this subliminal was born out of something i’ve been trying to understand for years.

i always had a goal. that was never the problem. but every time i decided to go after something, i could already feel the ceiling. like something in me had already decided the outcome before i’d even started. and then i would watch someone go after what they wanted and just- get it. with an ease that genuinely stunned me. i’m talking about the kind of ease that made me want to study them like a documentary subject. what are you eating. what do you believe. what is happening in your body right now.

and i’m not talking about the people with every advantage. i’m talking about the ones with a similar starting point, comparable constraints — who were still getting what they went after. and i couldn’t figure out why. which, if you know me, means i was about to make it my whole personality for several years.

my suffering made me obsessive about it. i spent years studying psychology, self-help, belief formation, nervous system regulation — genuinely trying to understand why my experience of life felt so different from other people’s. at some point i had accumulated enough evidence to finally stop assuming i was just the problem.

so if it wasn’t me, then it was something i was carrying that i couldn’t see yet. and i became determined to find it. i started asking what someone would have to believe, at a level beneath thought, for that kind of ease to feel normal. and then i turned that question on myself.

what i found wasn’t pretty. i would think about something i wanted and before i’d even begun, i already knew how it would fall short. the expectation was just there, underneath everything. quiet and certain, like it had been there my whole life. because it had.

in my world, support was limited. people had a threshold and eventually you’d hit it. wanting too much was its own kind of risk. and if something good came your way, it was only a matter of time before you’d watch it unravel. rest wasn’t safe — it was just time you weren’t spending compensating. receiving felt like debt. belonging felt conditional. health, abundance, ease — those were things that happened to other people, or to you briefly, before they were taken back.

i didn’t choose those beliefs. they weren’t conclusions i reasoned my way into. they were conclusions my nervous system reached, probably very early, based on what it observed. and then it spent years shaping what felt possible, what felt safe to want, what felt realistic to expect. not as thoughts. as the texture of daily life.

i thought i was looking at reality. but i was looking through a lens.

and once i saw it, i couldn’t unsee it. i felt what it had cost me. all the years i’d spent bracing for a life that might actually be less small than i’d believed. i was heartbroken. i was furious. i had spent years doing everything right and still felt like the least effective person in any given room. like everyone else had received a manual at birth that i was somehow not on the list for.

i wasn’t planning for support. i was planning for how i would compensate for the lack of it. work harder. think harder. carry more. need less. become so capable that i’d never have to rely on anyone in the first place. i had essentially built an entire personality around not needing things. and it worked, in the way that survival mechanisms work — just well enough to keep you from questioning them. people called it independence. i called it hell.

and from the outside, it looked like it was working. people called me capable, self-sufficient, someone who had it together. and they meant it kindly. but i was being praised for something that was quietly costing me everything. it’s hard to question a belief the world keeps rewarding you for having.

that realization explained more about my life than almost anything else ever has.

it explained the exhaustion that never fully went away no matter how much i rested. the kind that comes from spending years doing the work of many people — myself, and the support i knew wasn’t coming. there’s a particular kind of grief in realizing you’ve been working that hard for that long. and a particular kind of relief in finding out it wasn’t inevitable.

i sat with that for a while. and then i made the subliminal i wish i’d had years ago.

i want to be honest about something. of everything i tried, subliminals are what actually shifted something. and when i realized that, i found it genuinely frustrating. i had spent years in therapy, doing the work, studying, trying to think my way into a different experience. so many frameworks. so many conversations where i thought i’d finally cracked it, only to find myself back in the same loop two weeks later. and the missing piece was something i could do while i was asleep. that gap between the effort and the solution is almost insulting. i say that with love, but also with the full weight of someone who spent years doing it the hard way.

but it also makes complete sense — because the problem was never at the surface. you can’t effort your way out of something your nervous system learned before you had words for it. conscious tools can’t reach that deep. that’s why it felt so hard for so long.

this is what safe to thrive is for. it’s a subliminal i made specifically for people whose nervous systems have learned that life is something you survive rather than fully live. the affirmations work through beliefs around support, receiving, abundance, health, rest, belonging, and safety — the exact places where so many of us are quietly running old programs. the idea that you have to do everything yourself. that support comes with strings. that good things don’t last. that you have to stay vigilant to stay safe.

the subconscious has a filter. it’s designed to reject anything that conflicts with what it already believes — which is exactly why telling yourself something new rarely works. your conscious mind hears it. the filter stops it at the door. subliminals work because they don’t trigger that filter. they arrive quietly enough that the bouncer doesn’t notice. and with enough repetition, the new belief starts to feel familiar — and familiar is what the subconscious accepts.

that’s where the change has to happen. not at the level of what you think, but at the level of what your nervous system has decided is available to you. and having a solution that actually works at that level — that genuinely excites me. and the fact that i can share it — that excites me even more.

i spent an autistic amount of time writing the affirmations. every single one addresses something i personally had to untangle. the wording has to be specific enough to reach the actual program that’s running, and gentle enough not to trigger resistance. a poorly written affirmation can land wrong — confirming the old belief instead of replacing it. i rewrote some of them more times than i’d like to admit. but i’d rather you get something that actually works than something that just sounds nice.

all you have to do is listen — while you sleep, work, clean, drive, or just move through your day. the affirmations are intentionally quiet. you probably won’t consciously hear them. that’s the point.

i’ve tried a lot of methods. but subliminals have given me some of the most undeniable results. i notice a shift every single time i listen. something settles. something loosens. the world feels more open. and i’ve been genuinely surprised by how much that compounds over time.

if reading this makes you feel something between relief and irritation — like, this is it? this is what i’ve been missing? — that’s actually a good sign. that reaction means you’ve been doing the harder version for a long time. and i know what that’s like, because i did it for years. this is for you. 🤍

and if you try it, i’d genuinely love to hear what shifts.

I judge myself for it. Hard. I hate that I feel like a victim and I can’t seem to stop.

But today I tried something different. Instead of shutting it down, I asked: what is this actually trying to do?

The anger isn’t random. It’s showing me exactly what happened — how much effort it took to be okay. How often I had to override myself. How little space there was for softness.

And underneath all of that isn’t chaos. It’s a refusal.

I’m not doing that to myself anymore.

The grief carries something too — a realization I keep circling back to. I shouldn’t have had to work this hard just to exist. And what that gives me isn’t weakness. It’s permission. To slow down. To stop treating myself like a problem to manage.

That’s what’s coming out of all of this. A way of being where I don’t abandon myself just to survive.

—

this is the kind of thing i sit with people inside of

not to fix it, but to see it clearly — the pattern, what it’s been protecting, and what’s trying to change

i do short, written reads where i look at what you’re in and reflect that back in a way that’s specific to you

if you feel like you’re in something like this and want help seeing it more clearly, you can reply here or message me 🤍

it’s immediate.

i don’t think about it—i feel it.

a kind of panic, and something heavier underneath.

wrongness.

when i hear connection, i don’t go to the best moments of my life.

i go to the feeling of reaching

and falling on my face

but no one sees it.

like i hit the ground

right when i need someone.

like sending something that mattered

and watching the silence after it stay empty.

there’s a part of me that already knows—

even if i stay open…

there will be nowhere for it to land.

and that feels confusing, because it’s not the whole truth.

i have felt connection so deep, so natural, so unmistakable

it felt like being inside my version of heaven.

with a couple people, it wasn’t effort.

it wasn’t guessing.

it wasn’t me trying to be anything.

it just… was.

and i knew, without checking, i was inside something real.

so why doesn’t that come to mind first?

why does my body go somewhere else?

i think it’s because the part of me that learned connection wasn’t always there

is louder than the part that knows it can be.

my body remembers.

before thought, there’s a signal—

this isn’t safe to need.

everything pulls up into my head.

i want it to float away like a balloon

so i’m not responsible for what’s happening below.

i learned, somewhere,

that reaching could hurt more than staying closed.

and i still move that way

before i have a chance to choose.

so now the word itself carries that.

not the warmth.

not the ease.

the risk of it.

i’m not really trying to change that right now.

i think i’m just starting to understand it.

like—

of course i tighten.

of course there’s a part of me that doesn’t trust it.

of course connection doesn’t feel simple in my body.

it mattered too much.

but there’s also something else that hasn’t gone anywhere.

i know what it feels like when it’s real.

and even if that’s not the first thing my body reaches for—

it’s still there.

and to me, that feels like proof there’s more of it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

i recorded myself singing and playing the shruti box last night and i’m actually happy with how it turned out, which doesn’t happen super often :)

it’s the gayatri mantra, just simple, and figured i’d share it here in case it brings you a little calm or you feel like listening.

no pressure to respond, but if you do listen, i’d love to know what you felt!

i only know discomfort.
except for sex and dancing.
that’s it.

i’ve had something mysterious going on in my body for the past 10 years.
it’s been all-consuming.
i’m finally starting to feel a little better.

now i’m trying to come out of the functional freeze
i’ve been in for most of my life.

honestly, i’m scared to.

