Author: Derin Chisel

  • Snacks

    I remember going to a supermarket with an ex, buying snacks, and doing what any sane human being would do, wanting to have a snack on the way back. I opened it, and he looked at me like I had just committed a crime. “Can’t you just wait until we’re back?” he said, in full snack-police mode. That killed the vibe. The mood. The entire snack timeline.

    Then later, with another guy, after I’d retired from mid-commute snacking due to previous trauma, he surprised me. He bought snacks for the way back. My inner child practically jumped up and down in joy inside my heart. “Finally, someone who gets it!”

    When I was little, around five, I convinced my parents to let me go to the supermarket alone because apparently I was already a fiercely independent grocery enthusiast. I bought myself a snack, sat at the park, and ate it before going home. Meanwhile, my parents were in full panic mode, convinced I’d been kidnapped. When they found me, just chilling, I said, “I got myself a snack for the way back.” They were speechless. I was snack-satisfied.

    I think that’s the thing about connection. The more someone brings out your inner child, the happier you are. Science even says we’re more likely to fall in love with people who remind us of our childhood. I lived that. He had my favorite childhood tea at his place, completely by coincidence. Then, as we hung out more, I kept rediscovering snacks from my childhood in a totally different country. Coincidence? Maybe. Magic? Absolutely. Drinking milk with milk chocolate? Love it. Late night candy? Yes please. My inner child was thriving. She finally felt safe. Seen. Snack-approved.

    Since I was a kid, I always wanted someone in my life I could bring shells to. He was that. I’d spend hours at the beach finding the most perfect ones to bring back. He’d put them around his apartment, and that, even if it sounds small, was a dream come true. He was the guy who made so many of my childhood and adult dreams come true. Not all, but most.

    It didn’t last, of course, but that’s beside the point. If there’s anything I miss from that connection, is how my inner child felt around him. Safe, happy and healed. 

    Now, I surround myself with people who bring that version of me out. The one who laughs with her whole heart. The one who gets overexcited about gummy bears. The one who loves animals, and shares food without being asked. When my inner child comes online instead of hiding in her room, I know I’m around the right people. It is not the same, but it doesn’t have to be.

    So yeah, snacks and candy, apparently, are my love language. If you ever want to win my heart? Don’t wait till we’re home. Just open the damn bag.

  • Maybe Spirituality Was Never Supposed to Be a Practice

    I used to think I wasn’t spiritual at all. I couldn’t sit still to meditate, what I did to ground myself suspiciously looked like walking barefoot in the park, and every time someone said “visualize light,” my brain responded with: how about we just feel it instead?

    For a while, I felt guilty about that. Like I was missing some invisible membership card to the Enlightened People’s Club.

    But then, one day, somewhere between the flow of the Aare and the rhythm of a Swiss-German song I couldn’t stop humming with dragonflies landing on my body, I realized: I am meditating. Just not in the way people say I should.

    Maybe spirituality isn’t meant to look like sitting cross-legged with your eyes closed. Maybe it’s just being fully alive. Maybe meditative states happen naturally when your feet touch earth, not when your mind repeats affirmations. When you come across an animal, an insect, a bird and your heart’s walls melt. When you’re in a city that feels like home and you don’t have to do anything else but be. 

    Maybe alignment isn’t found in routine, but in recognition, the moment you notice how your entire being lights up in certain places, around certain people, under certain skies. 

    Maybe meditation is as simple as relaxing your body when its automatic reflex is to tighten up from cold. Maybe it’s keeping yourself calm in a sauna when your heart races. Maybe it’s balancing on a board or holding onto a boulder. Maybe it’s focusing on your breath to fall asleep, or on an ascent when your heart is racing.

    Maybe your flow state is when you’re going down a mountain on your bike. Maybe it’s hearing the sound of moving water. Maybe it’s being underwater. Getting kissed by the sun. Feeling the salt on your skin. Gliding through powder, or the waves. Carving on your skateboard. Whispers of wind that feel like freedom. Birdsong at 4AM. Morning red, evening pastels. Watching the clouds drift laying on grass. Smelling the air after rain or just before snow.

    Some souls don’t come here to follow the steps. We come here to remember that there were never any to begin with. We can find the spark in anything. We can turn anything into purpose. We can be anything our heart calls us to be. 

