It used to be mind-boggling to me that despite all the efforts humans make in their life time, so few ever seem to really change at fundamental levels of habits, such as relationships with food, with other people, with themselves. I remember reading that comic strip Cathy and thinking, "who are these crazy people who keep saying they are going to have more self control and never do?" I remember thinking, "but I’m going to be different. I am going to change."
 
Many years later, and I am blown away by anyone who manages to change even one central habit. As I see it now, you don’t expect a leopard to will itself to become a fox, why would you expect a carefully designed human with processes going on we haven’t yet even begun to understand, to easily change itself, with its own self? Do we ask a red paintbrush to turn itself purple? It would at the very least need something outside itself, a blue paint brush, to do that. But here I’ve been thinking I could just will myself to become an entirely different person than I had developed into, on my own no less, ultimately overestimating the power of the mind and underestimating the power of the body.

​I had an inspiration the other day, a subtle but significant shift in perspective about something I’ve been trying to work through for over thirty years, and I thought to myself, “Oh my gosh. This is it. This is the shift in perspective that’s going to change my life.”
 
And then I thought about all the times I’ve had that thought - that I'd found the answer - and it didn’t change anything at all.

And even if this time it was the thing that changed my life, that doesn’t mean it’s going help anyone else, which is like half the fun in discovery, right? Being able to help others is what makes it all feel meaningful and worthwhile. But the chances of a personal epiphany impacting someone else in the same profound way it did me are exceedingly small.
 
This is not to say that breakthroughs aren't worth sharing, or to devalue the small but important differences sharing could make for others, or to discourage attempts to change. It’s to say that it’s time to get real about how much goes into the changes that occur in a person's life, and how little we understand them.
 
The stories of zero to hero, from rags to riches, that get exalted in the media, in bestselling books and award-winning movies, make it seem like there’s this “one thing” that can change the trajectory of a person’s life. And we think that it could do the same for us—in a single lifetime no less. But evolution takes time, iterations, trial and error. It’s really only when we look back that we imagine we see the cause and effect on our path; and even then, it’s just one path, one way of unfolding.

​On the one hand, it is only in the present moment that anything ever happens. The present moment is where our point of power resides, where we may set ourselves in a new direction with new daily actions. It is the only time that our entire experience of the world can change—right now, in this moment.

But all the little things that led up to this moment and how they worked together to create our current presence of mind (how present our wired in nervous system allows us to be to make mindful choices) and our way of impacting the environment, are far beyond our comprehension. Our personal actions only make up a fraction of time, a few decades out of millennia of evolution and generational patterns.

Add into that all the biochemical processes going on that our brain is not conscious of, and you’ll see why I am wary of self-help teachers who proclaim to know “the answer,” something that guarantees to set you free.

The perfect combination of conditions that will result in the transformation you so desperately desire, the healing that finally allows you to unabashedly be who you are, cannot be predicted or manufactured in real life with certainty. It may seem like we’re in charge of whether we change; it may seem like we have choices. But what compels us to know when and how to make those choices, or to even know what choices are available to make?

It’s all speculation—what causes what. Yet so often, when someone undergoes a transformation that allows them to turn their life around, to be “successful” or true to themselves, they’re inclined to reverse engineer the steps they took to get there and share it with others as if it will work for them too. Their intentions are often genuine, but misled, for they leave out generations of evolution and untold variables that contributed to their own transformative moment. 
 
And that’s a problem.

This is my core issue with the coaching and self-help industry. It’s more complicated than many of the authors make it sound, leading the consumers to feel like failures when their attempts to model after their advice fail. Theoretically, anything is possible – sure, a life can shift toward a new trajectory in a single moment, but when and how that moment happens is simply unknowable. How can the brain predict itself when it is part of the very nature it’s trying to predict, and when nature is constantly unfolding?
 
No, it isn't all anarchy. And this doesn’t mean we don’t have an impact on our lives and environments with our moods and actions moment by moment. But what determines what mood we’re in? They’ll tell you it’s your thoughts, but I’m here to tell you it’s not. It’s more than that. It’s what you ate yesterday, who you talked to last week, the state of your nervous system, your age, your wiring, your genes, your ancestors—the unprocessed trauma fighting to break free and emerging whenever it pleases.

