that’s what this list is. seven months ago I wrote about the movies that taught me how to yearn, and a few of you in my dm’s wouldn’t let me stop there. this time it’s songs.

if you haven’t read the first piece, you can here.

to recap where that one started on my musings on yearning, here it is:

Yearning isn’t something you can manufacture. Yearning isn’t something you can manufacture.

it isn’t just an aesthetic or a fleeting mood you slip into when it’s convenient. it asks something of you. it asks you to stay open, even when there’s no guarantee of resolution. to sit in desire without rushing to collapse it into something tangible.

and yes, there is something deeply beautiful when longing is met. when desire lands, when connection becomes something real, something lived.

but that’s not where the transformation happens.

the transformation happens in the holding.

in the moments where you don’t know how it will unfold, and you choose to stay open anyway. when yearning stretches you, softens you, brings you into deeper honesty about what you want, what you feel, what you’re no longer willing to deny.

these films understand that.

they don’t just show love, they show the space that shapes you before it ever arrives. the tension, the almost, the quiet becoming that happens when you allow yourself to feel deeply without rushing to the end.

because yearning, when you let it, doesn’t just point you toward something else.

it changes you.

it makes you more honest.

more awake.

more available for the kind of love that doesn’t need to be chased or forced.

and maybe that’s why it lingers.

not because it was fulfilled, but because of who you became in the presence of it. 💋

which I thought summed up what I wanted to say about yearning. but interestingly enough, exploring it through a different art form cracked something open I hadn’t gotten to yet. while music plays a part in cinema, it relies on other mediums to do the work, the set, the costume, the angles. where music has just the sound alchemy, and something intimate about the songwriter, pairing with sound to invoke a whole story captured in a few minutes.

while I was selecting the songs it felt insanely challenging, so I ended up creating a playlist on spotify, and made it collaborative so you can all add your own, the songs that bring you into your yearning.

Listen here.

I also categorized the songs, not just yearning for someone, but yearning for nostalgia: yearning as atmosphere, yearning as narrative / rupture, yearning as the small and particular.

so without further ado, here’s the set list of songs that have taught me how to yearn, sequenced to move through that same arc, atmosphere → rupture → the small and particular:

I. Yearning as Atmosphere Fade Into You — Mazzy Star Sun Bleached Flies — Ethel Cain Crush — Ethel Cain

II. Yearning as Narrative / Rupture Great Expectation — Sienna Spiro Don’t Delete the Kisses — Wolf Alice Miss — Florence Road Lover, You Should’ve Come Over — Jeff Buckley Begged — Olivia Rodrigo

III. Yearning as the Small and Particular I Wanna Be Yours — Arctic Monkeys Ivy — Frank Ocean In the Living Room — Maggie Rogers Wish On An Eyelash — Mallrat

fade into you

the tempo drags just behind the beat. you feel yourself reaching before you even know what for. a person, a version of yourself, a feeling you can’t name yet. that’s the trick of it. the song never catches up to itself, so neither do you. every time I listen, my heart feels like it’s getting pried open to that yearn.

Hope Sandoval’s voice barely rises above a whisper the whole way through. not because she’s holding back, but because that’s what longing actually sounds like. not a scream. a whisper aimed at someone who isn’t in the room to hear it.

and the lyrics carry that same absence. the eyes that see nothing, hollowed out. the shadow life, lived somewhere just out of reach. it’s not darkness as danger here. it’s darkness as distance. as the space between you and the person you’re aching for. living in shadow becomes its own kind of intimacy, closer to the dark than to daylight, because daylight is where they’d actually have to be seen, be present, be real.

that’s the whole song, wanting something enough to let it stay unclear. fading into someone instead of arriving at them.

Fade into you music video

sun bleached flies

I find myself yearning backward instead of outward not for a person who’s absent in this moment, but for an entire past self, a past version of a life that already ended. the ache isn’t “come back to me.” it’s “let me go back to when things hadn’t broken yet.”

the length does something most pop songs don’t let themselves do it stretches past six minutes and refuses to hurry. that’s the point yearning for an old life doesn’t move at verse-chorus-verse speed. it drifts circling for the same memory from different angles. the song gives itself permission to sit in that circling instead of resolving it.

and Ethel builds an entire world around it. it’s a scene you’re dropped into. specific American landscape doing emotional work the way a film’s setting would. the lyrics don’t just describe a feeling, they place you somewhere: a town, a house, a version of family and faith that’s already gone. it feels less like a confession and more like being handed the opening shot of a movie.

crush

yearning outgrowing the size of a body. you don’t just feel it, you want to run the full length of it, wing to wing, like it’s architecture built for exactly this kind of feeling and nothing smaller. Ethel keeps reaching for religious scale because ordinary romantic language can’t hold what she’s describing. ache this size needs vaulted ceilings. it needs an altar.

and the lyrics match that scale in the most visceral way possible. violence tangled up with tenderness, a willingness to bleed for someone and call it devotion. fear of being beaten to the confession, of loving first and saying it second. submission written as if it’s the only honest posture left, the body giving up control because the feeling already has.

none of it is subtle, and that’s exactly why it works. Crush isn’t asking to be understood, it’s asking to be felt at cathedral volume. Talk about the art of yearning.

great expectation

the quietest kind of yearning on the list so far, and maybe the most private. not aching for someone who’s gone, not begging a body to be let in. this is loving an idea more than the person it’s attached to. choosing the fantasy on purpose, because the fantasy is safer than the real thing could ever be.

self-protection tangled up in it and wanting someone who never fully existed means you never have to survive them leaving, or disappointing you, or turning out smaller than you needed them to be. the yearning stays intact because the object of it was never real enough to fail you and sometimes that type of yearning is the most challenging because you never fully get closure.

don’t delete the kisses

verses read almost like spoken word, thoughts falling out in real time rather than being sung at you. and underneath, a shoegaze wall holding all of it up, soft and hazy, the melody is doing the emotional work the voice is too overwhelmed to do directly. it’s confession set against a wash of sound, private thinking made public by accident.

then the word repeats. love, love, love, love, love, building and building like a mind spinning on the same word until it stops meaning anything and starts meaning everything. and right after that peak, the question drops in and undercuts the whole thing: what if it’s not meant for me. that’s the moment the song stops being about a person and starts being about doubt itself. the fear underneath every yearning, whispered right after the loudest possible declaration of it.

it’s such a specific, human contradiction. saying the word enough times to convince yourself, then immediately wondering if you even get to have it. a thought so many people carry quietly and rarely say out loud, here sung right into the open.

miss

missing someone in the middle of a good night, dressed up, dancing, everyone around you having a great time, and the absence is still the loudest thing in the room. joy doesn’t cancel longing out sometimes it just makes the empty space next to you more obvious.

the song opens hushed, almost conversational, it’s being said quietly to no one in particular. and then it builds, the way the feeling itself builds when you can’t outrun it, until it breaks into something closer to a shout. the structure mirrors the emotional arc exactly: contained, contained, contained, and then it isn’t anymore.

I also found while listening a haunted quality running underneath it, a sense of someone’s absence still occupying physical space. a kitchen that isn’t empty even though no one’s there. a feeling in the air that won’t leave just because the person did. loneliest kind of yearning, that follows you into rooms full of people and refuses to stay behind.

lover, you should’ve come over

yearning with teeth in it. not soft, not hazy. this one unravels in real time, the vocal climbing and cracking as it goes, like restraint is being lost verse by verse instead of held from the start. by the end it isn’t asking anymore, it’s pleading, and the voice sounds like it’s paying a physical cost to get there.

underneath all of it is regret, the specific kind that wants a second chance more than it wants sympathy. not just missing someone, but replaying the exact moment things went wrong and wishing there was still time to fix it. a mistake that hasn’t been forgiven yet.

that’s what gives the song its weight. it isn’t mourning something that simply ended. it’s mourning something that could have been saved, if only the right door had been walked through at the right time. the ache isn’t clean. it’s tangled up with self-blame, which is so much harder to sit with than plain loss.

begged

stripping away any distance between the feeling and the telling. no metaphor standing in front of it, no cathedral, no shoegaze wall to soften the confession. just the plain, raw fact of it: begging someone to choose you, said out loud without any protection around the words.

you stop advocating for what you deserve and start negotiating for whatever you can get, hoping devotion might be enough to tip the scale. it’s a familiar shape for a lot of people, that shift from wanting to be chosen to actively performing the case for why you should be. the begging isn’t weakness exactly. it’s devotion with nowhere left to go but down on its knees for someone who’s likely unworthy and undeserving of your heart on full display.

what makes it land is the lack of performance in the delivery. it doesn’t sound stylized or poetic, it sounds like something admitted in private and never meant to be pretty. that rawness is what makes it recognizable. most people have had this exact moment somewhere, even if they never said it out loud.

i wanna be yours

the language here is almost funny on paper. wanting to be a vacuum cleaner, a coffee percolator, the most mundane objects imaginable offered up as devotion. but nothing about the delivery reads as a joke. that’s the trick of it. devotion doesn’t need grand language to be real, sometimes it’s more convincing in the small and the ordinary. wanting to be useful, wanting to be present in someone’s everyday life in the most unremarkable ways possible, that’s its own kind of vow.

and the tone is what makes it land instead of read as absurd. slow, syrupy, unhurried, like the song refuses to rush toward the punchline the lyrics seem to be setting up. the music tells you how seriously to take the words, and it insists: completely. that’s tone doing the emotional work the lyrics alone wouldn’t be able to carry. without that pacing, this could read as clever. with it, it reads as sincere devotion dressed up in the plainest objects available.

ivy

Ivy doesn’t just describe a memory, it puts you inside one. the production has that pitched, slightly warped quality by the end, like the past distorting the way it actually does when you replay it too many times. not a clean flashback. something closer to memory as it actually behaves, blurred at the edges, softened in some places and sharpened in others depending on what still hurts.

the yearning here isn’t really aimed at getting someone back. it’s aimed at a version of yourself that existed alongside them, a specific time that can’t be re-entered no matter how close the memory feels. nostalgia convinces you the door is still open when really you’re just standing very close to the glass, looking in.

in the living room

not every yearning comes from heartbreak or absence sometimes it’s quieter than that, and smaller. not longing for a person specifically, but for a whole domestic rhythm that hasn’t happened yet. the kettle already on when you wake up. someone else’s presence folded into the ordinary parts of a day, not the big romantic ones.

no rupture, no begging, no cathedral-sized ache. just wanting for the mundane made shared. a life where the small moments already have someone else built into them. it’s easy to overlook this as yearning at all, since it doesn’t hurt the same way heartbreak does. but the want is just as real, maybe even more honest, because it isn’t reaching for intensity. it’s reaching for steadiness within intimacy.

wish on an eyelash

just a wish, small and childlike, the kind made on an eyelash or a candle without needing a whole philosophy behind it. wanting something simply, without the weight of trauma or history attached to the wanting.

innocence in that which feels earned by the end of this list, not naive. after everything before it, the ache of absence, the performance of love, the begging, the domestic longing, landing somewhere this light feels like relief. like yearning doesn’t always have to cost something. sometimes it can just be a small hope.

A practice 4 you

when people think of nervous system work, they go straight to the practices that read as typically wellness oriented. the breathwork, the somatic checklist, the regulation techniques with a name and a method. and there’s a place for that, I write those pieces too, and I like writing them.

but in my experience, some of the most honest nervous system work happens in much simpler moments. allowing ourselves to actually feel the sensations. getting lost in a song. being fully in the experience of art instead of just consuming it.

I had to remind myself of that while I was making this piece. there’s an internal pressure to keep writing the nervous system 101 kind of content, the stuff that’s easy to categorize and easy to teach. but there’s an art of yearning in particular that teaches us something about the nervous system those pieces can’t quite reach.

so here’s the unconventional nervous system practice I want to leave you with: make your own yearning playlist. sit with it. notice how your body cracks open at the feeling of yearning, where it lands, what it does to your breath, your chest, your throat. or just listen to the one I made, and let yourself actually feel it instead of thinking your way through it.

so. some things I want to say clearly.

this is not an anti-motherhood piece. I want to name that up front because most of what gets said publicly about this topic falls into two camps: women who always knew they wanted children, and women who always knew they didn’t. both are real. both deserve their certainty. but there’s a third room nobody built a door for: women who don’t know, who are in process, who change their minds partway through building a whole life around one answer. I’m writing from that room.

a pew research study from last year found that 57 percent of adults under fifty who don’t have children now say they simply don’t want them, up significantly from a decade ago, and the number keeps climbing. permission is spreading. but permission and certainty are not the same thing, and nobody is tracking the women who are somewhere in between the two, renegotiating something they thought was already settled.

a boundary before I go further: if you’re a mother, I’m not looking for you to tell me I’ll feel different once I have a baby, or any version of that gentle condescension. you’re welcome to comment with your own story. witnessing is welcome. advice is not. sometimes the most generous thing another woman can offer is letting you stay in process without handing you her conclusion.

for the past few years, motherhood felt settled to me. I built my business around it, a structure that would let me have a spacious pregnancy and postpartum without a pay cut. I trained my body the way you’d train for anything you were serious about, ate for it, thought about it as preparation for carrying life. fertility was one of my words for the year. my partner and I have baby clothes folded in a drawer in our closet. it was a plan I believed in.

and then, something moved. I think it had always been there and I just hadn’t let myself feel it fully: what if I don’t want to be a mother.