    We find divinity in movement, in breath, in laughter, in mistakes, in the way the world mirrors us back to ourselves. And when we stop trying to do it “right,” that’s when we finally realize; we’ve been doing it right all along. We don’t need a label for the way we choose to live this human experience we call life.

    So no, you won’t see me in linen clothing with crystals, affirmations, or with the wild eyes of the people who’ve spent too much time in Bali. But you will see me living my life with awareness.

  • The Art of Being Grounded

    Today, I accidentally grounded myself. Not in a “spiritual practice” kind of way, more in a “bureaucracy dragged me to Switzerland and I ended up on a random walk by the Rhône” kind of way.

    Normally, I’d call that walk “too flat, too boring.” I’m a mountain girl. I crave altitude, challenge, sweat, existential breakthroughs at 2,000 meters. But my body, still in recovery, had other plans. Apparently, she wanted flat. Gentle. Ordinary and yet with hidden beauty everywhere.

    And somehow… it was perfect.

    I passed quiet valley towns, waved at black nose sheep, spotted horses, crows, a shy eurasian jay, the all black crows I love so much, cure sparrows… Basically, a Disney line-up for introverts. The sun hid behind the mountains, the air bit just enough to remind me it’s November. I photographed the first frost of the season like it was a celebrity sighting. 

    And for once since my August Bern trip which I spent 9 days in a constant state of bliss thanks to the Aare; I wasn’t thinking again. Not about what’s next. Not about the past. Not about anything, just the occasional Swiss German grammar questions I came up with. And my new favorite song, Grüens Liecht playing in my mind on repeat. My mind was… empty. And it felt peaceful. Blissful. 

    Afterward, I did what any enlightened woman would do: blew too much money at Migros and Coop. My fridge always looks like a Swiss grocery aisle – chocolate, cheese, butter, salad dressing, zopf… I even bring pasta back to Italy. If Italians find out, it won’t be good for me. In my defense I buy it for the shape. They don’t have “hörnli” and I love that shape of pasta because it reminds me of my childhood. My taste buds definitely don’t care about geography. They like what they like. 

    Then, like the universe wanted to wink at me, I stumbled into Fasnachtseröffnung. The costumes, the brass, the wild joy of it all. I’d been thinking about 11.11 11:11 for a week, and suddenly there it was, three days early. Unexpected, and definitely brought a smile.

    My old self would’ve hopped on the next train to Bern, chasing the gravitational pull I always feel towards that city, my personal north star. But instead, I stayed grounded. I stayed here. And maybe that’s growth: realizing you don’t need to orbit the brightest star in your universe to feel illuminated.

    Today reminded me when you’re whole, when you’re present, the coordinates don’t matter. Peace travels with you. 

  • Linguistic Diversity

    Christians call it a spiritual attack. New age spirituality calls it being in low frequency, or a Dark Night of the Soul. Psychology says it’s clinical depression. Philosophers call it an existential crisis somewhere in the dread of being alive.

    Christians believe a person is under demonic influence. New agers say, “your chakras are imbalanced.” Psychology throws you a few labels: narcissistic traits, psychopathy, trauma response, and philosophers shrug and call it a phenomenon of interpretive relativity.

    Christians call it following God’s word. New agers call it alignment, living from the heart. Psychology says, “you’re healed.” Philosophy says you’ve mastered life.

    Same thing. Different words. Everyone describing the same human experience with the vocabulary that matches their level of consciousness.

    You don’t have to believe in the word “chakra”. You can go full science mode if you want, and still, the fact that we don’t yet have tools sensitive enough to measure every internal process doesn’t mean the connection isn’t there.

    The Bible doesn’t use the word “chakra,” obviously. But it points to the same principle: energy, life force, breath, flowing through what it calls the temple of the Holy Spirit.

    ROOT – groundedness and faith (“planted by streams of water”)

    SACRAL – creativity and life (“rivers of living water will flow from within”)

    SOLAR PLEXUS – strength and will (“the joy of the Lord is my strength”)

    HEART – love and purity (“guard your heart, for everything flows from it”)

    THROAT – truth and expression (“life and death are in the power of the tongue”)

    THIRD EYE – spiritual vision (“the eye is the lamp of the body”)

    CROWN – divine connection (“be transformed by the renewing of your mind”)

    Modern psychology would translate it as: you’ve healed your childhood trauma, stopped projecting your wounds onto others, and maybe still take some pills, just in case.

