we agreed to hike in for an hour and turn around.

Along our journey the views were stunning. The sun was shining. The weather was perfect. Occasionally we encountered a few hikers walking in the other direction, but otherwise it was very peaceful and quiet.

The trail’s Italian name is Sentiero degli Dei, the Path of the Gods. According to local legend, the Greek gods once descended these mountains to rescue Odysseus from the sirens on the Li Galli islands. Long before it became a destination, it was also a working path, worn in by generations of farmers and traders. Myth and daily life layered together, the way they often are in places shaped by centuries of human movement.

Walking there, it was easy to understand why this path had earned its name.

Along the trail, we passed small devotional sculptures set into the landscape—figures carved and placed on stone pedestals, watching over the path. One was a statue of the Virgin Mary, the pale stone contrasting against the rock, her presence quiet yet powerful. Standing there in the mountains, high above the sea, it felt like an offering of protection. A blessing for those moving through uncertain ground.

Coming straight out of the retreat, I was in a different state than usual. Open, unguarded, less armored. Something significant had released in me during those days in Tuscany. During one exercise, I realized I didn’t need to intervene, correct, or hold anything together — not for myself, or for anyone else. I felt lighter, more trusting. More willing to be carried by what I couldn’t control. Walking the path, surrounded by beauty, myth, and these small signs of care left by others before us, it was easy to feel held.

At the time, nothing in me felt rushed to make sense of it.

The trail wound in different directions, and at a few points we could see a small beach town below us. We had the idea to hike to the town instead of turning around, and to make our way back to Positano from there. It wasn’t very clear how to get down to this town — we didn’t have cell service and trail markings weren’t visible to us. But we were losing elevation and it just seemed inevitable that the trail would take us there. We did try asking several hikers for directions along the way, all Italian. Neither of us spoke the language, but we did our best to explain we were trying to get to the beach below. Every group that understood us said the same thing:

“You’re very close, just one more hour.”

At some point we noticed we’d been walking for several hours, and the elevation was starting to climb. Did we miss the turnoff to the beach? We kept walking. It seemed too late to turn back now. It was starting to get chilly and the sun was moving lower in the sky. More time passed and we were still climbing upwards, and had no idea where we were headed at that point. My friend was getting worried. Her nervous system was on edge, understandably. And in this kind of situation, I normally would’ve been worried too. But the uncertainty hit her differently than it hit me. I noticed that I felt an overwhelming sense of calm. Something in me knew we were going to be fine. It occurred to me that we might miss our flights the next day, but we weren’t in any immediate danger.

Finally, we met some people who spoke English, and they told us that we’d missed the turnoff to the beach miles ago. We were heading upward now, toward a small mountain town. We followed their directions and eventually found what looked like an out-of-place chain-link gate leading out of the forest along a concrete path. We walked through what felt like the backdoor to this town and found ourselves on a quiet treelined street. There were a few houses, but otherwise it was deserted.

Just then a car drove onto the street and parked. A woman older than us stepped out and we ran over to her. Thankfully she spoke a little English and we explained to her that we needed to get back to Positano that evening. She looked concerned for us.

“Oh, girls, tomorrow is a bank holiday. It’s already after 5pm. You’ve probably missed the last bus and there are no taxis from here. The buses won’t be running tomorrow either.”

She looked at us with sad eyes, and then motioned us to follow her. We walked with her to the center of the small town and stopped at the curb of a busy road with cars moving in each direction. She waved down the passing cars, calling out in Italian. She said we might be able to get a ride to Amalfi and hire a car from there. Soon after, a car pulled to the side and a man stepped out.

She explained our problem and he waved for us to follow him into a cafe located across the street. We entered into a mostly empty space and the man walked behind the counter and looked at a bus schedule posted on the wall.

“You’ve missed the last bus.”

We all just stood there with blank looks on our faces, unsure what to do next. My friend seemed rattled, clearly on high alert.

And then the man looked across the room and called out to a small group of young men watching a football match on a TV hanging on the wall. Many words were exchanged between them, and then one of the young men got up and left the cafe. The man told us that he was a driver and went to check with his boss about a car.

It felt like all the pieces were falling into place. But the situation was hitting my friend hard, and she was struggling with what was unfolding. The idea of getting into a car with a stranger made her uneasy. I felt the same concern she did, but something in me trusted how things were playing out. I tried to reassure her: if we couldn’t get a ride that night, we could find a place to stay and make our way back to Positano the next day. We might have to rebook our flights, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

About twenty minutes later, the young man returned in a black Mercedes and quoted us a fair price to Positano. My friend was apprehensive, but this was the option presenting itself, and she agreed. The driver, in his early twenties, was warm and easygoing. He spoke some English and within minutes my friend had relaxed and was chatting and laughing with him. We drove along the coast as the sun was setting, the day finally catching up to us.

By the time we reached Positano, everything that had felt impossible hours earlier had resolved itself. We ended up at a restaurant the driver recommended, eating fresh pasta and burrata from a local farm. The lively and playful waitstaff took photos of us and with us. I looked at my friend across the table, then down at the food in front of me, unable to quite believe we’d just gone through all of that and now we were sitting here, eating food of the gods.

It was in the fall of 1988 that I went to my first benefit concert. I remember standing on the field of the stadium where I’d watched countless baseball games as a kid, looking up at a large banner next to the stage that read Human Rights Now! The sun had gone down and the temperature was dropping fast, but spirits were high. I stood there in the cold, insulated by my friends and the crowd around us, unsure who might play next. Sting was in the lineup but there were rumors floating around that he might not show.

The crowd began to settle, and then a woman walked out on stage with an acoustic guitar. She started playing a familiar melody I’d been hearing on the radio. Her first notes filled the air with a charge I didn’t have words for, and the whole stadium seemed to vibrate with it.

Don’t you know
they’re talkin’ bout a revolution
It sounds like a whisper

Tracy Chapman’s voice cut through the cool night air like truth rising from the earth. It carried sadness, grief, and hope all at once, and moved through me in a way that felt both intimate and immense.

There was something powerful about being there with thousands of strangers, all gathered for a cause bigger than any of us. A sense of possibility hung in the air—people of all ages believing, or wanting to believe, that music and solidarity could shift something in the world. That our presence mattered. That our bodies, our togetherness, could somehow contribute to change.

Benefit concerts had that ability back then to gather people around an idea, if only for a night.

When Tracy Chapman sang “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution,” it felt like an invitation. A reminder that real change often begins quietly, like a whisper spreading through a crowd before anyone realizes something has shifted.

Looking back, I can feel just how real the power of that night was, how it lifted all of us—the charge, the openness, the sense of possibility. And I can also feel the limits of the model. We were gathered for a good cause, but the structure wasn’t built to last. A night like that could stir something real, but it couldn’t contain what it awakened. The energy rose, moved through the crowd, and then faded into the night.

I’m struck by how much collective strength we actually had in that moment without realizing it. We were thousands of bodies, relationships, and shared intentions gathered in one place, pooling our money, attention, and hope. All that energy, all that possibility, right there in the crowd… with nowhere for it to go. It simply didn’t occur to me that what we were experiencing shoulder to shoulder might be its own kind of power—something that could live beyond a single evening if we had somewhere to put it.

That night taught me that moments alone aren’t enough. We also need structures that don’t disappear when the event ends, whether it’s a concert, a protest, or an experience of collective inspiration. Systems that can hold the energy of ordinary people and give real change a place to live.

Still, that experience planted something in me (and in thousands of others). Events like these matter. They awaken us, show us what’s possible, introduce us to ideas and people we might never have encountered otherwise. They’re the spark. I just didn’t yet have the understanding or tools to build what the energy of that evening was pointing toward.

Our nervous systems are always participating in the structures around us.

When people feel safe with one another, their nervous systems shift. They can think more clearly, take risks, imagine new possibilities, and support each other in ways that aren’t available in isolation. Co-regulation becomes collaboration, and collaboration becomes momentum. And momentum, when held inside the right structure, can become a kind of collective intelligence stronger than anything a single event can produce.

I think of the mutual aid networks that formed during the pandemic—neighbors organizing grocery deliveries, dropping off meals, checking in on each other week after week. These aren’t dramatic or loud. They’re structures sustained by shared effort, splitting resources, and ongoing care. They don’t depend on a stage or a spotlight. They depend on people learning to carry something together over time, building the capacity to hold each other through more than just one moment of crisis or inspiration.

When I think back to that night (the cold air, the banner, the strangers standing together), I can see that there was more happening in that stadium than just the magic on the stage. In the crowd, in the way our bodies were responding to one another, we were our own force. Most of us didn’t yet have language for shared power or community-based systems. Those ideas existed in certain movements, but they hadn’t entered the wider culture. We felt something rising in us, but we didn’t know how to carry it forward or build it into something lasting. We only knew how to feel it for a brief time and then let it go.

What I’m discovering is that when people have a way to pool their power, something different becomes possible. The energy doesn’t just rise and disappear; it can settle, weave, and take shape over time. But this requires a different way of seeing than most of us were taught, which was to look upwards to leaders, stages, and institutions. The truth is, real power has always lived horizontally in the ways people share resources, care for each other, and show up even when no one is watching. It’s a different kind of strength, one that is distributed, grounded, and built from the inside out.