last year, around this time, I was at a retreat my experience was entirely around owning motherhood, looking straight at whatever fear lived underneath it. there was a birthing pool. someone poured water over my head. I said yes to all of it, fully, and what came up wasn’t fear of pain or fear of loss of self. it was the realization that I don’t have many examples of motherhood that make me want it. I see a baby and feel the softness of it, the sweetness. but I don’t look at my mother and feel envy, that pull of wanting to trade places. that’s not a judgment on the path. I love children, I respect the women raising them, and my body still says, not for me at this time or in the near future.

maybe it’s my age. maybe it’s something closer to selfishness, and I’m not in a rush to correct that. the thought of trading sleep for a newborn doesn’t move me the way it seems to move other women. give me the auntie role, the spontaneous flight to europe, the version of my life where school drop-off was never on the calendar. I’m grateful for everything my mother gave up for us, five children, and I also find myself wondering, honestly, whether she ever grieves the life she might have had without all of it. I don’t know if that’s a mother wound or just an honest question. maybe both.

there’s a sociologist named orna donath who spent years interviewing mothers who, if given the choice again, say they wouldn’t have children. not women who struggled with the difficulty of motherhood, but women who loved their kids and still call the decision something they would now choose differently. her research treats regret as something structural rather than personal: proof that the paths available to women may have been narrower than they were told. what struck me reading about her work is the idea that love and regret can live in the same body at the same time, and that admitting one doesn’t cancel the other.

grief feels central to all of this, whichever way it goes. I think about not becoming a mother and I grieve a life that isn’t going to happen: the fullness in my body, the threshold of womanhood I’ll never cross that way, the particular intimacy that comes from raising a child alongside someone you love. and then I think about crossing that threshold and I grieve differently: the list that stays only mine, the spaciousness, the time, all my energy staying with me, with my boyfriend, with my friends, with my work. both futures cost something. I don’t think there’s a way through this that doesn’t involve losing a version of a life you’ll never get to live.

there’s a shame underneath it too, small but persistent. am I less of a woman because I care more about the legacy of my work than about giving life to another body. there’s propaganda on both sides of this: one side handing out approval for every woman who climbs the career ladder instead, the other insisting women have more children than they can reasonably afford. neither one is actually interested in what any specific woman wants. which is exactly why knowing yourself matters here more than almost anywhere else. are you choosing a path because it was laid out for you before you could question it. because of fear. because of a wound passed down without your consent. or because it’s genuinely what you want. or maybe, and this is allowed too, because you don’t know yet.

this piece was never going to resolve anything. it’s not a conclusion, it’s a permission slip. to have this conversation with yourself, with your partner, out loud, without needing to land anywhere by the end of it.

one thing I keep coming back to: what would I need to feel safe enough to become a mother. I want to acknowledge the privilege embedded in even asking that question. plenty of incredible mothers didn’t have any of the conditions I’m describing and did it anyway. but I think what I’m reclaiming, and I notice younger women doing this well, is the right to ask the question at all. gen z is questioning marriage, questioning the default timeline, building entirely new paths through content and career and community. a pew survey found that 30 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds without kids simply aren’t sure yet whether they want them. that uncertainty isn’t a failure to decide it might be the most honest thing available.

I’ve been a little obsessed lately with a woman online who has built a whole following cataloging her reasons for not wanting children, hundreds of them, some funny, some serious, some I’d never considered. I don’t find myself convinced by her list. but I’m grateful for the information, for someone doing the work of naming what usually stays unspoken.

THE LIST

I wasn’t raised by parents who pushed motherhood on me directly. it was just the assumed shape of a life: you get married, you buy a house, you have babies. because what else would you do with the time. except now I’m actually asking that question. what else would I do with the time. maybe I want to find out.

maybe I don’t need the answer yet. maybe saying this out loud, and staying honest as it keeps shifting, is the whole point.

I’m grateful, at least, for a partner who reminds me weekly that he wants me for who I am as a woman, not because I might one day give him a child. because of everything I already am without one.

I’ll take it. I came out of the womb knowing exactly what I wanted out loud about it, no apology in my body for it. and in a culture that treats women who know what they want as dangerous, especially young ones, that kind of clarity rattles people. It rattled the women in my family unit. teachers. dance teachers. friends’ moms. an entire chorus of people who needed me to be smaller so they could feel more comfortable in the room.

I never took the note.

back in my single-and-dating era I had a favorite line. somewhere between the small talk and someone trying to pick me up, when they’d ask me about myself, I’d say it:

“one thing you should know about me — I’m a woman who always gets what she wants out of life.”

and I’d watch people flinch. every time.

My boyfriend didn’t. He loves that I’m a little bratty, a little bitchy, intimidating. He wouldn’t use those words for me, but he loves the energy underneath them. I’m a realist though, so let’s call a spade a spade.

but when I say I get what I want, I’m not talking about good circumstances. the best deck of cards. some inherited privilege that made the whole thing easy. I’d argue the opposite, actually. and no I’m not unpacking my trauma for you here. If you want the intimate details, there’s a time and place for that. I gatekeep that shit. The dark-night-of-the-soul material needs a foundation this post isn’t built to hold.

what I will tell you: there have been so many Tower moments in my life. thresholds. long, disorienting walks through feeling completely lost, no map, no compass, just the walk. and those moments are the actual load-bearing structure of where I’m standing now.

I know that from the outside, my life reads like most people’s vision board. dream city. never worry about money. a business that runs whether I’m precious about it that week or not. a relationship that’s easy in the ways that matter. friendships with real weight to them. health. most of my family relationships intact. I travel when I want to. it’s a privileged life and I won’t pretend otherwise.

but I also built it. on purpose. with a mechanism underneath it, not a wish.

let’s sit with that word — work — for a second, because it ruffles feathers in these circles. Achieving something doesn’t always mean hustling for it. There’s a whole other essay on the difference between healthy ambition and the kind of chasing that’s really just outrunning yourself. That’s not this one. What I want to hand you today is the actual mechanics. The neurology sitting underneath getting what you want out of life, once you strip away the vision boards and the checkout-cart wishing.

the thing nobody tells you about manifesting

wellness culture is obsessed with your thoughts. Change your mindset, change your reality, journal it into existence. and I love a mindset upgrade as much as the next woman with a Notes app full of affirmations.

roughly 80% of the signal traveling through your vagus nerve, the nerve running the entire conversation between your gut, heart, lungs, and brain moves body to brain. only about 20% runs the other direction, brain down to body. This ratio isn’t a wellness stat someone made up for a slide deck. It’s one of the more well-established facts in vagal physiology, confirmed across decades of research.

which means your brain is constantly gathering intel from your body and building meaning out of what it finds there. This is the part that gets me fired up, genuinely, every time nervous system work gets flattened into “just shift your mindset.”

you cannot think your way out of a body that feels chronically unsafe. You cannot affirm your way out of exhaustion when your body is broadcasting depletion on every channel it has. Your brain takes its cues from your sleep, your hormones, your digestion, your breath, your relationships, the actual physiological weather system you’re living inside. The thoughts are downstream of that, more often than they’re driving it.

This doesn’t mean your thoughts don’t matter. It means the conversation runs both ways, and most of us were only ever taught to work the 20%. mindset is part of somatic work it’s one lever, not the whole machine. neuroplasticity itself isn’t purely subconscious work either. but that 20%, the conscious, mind-facing piece, is still worth tending closely. it’s just not the floor everything else stands on. The body is the floor.

So before we get to the practical part, the actual how I want to give you the frame I use to think about the body itself, because not all somatic work is built the same.

my four pillars of somatic guidance

nervous system alchemy — western influence. regulation as the floor, not the finish line. trauma-informed practice that builds real safety in the body, not performed calm for an audience. polyvagal theory as a map for activation, freeze, and expansion. tracking and shifting body states with actual precision, not vibes.

energetic embodiment — tantrik and yogic influence. subtle energy worked through breath, movement, sound. sensation mapped through chakras and meridians. masculine and feminine harmonized within the body — not projected onto a partner and left there to rot. presence built through somatic meditation and pranic awareness.

ancestral and earth-based somatics — shamanic influence. the body remembered as an extension of nature and lineage, not something separate from either. ritual and cyclical living as a way of attuning to the body’s own seasons. healing through elements, earth connection, animism. intergenerational trauma released through the body — not just narrated in a therapist’s office and left to live in the nervous system anyway.

expressive bodywork — artistic and creative influence. stored emotion unlocked through intuitive movement and self-expression. sound, rhythm, art, used to deepen the mind-body connection. perfectionism dismantled in the body, one degree of fluidity at a time. self-trust rebuilt through play, voice, sensation — the parts of us that spreadsheets can’t reach.

four different lineages, one throughline: the body isn’t a subplot to the mind. It’s the main character. and once you actually believe that, the entire question of “how do I get what I want out of life” changes shape.

the domino effect: finding your one load-bearing area

I usually to call this the areas of success, but since you all aren’t my female business clients scaling their work let’s call it areas of life:

• financial — wealth, income goals

• work — career, business, service, contribution

• inspiration — travel, creativity, adventure, passion

• social — connection, community, fun, relationship

• spiritual — soul, being, expression

• mental — mind, learning, wisdom

• physical — health, fitness, wellbeing

when I’m looking at upgrading my own life or walking a client through it inside the mastermind — I zoom all the way out first. holistic lens, all seven categories on the table at once. The question was never “which one do I optimize this quarter.” it’s which one, tended, would lift the other six.

These areas are interconnected. Not a to-do list where you check boxes one at a time. It’s closer to structural engineering. You find the beam that’s actually load-bearing, and you reinforce that one first, because reinforcing the wrong wall doesn’t save the house.

I run this audit on myself every quarter, at every season shift. This past summer, physical wellbeing was the one flashing red. Specifically, my training. I could feel it creating a kind of suppression across my entire energy: lack of mobility, lack of strength, a low-grade static I couldn’t meditate my way out of. and my nervous system was responding by bracing. Which meant more meditation was actually the wrong tool. What the moment needed wasn’t more stillness. It was lifting. strengthening and lengthening the body, structurally, to resolve something happening in my nervous system. You can’t have a healthy nervous system if your physical body is weak.

The compounding effect showed up almost immediately. focus at work sharpened. more strength in the body translated, directly, to more inspiration in the mind. one wall reinforced, and the whole house stood straighter.

find the one area quietly asking for your attention. Start there. and this is where I want to get a little more honest than the standard manifestation conversation usually allows I’m not fully talking about manifestation the way it’s typically sold to you.

the paradox at the center of this whole piece

If I’m being honest, my process was never purely “what do I want out of life.” and I think that’s exactly where mainstream manifestation culture breaks down. It gets so obsessed with self, self, self, that it forgets to drop into soul — into a relationship with something bigger than the self doing the wanting.

I respect everyone’s relationship to that bigger thing, whatever they call it, however their gnosis gets them there. I’ve used mother earth, goddess, universe, over the years. lately god is the word that feels most true for me — not religiously, but as the closest language I’ve found for a relationship with something beyond myself.

Religion tends to say the most fulfilling life is the one god asks of you. I think there’s real truth buried in that kind of surrender that genuinely works, when it’s not weaponized. but that framing on its own leaves out our own gnosis. Our inner knowing. the thing I’d call intuition. I’m less interested in picking a side of that equation and more interested in where the two actually meet.

picture a venn diagram. what I want for myself, on one side. what god the universe, whatever word does it for you wants for me, on the other. I don’t care which language you land on. I care about the overlap.

and in my experience, that overlap is where the real growth lives, not the vision board. (Although I did just update mine so I do love that practice) but I don’t manifest off a checklist. I don’t ask for what I want the way you’d build a cart on a shopping site, adding line items until the total feels satisfying. My life got richer the moment I stopped adding to that list and started asking which of those wants were actually self-serving, versus which ones held something deeper if I let myself sit in them a little longer.

so instead of saying “I’m manifesting 10k months,” I started framing it as an ignition. The number is still the number, sure. But underneath it is an intention almost a prayer about the character of the woman who can actually hold that wealth. the energy. groundedness. the capacity to not spill it the second it arrives.

That reframe is what actually grew my business. because for years I’d been settling for a version of my desires so much smaller than what was already available to me checking a box on a list, when the room I was standing in went so much bigger than the box I’d drawn around myself.

So as you’re naming what you want, treat it less like a checkout cart and more like tuning a frequency. Where do you and that bigger current actually meet? That’s the question worth sitting with not “how do I add this to my life,” but “who do I have to become to already be a match for it.”

using neuroplasticity on purpose

Here’s where science stops being backdrop and starts being something you can actually use.

learn something with zero mastery. a new language, an instrument, a style of dance you’ve never attempted. I’m learning Portuguese right now ahead of a trip to Portugal this fall partly practical, but mostly because nothing forces new neural pathways to form quite like being a total beginner again, on purpose, as an adult who’s used to being good at things.

break your own pattern. Humans are creatures of habit. How much depends on your particular wiring, whatever framework you use to describe it. but novelty itself is the lever. a different walking route. a genre of music you’d normally skip past. small, deliberate disruptions that keep the brain actively building instead of running on autopilot.

give your mind actual resistance. puzzles, sudoku, anything that makes the brain work for it. mental fitness follows the same law as physical fitness; it doesn’t grow without load.

move your body, specifically. Exercise is one of the most well-documented drivers of neuroplasticity there is. It raises BDNF, a protein that supports the growth and survival of neurons, essentially fertilizer for new neural connections. This is not a wellness girl talking point. This is one of the more replicated findings in the research.

reduce your stress, actually, not performatively. obvious on paper. still the piece most people skip in practice, every single time.

protect your sleep like it’s revenue. because functionally, it is. sleep is when a huge amount of that neural reorganizing and consolidating actually happens you don’t get the rewire without the rest.

