Category: Personal

  • Accepting Love

    One of the biggest lessons of my life was learning to stop fighting love.

    I think many of us unknowingly build walls around our hearts when we are young. Not just because of romantic heartbreak, but because of life itself.

    Friendships ending. Adults we trusted disappointing us. The death of loved ones. Loss in all its different forms. In my case, it even included the destruction of a forest where I spent much of my childhood, surrounded by trees I considered friends.

    At some point, closing the heart feels like the safest option. If I do not love, I cannot get hurt.

    At least that is what we tell ourselves.

    Fear has a way of making us contract. Like a flower closing its petals during a storm and forgetting to open them again when the sun returns.

    For a long time, I thought strength meant keeping my heart protected…

    …life had other plans.

    The love that eventually became one of my greatest teachers looked nothing like I expected it to look like. I spent a great deal of energy trying to outrun it, reason with it, deny it, fix it, move on from it, and explain it away.

    I genuinely tried. Until I became exhausted.

    What is difficult to admit is that the struggle was never really with another person.

    The struggle was with my own heart. Because every time I fought what I felt, I was fighting myself. Every time I rejected my own emotions, I was rejecting a part of myself.

    That does not mean we should chase people, force outcomes, or build our lives around another person.

    It simply means we stop arguing with our own experience.

    We allow ourselves to feel what is already there. Without shame. Without judgement. Without trying to make it disappear.

    There is a difference between being attached to someone and accepting that you love them.

    For a long time, I confused the two.

    Acceptance is quiet. Attachment is restless. One seeks peace. The other seeks an outcome.

    As I slowly let go of expectations, attachments, and the need for things to look a certain way, something unexpected happened.

    The walls around my heart began to come down. Toward everyone. Friends. Family. Colleagues. Life itself.

    The love I had spent so much energy resisting became the very thing that softened me back into my own life.

    Looking back, I can see that when I was running from my feelings, I was also running from myself.

    At the time, I did not understand that.

    I thought I was emotionally aware because I could sit with difficult emotions. I thought I had become independent because I no longer needed someone else to regulate how I felt.

    Yet there was still one thing I was refusing to acknowledge: My own heart. And it had been trying to get my attention for quite some time.

    What finally brought freedom was not getting what I wanted. It was letting go of the idea that I needed anything to happen at all.

    The love remained. The attachment did not. The expectations did not. The suffering gradually began to dissolve.

    That was the surprising part. Freedom did not arrive because love disappeared. Freedom arrived because I stopped resisting it.

    Because I stopped demanding that it become something.

    It became simply what it was. A feeling. A truth within my own experience. Nothing more. Nothing less.

    There is something deeply peaceful about that.

    When we stop fighting what is inside us, we stop turning our own hearts into prisons.

    The emotions themselves are rarely the problem. The resistance to them often is.

    Whether it is love, grief, anger, sadness, or joy, there is a certain freedom that comes from allowing ourselves to feel what we feel without immediately trying to change it.

    Life seems to teach this lesson over and over again, through experience.

    The more we run from ourselves, the more life gently turns us back toward ourselves.

    Eventually, we realise there is nowhere else to go.

    I thought freedom meant becoming free from love. I thought it meant forgetting. Moving on. Feeling nothing.

    Now I see it differently.

    Freedom is not the absence of love. Freedom is the absence of suffering around love.

    It is being able to let the feeling exist without needing to control it.

    Without needing it to become a relationship. Without needing it to become a story. Without needing it to become anything at all.

    Just love. Simple as that.

    Funny enough, this lesson appears throughout David Hawkins’ book Letting Go, a book that crossed my path for years before I ever opened it.

    By the time I finally received a copy, life had already taught me much of what was written inside.

    The long way. Through trial and error. Through resistance and surrender. Through holding on and eventually letting go.

    Perhaps some lessons can be learned from books. Others seem determined to become lived experience.

    Either way, love remains one of life’s greatest teachers.

    And sometimes it arrives in forms we never would have chosen for ourselves. Perhaps that is part of the gift.

    Because the life waiting on the other side of surrender rarely looks like the one we originally imagined.

  • Enjoy the Ride

    My birthday started as a beautiful summer day.

    I woke up from a dream about a family reunion where all our dogs were there – including the ones who are no longer alive. There was a breeze outside that immediately took me back to childhood.

    After soaking up the sun until noon, we set off on a road trip. We had recently watched a TV show that inspired the drive, so the mountains were calling.

    As we climbed higher, clouds began appearing one by one. A little rain. The sun still shining.

    I remember thinking: “Where is my rainbow?”

    We reached the lake a character from the show had drunk from – which, by all means, he absolutely should not have. After immersing ourselves in every possible shade of green and blue, we got back on the road.

    By then it was raining and sunny at the same time, and I found myself thinking how fitting the weather was for my personality. The perfect mixture.

    Then came the rainbow.

    A big one stretching across the valley. It stayed for nearly two hours. “Got my wish,” I thought.