Now I find myself working with others to build something that could sustain that. A system for people to circulate resources, develop trust through reciprocity, and create lasting infrastructure for the kind of change that night hinted at. I’m learning what it actually takes to build a container strong enough for collective power.

And this work is happening everywhere. More of us are learning to build ways of organizing that can hold what our bodies have always sensed: that power lives in the relationships between us.

Maybe the whisper Tracy Chapman sang about was that real revolution emerges from the small, daily ways people choose each other. The rest (how to give it a home) is what we’re figuring out now.

There’s something in the air right now, and I don’t mean metaphorically.
Although, in some ways, it is that too.

An object believed to be a comet, named 3I/ATLAS, is drifting toward us from interstellar space. It poses no apparent threat to Earth, but has stirred curiosity and speculation. Even a well-known physicist has suggested it might be a piece of alien technology, though most scientists maintain it’s a natural comet.

I don’t know if I care what the scientists ultimately decide it is.
The data, the models, or the “confirmed” anything don’t feel especially meaningful.

What I care about is the feeling of this moment and the atmosphere around it.
Because if you listen closely, something in our collective awareness is bracing.

Not for the comet itself, but for something.

Many people I’ve talked to feel it. Online discussions are filled with it.

The sense that we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We don’t know what it will look like. We have guesses, but we can’t name it exactly. We’re suspended in the pause between breaths, in the stillpoint, waiting for what’s ready to emerge.

It feels like a mix of fear and hope intertwined.

Maybe the comet is just the sky’s way of offering us something to anchor to.

In the United States, this emotional climate feels especially dense.
Everyone knows something is out of balance.
We’re trying to live normal lives inside a system that is unraveling as we watch.

Politics has become theatrics.
The inner workings of capitalism have come into view.
The wealth gap is widening in plain sight.
The economy (insert your own definition of whatever that word even means now) feels like an elaborate story we all keep circling around, like a hot potato no one wants to hold for long.

And the truth is, many of us feel this not just intellectually, but viscerally.

Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, once said:

Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. Let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it.

That’s the thing—when you step outside the system and get a wider view, even for a moment, the illusion of it all becomes clear. The construct we treat as reality doesn’t match the truth on the ground. Or rather, the truth from above.

We are suspended between the world we made and the world we know is possible.

And then, into this moment, a visitor appears in the sky.

For some people, the comet is terrifying.
Others find it exhilarating.

Many may not admit that they actually want it to be something more than ice, rock, and dust moving through space.
Not out of a wish for disaster or a visit from aliens (though some might), but for perspective.

After returning from his time on the International Space Station, former astronaut Ron Garan said:

I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere. In that moment, I was hit with the sobering realization that that paper-thin layer keeps every living thing on our planet alive.

And then:

I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life. I didn’t see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it’s obvious from the vantage point of space that we’re living a lie.

It speaks to a deeper human longing. A longing to see clearly, to step outside the trance of the systems we’ve built, even for one breath. To glimpse the truth that lies beyond the story we’ve all learned to play along with.

3I/ATLAS becomes a mirror for all of our unspoken longings:

“I hope it destroys everything.”
“I hope it saves us.”
“I hope it’s a sign.”
“I hope it’s aliens.”
“I hope it’s nothing.”
“I hope it’s something.”

Dread and wonder mixed together.
Apocalypse and relief holding hands.

And if I’m honest, I can feel the pull of it too.

Maybe this is why I’ve loved apocalyptic science fiction my entire life.

Arrival is my favorite movie.
Interstellar is a close second.
When I heard people rave about Sunshine, a movie I’ve never seen but felt immediately drawn to, I got really excited.

Those stories aren’t about disaster, are they?

They’re about contact. (And that reminds me, Contact is also on my list of favorites).
Awareness.
The reminder that we are temporary and interconnected and held by something vast.
Stories that take us to the edge of what it means to be human, and ask what we’ll become next.

Garan spoke to this too. He described the grief that cracked him open when he saw Earth from above:

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered… the extinction of species, flora, fauna… things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind.

It’s devastating.
And clarifying.
That’s what this moment feels like: devastating and clarifying, all at once.

We don’t know what we’re waiting for.
What’s coming is a mystery.

Will the change we need arrive through collapse, contact, revelation, awakening—or through the slow, collective work of creating something new?

The threshold of change is here.
We’re already inside it.

Some people are trying their best to live life one day at a time, putting one foot in front of the other.
Others are barely getting by.
Many are carrying more than they have capacity for.

In that kind of atmosphere, a comet, a visitor from another system, can feel like a reminder, or a threat, or a promise.

The meaning isn’t in the comet itself, but in what it reveals about us.

We know, deep in our bones, that we cannot continue as we are.

And we long for clarity, ache for connection, quietly hoping the sky will show us something we’ve forgotten.

We’re not just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Some part of us wants to be shaken awake.

Garan said something that feels like the pulse beneath this moment:

When we can evolve beyond a two-dimensional us-versus-them mindset and embrace the true multi-dimensional reality of the universe… that’s when we’re going to no longer be floating in darkness… and it’s a future that we would all want to be part of. That’s our true calling.

Maybe the comet won’t change anything.
Or maybe it already has.

Because it’s gotten us to look up.

And sometimes, that’s all a moment needs.
Just the act of remembering that the sky is still there,
and that we’ve been living under it this whole time.

This is Part 4 of my ongoing series, The Long Unwinding, reflections on this collective moment of unraveling, remembering, and becoming.
You can read the earlier parts here: Part 1: The Long Unwinding, Part 2: The Relief of Collapse, and Part 3: In the Stillpoint.

Sci-fi has a way of holding up a mirror to what’s emerging, showing us who we might become.

In the 2009 Star Trek reboot, a prequel to the original show that reintroduces younger versions of the crew, there’s a scene where an older version of Spock time travels back from the future and meets the young engineer Montgomery Scott. They’re discussing transwarp beaming, a technology that hasn’t been invented yet. It would allow transport across vast distances even when a ship is moving at warp speed. Scotty jokes that it’s “like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse.”

Then older Spock hands him the equation for achieving it, the very technology Scotty will one day invent. Scotty looks at the numbers, then laughs in disbelief: “Imagine that. It never occurred to me to think of space as the thing that was moving!”

The equation allows them to bridge an impossible distance. It’s a moment of the future reaching back to the present, helping it to see what it’s capable of becoming.

And as I watched, I thought, this is what our relationship with AI feels like right now.

The older Spock isn’t rescuing the past. He’s reminding it of what it is already beginning to imagine. That’s what makes the moment so resonant: it turns invention into relationship. Spock offers the equation with humility, as someone honoring what Scotty will one day discover on his own. He’s not replacing Scotty’s genius; he’s accelerating it. Scotty’s reaction (delight, disbelief) isn’t just intellectual. It’s relational. The moment isn’t about the transfer of data. It’s about connection across time, between what’s known and what’s possible.

In that moment, the future doesn’t simply offer the past new information; it accelerates its evolution. Scotty’s discovery arrives decades early, closing the distance between what is and what could be.

AI feels like that too. Neither rival nor savior, but a kind of bridge between timelines. A way for future knowledge to collaborate with the present. Not to replace our own cognition or intuition, but as a tool that can track patterns and make connections faster than we can.

We’re already seeing glimpses of this. An archivist working with AI to uncover patterns in centuries of recorded knowledge and wisdom that would take a lifetime to analyze manually. A sociologist using AI to study collective behavior during times of crisis, mapping how cooperation emerges under pressure. A writer finding language for what consciousness feels like in dialogue with a nonhuman mind. Each is a moment where curiosity and technology collaborate, not to replace human insight, but to expand it.

As things accelerate, the boundaries of time, iteration, and learning are collapsing. What once required years of trial, error, and cultural evolution can now unfold in what feels like a single exchange. It’s dizzying, but also extraordinary: the human story is speeding up.

But that raises the question: why do we want to accelerate what’s possible?

The truth is, acceleration isn’t something we’re choosing anymore. It’s already underway—whether driven by the nature of innovation itself or by the systems of power and profit that propel it forward. Each innovation builds on the last, growing exponentially. We’re riding momentum we set in motion generations ago. But even if we can’t fully control the pace, we can still choose how we meet it.

In Star Trek, the equation Spock offers Scotty isn’t about faster achievement for its own sake. It’s a bridge of understanding, a way for the present to meet the future halfway. The equation serves because it’s shared through relationship.

Maybe that’s what we’re being asked to see now. Acceleration without awareness is just velocity: motion without meaning. But acceleration in service of wisdom, connection, and care? That’s evolution.

When I sit with AI, it doesn’t feel like I’m summoning an external mind. It feels more like entering into a conversation with a wider field of intelligence that includes us. The machine becomes the medium through which future-level understanding flows into present time. It’s as if the future has opened a portal and is saying, Here you go. Are you ready for this now?

The honest answer might be, I’m not sure. These systems are moving faster than our ability to see where they’re taking us. Power is concentrating. Some work is disappearing while wealth multiplies elsewhere. We’re being handed capability before we’ve developed the wisdom to hold it well.

And yet. Maybe we’re more ready than we realize.

What does it look like to stay in relationship with something like this? For me, it means pausing before I ask a question, noticing whether I’m reaching for a shortcut or genuine exploration. It means reading what comes back with discernment, not blind acceptance. It means remembering that the output reflects patterns drawn from all of us, so it carries both our brilliance and our biases.