None of this is new information. It’s almost embarrassingly basic. but the most reliable magic I’ve ever found has never been the elaborate process. It’s the compounding of the basics, done consistently, for long enough that the brain actually rebuilds itself around them.

That baseline — solid, well-tended neuroplasticity — is what lets you re-pattern cognitive function and lay down a genuinely new baseline identity. and that’s the bridge into the deeper subconscious work: EFT, meridian point work, hypnosis, and the kind of mindset work that actually has a body underneath it, holding it up, instead of floating free of one. It also supports us in building capacity for discomfort and doing the hard things in life aka building towards the dream life that’s not just a dream but an insight into the timeline we’re meant to be on.

the practice underneath all of this

every season every quarter, or whenever the shift is loud enough that I can feel it in my body before I can name it I run the same audit across all seven areas of life. money, work, inspiration, social, spiritual, mental, physical. I rate each one, gut-level, no rationalizing my way to a number that sounds better than what’s true. I find the one wall that’s actually load-bearing of the house of me.

this is where I’ll actually reclaim the word quantum for a second, because I think it’s earned itself back here. not in a bypass-y, thoughts-become-things, skip-the-reps kind of way I’m not skipping the training, the structural work, the actual hours in my body or my business to get there. I mean something more specific: the real, compounding effect of doing this on purpose, every season, instead of by accident once a year when I’ve burned out enough to finally notice something was off. one wall reinforced makes the next wall easier to see. that’s the entire mechanism. done with enough precision and enough repetition that it starts to look like magic from the outside.

it’s the difference between hoping your life adds up eventually, and actually running tending to it.

so here's the actual invitation: become a paid subscriber and I'll hand you the full practice. not a summary of it the exact audit, the rating system, the questions I ask myself for each of the seven areas, and the sentence structure I use to write my own ignition every season. the same process behind every upgrade I've just described to you, laid out so you can run it on yourself before this season turns into the next one.

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She accidentally bumped the curb, laughed, and without missing a beat said, “Oops... I’m just a girl.”

We all laughed.

It was a moment that would disappear as quickly as it arrived if you weren’t paying attention. But for some reason it lodged itself somewhere inside me.

I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Where is the line between girlhood and womanhood?

Not in the biological sense, but in the psychological, cultural, and even spiritual sense.

Over the last year, my social media feeds have become filled with women insisting that we need to stop calling ourselves girls.

Stop saying “hot girl summer.”

Stop saying “girly.”

Stop identifying as a “soft girl.”

And I look around and ask myself the same question:

When did girl become a branding strategy?

Girl dinner.

Girl math.

Hot girl walks.

Girlboss.

Clean girl.

Coquette.

Suddenly bows are back in our hair. Ballet flats are everywhere. Baby doll dresses are having a cultural moment. There is an entire economy built around recreating, aestheticizing, and selling versions of girlhood.

And I find myself asking:

Are we reclaiming girlhood because we recognize that there is something sacred about this developmental stage? Something essential about play, creativity, softness, imagination, and innocence that women deserve to carry into adulthood?

Or are we using girlhood as a way to avoid the maturation process into womanhood?

The answer, I think, is both. And both are important to understand.

Because yes, there is danger when girlhood becomes a way of avoiding the thresholds of womanhood. When youth becomes something we cling to because we are afraid of aging, responsibility, wisdom, or power.

We live in a culture where teenage girls are buying anti-aging skincare, twenty-year-olds are getting preventative Botox, and aging women are often treated as if their relevance expires with their youth.

We don’t just fear getting older.

We fear becoming invisible.

But I also think there is something missing from many of these conversations. When we critique girlhood, sometimes we forget to ask what women are actually longing for. Maybe women aren’t longing to become girls again. Maybe they are longing to reconnect with the parts of themselves that were never supposed to die.

We spent decades celebrating a very specific version of empowerment. The girlboss. The woman who could do everything. The woman who could build an empire, work endlessly, suppress her needs, and prove she was just as capable as men.

And maybe this resurgence of femininity, softness, bows, dresses, rituals, and play is a response to that.

Maybe women are exhausted.

Maybe they are trying to remember themselves after years of being told that success looked like abandoning softness.

Capitalism is also very skilled at taking our deepest longings and turning them into products.

Both things can be true. We can be reclaiming something sacred while also participating in a culture obsessed with youth.

Recently, Olivia Rodrigo received criticism for wearing a baby doll dress while running around the Palace of Versailles in a music video. Many feminists criticized the styling as infantilizing, as playing into the male gaze, as reinforcing youthfulness.

I understand the critique. Women have a long history of being reduced to girlhood by men. Of being told we are innocent, sweet, young, desirable, but never powerful.

History matters but where I struggle is when every feminine choice becomes reduced to whether it is acceptable through the lens of feminism. At what point do we return the authority back to women themselves?

I remember a time in my own life when I stopped shaving my legs and armpits as an act of feminist resistance. At the time, it felt empowering. It felt like reclaiming my body and refusing to participate in beauty standards I believed had been imposed on me.

Years later, I started shaving again.

Not because a man asked me to.

Not because I had become less aware.

Not because I had abandoned feminism.

But because I actually enjoyed the ritual.

I liked how it felt in my body.

I liked feeling soft.

I liked feeling beautiful in that expression.

And that taught me something important.

We can outsource our womanhood to patriarchy, but we can also outsource it to ideology.

Liberation is not creating a new box where women must perform empowerment correctly.

Liberation is the ability to choose.

Wear the ribbons.

Don’t wear the ribbons.

Shave your legs.

Don’t shave your legs.

Want a fifty-fifty relationship.

Want a partner who provides.

The question isn’t whether your choice fits someone else’s definition of a liberated woman.

The question is whether you are in a relationship with yourself.

This is where I think many conversations around girlhood become too simplistic.

It isn’t as simple as saying women calling themselves girls is automatically infantilizing.

But it also isn’t true that every expression of girlhood is automatically empowering.

I have met women who are hiding in the margins of their lives, staying attached to girlhood because stepping into their power as women feels terrifying. When girlhood becomes a way to avoid responsibility, authority, wisdom, or self-trust, then yes, we have to look at that.

Becoming a woman requires a crossing.

It requires maturation.

It requires integration.

I actually agree that the West has very few meaningful rites of passage into womanhood anymore.

Outside of menstruation, motherhood, marriage, or menopause, there are very few moments where a community gathers around a woman and says:

Something has changed.

You have crossed a threshold.

So what are our modern-day initiations?

Heartbreak.

The friendship that ends and changes you forever.

The relationship you finally leave.

The miscarriage no one knew about.

Moving across the world.

Burnout.

Caring for aging parents.

Losing an identity you spent years building.

The first time you choose yourself.

We still become women.

We simply do it without witnesses.

Many Indigenous cultures have long understood the importance of ceremony, lineage, and community in these crossings. Moon lodges, rites of passage, gatherings of grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and young women all recognizing that becoming a woman is not something we do alone.

There is a lineage.

A thread connecting the women who came before us, the women beside us, and the women who come after.

Many of us are left to create those ceremonies for ourselves.

And I wonder if, in our attempt to be taken seriously as women, we have started treating girlhood like something embarrassing that must be discarded.

As if becoming a woman requires killing the girl.

I don’t think that’s true.

If anything, after more than a decade working with women’s nervous systems, I’ve found the opposite.

The women who are most disconnected from themselves often aren’t too attached to girlhood.

They’re grieving her.

Nervous systems don’t organize around age, they organize around safety. The girl who should have been playing becomes the caretaker. The child who should have been exploring becomes the achiever. The young woman who should have been discovering herself becomes focused on proving herself.

She learns competence before curiosity. What looks like empowerment from the outside is actually survival.

I know this because I have lived this.

There were seasons where I hid behind intellect. Where being intelligent felt safer than being vulnerable. Where I believed proving my capability would protect me from being hurt.

But eventually I realized the parts of myself I was rejecting were not weaknesses.

My softness was not weakness.

My playfulness was not immaturity.

My desire was not something to apologize for.

The girl was not the problem.

She was the part of me that needed protection.

This is why I believe the woman protects the girl.

The woman is the one who creates safety.

She sets boundaries.

She leaves relationships that harm her.

She earns money.

She makes decisions.

She chooses.

But the girl?

She is still the one who laughs too loudly.

She dances in the kitchen.

She believes in magic.

She gets excited when an old Camp Rock song comes on.

She notices sunsets.

She finds joy in tiny things.

The woman does not replace the girl.

She becomes the person the girl can finally trust.

Maybe there is nostalgia around girlhood because so many of us believe we have to choose.

Girl or woman.

Soft or powerful.

Beautiful or intelligent.

Sexual or respected.

But there is always a third way.

One where all parts of ourselves are allowed to exist.

The elder matriarch is still a girl.

The grandmother still laughs like a child.

The woman in her fifties can still wear bright lipstick because it makes her happy.

The woman in her eighties can still dance.

Age does not erase the girl.

Wisdom simply gives her a safer home.

Maybe the women who inspire me most aren’t the ones who have abandoned girlhood.

They are the ones who have integrated it.

They carry her with them.

Not as an identity to cling to.

But as a living part of themselves.

Maybe womanhood isn’t the absence of girlhood.

Maybe womanhood is having the capacity to hold every version of yourself with love.

Maybe that is the real initiation.

Not becoming someone new.

But finally becoming safe enough to welcome every woman you have ever been.

I keep watching women get stuck at the same door.

they feel something. and instead of feeling it, they interrogate it.

is this anxiety? is this fear? is this intuition? is this desire? is this just excitement wearing a costume?

they hold the sensation up to the light like a suspect in a lineup, trying …

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Recently inside my writing group we were given the prompt: write about the first time you truly felt seen in sex.

Not the best sex or the hottest person you’ve slept with.

But the first time your body softened into the feeling of being fully met.

And almost instantly my mind went to a moment that had nothing to do with romance in the traditional sense and everything to do with power, surrender, safety, and the strange intimacy of finally not feeling “too much” for someone.

What surprised me most wasn’t the kink itself.
It was realizing how many women spend years editing themselves inside intimacy.
Muting fantasies.
Performing versions of femininity that feel digestible instead of honest.

This was the first time I didn’t.

This was the erotic writing prompt given by my mentor

Write about the first time you truly felt seen in sex. What happened? Who were you with? How did your body respond? What made this different from other sexual experiences?

My erotic story…

He placed a choking collar around my neck and tightened the clasp.
I looked at him dead in the eyes as he attached the leash around the collar and motioned me to lay on my back.

His fingers grasped the leash as if he was delicately plucking at violin strings getting ready to tug ever so slightly but making me wait. Making me anticipate.

It was the first time I felt like I was being met.
That my desires were being fed.
And I wasn’t made wrong for them.

Not seen as dirty, dark, dramatic, or weird but an honouring of wanting to relinquish control for once in my life.

Call me kinky or freaky but there was something empowering about potentially not being able to breathe and giving that power to a man.
Because it wasn’t about me being helpless.
It was the woman in power the whole time choosing to surrender.

And maybe that’s what made it feel so intimate.
Not the collar or the leash but the fact I didn’t feel like I needed to water myself down to be wanted.

As he started playing with my pussy with his other hand, fingers stroking and knowing exactly what strings to pluck to allow sweet music from my mouth to roll off my tongue moaning and feeling heat rise between my legs.

Teasing until he felt me wet enough to enter me all while keeping his eyes locked on mine.
That was the rule.
Eyes locked. No turning away.

Fully present with me.
Like he wanted to witness every expression that crossed my face. Every shift in breath. Every sound.

As he started moving his hips dancing inside me he tugged harder at the collar capturing the breath and moans wanting to escape my mouth.

And strangely enough I felt completely safe.
More safe than any man I had ever been with.

Because for the first time I wasn’t trying to perform softness or pretend I was less intense than I actually was.
I didn’t feel too much. I didn’t feel difficult to hold.

I felt desired in the exact shape I arrived in.

Being taken fully.
Letting myself be met in what I truly wanted without shame.

xx

Musings as I love back on this moment….

I think so many women are starving to be seen without being sanitized first.

To be wanted in their full complexity. Not just the beautiful, polished parts but the messy, hungry, intense, possessive, emotional, erotic parts too.

That’s why this memory stayed with me. Underneath the kink, underneath the sex, underneath the power play was something far more vulnerable — and far more physiological than I gave it credit for at the time.

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand since: the nervous system was never asking to be safe at least in the tradtional way while safety is a core part of eros safety from flatness isn’t the same thing as safety that evokes eros to take up space. Eros asks to be met.

We’ve just been taught those are the same thing. That safety means soft. Predictable. Manageable. A body that doesn’t ask for too much, doesn’t take up too much space, doesn’t need too much handling. But a nervous system that’s only ever soothed never actually gets to find out what it can hold. It stays small because it’s never been tested, never been matched, never been reached for at full volume.

I was being witnessed without needing to shrink.

There’s a kind of grief that comes when you realize how often womanhood teaches us to make ourselves more digestible in intimacy. To be desired but not too desiring. Sensual but not dark. Wild but still manageable. We learn to titrate ourselves down to a dose other people can tolerate, and we call that titration “safety” — when really it’s just absence dressed up as peace.