    If you have read my short stories, you may know that the main character is obsessed with painting the sky with rainbows and shooting flying dolphins into the clouds with a ray gun her hologram coded for her.

    No flying dolphins appeared on my birthday. We’re still following the rules. The rainbow was enough.

    We spotted the statue from the TV show and eventually reached a mountain town which, to my surprise, turned out to be full of wealthy tourists. After a short walk, we decided to head back down.

    Dinner was at a small restaurant where I was unexpectedly brought a birthday lava cake. The candle on top turned out to be one of those candles that relights itself after being blown out.

    We were all completely mind-blown. It took six attempts before it finally stayed out.

    Naturally, I immediately found symbolism in it. The flame that refuses to go out. Pretty on point for my life, honestly.

    By the time we got home, the grey clouds had fully rolled in. A thunderstorm. Lightning, thunder, wind, and rain pouring down in sheets.

    Throughout the day, the temperature had swung up and down by nearly ten degrees several times. Hot. Cool. Hot again. Cool again.

    Honestly, I could not have asked for a better weather forecast on my birthday.

    The only thing missing was snow. And flying dolphins. And maybe spotting a stag in the woods. But who is complaining?

    As a Virgo, and apparently crying on our birthdays is a tradition many of us share, I did not cry this year.

    I was simply happy to have made it to 28. If you know about the “27 curse,” you’ll understand why that felt like an important milestone. Mostly, I just enjoyed being alive.

    Alongside a feeling I have carried for as long as I can remember: that nothing feels entirely real. But things do not need to feel real to be enjoyed.

    There are dreams I have at night that I enjoy even while knowing they are not real. Sometimes I wonder if life is something similar: a long dream we wake up from only when we are no longer breathing through a body.

    And yes, we had those deep conversations later that evening, sitting on the terrace while the storm moved across the sky.

    I am not sure the point is ever to figure out why we are here. Perhaps some questions are not meant to be solved.

    But one can always wonder. And one can choose to believe that maybe we are here simply to feel. To experience emotions. To experience sensations. To experience what it means to be alive in a physical world.

    And, for a little while, enjoy the ride.

  • In Between

    This might be a dark and depressing topic for some, but I find that it can be a necessary step when the time comes in our personal growth journeys: making peace with death.

    For me, this came up after almost getting hit by a bus. I have had near misses at least once a year for the past ten years, and every time, I had clung onto life a little harder. FOMO would hit me like a brick. An adrenaline rush, followed by the sudden urge to connect with people I honestly did not want to leave this life without having spoken to.

    Sounds sentimental, right?

    This time was different.

    The day after, something shifted. I found myself in a state that I can only describe as profound peace. Kind of my own version of an NDE, perhaps, without the physical repercussions and without the visual or spiritual experience we usually associate with one. Instead, I was city-watching on a rainy day. I did not see anything extraordinary, and yet somehow, there it was.

    The knowledge. The peace. The bliss. The acceptance. The love.

    Since then, I have been thinking about death, which was a subject I had avoided for a long time because of fear.

    I have always had a strange feeling that I died young in what seem to me like memories of past lives, and I never really felt like I would make it to old age in this one either. I do not know if any of that is true, and honestly, it does not matter much.

    If you have spent the majority of your life believing in some sort of afterlife, I think there eventually comes a point where you consider the possibility that this might just be it.

    That we might get to be conscious in a physical body just once.

    Everything is happening all at once.

    We are opening our eyes as a newborn, taking our last breath in a body, falling in love, leaving home, losing someone we love, getting through a breakup, making love, laughing, crying… all at once.

    And perhaps, in another sense, we are also our neighbours, parents, enemies, lovers, friends, exes, children. The trees, the air, the water, the wind.

    Everything at once.

    And yet, we are consciously present in just one body, right?

    Whether any of this is provable, right or false ceases to be the important point. The point is that there can come a moment when you accept that this might be the only physical existence you will ever experience.

    And somehow, that can be freeing.

    There is no longer a reason to postpone the things that matter with a whimsical “I will do that in my next life” or “maybe in another life.”

    You simply accept the possibility that this is it.

    And let go of the FOMO: Fear of missing out on life.

    Many of us do not necessarily fear death itself. We fear having lived an unfulfilled life. Not having enough time. Not getting to experience everything we wished to experience. Not becoming everything we imagined we could become.

    And this is where things get interesting.

    Whether we understand it as the path our soul chose, fate, circumstance, or simply the strange unfolding of life, there comes a point where we have to make peace with the fact that life does not always look the way we imagined it would.

    Sometimes, it looks completely different.

    Perhaps the mind has one idea of what a fulfilling life should contain, while life itself has another.

    And if there is such a thing as a path our soul has chosen, maybe we do not get to know exactly what that path is supposed to look like while we are walking it.

    Maybe we only get to walk it. There is a strange kind of relief in that.