—

i asked my subconscious what to do
and it showed me a lizard.
which feels very on brand for my life lately.

—

a lizard doesn’t plan.
it doesn’t perform.

it moves when it’s warm enough.
it rests when it’s not.

—

return to something simple.
something that barely asks anything of you.

• something small
• something physical
• something that doesn’t require being seen

like:

• sit somewhere warm for a few minutes
• do a tiny, almost pointless body movement (stretch, sway, lay on the floor)
• follow the smallest impulse instead of the most important one

don’t try to expand right now—
just come back in small ways
and stop before it’s too much.

lizards don’t force themselves to act when they’re not ready.

—

so my work right now is this:

taking all the pressure off.
like… all of it.

letting it be uncomfortably slow.

trying to fall into a rhythm
i haven’t found yet.

one that’s as slow as nature.
or something like a lizard.

declaring that i’m not behind.
that i’m not doing it wrong.

that maybe
i’m healing 30 years of panic in my body.

that maybe
i’m becoming something new.

the best things happen slowly.

i’m starting to see i need to take my time.
more time than i ever thought was allowed.

of course this is how i find my power again.
i just couldn’t see it before.

in the past i was moving from what i thought was expected of me.
i had never seen anyone move slowly.
not like this.

not outside of survival.
not without constantly thinking about what needed to be done.

this feels like being given another chance.
to start moving from something else.

not from my mind.

—

is anyone else trying to come back
to a body that never felt safe?

that made something click for them

that made them feel seen

clear

lit up

because i know what it feels like to be missed

i think part of me believed

if i could unlock something in others

i wouldn’t have to feel that ache anymore

i think what i really wanted

was to feel understood

i’m starting to see

you can’t get the feeling you want by trying to create it in someone else

so when i reach out

hoping they’ll change how i feel

that’s my cue

to come back to myself

to stop looking outward for a feeling

i’m being asked to hold

i was scrolling today and noticing how many people write about the lighter parts of life.

joy. jokes. romance. little moments.

and my first instinct was to compare.

i thought,

wow… you seem pretty serious for a girl in her twenties.

that sentence felt familiar.

like something i’ve been carrying for a long time.

i’ve always had this sense that i come across as… heavier than other people.

more serious.

less easy. less light.

i don’t even know if that’s actually true.

but it’s how i’ve seen myself for as long as i can remember.

and it used to hurt.

it used to feel like evidence that something about me was off.

like i was missing whatever made other people feel effortless and fun to be around.

but now, when that thought comes up, it lands differently.

because i can see the context.

i can see that i’ve been doing my best inside a system that kept my body in stress for a long time.

of course i learned to move through the world in a more serious way.

of course i became someone who was watching, thinking, bracing, making sense of things.

that wasn’t my personality.

that was adaptation.

and something is shifting now.

i can feel myself coming out of it—slowly, naturally.

not because i’m forcing myself to be lighter,

but because i’m no longer living in the same level of pressure.

and what i’m starting to understand is this:

the heaviness i’ve known isn’t a reflection of who i am.

it’s a reflection of what i’ve moved through.

and if anything, it speaks to how much lightness i’m actually capable of.

so in this in-between space,

i don’t need to rush to become someone else.

i don’t need to prove that i can be more playful or more easy or more anything.

i just get to notice—

that i’m not who i thought i was.

and maybe i never was.

Last night I was in a crystal shop, choosing three crystals to wear on a necklace. One for my root, one for my sacral, one for my solar plexus. Safety. Connection. Power. The parts of me that determine whether I can actually be here, want things, and move toward them. I considered how expensive the crystals were going to be and decided I would just put them on the credit card. I was willing to pay whatever it cost to have access to that aliveness.

Then a musician I follow on Instagram told me I didn't have to pay for them. She lives exactly what I'm working toward — making money from music, DJing for the joy of it, teaching kids classes in the park. Of course she was the one to say it. Like that version of me already knows I don't have to pay with suffering to get there.

She looked at me with a huge, sincere smile and told me I had won the crystals. I couldn’t believe it. They looked activated, bright, alive. I was ready to put them on my body.

I held them in my hand and they turned gray.

This is what I’ve been dealing with in real life. I keep trying so hard to conquer safety, my desires, my sense of power. And the moment something opens — a little hope, a literal energy, a sense of possibility — it gets crushed by all my expectations. Like it can’t last. Like I won’t be able to keep it. Like it’s not actually available to me. This pattern is absolutely devastating.

The way I've been living, as a body stuck in functional freeze — a nervous system state where you're neither fully online nor fully shut down, just stuck — assumes that everything comes at a cost. If I want to create, I have to push. If I want money, I have to override myself. If I want a life that feels like mine, I have to force it into existence. It doesn’t even feel like a belief. It feels like reality.

And right now, with money being tight, it gets activated constantly. I’ll think about something I need or want, and there’s an immediate reaction in my body. Sharper than stress. It’s the rage I’m always covering up, suddenly activated — and then it turns on me. Like my invisible gigantic bully is pounding on me again, the one no one can see, which means no one believes I need any help. It’s collapse heightened by urgency and I’m screaming internally — I NEED TO FIX THIS. I NEED TO FIGURE IT OUT. I NEED TO DO SOMETHING NOW.

But that energy doesn’t actually move anything. It makes me do things in a panic — force myself to create, to produce, in the hopes of gaining connection or making money — and then I’m so wrecked by all the force I used that I forget I have a heart center I could access. And then I spend way more time than feels helpful in fetal position, frozen.

In the dream, I was fully prepared to pay. Willing to do anything in exchange for access to safety, connection, power. But what the dream showed me is something I don’t know how to do yet. That I might not have to pay to access myself. That the parts of me I’m trying so hard to activate might already be there.

The real edge isn’t accessing them. It’s holding them.

I can feel desire but it turns into obligation. I can feel energy but it turns into pressure. I can feel possibility, but it becomes something I have to immediately act on or I’ll lose it. And then it disappears anyway.

The dream showed me the pattern clearly — that I’m still operating like everything meaningful requires force. That there’s another way available, one that doesn’t rely on pressure, but I don’t trust it yet. Of course I don’t. I’ve been here for almost thirty years — long enough to work myself into a physical illness that had me begging to die. I’m still slowly coming out of that. That thirty years makes me sad. But I know that seeing it more clearly is going to help me.

The work is to notice the moment something alive in me turns gray. And instead of immediately trying to fix it or push past it — pause. Check in with my body. Look for proof that I’m safe where I am. Remember that I can choose, with my breath, to drop back into connection. And make whatever decision I would actually prefer to make. Not label the situation a problem. Not plan an attack that will leave me exhausted.

I’ve felt flickers of it a few times recently. A moment where I feel grounded, slightly taller than usual. Where I can actually see my options laid out in front of me — the force, and the easy way. Just being able to see both is new. That’s the thread I’m following.

I want to figure this out fast. I’m bitter that I’ve spent my whole life living this way — I have never not been exhausted. But I know my job is to slow down and do this the easy way. It’s crazy how unnatural that feels. Could it be possible that someday I’ll hardly have to try?

If any of this resonates — if you’ve felt that same thing where something alive in you just goes gray — I really want to hear about it. And if you’ve found something that helps, a practice, a reframe, a moment that shifted things, please share it. I’m genuinely trying to figure this out and I don’t want to do it alone. Drop it in the comments.

For most of my life, I thought growth meant trying harder. And boy, did I try!

Eventually, I began to see how much of that effort was conditioning—patterns my nervous system had learned to survive, belong, and stay safe.

Once I could see the patterns clearly, I didn’t have to live inside them the same way.