But the moments that change you are usually the ones where someone looks directly at the parts you thought you had to hide and instead of flinching… they move closer. That’s not the safety we were taught to chase. That’s something underneath it. That’s being met.

you cannot tell me
that scripture knows more about divinity
than my own body
this body that feels
bleeds
aches
opens
this body that has always been oracle

you cannot tell me holiness lives in covering myself
when i have felt god most intimately
bare-skinned in cold creek water
hips kissed by the current
sunlight turning my wet body
into something worth worshipping

you cannot tell me
that prayer must begin with
“our heavenly father”

sometimes prayer sounds like music vibrating through my chest
like striking a match at midnight
like tobacco smoke curling from parted lips
like inhaling deeply enough
to remember i belong to something ancient
something fierce
something unbearably tender

and maybe that’s what terrifies people most
that women might find god
without needing permission first

in their arousal
in their eros
in the sacred pulse between their legs
not needing a man to touch holiness into them
but finding god through their own pleasure first

god aches for your fullness
for your ripeness
for the soft split-open sweetness of you
like a peach dripping in late summer

for you to surrender completely
to sensation
to beauty
to earthly delights

after all
why would god create a world this lush
if not for you to taste it fully, my love

Someone inevitably asks:

“What about men?”

Or:

“What about non-binary bodies?”

The question itself doesn’t bother me.

What interests me is the assumption underneath it that a conversation centered on female biology somehow becomes incomplete unless it expands to include every body.

I don’t believe that’s how expertise works. And when we demand that expertise operate this way, I think we lose the plot of thought leadership and education.

I believe there is tremendous value in educators, researchers, practitioners, and writers speaking from a place of depth rather than attempting to speak for everyone.

There are many people doing important work around nervous system regulation across a wide spectrum of identities, experiences, and physiological realities. Their work matters. I often share and amplify those voices because I believe we need a richer and more diverse landscape of education, not a narrower one.

My contribution to that landscape is female biology not because I think female bodies are the only bodies worth discussing.

This is the area I have spent years living in, studying, observing, and understanding.

One of the things I’ve observed as a woman is how often conversations centered on women are expected to expand beyond themselves.

A woman shares information about female hormones and someone asks where men fit into the discussion.

A woman creates content for women and is asked to explain how it applies to everyone else.

A woman speaks from her lived experience and is expected to immediately widen the lens.

Meanwhile, very few people would expect a specialist in men’s health to stop and account for every possible physiological experience before speaking about the population they serve.

There seems to be an assumption that women can have spaces, conversations, and educational content focused on women but only if they remain universally accessible at all times.

I don’t agree with that expectation.

Not every piece of content needs to be about everyone and not every educator needs to speak for every body.

When we talk about nervous system health, we’re talking about physiology. (yes this is one part of the puzzle but it’s a big one)

The nervous system does not exist in isolation from the rest of the body. It is intimately connected to hormones, metabolism, inflammation, reproductive health, sleep, energy production, and emotional processing. These systems are in constant conversation with one another.

Female biology introduces variables that significantly shape that conversation.

Estrogen influences neurotransmitters, mood, cognition, and stress resilience. Progesterone affects nervous system regulation, sleep quality, and emotional processing.

Throughout a single month, a woman’s physiological landscape can change dramatically. The nervous system is not responding to the exact same internal environment on day three of a menstrual cycle as it is during ovulation or in the days leading up to menstruation.

Hormonal fluctuations can influence everything from stress tolerance to recovery needs to emotional sensitivity.

Then there are life stages that are uniquely female experiences.

Pregnancy.

Postpartum.

Perimenopause.

Menopause.

Each creates profound physiological shifts that directly impact how a woman experiences stress, energy, recovery, mood, and nervous system regulation.

A postpartum woman navigating sleep deprivation, fluctuating hormones, and recovery is experiencing a physiological reality that requires specific understanding.

Likewise, a woman in perimenopause may find that the nervous system tools that worked for decades suddenly stop working as estrogen levels begin to fluctuate and decline.

These aren’t niche experiences.

They are central realities in the lives of millions of women.

Historically, however, much of what we understand about health, stress, performance, and physiology was built upon research conducted primarily on men. For decades, women were frequently excluded from research because hormonal fluctuations were considered too complex to account for.

The result is that many women have spent years trying to apply advice designed around male physiology to bodies that operate differently.

This is one of the reasons I believe female-centered education matters.

Not because women’s bodies are better.

Not because men’s experiences are less important.

But because women deserve education that reflects the realities of their own physiology rather than assuming that what works for one body will automatically work for another.

Writing through the lens of female biology is not an act of exclusion.

It is an act of specificity.

And specificity is what allows education to become useful and actually create resolution in the body rather than more management, more confusion, and more years of feeling like you're getting nowhere.

I also think something important gets missed in these conversations.

A non-binary person may have a female body, a male body, be taking hormones, not be taking hormones, be post-transition, pre-transition, intersex, or have a physiology that requires a very different conversation than the one I’m equipped to lead.

The issue isn’t whether people are welcome in my work.

The issue is whether I have the expertise to teach experiences that aren't my area of focus and whether it would even be responsible for me to speak on them.

I teach through the lens of female physiology because that’s where my education, lived experience, and expertise are rooted.

Could I create content for non-binary people?

Actually, no. I don't feel equipped, and it's not within my scope. Part of what creates safety when working with someone is knowing they're willing to stay in the lane they're qualified to teach from I’m not properly educated to speak to that reality.

What matters is being clear about the lens through which you’re teaching and honest about the experiences and physiological realities you understand well enough to teach responsibly.

A lot of the way I teach isn’t purely academic.

It’s through storytelling, lived experience, observation, and the expertise I’ve developed through inhabiting a female body.

I don’t believe every educator is called to teach in the same way.

Some people teach primarily through research.

Others through clinical practice.

Others through activism, identity, or scholarship.

I teach through the intersection of study and story.

I weave together nervous system education, physiology, personal experience, the stories of the women I’ve worked with, and the wisdom I’ve inherited from the women who came before me.

That lens is valuable because information alone rarely creates transformation. Transformation happens when theory becomes lived experience. And yes, there is nuance here. Many of my clients are mothers or women in menopause, and I've never personally experienced those life stages. But inhabiting a female body still creates a shared physiological context that matters.

People often understand themselves through stories long before they understand themselves through data.

My work is rooted in the female experience because that is the experience I know most intimately.

It’s the body I’ve lived in, studied, listened to, and learned from for decades.

I think we need more educators who are willing to be honest about the lens through which they teach rather than pretending they can speak for every body, every identity, and every experience to prove allyship or center men in the conversation.

If you’re looking for a male educator, I’d rather you message me so I can ask a few questions and point you toward someone whose expertise is better aligned with what you’re seeking. The same applies if you’re non-binary or trans.

Or, if you enjoy my content, I’d invite you to have the media literacy to understand that I’ve been clear from the beginning: my work is rooted in female biology. If you want to support my writing and stick around, amazing. But it’s not my responsibility to write for everyone.

My responsibility is to teach from the area of expertise I know deeply and to do so with integrity.

My role is not to become a spokesperson for every body.

My role is to speak clearly about the body I know, the physiology I have studied, and the experiences I am most equipped to teach.

My work centers female biology because that’s where my expertise lives.

Anyone is welcome to read my work.

My work is written through the lens of female biology.

That lens won’t be relevant to everyone, and that’s okay.

As my work has reached more people, it’s also attracted more criticism, more projection, and more questions about who my work is for and who it isn’t for.

So I wanted to write this piece as a loving boundary and a point of clarity.

My work is rooted in female biology.

It’s written for people who want to understand the female nervous system, female physiology, female hormones, and the lived experience of inhabiting a female body.

That doesn’t mean everyone will resonate with it.

That doesn’t mean everyone will agree with it.

And it certainly doesn’t mean every piece of content I create needs to apply to every person who reads it.

My responsibility isn’t to write for everyone.

My responsibility is to teach from the place where my experience, education, and expertise intersect.

Professional integrity requires staying within our scope, uplifting the voices of people who work in different areas of expertise, and being humble enough to say, "That's not something I know enough about to teach."

I know astrology girlies and wellness girls don’t always get taken seriously in the same sentence but personally I think there’s something deeply fascinating about the overlap between archetypes, personality, female nervous systems, and the things that make us feel alive.

… some people genuinely regulate through silence and journaling while others need to flirt at a rooftop bar, buy a glitter eyeshadow palette, and aggressively walk around the city listening to Charli XCX.

Both are valid forms of healing to me. And honestly depending where I’m at in my cycle… I am all of these women.

And while I don’t think your astrology sign determines your entire personality, I do think it can reveal something about the environments, sensations, rhythms, and emotional experiences your body naturally gravitates toward.

Really what I’m saying is… don’t take this too seriously. This is playful. This is fun. This is nervous system pattern tracking through the lens of archetypes and feminine energy and internet culture and whatever else my brain likes to connect together at 11pm.

So if you’re about to comment “omg but I’m a Gemini and resonate more with Sagittarius” babe… I love you deeply but this isn’t a peer reviewed study. You’re a multidimensional woman. Check your moon, rising, Venus, your situationship’s chart, whatever you want. Take what resonates and leave the rest.

Aries

An Aries nervous system does not regulate through pretending to be calm when it’s clearly craving stimulation.

You girls need movement. Heat. Passion. Competition. Somewhere for the fire to go before you accidentally start an argument in a group chat for enrichment

An Aries woman trying to meditate for an hour without moving her body first is honestly one of the funniest things imaginable. Babe go do a workout class. Go rage clean your apartment. Go make out with someone. Then maybe we can discuss breathwork.

Your nervous system thrives when life feels stimulating!!

Taurus

A Taurus nervous system is essentially a luxury house cat.

You regulate through sensory safety. Good food. Stable routines. Skin care. Linen sheets. Warm drinks. Being touched affectionately. Sitting in the sun for suspiciously long periods of time.

You regulate through softness and sensory pleasure. Matching pyjama sets. Good food. Slow mornings. Fresh strawberries. Clean sheets. Warm lighting. Being rubbed on the back while someone tells you everything is handled maybe throw in “you’re such a good girl” and you can fully exhale.

You’re the sign most likely to spend $47 dollars on fancy butter and honestly? I support it. (but please share some with me)

Your nervous system suffers when life starts feeling rushed, sterile, overstimulating, or disconnected from beauty. Taurus women don’t need to optimize every second of the day they need to romantically stare out the window while drinking something in a cute glass.

Gemini

Geminis don’t need less stimulation they need better stimulation.

Your nervous system thrives through novelty, conversation, storytelling, humour, flirting, random hyper-fixations, and hearing one slightly interesting fact that sends you into a three hour research spiral.

A Gemini woman with no mental stimulation becomes emotionally haunted.

You regulate through changing environments, voice notes that should’ve been podcasts, texting six people at once, bookstores, rooftop conversations, chaotic travel plans, and accidentally developing a new personality every three months.

Honestly your nervous system would probably improve if you stopped forcing yourself into boring wellness routines created by people who have never once had an interesting thought.

Cancer

Cancer women regulate through emotional safety and tiny domestic rituals.

Your nervous system loves nesting. Cooking for people. Slow mornings. Deep conversations. Nostalgia. Soft blankets. Crying dramatically and then immediately wanting snacks afterwards.

You’re the sign most likely to say “I’m fine” while your nervous system is literally begging for a hug and a soup.

Cancer women don’t just need alone time they need emotional tenderness. Your body can instantly tell when someone feels emotionally unsafe even if everyone else in the room is pretending things are normal.

Your ideal form of regulation is probably being held while watching a movie you’ve already seen fourteen times.

Leo

Leo women regulate through self expression and being adored a little bit.(Okay a lot) like worship me or die energy.

Yes I said it.

Your nervous system thrives through beauty, creativity, play, attention, romance, compliments, dramatic storytelling, and wearing outfits that make strangers look at you in public.

A Leo woman in her healthiest state is slightly overdressed and glowing. (For the record I don’t believe in being overdressed)

Also I fully believe a Leo woman’s cortisol lowers immediately after hearing “you look so sexy as fuck.” Neuroscience in a nutshell.

Virgo

Virgos love wellness but sometimes in the way Victorian women loved developing mysterious illnesses.

Your nervous system genuinely thrives through routines, organization, clean spaces, nourishing meals, movement, supplements, structure, and crossing things off a to-do list with religious intensity.

But babe… not every single thing needs optimization.

Sometimes your nervous system would benefit more from laying in the grass than researching magnesium glycinate versus citrate for six business days.

Virgo women regulate through feeling useful and capable but your healing edge is learning you don’t have to earn rest by becoming physically exhausted first.

Libra

Libra nervous systems regulate through beauty, romance, connection, and aesthetically pleasing environments.

You girls need candles. Music. Dim lighting. Cute drinks. Beautiful outfits. Someone flirting with you while you pretend not to enjoy it.

Libras physically deteriorate in ugly environments.

You regulate through co-regulation too which means the energy around you deeply impacts your body. Harshness feels physically jarring to your nervous system.

But your lesson is realizing peacekeeping and self abandonment are not the same thing.

A regulated Libra woman is basically just a well dressed diplomat with lip gloss and emotional intelligence.

Also I refuse to believe Libras don’t physically suffer in ugly lighting.

Scorpio

Scorpios can smell performative wellness from a mile away.

You don’t want shallow healing. You want transformation. Intensity. Intimacy. Devotion. Emotional honesty. Sensuality. Truth.

Your nervous system does not relax around emotionally surface level people.

You regulate through depth. Long conversations at midnight. Being deeply desired. Therapy that actually goes somewhere. Music that emotionally ruins you. Staring dramatically out of car windows. Pretending you don’t care when you absolutely do.

Scorpio women either need privacy or a complete emotional rebirth there’s rarely an in between.

Sagittarius

Sagittarius women suffer when life starts feeling too repetitive or emotionally claustrophobic.