    Plato said the soul has three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite and virtue is when they’re balanced under wisdom. That’s basically the philosophical version of balanced chakras. Aristotle called the psyche the animating principle of life, same thing as the “breath of God” or “life force energy.” The Stoics talked about Logos: divine reason or order running through everything. Living “according to nature” meant aligning your inner being with that cosmic order. Basically: walking in the Spirit, but make it Greco-Roman.

    What if we stopped fighting over semantics and accepted that everyone’s been describing the same thing all along? Whether you call it energy, spirit, psyche, chi, or grace, it’s the same current. Maybe the point isn’t choosing the right label. Maybe it’s purifying the noise within, accepting there is a creator behind all this, living in alignment, surrender, and acceptance, no matter which dictionary you use.

  • The Cloud

    I like to imagine the subconscious as an infinite cloud floating somewhere above us. Not grey and stormy, but pastel pink, soft blue, brushed with new leafy greens, flashes of purple and bright pink, orange glimmers, dusted in gold all drifting across a deep purple infinity that stretches forever. The cloud feels light, ethereal, alive. Like thought itself breathing in color. Stars flickering through it like neurons firing in slow motion. And inside that infinite shimmer, we’re all connected.

    It’s somewhere between a nebula and lucid dreaming. Weightless, infinite, but alive. 

    Loved ones. Strangers. Ancestors. Everyone who’s ever lived, and everyone who hasn’t yet in linear time. All just vibing in the same frequency field.

    Maybe that’s why love feels like the strongest force we know. Because love is the WiFi password. It opens the door. It lifts us to that cloud, where we remember what we had forgotten. 

    Maybe that’s how we visit each other in dreams. How the ones who’ve left can still find us. How we meet the pure version of ourselves before the the matrix conditioned us which shaped our egos.

    Somewhere in that cloud lives what spiritual folk call our “higher self.” The one untouched by fear. The one who doesn’t flinch, perform, mask, or shrink. The one who remembers who we were before the world told us otherwise.

    Every time we quiet the noise: the scroll, the hustle, the “shoulds,” we connect to that cloud, our subconscious. The static clears and the signal strengthens. And we start aligning with who we’ve been all along.

    Maybe that’s the real purpose of all this. Not chasing meaning, but remembering it. Not escaping the world, but syncing with the part of us that never left the cloud.

    Maybe, just maybe, that’s been the entire point of existence the whole time. Remembrance. 

  • To the Source (And Back Again)

    In Matrix Revolutions, Neo had to go to the Source. By that point, he’d chosen love over fear, stepped outside yet another system of control (hi, Zion), followed the pull of his dreams, and just knew. Even if it meant he might never return.

    But what if the Source was never out there in some glowing, code-filled mainframe? Or an eternal library filled with countless books (that’s what I used to imagine it as.) What if it’s been inside us the whole time, sitting quietly in our subconscious, waiting for us to listen?

    The more I think about it, the more I wonder if “going to the Source” was always a metaphor for diving inward.

    What if every time we meditate, dream, or follow a gut nudge, we’re not channeling something external, we’re simply unlocking deeper layers of ourselves?

    We underestimate the subconscious. It’s an infinite hard drive we barely access. Sometimes I think it already understands everything (every language, even the ones animals speak), it’s just our conscious mind that hasn’t caught up yet.

    Because here’s the thing, neuroscience already told us this. Ninety-five percent of what we think, feel, and decide happens below conscious awareness. We’re not driving the car; we’re the passenger who thinks they’re steering while the GPS (subconscious) just lets us believe it.

    Maybe the downloads we receive aren’t cosmic emails from some divine cloud storage. Maybe they’re reflections: things we’ve seen, heard, or sensed without realizing, all reorganized into clarity. Maybe the “guidance” is just us remembering what we already know. What our ancestors knew. What our predecessors had discovered. And all the evolutionary knowledge has been stored in our DNA and maybe that’s how we’ve been progressing. 

    Because meditation, breathwork, cold plunges: they don’t open some mystical portal; they just quiet the narrator. That loud ego voice that thinks it knows everything. Once that shuts up, the subconscious finally gets to speak. And suddenly, you hear it. You feel it. You know things you can’t explain.

    There’s even a network in our brains: the Default Mode Network, that lights up when we stop trying. When we’re spacing out, shower-thinking, walking by a river. That’s where the revelations drop. That’s where intuition hits us like lightning out of nowhere, except it’s not “out of nowhere.” It’s been you, whispering to you, the whole damn time.