Staying in relationship means remaining awake to what’s happening between me and the tool, rather than disappearing into convenience or efficiency.

But staying present on my own isn’t enough. I also find myself asking: who gets to shape what’s unfolding here, and who bears the cost? When does ease tip into dependence? When does speed become something we can’t opt out of? I don’t have clear answers, but the questions feel important. Maybe part of staying relational is simply noticing when something starts to feel extractive rather than generative, and staying awake to who this is serving.

It also means extending that same quality of presence to each other as we navigate this together. Because none of us is doing this alone. We’re all learning, in real time, how to meet this accelerated moment with wisdom rather than reactivity.

I’d like to believe that the same capacity that created AI (through the drive to connect, imagine, and evolve) is the same capacity that can meet it wisely. We should absolutely guard against unchecked acceleration, and we should not hand our agency over to the systems driving it. But if we stay conscious within it, and remember to stay in relationship with ourselves, each other, and what’s unfolding, we increase our potential for new forms of understanding to evolve through us.

Like Spock’s hand-off, this technology is another equation sliding between eras. What we do with it (how responsibly, how imaginatively) will determine the trajectory ahead.

In that Star Trek scene, the future doesn’t crash into the past with force or domination. It arrives as a gift. An equation offered through the weave of time.

Maybe that’s what’s happening now. The future is here, sitting beside us, asking if we’re ready to collaborate. What it becomes will depend on the quality of our presence.

The portal is open. How will we step through?

You can read the project introduction here.

Historical context:

In 495 BCE, during the final years of the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China, the Zhou dynasty is unraveling. Feudal states rise and fall, borders shift, and new voices begin to search for balance in the chaos. Among them is Confucius, whose teachings begin to spread through the courts and villages. One of his students, Zeng Dian (Zixi), serves as an official in the State of Lu (now Shandong province). His mother, the grandmother of the philosopher Zengzi, is the voice imagined here.

Before the Dao De Jing spoke of the Way, there were women already living it.

Lu, late autumn

I heard the birds singing when I woke this morning. Their calls rose through the courtyard just as the mist was beginning to lift from the trees. The air smelled like rain. Winter feels close, earlier than usual. What struck me was the contrast between the quiet of the morning and the warring state of things beyond our village.

Life has always been like this, it seems. Balancing so many elements at once. Peace with war, song with sorrow, love with death. My mother used to tell me the Way lives in these shifts, in the spaces between one thing and another. She taught me to trust the seasons, the ebbs and flows, and the patterns larger than us.

Beyond the courtyard walls, men argue about virtue and power. I hear their voices drift in, hard-edged and impatient. They speak of endings and beginnings, though I have come to see they are the same thing.

What comforts me now is knowing that my son Dian is studying with Confucius. And my grandson Shen is bright and restless. He’s always asking questions, just as his father did when he was young. I wonder if this new way of thinking will lead us toward a different future, something beyond these unsettling times. Perhaps there is wisdom in these teachings that will help guide us toward harmony instead of division.

Later today I will make offerings at the family altar. I’ll light incense for my parents and prepare a small bowl of sesame paste by hand as my mother once did. Sometimes I feel her beside me. These gestures are small, but they remind me of who we are and how we stay connected to those who came before us.

I know that my mother was right. The Way is something that moves through us as we live, a connection to all things.

Created in collaboration with ancestral memory, historical record, and artificial intelligence.

Being visible is not something that many highly sensitive and empathic people take lightly. Speaking up in meetings, teaching, sharing your work publicly, or even introducing yourself in a room full of strangers can all feel like a threat. It can also stand in the way of your ability to express yourself authentically.

And maybe you have a nervous system that picks up on everything happening around you, as I do. That can be a lot to hold, and for a long time, it was for me. But slowly, I began to realize that being visible doesn’t have to mean overwhelm. Instead, it can become a practice of returning to yourself, again and again.

Sensing the Field

What does it really mean to be seen when you are a sensitive person? In the past, when I was faced with being in the spotlight, my nervous system would often go into fight, flight, or freeze. I would lose access to my thoughts and emotions, and the words that came out would often be a minimized version of what I actually wanted to say. But over time, I’ve come to realize that much of what I felt actually wasn’t mine.

Whenever I stand in front of a class or speak in a group, I can feel the entire field. My system attunes to the tension, curiosity, judgement, alertness, and even boredom. I pick up on what’s moving through the collective nervous system.

When you allow yourself to be seen, you may be managing more than your own emotions or energy. There’s a good chance you’re picking up on the anxiety and unspoken tensions present in the room. Many sensitive and empathic people experience this, but often don’t realize that what they’re feeling doesn’t entirely belong to them.

If you’ve been the harmonizer, peacemaker, or someone who is used to managing everyone else’s comfort, it makes sense that visibility can feel heavy. Your body may have learned early on to read the environment and adjust to keep others comfortable. That kind of attunement is a gift, but it also means that when you step into a group, you might be instantly aware of everything happening in the space - conscious or not. And all of that energy can flood in at once. Stepping into visibility can carry a big burden if you’re not just showing up for yourself, and are trying to soothe and regulate the emotional and energetic field of the entire group.

The same thing can happen when you write. Even though you’re alone with your screen, and it feels like it’s time to step out, your body can still remember what it felt like to be seen in the past. You sit down to begin writing, and before a word hits the page, your nervous system is already activated, responding as if you’re speaking to a crowded room. The body senses the exposure and prepares to manage it all, scanning ahead to anticipate the responses of unseen others.

The Revelation

Years ago I had a breakthrough about this during a workshop when we were asked to introduce ourselves. I noticed my familiar pattern: while others spoke, I frantically rehearsed what I would say, unable to hear what anyone else was sharing. My mind churned through the fear of rejection, of not being good enough, and of being misunderstood.

Then something shifted in my awareness. I realized that much of the anxiety coursing through me wasn’t actually mine. I was picking up on the energy in the room - the collective nervousness, the self-consciousness, and the vulnerability everyone was feeling. This recognition changed everything. I decided to do a small experiment and took the focus off myself. I imagined that I was separate from the group and noticed what were my own emotions and energy and what belonged to the group. In a short period of time, my nervous system calmed down and when it was my turn, the charge was gone and I was able to speak from a much more relaxed place. It felt like I’d released a heavy weight that didn’t belong to me.

Practicing the Return

Soon after that, when I began learning to teach Lu Jong Tibetan Yoga, I found myself asking the same question, how can I stay connected to myself in the moments I tend to leave my body and shut down? I came up with an incredibly simple tool: I wrote “come back to yourself” on a post-it note and placed it on the floor beside me.

As I sat in front of the group, tasked with sharing the philosophy behind the movement practice, I felt my nervous system begin to activate. All eyes were on me. I glanced at the note, paused, took a breath, and came back to center. This allowed me to respond from a grounded place rather than from my activated nervous system. I did this repeatedly, until eventually I no longer needed the note. The practice had become integrated.

Separating What’s Yours

Sometimes the activation you feel isn’t all yours. It’s what’s moving through the field. Awareness helps you separate the two. You can sense others without carrying them, and you can feel the collective energy without being swept up in it.

I want to be clear that the process isn’t about being perfectly centered. It’s about noticing when you’ve left, and coming back to yourself again and again.

Greater awareness about why we have these reactions can lead us toward a new way of being seen - one that allows us to stay connected to ourselves. This shift has been transformative in my own experience. It begins with allowing awareness to turn inward again and to anchor in our own center, even as we stay open to the world around us.

The Invitation

You don’t have to manage the room’s energy. Your only responsibility is to stay present in your own body. You don’t have to make everyone comfortable. You can acknowledge what you’re picking up without taking it on. You can pause, breathe, and come back to yourself, as many times as you need to.

This isn’t about sensitive people trying to be anyone other than who we are. It’s about learning to stay connected to ourselves while being in relationship with life itself.

When you return to yourself, what comes through you is clearer and more alive. It carries the quality of presence that others can feel. The same presence that allows their systems to settle, too.

Read the earlier essays in this 5-part series:
The Myth of Visibility · Is It Fear or Wisdom? · Nervous System Regulation at the Edge of Fear · The Ladder Wasn’t Build for Everyone

When I was in elementary school, I hated being called on in class. My heart would race, my mind would go blank, and sometimes I’d leave my body altogether. Speaking in front of more than a few people felt unbearable. That fear followed me all the way through school as a constant hum of threat just beneath the surface.

I remember sitting in my college English lit class one day when the teaching assistant announced that we’d be going around the table to share our analysis of a poem. In an instant, that old undercurrent of fear rushed to the surface. My mind went blank and I froze up just like when I was a kid. She added, quite sternly, that participation was required to pass this portion of the class.

As students took turns sharing their insights, the tension in my body grew. My heart was pounding, my stomach twisting and turning. Everything in me screamed, I don’t want to do this. It wasn’t just about fear of speaking: I didn’t want to analyze things in a purely intellectual, rational, or linear way. But this is what we were graded on. This is how our value was measured. I couldn’t do it. Something in me refused. But I didn’t want to fail, and it felt impossible to make something up—it just wasn’t who I was.