Your nervous system thrives through adventure, movement, humour, freedom, philosophy, spontaneity, travel, and experiences that make you feel wildly alive.

Your nervous system doesn’t need another self help book it needs a last minute flight and a flirty conversation with a stranger.

You regulate through expansion. Through possibility. Through stories. Through laughing so hard you can’t breathe.

A Sagittarius woman trapped in routine too long starts emotionally chewing through the walls.

Babe you are the party so start acting like it.

Capricorn

Capricorns often learned that productivity equals safety.

Your nervous system genuinely feels calmer when there’s structure, financial stability, long term vision, and a sense of control over your life.

But sometimes you accidentally start treating yourself like a highly efficient corporation instead of a woman with a body.

Capricorn women regulate through competence but also secretly through softness, affection, luxury, deep rest, and not having to hold everything alone for five minutes.

Honestly some of you need a nap and someone else paying for dinner.

I know. Horrifying information for a Capricorn.

Aquarius

Aquarius women regulate through space.

Not because you don’t care about people but because your nervous system genuinely needs room to process and reconnect to itself without constant emotional demands. (hello alien sister I see you)

You thrive through creativity, individuality, meaningful conversations, weird ideas, freedom, community, and disappearing for six hours to hyper-fixate on something oddly specific.

Your nervous system hates conformity and emotionally performative relationships.

Also Aquarius women absolutely regulate by sitting in silence thinking about humanity while simultaneously forgetting to text people back.

Pisces

Pisces nervous systems absorb everything.

Energy. Music. Tension. Beauty. Other people’s emotions. Weird vibes in coffee shops. The emotional state of a cashier. Literally everything.

You regulate through art, water, music, spirituality, romance, sleep, tenderness, fantasy, imagination, and accidentally daydreaming for forty minutes straight.

Pisces women need boundaries the same way humans need water.

sometimes your nervous system is exhausted not because your life is hard but because you emotionally adopted everyone within a five mile radius.

Maybe the real point here is that nervous system regulation is not one-size-fits-all.

Some women regulate through solitude. Some through laughter. Some through beauty. Some through intensity. Some through movement. Some through softness.

There are women whose nervous systems genuinely come alive dancing barefoot at a festival and others who regulate through gardening and baking banana bread in silence.

The internet loves turning healing into one universal formula. But female nervous systems are nuanced. Cyclical. Sensory. Archetypal. Alive.

Which means maybe healing isn’t about becoming calmer but about becoming more yourself.

Then I would proceed to rip a page out of my journal ever so slightly so it wouldn’t be obvious I stole a page, and write out the ultimate summer glow-up list.

When I look back now through my giant tote of journals I’ve kept since I was 7 years old, I find scattered loose pages of teenage summer glow-up lists but now I find them disheartening. They all had one thing in common: a giant list of physical things I wanted to change about myself.

Toned abs for summer.

Whiter teeth.

Better hair.

Smaller waist.

Clearer skin.

Women Glow Differently When They Feel Alive

I am a firm believer that wanting to enhance your beauty isn’t vain when it’s coming from the right place. But what does it say about our culture when such a large amount of women’s money goes toward beauty enhancement without doing the inner work that actually makes women glow differently?

When I sit with women, yes maybe at first glance I notice the exterior. But I’m not leaning in because she doesn’t have wrinkles or because her lips are lined perfectly. There’s something else. Something in her energy. Her aliveness. (I’m drooling just thinking about it)

Aura, to me, is energetic, physiological, emotional, sensual.

The real glow isn’t having the perfect exfoliation routine or the perfect Pilates body. I notice this in my own relationship with the world too. Especially once I stopped centering men so heavily and started being in relationship with life itself.

When I glow differently, life feels like it’s flirting with me.

I’m horny for life and life wants to seduce me back. But truly, that’s what it feels like. A flirtation. A seduction. A feeling that I’m alive and in relationship with life itself. And the more alive I become, the more life responds back.

That’s what summer amplifies.

There’s this juicy energy to summer that radiates.

Plump.

Ripe.

Alive.

Sticky skin from sweat and ocean air.

More community-centered activities.

More laughter.

More desire.

More presence.

Maybe instead of preparing for summer with a list full of expensive beauty treatments, we need to get back to tending to our actual aura.

And listen, I’m not against Botox, nails, filler, or beauty rituals at all. I love beauty. I love glamour. I love enhancement. But that’s not actually the core thing enhancing a woman’s magnetic field. (And we will touch on these things as well hello fascia tending.)

As I mentioned before, when I say aura this is what I mean:

Energetic.

Physiological.

Emotional.

Sensual.

You can feel someone’s aura before they even speak. You can feel when someone is deeply insecure but packaged beautifully. You can feel when someone is desperate for validation. You can feel when someone is disconnected from themselves. You can also feel when a woman is deeply embodied, safe in herself, nourished, playful, sensual, emotionally alive. The aura is constantly communicating.

Women spend so much time trying to perfect the visual aspects of attraction while neglecting the energetic field transmitting underneath it all. The nervous system is always speaking like a signal. A woman in chronic survival mode carries a very different aura than a woman whose body feels safe enough to soften, laugh loudly, flirt with life, make eye contact, receive pleasure, take up space, rest, and actually be present.

This is why two women can wear the exact same outfit and one woman radiates magnetism while the other feels almost invisible.

Aura is not just beauty. It’s the coherence of a woman’s connection to self. When the body, emotions, energy, and sense of self are all communicating in the same direction, women glow differently.

People can feel when someone is trying to become desirable instead of actually being connected to desire itself. The aura sharpens when women become more alive. This is why some of the most magnetic women aren’t necessarily the most conventionally beautiful in the room. They’re often the women most connected to sensation, pleasure, creativity, humour, depth, presence, emotional range, and life force itself.

Which is why I think summer can become such powerful medicine for women when we let it not because “hot girl summer” gives us permission to be hotter for consumption, but because summer naturally invites the body back into sensation.

Sun on skin.

Cold fruit.

Salt water.

Music.

Movement.

Community.

Long evenings.

Bare feet.

Desire.

Play.

All things that actually nourish the female nervous system and bring the aura back online.

Summer Is Medicine for the Female Nervous System

Women are seasonal beings. Our hormones, neurotransmitters, energy levels, even the way we socialize and relate shifts with light, temperature, and the seasons themselves. Summer naturally boosts dopamine and serotonin through sunlight, movement, novelty, pleasure. Oxytocin rises through closeness, touch, laughter, flirting, play.

Summer is basically bees to honey for the female nervous system.

And sensations are one of the core ways I guide women back into relationship with their nervous systems. Back into their bodies. Back into their erotic blueprint and aliveness through sensation itself.

we often reduce sensuality down to sexuality when sensuality is actually about being deeply connected to the senses. A woman connected to her sensuality is often the most powerful and “regulated” woman in the room because she knows how to let eros move through her instead of gripping herself so tightly trying to be composed all the time.

Summer is one of the easiest portals into that.

As my sensational muse Anne of Green Gables would say, summer provides so much “scope for the imagination” but honestly I think summer provides even more scope for the senses.

Sweat collecting between your boobs on a hot summer day.
Ocean water dripping from your hair down your spine.
The first bite of a ripe peach with juice all over your fingers.
A sunburn you absolutely knew was coming but accepted anyways because the lake day was worth it.
Music vibrating through your chest at a festival.
Making out with someone slightly toxic but spiritually necessary for character development.
Making love in the middle of the day with the windows open and absolutely no plans after.

Summer pulls women back into sensation.

Longer days mean more time outside, more accidental social connection, more movement, more moments where the nervous system gets to unclench from survival mode and remember there’s actually a world outside productivity and emails and optimizing yourself into oblivion.

Historically women gathered outside in summer.
Markets.
Harvests.
Festivals.
Communal baths.
Long evenings spent feeding one another and talking for hours.

Bodies were designed for this.

And after winter’s contraction both literal and emotional the body naturally craves expansion.

The body wants to spread out.
To take up space.
To wear less clothing.
To stay outside until 10pm on a Tuesday.
To laugh so hard your stomach hurts while someone feeds you watermelon slices.

And I think there’s something deeply regulating about the nostalgia summer brings forward too.

There’s a reason we romanticize teenage summers so heavily.
The saturated colour grading of memory.
Sun-bleached tees.
DIY bikinis.
Overly bright nail polish.
Gas station snacks.
Disposable cameras.
Bike rides.
Staying out too late.
Blasting music with your girlfriends while getting ready even though nobody actually knew where the night was going.

For me summer always felt like freedom.

And after over a decade of working with women I’ve noticed seasons themselves become extraordinary nervous system containers because they give women permission to change tempo.

Ayurveda and Chinese Medicine both honour summer as expansion.
Warmth.
Circulation.
Yang energy.
Aliveness.

Or in less clinical terms:
Summer wants women a little more feral.

Aura-maxxing this summer calls for swimming until your lips are salt-stiff.
Flirting more.
Laughing harder.
Eating fruit slowly.
Kissing someone under string lights.
Letting yourself experience pleasure without needing to justify why you deserve it first.

Nostalgia isn’t always escapism or longing for what once was…. I often feel it’s a mirror holding up a reflection of using romanticism as a portal of longing for what we need in our current season of life. (or at least that’s what I told myself as I added jelly shoes, and aquamarine coloured clothing items to my shopping cart for my summer wardrobe)

The sensory memories of summer tanning oil on shoulders, sand stuck to your feet, the sour sweetness of a gas station slushy anchor the nervous system back into play, safety, sensation, and aliveness.

Teenage summer rituals were actually messy little masterclasses in embodiment.

I think a lot of women need that version of themselves back.

Recreating these rituals in adulthood isn’t regression… so I dare you to…

Make a summer bucket list that reads like a sensory prayer. Steal a sunset with friends. Buy the cheap candy you used to eat before wellness culture convinced everyone a blue raspberry slushy was the devil incarnate. Blast music so loud the speakers crackle a little. Try roller skating again even if you’re terrible at it. The point isn’t to look young again. It’s to let the body remember what openness feels like.

The Physical Aura: Fascia, Lymph & Fluidity

Now for the physical aura…

Because glow is physiological too.

And I need you all to note this now because I’m calling it early:
the same way everyone and their distant cousin suddenly became a nervous system expert is exactly what’s about to happen with fascia over the next few years. So if you want the elite intel on glow-up wellness secrets start tending to your fascia now, lovebug.

Fascia is essentially this connective tissue web running through the entire body and it stores so much more than people realize. Tension. Stress. Emotional holding patterns. Posture. Trauma. Constriction. When fascia becomes tight and dehydrated the whole body starts looking braced against life.

And lymph? Oh babe when lymph gets stagnant you can FEEL it.
Puffiness.
Heaviness.
Dullness.
Low energy.
That “why do I suddenly look exhausted even after sleeping?” feeling.

Which is why I honestly think the things that make women look the most alive aren’t always the super expensive beauty treatments. It’s the things moving tissue. Moving fluids. Moving energy. Moving emotion.

A fluid woman is so HOTTTTT.

There’s something deeply magnetic about a woman whose body looks supple instead of clenched. A woman who moves like life is actually flowing through her instead of looking like she’s one inconvenience away from a nervous breakdown.

And no you do not need to spend $350 every week on a lymphatic drainage massage. (Although if a wealthy man wants to fund your wellness rituals, who am I to block divine intervention?)

But genuinely some of the best things for your glow are painfully simple.

Dry brushing before a shower while music plays in the background and sunlight spills through the bathroom window does more for some women’s aura than another overpriced serum. Walking daily. Twisting your body. Stretching lazily in the morning. Actually hydrating yourself properly instead of surviving off caffeine and cortisol. Lymphatic massage while oiling your skin after a shower. Sweating. Dancing. Breathing deeply. Letting your body stop being so frozen all the time.

And if you want something more guided my friend and client created a lymphatic drainage nervous system reset and honestly… after doing this work consistently for a few months the results speak for themselves. Less puffiness. Brighter skin. More softness in the face. More energy. More aliveness. Women underestimate how much of their glow is trapped in stagnant tissue and exhausted nervous systems.

Lymph course here.

Move the fascia.
Move the fluids.
Hydrate the cells.
Support the nervous system.

And the outside starts reflecting the inside.

Happy fascia happy life.
Happy lymph happy life.

Oxytocin, Girlhood & The Return of the Girly Hangout

under the category of physical aura-maxxing I think oxytocin is one of the most underrated medicines for women.

Female friendship is co-regulation in action.

Modern adulthood has starved women of third spaces and while yes therapy is beautiful and journaling is beautiful and your little morning routines are beautiful sometimes a bitch simply needs to cackle with her coven while watching old rom-coms or maybe go rave until 2am.

Healing alone can only go so far.

Some things only heal in relationships.

A sauna with girlfriends where nobody is performing. A living room sleepover where everyone braids each other’s hair. A beach day with shared fruit and terrible pop songs. A “getting ready” night where makeup, gossip, perfume, and music become ceremonial.

The sacredness of someone rubbing sunscreen onto your back.
Someone saying “that colour looks SO good on you.”
Laughing until your stomach hurts.
Messy makeovers.
Cheap wine.
The intimacy of being known.

Bring back the girly hangout.
Not because it looks aesthetically pleasing online but because women genuinely glow differently in the community.

I know I do.

I glow differently when I’m surrounded by women I deeply love.

The Mysticism of Aura

Now for my favourite section because I think modern nervous system conversations sometimes become so clinical they lose the soul entirely.

I love Polyvagal Theory. I love understanding physiology. But sometimes wellness culture becomes so obsessed with “regulation” that it forgets mysticism. It forgets eros. It forgets the soul.