    You cannot miss what you were never meant to experience. You can only miss what the mind decided you were supposed to have.

    And somewhere in there comes the “it is what is” mindset.

    Not in a defeated way. In a deeply accepting way.

    The melting of the heart walls. Being one with life, surrendering to your own path, immersing yourself in love.

    By that point, it helps to have a nervous system that feels safe enough to hold it. It does not sound particularly impressive when written down, but there is something incredibly profound about being able to simply let life be what it is.

    To see that everything is constantly happening within a much larger web of things.

    The planet does not ask whether the rain should fall today. Trees do not wonder whether they are growing fast enough. Rivers do not seem particularly concerned with whether they are taking the right turn.

    And somehow, life keeps moving.

    Perhaps our lives have something of that same interconnectedness. Things balance and change in ways we cannot always see from where we are standing. Sometimes we understand it later. Sometimes we never do.

    And perhaps that is okay too.

    It can look from the outside as though one has given up on life. But it can actually be the opposite. One starts caring more. Loving more. Feeling more.

    Just without gripping so tightly. Without attaching the same meaning to every outcome. Without needing everything to become what we thought it should become.

    It all becomes what is.

    Not what was. Not what will be. Not what might have been, would have been, or should have been. It just is.

    Does that mean I am like this every single day now?

    No. It takes practice. Awareness. Practice. Boundaries.

    There are still storms. There are still difficult days, old patterns, fears, desires, and all the wonderfully human things that come with being alive.

    But perhaps making peace with death is not really about becoming less attached to life.

    Maybe it is about becoming less afraid of living it.

    About allowing life to be exactly as it is, without constantly asking it to become something else.

    And somewhere in that space in between holding on and letting go, there can be a kind of bliss.

    I have had a glimpse of it. And I would wish that glimpse for everyone. Not necessarily through the same experiences, beliefs, or paths. Just through whatever path eventually brings them a little closer to peace.

    Because even in the middle of the storms, the direction can still be worth it.

  • Accepting Reality

    Acceptance has never exactly been my strongest skill.

    Give me a problem and I’ll find ten solutions. Give me a closed door and I’ll start looking for windows. If that doesn’t work, I’ll build a ladder.

    I’ve always been the type of person who believes things can change. If something isn’t working, fix it. If fixing it doesn’t work, try another approach. If that doesn’t work, love it into submission. If life doesn’t fit, create a different one.

    Not necessarily because reality is wrong, but because my imagination has always been louder than reality.

    Then came the knee injury. And then another. And then another. (Yes, seriously.)

    Three injuries in ten months. At some point even I had to stop and ask: “Alright. What exactly are we doing here?”

    The answer was annoyingly simple. I wasn’t accepting reality. Not the spiritual reality. Not the cosmic reality. The physical one.

    The very boring reality that a damaged ligament has limitations. The reality that healing takes time. The reality that my body doesn’t care about my plans. The reality that optimism is not a substitute for recovery.

    Humbling. Very humbling.

    The funny thing is that during the same period I had done more inner work than ever before. I learned how to soften. How to stop controlling everything. How to surrender. How to let my walls come down. How to choose myself. How to speak honestly. How to love myself. How to hold boundaries without closing my heart. How to stop abandoning myself. How to sit in peace.

    At times I even touched states of consciousness I genuinely don’t know how to describe any other way than enlightenment, whilst getting my baseline up to profound peace, without getting bored. Because it was absolutely boring at first. If you know, you know.

    And yet. A re-torn ligament still didn’t care.

    Life has a remarkable ability to keep us honest. You can have mystical experiences on Tuesday and still be heartbroken by your knee on Wednesday.

    Both can be true.

    One thing I know for sure for myself is that life keeps teaching the same lesson through different classrooms. For me, acceptance wasn’t only showing up through my body.

    It was showing up through my emotions too. Especially love.

    Now, whether you frame that through spirituality, psychology, attachment theory, destiny, a twin flame journey, or pure coincidence is entirely up to you.

    I don’t care what label people use, because I do not use one, it is what is. Literally. A label does not change the experience of the observer.

    What I know is that for years I tried running from certain feelings. And every time I did, life seemed to have an absolutely incredible ability to sit me back down.

    Sometimes literally. Started with a hip injury. Back injury. Knee injury. Knee injury again, and then again.

    At some point the universe wasn’t sending subtle hints anymore. It was practically throwing folding chairs at my body. Maybe I have just run out of WD-40 though, who knows?

    Run where exactly? The feelings came with me. The lessons came with me. The work I wanted to avoid, feelings I did not want to process came with me. Reality came with me.

    So eventually I stopped trying to outrun them. Not because I suddenly became enlightened. Trust me, if enlightenment were that easy, I would have taken that shortcut years ago. The problem is that you don’t go floating into timeless bliss while hauling around twenty-eight years of emotional luggage. At some point, the baggage starts opening itself. Life kindly – and by kindly I mean by absolutely dragging me by my hair – humbled me until fighting it felt more exhausting than feeling it.