It doesn’t mean that our focus doesn’t influence our path in life. You spend 10,000 hours practicing a skill, you are bound to master it. But what determines what we wind up focusing on? How much meditation is required to go from confusion to the clarity and presence of mind to make good decisions at particular moments in time that set us on that new path that breaks generations of self-defeating patterns that in themselves are part of the evolution?

I believe these things are unknowable, different for everyone, and mostly out of our control.

​Now you may be asking: how is it helpful to acknowledge how little control we have over our lives, despite being responsible for each moment? More knowledge is not what we want. We want more peace, more love, more power over our lives, not less.

Well, if you had said this to me when I was in my twenties – that the chances are next to nil that I will break free from my negative ancestral patterns by the time I was thirty-five, I would have gone ballistic. Not because life would be meaningless if everything were preordained, but because my life would be too painful if I was destined to follow any more in my tragic ancestors’ footsteps.  

But over a decade later, this new perspective of things not all being in my control is now the thing that keeps me wanting to live. I no longer believe a simple set of decisions could have changed it all around. That’s like tracing back the way a flower bloomed and whether it became a rose or an iris to some simple set of instructions you could change with the attention of the conscious mind!  No, it was my entire way of being that got me here. And my entire way of being is far more nuanced and complex than a set of instructions in a book, or decisions my conscious brain can manufacture, let alone a set of positive thoughts..

​
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There’s just so much that we cannot see or even grasp. When you think of all the processes going on in our bodies, so many that our conscious minds aren't controlling, it starts to make sense when people talk about the wisdom in our bodies being so much greater than our minds. It’s why we have to take ourselves off the hook for how far we’ve gotten in our own personal growth journey. Sheer acts of will and positive thinking only go so far.
 
It’s also why meditation, breathing, and somatic experiencing are such powerful healing tools. It points to the deep need for us as a species to learn how to move out of our thinking minds—the parts of us that search for answers to why, that judge ourselves and second guess our decisions, and try to reverse engineer formulas for change—and into our bodies. But even then, depending on the type of trauma and nervous system a person has, breath work or meditation could be dangerous, especially not in the presence of a loving other.

I would like to leave on a more conclusive note, summarizing the whole spiel into a neatly articulated point, but I am not quite there yet. But I'll leave you with this. 

Right out the gate, let’s be clear. This essay is not arguing for or against AI technology, nor does it go in depth about the benefits and harms it could cause society or humanity. What it does is critique the way the technology is being developed and how it’s being deployed; explores how the magnitude of AI's disruptive nature has brought to light more clearly, for me, the systemic issues in our political and socioeconomic systems which are long overdue for an overhaul; and advocates for upgrading our political system’s Operating System to one that can effectively handle the new technology, before it’s too late.

​People scraping the internet for text and images for AI without asking permission makes me feel: (1) naive for sharing my work publicly and carelessly across social media platforms; and (2) taken advantage of like a fool. Just like when I take responsibility for putting myself in a vulnerable situation—walking home at night alone—doesn’t make the person that mugs me innocent or justified; when someone admits they were naive about what they were signing away in privacy policies, does not mean what the AI tech companies did was ethical.

That it has happened before (technological innovations shaking up society), and we have always adapted is not a good enough argument for why we should sit this one out and allow the tech moguls to force feed us a new way of living that we didn't have a hand in creating, except in the most literal sense of being the input to the algorithm, and inadvertently in our own passivity and acquiescence.
 
It has indeed happened before, very recently in fact, with the advent of social media, and look how that turned out. We haven't even caught up with the fallout from it--the biases, the rabbit holes leading to polarization, the impact on self-esteem, the algorithms that make people twist and contort themselves just to keep getting views. When the whole point of it, supposedly, was to share art, messages and connect with others. But we weren’t the social media company's customers, the advertisers were, which creates a trade system that lacks transparency on what is being bought and sold; in other words, a system primed for injustice. Add in the stockholders for these publicly traded tech companies and you’ve got all kinds of misaligned incentives and competing needs.
 
And it’s these same tech companies who aren’t being direct and honest about their motives or respecting people enough to ask permission (#me too movement anyone?) that are pervading every aspect of people's lives and no one seems to think there's anything dangerous about that.

​It’s like the “boiling frog” metaphor.

​I too have been guilty of being blind. But not anymore. 

