Not because I’m conducting a study, although in some ways I suppose I am.

I’m embodied. I feel better when my body is involved in my life. The idea, the art, the project, they all start in a field.

I frolic through fields and forests daily.

Every time it’s different.

This is how I make sense of things.

When I was about 20, I hosted an adventure show called Get Out for three seasons. We went places. Tried things. Got ourselves into situations. It was ridiculously fun.

It taught me that you can think about life all you want, but eventually you have to go have one.

Fuck yes.

Fieldwork can be anything. A building project. Tending the garden. Cooking. Making something you need. Literally walking barefoot through a field to sit on a giant rock and watch the world play out.

We have more access to information than ever. But knowing about something and knowing it are not the same thing.

We live in a culture obsessed with preparation. Research it. Buy the right equipment. Take the course. Make the plan. Wait until you hear from so-and-so. Optimize.

Meanwhile, life is happening.

Most of what I know comes from doing it.

Join me in the field.

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I’ve felt a little like Goldilocks over the past few years. After Beverly Hills and perhaps a few too many bushes later, I’ve tried enough versions of living to know what “just right” m…

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I’ve spent the last six years discovering what’s next by moving away from what no longer fits and becoming curious about what might. I lived in Los Angeles for fifteen years, and I wasn’t looking for a reason to leave. I wasn’t secretly dreaming about cabins in the woods or starting over every eight months. I had built a life there. I had a beautiful apartment in Beverly Hills, I had clients, contracts, friends, and more opportunity than I knew what to do with. I belonged in an ecosystem where everyone was becoming something or creating something, businesses, bodies, art, brands, films, dreams. There was always movement.

When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I was determined to prove I could make it there. Los Angeles was not going to chew me up and spit me out. I would decide when I was done. For years, I pushed through every discomfort that came with starting over in a new country because I believed leaving before I’d made something of myself would feel like failure. So I did. Which is why I never thought about leaving at all.

Then life interrupted my plans. COVID. A failed marriage. Someone vandalized my truck from top to bottom. Within two weeks, I closed my LLC, dealt with insurance, filed for divorce, hired international movers, and packed an entire version of myself into expensive totes and duffel bags. I didn’t pack for my future self. I packed LA Amy into boxes that overflowed my mother’s house and I’ve since paid to store the evidence. That move cost more than fifteen thousand dollars. It was one of those life-changing ordeals that happened so quickly I was making permanent decisions before I’d even begun to process what was happening.

The years that followed became one long experiment. My parents’ basement was a soft landing while I figured out what came next. I tried the city. I spent a season on the beaches of Playa del Carmen discovering more of who I was before returning to a heritage house I affectionately called the Barbie Dream House. A place for dreaming, and I dreamed of the open road.

That dream refused to happen on my timeline. One vehicle fell through. Then another. There were months of rigging and planning, and more than a few moments when I wondered if I’d ever actually hit the road. Eventually I did, spending half a year exploring national parks, forests, and wild places across Canada and the United States. Amidst the mountains, big trees, and fresh air, I had the most fun and freedom I’d ever known. But adventures take a lot of energy, and I was tired of moving.

I stopped in Ontario once more for the dream of a flower farm, and it was beautiful but it also wasn’t “it”. In the fall, I packed up the truck with little more than a duffel bag and headed west for the big trees, witnessed the blockade, endured weeks of relentless rain in a truck that leaked almost as much as the sky. I left the island and drove 400 miles inland to visit an old friend with one simple idea: maybe, somehow, I’d build a cabin in the woods. Two days later, we broke ground. It was a dream come true.

I’ve realized I may be more nomadic than I ever intended to be, but I’m not lost or running away. I’m simply willing to go for it. And when something calls me, I follow it. That’s where the magic is. On the first of July, I left my British Columbia cabin dream for a hundred reasons. I took the long way home to Hobbit Land. I turned a 44 hour drive into an eleven day journey. Now, it’s been a couple weeks of minor renovations, and I’m settling into my sweet little off-grid home close to my parents.

I certainly don’t want to wander forever, but I’ve also stopped expecting every place to become my forever home. Some places were meant to fulfill a particular dream, while others quietly prepare us for the next one. I’ve made peace with not knowing exactly where or when I’ll stop, but I’ve never gone backward. Every place has met a different version of me.