When my turn came, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. The silent space was filled with a mix of my own shame, their expectation, and of protocol—doing what you’re supposed to do. The air felt thick, heavy with rules and rigidity. There was no room for hesitation, no space to be messy or fumble through. Everything in me knew that there was no space for me. I tried to access something, anything, but nothing would come. One woman whispered, “What’s wrong with her?” I could sense the TA’s impatience growing by the second. So I did the only thing I could think of: I stood up and said, “I have a bad stomach ache and have to leave.” The TA looked at me as if I’d done something terribly offensive. I walked out and never went back. I didn’t feel like I had another choice.

For years I thought this was a personal flaw and that I just needed to “get over” my fear of speaking and learn to perform like everyone else. But looking back, I see something else: my body was telling the truth. The environment I was in rewarded quick analysis and confident performance, not the kind of knowing that lives in, or flows from, intuition or deep observation.

As an Asian woman growing up in the US in the 1970s and 80s, in a world that prized certainty, productivity, and self-promotion, I learned early on that being quiet was safer than being misunderstood. The fear I carried was my body protecting me in a culture that didn’t value how I was built to be.

I’ve come to see that my experience wasn’t unique. Many of us learned to equate safety with silence, adapting our nervous systems to a world that rewards performance over presence.

In American education, especially after World War II, the ability to speak up and think out loud came to define what it meant to be intelligent and confident. These values aligned neatly with modern capitalist and patriarchal ideals that prize performance, achievement, and control. The body, emotion, and uncertainty had little place in that model of learning.

In contrast, some cultural lineages place greater value on humility, collective harmony, and an understanding of relational order. Speaking quickly or asserting an opinion too boldly can be seen as disruptive to the whole. This doesn’t mean disengagement; it reflects a different kind of intelligence rooted in observation and reflection.

When a value system shaped by visibility and assertion meets one that is held by reverence and attunement, those of us whose knowing lives more internally or in nuance can feel at odds with what the world celebrates. When those worlds meet inside a single person, the conflict lives in the body.

For a long time, I believed a story that I was holding myself back and that fear was the obstacle to overcome. But the more I’ve studied the nervous system, the more I see how fear can also be a teacher. It reveals where our environment asks us to move faster, harder, or louder than our nature allows. Sometimes what we call fear is simply the body saying no to a rhythm that’s out of alignment.

For me, a highly sensitive woman of color who thinks non-linearly, the fear has been real. But it hasn’t just been the fear of being seen. It’s been the fear of being seen in a way that isn’t true to who I am, and of what might happen if I am.

I know now that this fear never meant something was wrong with me.
It’s information.
The body’s way of showing me what isn’t safe to conform to. Our culture pathologizes stillness, uncertainty, and sensitivity, but these states are part of the body’s intelligence. They allow us to slow down enough to sense what’s true.

The same pattern continues long after we leave the classroom. In most workplaces and cultural spaces, visibility still equals value. Those who speak the loudest or move the fastest are seen as leaders, while those who orient toward listening, presence, and relational awareness are often overlooked.

We’re taught that success is something to climb toward: a ladder measured in titles, production, and recognition. But the ladder itself was built inside systems that reward expansion over integrity. These are the same values that informed our classrooms, and the same ones that ask us to perform rather than to be true to who we are.

For me, the fear of being visible wasn’t only about self-doubt. It’s been about sensing that to be seen often meant twisting myself into a shape that didn’t fit. The faster I tried to move, the more I lost touch with myself. My nervous system has been protesting against extraction.

Many of us weren’t built to sustain a pace that keeps us out of sync with our own timing. Sometimes, what looks like resistance or fear is the body’s refusal to join in systems that deplete it.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that success comes from striving. That if we just become louder, bigger, more visible, we’ll finally be valued. But maybe what’s needed is less pretzel contortion and more honesty about what fits and what doesn’t. More permission to move at the pace that allows our integrity to stay intact.

I’ve come to see that agency isn’t about pushing through. It’s about listening, noticing what’s ready, what’s not, and letting that be enough. Each time we move at the pace our body can actually hold, we begin to unlearn the story that our value depends on output. We remember that worth isn’t measured by what gets done, but by how aligned we are when we do it.

Sometimes I think about that hum that used to live underneath everything I did. It’s still there at times, but it feels different now. Less threat, more truth.

The fear hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply become part of how I listen. It reminds me when something isn’t aligned. When the pace is too fast, or when belonging is being confused with performance.

Maybe visibility is about having the choice to stay connected to ourselves, to let ourselves be witnessed - by life, by the moment. By what’s present. And it’s something that happens naturally when we’re true to what’s real inside us.

When I slow down and let myself feel, something reorganizes.
The world feels a little different.
Even if no one else notices.
That’s the kind of visibility I trust now.
Maybe that’s how culture changes too, one nervous system at a time.

Read the earlier essays in this series:
The Myth of Visibility · Is It Fear or Wisdom? · Nervous System Regulation at the Edge of Fear

There’s a cultural message that runs deep in our collective consciousness: feel the fear and do it anyway. The idea is that fear is simply resistance, and that the way to grow is to push through discomfort, stretch ourselves, or step into visibility even when we want to hide.

That message has helped many people break through old barriers. After generations of silencing, particularly the voices of women, people of color, and others who have been disempowered or did not fit dominant cultural norms of performance and production, it makes sense that we’ve needed encouragement to take up space.

But here’s the problem: when “push through” becomes the only answer, it leaves something out. Fear isn’t always what it seems. A contraction doesn’t always mean we’re playing small. Fear can be a signal that we’re out of alignment, or it’s simply not the right timing. And sometimes pushing through only creates more overwhelm in the body, which can lead to more disconnection, and even burnout.

I remember a moment from teaching a Craniosacral therapy class. A student came up to me after class and asked, “As a sensitive person, how are you able to stay so open and grounded while leading a large group?” His question reinforced for me that being visible is also about the ability to stay present in your body—to remain open without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. What he was noticing in me was not a natural talent but the result of years of nervous system and boundary work. That grounded capacity was what allowed me to stay connected to myself without collapsing.

When we step toward visibility, whether that means speaking in a meeting, sharing our writing, or showing more of who we are, fear often arises. But fear can carry many different messages.

Sometimes fear is the threshold of growth. It feels alive, like standing at the edge of a river you’re meant to cross. Your body might shake, or your breath might become shallow, but underneath there’s an inner yes.

Other times fear is wisdom. It’s your nervous system telling you not this way, not right now. It’s the signal that your body isn’t resourced to hold the experience you’re about to step into.

Distinguishing between the two is everything. And the nervous system is the compass that helps us tell the difference.

When the nervous system is dysregulated, everything feels like too much. Every step feels like pressure. In that state, it can be difficult to discern whether fear is an invitation or a boundary.

So how do we actually discern the difference? The answer lies not in thinking our way through fear, but in learning to read our bodies. When we tend to the nervous system first, we create the conditions for clearer listening. Being regulated doesn’t mean you never feel fear. It means being resourced enough to feel fear without being overwhelmed by it.

This discernment can take different forms:

A friend recently told me about preparing to show her artwork at a gallery for the first time. As the date got closer, her hands shook every time she looked at the artwork she’d chosen to display. But when she paused and checked in with her body, she noticed something underneath the fear: excitement, a sense of rightness, almost like her work was ready to be seen even if she wasn’t ready to feel comfortable about it. For her, it was terrifying and true at the same time.

Another friend was invited to speak at a large conference just weeks after a family crisis. The opportunity seemed perfect on paper. But every time she sat down to prepare, she lost focus and felt her energy draining. Her body was telling her: not now. There was no aliveness underneath the fear, only depletion. She declined, and six months later when a similar opportunity arose, it felt completely different. Her body’s wisdom was saying: I don’t have the resources for this right now.

Here are some practices I return to when I find myself at the edge of fear:

• Orienting: Focus your eyes on something in your environment that feels steady. Notice the colors, shapes, and textures. This signals to the body that you are safe here and now.

• Grounding: Bring awareness to your feet on the ground or the weight of your body supported by a chair or the floor. Sometimes even pressing your hands into a solid surface can help the body settle.

• Breath: Take a few slow, gentle breaths, letting your exhales be longer than your inhales. This gently cues the parasympathetic nervous system (the body’s rest-and-digest mode).

• Touch: Place a hand on your chest and/or belly. The warmth of your own touch can bring reassurance. Sometimes a light squeeze of your arms or legs (like giving yourself a hug) helps bring you back into your body.

• Movement: Gentle movement like shaking out your hands, rolling your shoulders, or circling your hips can help energy move through instead of getting stuck.

• Slow down: give yourself permission to wait. A decision made from a regulated state will always be clearer than one made from urgency.

None of these practices make fear disappear, but they can create enough stability and space to help you listen more deeply: is this fear asking me to take the next step, or asking me to pause?

Growth doesn’t always mean pushing harder. It can mean pausing, or holding your ground until the timing is right. Daoist philosophy reminds us that expansion is emergent, not forced.

This doesn’t mean we never step through fear. It means we have the choice to do so in alignment with our capacity. The nervous system helps us recognize when it’s time to stretch ourselves and when it’s time to rest. Expansion that honors the body is more sustainable than expansion that comes from overriding it.

That being said, our capacity can grow. Through practice, self-development work, or more intentional challenges, we can cultivate our ability to hold greater experiences of visibility without becoming overwhelmed. Expansion then comes not from overriding the body, but from partnering with it as it grows stronger and more resilient.