Of course technological developments are always creating disruptions that takes people’s jobs, but the concern is that it hasn’t ever happened on this potential scale or speed. A question we might want to ask ourselves, is this:

Interestingly, the extreme disruptive nature of this new technology has prompted existential questions that reveal, not the greatness of technology, but its futility. We all know that people on their death beds don't regret not watching more YouTube videos or not working more and making more money, but rather not spending time connecting with their loved ones. And I'll bet money that AI taking over jobs will not lead to more fulfillment or more free time to spend with loved ones. Has any other recent invention, outside of healthcare that can extend lives, really given us more "free time?"
 
What people want is to feel good on a deep visceral level. People want real connection and they also want to work and have purpose. The priority isn't to do away with jobs but to compensate people fairly for their work, create meaningful opportunities for growth, and ideally set children up from a young age to figure out what kind of work will be most suited to them individually, so they are more likely to excel and become active contributing members of society.
 
There’s nothing wrong with shaking up the economy with a new invention, but at the very least, why not do it in a way that helps people prepare for it first, rather than blindly playing race to the market games? These are people’s lives we are talking about.

​These companies are in such a hurry toward this illusion of “technological progress” that they don’t mind leaving the majority of the human race in the dust. It is important to be able to adapt to change, but more people should have a voice in what the change is. Perhaps the really smart and adaptive thing to do is to start questioning the direction we are going.
 
Where are we trying to go anyways? Is this direction inevitable? Or is it just an arbitrary decision by a few giant companies playing around with their toys, trying to corner the market, to maximize profit without concern for the whole. It feels reminiscent of the days when industry was allowed to throw toxic waste in rivers and it’s being done right under our noses.

It's a great disservice to society that whether "the ends justify the means" is framed as something that’s up for debate. Not only is the philosophy of the ends justifying the means attributed to Machiavelli, a well-known scoundrel, but just based on simple logic, it falls apart. If you have to violate the principle/values/vision of the ends to get there, you will never actually get there. Whatever “there” is, it will be corrupted by the means.  

What these people behind ChatGPT and MidJourney did—how they did it—is not ethical, just as wrong as the way social media companies sell people’s data and lack transparency in their algorithms is unethical. With A.I., instead of claiming the effort was to connect people more quickly to things they want, they veiled it under the guise of a nonprofit collecting information to better humankind (which by the way they've since re-negged on and converted towards for-profit). But we all know, no matter what the benefits are--there are always some benefits--in the end, it’s likely going to perpetuate the same injustices and contribute to existing economic disparities favoriting those in power. 

For us to put our foot down, is it not enough to know that the people behind this technology are not taking proper safeguards? Why is it not a crime for them to have done what they have done? The companies behind this technology are not looking out for the people, not enough. If they did, they would have asked “the people” permission to do this. If they did, they would be taking incredible measures to make sure there are laws and policies in place to protect the public before deploying their new AI toys.

If WE, THE PEOPLE, don’t rally together and DO something, we are setting a dangerous new precedent about how willing we are to take things lying down while some small subset of techies direct the entire lifestyle of the country. They’re asking, “Can we do it, and how much can we make?” when they should be asking, “Should we do it, and how will it impact humanity?” They’re racing at breakneck speed to implement their vision of the future based on motives of curiosity and profit rather than heart and soul. That does not sound like a recipe for the benefit of humankind.

And since the code behind AI is programmed by humans, the unconscious biases people who have not been thoroughly vetted, are going to be mirrored in this technology. If a huge ethics committee isn't involved in the AI's creation every step of the way, how good do you think it's going to turn out? Think about it. And don't get me started on the transparency of the data going into the system—how do you even quality control that?

But even if they had built the model ethically and transparently, there's still the problem with the careless way they’re rolling the products out, which is incredibly dangerous to do without proper regulatory protocols in place to protect the massive amounts of disinformation and scams that will inevitably result—and those are just the most easily foreseeable issues.

“But that’s capitalism for you,” I used to say. No. Not this time. Not this way. Not this small subset of bullying, old school paradigm tech giants dictating the direction of humanity.

This could become a runaway train fast. Europe is already ahead of the U.S. in policy setting, as usual. Will we keep pace? We still haven’t addressed the massive corruption and immoral practices behind social media and the selling of people's data, algorithmic biases, etc. We haven’t even addressed the root of the housing bubble crisis of 2009 for that matter.

If nothing else, this is too much too quickly without the proper protocols and safety measures. It’s a negligence by a bunch of curious tech folks asking can we? not should we? Asking how much money? not how much meaningful benefit to mankind?