If the past six years have taught me anything, it’s that we’re allowed to fuck around and find out. Life changes. We change. Sometimes the only way to know if something is right is to follow the pull. It’s okay if it isn’t what we imagined. Changing our mind isn’t failure. Mistaking endurance for commitment is. The journey doesn’t stop just because we do.

Thriving has less to do with where we live than with how a place allows us to live. Home isn’t just an address. It’s a feeling. Peace. Tranquility. Space to breathe. Room to roam. Safety. Comfort. The land. The people. The pace. It’s finally letting your shoulders come down from your ears. Our surroundings don’t just hold our lives. They shape them. What we inhabit becomes our habit.

The less I carry, the more room there is for possibility. Life keeps delighting me one chapter at a time. The dream keeps evolving, and so do I.

The better it gets, the better it gets.

Thank you for coming along for the ride.

This summer has been a wild one already. Between another cross-country journey / move, settling into Hobbit Land, and another year around the sun, writing had to take a brief back seat. I know it’s been about a month since my last post.

I appreciate your patience. Thank you for supporting my work and giving me the space to live these stories before I write them. I’m happy to be back, and I have a feeling this next chapter is going to be a good one.

If you’re new here, I’d love to have you around. There are plenty more stories, Field Notes, and adventures to come.

Join me fireside, for more Field Notes, stories, and adventures…

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I’ve had a lot of dreams, the kind you spend years getting ready for. And recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens after the dream. We spend so much time talking about how to manifest our dreams. Here’s what happens after you actually arrive, happiness doesn’t exist somewhere over the next mountain, in a new place, or inside a new version of yourself.

I’ve lived versions of life that looked extraordinary from the outside. I’ve sat in rooms I once thought meant I’d made it. I’ve had access, experienced luxury, traveled the world seven-star style, and I’ve also traveled across North America in my pickup truck experiencing freedom firsthand.

Dreams eventually become Tuesday. So here I am living out another dream in a cabin in the woods, and as I write this, funny enough, it’s Tuesday.

Over the past six years I’ve been on a solo journey learning who the fuck she is. The pickup truck adventure was a wild one. It forced me to become a highly adaptable, independent, tough human with what felt like superhuman capabilities, but that’s an entire chapter for another article.

Somewhere along the way, she stopped being someone I was trying to become and became someone I could finally get to know.

I’ve been listening to the little girl inside of her. Forgiving the versions of herself that were only doing their best with what they had. Learning how to love the woman she is today. Shedding identities, cities, relationships, and expectations.

I don’t believe in luck or coincidences. How’d she do that? Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s the fairy dust, maybe it’s the unwavering belief that everything she wants is possible, or maybe she simply lost all her fucking fucks, more than she even knew she had, and went for it.

Every time I think, “that’s the last of my fucks,” another one falls off on the trail.

The dream starts as an idea, then you imagine possibilities, then refine and make decisions, do a shit ton of work, and poof babydoll it’s your reality. Now, I’m living in a cabin in the woods, growing a giant garden, and living inside another manifestation.

It’s wild reflecting because literally it goes from day dreaming about it, through a time warp and before you know it, you’re standing in the middle of it wondering how something that once felt so distant, impossible even now feels completely normal.

But arriving somewhere isn’t the same thing as becoming fulfilled. We adapt, and we’re remarkably good at normalizing what once felt extraordinary. The life you spent years trying to create eventually becomes Tuesday.

That’s exactly why life keeps handing us contrast. Contrast is life sauce. It’s part of what makes being human so beautiful. Without contrast, there is no expansion. Once we adapt to the familiar view, we naturally begin looking toward the horizon again. Not because we’re ungrateful, but because we’re alive.

My garden has become my greatest teacher. I know everyone says that, but I actually have examples. Everything growing in it depends on relationship, the soil, the rain, fungi beneath the ground, pollinators drifting from flower to flower. Nothing in my garden thrives entirely on its own. Even the weeds are responding to everything around them, and we aren’t any different.