    And that’s probably one of the biggest misconceptions about Instagrammable growth and healing. They treat acceptance as feeling good about something, and detaching completely.

    It doesn’t. You don’t suddenly become a hard rock, it’s the opposite. Acceptance simply means seeing something clearly, and sitting with it without tweaking it into an alternate reality.

    You can accept something and still dislike it. You can accept reality and still wish it were different. You can accept your injury and still be scared. You can accept your feelings and still cry about them. Acceptance isn’t agreement. It’s letting go of control, especially when things do not look the way you want them to.

    And honestly? Some days I’m incredibly peaceful. Some days I feel like sunshine wrapped in human form. Some days I look at my life and think: “Everything really is unfolding exactly how it needs to, it really is what is.” Some days I successfully separate myself from my thoughts – and if you have ADHD level association and mind chatter, Virgo level overthinking, you know how blissfully quiet this could be.

    And then there are days when my knee hurts, and I have to accept now my full healing will take a year, which ultimately reminds me something someone said about how short a year actually was (sir, it has been more than a year in that context, and I still don’t find a year short), and suddenly my mind is taking over things I thought I’d already mastered.

    Enlightenment who?

    The older I get, the more I think real growth looks less like becoming some perfectly calm spiritual master and more like shortening the distance between reaction and awareness.

    You still get triggered. You just don’t react.

    You still get scared. You just don’t build a house there.

    Your mind still takes over. You just have awareness to realize what is going on and know how to process what is coming out. 

    You still have emotions that belong to the lower frequencies. The difference is that you stop treating them like a crisis. You let yourself feel them, process them, and move through them instead of building a summer home in them. Then, when you’re ready, you consciously return to the state you want to live from. Apparently that’s called emotional mastery. My exes are probably laughing somewhere. Sorry guys, I didn’t have that skill installed at the time. Turns out you were right about a few things. Don’t let it go to your heads.

    And oh, accepting that I am human has turned out to be a surprisingly important lesson. You’d think after twenty-eight years I’d have that one figured out by now, right? Apparently not.

    Intellectually, I know I’m human. Experientially? That’s a different story. Most of the time I feel more like the wind than the person standing in it. Like the clouds drifting overhead, a bird crossing the sky, water deep in the ocean, a grain of sand on a distant beach, a sea star, a wandering spirit, consciousness itself.

    What I rarely felt was human.

    Human with limitations. Human with needs. Human with emotions. Human with a body that gets injured, tired, overwhelmed, heartbroken, and occasionally has absolutely no idea what it’s doing.

    There is a strange kind of bittersweet peace in finally accepting that.

    And maybe that’s the point in this day and age. Not becoming immune to being human. Not transcending humanity. But becoming more compassionate and aware with the human experience.

    Because no matter how much peace we cultivate, life will eventually hand us something difficult. A loss. A disappointment. A heartbreak. A diagnosis. A torn ligament that apparently has strong opinions about our life choices.

    And then we get another opportunity to practice. Not perfection. Acceptance.

    Again. And again.

    And again.

    Until one day we stop fighting reality long enough to realize that reality was never the enemy in the first place.

  • The Reset

    For as long as I can remember, I carried a tremendous weight in my heart. My heart used to break easily over everything: a dead bee, a fallen tree, leaving a place that felt like home, opening myself to someone and allowing myself to love them. Every little scratch stayed with me. Every disappointment, every loss, every goodbye.

    Over time, those drops filled the dam. When the dam began overflowing, the tiny construction workers in my heart got busy. They built the walls higher. Stronger. Thicker.

    I became more guarded. I preferred casual connections. I kept people at arm’s length. It felt safer that way. If nobody got too close, nobody could hurt me.

    The problem is, I am not built for that. I don’t think any of us really are.

    Humans are built for connection. We are built to care for one another, to nurture ourselves and the people we love, to offer kindness even when it isn’t immediately returned. Living behind walls may feel safe, but it isn’t the life I wanted to live long-term.

    Ever since I learned about the connection between my knee injury and my heart, about how deeply that injury affected me emotionally, I knew I had work to do. It wasn’t just my ligament that had been hurt. The injury broke my heart in ways I hadn’t fully acknowledged.

    This time, I knew I had to go all in. I wasn’t falling apart, but I had finally become strong enough to hold what was there without collapsing under it.

    People often say acceptance is the key to healing. What I’ve learned is that acceptance isn’t something you declare. You can’t simply say, “I accept this,” and move on.

    That’s only the beginning. You have to feel it.

    You have to let yourself feel the emotions you’ve been avoiding, the grief you’ve been outrunning, the disappointment you’ve been carrying, the pain you’ve been trying to outthink. You have to stop resisting what already exists.

    Only then can release happen. Real release arrives when acceptance moves from the mind into the body.