It’s too much to bear.  This has gone too far. Enough is enough.

​The only solution I see is to go directly to the deeper level of the issue, namely, cleaning up the way in which money influences politics, such as campaign financing. Good old Bernie Sanders opened my eyes to this one. The government is working far too much for big business and not for the people and it’s only getting worse every day we don’t do something about it.
 
I know, companies are just made up of people. But you see, when they get big enough, the sum total is greater than its parts and takes on a life of its own (oh, hey, kind of like emergent AI.) And with competing incentives—customers, stockholders, employees, owners—things get mucky very fast.
 
Without government oversight, rivers and air get polluted, companies pay poverty wages, monopolies get created, mortgage-backed securities cause a housing crisis, and the American people get raped by Big Tech. We need a government that works for us, where the people in Congress setting the laws are no longer beholden to the corporations that fund their election and are free to reflect the needs of the individual people they represent.

So how do we change this? 

It's simple. We speak in the language they understand, our pocketbooks, and go on strike. We demand that corporate money be taken out of politics, arguably the most important thing to separate from politics since religion.

I can guarantee you, our founding father's would applaud such an idea. 

The very foundations of our democracy support this kind of movement to get us back on track where the country is for the people by the people, not for the corporations by the corporations. Big business pays a tiny fraction of the taxes individuals do, but influence policy orders of magnitude more. We need to make changes that allow for our voices to  be represented fairly. We need to realign the values of this country with the sentiment of democracy it was built on.

​And there's no time to lose, because it's very possible that with A.I., at some point this kind of protest may no longer be possible. We could have put our foot down last time, and we didn’t.
 
If Americans came together on this bipartisan issue, demanding reform in campaign financing so that politicians are no longer so indebted to big business, we could really start to push the needle towards a better world. 

Conversely, if we don’t do anything, we are letting it happen. That’s it. On some level, we are part of the problem if we are not part of the solution. 

Of course, as I mentioned before, it's not AI itself that’s the problem. It’s the way it was created in isolation without approval, and the way it is now being deployed without care for the people, for the children, for the future of mankind. If there isn’t a Dalai Lama level conscience in the board meetings with these companies, they are doing it wrong. This stuff is potent, and they are being negligent. At least with the atom bomb we had enough sense to keep it tightly regulated.

It's understandable why it’s hard to see things clearly. On some level this is nothing new. This is just a symptom of an issue that's always existed; but we can see the widening gap of poor and rich in our country. That should be indicator enough that something is wrong; that while technological developments are surely moving the needle in areas such as medicine and research—extending people’s lives—they are not necessarily leading to greater wellbeing and enjoyment while alive. There is another step we need to take, that’s better for everyone involved, even business, in the long term.

That humans haven’t even mastered their own selves before creating AI is a phenomenal irony. That so much energy and money is directed towards technology when more and more young people are killing themselves, ostensibly as a result of this very technology, says something is really off with the priorities here. So much more beauty would come from a shift in focus to early childhood education, mindfulness, to learning how to be in our bodies, how to learn how to listen to ourselves and own longings and wishes, not the things people are telling us to long for and wish for. But a bunch of free thinkers with that much agency and aspiration running around isn’t necessarily in the interest of those already in power.

The silver lining in all this is that the monstrosity of the violation and rape that just happened is opening people's eyes to how deep this corruption goes – just how much our own brothers will sell us out for a quick buck. The selling of our data was the most recent violation and I didn’t understand it at the time. I feel ashamed about not speaking up about it, but now, with the release of AI in such a haphazard way, I see. Now I can feel it. 

The water is f*&$ing hot!

What if the ego voice is really a reaction to trauma? And that's why it's not very effective to solve deep patterns at the level of ego maintenance. Because simply interacting with ego brings you to its level which is not a place of love and healing. It's only when we take a step back (or deeper) outside of our thinking minds that we access a more powerful potential for change, where the roots can get dug up and new seeds can get planted.

In a similar vein, trying to change your life by changing your thoughts is a very inefficient way to improve your life at deep foundational levels. (The exception being for those working at a fine-tuning level, or who are adept at using thoughts as a gateway to  examine deeper beliefs and core wounds. But most of us are not there yet.) 