My life feels more like mine.

That shift is what led me to create this work.

I’ve built a body of guides and personal maps designed to help me and you recognize the patterns shaping our lives- and move from a place that feels more honest and self-directed.

There’s the Sovereignty Series— short written works for the moments you feel yourself slipping into over-effort, performance, or pressure. They are micro interruptions, clear reminders, and a return to yourself.

But sometimes clarity requires more than interruption.

It requires structure.

That’s where Personal Maps come in. They are structured written orientations that bring precision to the patterns, seasons, and transitions uniquely shaping your life. These are personalized analyses for when you want depth, not just reflection.

There are three:

Current Season — a clear read on where you are right now.
Pattern Intensive — a focused mapping of one recurring dynamic.
Year of Coherence — an annual orientation for the year ahead.

Everything now lives in one place.

You can explore the work here:
www.activatingeden.com

If this resonates, I’m glad you’re here.

Of course.

My father did violence to my mother and I saw it. He didn’t care about our wellbeing either — my brother’s or mine, at least that’s what his actions said. We were just leverage. A way to exert control over her.

That got into me in ways I’m still finding. I spent my whole life expecting to be tricked and humiliated and that when it came down to it, I simply wouldn’t matter enough.

I have never felt safe around men. Not even the ones I had every reason to believe were safe. I’ve been suspicious of every single one, and that has touched every action of my entire life. I became guarded very young — to avoid their attention, to make myself less visible, less available, less there. It worked pretty well but it also meant I wasn’t myself.

My true self was sensual. Passionate. Romantic and artistic and someone who wanted to make love to life. She just never felt safe enough to come out.

I didn’t know until I was 26 that I’m autistic. Looking back it helps explain so much — including why I had almost zero interest in men or boys as human beings unless they were gay. Literally. My particular profile comes with this relentless drive for autonomy, and the male gaze didn’t just bother me, it felt like a violation was occurring in real time. The ones I could sense were fascinated by me — I was grossed out by them. I judged them. I couldn’t even hug male relatives without something in me going no while my body just did it anyway because life moves too fast for me to stop and figure out my options.

I thought this was just... what being a woman was. I genuinely thought we all felt this way. That we’d collectively agreed men were good for nothing and we were just out here managing them 😂

It took me way too long to realize that wasn’t everyone’s experience.

At 16 I met my now husband and for a long time we saw each other as actually perfect. Then life happened to us in a way that felt cruel and unusual — I got an autoimmune disease and spent a couple years in bed, and he started drinking. Two people disappearing at the same time in different directions.

But we came back. And the versions of us that came back had learned something hard — that you can’t abandon yourself to serve the other person and call it love. We wouldn’t do that anymore. We came back knowing that.

Here’s the thing I want to be honest about though: he also came with a lot of traits that were genuinely hard for me to deal with.

An insanely high sex drive. Insecure attachment. Drinking too much with his friends — which, as I said, eventually became something that almost took us under entirely. There were so many moments where I wanted to cancel him for these things. Just exit. Done. We’re taught to do that now, to treat certain behaviors as disqualifying and walk away clean.

But I kept coming to him instead. Explaining my side of the experience. And every time — every single time — he made the effort to change.

It happens slower than I’d like. That part is true. But there is something I find genuinely romantic about watching his actual effort. Watching someone fight their own nature, their own wiring, their own habits — because they know it matters to you. Because you matter to them. That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.

And then there’s this other thing he did that I’m not sure he even fully knows.

He became my bodyguard. Not in a protective-possessive way. He made enough space around me that I could start dipping my toe back into being myself. The sensual version. The real one. The one I’d kept locked up since I was a little girl trying not to be seen.

In all the other ways I was guarded — terrified to spend money, scared to be messy, scared to take up space — he was just there, encouraging me to explore. And we found a balance in each other that I genuinely did not think was available to me.

It makes me believe in life. I don’t know how else to say it. It just makes me believe in life.

I’m not trying to make any observations about men in general. I just want to write about what I’ve seen in him, because it’s allowed me to see it in others, and because today this is what felt healing to write.

He wants to make my life easier every single day and is willing to do hard things to make that happen. His sense of how important I am to him doesn’t waver. Ever. He wants to feel needed — which honestly, after decades of dangerous overfunctioning, I receive as an enormous gift.

And then there’s something harder to explain. Sometimes when he’s taking care of me he doesn’t even seem human — he’s just pure strength and sensitivity arriving at the exact same time. I didn’t know a person could do that!

When we’ve had serious disagreements — real ones, while our daughter has been alive — he says: just don’t worry. Even if you decide you don’t want to be with me, I’m going to take care of you and our daughter for the rest of my life.

I’d been taking notes on angry men my whole life.

That’s who he chose to become.

P.S. Our daughter is two. When my husband and I talk passionately — even happily, even loudly with love — she yells at us to stop. She came out already knowing she doesn’t have to tolerate overwhelming energy. I know my experiences helped shape her DNA. But I would’ve fought for that in her either way.

She is the perfect mix of both of us and we say that out loud to each other every single day.

She’s also, I think, who I would have been, if I had been safe enough.

As an autistic kid who knew something was profoundly different about me but would never have guessed it was autism, I noticed patterns in everything. My brain works through global-first processing- I look for the frame before I look for the pieces. When you’re wired this way and the world feels hostile, you try to reverse-engineer it. I was searching for reality's source code, the underlying rules that would explain everything."

I needed an explanation for why the world was the way it was. Why I was here. Why everything hurt so much. How I could escape from it, or transcend it, or at least survive it. The world felt evil and chaotic, and I felt like a victim of something I couldn’t name.

Other people found comfort in connection. Meanwhile, I’d leave a party feeling like I’d left a warzone.

I grew up in a high control religion. I questioned it constantly—obsessively, really—but I still placed it above myself. I trusted it was real and true, and that I just wasn’t worthy enough to understand it yet.

The rules were many: Don’t trust your body—it will lead you astray. Don’t drink caffeine—it alters God’s design. Don’t watch R-rated movies—the world wants to corrupt you. Dozens of small prohibitions that added up to one big mandate: monitor yourself constantly. Is this thought okay? Is this feeling allowed? Am I staying within the lines?

I internalized the central message beneath all the rules: your instincts are wrong, your desires are corrupt, and you need an external system to tell you how to be. I was learning, very early, not to trust myself. Which was convenient, because I’d already learned that my way of experiencing the world was quite different from other people’s—so different that I couldn’t trust my own perceptions. I had to be the broken one.

So I learned to trust other people’s judgment over my own, even while being simultaneously convinced they couldn’t see as clearly as I could. The contradiction didn’t matter. If everyone else saw things one way and I saw them differently, I must be wrong. Right? The religion just formalized what I’d already figured out: don’t trust yourself, ever, even when you’re pretty sure you’re right.

Then a pattern emerged that would define my life. Every few years, I’d discover a new system or philosophy that completely shattered my previous worldview—and I do mean shattered, like the floor falling out from under me, like waking up in a different room—and I’d throw myself into it entirely, study it, create within it, try to live by it, and also keep questioning it because that’s just how my brain works—I can’t help it. And then, inevitably, something new would come along and shatter that framework too, and the cycle would start over. Each time I wondered if I was losing my fucking mind.

When I broke from Mormonism—my parents left when I was 12 and I followed—I landed hard in science because it felt like freedom—empirical, testable, real, no more invisible authorities, just observable reality. I clung to it. Then in some college class my eyes were opened to the fact that it was only white men I had been hearing from, that Western and Eastern modes of thought were vastly different, that male and female bodies were vastly different, and that the nepotism going on in scientific journals made all conclusions laughable. The floor dropped out again. Whoops.

My boyfriend taught me a new framework around then: weed heals all. And honestly? For a while, it did. Until it turned on me and compounded all my health problems. Another thing I couldn’t trust.

By then I was desperate for something that predated all the modern corruption, something ancient enough to be true. I started piecing together spiritual material that the oldest civilizations had in common—if multiple ancient cultures pointed to the same truths, maybe that was the real signal beneath all the noise. Around that time I had an experience during a cacao ceremony that shocked me and whatever I felt, I took it as proof there was much more to reality than I’d been taught. Was I crazy? Was I on my way to enlightenment?