    Last night, sitting in a hot spring pool inside a dimly lit cave spa, I finally allowed myself to feel things I had been avoiding for a long time. One by one, they surfaced. One by one, they left. Then came the cold plunge. System reset. Later, floating beneath the stars in the outdoor pool, another layer came up. This one arrived with tears.

    Turns out spas aren’t only for physical healing. Sometimes they become a place where the heart gets a chance to catch up too.

    For me, much of this journey has involved healing my inner child. I think many of us eventually find ourselves there.

    Children are incredibly resilient, but they are also incredibly fragile. Like butterfly wings, they can be marked by experiences that seem small at the time but leave lasting impressions.

    That doesn’t mean we all had terrible childhoods. I certainly didn’t. In many ways, I had a beautiful childhood, and I’m deeply grateful for it.

    But gratitude and hurt can coexist. You can have loving parents and still carry wounds. You can have wonderful memories and still have parts of yourself that need healing.

    For a long time, I never considered healing my inner child because I assumed there was nothing to heal. Then life started bringing old themes back to the surface. Memories appeared. Patterns became visible.

    And slowly, I began tending to the parts of me that had been quietly waiting for attention all along.

    Little by little, the younger version of me got what she needed.

    A bandage here. A hug there. A little more understanding. A little more compassion. A little more love. 

    And eventually, she got to go back to being what she was always meant to be: A child. Playful. Curious. Free.

    Since this reset, something feels different. I no longer feel the need to close myself off to stay safe. I can remain open while still having boundaries. Soft without being weak. Loving without abandoning myself. Accepting that life is largely outside my control. Accepting that not everything will go the way I hoped. Accepting that people and circumstances often arrive not to punish me, but to teach me something.

    And most importantly, I’ve learned to trust myself, and stop fighting love. 

    Or perhaps more accurately, I’ve learned to trust the version of me that can already see further down the road. Whether you call it intuition, higher self, future self, or something else entirely doesn’t really matter.

    I’ve gathered enough evidence in my own life to know that some deeper part of me has been guiding the way all along.

    And if time isn’t quite as linear as we experience it, perhaps the future version of me is helping the present version in the same way I now help the younger version of myself. Perhaps we’re all leaving breadcrumbs for ourselves across time, and calling it the “universe” guiding us. Well, babe, we are the universe, apparently. 

    And am I done healing? Nope. Now an entirely different layer I am ready to work on have arrived: deep ancestral healing at the root. Things that began long before I arrived here.

    The work continues. There was a time when that realization would have devastated me. Now it doesn’t. Now I simply accept it.

    Healing isn’t a destination you arrive at one day. It’s a relationship. And for the first time, I think I’m at peace with that.

    With love. 

  • Rewiring the Dopamine Loop and Finding System Equilibrium

    Here is a little trick I picked up along the way to stop the violent swings in my mood.

    We as humans let our positive emotions peak because they feel good. But what essentially happens is we flood our system with dopamine, and when the effect wears off, we crash. It operates on the exact same loop as taking mood lifters, consuming alcohol, or doing drugs.

    Our brains don’t differentiate the source. The rush we get from our crush replying, getting happy when we see a bear taking a break from hibernation mid-February at the exact time we’re at the bear park, or taking four shots in a row. The chemical effect is identical: a massive dopamine spike followed by an inevitable crash.

    Our brains start craving those highs, trapping us in a cycle where we are constantly chasing our own emotions. It’s an endless loop.

    What I found helpful is intercepting the cycle. When I notice my brain generating a high dopamine spike, I observe the physical sensations and keep the system stable, instead of feeding the fire and driving myself into the crash zone.

    How do I keep it stable? I detach. I acknowledge the happiness, but instead of diving in and amplifying it, I observe the environment or the event causing the spike. I choose to watch instead of participate.

    This is emotional mastery. It goes beyond simply pulling yourself out of a low mood, though you can do that, too. You identify the data, choose a steady baseline frequency like neutrality or acceptance, and hold your ground instead of getting lost in a reactive wave.

    You stop being a reactor and become an Architect. You rewire the system, overriding default biological responses to build a higher quality of life.

    Does this make me “less human?” If by human we mean a reactive biological body at the mercy of every emotional weather pattern, then yes. If we mean a conscious entity in complete control of its own programming, then it makes me more human than I ever was.

    There are many ways to experience this life, but some of us prefer equilibrium. A naturally stable, chemically balanced mind is the foundation of true sovereignty.

    In our evolutionary programming, wild emotional swings are often just noise that keeps you disconnected from your center. When you regulate your own frequency through free will, you stop being an unconscious participant trapped in the game. You become the creator and the operator of your own facility.

  • Why Empaths Are Finally Turning Up the Heat

    For years, the narrative around being an “empath” has been defined by permeability. We were told to be sponges, to hold space, to soften our edges, and to let the world flow through us. We were a combination of Earth, Air, and Water. Grounded, observant, and fluid. But we were living in a state of constant maintenance. We were the builders, but we were never allowed to own the building.