Doing everything alone eventually lacks something that seems fundamental to the human experience: amplification. The last six years have taught me that I can build a beautiful abundant life on my own. I’m independent AF, and I’m never bored. But what if abundance and independence aren’t the final destination? What if they’re the foundation?

We know what we know. We know what we don’t know. But then there’s this vast territory of things we don’t even know exist. The most interesting parts of life aren’t hidden, they’re emergent. A forest isn’t a tree, it’s an ecosystem.

The real power of co-creation exists in relationship, whether that’s through love, friendship, community, nature, or collaboration, because relationship expands the field. It poses questions we may never have thought to ask. It reveals things we couldn’t have seen on our own. Relationship introduces contrast, ideas, experiences, and dreams to enter dimensions we simply don’t have the keys to access alone.

That’s the real power of co-creation. Alone, our thoughts compound. Together, possibilities compound.

Tuesday is always going to be Tuesday.

I’ll be over here sprinkling fairy dust on mine.

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The answer isn’t a number, it’s a feeling. I love collecting stories, flowers, moments, scents, observations, and beauty. But somewhere along the line, every collection became a project. There is a weight that comes from carrying every version of the future at once.

Beauty and expansion have a little way of carrying me away. Last season I grew a massive garden while simultaneously harvesting screenfuls of flora from the field. The wild kept blooming and I kept plucking and creating non-stop for months. I created bags of herbs for tea, fairy dusts and cedar sticks for burning, along with three sizes of every tincture, oil infusion, and tallow balm. I had nearly 100 SKUs complete with labels and product descriptions, photography, then an Etsy shop, and a website while simultaneously doing the farmers market every Saturday.

Why the hell did I do all that?

There is this voice that sounds like something out of a horror movie, whispering in my ear: More is more, Amy. Come on, take advantage of this time. You’ve got your flower ranch now. Don’t waste it, hustle harder. Show those flowers what you’re made of. You’re here, look at all this abundance, surely you can squeeze more out of it.

And fuck, I did.

Nothing gets me more excited than wood and basketfuls of wylde gold. I genuinely love exploring the depths of flowers and plants, not only for their beauty, but for their medicinal and energetic qualities. And I love making things beautiful. And then there’s that LA girl-boss hustle culture which was forever imprinted into me.

I wish I had stopped more often to smell all the flowers I grew. There were so many, it was overwhelming at times. Everything I’ve asked for, I’ve received. Then life goes ahead and provides more contrast. Wanting more is inevitable.

Sunday morning I took my boys out. The rain had just passed, the sky cracked open, and off we went. My temptation to forage was peaking, but my boys are not the most cooperative foragers. I had a fleeting thought to bring them home so I could gather more.

Then I paused.

Forgo the walk and bring them home so I could go back out and do more gathering alone? No. I wanted to be with my dogs, just appreciating the gorgeous shades of pink and bright yellow nature is giving right now. We continued along together and I casually collected a generous pocketful of wild roses, clovers, and buttercups.

It’s my first season in the Cariboo, and a whole new world of flora to explore. But with just a pocketful of roses and my dogs beside me, my body said: “Actually, I’d like to just be here.” That’s a very different energy than “work harder.” Somewhere along that trail, I realized I’m not meant to manufacture every beautiful thing I encounter. The point is, here I am on the mountain I dreamed of, in the wild West, in a forest with a creek running through it, still wanting more fucking basketfuls.

Perhaps that's the whole point, I’m just supposed to be here smelling the roses, and maybe I don’t need more basketfuls of bounty. Maybe a pocketful is enough. Reflecting on my last chapter gives me a sense of pride mixed with grief, and my second realization: exhaustion.

I drove across the country late last fall, built the cabin over the winter, and now that build mode is complete, I found myself right back in infrastructure mode, then garden mode, then the more zone. Gardens. Logs. Dirt. Maybe if I plant three kinds of those over there and just a sprinkle of four kinds of these over here. More, and more, and more. It's its own kind of hunger.

No. Baby girl. Slow down. Rest. What if this chapter is about receiving the forest's finest. We didn't know we came here to rest. To walk in it, not just work it. It's walking through the woods with my boys and the scent of a rose in my pocket while thinking about how wild life is, and how the heck I ended up here on this particular mountain living another manifested reality inside the dream I just dreamed.