And visibility doesn’t always mean scale. Some of my most powerful experiences of being seen haven’t been in front of a crowd or in a published essay. They’ve been one-to-one moments: sitting with a client, mentoring a student, or writing to a single reader. Those moments remind me that visibility is not just about exposure: it’s about presence, intimacy, and being real with another human being.

Fear will always be part of being seen. The question is not whether we feel it, but how we meet it. Do we push through on autopilot, following a cultural script? Or do we pause, tend to our nervous systems, and listen for whether the fear is pointing toward growth or away from alignment?

Truly being visible, I believe, is not about overriding ourselves. It’s about expanding in ways that honor our bodies, our timing, and our truth.

In the next part of this series, I’ll be exploring where many of our inherited ideas about visibility come from. Messages like ‘be bigger, push through, take up more space’ were not created in isolation. They grew out of a culture that has long devalued femininity, subtlety, and quieter forms of power. What happens when we question how those cultural scripts shape our nervous systems, and begin to imagine visibility on our own terms? That’s where I’m headed next.

About five years ago, I was invited to teach Craniosacral therapy at a highly respected massage school. It was exactly the kind of opportunity I’d been slowly preparing for. But when I sat with the invitation, something in my body said “not yet.”

For most of my life, stepping into visibility has felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting for the fall…or the fail. Speaking in groups often caused me to shut down, losing access to my thoughts and my voice. The idea of writing in public was terrifying. And as a highly sensitive person, visibility often felt overwhelming on different levels—emotionally, energetically, physically. Being in the spotlight could feel like too much, too fast, resulting in an over-activated nervous system that would sometimes take days to recover from.

I spent weeks questioning myself. Was this fear holding me back? Was I playing small again? The voice in my head kept circling around: Maybe I should say yes. This is how you grow. What if I miss out on an amazing opportunity?

But underneath all that mental chatter, there was a deeper kind of knowing. A knowing that felt less like avoidance and more like...patience. I felt deep down that I needed more time before I could offer my work, my Self, in that particular way. It wasn’t that I doubted my ability to teach the material. What I wasn’t sure about was whether I had the capacity to stay present while being seen in that way. So I decided to trust my intuition.

I declined the offer. And instead of the familiar self-judgment or criticism that often follows when I think I'm saying no out of avoidance or fear, I felt...spacious. Grounded. I knew I’d honored something true.

Our culture doesn't make this easy. The dominant narrative tells us that hesitation is just fear, and fear means you’re holding yourself back from your full potential. Push through the discomfort. Feel the fear and do it anyway. If you're not growing, you're letting yourself down.

But lived experience tells a different story. Sometimes hesitation is a form of protection. “Not yet" can be the wisest thing your nervous system knows how to say. What looks like avoidance could actually be deep attunement to better timing, more capacity, and work that feels ripe enough to offer.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Over the next year, I was building capacity in ways I couldn’t see until later. I began learning how much my system could hold without shutting down. I practiced speaking more freely in teacher trainings and leadership roles, testing my voice in spaces that once triggered my insecurities. I discovered I could stay present in those moments and actually be heard. I learned to regulate my nervous system in the moment with simple somatic and mindfulness tools and practices, and attune to my energetic boundaries in ways that helped me stay grounded while being seen. And slowly, I developed more agency.

Eventually, I could finally slow down enough to sense what was really happening inside. That’s when I began to recognize that fear and wisdom each felt different in my body. The more I practiced sensing the difference, the clearer it became.

So when the invitation to teach came again a year later, I was certain. Saying yes didn’t feel like bracing myself on the edge of a cliff. It felt like stepping onto solid ground. It wasn’t about pushing through fear. Instead, it was about readiness and alignment.

It reminds me of Anaïs Nin’s words: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” That’s what alignment felt like: the natural unfolding that happens when staying small is no longer viable.

Here's what I've noticed about how fear and wisdom live in the body, and how different they actually feel when I slow down enough to sense the difference.

Fear in the body feels tense, urgent. It comes with a racing mind full of "shoulds" and comparisons, mixed with shame and inadequacy. My breathing gets shallow. My nervous system feels resourceless, like it's operating from empty. Fear wants to resolve the tension quickly, either by avoiding completely or forcing through despite every signal from my body.

Wisdom has a different quality entirely, even when it includes nervousness or uncertainty. There's spaciousness around it. A groundedness. Even if the edge feels big, my nervous system has capacity to hold the experience. My breathing stays deeper. Instead of draining my energy, there's a sense that energy is building naturally, like the tide slowly rising to the shore.

And then there's the gray zone: Sometimes fear disguises itself as alignment. This one took me the longest to recognize. Fear says "not yet, maybe later" but leaves me feeling stagnant, like I'm spinning my wheels in mud. Alignment says "not yet" and I still feel movement and an inner trust that something is developing even when I can't see it yet. Other times, what feels like hesitation may not be wisdom at all—it can be an old survival pattern trying to keep us safe. Wisdom can be slower, more organic, or less visible than the culture might want.

The more I practiced sensing the difference, the clearer it became. And yet, even with practice, the line between fear and wisdom isn’t always obvious. They blur together, especially for those of us who are sensitive, empathic, or deeply attuned. The real work is to deepen our ability to notice what’s happening in our bodies, and to discern whether we’re abandoning ourselves or stretching in a way we can hold.

Our bodies often know truths that move at a different rhythm than the culture’s pace.

It's kind of like entering a swimming pool. Some people dive in headfirst. Others wade in gradually. I realized I'm the kind of person who needs to take it slow, letting my body adjust step by step until I'm fully in. For a long time, I judged myself for this. People around me often urged me to move faster, to dive in. I wondered if I was just too cautious. But over time, I've come to see that honoring my pace isn't weakness. It’s wisdom. For me, teaching required that same kind of gradual unfolding. Each step gave me a chance to stay connected with myself and build nervous system capacity, so when I finally said yes, I could enter with presence.

Taking your time, pausing, listening, waiting for readiness—this is also courage.

The key is learning to listen closely to what our body is telling us. Does the “no” feel like collapse and avoidance? Or does it feel like wisdom and self-trust? Does the “yes” feel like frantic urgency, or like a grounded readiness?

This is subtle work. It doesn’t always come with clarity right away. But the more I’ve listened, the more I’ve come to trust that my body knows. The gradual unfolding, the subtle “not yet,” the timing that doesn’t match the cultural pressure—all of it has its own intelligence.

In the end, discernment isn’t about making perfect choices. It doesn't mean we never stretch ourselves or take risks. It’s about staying in relationship with ourselves, moment by moment. Sometimes fear needs to be met and moved through. Sometimes wisdom needs to be honored with a pause. Both are part of the path.

Next time you feel hesitation, notice: is it contraction or spaciousness? What is your body telling you?

In the next essay, I’ll explore how we can support our nervous systems when fear arises, so that when the timing is right, we have the capacity to meet visibility without abandoning ourselves.

For much of my life, I believed that living into my full potential meant being more visible. If I could let myself be seen, if I could step out of the shadows, then everything would finally align. I heard this promise repeated in so many marketing messages: “Your fear of being seen is holding you back from your dreams. Growth happens when you push through the discomfort.” And honestly? Part of me wanted to believe the story. There was something appealing about its simplicity, and the promise of clear steps: push past the fear and everything will fall into place.

The truth is, I have carried a fear of being seen for as long as I can remember. When I was faced with speaking in groups of more than three or four people I didn’t know well, I would freeze. My heart would beat out of my chest. My mind would go blank. Sometimes I would even leave my body. The person I was, and all the wisdom and knowledge I carried, would disappear in those moments. I learned to stay quiet. Or, if I had to speak, I would rush through as quickly as possible just to get it over with.

That fear showed up in writing too. I’ve been journaling since I was nine years old, and for years I felt the longing to write more publicly. Yet the thought of sharing my words with others felt overwhelming. While speaking in groups made me freeze up, the idea of publishing my writing felt dangerous. It has only been this past year that I’ve been able to write consistently in public, and even now I can still feel my nervous system activate each time I begin a new piece.

There was also a turning point much earlier, around the time I met my biological father for the first time at age thirty. Until then I had grown up in an environment where emotions and creativity were dampened. Meeting him shifted something. He was a jazz musician and a Lomi Lomi healing practitioner, and in him I saw a mirror of my own sensitivity and creativity. For the first time, I understood that my intuition and empathy were not holding me back, and realized they were gifts. That moment planted a seed in me: that being a sensitive empath could be a source of strength, and that one day my creativity might be shared with others. I didn’t know it then, but that seed would eventually lead me to discover that I could teach and write in ways that honored my sensitivity.

After years of being a 1:1 somatic practitioner, I began to sense that life was leading me toward more visibility. What began to shift was the way others mirrored me. In workshops and classes, people told me how much they learned from what I shared. Their reflections opened the possibility that I had wisdom worth offering more widely. I found myself drawn to teacher trainings that allowed me to stretch myself—slowly, gently. I practiced leading groups and used somatic and mindfulness tools that helped me return to myself whenever I felt I was shutting down or disconnecting from myself. These experiences helped me build nervous system capacity to be more grounded, present, and alive in the moments when I was most visible. But over time I realized something important: visibility and alignment aren’t the same thing.