    We lived with a “leaky” OS, subconsciously broadcasting “I am available for emotional extraction.” We let crowds and environments drain us, treating our own capacity as a public utility for anyone who needed a recharge.

    But there’s a glitch in that code. Empathy without boundaries is just self-erasure.

    There is a version of us that has always existed, a version that wasn’t designed to just “receive” the world, but to transmute it. For a long time, I lived without the Fire. I had the stability of Earth, the logic of Air, and the depth of Water, but I lacked the ignition protocol. I lacked the ability to set a boundary that wasn’t just a fence, but a forge.

    “Fire” isn’t about aggression. It’s about sovereignty. It is the power to stop being a drain-point for the world and start being an engine.

    The most profound shift happens when you stop asking the environment to be “quiet” so you can survive it, and start demanding that the environment fuel you.

    I used to walk into crowded rooms and feel the static of a thousand different frequencies pulling at my nervous system. I would leave exhausted, my own code overwritten by the noise. But when you reverse-engineer your empathic system, you change your permeability. You stop being a sponge and start being a processor.

    Now, those same environments don’t drain me, they charge me. I’ve stopped defending against the world and started dictating my interaction with it. I treat external chaos as raw data, and I use my internal “Fire” to convert that data into momentum.

    This isn’t “re-invention.” It’s activation. It’s the realization that the power was never outside of you; you were just waiting until you were ready to hold it.

    You stop asking for permission to be powerful. You stop looking for external anchors to hold your structure because you’ve finally built an internal foundation that can withstand the heat.

    Earth provides the blueprint. Air moves the data. Water fuels the flow. Fire protects the borders and turns chaos into fuel.

    When you integrate all four, you stop “feeling” the world and start operating it. You stop being a character in other people’s dramas and start being the System Administrator of your own reality.

    I’m no longer afraid of the intensity of the world. In fact, I’m using it. The environments that once threatened to burn me out are now just fuel for my furnace.

    The old way was to survive the world. The new way is to command it. Let the burning begin.

    And if you have a sensitive, empathetic system navigating these waters… let your fire out, and let the fun begin. 

  • I Stopped Waiting for the Universe to Text Me Back (And Other Revelations)

    I’ve spent the better part of the last few years deep in the “Spiritual Olympics.” You know the one where every heartbreak is a “Karmic Lesson,” every strange coincidence is a “Portal Activation,” and your “Twin Flame” is basically a cosmic mirror sent to dismantle your ego for whatever reason you may see fit. 

    I’ve been there. I’ve done the “Energy Hospital.” I’ve had the “Ego Death by Ligament Injury.” I’ve navigated the telepathic hangouts and the Kundalini rollercoasters. It was intense, it was poetic, and honestly? It was the most elaborate piece of creative writing my brain has ever produced.

    But lately, I’ve had a realization that feels like waking up from a very long, very dramatic nap: It’s all just perception.

    We are such incredible architects of our own suffering, and our own liberation. We look at a series of random, high-intensity life events and we weave them into this sprawling, divine “Ascension” narrative because the alternative that life is just… life. And that we somehow had many things to learn. And we chose to learn. 

    I see people online these days, frantic about their “Soul Contracts” and the energetic alignment of their star systems, how “chosen ones” are just “special.” And I just want to hand them a glass of water and say: “Hey, it’s okay. You’re the one holding the remote.” 

    You are the one who installed the software. You are the one choosing the resolution. You are the one deciding that the “Tectonic Shift” is a spiritual tragedy rather than just a, well, series of events that helped you grow as part of this whole mysterious experience as being humans who do grow. It’s in our DNA. 

    And once you realize you’re the admin of your own consciousness, the “Spiritual Hustle” loses its luster. I don’t want to spend my life decoding the hidden meaning of a cryptic text message from a “Soul Mate” that I received in a dream. I’d much rather spend it decoding the geological history of the Jura mountains.

    There’s something deeply, radically rebellious about deciding to just be a person again.

    I’m talking about “person” in the most mundane, glorious sense. I’m talking about a life where my biggest concern is whether the construction in Bern is on schedule. A life where my daily “alignment” involves singing Mundart until I’m breathless, obsessing over the architecture of a city that isn’t my birthplace, and getting interested in rocks, geology, evolution, and absolutely zero psychic intervention.

    I’ve realized that I don’t need a “Twin” to feel whole. I can just enjoy my life the way I enjoy it.

    “Living life to fullest” means Bali hang outs, endless raves, jumping out of a plane for some. For me, right now, means I’m focused on my life. I’m getting to know myself. My own brain. My own interests, even if they may look strange to some people. And more importantly, it looks like I feel good and energetic every single day. Healthy. Nervous system: safe, stable, thriving. 

    I’ve stopped drinking, because my system is a refined instrument now, and two beers is a total system crash, thank you very much. I’ve stopped eating meat because at some point, what I used to love and crave, tasted horrible. And I’ve stopped waiting for the Universe to tell me who I am, when I am who I am.