    And here’s the wildest part, science also says our nervous systems literally sync with other people’s. Heartbeats, breathing, micro-expressions. we’re basically walking WiFi routers of energy. Mirror neurons, baby. You feel someone’s vibe before they even talk because your bodies already started the conversation.

    So maybe “oneness” isn’t woo-woo. Maybe it’s just biology we haven’t caught up with yet.

    So no, Neo didn’t go anywhere. He went in. He went in and surrendered. 

    And that’s the move, isn’t it? Not to escape the Matrix, but to unplug from the noise long enough to remember what’s already running inside you. That the Source isn’t a destination. It’s an integration.

    The moment you stop outsourcing wisdom to the sky and realize…

    We’ve been the Source all along.

  • The Code Beneath the Wings

    I was standing there, watching a cluster of starlings move like liquid thought across the sky. A murmuration. Thousands of bodies, one mind. No leader. No command. Just pure communication in motion.

    And as I watched, something clicked. It was the code. The same one The Matrix tried to show us, not the green symbols, but the pulse beneath everything living. The way energy organizes itself when it’s free.

    Every wingbeat was a line of code written in real time. Every shift in direction was a choice born from trust. The whole sky was a breathing organism, constantly dissolving and reforming, never once collapsing into chaos.

    That’s when I realized: this is what we lost.

    We built systems over systems, cages over cages, and every escape, every structure, every fear based decision we made hardened into another cage that trapped us even harder than the other. 

    But the starlings reminded me what freedom actually looks like. It’s not lawless. It’s not control. It’s coherence without command. It’s order without oppression.

    Civilization wants to be the architect of order. Nature already is order: because it never stops listening.

    The birds move as one because they remember what we’ve forgotten: Connection isn’t forced, it’s felt.

  • The Original System of Control

    Somewhere between the first spark of language and the first wall built from stone, humanity made a deal with fear. We traded freedom for structure, and called it civilization.

    From that moment on, every system we’ve created has been an echo of the same impulse: the need to control what we don’t understand. We built religion to escape chaos, capitalism to escape scarcity, and spirituality to escape ego. And every single one eventually hardened into another cage. Bent and hid truth beneath fear, control, and interest.

    That’s the paradox no one likes to look at: Our escapes always become our prisons.

    The Matrix told us this decades ago, that even the idea of freedom can be scripted. Zion, the city of the awakened, was just another form of control. Even the One was an algorithmic anomaly designed to keep the system stable. But love: the code that couldn’t be predicted, categorized, or controlled, broke the loop. Neo and Trinity didn’t just escape the Matrix; they transcended it. They remembered that freedom doesn’t come from destroying the system, but from seeing through it.

    That’s the same lesson humanity keeps missing. Every time we evolve, we just build a prettier version of the cage. We replace one god with another, one ideology with its opposite. The binary itself: good and evil, light and dark, awakened and asleep, is the real prison.

    Look back far enough, and you’ll see the same pattern in our origin story. There wasn’t just one kind of human.

    There were many: sapiens, neanderthals, denisovans, coexisting for a time. And then, only one survived.

    We like to call that evolution, but maybe it was the first act of separation. The first Matrix. The moment humanity decided it was safer to dominate than to coexist.

    Since then, we’ve just been building more sophisticated versions of that original illusion, more elaborate systems of “us vs. them.” From tribes to nations, from gods to markets, from religions to algorithms. We keep building walls around infinity, manipulating circumstances we cannot understand to fit it in structured boxes and dogmatism.

    But the truth was never meant to be contained. It breathes, it mutates, it dissolves structures. It’s not the light or the dark, it’s the pulse between them.

    Maybe the real awakening isn’t more division. Maybe it isn’t deciding which sub-category of the same human species you belong to. Maybe it’s accepting that we are all one, connected and having a human experience all together. Maybe the point is unity through acceptance. 

    That’s when love reclaims its original function: not as emotion, not as attachment, but as the frequency of wholeness.

    And maybe that’s all “The One” ever meant, the remembrance that we were never divided to begin with.

  • Matrix

    They say we were born into a system of control. That we live inside a simulation. That somewhere out there, someone, or something, is pulling the strings.

    But what if there’s no “out there”? What if we did it?