Aura-maxxing that actually lasts is messy. Embodied. Emotional. Sometimes wildly unglamorous.

Becoming truly magnetic often requires a Persephone journey. Becoming the queen of your own underworld. Meeting the parts of yourself you’ve abandoned. The rage. The desire. The grief. Sensuality. The hunger. The truth.

To be hot.
To be erotic.
To be alive.
Requires knowing yourself.

And I know “know thyself” sounds philosophical and abstract but honestly I think the doorway starts much simpler than people realize.

It starts with sensation.

What makes your body soften?
What expands you?
What drains you?
What makes you feel warm?
What makes you feel alive?
What makes you feel more like yourself?

Women are taught to override sensation constantly.
Ignore hunger.
Ignore exhaustion.
Ignore intuition.
Ignore desire.
Ignore pleasure.

Aura-maxxing at its core is really just becoming intimate with yourself again.

And unraveling through sensation might be one of the most luxurious places to begin, my love.

So this summer let’s be less interested in becoming a curated fantasy and more interested in becoming alive.

Less optimization.
More aliveness.
Less performing wellness.
More living.

Your body wants joy. Community. Beauty. Pleasure. Play. Messy rituals. Permission to be ridiculous.

The real glow isn’t a list of enhancements.

It’s the feeling of widening into your own life until life widens back.

xx ally

And I swear there’s a version of me that still freezes at that question.

Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone would notice. Just a slight pause in my body. A soft tightening in my chest. Like something old quietly sits up and says, be careful.

Because for a long time, wanting came with consequence. Not in a loud, punishing way—but in the subtle math of childhood. My sister’s medical bills stacking quietly in the background. The unspoken tension around money. The way you learn to read a room before anyone says a word.

So I became fluent in less.

Less expensive.
Less inconvenient.
Less desire.

I became the girl who could scan a menu and already know what she was allowed to want. The one who chose the cheaper option before anyone had to ask. The one who made herself easy to take care of.

And the thing about patterns like that is they don’t announce themselves when they follow you into adulthood. They don’t say, hi, I’m your scarcity wound, I’ll be choosing your dinner tonight.

They just slip in quietly.

Like tonight.

I’m staring at the menu on my phone, and I can feel it happening in real time. My fingers hovering over the appetizer section. My brain already justifying it. You don’t need a full meal. That’s enough. Be chill.

And what’s wild is how convincing it still is. How it dresses itself up as logic. As humility. As being “low maintenance.”

But my body knows the difference now.

There’s a very specific feeling when you’re about to abandon yourself. It’s subtle, but it’s there. A slight contraction. A dimming. Like something in you is quietly being negotiated down.

And then there’s the other feeling.

The one that’s a little more alive. A little more direct. A little less polite.

I want the butternut squash ravioli.

Not because it’s the most impressive thing on the menu. Not because it proves anything. Just because it’s what I actually want. The warm, rich, slightly sweet kind of meal that feels like being taken care of.

So I pause.

Right there, in the middle of the pattern. That exact moment where your past reaches for the wheel… and your present self notices.

And instead of overriding it with another mindset trick, or turning it into a whole healing project, I just choose.

I text him the ravioli.

No explanation. No softening. No if that’s okay. Just desire, stated clean.

And it feels almost embarrassingly simple.

Which is usually how you know it’s real.

Because we love to make healing this big, ceremonial thing. The perfect practice. The right modality. The breakthrough moment that changes everything at once.

But most of the time, it looks like this.

A quiet Tuesday night decision.
A menu.
A text message.

A woman catching herself in the act of becoming smaller… and deciding not to.

This is where patterns actually live.

In the micro-moments. In what you order when no one’s watching. In what you ask for when it would be easier not to. In the split second where you either default… or choose.

And this is also where they unravel.

Not always through doing more but through noticing. Through trusting that the years of work, the layers you’ve moved through, the ways you’ve met yourself… actually did something.

That they built a woman who can feel the old story rise up and not mistake it for truth.

There was a time when I would have called this “not a big deal.”

Just dinner. Just food.

But it’s never just the thing.

It’s the identity underneath it.

The woman who takes up the space of her own desires.
The woman who doesn’t edit herself down to be more palatable.
The woman who doesn’t confuse self-abandonment with being easy to love.

And that woman is built in moments like this.

Not perfectly. Not permanently.

But consistently.

Because the ravioli isn’t just dinner.

It’s desire without apology.

And when you start paying attention, you realize how deeply women have been taught to mistrust their appetite—in every form. To second-guess it. To dress it up as “balance,” or “being low maintenance,” or “not too much.” Hunger becomes something to manage instead of something to follow.

But hunger and vitality are the same current, just expressed differently.

A woman who lets herself be hungry is a woman who is available for life. She’s responsive, turned on, participatory. Not controlled. Not numbed out. Not negotiating herself down to be digestible.

You see it everywhere.

In food—choosing the smaller portion, the “good” option.
In money—undercharging, overgiving, hesitating to ask for more.
In relationships—minimizing needs, being the “easy” partner, not wanting to be a burden.
In life itself—dulling desire, calling it unrealistic, learning to want less so you’re never disappointed.

None of this is accidental.

It’s a socialization of containment.

It reminds me of Gone Girl—the “cool girl” monologue. A manifesto on suppressed appetite. The woman who eats burgers and drinks beer but never gains weight. Who wants everything a man wants, but never too much. It’s hunger performed, not actually lived.

COOL GIRL MONOLOGUE (IN THE MOVIE) The way Rosamund Pike says “I waxed my pussy raw” is enough reason to watch the delivery of this monologue. But here’s a picture below of the monologue if you want to read :)

Because a woman who is fully in touch with her hunger is harder to control.

She takes up space. She makes choices that aren’t always convenient. She disrupts systems that rely on her being agreeable, self-sacrificing, or small.

So of course we were taught to mistrust it.

And then the reclamation becomes almost seductively simple:

What if your hunger isn’t the problem—but the compass?

What if the work isn’t to regulate it down, but to build the capacity to hold it?

To trust that wanting more doesn’t make you greedy, dramatic, or high maintenance.

It makes you alive.

This is something I’ve witnessed again and again after years of working with hundreds of women and tending to the female nervous system. One of my favorite moments is watching a woman start to celebrate her own aliveness.

The way she becomes turned on by her life again. By music. By her body. By choosing what she actually wants off the menu. By creating the business she desires. By claiming the kind of relationship she once thought was too much to ask for.

And it doesn’t stop at desire.

It deepens into being fully fed.

Because a satiated woman is a powerful woman.

And inside my spaces, this is something we practice not as theory, but as lived experience. I’ve guided women through somatic work that helps them access the feeling of being fully fed, fully resourced, fully available for their lives.

And I want to start sharing more of that here.

This space is becoming something deeper than just writing. It’s a place for somatic practices, feminine leadership, and everything Eros and Honey coded. Not just content but devotion. A kind of membership into your own body.

When you upgrade your subscription, you step into a deeper layer of this world.

You’ll receive:
– Exclusive essays that go beyond what I share publicly
– Somatic practices designed to rewire your relationship to desire, money, and your body
– “Honey drips” — short, potent transmissions you can return to daily
– Occasional coaching and guidance woven directly into this space

It’s a place to practice being a fully fed woman.

And if something in you is already leaning in… trust that.

So consider this the first drip.

Ps. I recommend listening with this playlist in the background.

LISTEN TO ME

PPS. I’d love to hear your thoughts after you do the practice comment your feedback below. <3

xo ally

Because as I kept seeing women on Instagram stories call it the ultimate yearning love story, part of me was like…
girlie, did we watch the same movie? did we read the same book?

This isn’t a piece about debating Wuthering Heights—there are more than enough Substacks and film critics doing that far better than I could. Let’s just say I gave it 2½ stars on Letterboxd (ouch).

It was pretty. The actors did a half-decent job. And emerald fennell did a hald baked job and translating “yearning” into sub part “sex” scenes that were supposed to be hot but felt almost comedic at how bad they were at what the story is actually about.
But it felt… hollow.

And maybe that’s because I couldn’t separate how problematic the director’s perspective felt in the film.

But what I did notice wasn’t just the film itself.

It was the longing around it.

Women wanting to yearn. (the women going to the movies)

I’m seeing it everywhere—on Instagram, on TikTok, even “yearning” becoming a Pinterest aesthetic.

And as a lifelong yearning woman, I get it.

We romanticize yearning, but very few people have the capacity to actually feel it.

Because yearning isn’t just soft or pretty or cinematic.

It’s tension.
It’s restraint.
It’s desire that doesn’t get resolved right away.

It asks you to stay.

And if I’m honest, much of how I learned to yearn wasn’t my first relationship.

It was through film.
Through watching stories unfold slowly, visually
stories that let longing breathe instead of rushing to satisfy it. and watches the stories within film yearning.

Films that understood the power of the almost.

So here are my favourite yearning films—and why I love them.

Before Sunrise

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have my whole heart. I am ten toes down that this film and the entire trilogy is one of the best of all time, easily sitting in my Letterboxd top four. I’ve rewatched it at different points in my life, and each time it’s met me differently. The first time, I was too young to have ever experienced something like this. The second, I was deep in a situationship the kind of almost-love that never quite lands but never really leaves you either. And that’s when it clicked. This is what yearning looks like when it’s still innocent enough to believe in timing. Two people meet, and somewhere in their bodies, they know this isn’t built to last, and instead of rushing it, fixing it, or trying to force it into something permanent, they let it be exactly what it is a night, a conversation, a possibility.

To know that a connection isn’t meant to last forever and still allow yourself to fully enter it is a kind of emotional bravery most people don’t have, because sometimes those fleeting moments feel deeper than relationships that span years.

The yearning isn’t in whether they end up together, it’s in the decision to honour the chemistry now, to stay in the moment without collapsing it into a future. And even beyond the story, the film itself mirrors this. It’s slow, it lingers, it trusts conversation. It doesn’t rely on gimmicks or overproduced intimacy or those cheap, performative sex scenes that try to convince you something is deep when it’s not.

The tension here is different it lives in the pauses, the glances, the way two people circle each other without quite touching. It’s sensual without trying to be, and that’s what makes it feel so rare, especially in an era of fast, disposable, almost fast-food media. This film understands something most don’t: that yearning doesn’t need to be explicit to be felt in fact, it’s often stronger when it isn’t.

Memoirs of a Geisha

This is yearning stretched across years not the messy, impulsive kind that modern love stories default to, where everything is confessed, acted on, and consumed too quickly, but something far more restrained, more disciplined, more… elegant. It’s watching a woman claim her longing not through chaos, but through containment through devotion, through becoming. There’s a refinement to her desire. It isn’t loud, it isn’t reactive, it doesn’t demand to be seen or chosen in every moment. Instead, she allows it to shape her, to guide her evolution, to become part of the woman she is becoming. And there’s something deeply confronting about that, because it asks a question most of us don’t want to sit with: what if you didn’t rush your desire? What if you let it stay? In that waiting, desire becomes something else entirely something refined, something almost sacred.

This film understands that longing doesn’t always need to be expressed to be deeply felt, that there is a kind of freedom in restraint, in knowing what you feel and not needing to collapse it into immediate action. And while parts of her life are shaped by limitation, there is also a quiet agency in how she holds herself within it—a devotion not just to him, but to her own becoming.

Lost in Translation

Some connections are only meant to exist in a single moment in time. And unlike Before Sunrise, this isn’t built on possibility it’s built on reality. Two people who are already in relationships, already living full lives, and still… something is missing. This film captures what it feels like to not be fully seen in your own life to be surrounded by people, commitments, and roles, and still feel slightly disconnected from yourself. And then, for a brief moment, you meet someone who gets it. Not in a dramatic, life-altering way, not in a way that requires you to blow up your entire world, but in a quiet, undeniable way. They see you, you feel it, and you don’t need to explain it.

What I love about this film is that it doesn’t try to turn that connection into something bigger than it is. There’s no rush to define it, no urgency to act on it, no need to make it permanent. Because part of the honesty of this kind of connection is knowing it exists because of the moment you’re in—not in spite of it. And that’s what makes it so specific. It’s not about what if we were together? It’s about this mattered, even if it never becomes anything. There’s a maturity to that to feel something real and not immediately try to build a future around it, to let it be contained to the time and place it belongs. And somehow, that’s what makes it stay with you longer.

Chocolat

This is yearning but not for a person, for life itself. For pleasure, for softness, for sensation in a world that has learned to suppress it. What makes this film so effective is that it’s not really a romance it’s a critique. A small, rigid town built on control, routine, and quiet moral superiority is disrupted by a woman who doesn’t argue, doesn’t convince, doesn’t try to prove anything. She simply lives differently. She eats what she wants, wears what she wants, creates, indulges, and follows her own rhythm and that alone is enough to unsettle everything. Because what she awakens in others isn’t just desire for her, it’s desire for their own lives.

That’s the real yearning in this film. Not romantic longing, but a kind of bodily remembering of pleasure, of hunger, of what it feels like to want something without immediately denying it. And from a film perspective, it’s done subtly. The use of food, texture, and colour is designed to feel sensual without being overt, with the chocolate itself becoming a narrative device not just something to consume, but something that mirrors each character’s relationship to desire: who allows it, who resists it, who feels guilty for it. And at the center of it is a woman who doesn’t force transformation she models it. She simply exists in her pleasure, and the town slowly begins to reorganize itself around that.