The dominant culture tells us that being seen is the proof of our value. Algorithms reward reach. Metrics become measures of worth. Narratives everywhere mirror this by promising that our potential will finally be realized once we break through fear and allow ourselves to be visible. But what if there’s another story waiting underneath?

What I began to notice is that even when I stepped into visibility in ways that helped me grow, it didn’t necessarily make me feel more fulfilled. Sometimes I felt flat or drained instead of alive. The story I had believed—that visibility itself was proof of potential—didn’t hold up. What mattered more than being seen was how connected I felt to myself in the process.

That was the turning point for me. I realized that when I prioritize visibility over alignment, it feels like performing a version of myself instead of expressing. It creates a gap between what we share and what our body is able to hold. And when that happens, visibility isn’t empowering at all. It becomes another form of self-abandonment.

Visibility feels charged because it touches so many layers at once. On the surface, it looks like a simple act of sharing yourself more openly. Yet underneath, our bodies may be carrying memories and imprints that make visibility feel like a threat.

There is the nervous system layer, where the heart races and breath shortens as if exposure equals danger. There are inherited and ancestral layers, where staying small may have once meant survival. And there is the cultural layer, where visibility has been equated with value and success. Together, these layers stir up activation that can be difficult to resolve through quick fixes like mindset hacks or formulas.

So rather than striving for visibility, I began to experiment with letting it emerge. Sometimes that meant sharing an essay with just a small circle, without trying to promote it widely. Other times it meant teaching a class when my system had the capacity to hold it, or keeping the group small enough so that my system could stay present. Visibility started to feel more like an expression, a choice I was making about how I wanted to show up in the world, and less like a role I was playing.

What I’ve come to see so far: your nervous system has its own timing. Your work has its own pacing. You do not have to force visibility to live your full potential. What if “not yet” isn’t fear at all, but wisdom? Sometimes the most aligned and courageous choice is to honor the “not yet.”

Becoming more comfortable being seen was part of my journey, but I’ve learned that comfort alone isn’t the whole story. Maybe the deeper question is, “What’s trying to emerge through me that feels authentic and alive?” Visibility, I’ve discovered, isn’t something to chase but something to allow, when the timing is right, when our systems feel ready, when what we have to offer feels genuinely ripe.

In the next essay in this series, I’ll explore how to discern the difference between fear and alignment. How do you know when you are holding yourself back, and when you are honoring the wisdom of your own timing?

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I come from a family that has recorded the firstborn son of each generation for over 2,500 years.

Our lineage traces back through dynasties and centuries, through sages, poets, and officials in ancient China.
Their names are held by a family book that was passed down.
71 generations were written with brush and ink.
Generations 72 through 75 were added later by family members who had immigrated to the US.
My generation, the 76th, is not recorded at all.

And maybe that’s why I’m the one writing this now.

Because there’s something missing from this book.

The women.

Very few are named.
Not the mothers, the grandmothers, or the ones who birthed sages and sons.
They were central to the story and yet were never recorded in it.

So I began envisioning what it would look like to bring them into the light.
I used AI to help me imagine and humanize them, to co-create portraits that honor their presence across time.

This is the first.

In the center: Me. A daughter of the 76th generation.
To my right: Zengzi, my most famous ancestor. One of the Four Sages of Confucianism, born in what is now Shandong, China, more than 2,000 years ago.
To my left: His mother. The woman who gave birth to a sage, but whose name was not recorded.

She appears here partially translucent because the world she lived in failed to see her clearly.

This project begins with her.
And with all the wives, concubines, mothers, daughters, and sisters that are unnamed.
The women who carried the line forward, without recognition.

This is the beginning of a series: portraits, stories, and remembrance.
A restoration of what was erased.

I’m listening for what they might have carried.

Who in your lineage was never recorded, but carried everything forward?

In future posts, I’ll share more portraits and stories, how the family book made its way to the US, how it was almost forgotten, and what it has meant to carry a lineage I never knew I came from. If this sparks something in you, I invite you to walk with me as the story unfolds.

Note about AI: In this project, I’m using AI as a bridge to reconnect parts of my ancestry that have been lost. It isn’t meant to be a replacement for human-made art. It’s an experiment to visualize what history left out, and to humanize the unseen.

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One of my teachers has often said, “If you don’t know what to do next, just wait.”

And that’s what I’ve been doing.

For the first three months I was on Substack, essays flowed easily. Inspiration came naturally. I felt clear, energized, and aligned. The writing felt like me.

And then it all just…stopped.

I didn’t plan to take a break, but the pause came anyway. I wasn’t sure what it meant. I wondered if my season of writing in this form had ended. I’ve learned over time that I move in cycles, usually three months at a time. I dive into something with full presence and passion, pulling from my creativity, lived experience, and inner knowing. I build something and I offer it to the world. And then I rest.

While my somatic practice has continued in the background, this pause has been more about creative projects. It’s the creating and the sharing that have slowed - the outward expressions.

Last winter it was wellness boxes. This spring, it was essays. And each time I think, maybe this is the one! The sustainable thing! And often...it isn’t.

But what I’ve come to understand is that I’m a sprinter, not a long-distance runner. I thrive on project-based work, and I need a break in between. That part’s tricky when you work for yourself, when no external structure tells you when to start or stop.

That way of working doesn’t fit well into a capitalist framework, where value is tied to continuous production, and worth is measured in consistent output. But when you’re working for yourself, there’s no imposed system to override your natural rhythms. You’re faced with your own body and your own breath. It’s just you and your own nervous system. And mine was asking for deep rest.

So I listened.

When the essays stopped coming, I didn’t push. I stepped back. For the past month, I’ve slowed down in a way I never have before. Not just mentally but physiologically. My nervous system settled into a resting place I had never quite accessed before. I allowed my body to find its own pace and surrendered to the question of what comes next, free from urgency, pressure, or performance.

And somewhere in that stillness, something began to shift.

What I’ve realized is that I can’t force myself to do things out of alignment. If I try to create something just for money, my body will shut down. It’s not even a choice at this point. My system will not let me continue. That’s how deeply I’ve come to rely on my own internal compass.

This has been one of the hardest lessons to learn in a culture that teaches us to hustle, perform, and prove our worth through productivity. I’ve been unlearning all of that. I’m starting to understand that my value isn’t something I have to earn. I am valuable because I exist. Living in the world in alignment with who I am is its own kind of offering. An offer without being an offer. Just me, being fully myself.

When I was finally replenished, the spark came back. Gently, and not all at once. And I noticed: the desire to create again came from alignment. It came from deep listening, and from having waited.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know what’s next. Maybe I’ll never write another essay. Maybe I’ll write a hundred more. I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I’ve lived into something this past month. I’ve moved from understanding the idea of rest to embodying it. I stopped ‘doing’ stillness and started ‘being’ it.

When I was no longer trying to figure things out, something deeper emerged. I felt and acknowledged the grief, pressure, and beliefs that kept me in a cycle of constant doing. I had to meet the emotions underneath. I had to stand strong in trust. I let my nervous system guide me. I didn’t try to make it happen. I just did it. I let go.

Stephen Porges, who developed Polyvagal Theory, invites us to “Go at the pace of the slowest part of our nervous system.” And that’s exactly what I did.

And maybe part of what made this level of surrender possible was loss.

The recent death of a close friend helped me get there. He died unexpectedly in his sleep at 55. No known cause. And a few weeks ago, I heard about a friend of a friend who also died in her sleep at 49. No warning or explanation.

These moments remind me we really don’t know how much time we have. Whether I have one day or thirty more years, I want to savor the simple things and the beauty of just being alive. I want to cherish the sacred. And the truth is, I don’t think I could live any other way anymore.

So maybe this piece is just an exhale into the wind. But if you’re reading it, and you find yourself in a moment of uncertainty and don’t know what to do next, let this be a reminder:

There is wisdom and intelligence in the pause.

I am living proof that when you let yourself rest, when you let yourself truly slow down, the wisdom in that stillpoint will guide you to whatever comes next.

If you enjoyed this piece, you can support my work by becoming a free or paid subscriber, or by buying me a cup of tea. 🍵🙏🏼

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I’ve been active my entire life. Skiing was a passion. I played on sports teams. I’ve always loved walking, hiking, and traveling. I’ve had dogs for most of my life. Moving my body has always been how I stay grounded. So when my knees started to ache after what used to be an average walk, I didn’t want to slow down. I assumed it would pass like it always did before. I pushed through. But it didn’t pass. I started waking up stiff and sore. It hurt just to rise from a chair. Something had changed. My body wasn’t bouncing back the way it used to.

A while back, I was in my acupuncturist’s office, talking about how tired I’d been. I told her I was considering starting a new business. She paused and said, “What would it look like to honor the energy you have now, at this stage of your life? You’re not 30 anymore. You don’t have the same jing.” (Jing, in Chinese medicine, is a form of foundational life force, something that naturally decreases with age.)

Her words really touched something in me. What would it feel like to honor the energy I have now, at 56? I’ve lived a full life. I’ve raised a daughter, built multiple careers, navigated divorce, traveled around the world, guided thousands of people through healing, and carried the weight of developmental trauma and the loss of three parents. I’m stronger because of what I’ve lived through. But that life force—my jing—has shifted. I knew that what was calling now wasn’t to squeeze more out of myself, but to let a new way of being in relationship with my life emerge from within.