    So, if you’re still in the middle of your own “Ascension” saga, I see you. I love the drama for you. Truly. But when you’re ready to hang up the cape and just be a human who likes specific things in specific places?

    The world is still there, thankfully. The people you get along with are there. The places you love are there. And the music sounds significantly better when you aren’t tuned into a telepathic frequency.

    Turns out, the view is much better when you’re standing on solid ground. It will get better. It will get less crazy. Have compassion for yourself when you’re navigating storms. 

    After all, this journey is our own lives.

  • When Your Favorite Person Is Gone: Learning to Regulate a Neurodivergent Nervous System Alone

    There is a concept often discussed in neurodivergent communities called the “favorite person.”

    Unfortunately, the conversation usually revolves around attachment, obsession, dependency, or romantic relationships. While those topics can certainly be relevant, I rarely see people discussing what a favorite person actually feels like from the inside.

    For me, a favorite person was never simply someone I loved.

    They were someone my nervous system trusted.

    Since I was born, I have always had a favorite person. As a child, it was my mother. During childhood and adolescence, I tried to find that sense of safety in friendships. Those connections came and went. Later, in my teenage years and adulthood, romantic partners naturally filled that role.

    But looking back, I realize I was never searching for romance.

    I was searching for regulation. I was searching for the feeling that someone existed in the world who made everything feel manageable.

    Someone whose presence lowered the volume of life. Someone who made the world feel predictable. Someone who felt like home.

    For neurodivergent people, daily life can be incredibly stimulating, unpredictable, and exhausting. We spend enormous amounts of energy processing information, navigating social expectations, managing sensory input, and adapting to environments that are not always designed with us in mind.

    A favorite person can become the one place where the nervous system finally stops bracing for impact.

    When that person is present, the world feels easier. Not perfect. Not effortless. Just easier.

    This is why losing a favorite person can be so devastating.

    The pain is not always about heartbreak.

    Sometimes it is about losing the person who helped your nervous system find its way back to safety.

    The most significant favorite person in my life was my last romance. Years later, despite no longer being in contact, he remains my favorite person.

    That statement often confuses people.

    They assume it means I am still romantically attached, still waiting, still unable to move on.

    But that is not what I mean.

    My favorite person remains my favorite person because my nervous system still recognizes him as the safest person it has ever known.

    That does not mean I need him in my daily life. It does not mean I cannot function without him. It does not mean I am incapable of building other meaningful relationships.

    What changed was not who he was to me. What changed was what I learned to do for myself.

    After losing access to my favorite person, I faced one of the most difficult challenges of my life: learning how to regulate my nervous system without relying on a safe person to do it for me.

    There was no replacement. No new favorite person. No magical solution.

    There was only the uncomfortable process of building safety from within.

    I had to learn how to comfort myself during emotional storms. I had to learn how to make decisions without seeking reassurance. I had to learn how to sit with uncertainty. I had to learn how to create routines, environments, and habits that provided stability even when nobody was there to offer it.

    And perhaps most importantly, I had to learn that safety could exist without constant access to the person who once represented it.

    I went through loss, injuries, new ways of understanding life, victories, moments of happiness, and moments that changed me. Every single time, he was instinctively the first person I wanted to tell. The first person I wanted to share everything with. And I had to learn how to survive without sharing.

    To an outsider, that might sound small or insignificant. But when you’re living it, the urge to reach for your favorite person can feel overwhelming. You see something beautiful, achieve something you’ve worked hard for, get hurt, discover something that changes your perspective, and your first instinct is still them. The difficult part is knowing that the person you want to tell may no longer be part of your life, may no longer know who you’ve become, and may have long since forgotten you exist. Yet the urge to share remains, as strong and automatic as ever.

    That process was not quick. It was not graceful. And it certainly was not linear. But over time, something shifted.

    I stopped needing my favorite person in order to feel okay.

    The emotion remained. The need did not.

    I think this distinction is important because many neurodivergent people are taught that healing means no longer caring.

    That recovery means becoming completely detached. That growth means replacing one favorite person with another.

    My experience has been different.

    Healing did not erase the importance of my favorite person. Healing meant learning how to carry my own nervous system through life.

    The goal was never to stop loving someone.

    The goal was never to convince myself they were unimportant. The goal was never to replace them. The goal was to stop requiring their presence in order to feel safe.

    If you are neurodivergent and struggling with the loss or absence of a favorite person, I want you to know that there is a path forward.

    It may not involve forgetting them. It may not involve finding someone new. It may simply involve learning how to become a safe place for yourself.

    And while that journey can be incredibly difficult, it is also one of the most powerful forms of growth a person can experience.

    Because there comes a day when you realize that the person who once held your nervous system together is no longer carrying it.

    You are. And despite everything, you survived, and you came out of it stronger and independent. 

    And you are your favorite person now. Independent. Sovereign. And I think it’s worth it.