Dangerous Beauty

This is yearning that knows exactly what it’s doing. Not naive, not accidental, not something she simply falls into—but something she studies, refines, and learns how to wield. Because in this world, desire isn’t just romantic, it’s cultural. Women aren’t free to want openly; they’re positioned, chosen, and constrained within systems of power and class.

What makes this film so compelling is how she navigates that reality. She understands that desire isn’t just something you feel it’s something you can hold, shape, and use. Not in a cynical way, but in a deeply intelligent one.

Becoming a courtesan isn’t framed as a failure of options, but as a strategic choice within limitation—a way of accessing a form of agency that wouldn’t otherwise be available to her. And within that, she cultivates something rare: a woman who is fully conscious of her own longing and how it moves others.

This is where the cultural dimension of yearning comes in. It’s not just her desire for a man, but for freedom, expression, and a life that exists beyond the constraints she was born into. The film doesn’t separate those desires romantic longing and social mobility blur together, intimacy becomes currency, beauty becomes language. But what makes it land is that she never loses awareness. She knows what’s real, what’s being performed, and she moves between the two with precision. This film doesn’t just portray longing—it shows a woman who understands it, contains it, and chooses how to use it. And that’s what makes it dangerous.

Yearning isn’t something you can manufacture.

Yearning isn’t something you can manufacture.

It isn’t just an aesthetic or a fleeting mood you slip into when it’s convenient. It asks something of you. It asks you to stay open, even when there’s no guarantee of resolution. To sit in desire without rushing to collapse it into something tangible.

And yes there is something deeply beautiful when longing is met. When desire lands, when connection becomes something real, something lived.

But that’s not where the transformation happens.

The transformation happens in the holding.

In the moments where you don’t know how it will unfold, and you choose to stay open anyway. When yearning stretches you, softens you, brings you into deeper honesty about what you want, what you feel, what you’re no longer willing to deny.

These films understand that.

They don’t just show love they show the space that shapes you before it ever arrives. The tension, the almost, the quiet becoming that happens when you allow yourself to feel deeply without rushing to the end.

Because yearning, when you let it, doesn’t just point you toward something else.

It changes you.

It makes you more honest.
More awake.
More available for the kind of love that doesn’t need to be chased or forced.

And maybe that’s why it lingers.

Not because it was fulfilled
but because of who you became in the presence of it. 💋

PS. What do you say—does this post deserve a part two (Maybe best yearning albums)? Comment below & tell me!

Like yesss. We want to feel sexy again. And not in the surface-level way of another wellness girlie checklist. But true horny, erotic energy for life.

A nervous system that feels safe enough, nourished enough, and curious enough to actually want to participate in being alive. To let life flirt with them.

After my notifications kept popping off on this post, I asked myself why.

For me, because this is so much of the nature of my work. After more than a decade studying the female nervous system and feminine arts, and eight years building a business in this field, I understand why women respond to this.

But what it signaled to me is that in a world where self-care and nervous system work has become trendier than ever, women aren’t just craving their spark back.

And truthfully, that’s not even what my work is for.

My work is an advanced embodiment of the foundations. For women who of depth.

Modern life dulls that instinct.

Too much optimization. Too many rules about productivity, wellness, and self-improvement.

The female nervous system was never meant to live like a checklist.

And I encourage women to stop falling into the trap of following brand-new nervous system graduates handing out protocol advice. That stage of healing is important. But depth only happens when you move past it.

I would even argue that eventually you stop identifying with being “in your healing journey” altogether.

The focus shifts toward resolution in the body and the expansion of sensation. Not just for the heavier emotions, but for beauty, curiosity, and pleasure.

Most conversations about the nervous system focus on calming down.

Regulation.
Grounding.
Reducing anxiety.

Yes, we need that.

But there’s a wellspring that often isn’t touched.

And when we don’t touch that wellspring, we miss the oceanic nature of the female body.

A woman is not just in the ocean.

She is the ocean.

And that makes a wet woman.

And a wet woman is a powerful woman.

There is another side of nervous system health that is talked about far less often.

The ability to hold pleasure.

In neuroscience, this is sometimes described as capacity. The nervous system’s ability to experience sensation, emotion, connection, and stimulation without becoming overwhelmed.

Many women are not struggling with a lack of discipline or motivation.

They are struggling with a nervous system that has spent years adapting to stress, hyper-vigilance, emotional labor, and constant cognitive load.

When the nervous system has been living in survival for long enough, something subtle happens.

It begins to narrow the range of sensation it can tolerate.

Which means not only stress becomes difficult to hold.

Pleasure does too.

Because biologically, excitement and anxiety activate very similar physiological responses. Increased heart rate. Heightened sensation. A rise in energy through the body.

If the nervous system doesn’t have enough capacity, it will unconsciously dampen both.

This is why many women feel strangely flat even when life is objectively good.

Their body simply hasn’t had the opportunity to expand its tolerance for aliveness.

But when the nervous system begins to feel safer, something fascinating happens in the brain.

The prefrontal cortex and ventral vagal network become more active. These systems support curiosity, social connection, creativity, and emotional openness.

At the same time, dopamine pathways begin responding more easily to small sources of pleasure.

Beauty feels more stimulating.
Music feels more immersive.
Food tastes more vivid.

The body quite literally becomes more receptive to joy.

For women, this process is also deeply tied to oxytocin, the neurochemical responsible for bonding, trust, and safety in connection.

Oxytocin softens the nervous system.

It tells the body that the environment is safe enough to open.

And when the body opens, sensation returns.

This is where that horny for life energy begins to appear.

Not necessarily as sexuality.

But as Eros.

A woman who is regulated and resourced often becomes more playful. More curious. More expressive.

Her nervous system has enough capacity to experience the full spectrum of sensation again.

And when that happens, life starts to feel delicious in ways that are hard to explain but very easy to recognize.

If we’re going to talk about becoming horny for life again, I want to make a subtle distinction.

I’m not talking about the surface-level sexual liberation movement. Which honestly deserves its own essay.

I often see women who come from deeply repressed environments swing into the opposite extreme of “liberation.”

But sometimes that pendulum swing is just another trauma response dressed up with a hashtag.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

And to be clear, I’m not saying posting sensual photos of yourself online is a trauma response.

But any real liberation requires containment.

Sexual and sensual expression, in its most embodied form, is rarely loud and performative.

More often it is subtle.

Quiet.

And somehow the most powerful presence in the room.

This list of horny-for-life rituals is meant to act as a guiding post for depth.

Not another checklist.
Not another thing to optimize.

But an invitation into oxytocin-led living.

Go slowly with it.

Let it deepen your capacity to feel.

8 ways to feel horny for life

1. Moving your body in ways that are instinctive rather than optimized

Most women have been trained to move their bodies through discipline. Steps. Workouts. Programs. Fitness goals.

But the nervous system regulates far more efficiently through organic, rhythmic movement than through performance.

This is why dancing in your kitchen, swaying to music, stretching on the floor, or walking slowly through your neighborhood can feel strangely pleasurable in a way a structured workout sometimes doesn’t.

When movement isn’t tied to improvement or achievement, the body relaxes its guard.

And when the body relaxes, sensation returns.

2. Letting your senses register pleasure again

A dysregulated nervous system narrows perception. It prioritizes scanning for problems over experiencing pleasure.

But when the system begins to settle, the senses widen again.

You start noticing textures. The warmth of water on your back in the shower. The softness of a sweater against your skin. The smell of something cooking.

These aren’t trivial pleasures.

They are signals of safety to the nervous system.

And the more often the body receives those signals, the more it remembers that life can be something to enjoy instead of simply endure.

3. Spending time around beauty

The female nervous system is uniquely responsive to aesthetic environments.

Flowers on a table. A beautiful film. A room that feels thoughtfully arranged. Music that makes something in your chest soften.

Beauty stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the branch responsible for rest, restoration, and connection.

It’s why women often feel more alive in spaces that are visually nourishing.

Beauty isn’t frivolous.

For many women, it’s regulatory.

4. Slowing down enough for the body to actually experience something

A rushed nervous system doesn’t have the bandwidth to feel pleasure.

It’s too busy anticipating the next task.

When a woman slows down even slightly—eating more slowly, walking more slowly, speaking more slowly—her nervous system begins shifting out of urgency.

That shift alone can change how the body experiences the day.

Suddenly the coffee tastes better.
The sunlight feels warmer.
The moment lasts longer.

Pleasure often lives inside slower time.

5. Being around women who feel safe and alive

One of the most powerful regulators of the female nervous system is co-regulation.

When women laugh together, share stories, or simply exist in each other’s company without performance, oxytocin rises in the body.

Oxytocin softens the nervous system.

It reduces vigilance.
It increases trust.
It allows the body to relax into connection.

And when the body feels safe in connection, Eros tends to reappear naturally.

6. Following curiosity instead of only obligation

Curiosity is one of the most reliable signs that a nervous system feels safe.

When the body isn’t in survival mode, attention begins to wander again.

You notice a café you’ve never tried.
You wander into a bookstore.
You walk down a street you usually ignore.

These small moments of exploration may seem insignificant, but biologically they represent something important.

The nervous system is no longer conserving energy for survival.

It has enough capacity to play.

7. Letting the body express emotion instead of managing it

Many women have been trained to keep emotional expression tidy.

But the nervous system processes emotion through movement and release.

Sighing. Crying. Laughing. Stretching. Shaking your hands after stress.

When emotion moves through the body rather than being suppressed, the nervous system completes its stress cycle more efficiently.

And when the body isn’t holding onto unresolved stress, it has far more capacity to experience pleasure.

8. Anticipating something delicious

Anticipation is deeply erotic to the nervous system.

Looking forward to a meal, a trip, a conversation, or even a quiet evening alone creates a subtle rise in dopamine.

Dopamine isn’t just about reward.

It’s about expectation of pleasure.

And when a woman regularly gives herself things to look forward to, her nervous system begins orienting toward life with curiosity again.

The truth is, healing doesn’t always look like becoming calmer or more controlled.

Sometimes the clearest sign a woman’s nervous system is repairing itself is that she starts to feel hungry for life again.

She notices beauty.

She laughs more easily.

She wants more out of her days.

In other words, she becomes a little horny for life again.

Spitting out any taste or flavour

of a calm cool girl exterior.

Feral and untamed,

lipstick slightly smudged from living.

Plugging into God’s hotline of provision

like it’s the most natural thing in the world

to ask for more.

The deliciously fed woman

doesn’t deny her hunger

for life

for wealth

for money

for the thick sweetness of being alive.

She does not pretend

she only wants a bite.

She wants the whole table.

The devilishly fed woman

knows she’s beautiful.

She doesn’t shrink inside a compliment

like it’s something dangerous to hold.

She lets it land

on her collarbones

like warm honey.

She orders what she wants off the menu

not counting her macros

not apologizing for her appetite

not pretending she’s already full.

She eats slowly.

Luxuriously.

Like pleasure was always meant

to belong to her.

She knows starvation

was never holiness.

She knows deprivation

was never devotion.

The deliciously fed woman

lets life feed her

until her body hums

with a fullness that looks suspiciously

like power.

She laughs with her mouth open.

She says yes when desire knocks.

She says no when something tastes

like less than she deserves.

And when the world asks her

to be smaller

quieter

less hungry

she wipes the honey from her lips

and orders dessert.

Because a deliciously fed woman

doesn’t come to life

to nibble.

She comes here

to feast. 🍯

Woman after woman returning to Christ.

Oracle decks thrown in the garbage.
Programs that once made them hundreds of thousands quietly disappearing from their websites.
Posts about how the practices that once defined their work were actually sinful all along.

And I understand the impulse.

Most conscious women who have even a loose pulse on the industry have watched this shift happen between 2022 and now. It’s become almost a genre of testimony.

But what’s interesting is that I had my own version of this long before it became a trend.

Back in 2020 I went through a quieter recalibration.

Not a dramatic renunciation.
Not a public declaration that everything I had once practiced was wrong.

But a pause.

I stopped outsourcing my inner knowing to astrology charts and oracle cards. I stopped looking outside myself for the final word on what was already alive in my own body and spirit.

And the thing is, my journey wasn’t about coming back to Christ.

Because Christ, prayer, God—those were never absent from my life.

They were always there.

What changed was the orientation.

Prayer moved from the margins to the center.

Not as a performance.
Not as a brand identity.
But as a living relationship.

And watching the current wave of spiritual “returns” has been… complicated.

Because I’ve also watched women who once called themselves witches, priestesses, or oracles suddenly speak about those identities with embarrassment or shame. As if the only way to come back to God is to throw away every mystical language that once shaped their spirituality.

Now their bios hold a tidy Bible verse.

And I know, for many of them, the story is deeper than that.

But what saddens me is the pendulum swing.

From one extreme to the other.

From devotion to the mystical feminine… to a rigid hierarchy of what a relationship with God is supposed to look like.

As if intimacy with the divine now requires a specific aesthetic, vocabulary, or moral posture.

For the last two and a half years I’ve been quietly studying in a Gnosis ministry program, repairing and deepening my own relationship with God.

And it’s an interesting place to stand.

To love prayer deeply.
To feel moved by the presence of God.

And also to still practice things that people now label as “new age.”

Practices that, if we’re being historically honest, existed in many of our ancestral lineages long before colonization reframed them as heresy.

So when my friend Kim posted about her reimagined version of Lent—Slutty Lent—I laughed and immediately knew I wanted to participate.

Not because I need irreverence for the sake of it.

But because something about it felt honest.

One of the journal prompts asked:

Where have you talked yourself out of something that actually matters to you?

And immediately I knew the answer.

My relationship with God.

Not because the love isn’t there.

But because the cultural conversation around faith right now feels suffocating.