After this so-called spiritual awakening, combined with all I had learned in college, I could see through a lot of the bullshit—giving our life force to jobs to get paid minimum wage and go home and watch TV, being fed literal poison, the whole system designed to keep us numb and compliant. I distrusted the government, of course—thought they were literally evil—and people rolled their eyes at me. When COVID hit, I distrusted the vaccine and even the virus itself. I could see it was a real illness, but I thought it might have a nefarious origin. People told me I was paranoid, conspiracy-brained. At least, that’s how it looked to me then. I worried too, whether I was seeing clearly or spiraling.

I discovered near-death experiences and fell deep into New Age spirituality because here was empirical evidence—people dying, coming back, reporting the same things—and here was a whole community telling me that consciousness creates reality, that we’re all connected, that love and light could heal everything. I threw myself into transcendence. Breathwork, carefully curated foods that ‘raised my vibration,’ hours of meditation—all to rise above the body, to transcend the ego, because the body was the trap, the illusion, the thing keeping me stuck in lower vibrations. I was dissociating and judging other people hard LOL.

Until that framework shattered too and suddenly I was all about the exact opposite—eat more meat, embody your anger, stop spiritually bypassing because the body isn’t the problem, disconnection from the body is the problem. Whiplash. Again. Was I grounding myself or just grasping at the next shiny thing? I didn’t know. I never knew.

Quantum physics came next—or at least YouTube videos about it at 3am. Double-slit experiments: the observer affects the observed, reality isn’t fixed, consciousness might be fundamental—and finally here was a framework that could hold both the spiritual experiences I’d had and the scientific rigor I craved. Then neuroscience, learning that the brain is filtering out millions of bits of information every second and our reality comes from structures that formed prelanguage, that the self is constructed and perception is limited, and maybe if I understood the mechanism of consciousness I could finally understand why nothing felt real. Why I didn’t feel real.

Each framework felt like the answer—not just an answer, but the thing that would finally make me stop feeling insane—and each one eventually revealed itself to be just another lens I was looking through, just another system telling me how to see. The cycle continued. I was either the world’s most dedicated truth-seeker or completely unhinged. Take your pick.

No Floor

I cycled through worldviews so fast that eventually my mind couldn’t keep up.

The breaking point came about five years ago when I was chronically ill—autism and other factors had worn my body down in ways I didn’t fully understand—and I was desperate for answers, so I did ayahuasca a bunch of times, searching for the pattern that would explain why my body was failing, why I couldn’t function in this world, why everything hurt so much.

Instead, ayahuasca pushed me further into a state where I couldn’t distinguish between symbolic meaning and literal reality and I started believing that the symbols appearing in my dreams were direct communications about what was actually happening in the world. The floor didn’t just drop out this time—there was no floor. I was connecting dots that weren’t there, or maybe they were there but I couldn’t hold them in any coherent way, and the debris from all those shattered frameworks had left my body, brain, and psyche so fractured that everything made perfect sense to me while everyone around me could see I was detached from reality.

Here’s what haunts me: the themes of the Epstein files that suddenly the whole world is dealing with—power, control, systemic abuse, sexual abuse—were all the same things I was obsessively concerned with during psychosis. I was seeing patterns of control and exploitation everywhere. I accused people in my own family of things that weren’t true. I was connecting dots that didn’t exist, seeing abuse where there was none. I was absolutely, undeniably wrong.

But the patterns I was obsessed with? Those were real. Just not where I was looking.

The Rabbit Hole has a Rabbit Hole

Fast forward to now. Recently I fell down a rabbit hole with the Epstein files and my brain latched onto them the way it always does when something doesn’t make sense—obsessively, compulsively trying to find the pattern, connecting dots on Reddit at 2am with my eyes burning, one more thread, one more connection, trying to map it out, the history of the world. Plus everything in the multiverse?

I kept trying to comfort myself with the narrative I’d been building: that oppressive systems are finally loosening their grip, both at the macro level and in our individual lives, that real change is coming. I was working so hard to stay positive, to keep my grip on reality.

But after days of consuming Epstein content, something shifted and I started asking different questions, not about him but about me, about all of us.

How have I decided what to believe throughout my life? Think of all the media I’ve consumed since I was a toddler. I thought about my years in school, how much of what I learned came straight from McGraw Hill textbooks—textbooks published by a company owned by Ghislaine Maxwell’s father in the 80s and 90s. The same family at the center of all of this. So what does that mean about everything I was taught? Cool. Cool cool cool.

I thought about how much time I spend consuming—we all do—and I wondered: what level of control has been exerted on me this whole time? On all of us?

My boyfriend helped me see something I’d somehow never put together: the wealthy have always controlled the technology. I mean, of course they have—they fund it, own it, direct it—but I’d never thought about what that actually means. Has the CIA really been dealing with aliens this whole time? Time travel? Have they been employing AI for decades? Are you fucking kidding me? What does this mean about all my experiences on earth? What have I been looking at this whole time?

And then there’s this: someone is controlling what gets leaked to us from the Epstein files. Someone chose what we see and what stays hidden. Which means even this—this thing I’m treating as evidence, as confirmation of patterns—is curated. Controlled. And what if it’s just a distraction from something else entirely? What if while I’m obsessing over these files, connecting these dots, building this narrative, the real manipulation is happening somewhere I’m not even looking? How do I reconcile that? How do I hold the possibility that these patterns are both real AND being used to direct my attention exactly where someone wants it? The rabbit hole has a rabbit hole and I don’t know which level of paranoia is actually appropriate anymore.

And here’s the thing that’s really fucking with me: my boyfriend’s dad used to tell us about the Rothschilds, adrenochrome, Hollywood, reptilians. He was obsessed with the Bible. A great researcher. And of course it sounded crazy—we’d listen politely and exchange glances and I’d think, okay, this is too far, this is where pattern-seeking becomes paranoia. He’s died since then. And now I’m looking at the Epstein files and I literally can’t believe that all of this stuff could possibly be true. But what if some of it is? How do I sort the signal from the noise when I can’t trust my own discernment, when I’ve been wrong about reality so many times before?

I got all worked up about all of this. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think straight. So I did what I always do—I reached for a framework to make sense of it. This time: systems theory. I coached myself through it, found a way to see the patterns that felt hopeful instead of terrifying. And this morning I posted an Instagram carousel because I thought maybe I could help other people do the same thing. I wanted people to take comfort in the idea that regimes built on extraction and erasure are collapsing because people are becoming more aware of them. I thought awareness meant change was imminent. I wanted to encourage all of us to feel and act in sovereignty in our own lives, believing that would ripple out and affect things at the macro level. I was trying so hard to stay positive, to find the hopeful pattern in all of this.

But then I started questioning that too. What if systems theory is just another framework I’m using to cope? What if it’s not revealing truth but just making me feel better? Is it somehow exploiting me and my energy the same way everything else has?

I used to know exactly what to do in moments like this because I’d learned it from spiritual influencers over the years, and I’d repeat it like a mantra: Don’t take this in, protect your energy, go outside, commune with nature.

But here’s the thing I’ve rarely admitted (even to myself): nature creeps me out. Monkeys kill for sport. They eat babies. Nature can be peaceful but it’s also violent and indifferent.

Yes, sunsets have made me cry, especially when I’m with one of the few people I’m close to, but just as often nature seems like an AI backdrop—the sun and moon as alien to me as anything else. Sometimes I hug a tree, trying so hard to connect to what I’ve been told is ancient wisdom, and I feel nothing. Just the same existential dread I’ve always felt. And then I’m furious at myself for not being able to feel what those spiritual people seem to feel so easily.

And those spiritual influencers telling me to bypass my anger—are they just white supremacists in yoga pants profiting off me ignoring my rage about the Epstein files, about all of it? (But also my brain literally cannot process that those files are real, that this happened, that it’s still happening.)

I have never felt at home in my body. I have never felt at home in nature. I have never felt at home with my family. I have never felt at home anywhere.

So what am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to move through a reality that has never felt real to me? I’ve spent my entire life searching for a framework that would finally make sense of the chaos, that would make me make sense, and now I’m looking at the frameworks themselves and seeing control, manipulation, well-meaning bullshit, or some combination of all three. I’m either seeing the truth or losing my mind. Again. Still. Always.