For those of us with early developmental core wounding running a lot of the show, working at the level of thought is like trying to stop a car rolling down a hill when it’s already two thirds of the way down. By the time an experience gets to the conscious thought level, there’s already so much momentum in the form of emotions and body/subconscious memories, that just telling yourself something is OK is not going to be convincing to a body that is in fight or flight mode.

I believe this is why somatic healing, which focuses on mindfulness of the body is so effective. It teaches you to become aware at an earlier stage of the process, at the physical level where it picks up more subtle signals before they become conscious as thoughts, before the momentum gets going. 

Another way of looking at it, without having to make a distinction between mind and body (it’s hard to say where one ends and the other begins), is just that resolving patterns is about becoming more aware and mindful of little details going on inside you, about slowing everything down, about catching that rolling car sooner. And focusing on the body is a technique to help you do that.

I am happy to report that after two years of somatic therapy, I am finally able to do deep breathing and meditation each morning without losing my balance or falling apart, and I'm so grateful for this. 

Share with me your experience with meditation and nervous system regulation in the comments below.  ​

 

I wrote the affirmation in this drawing partly in response to the trend in the wellness community of touting gratitude as the key to creating a life you love. So much so that there's more shame now around not feeling gratitude (and shame is a show stopper when it comes to learning.) Not to mention the spiritual bypassing that gets activated when one tries to force oneself to feel grateful when maybe the next step is to get sad, and go inward to heal. 

As always, this relates to that point I come back to time and again: for those of us in the metaphysics and philosophy space, we need to keep in mind that we are just guessing about what causes what. Yes, we all notice that people who feel happier or experience great abundance tend to feel gratitude more often. But immediately concluding that it's the gratitude causing the happiness/abundance is a bit premature. Why couldn't it be the happiness causing the gratitude? Or, more likely, something else entirely causing both?

​We have to be aware of what they call in statistics the "correlation vs. causation" concept, which says that just because two things are correlated doesn't mean that one is causing the other.  A third thing could be causing both.

So, just for fun, I wanted to look at gratitude, not as something to pressure ourselves to feel in order to have a good life. But as an indicator of whether we are in a receiving state. If we can't access the feeling, maybe there is something else we need to do before we can get into that state of receptivity and gratitude.

P.S.
Receiving takes practice, and requires us, not to shrink ourselves, but to expand our feelings of self worth and what is possible for us in life. Often this involves learning to move through uncomfortable feelings and becoming more present to our needs on a moment to moment basis. And this may require the assistance of a trained somatic healer. But don't discount simple solutions, such as calling a loved one, doing art, or going for a run or a walk in nature. 

​Today is the day a change comes your way
In the form of a scream or a soft spoken "hey."
A flash on your phone, a knock on the door.
Keep your mind open to receive what's in store.
Oh, if only you knew, my fine feathered friend
how long we've been waiting for the old story to end.

So hold your thoughts still like you're holding your breath
and don't worry if it feels a little like death.
For today is the day a breakthrough is made
when all the old patterns are peacefully laid
to rest in the fields where things go to die,
you laugh and you cry as you wave them goodbye
and all of those things that once felt intense
no longer seem big, or even make sense.
What used to seem daunting's a fun little quest.
Words that once stung are now taken in jest.

The release of your tears burst open the doors
as a river that flows to wondrous new shores
and the momentum is held in the form of a wave
that not even the stubbornest of thoughts can evade.
As you reach the end of this strange breakthrough day
it's the start of a life that's true to you in every way.

~ May 6, 2015

Those who know me well, know that when I come across a book or article I find really inspirational, I want to share it with all my favorite people. That can be a good thing. Taken to an extreme, you can even make a career of it - just look at Oprah.  

Other times though, due to things outside my control - like the timing and mind state of the person I'm sharing with - it's not always what the moment calls for. And over time I've started being more mindful of when, how and with whom I share things. I ask myself, "Is this really something that is going to help someone else? Or is it just an inside joke that resonates with me?"

Well, today I'm feeling really pulled to share something. It's an excerpt from an Elephant Journal article, "Finding Power in Powerlessness," written by my friend, Mia Hetenyi, who I met back in 2012. Over the past few months her posts have been coming up in my feed as she began writing prolifically on topics I have been pondering and writing a lot about myself. This recent one really hit home and hope it resonate with you too. 