The “coming back to Christ” movement has, in many corners, started to carry the familiar scent of purity culture. Of moral hierarchy. Of spiritual superiority disguised as liberation.

And it has made me hesitant to speak about the most intimate thing in my life.

Prayer.

My love for prayer is loud.
It’s intimate.
It’s deeply embodied.

But it doesn’t follow a script.

It doesn’t need a Bible verse in my bio.
It doesn’t need a “faith-led entrepreneur” label in my Instagram name.
It doesn’t need to publicly condemn practices I once loved in order to prove my devotion.

And I think, in some quiet way, I’ve talked myself out of claiming that relationship openly.

Because I’m afraid the moment I say it out loud, people will assume they understand what it means.

That I’m suddenly Christian in a very particular way.
That I’m religious in a very particular way.

But intimacy with God has never felt tidy to me.

It feels alive.
Messy.
Personal.

More like a conversation than a doctrine.

More like a lover than a rulebook.

And maybe the real work right now isn’t choosing between mysticism and faith.

Maybe it’s refusing the demand that we collapse our spiritual lives into something easily categorized.

Maybe devotion can still be wild.

Maybe prayer can still be erotic.

Maybe God is big enough to meet us in both.

Maybe God was never asking us to choose between mysticism and devotion.

Maybe that demand came from somewhere else.

Because the God I know doesn’t feel threatened by curiosity, embodiment, or mystery.

If anything, those are the very places I’ve felt closest.

And after all the pendulum swings, that’s the relationship I’m still interested in keeping.

Which feels almost illegal to admit in an era where beach vacations have become performance art. Booking the flight is the easy part. The real itinerary begins weeks before departure. Not with excursions, but with correction.

fake tan
nails done
cut out dairy so your stomach stays flat
extra gym sessions so your shoulders photograph “effortless”
buy a new bikini not because you need one but because it must signal a version of you that is thriving

It’s less about the beach and more about the evidence.

Proof of desirability to a pixelated world of the social media realm of your choosing.

Under the cynical light of glamorized self care, it all starts to feel like influencer cosplay. Everyone becoming a slightly shinier version of the same woman. Skin glazed. Waist cinched. Smile casual but strategic. The modern equivalent of stepping out of the ocean in slow motion like Ursula Andress in Dr. No, except now the audience isn’t Bond. It’s everyone. It’s the grid. It’s the quiet anonymous women you went to high school with watching your stories at midnight.

And I’m not doing it.

Not because I’m above it. Not because I don’t understand the seduction. But because my body feels like a no.

I’ve been sick. My lungs still feel like they’re clearing something ancient. An old client filed a chargeback and suddenly I was in spreadsheets and evidence folders instead of daydreams and linen dresses. There is nothing particularly “hot girl summer” about emailing Stripe support at 11 pm while drinking tea that tastes like boiled roots.

And I notice the subtle panic that creeps in when I don’t feel hot. Not sick. Not tired. Not stressed. Specifically not hot.

It’s fascinating how much that word has functioned as a metric.

Because I used to be devoted to it.

In high school, I wasn’t the hot girl. I had enormous braces and a strange, over-curated weirdness. I leaned into being eccentric because it gave me somewhere to stand, but underneath it was a quiet, humiliating desire to be unmistakably wanted. When boys called me cute, I felt insulted. Cute was patronizing. Cute was safe. I wanted hot. I wanted the kind of attention that rearranged the air in a room.

Hot meant power.

By my early twenties, I understood that hotness wasn’t just physical. It was energetic. It was eye contact that lasted half a second longer than necessary. It was posting a photo and pretending you didn’t care who saw it. It was Kate Moss in the 90s, careless and untouchable. It was Megan Fox leaning against a car in Transformers, fully aware of the camera and completely unbothered by it.

Hotness was a frequency. And learning how to access it taught me confidence. It taught me authorship over my own desirability. It taught me that I could be the subject, not just the observer.

But something has been quietly shifting.

The same way you can listen to a song obsessively for months and then one day it does nothing for you. Not because the song changed. Because you did.

I still understand the appeal of being hot. I still see the women online selling hotness as a mindset, a personal brand, a form of empowerment. And I believe them. It works. It opens doors. It rearranges how people respond to you.

But lately it feels like a surface translation of a deeper hunger.

Hotness is often about being seen.

Eros is about being felt.

Hotness performs outward. It asks how you appear. It is aware of the gaze. It sharpens itself against it.

But being erotically alive is different. It exists whether or not anyone is watching. It’s the private pleasure of your own aliveness. The way music moves through your body when you’re alone in your kitchen. The way your skin feels after swimming in the ocean without documenting it. The way you laugh harder when you stop monitoring how you look while laughing.

It’s less Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue and more the women in Call Me By Your Name, sun-drenched and uncurated, existing inside their own nervous systems instead of outside them.

Hotness says look at me.

Eros says feel me. Even if no one does.

And right now, I don’t feel hot. I feel human. Slightly fragile. Slightly uninterested in optimizing myself into desirability.

But underneath that, there is something else returning.

Not the urgency to be hot. Not the performance of becoming hotter.

It’s seductively slow like honey and more dangerous like a bee hovering close enough to remind you it has a sting.

The return of being deeply erotically alive. And strangely, more confident than ever.

So instead of spending the next 29 days fumbling under the pressure of the hot girl vacation checklist, wearing the mask of hot girl cosplay, I keep thinking about a TikTok series I fell in love with last year. Sexy for yourself by Greta Louise Tome. Watching it felt like watching someone step out of the audience and back into her own body.

Not performing sexy. Not optimizing sexy. Becoming intimate with it.

And even that word now feels incomplete.

Because I don’t just want sexy energy. Sexy still lives too close to being consumable. Too easily translated into something legible for other people.

What I want is depth. I want the version of Venus before she surfaced, when she was still submerged. I want Inanna descending into the underworld, stripped of every ornament she once used to define herself. I want Eden before the fig leaf. I want the woman biting into ripe fruit without thinking about how her stomach looks when she leans forward.

I want my unoptimized body under the Mexican sun. Belly soft. Skin uneven. Hair doing whatever salt water asks of it.

I want blurry photos because I was too present with the sunset to focus the lens.

I want to be witnessed by the ocean, not the algorithm.

And if I decide to participate in the glamour magic of the social realms, it will be on my terms. As play.

So for the next 29 days, I’m creating my own private series on here, sharing my musings and reflections as I navigate this new depth of confidence within my female body. A reclamation. Not of hotness as performance, but of erotic aliveness as embodiment, cultivated through somatic intelligence.

Through remembering what it feels like to belong to myself again.

Ice baths before sunrise.
Matcha instead of coffee.
Gua sha lined up beside the sink.
EFT, hypnosis, yoga, somatic shaking sometimes all in the same day.

And to be clear: none of this is bad. Much of it was beautiful. Some of it genuinely supportive.

But at a certain point, I had to be honest with myself.

I wasn’t relating to my nervous system.
I was managing it.

Somewhere along the way, nervous system regulation got flattened into a checklist. A personality trait. A moral high ground. A kind of internal optimization project where the goal was to appear calm, centered, unbothered preferably at all times.

This piece (and the YouTube video that accompanies it) is an offering to gently disrupt that narrative.

Because women don’t need more practices.
We need more capacity.
More relationship.
More trust in the intelligence of our bodies.

Below are a few of the core myths I see circulating — especially in online wellness culture and what I’ve come to understand instead.

Myth #1: Nervous system regulation is about stacking practices

At certain seasons of healing, structure matters.

Rituals can create containment.
Practices can interrupt old behavioral loops.
Daily anchors can help establish a new baseline.

But practices are not the destination.

The problem begins when we mistake the bridge for the place we’re meant to live.

A healthy nervous system isn’t built through rigid routines or constant prescription. It’s built when what you learned through those practices becomes integrated enough that you can actually meet life from a resourced place without needing to perform regulation.

There is a season where the work becomes less about doing and more about trusting.

Trusting that your body knows how to orient.
Trusting that you don’t need to micromanage yourself.
Trusting the baseline you’ve built.

Myth #2: Nervous system regulation means being calm

Calm has become the gold star of wellness culture.

But calm is not the same thing as capacity.

If your nervous system can only feel “safe” when you’re calm, then you’re not regulated — you’re constrained.

Women are cyclical, hormonal, relational beings.
Our bodies are designed to move through waves of emotion, sensation, and expression.

Anger.
Grief.
Desire.
Anxiety.
Joy.

A healthy nervous system is not one that avoids these states — it’s one that can be with them.

When calm becomes the goal, we subtly teach ourselves that certain emotions are unacceptable. And that’s not regulation that’s bypassing with better branding.

Myth #3: Your nervous system is broken and needs to be fixed

This one is quiet, but deeply harmful.

When we relate to our nervous system as something broken, fragile, or malfunctioning, we erode trust with the very system that’s trying to protect us.

Your trauma responses didn’t appear randomly.
They formed because they once kept you safe.

Approaching your body with the attitude of “what’s wrong with me?” creates more shame — and shame is profoundly dysregulating.

Somatic work is relational.
Soma means the living body.

The work isn’t fixing yourself.
It’s listening.
It’s curiosity.
It’s learning the language your body has been speaking all along.

Myth #4: You just need more breathwork and meditation

Stillness has its place.

But emotions are movement.

Sometimes regulation looks like slowing down.
And sometimes it looks like shaking, pacing, crying, or letting anger move through the body instead of being swallowed.

If the only tools you have are stillness-based, you may unknowingly suppress the very energy your body is trying to discharge.

This is where embodiment matters.
Not as a trend — but as a lived experience.

Why I’m naming this now

I see so many women sincerely trying to “heal their nervous systems” while subtly staying disconnected from their bodies.

Consuming more content.
Adding more rituals.
Chasing a version of themselves that feels calm enough, healed enough, regulated enough.

But regulation isn’t a performance.
It’s a relationship.

And relationships are dynamic, alive, imperfect, and responsive.

That’s what this conversation is really about.

If this resonates, I invite you to watch the full YouTube video where I break down the myths more fully and speak to the remaining ones in depth. And if you’re in a season of loosening your grip on self-optimization and learning how to actually live inside your body.

Before I entered the professional world of nervous system regulation—or had certifications to my name—I had a different kind of education.

I grew up learning from elders in the jungle.
I was there when Gabor Maté was starting Compassionate Inquiry—collaborating with my uncle, who facilitated plant medicine ceremonies in the mountains of Mexico.

Before that, I had already done a dieta.

In the plant medicine world, a dieta is a ritual for deepening your relationship with a master plant. You work with it, sit with it, listen to it. It’s not a psychedelic journey it’s subtle, slow, and asks a different level of presence.

I had done one before but this one was different.

It was an isolation dieta.
I was sixteen.
And after the opening ceremony, I was guided to a hilltop near a jaguar cave in Mexico.

No phone.
No food—besides diluted rice congee every few days.
No journaling.
No breathwork.
No rituals.

Just silence. Stillness. My body. The land.

And a plant spirit that would become one of my greatest teachers.

This is where my nervous system work really began

The first few days, my mind did what minds do—spiraled, obsessed, begged for distraction.

But this wasn’t an ayahuasca ceremony.
It wasn’t a mushroom trip.

Master plants are more subtle in how they guide. Their teachings aren’t loud or dramatic—they work through the body. They take time.

This is what I now call my first somatic training.
Not in a certification course, but through lived experience with something far older and more intelligent than human theory.

The plant I was dieting with had a known physical effect—slowing the body down so deeply, some days I couldn’t move. Literally.

It was intentional.
The medicine works at the level of the cells—repatterning the nervous system from the inside out.

I was being stripped of the layers that wanted healing to feel dramatic.
There was no tapping, no shaking, no big breakdown-into-breakthrough moment.

It was quiet. Confronting. Real.

So when I entered the somatics space professionally…

…something felt off.

In most rooms I walked into, it smelled like performance.

The way I had been taught—both by elders and in later certifications—was not about constantly “doing” more practices.
It wasn’t about turning somatics into a spiritual hustle.

And yet, I started to see somatic work turned into another aesthetic.
Wellness influencers copying each other.
Nervous system coaches parroting the same phrases like AI wrote them.

Somatics became content.
Regulation became a checklist.

But the thing is—practices are just part of the picture.
They help. They regulate. They reorient.

But they don’t always get you to depth.
They don’t guarantee integration.

Integration is not a course module

For years, I’ve joked that my work is the “unglamorous” work.
Clients come to me when the shiny tools stop working.
When they realize the real work isn’t in shaking or tapping or ice baths or fancy morning routines.

It’s in how you live.
How your body responds in real time.

Because a regulated nervous system isn’t always about being calm.
It’s about capacity.
To feel. To stay. To be with.

And integration? It’s not fluffy. It’s lived.

I know—when I say “integration,” it can sound vague and word-salady.
But it’s not.

Integration isn’t something that happens just because you downloaded someone’s somatic course.
It doesn’t live in a perfect morning routine or in a stack of self-soothing techniques.

It lives in your actual nervous system.
In your real life.

It shows up in how you hold discomfort in a hard conversation.
In how you soften instead of snap.
In how you’re not chasing a “breakthrough,” but building a body that can be here now.

I’m not here to sell another nervous system checklist

Yes—I have libraries of tools.
But that’s not the core of my work.

Because if you just want tools, YouTube has thousands.
If you want depth, that’s different.

The work I do is confronting.
It holds up a mirror.

It asks:
Have you swapped micromanaging your life with managing your healing?

Have you replaced hustle with hyper-vigilant wellness?

Are you still performing—just with softer branding?