I looked back at that Instagram post and deleted it. Was I helping people or was I just publicly coping? Was it insight or delusion? So I’m writing this instead—at least here I can admit I don’t have answers.

I’m at an impasse. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s real.

For now, I’m going to focus on the people right beside me. The ones I can see in person, not through a screen, and actually touch. And writing this shit out helped me immensely—at least while I was doing it, at least for now. I do believe there’s something about creating, about making something concrete when your mind can’t find purchase anywhere else. That’s all I’ve got.

I didn’t have language for what I was doing. But it was very obvious that no one around me lived like I did. No one else acted like there was a tiger in every room. Everyone seemed so much more comfortable inside themselves, and I worried I was born without something they had been given. Meanwhile, I was constantly drowning in shame over my thoughts, which—spoiler alert—were just regular human thoughts.

I didn’t know I was autistic. But I knew the world felt wrong—too loud, too sharp, too disharmonious and ungodly. I knew most people and environments felt overwhelming and evil. I knew I was different in a way I couldn’t explain. And I believed with all my might that there was something shameful about my composition, like God had felt the need to test me.

As if that weren’t confusing enough, my family became Mormon when I was 6. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you give a perfectionist child a religion that treats thought crimes like actual crimes, I can tell you: nothing good. I already had a mind built for spotting danger everywhere, and I absorbed everything I could about the church’s values and tried to execute them flawlessly. I began believing I had to outsmart my body at every turn, that I had to analyze every single one of my physical impulses.

I thought thoughts mattered just as much as my actions—that God had access to my brain and was taking notes. As a hyperempathetic human being, all I wanted was to be in service to people. I thought the path of erasing myself in the service of others was the only way I’d ever be allowed to enjoy anything without punishment. Of course I was watching myself. Of course I was trying to catch the bad parts before they could surface. Of course I believed that the ego I couldn’t get rid of would disqualify me from love.

I only recently learned that this has a name.

Scrupulosity OCD is what happens when a brain that’s wired to spot danger starts treating thoughts and moral mistakes as threats. In environments that emphasize purity and constant self-monitoring, that alarm system turns inward. Your own mind becomes something you have to police in order to stay safe. You become both the prisoner and the guard, and somehow you’re still getting written up for crimes.

Reading about it was a life-altering moment. It felt so fucking good to be

seen.

* * *

When I was sixteen, I fell in love at first sight. It was the only time the fascist in my head was overpowered, and it was the first time I felt happy. My partner became my everything in an instant, and I stayed addicted. He was my only connection to peace.

He was the first human I wanted to be affectionate with. With him I could soften completely. I didn’t have to be the perfect person I thought I had to be in front of everyone else. My body learned what it felt like to be held without being evaluated.

Looking back, I think this is part of why spirituality later became so magnetic to me. (By the way, I guess what I’m into is often referred to as New Age spirituality.) I was looking for that same feeling—some presence that would hold me without judging me. Because my constant inner monitor kept me absolutely miserable, and I was desperate for an off switch.

My boyfriend and I centered our lives around each other for the next decade.

When I was twenty, everything cracked open during a cacao ceremony a friend hosted at our house. I didn’t know at the time, but I experienced a kundalini awakening. From that day, I’ve been way more aware of all the energies surrounding me. Everything became more vivid. For the first time, I felt plugged into something vast and alive, something that didn’t seem to be measuring me.

I was on a high for a couple days. Then I started feeling sick. And kept getting sicker and sicker.

Looking back, I think my body was already on the edge—chronically stressed, undiagnosed, barely holding it together. The awakening wasn’t the cause; it was the final stressor that pushed everything over the cliff.

There are many probable causes. There are all these comorbidities that come with being autistic—turns out the brain difference comes with a whole constellation of bonus health issues. I also have the MTHFR gene, which makes me more vulnerable to things like mold (and we definitely had mold in the basement, because of course we did). The kundalini awakening had stirred up a lifetime of trauma. And my nervous system, after twenty years of trying to erase itself, finally just... couldn’t do it anymore.

It felt like whatever had been holding everything together finally let go. My organs started doing wacky shit—and that’s the technical term LOL. I felt so weak that I lived mostly in bed for a couple years. My brain felt poisoned. I was beyond terrified.It was some kind of autoimmune condition—I was in bad pain all day, every day, and I never did get it diagnosed. But I didn't know that this was happening because my nervous system was overwhelmed.

But I didn’t know that this was happening because my nervous system was overwhelmed.

The story my brain told me? I fucked up in the most vile, foolish way. I was given something precious and I wasn’t innocent enough with it. I hadn’t been careful enough. I hadn’t eaten right, meditated enough, protected myself enough. I believed my disease was the consequence for not doing life the right way—like I’d failed the test.

So I couldn’t help but correct myself even more obsessively. Every flare meant I had failed again. I lived inside this loop of shame and hypervigilance, convinced that if I could just figure out the right combination of discipline and purity, I would start to heal. If I could just

be good enough, my body would stop punishing me.

It’s almost funny now how backwards I had it. The more I tried to control everything, the sicker I got. The perfectionism wasn’t the cure—it was gasoline on the fire.

But it was not very funny then.

* * *

I was so sick and hopeless for so long that I wished I could die. I was desperate for relief from the absolute insanity inside me that wasn’t actually chaos at all. It was a structure. A pattern I picked up in my youth that I didn’t realize I should question.

In that wreckage, spirituality was my only source of hope. Reiki, plant medicine, energy work—they spoke in a language that said my body wasn’t the enemy, that maybe something beautiful was moving through me. Obviously I yearned for a God who didn’t punish, and a universe that didn’t treat my suffering like a test.

Then quarantine hit and our lives imploded. My partner started drinking heavily. When he drank, he became a different person, and life turned into pure hell. It felt like the end of the world. Even though I’d planned to be with him forever since I was sixteen, things got so bad that I broke up with him and moved out.

He begged me to stay and promised to change. I took him back after three weeks. Things got a little better for a while. Then the drinking came back, and I fell apart all over again.

Though we were living together again, I felt as isolated as I’d always been before him. My autistic brain doesn’t instinctively reach out to people, and I didn’t have a community. Mostly I spent my days alone with my own thoughts—which, if you’ve been paying attention, is a dangerous neighborhood for me to hang out in unsupervised.

I started bingeing on spiritual creators online, trying to find something to hold onto, a framework to understand my life, a story that didn’t hinge on “my body is failing and I don’t know why.”

At my lowest point, I dropped hundreds of dollars on a tarot reading. The moment I saw the cute blonde psychic on that Zoom call, I felt like I was interfacing with my destiny. Her energy was intoxicating. When she started to speak, I felt a tingling at the crown of my head. I’d heard someone say once that your crown chakra tingles when truth hits, so I was convinced that was what I was experiencing. I guess that’s what you do when you’re desperate—you reach for any framework that makes the random feel meaningful.

I didn’t share anything about myself, and the reading blew my mind. How could she describe my life with such depth? How could she reference the dreams I’d never told anyone about? She genuinely knew things—I’m not sure how, and it doesn’t really matter now. What matters is that those accurate details made everything else she said feel equally true, even the parts that were pure speculation.

She told me to leave my partner. She told me my twin flame was coming. She told me I’d soon live the life I’d secretly dreamed of—serving plant medicine, doing Reiki, being guided by a mentor who would finally show me how to live.

My biggest wish has always been to have a guide—someone who’s infinitely patient, someone who could see me and tell me what to do. The fact she somehow “knew” those dreams I’d never voiced felt like proof that someone could be psychic, and that it must come from God.

It felt like everything finally clicked. The pain wasn’t random, and I wasn’t broken or corrupted. I was

chosen.

So I ended things with my partner again. I gave the psychic all my money. I rearranged my life around this promise. Looking back, so much of what I did was wild. Objectively unhinged. And the destiny she sold me never happened. The man she said was my soulmate was never going to be mine.

I spent a year deeply sick and utterly alone, without the only person who ever made life feel survivable.

What I see now is how airtight that whole world was. Every outcome confirmed the system:

When I was failing, it meant I hadn’t surrendered enough. If nothing happened, it meant I needed more faith. If I doubted, it meant my ego was blocking destiny. There was no exit that didn’t look like moral failure. It was an immaculately designed, perfect trap.