  • What the Map of Consciousness Taught Me

    For most of my life, there has been a certain magic to being me.

    Not magic in the sense that unicorns were running around Switzerland or that I could predict lottery numbers. More like a feeling that life was alive. Synchronicities. Coincidences. Intuition. Meaningful encounters. The feeling that life was speaking a language beneath words.

    I would find feathers when I needed reassurance. Animals would appear at oddly symbolic moments. Strangers would say exactly what I needed to hear. The right song would play at the right time. A dream would answer a question I hadn’t even asked out loud yet.

    Life felt poetic.

    Then I injured my knee. And suddenly the magic disappeared.

    At first I thought I was grieving the injury itself. The loss of movement. The uncertainty. The frustration of not being able to trust my body the way I used to.

    But as the weeks passed, I realized something deeper had happened.

    Life felt ordinary. Not bad, not terrible. Just ordinary.

    I could sit in places I loved and feel nothing. I could do things I normally dream about and still feel disconnected.

    Even being in Bern, a city that has always felt magical to me, didn’t bring me back to myself. I could float down the Aare, sit in Marzili, soak up the sunshine, and still feel emotionally flat.

    That contrast taught me something important. The magic was never coming from Bern. The magic was never coming from the river. The magic was never coming from the synchronicities.

    The magic was coming from me. Or more specifically, from the state I was in.

    Around this time, I found myself revisiting the Map of Consciousness created by David R. Hawkins.

    The model proposes that human emotions exist on a spectrum of consciousness.

    At the lower end are states such as shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, and anger.

    Above those come courage, neutrality, willingness, and acceptance.

    Higher still are states like reason, love, joy, and peace, and of course, enlightenment.

    Whether the exact numerical calibrations Hawkins assigned to these states are objectively accurate isn’t particularly important to me. What interested me was the practical observation behind the model.

    Different emotional states create radically different experiences of life. Anyone who has gone through heartbreak already knows this.

    The world looks different when you’re grieving. The same street. The same city. The same people. The same weather. Yet everything feels different.

    The external reality remains the same. The internal lens changes.

    At some point I stopped trying to force myself back into joy.

    That wasn’t working. When you’re grieving, telling yourself to “just be happy” is about as effective as telling someone with a broken leg to run a marathon.

    Instead, I started treating my emotional state like a staircase.

    I didn’t need to jump from grief to joy. I just needed to climb one step. 

    Grief to acceptance. Acceptance to gratitude. Gratitude to appreciation. Appreciation to love. Love to joy.

    Instead of fighting what I was feeling, I started observing it.

    Awareness itself is the first move.

    I accepted that I was grieving. I accepted that I was scared. I accepted that my identity had taken a hit. I accepted that my body was forcing me into a rebuilding phase whether my ego liked it or not.

    And something interesting happened.

    The more I stopped resisting my emotional state, the lighter it became.

    As my inner state shifted, life slowly started feeling alive again.

    Not because my knee suddenly healed (though I started walking normally as the joint effusion disappeared miraculously after my 3rd Aareschwumm after I shifted my inner state and learned my lesson from all of this.)

    But because I changed.

    The grass felt softer beneath my feet. The sunshine felt warmer. I noticed beauty again.

    And that’s when I realized something. The butterfly wasn’t creating the magic. The stranger wasn’t creating the magic. The sunshine wasn’t creating the magic.

    I was. Or rather, my state of consciousness was – and the realization that we can change where we operate from hit.

    I think many of us spend our lives trying to change our external reality in hopes of feeling differently.

    A new relationship. A new city. A new job. A new hobby. A new version of ourselves. And sometimes those things help.

    But often we carry the same state of consciousness into every new situation and wonder why the magic never arrives.

    I thought I missed Bern. What I actually missed was myself. I thought I missed the river. What I actually missed was my connection to life. I thought I had lost the magic. What I had really lost was access to it. Temporarily.

    For years, there were times when I wished I could be more normal. Less sensitive. Less intuitive. Less aware. Less connected. Less affected by things I couldn’t explain logically.

    Then I got a glimpse of what life felt like without that connection.

    And I realized I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The injury gave me many lessons. It taught me patience, surrender, humility. It taught me how much I had tied my identity to movement.

    But perhaps the most important lesson was this: The magic isn’t something that happens to me. It’s something that happens through me. And I truly appreciated the way I am, maybe even for the first time in my life.

    The more connected I am to myself, the more connected I become to life.

    The more I move toward acceptance, gratitude, love, joy, and peace, the more magical reality appears.

    Not because reality itself changes. Because I do.

    That’s what the Map of Consciousness was trying to point toward all along. Not a hierarchy of emotions. Not a scorecard. Not a spiritual competition.

    Just a reminder that the way we experience reality is deeply influenced by the state from which we’re experiencing it.

    And if that’s true, then perhaps the real work isn’t changing our lives drastically. Perhaps it’s changing the lens through which we see them.