On feeling lost, stuck and disconnected.

Lost in the chaotic wilderness of your inner landscape?
Stuck in reactive, automatic patterns that feel like you’re watching from a movie screen, where you’re screaming at the character: Why are you going into that creepy old mansion?
Disconnected from joy, purpose, simple pleasures—a life path that makes sense, and one that you actually want to be on?

The architecture of the inner self is set up to play the game of life in hard mode.
We come into this life relatively whole (note: I say “relatively” because we often arrive with generational trauma from our family or ancestral lineage—or just straight-up past life stuff that we still need to work out... but I think you get the idea).
Imagine the pure, sparkling, unfettered joy of a baby. Everything delights them; they are full of wonder. They radiate with life.
We are newly arrived from the unlimited realm of spirit, so we still very much emanate our wholeness. Upon arriving here, we are immediately plunged into the limitations of 1) being a spirit now housed in a human body, and 2) the restrictions that come in the form of family, social, and societal expectations that guide - or force - us to be a certain way.

What’s a good little boy/girl/human to do in a situation like this? You grow. You want to learn the ways of the world, to belong and be accepted in order to play the game well.

Heard messages when you were young that made you feel unwanted? Oh—best to hide the quirkiest and seemingly least desirable aspects of yourself!
So, you hide those aspects from the world. The tricky part is that we also end up hiding those parts from ourselves. Yet those are often the most vibrant and essential parts of who we are.
And this hiding doesn’t usually happen with just one aspect—it happens many times over. By the time you’re done hiding all the things, you eventually feel hollow.

Years, decades even, down the road, you end up wondering... Wait a minute... something is missing.

What happens in the interim?
You’ve suffered from years or decades of anxiety, disordered eating, feeling like life is “happening” to you—like a movie. You’ve had secret longings and inexplicable resentment, shopping addictions, married someone everyone else approved of, had kids due to social pressure, spent decades in a career or job you hate, etc.
(Feel free to add to the list in whatever way this manifests for you.)

My version of this?
I ended up in a series of relationships that weren’t right because I was caught up in what was “expected.”
I moved to a giant metropolis—somewhere I never wanted to live—and became cut off from nature.
I experienced uncontrollable existential dread and anxiety.
I got married to someone I knew wasn’t right for me.
I changed jobs, therapists, and hobbies frequently, hoping something would help.
The idea of having kids felt out of the question for existential reasons, and even entertaining the idea amplified my inner chaos in a paralyzing way.

I get claustrophobic and emotional even thinking of that past version of me.
I recently found my journals from that period, and the amount of suffering I was going through just jumps off the page and breaks my heart.

This past version of me illustrates my earlier point about how the architecture of the self is set up for “hard mode” gameplay.
By following the explicit and implicit rules of life, I cut myself off from so many aspects of myself that I was deeply lost in my own inner wilderness.
What a sinking, lonely, and often terrifying feeling.

I didn’t know then about some of the main tenets of healing: the art of being with yourself, and how to practice deep listening.
I wish everyone could learn this in school, because these two concepts are actually quite simple.
If you learned how to practice these things when you were young, it would be an update to the architecture of the inner self that would be truly useful.
It’s only after decades of being lost, stuck, and disconnected from yourself that these practices seem hard.

The Art of Being with Yourself is akin to presence: anchoring yourself in the here and now by noticing your senses and body sensations to ground and become present.

Deep Listening is asking yourself two important questions:
What is here? What is needed?
Then, doing what is needed—instead of distracting yourself or trying to bully or shame yourself.

Simple, yes?

I created a simple guide to help you practice the Art of Being with Yourself.
It’s available for folks joining my email list—go here to sign up and download the guide.

As for Deep Listening, you can practice that on your own, or you can join my upcoming group practice sessions.
You can also work with me directly when you’re ready to find yourself, get unstuck, and reconnect with that beautiful, vibrant, quirky, and full-of-life inner core that is there—waiting for you to return to it.