* * *

I spent a year and a half on my own. I even moved to Peru to do ayahuasca ceremonies, desperately hoping plant medicine would heal my body. And I stayed there pursuing the twin flame prophecy—chasing someone who was never meant to be mine. When none of it materialized, I finally gave up.

A few months later, I got it in my gut to call my ex. I felt such shame—like it meant I was weak, like I was reaching for something poisonous, like I was failing the spiritual test.

He told me he was sober.

THANK GOD.

We reunited. And once I had a real person to love again, I had no need for prophecies. Having someone to sleep beside, and someone who really knew me made all that psychic shit seem silly. My body was like, ‘Oh right, this is what I actually needed.’

We’ve been together since. We’re mostly very happy. A couple years after reuniting, we had a daughter.

* * *

Yesterday, I saw a creator I follow offering a giveaway for a spiritual reading and thought, why not? Then a part of me hesitated—I’ve learned that those can mess with me—but I was drawn by the promise of dopamine, that little hit of “maybe this means something.”

The reading arrived in the form of an email, and I started holding my breath when I saw how long it was. Pages and pages of dense text. As I read, I was hit with nausea, dread, that familiar drop in my stomach.

And in addition to the physical response, something else was happening: I was believing it. It was telling me all the truth about my life I was too scared or in denial to admit.

It spoke of tests, cycles closing, pivotal choices, and a relationship ending. A harsh breakup at the end of the year. Lessons I must pass or repeat. The core message: the romantic relationship I’m in isn’t right for me. I need to learn how to be on my own. It would be painful, but it was the right thing to do. And in a few months, a new romance would come my way. It told me I’m a wounded healer, that I’m meant for Reiki, that if I don’t choose correctly I’ll relive the pattern.

My OCD brain didn’t just latch onto this—it grabbed it with both hands. This was my final test. I was being advised to leave the best support system I’ve ever had in order to reach my destiny. I was crushed. I did not want to leave my partner at all. We’re enjoying life! We’re obsessed with our daughter who makes our lives feel like heaven, even when work is hard and money is tight and everything else is a mess.

Even as I was believing the reading, I was also grieving. The terror of separating again was unbearable—so much deeper this time because it wasn’t just losing him. It was breaking apart the life we’d built, the family that makes everything else worth it. I was simultaneously convinced I had to do it and devastated by the thought of doing it.

Then I got to the end and something clicked.

This was nearly the exact same reading I’d received five years ago. The same predictions. The same warnings. The same promised transformation that never came.

What the actual fuck.

This shit plugged right into something hardwired in me—the part that believes life is a test and pain means I’ve failed. If I choose wrong, I will be punished. Staying where I am is betraying something sacred.

Here’s what I understand now:

I’m finally able to recognize this pattern—it masquerades as intuition, but it’s actually just the familiar voice of my trauma. I didn’t fall for it because I’m naive. I fell for it because I was trained to doubt myself, and because after so many quiet, isolated hours with my own relentless thoughts, a voice that sounded certain felt like someone finally handing me answers.

All that spiritual language hurt because it met my trauma exactly where it lives—in that place that believes I’m always one wrong move away from deserving punishment.

Here’s the thing about being autistic: my nervous system was already running on high alert, already treating the world as threatening, already prone to overwhelm. That same wiring that made me vulnerable to scrupulosity as a Mormon kid—that hair-trigger alarm system constantly scanning for moral danger—made me equally vulnerable to spiritual bypassing as a sick adult. When your nervous system is dysregulated, when you’re chronically overwhelmed and desperate for relief, these systems that promise order and meaning and a way to finally feel safe become irresistible. Different costumes, same underlying belief:

something is wrong with me, and if I can just figure out the right way to be, I’ll finally be safe.

The tarot reader didn’t invent that belief—she was probably operating from the same one herself. And readings like the one I got yesterday? They perpetuate a cycle whether anyone means them to or not: you’re special, you’re chosen, you’re being tested, and if you fail, it’s because you weren’t enlightened enough.

It’s the same perfectionism. Just wearing the irresistible costume of divine purpose.

* * *

I think I’ve arrived at the moment my life will never be the same.

I read that email and I was terrified for maybe five minutes. And then I could see through it. I broke the spell. The loop dissolved because I finally saw it for what it was.

And breaking it changes everything. I don’t have to scan every decision for hidden meaning anymore. I don’t have to ask if I’m choosing the perfect path. I don’t have to live like I’m one wrong move away from the ultimate punishment. I just get to live.

I’m still spiritual. I feel like I understand the concept of “spirit” much better having gone through all that shit. I have learned that spirituality without agency is just another cage. I’m done asking strangers what to do with my life. I’ve been learning what my actual intuition sounds like—not the fear, not the OCD, not the desperate hope that someone else knows better than me.

I am finally hearing the difference between guidance and doom. I can feel whether something opens me up or shuts me down.

I’m no longer on trial! I am embracing presence without trying to fix myself, and with the understanding that there’s no test to pass. It is such a sweet relief to allow myself to just be here with the person I love and our daughter and this messy, beautiful, totally unplanned life.

Love you for listening. Thanks for sticking with me through the chaos. I’m grateful I stuck with myself through it too.

Lately I’ve been practicing a different response. When the drop comes, I pause and read this to myself:

Something in me wants more. That doesn’t make me needy, greedy or flawed. It means I’m alive. I’m allowed to want what I can’t have. I don’t have to punish myself for it. I don’t have to disappear. This moment is uncomfortable, and it isn’t dangerous. I can be here. I can keep myself company. I still belong to my own life.

Then I do take some small action to show myself I’m allowed to want. A karate kick usually does the trick.

Nothing much changes at first. I still can’t buy the thing. But I know that every time I stay with myself instead of getting lost in stories about my worth, my body learns that life isn’t something I’m locked out of.

I made a tiny guide, a five-minute reset, for this exact moment, and I’m using it every day. It absolutely helps!

Love, Eden

P.S. If you want to try it out with me, you can find it here.

(it’s $3 for a 2 pg phone companion)

A Note From Me

Before I invite you into the practice itself, I want to share how this relationship found me.

A few months ago, I stumbled across a YouTube video of a female shaman speaking about the womb. She said the most powerful thing a woman could do was to build a relationship with it—and then begin creating from that place. She described the womb as the easiest place to manifest from.

She said the womb creates before thought.
That it doesn’t lie to itself.
That it understands timing.
That it mirrors the earth.
That it knows how to hold without forcing—and release without gripping.

I sat with that for a while. When I considered what I already knew about the womb—what it can grow, what it can sustain, what it has carried inside me my entire life—I realized it must hold a kind of power far beyond my understanding.

I was intrigued. And I wanted to experience it for myself.

So I began building a relationship with my womb in a very simple way. I started asking it questions every morning and every night. Questions like What do you need right now? or What do you want to create? I thanked it for being with me my entire life. I thanked it for creating my daughter—the greatest miracle I know. If my womb could grow her, it already felt like absolute magic to me.

At first, nothing really happened.

For weeks, I didn’t receive answers the way I expected. No clear messages. No dramatic sensations. Just the quiet practice of showing up and listening anyway. Honestly, I felt frustrated. I considered giving up more than once. But something in me wanted to keep going.

And then, slowly, something shifted.

I began to see images or hear words when I asked my questions. One day, when I asked how I could take care of my womb, I received two images: blueberries and a grass skirt.

I was completely perplexed.

Eventually—and somewhat begrudgingly, because it felt a little unsacred—I asked ChatGPT to help me interpret the symbols. I was shocked by how deeply the message resonated. I’m sharing it here so you can see how even a couple of simple images can carry profound meaning.

Blueberries came through as a message of small, potent nourishment. From the womb’s perspective, they suggested that what I needed was simple, not grand. That nourishment could be sweet, gentle, and frequent. That tiny things, done consistently, create vitality. Blueberries aren’t a feast food—they’re gathered one by one. This pointed to tending rather than striving, trusting accumulation over force, choosing what’s naturally available instead of what’s engineered.

Because blueberries grow low to the ground, they also carried the message of staying close to the earth—receiving without reaching, nourishment without performance. It felt like my womb was saying: Feed me what is simple, alive, and within reach.

The message from the grass skirt gave me goosebumps. It carried themes of movement, protection, and embodied rhythm. Not armor—but covering that moves. Protection without restriction. An invitation to sway, to breathe, to dance. Grass is flexible, renewable, rooted but not rigid.