    Once upon a time, we were just wild things under starlight, sleeping by rivers, trusting instinct more than reason. Then we started to gather, and to gather we needed rules. And rules needed rulers. And rulers needed followers. And before we knew it, the code was written.

    Civilization began as a survival hack, a way to make sure our fires stayed lit and our bellies stayed full. But like every invention, it turned around and started inventing us. Agriculture created hierarchy. Writing created bureaucracy. Religion created moral control. Money created worth systems. And the internet? It created an economy out of attention.

    We wanted safety. We wanted love. We wanted belonging. And to get them, we started building walls: around our cities, around our hearts, around our very sense of self.

    Fast-forward a few millennia, and now we scroll through our own architecture: screens, systems, currencies, careers. All the digital temples built to worship the illusion of control. We call it progress. But it’s just the next version of the same software.

    And here’s the cosmic joke: even those of us who say we’re “waking up” are still playing by the same rules, only now it’s spiritual capitalism, emotional branding, and ego dressed in enlightenment. The Matrix 2.0: the Conscious Edition. 

    But maybe awakening isn’t about unplugging. Maybe it’s about remembering who built the system, and realizing the code still answers to you. Because awareness changes everything. When you see it, you can shape it. When you own it, you’re no longer owned.

    Maybe the goal isn’t to escape the Matrix at all. Maybe it’s to become conscious within it, to use the system without being used by it. To love without losing ourselves. To earn without being owned. To play the game, but never forget we’re the ones holding the controller.

    Maybe we’re not meant to burn the Matrix down. Maybe we’re meant to turn its architecture into art: to live as the glitch that reminds the world it’s dreaming.

  • Ice Walls

    My relationship with the cold began after I was mentally, emotionally, and spiritually destroyed. I couldn’t even stand the heat, my chest would tighten, my breath would catch, and the sun felt like an interrogation lamp I never agreed to sit under. I hated the sun because it was warm and bright and cheerful, three things I was not. I even avoided the sea, the same sea I grew up with, because water was too emotional. Too much flow. I needed the mountains instead. The heights, the rigidity, the stillness, the cold air, the quiet blanket of snow. 

    I became cold-resistant out of sheer survival. I learned to control my muscles, to reverse the involuntary flexing that comes with feeling cold. When you relax your muscles in the cold, you stop feeling it. Wild, I know. That little trick trained me to control my emotions too, especially the negative ones. I built walls. My heart became an ice fortress. Elsa would’ve been impressed. 

    Then he came along. (There’s always a he, isn’t there?) I remember the exact night my walls melted in front of him. With him, I started enjoying the sun again. I found peace near water again, like I used to. I remember floating, laughing, breathing. I was healing. I even lost my cold resistance, which at the time I blamed on his overheated apartment; meanwhile, mine was hanging out somewhere between 13 to 16 degrees like a polite fridge. Now I know it wasn’t his radiator. It was my nervous system feeling safe. Warm. Nurtured. 

    It didn’t last, of course. I’m cold-resistant again. But this time, I don’t hate the warmth. I can enjoy both the sun and the snow, the flow and the stillness. My apartment’s still cold, but I’ve got blankets. Layers. Tea. Balance. Orange and blue. The Moon and the Sun. The Feminine and the Masculine. Shadow and Light. Harmony.

    My walls are still down, but don’t get me wrong, the boundaries are very much installed. I learned them the hard way. I broke every rule I had for a person, stretched my limits into a yoga pose that didn’t exist. And that taught me everything I needed to know about myself. 

    So even if my ego still throws shade at him and says, “no forgiveness, not today,” my soul knows better. It sees the whole thing as growth. As healing. As my love finding its way back to me, even if it took the scenic route through chaos. 

    Someone once told me I needed to get hurt to learn. At the time, I thought, “that’s a terrible teaching method.” But they were right. Pain really is the ultimate life coach. And the sooner we accept that, the sooner we get to ride the waves of life instead of fighting them.

    Some waves crash you down, some you ride like a pro, but either way, the ocean always teaches you something. That’s probably why I want to surf so badly. My emotional body has been riding waves its whole life; it’s only fair my physical body gets to join the party, so I can master the act of Surrender in real time. 

    So maybe, just maybe, the point isn’t to stay warm or cold. Maybe it’s to live in that perfect middle ground; balance, harmony, integration. Learning to dance between shadow and light, and realizing you’re both the wave and the one riding it.