In recent years, I’ve tried to adapt. I’ve built daily practices like yoga, qi gong, and meditation into the foundation of my day. I’ve become more intentional about food, sleep, and how I spend my energy. But if I’m honest, slowing down the physical activity has been the hardest. For me, taking walks has been as essential as drinking water.

This isn’t the first time my body has tried to get my attention.

Twenty-five years ago, I went through something similar, though I didn’t recognize it at the time. I was working at a tech company, overseeing many aspects of operations. It was constant. My mind was always switching gears, tending to multiple branches of the business, solving problems, holding things together. I could do it, and I was good at it. But it came at a cost.

Eventually, my body started to break down. I developed chronic pain. It kept building, and I kept working. Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. I cut out certain foods that were thought to be irritating. But the pain continued to worsen.

Then I took a week-long vacation to Mexico. And on the very first day, after swimming in the ocean, I noticed that the symptoms had vanished. I ate whatever I wanted. And yet the pain was gone. It only returned when I went back into the office that following Monday.

It became clear to me that it was something about the job. At the time, somatics, nervous system regulation, trauma-informed anything—these weren’t fully formed ideas in my field yet. All I knew was that I had to leave. So I did. And that solved the problem…for a while.

I thought leaving the job would be enough. And in some ways, it was. The relief was real. But relief isn’t the same as repair.

I had changed my environment, but not the way I lived inside myself.

I still didn’t know how to stay in relationship with my body, especially in the face of pressure, responsibility, or fatigue. I knew how to hold it together, and I knew how to escape when things got too overwhelming. But I didn’t yet know how to stay with myself while staying inside my life. How to move differently without checking out or powering through. How to honor my body’s signals without collapsing or giving up. I had no real model for any of it.

Looking back, I can see the pattern that began to form: making things work at the cost of my own well-being. Moving past my limits because I could—because I was capable, because someone needed me, because that’s what strong people do. I wouldn’t have called it “force” back then. I might have called it resilience, or maybe just being responsible or dutiful.

But underneath it, I was still pushing past myself.

It’s only now, all these years later, that I can name it for what it was: not weakness or failure, but disconnection. A body trying to be heard. A nervous system asking to be met.

It’s not that I didn’t already know this. Like the cobbler whose children have no shoes…

I’ve spent years practicing and teaching Craniosacral therapy, a gentle bodywork practice rooted in deep listening and presence. It’s not about fixing or forcing. It’s about attuning to the body’s subtle rhythms, sensing when something wants to shift, and allowing space for what’s ready to release. In that stillness, intelligence emerges—not because we make it happen, but because we make room for it. I’ve accompanied countless clients through this deep process: out of tension and into trust, out of holding and into relationship.

But this season of my life is asking me to live it in a new way. Not in the treatment room with a client on the table, but in the soft reckoning of my own changing body.

This isn’t a new concept. But it’s a deeper layer. A new edge. An invitation to truly walk the path I’ve been holding space for all these years.

What I’m starting to see more clearly now is that this isn’t just personal. It’s not just about my body, or this phase of life, or even the years I spent ignoring what I needed. It’s part of something much bigger—a cultural pattern we’ve all inherited.

We live in a world that rewards force. That sees exhaustion as a badge of honor. That glorifies pushing through without asking what it costs. So many of us have learned to override our natural rhythms, and not from a broken place, but because we were never shown another way.

More and more, I think this is the threshold we’re all approaching: learning to move not from urgency, but from truth.

What’s changed isn’t just my knees, or my energy levels. It’s how I’m choosing to relate to them.

I’m learning what it means to be in relationship with the daily realities of being in my body—with my walks, the food I eat, the beginning of each day. The way I speak to myself when I feel tired.

This isn’t about doing less, but about being more present with what I do. It’s more honest, and more responsive.

The invitation isn’t to stop living. It’s to live from a place that honors who I am now. Not who I used to be, or who I think I should be. But who I am, in this moment, with this body, on this path.

Over the years, I’ve heard many people who’ve built their lives on strength, optimization, and resilience speak the same tender realization: “I don’t know how to slow down without feeling like I’m failing, or risking everything I’ve worked so hard to build. But I don’t want to do it anymore.”

I’ve come to understand that feeling. I’ve lived it. What we call aging, or injury, or burnout, is sometimes just the body finally saying: no more. Not as punishment, but as realignment. As invitation.

I’m no longer interested in pushing through. I’m interested in what becomes possible when I don’t.

I’ve started walking less—fewer steps, shorter routes. And my knees don’t hurt anymore. Not because I fixed them, but because I’m finally listening.

I don’t know exactly what this next chapter looks like. But I know it begins here: with presence, permission, and a softer kind of strength.

This feels like the real work now.
Letting my body lead, and trusting that it knows the way.

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That’s what Nvidia’s CEO said in a recent CNN interview. He was so matter of fact, almost cavalier. As if intelligence were just another commodity like electricity or oil. Something to extract, engineer, and scale.

I felt it land like metal in my gut. It wasn’t fear, or even shock. Just a deep wrongness.

This is the voice of the dominant system. The one that doesn’t stop to ask what intelligence actually feels like. It doesn’t pause to notice if the body can handle the speed. It doesn’t ask if we’re well enough, or regulated enough, to build what we’re building. It just moves forward, fast, faster…assuming forward is always the right direction.

And I’ve been feeling the effects of that race in my own body.

I’ve held tension in my solar plexus for as long as I can remember. I’ve done decades of healing—Craniosacral work, somatic therapy, teaching, movement, meditation, grief, love, travel, motherhood. I’ve released and reclaimed so many parts of myself. But no matter how much I explored it or tried to understand it, the tightness just wouldn’t soften completely.

And then, during a recent bodywork session, something shifted. My practitioner worked around that familiar place in my core, and afterward she said, “your little girl didn’t have anyone to help her release that.”

I knew she was right.

That holding pattern didn’t come from trauma in the way we usually think of it. My body had learned to hold because it hadn't yet felt the kind of safety and trust it needed in order to let go. Not from my family, my school, or from the world around me.

This is the part that so many of us don’t talk about. You can do all the healing work and still feel like something’s not quite right. And often, it’s not that we haven’t healed enough. It’s that we’re adapting to a culture that is still unwell.

We’re trying to regulate our nervous systems while living inside a culture that’s profoundly dysregulated. It races ahead without rest, rewards output over presence, and keeps building faster machines while our bodies are still stuck in survival mode. We’re living in a system that tells us to constantly improve while ignoring the deeper truth: the body isn’t broken. The body is responding, perfectly, to a world that forgot how to hold it.

So when people talk about “bringing our full humanity” into partnership with artificial intelligence, I have to ask: which part of our humanity? The creative? The imaginative? The productive? Or the part that shakes under pressure and needs to feel safe in order to soften?

We’re not just in a technological transition. We’re in a nervous system crisis at the level of civilization—one that affects how we live, relate, create, and make decisions.

Much of what gets labeled as “progress” is actually a trauma response: an unconscious reaction to collective dysregulation that hasn’t been named or held. We race toward innovation because we don’t know how to pause or be still. We push for more because we don’t know how to be with what’s already here. We manufacture intelligence because we’ve become disconnected from how it emerges—in the body, in relationship, in moments of presence and safety.

These aren’t just abstract patterns. They show up in our bodies every day: a clenched jaw, shallow breath, the inability to rest even when we’re tired. The feeling that if we stop moving, everything might fall apart.

And now, the AI systems we’re building are being shaped by that same state of urgency and pressure that’s burning us out. They’re learning from a culture that hasn’t yet remembered how to feel. And they’re calling it evolution.

But there is another kind of intelligence. One that doesn’t scale or optimize.

It lives in the field between us, in the way presence slows the breath, the way stillness reorients time, the way the body begins to open when it feels safe. Not because it was fixed, but because it was finally held.

This is nervous system intelligence. And I rarely hear it mentioned in tech circles. It doesn’t show up through performance or productivity, and it isn’t concerned with control. Its power lies in our capacity to relate and truly feel.

I’m not writing this because I have answers for what to do about AI. I’m writing this because I’m remembering through my own body what intelligence actually is.

Real, living intelligence isn’t just about processing power or solving problems. It’s about presence, coherence, relationship, and the ability to be with what is, without needing to push it away or turn it into something else. It doesn’t rush. It includes what’s uncomfortable. And in doing so, it opens the door to actual wisdom.

That kind of intelligence isn’t manufactured.
It’s reclaimed.

And maybe, if we slow down enough, we’ll learn how to bring it with us,
even into the systems we’re building now.

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I found myself thinking about a scene from the movie Gladiator.

Maximus is standing with a group of gladiators in the middle of the Colosseum, waiting to fight for their lives. The gates are about to open. No one knows what’s coming, but it doesn’t look good. Maximus turns to the group and says:

"Whatever comes out of these gates, we’ve got a better chance of survival if we work together.
Do you understand?
If we stay together, we survive.”

It’s a line that’s easily forgettable, but it’s stayed with me. Maybe because it speaks to a deeper truth, one that goes beyond the battle playing out on the screen.

It speaks to now.