The grass skirt felt like a request for more movement in my hips, sensuality without exposure, ritual without heaviness. It also felt ancestral—movement for the body itself, not performance for an audience. The message was clear: Let me move. Let me be adorned lightly. Let me be felt, not managed.

Together, the images formed a cohesive message: simple nourishment, gentle adornment, rhythmic movement, earth-based pleasure. Not excess. Not deprivation. Sufficiency and sensuality. Almost like my womb was saying, Feed me simply. Let me sway. We will grow from there.

This message came to me during a time when I was in a freeze state from stress. I hadn’t moved much in days. I was sad, worried, and undernourished. While it took effort to put on music and dance, it felt deeply comforting to receive the sense that no matter how dark things felt, rhythm wasn’t out of reach.

My womb wanted me to feel better. And that made me feel held.

It felt maternal. Like a mother. Like a grandmother. Like an aunt.

Even though it still amused me that I needed a “middleman” to interpret the symbolism, I decided that would be my method when meaning wasn’t immediately clear. Because it worked. It helped me reorient toward the way I actually want to live. And honestly—who cares how the message arrives if it brings you home?

Now, when I ask my womb questions, I almost always receive images or words. I love witnessing her intelligence. Through listening to her wisdom, I’ve learned to trust myself more. That trust has changed how I move through the world. I feel more confident in my decisions, more anchored in my body, and less dependent on external validation.

Many of the seeds I’ve planted in my womb—intentions, desires, inner shifts—have come to me with an ease I hadn’t experienced before. This was very different from my experiences with traditional law-of-attraction practices. There was no forcing, no constant visualizing, no pressure to maintain a certain emotional state. Instead, there was regulation, relationship, and release.

I’ll give you an example. I’ve wanted to record music my entire life but felt completely blocked from the possibility. It was one of my deepest wishes, yet I couldn’t envision it actually happening. I asked my womb for help, and I got started recording effortlessly a couple days later. I just suddenly had the energy to do it.

I was ecstatic. And somehow, I now have complete confidence in my ability to make the music I have always dreamed about. This shift couldn’t have felt more complete.

Thank you, womb!!

Another thing I love about this practice is seeing myself as earth—and my womb as one of the ways I consciously relate to myself as earth: living, cyclical, responsive, and wise beyond linear logic.

The practice is still mysterious to me. I don’t pretend to have it all figured out. But I love deepening the relationship—listening, trusting, and co-creating with something inside me that feels ancient and alive.

I hope you enjoy connecting with your womb as much as I have. To me, it feels like a direct connection to what is sacred. I hope this practice helps you feel supported and held. I hope it shocks you with your own creative power.

Thank you for being here with me. I love you.

<3, Eden

You can find the full guide here: guide

I found what felt like another version of myself on Instagram. I don’t know her, and I have no idea how I even landed on her profile. I was stunned to see that we’re passionate about the exact same things—except she’s been far more successful. I found myself thinking that the secret to her success was how constantly she expresses herself. And that’s always been one of my biggest struggles.

I saw a photos of a book she’d published, her name on a marquee, and it felt like the wind got knocked out of me. My face went hot. I actually felt sick to my stomach. Inside, it felt like I had never known love before—like I’d been rejected from the moment I was born. I felt so much shame.

This is a pattern I know intimately. It visits me often.

In my head I said, focus. You can meet this. You can reframe this pain and come back to yourself.

I could feel that this wound came from childhood, even if I don’t know the exact moment it formed. Something like:

If someone else shines, I disappear.

I realized my system learned to track uniqueness as survival, because being “special” once felt like the only way to stay seen. Somewhere along the way, I learned that love and safety were conditional.

So for a long time now, whenever I encounter someone doing the work I care about most, I hurt.

It lands as:

What I offer has already been done better.

My body reads their existence as proof that I’m unnecessary.

That’s why it feels annihilating.

I was determined to meet this differently. I set out to map the loop, and this is what I found:

I’m am passionate about what I’m passionate about.
I come across someone who mirrors me.
My system concludes: I don’t matter.
I exile myself internally.
I feel hopeless. I lose all drive to engage.
The belief is reinforced: See? I fade.

I realized the only way out of this pattern is to interrupt it at the meaning-making step.

So I said to myself:

This is familiar.
This isn’t truth.
This is old wiring.

Then I reoriented:

Their existence doesn’t erase mine.
It shows me I’m not alone in what I care about.

And honestly? I still felt sick. A whole cocktail of jealousy, grief, rage, and despair moved through me.

What surfaced next was a deep, deep fear:

What if I’m always this undone by other people’s success?

The shame in that idea.

But I could feel that simply seeing this pattern was already loosening its grip. I decided I would return to this map every time I meet this trigger.

My system learned this response over many years. It won’t unlearn it in a handful of moments. But it will update if, over time, the experience becomes:

The feeling arises.
I notice I’m in the loop.
I stay with myself.
Nothing terrible happens.

The body learns through lived contradiction.

The fear that I’ll “never get over this” is just the old logic speaking:

If I’m not special, I’m unsafe.

The good news is I don’t need to prove that wrong. I only need to keep giving my system one new piece of data at a time:

I can feel this and still be important.

My ego needed proof. So I asked myself what about me can’t be replicated.

My perspective was forged by the exact life I’ve lived—by every place I’ve been broken open, every way I’ve learned to survive, every repair I’ve had to make inside myself. No one else carries this combination of wounds and wisdom. No one else feels the world through this nervous system. No one else notices what I notice, asks the questions I ask, or translates pain the way I do. Even my presence changes a room in a way that can’t be duplicated.

What I bring has never existed before.
It will never exist again.

When I really let that land, it becomes easy to see myself—and everyone else—as miraculous.

Now a new thought is available to me:

Isn’t it beautiful that another person’s brilliance doesn’t cancel mine?

My survival wiring taught me:

Only one gets to shine.

The new understanding is:

Many expressions can carry the same light.

It’s honestly a relief to realize that my work isn’t to outshine anyone.
It’s simply to stay with myself when this inevitably rises again.

<3, Eden

Do any of you struggle with this trigger?
How do you usually deal with it?
What do you think of this reframe?

I would really, really love to know in the comments.

Do you know how badly I want that?
It lives in my body like hunger.

And yet every day, I live almost the exact opposite of that life.

I wake up wanting sunlight, but not being able to tolerate its brightness. I want nature more than anything, but nature overwhelms me. I am autistic. The very things that are natural to being human often feel impossible or punishing to me. Even the things that heal me come with a cost.

I’m eating a lot of frozen meals even though I fucking hate them. I don’t have the energy to cook. I never have. I think constantly about how much better my relationship with myself would be if I were eating grilled meat, nutrient-dense nourishment, warm meals that feel like care. I crave cooked vegetables. I know what my body wants. I just can’t always give it what it’s asking for.

My husband has to work out of state because that job pays him so much better than anything around our town. We all hate this arrangement because our family feels incomplete the entire time he’s gone. None of us are as well cared for as we are when we’re together. We eat worse. We sleep worse. I unravel in small, frightening ways.

But we need money to live. So we endure it. We accept this separation because the world makes it feel necessary. And every time he leaves, I’m reminded how much of my survival depends on love being physically near.

My two-year-old gets almost everything I have. She keeps me in good spirits, and she deserves my best. But it means I have very little left.

I live with my mom, dad, and brother. I love them deeply. We’re all doing our best inside a life none of us really chose.I think about them all day. I’m aware that anything could happen to us at any time, and I don’t want to take a single moment for granted. And still—I don’t reach out much. I consider it so many times a day, and can’t think of what to say. Being an autistic girl in survival mode taught me to disappear. Closeness once meant confusion and overwhelm. My body remembers that. So now I live inside a contradiction: wanting intimacy, and being afraid of it.

I have my phone in my hand pretty much all day. I use it to order groceries because my body lives so deeply in a freeze state that I’ve never been able to safely drive a car. That limits me in ways that are both practical and invisible, and it hurts my spirit more than I know how to explain. Because of that, this glowing rectangle I resent the shit out of has become essential to my survival. I use it to Google all my weird body symptoms—and, honestly, it really helps.