​I've been finding it reassuring that Mia's essays often call out the rampant spiritual and emotional bypassing in our society, which unfortunately made its way insidiously into the self-help movement under the guise of “being high vibe.” It is one of the themes I have been wrestling with a lot these days myself. It feel feels like I've come full circle to that time in 2012, around the time I first met her, when I simultaneously got more focused on my healing journey, while also moving further away from myself by denying the darkness and trying so much to "be in the light". It's as if my desire for light led me further and further into the darkness. 

​So in the vein of the title of my friend's article, maybe this is the year we can find light in the darkness. And I don't mean finding some silver lining or "being positive" in the midst of chaos to try to make a bad thing feel better. I mean finding the light that never dies, that goes beyond words, that perhaps can only be found by delving deep into the unknown, into utter darkness, and facing the underbelly of the human experience head on, but this time making it through to the other side with a much greater strength and understanding. Victor Frankl, in his famous book, "Man's Search for Meaning," expresses a profound perspective on this, a realization he had while being marched to a concentration camp in World War II.

A few years ago, I had a terrible omen-like vision of bitterness in the distance running towards me at a breakneck speed. It was the first time in my life that I can remember worrying about becoming bitter and was sparked by an experience fostering a dog of all the things.

I had the sense that if I didn't realize my dreams soon, it was going to be too late and I would become one of those bitter, cynical people who had given up on life. I felt that if something didn't change soon, bitterness was going to seep into my bones and become a part of my physiology and that simply willing myself to "mind over matter" things was no longer enough - things were falling apart faster than they were coming together, and nothing I was doing was working anymore. It was one of the worst feelings I had ever experienced and the start of new level of depression, despair and hopelessness that lasted the next three years.

Now, up until that point, each year that had passed since my dark high school years I had actually felt like I was getting younger - more hopeful, more innocent, more connected to myself and my dreams. Inspired by my eastern philosophy (mostly buddhism) upbringing, at the age of 17, I realized that the negativity I had somehow become proud of in myself was really just an ego identity I'd copied from my mom - that I was just a shell of a person, and that there was another way to see the world - things didn't have to be so grim. It was a genuinely empowering realization, and so off I went to college determined to become a well adjusted positive person and eventually attain some form of spiritual mastery. 

And it seemed that year after year I was moving forward, becoming more well adjusted, having more positive experiences with people that counteracted my early experiences of low self worth. But, for reasons I still don't fully understand, it wasn't really the progress I had thought, and the skills I acquired over the two decades following high school were no match for the realities of life, let a lone for a creative entrepreneurship journey. 

Little did I know that how I felt in high school was perhaps not the best baselines to compare my progress in life. The despair, bitterness, negativity and anger I felt and acted out in high school was quite intense. So in a way, each year I felt myself feeling more confident was really just me digging myself out of massive disregulation and into a semi-functioning emotionally regulated "adult" state. It was not me healing some great wounds or "catching" up to people who had been born with stable regulated systems, as I delusionally thought was going on.

Little did I know, all the work I had done so far was built on the faulty premise that there was something wrong with me, that it was my fault I couldn't be mindful and in the moment. 

Little did I know that I had embarked on a healing processes without proper guidance and support, and what was really going on those two decades after high school was me swinging to another extreme - desperately willing myself to see the positive in everything, while rejecting the parts of myself that had been negative and cynical (sometimes for good reason!). I had concluded that those parts of me were all faulty and been mistaken perceptions of the world and that I could simply decide one day to see things positively and be done with it.

But I now know that true healing can't happen in an atmosphere of rejection. You don't grow up to be a suicidal 15 year old simply because you were "just being negative", or even due to some chemical imbalance in the brain. The level of emotional instability I demonstrated back then (and even onward through my 20s, though then in the context of at least trying to change) doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens from repeated experiences of being unable to get needs met over and over and over again.

Subscribing to lofty ideals of Buddhism, the prominent religious philosophy in my life growing up, without proper guidance and context, wound up taking the form of spiritual bypassing. I admit, believing I could simply will myself to be more mindful and think good thoughts, allowed me to have hope and gave me the ability to function in a world that actually is full of great tragedy.  But it only got me so far and kept me removed from reality and therefore really living. Now that I am waking up, I'm seeing veils being lifted in ways I didn't expect. 

1. Everything happens for a reason. We can make one up retrospectively, but there’s no way to know if there’s any kind of grand design and in fact you could argue there's  more proof to the contrary.