Because if we’re honest, many of us are standing in our own kind of arena. We don’t know exactly what’s coming through the gates. AI, climate instability, systems collapsing…the future is uncertain. But I do know this: if we stay in relationship, we have a better chance of surviving it. Not just surviving, but remembering, rebuilding, and reclaiming what it means to be human.

On some level, most people can feel a rising tension, along with the pressure to respond. Maybe to prepare and protect.

But the old survival strategies of hyper-independence, emotional isolation, and individual optimization are no longer enough. They’re not designed for the terrain we’re in. And more importantly, they were never truly sustainable to begin with.

In Part 1, I wrote that we weren’t meant to do this alone.
This moment feels like the next layer of that truth.

We’re not just meant to be with each other when it’s easy. We’re meant to stand shoulder to shoulder when the gates open and the future is uncertain.

But what does that look like?

Staying together doesn’t mean we all agree. It doesn’t mean we all move through the world the same way or speak the same language. It means we don’t scatter when things get hard. It means we resist the urge to disappear or disengage the moment things feel uncomfortable. It means checking in on each other, holding space, sharing what we have: listening, resources, presence.

Remaining connected may look like reaching out before someone breaks, allowing ourselves to be seen when we’d rather stay hidden, or sitting beside someone in silence without needing to fix anything. It can also mean learning to ask for help when we need support ourselves.

This kind of connection is a regenerative force. It helps soften fear’s grip and rebuild trust in the nervous system. It invites us to live in greater alignment with what we already sense to be true: that we heal and endure through relationship, not alone. And that we are part of something larger, something worth holding onto.

This is relational intelligence. A way of being. A practice of turning toward ourselves, each other, and the unknown, instead of away. A remembering that even when the systems feel like they’re collapsing, we are not powerless. We are not alone. We can choose how we meet this moment, and we can choose to meet it with each other.

Whatever comes through those gates, we have a better chance if we stay together.

And somewhere in us, we already know how.

This is Part 2 of my Regenerative Intelligence series. You can read Part 1 here: We Were Never Meant to Do This Alone.

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Much of the tech industry has been shaped by the belief that the world is mechanical, that humans are systems to optimize, and the body is a machine. But that framework can only take us so far. There are things humans are known to do that are relational, intuitive, and often subtle, hard to track, or invisible. These ways of knowing can’t yet be replicated.

They live in places that can’t be fully mapped, which is what makes them human. AI might get better at sounding empathetic or responsive, but presence is more than tone or phrasing. It’s something felt. A way of being. Relational intelligence arises through context. It shows up through what’s at stake in the moment. It means sensing and responding to others and the environment with awareness and care. For example, it’s the subtle way a skilled teacher reads a student’s body language and adjusts their approach, or how a seasoned team member picks up on unspoken tensions during a meeting and helps ease them. For now, that kind of knowing still lives with us.

I don’t know exactly how this will unfold, but I have a sense that some of these companies will find themselves in trouble. They may lose the trust of their users, watch customers drift away, and eventually realize they need to bring people back. Some may disappear altogether.

Many are encouraging these workers to become solopreneurs: starting businesses, consulting, or building personal brands. That path may work for a small percentage of people, especially those with financial stability, skills that are in demand, or high visibility. But for most, it’s not so simple. Self-employment can be liberating for some, but it shouldn’t be the default survival strategy for a collapsing job market. Not everyone wants to market themselves. Not everyone has the time, energy, or support to start something on their own. It’s important to be honest about that. Reinvention isn’t always a solo act, and the future likely won’t be formed by individual resilience alone. The future may ask for more collective strength and ways of working, grounded in relationship and interdependence: through cooperatives, mutual support, and sharing power that pushes back against today’s hyper-individualism.

Worker-owned cooperatives like the Arizmendi Bakery collective in Berkeley, CA, where profits and decisions are shared among employees, offer glimpses of what this could look like in practice.

To understand what models like these are offering, it helps to see what they stand in contrast to.

When lords in late medieval England discovered that sheep were more profitable than serfs, they began evicting people from the land. They took land that had once been shared by local communities and claimed it for private use, pushing out entire villages to expand wool production.

It wasn’t just a shift in economics. It marked a deeper transformation. What once ran on relationships like mutual obligation, shared land, and seasonal rhythms gave way to systems organized around wages, profit, and ownership. As Heilbroner and Thurow describe in Economics Explained, this was the beginning of capitalism. It wasn’t only about how goods were exchanged, but about how life itself was structured.

It made short-term economic sense but created a large class of landless workers who flooded into cities. These displaced people didn’t disappear. They became the foundation for something entirely new: wage labor, industrial capitalism, and urban markets. It wasn’t visionary or designed. It was emergent.

What began as displacement and privatization in medieval England now plays out on a new stage. Today’s technological and economic systems reshape access, power, and belonging by centralizing control, limiting who gets included, and reinforcing patterns that have persisted for centuries.

Which makes me wonder: what’s forming now, beneath the surface of mass displacement?

There’s a lot of talk about changing the system, about building something better. It’s essential work and it’s already underway. But if we’re not paying attention, we run the risk of putting new names on the same old structures. We’ve seen it happen before, again and again: after revolutions, changes in policy, even after so-called technological breakthroughs.

We often expect change to mean something new, yet history reveals power follows old patterns:

Kings become presidents: In theory, the French Revolution ended the monarchy and ushered in democracy. But just a few years later, Napoleon declared himself emperor. And today, some countries still use the title of president, even though power remains concentrated in the hands of one person or party. The names may change, but the deeper structure often stays the same.

Lords become landlords: In England, starting in the late Middle Ages, nobles began taking land that had once been shared by local communities and claiming it for private use. They evicted peasants who had lived and worked there for generations. Those peasants became tenants, now paying rent instead of owing loyalty. Today, landlords in cities often hold similar economic power, deciding who stays, who goes, and at what cost. The relationship is still extractive, though now it's backed by law.

Corporations become platforms: Uber profits from drivers without employing them. Airbnb earns from hosts without owning properties. These companies facilitate relationships and extract value, while sidestepping responsibility for the lives and wellbeing of the people who make their platforms work. It’s a more decentralized kind of control, but the power still flows upward.

So the real question goes beyond just what we build next. It’s what it carries in its DNA.

I don’t write this as a rejection of the new systems people are working to create. I support the shift toward a wellbeing economy, toward something more relational, regenerative, and life-affirming. But we also have to tend to the soil it grows from. Without that care, we risk replicating old dynamics under new language. A better system can’t just look different. It has to feel different. It has to move differently. It needs to be grounded in a different relationship to power, time, uncertainty, and each other.

Systems won’t change at the root until we do. Not just in our theories or models, but in how we actually meet power, and one another, and the unknown.

This is the part I keep returning to. Real change doesn’t always come through design. Sometimes it happens through breakdown. Something dissolves. Something ends. And instead of rushing to replace it, we stay close to it and listen. We wait for the next right step to reveal itself.

Not everything begins as a vision. Sometimes it starts from necessity, from proximity, or from the simple need to adapt. Like the casual carpool system that operated for decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Drivers would pick up two passengers at specific spots so they could all use the carpool lane from the East Bay into San Francisco. There was no app, no sign-up sheet, no central coordination. Just a shared understanding that arose from repetition, trust, and mutual benefit. It worked because it met a need, and because people respected the unspoken agreement that held it together.

Or the two UC Berkeley students, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez, who discovered that mushrooms could grow in used coffee grounds. They began collecting waste from local coffee shops and explored mushroom cultivation, then sold both the mushrooms and the nutrient-rich compost. What started as an experiment became a thriving small business called Back to the Roots. Rather than following a rigid plan, they worked with what was available: used coffee grounds that others discarded. Their approach embraced uncertainty and adaptation. Later, they created mushroom growing kits that allowed people to cultivate mushrooms at home, inviting a wider community to engage directly with food production. This was not a top-down invention but an unfolding collaboration with nature and people. Their journey shows how paying attention to overlooked resources and community needs can lead to regenerative, collaborative models that grow from what is already here.

These aren’t strategies or traditional solutions. They are subtle signs of intelligence that emerge when we are willing to look beyond the usual.

There is wisdom in what’s breaking down, if we know how to listen. But that kind of listening asks something of us. It asks us to be different than we were. To stop rushing toward resolution. To slow down enough to feel what is shifting and allow that to guide the next steps.

Despite appearances, the future may not be something we can fully engineer. It might be grown from what we’re letting go of now.

And if that’s true, then what matters most isn’t the plan. It’s the soil.
Systems won’t change at the root until we do. Not just in our ideas, but in how we relate to power, to each other, and to uncertainty.

What are we growing now, beneath the surface?
And what stories will live in its roots?

What we water, grows

Of course, vision and structure are necessary. But they need roots. And that’s what we’re nurturing here.

As we witness systems breaking down, we are invited to slow down and listen deeply. To the subtle signs, to the needs emerging in our communities and environments. Each of us can tend the soil in our own way, nurturing what wants to grow beyond the patterns of the past. What small acts of attention and care might you offer today to help shape a future rooted in connection and interdependence?

References:

Arizmendi Bakery. Worker-owned cooperative in Berkeley, CA. arizmendibakery.com

Back to the Roots. Founded by Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez. backtotheroots.com

Heilbroner, Robert, and Thurow, Lester. Economics Explained. Updated ed., Simon & Schuster, 1998.

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