Throughout the day I think about calling my one friend, but I don’t. My energy feels heavy in a way that feels contagious. I don’t want it to be so obvious I’m depressed every time we talk. It feels like an aura I can’t turn off—because it’s also a true thing about me.

When my daughter goes to bed, you already know I watch reality TV for a few hours. Sometimes I enjoy it. But most of the time, I don’t. It’s just the only way I know how to keep myself company without asking too much of myself.

When I finally lie down, I become more aware of all the pain and trauma stuck in my body after so many years of having no idea how to take care of myself. Stillness isn’t peaceful yet. It’s disturbing. It makes it incredibly hard not to organize my identity around being someone things happened to.

And that’s where work enters the picture.

I work on a laptop and a phone. Writing feels good. Making myself post feels like torture—like going against myself, like performing when my body is begging to be quiet.

But I do it anyway, because I can’t work a normal job. I can’t find one that won’t destroy me. So I try to build something on my own. I know I can. That’s why I keep going. That’s why I hashtag my pain. LOL.

I sell pieces of myself to an algorithm in a world run by billionaires, where our attention is mined and sold. It feels like our entire species has been quietly downgraded—trained to choose scrolling and isolation over real life, over each other, almost every time. I find that heartbreaking. I find it soul-crushing.

And it isn’t just my own life that exhausts me. When there’s news like a new ICE station opening in my town, a big part of me wants to dissociate just to make it through the day and take care of my daughter without collapsing. I know the privilege in that. I’m not the one being brutalized. And still, my body feels the weight of what’s happening. It’s beyond disorienting to realize how thin the line is between “this is unimaginable” and “this is already beginning.” I carry guilt for being safe, grief for those who aren’t, and a visceral sense of panic about the world my daughter is inheriting. I feel unfit to guide her through it. I feel so not okay. Am I just supposed to pretend I can handle it in front of her?

And then I open my phone and see a different world entirely. I see people online living the life I dream of. Slow mornings. Forests. Community. Freedom. I feel so physically jealous, but I know the truer feeling is a bottomless grief.

There are so many moments in a single day when I feel myself wanting to expand. I meet a wall. I have no money for the small sparks that come to me: What if we went camping? What if we just left for a few days? We can’t. And the wanting doesn’t stop.

Every day I am aware of the trap. Every day I try, in tiny ways, to break it.

I am not lazy.
I am not ungrateful.

I am not broken.

I am a human animal trying to remember what kind of world my body was built for—inside a system that forgot.

I’m sharing this in case you’re trying to remember too. We’re not alone!

And so when you’re tired, reactive, distant, overwhelmed, you don’t think, This is heavy.
You think, Something is wrong with me.

You start carrying a quiet internal record—moments you wish you could redo, patterns you don’t understand, the way you disappear or lash out or reach for comfort you promised yourself you wouldn’t need. Each of these becomes evidence. Not just that something happened, but that you are the problem. You begin to live inside this subtle audit, constantly scanning yourself for what needs correcting.

I know this way of keeping score. I lived inside it for a long time. I used it to explain why my body hurt, why I couldn’t keep up, why I felt so out of place in the world. I believed I was built wrong. That other people had received some internal instruction manual I had somehow missed. For years I thought these patterns were proof of weakness, proof that something in me was defective at the core.

Until one day something cracked.

It hit me that I wasn’t broken—I was exhausted from being at war with myself.

What I had been calling failure was actually a body trying to survive being pushed past its limits. It wasn’t sabotage. It wasn’t laziness. It wasn’t moral failure. It was intelligence under strain. The harder I tried to fix myself, the worse I felt. Shame didn’t make me kinder or more capable or more whole. It made me smaller, quieter, and closer to disappearing.

That’s when I finally saw myself for what I really was—not a problem to solve, but a living thing in need of mercy.

I adapted inside conditions that were never neutral. Something was done to me. I learned how to survive it.

I wish someone had found me before my breaking point and proven it to me:

Nothing is wrong with you.

If you know someone who needs to hear this, send it their way. It might just change everything.

P.S. I created this guidebook because it’s the thing I wish I’d had in my darkest moments—something I could open when I was collapsing into inner condemnation, when I couldn’t see clearly, when I felt like I was the problem. It’s the companion I didn’t have.

And it isn’t only for crisis. It’s just as powerful in the good seasons of life, when you’re open, curious, or building something new. It helps you stay rooted in a truer story about who you are, so you don’t have to relearn it the hard way.

It’s meant to live with you. To be returned to. To give energy back instead of taking it.

You can find it here: Guidebook

I come from poverty—the nervous-system kind.

The kind where every decision is shaped by fear, scarcity, and the quiet humiliation of needing more than you’re allowed to have.

I spent much of my life watching people I love trade their time, their bodies, their creativity, their sovereignty—their literal life force—just to survive. Watching brilliant, sensitive humans grind themselves down so they could afford food, rent, healthcare, a thin margin of safety. Watching dignity become a luxury.

When it was my turn to join the workforce—before I knew I was disabled—I was horrified by my inability to keep up. Every job made me physically ill. My body registered the truth long before my mind could articulate it. It said: this is not sustainable.

That truth wasn’t listened to. It was pathologized, punished, reframed as personal failure. As my capacity diminished, fear about my future set in. There were periods when I couldn’t care for myself—when even basic tasks felt impossible—and I couldn’t imagine how I was meant to survive in a world that demanded more than my body could give.

Every option available to me required ongoing harm to my body. Each one led to worsening illness, increasing dependency, and a deeper erosion of my ability to function. As my body began to turn on itself, death stopped feeling abstract or extreme. It registered as relief—the foreseeable outcome of a system that offers no viable place for bodies like mine.

It was out of that desperation—and a fierce devotion to healing my body—that something began to change. I could no longer survive by overriding myself. I couldn’t reason or force my way out. What remained was listening. Learning how to work with my body instead of against it.

Slowly, I began to trust that another way was possible—one that felt both new and ancient. A way of living and serving that didn’t require self-abandonment. Where sensitivity wasn’t a flaw but an intelligence. Where intuition, presence, and devotion weren’t sidelined, but essential.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve experienced myself as moving to a different rhythm than the world around me—not superior to it, not separate from it, just attuned to a different register. I noticed the suffering first. The tension beneath people’s words. The way bodies braced themselves just to get through ordinary days. As a child, I found myself listening, reflecting, offering something back—long before I had language for what that was, or any sense that it could become a form of work. I only knew that when someone felt fully met, something inside them softened.

This is the orientation I live from now.

This is the future I am practicing.

It’s also what led me to the work I do: activations.

Activations aren’t advice or coaching, and they don’t require belief. They’re experiential—working directly with the nervous system rather than the thinking mind. I facilitate them through sound and voice, often referred to as light language. If that term feels unfamiliar or loaded, think of it simply as a non-verbal language of tone, rhythm, and frequency—something the body can respond to before the intellect needs to understand.

These experiences are designed to invite a state of flow—where the nervous system softens its defenses and the body remembers how to organize itself without force. In that state, insight doesn’t need to be chased, and change doesn’t require willpower. What tends to emerge instead is a clearer sense of one’s own capacity: personal power, creative intelligence, and the unique gifts and ways of perceiving that have often been muted by survival.

The activations don’t give you anything you don’t already have. They create the conditions for what is already yours to surface—through sensation, resonance, and felt knowing rather than instruction.

This work changed my nervous system. It softened my rage without extinguishing it. It helped me stop fighting my own biology and begin cooperating with it. What emerged wasn’t transcendence or escape—it was clarity, embodied and lived.

I understand how this may look from the outside. To some, it appears that I’m charging “a lot” for something that sounds like gibberish, for a form of expression that resists easy explanation or optimization.

But what I’m offering isn’t information. It isn’t productivity. It isn’t a hustle.

It’s a different relationship to value, to energy, to exchange, and to self.

If you’re curious, I don’t need you to believe me or to fully understand it. I’m simply inviting you to experience it—and notice what shifts in your body, your perception, your inner world.

And if it’s not for you, that’s okay.

But I’m no longer pretending this path is frivolous or less real than a system that is actively breaking us.

This is me choosing life. This is me choosing truth. This is me building the world I want to live in—one offering at a time.

With love,

Eden

P.S. If you are interested in experiencing a personal activation, check out my shop linked below. (I also have some ebooks that are straight soul medicine.)

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