2. Everything will work out or be Ok. There’s no way to guarantee that. And what are we defining “ok” as? Not dead? Sure, everything is always OK if you want to think of it that way. Life is life. When we die we go back to oneness. I guess that’s ok too. What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you, and if it does, you’re dead and at least not in pain anymore.

3. Life only gives us what we are ready for. Bullshit! One definition of trauma, (physical, mental or emotional) is “too much too soon”.  Conversely, sometimes you can handle more but, for a number reasons, do not. I never had to face the loss of a super close loved one until this year. And at first I thought life graciously waited until I could handle it. Then I realized, no, in the face of losing a loved one imminently, I rose to the occasion - because there really wasn’t an alternative, and became one who could handle it. I grew so much because of it. I feel now that I could have taken on so much more earlier and to do so would have allowed me to grow a lot more. Instead I hid away from much of life's normal challenges, further stunting an already stunted emotional system.

4. Things will work out, you’ll find someone, you’ll find peace. Actually, my family heritage shows that is not the case, and it takes immense concentration and work to steer one's self towards a course where life is going to feel safe, kind and rewarding, both intimately with friends and experientially with money to the extent where one gains true freedom, autonomy and is allowed to live with dignity with access to healthcare, healthy foods, and the therapy needed to overcome cPTSD and early childhood traumas. Any slip in focus on this path to healing can set you back decades, if not generations. There is absolutely no guarantee you will meet someone and have a good life.

5. Time heals all wounds. Time and facing the pain in the right way with the right help can heal wounds and yes, the sting of certain disappointments surely can fade over time; but with respect to deep impacts, time by itself often just serves as a boiler room for unmet needs and traumas to grow.

6. There is something that I’m meant to do and I’ll figure it out.  Millions of people die every day on their way to figuring out their purpose, many with unlived dreams that die inside them. There’s no guarantee of figuring it out or living it. Unless you were raised in a loving environment with basic human emotional survival skills, it will take every last bit of focus, energy and concentration to turn your ship in the right direction and then live long enough to see some of your dreams actually come true.

7. Slow and steady wins the race. This is another old adage that is true in certain contexts but is by no means universal and can definitely be misunderstood. The wisdom in this is basically not to erratically rush things because you can wind up making costly mistakes that set you back as a result.

But if you want to get anywhere, steady, yes, is important (though there's no rule that says major spurts of creativity can't also be helpful), AND in many contexts the pace needs to be at least a brisk walk. Because it IS possible to go so slow that you will not reap the benefits of your actions in this life time. Furthermore, there are things that require momentum to accomplish, especially big changes. A great nature analogy for this is leaping over, say a wide river or crevice. If it's a great enough distance, walking up to it and then jumping may never allow you to get over it, no matter how many times you repeat it - you may actually need a running start.

​This adage brings up another big theme for me, namely that many truth do have great wisdom, but are meant for certain contexts, not to be used as a blanked truth for every situation. For someone like me, with a mathematical/science brain looking for universal laws, it has taken awhile to grasp this.

8. The Law of Attraction (LOA) is a neutral universal force of natural (spiritual and physical) that we can easily work with at the level of thought to create the life we desire. LOA is a monstrous beast and is behind why abused children put themselves in abusive situations in their adult life that reinforce the self perception and internal map of the world and their worth in it (and/or become abusers themselves). LOA is the reason the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - it's reflected in the math behind interest rates and exponential functions.

Additionally, evidence shows that trauma and childhood conditioning lives in our bodies more than our minds, that the mind often actually serves as a defense mechanism against feeling our bodies and the wisdom stored in them, and that our thoughts are the effects of dysregulated nervous system as much if not more than the cause of it. Thus, the focus on changing our lives with thoughts alone is like trying to make a marble sculpture with a toothpick. 

9. That I am responsible for my actions.  I know, I know. this one is loaded - but it actually brings this piece full circle from where I started about going from extremes. Ever since I realized in high school that I had a choice in how to look at life, I concluded that I had created all misery in my life thus far by having a negative attitude. Now, if we get down to the cellular law of attraction level, sure, I have attracted and created everything in my life - cause and effect. But that's not the whole picture, doesn't get to the what actually caused our cells and subconscious to wire and attract the way it does in the first place - do you blame a cheetah for being born a cheetah and being a carnivore? Is it going to think itself into being a zebra?

I've been carrying this burden of everything being my fault my whole life - I felt responsible for my family disfunction even before my high school epiphany. All that high school realization about having a choice to think more positively about things did was add more weight to an already self blaming predisposition. *(OK, maybe it was an honest insight with some truth, but it just was so incomplete.)

​Past lives aside (which is a nice way to explain the injustices in this world but is NOT the way to heal personal trauma), it is NOT my fault that I was wired a certain way, that I was raised with neglect or trauma, that I developed such low self worth and then attracted low self worth situations that further perpetuated ancestral stories. It's not my fault that trying to get out of the cycle often just kept perpetuating the cycle. It's not even my fault that I had a predisposition for seeking help or educating myself - that was wired in too.

I'm starting to believe that where I am in my life could have been largely predicted within some margin of error, based on the upbringing and genes and environment I was born into. (Read The Body Keeps the Score if you don't believe me).  Is everything predetermined? I can't say for sure of course, and in many ways it really doesn't matter because we are still going to try our damnedest to heal. 

The point is, the act of "taking responsibility for all one's actions" is so much more nuanced than I took it to mean and can in fact be toxic for those who already blame themselves for everything.

So much to say about this. So many different ways to say it. So many different experiences of leaping. ​The one that comes to mind a lot is one that until recently haunted me. 

A few years ago I took an awkward leap of faith and did not land on the other side, or wherever people wind up when they tell the happy ending stories about taking that leap of faith and the net appearing. The idea behind that saying is relatively down to earth. When we take (measured) risks, we often find that things work out much better than we feared - people/opportunities come into our lives at the right time creating a smoother landing than we expected or even hoped for. I know that has happened to me, but usually with things that didn't feel like a big leap (i.e. by the time I made the "big" change, it was really just the next natural step.) And I believe that big leaps that end beautifully must happen to others - but we usually only hear about it from the people that make it because they lived to tell the tale and their success brought them into the spotlight where they could share it, where we would wind up hearing about it.

But what about the others who didn’t survive, or who are still falling?

It doesn’t always have a neat little ending - people can die in pursuit of their dreams (well, we all will die eventually on the way somewhere). Or things can get worse before they get better, which is what happened to me when I left my day job and created my first children’s book only to spend all my money producing it and winding up virtually homeless and reliving childhood nightmares for several years after.

My initial understanding of the experience was two fold. One, that I took the leap a bit prematurely, not well calculated and with a lot of anxiety. It was more than the healthy excited anxiety when one stretches outside ones comfort zone; and more like the panic and stress from being way too far out without the proper resources and support in place. 

And two, that net didn’t appear because I didn’t have enough faith. While  I whole heartedly believed that with faith it would appear, there was a part of me that didn’t believe it would appear for me, and/or that I didn’t deserve it - possibly in part due to the lack of preparation and strategy. (The strategy and planning piece ties into the faith piece so much that it's hard to untie them in way to really know what is causing what).

The frustrating part of it, was that when I wandered back to the 9-5 job world with my tail between my legs, I still felt like I was falling. Sure, I evaded homelessness and brought myself back up to being able to support myself, but still worse off in many ways than I was before I took the leap. Meanwhile, day by day, my dream of having a successful career in children’s media continued to grow and evolve while every step I took was too slow and ineffective to make a dent or get a foothold anywhere, so the gap between where I was and my dreams just kept growing. It was a literal nightmare.  

And up until a few months ago, I was still falling. A spiritual retreat to Peru in 2019 to treat trauma didn't stop the fall - it may have changed the course of my fall, but I still can't tell if it was for the better yet - as I was also re-traumatized and had things come up without the proper support to heal it.

A spiritual entrepreneurship program in 2020 was the first thing that started to slow the decent with some basic online business skills and exposure to a group of wonderful supportive women. At the end of the program I finally got it. I finally received the unequivocal message that I needed not just to get trauma therapy, but from the RIGHT people. 

When I started to get the trauma therapy I needed, I started to learn how to fly, in bits and pieces: how to navigate stress and the unknown without crumbling and falling, and how to show up outside my comfort zone consistently in baby steps. 

While I still feel like I'm falling, I'm starting to wonder whether we every really find solid ground. I'm starting to realize that wha ti need to do is learn an entirely different skill set - how to hold myself above the abyss of helplessness without a corporate job, and to learn how to fly in the creative entrepreneurship world. Let's see!

This quote really resonates:

“The bad news is, we are falling through the air without a parachute. The good news is, there is no ground."

~Chogyam Trungpa