Rest is not a symptom. It’s part of the rhythm. Flowers close, trees go dormant, the land pulls inward before it pours outward again. This chapter is about soaking in the land. I'm just here to receive the forest's finest. So far I haven’t discovered whether it grows hot, capable woodsmen.

Research is ongoing. A long walk in the woods and a nap are enough for today.

When we give energy an outlet, we help our nervous system regulate, relax and let go of thoughts that contradict desires And, the more relaxed we are, the better we tend to be at everything. We think more clearly, move differently, and even look better. It’s a whole body experience. I like to think of it like an oil change for the mind. Clear the gunk and tune the senses, then navigation through the world becomes much easier because the signal is clear.

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The Greeks named the daughter of their union Hedone. Pleasure as participation. The kind that comes from being fully present inside our lives. Every spring we witness the expansion, buds popping, greenery everywhere, birds screaming, flowers blooming, pine pollen poofing, spruce tipping, everything reaching outward all at once. Days lengthen and the earth opens. The scent of spring is nostalgic, while the feeling carries the energy of aliveness and renewal. I always missed the seasons when I was living in LA, entire years could go by if you weren’t paying attention because it’s always sunny and warm there. But spring in the North is a vibe, especially after a long hard winter. Spring feels like a full-body wake-up call unlike any other season. The world may be industrialized but our bodies still respond to light, temperature, scent, movement, seasonality, touch, and environment.

We witness this expansion everywhere in spring, but we experience it in our own lives too. Sometimes it arrives as an idea. Sometimes as a longing that refuses to leave us alone. Mine arrived as a dream of mountains, forests, and a creek running through them.

I rigged a pickup truck to live and journey in and set out in late spring on my second truck journey to the West from Ontario to the big trees on Vancouver Island. I took my time along the way to experience varieties of wild landscapes and parks. Having lived in Los Angeles for 15 adult years, with some years in Mexico, I felt rather displaced when I moved to my original place of origin (Ontario) in the midst of covid. It didn’t feel like home, nor did LA, or Mexico feel right when I revisited later. My Westerly mountain dream didn’t seem possible from behind a computer. With nothing tying me down, the idea was to explore and eventually discover a wild place to call home in the end.

Full-time living in a truck with two tiny dogs was never the point. It was a means to an end. After six extremely wild months on wheels, I was low on funds and energy. I needed to get to work. I landed back in Ontario for almost a year. The farm was comfortable enough, but sometimes comfort is what keeps us where we are. Ontario wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t the dream. I tried to convince myself I was excited to plant roots. I planted a massive garden. I started building a life. But comfort and alignment are not the same thing. The farm wasn’t what I had in mind for my final destination and it felt like I was settling. I knew in my heart I was climbing the wrong mountain. Reason being, there was no mountain. And the trees were just mediocre.

We can want something for years, dream about it, talk about it, write about it, and stay exactly where we are because it’s not bad enough to do anything about it. When things are unbearable, the decision gets made for us. There is nowhere to go but change. The hard part isn’t knowing. The hard part is choosing. Desire points. Consciousness chooses. Action changes everything.

I missed living on the West coast and life is too short for mediocre.

Fall is not the time for expansion, but I was not only following desire, it was my dream. Both my heart and my gut knew I had to go before certainty of anything waiting for me on the other side. I also couldn’t stand the thought that they had resumed logging the ancients. I decided in the warmth of August that I’d head out again once I was done with my garden. After capsulizing and carefully packing away 6 months worth of work, I simultaneously packed the truck the lightest I’d ever packed for a journey (3rd time is a charm). But when reality caught up with me in late September, the idea of another wild adventure was exhausting. A road trip was the complete opposite direction of my craving for a cozy comfortable sanctuary. But, I also knew it was now or never, because the weight of leaving at some later point in time would only become heavier and harder if I did it at all.

Driving long distances feels like time travel to me. One decision can place you thousands of miles away, in another landscape, another time zone, another life entirely. With temperatures dropping below freezing at night, I skipped the scenic route. This time the drive towards the big trees felt like a warp tunnel, it went fast like 1000 km/day fast. All of a sudden, there I was standing in the cold November rain at the gate of the fairy tree blockade. I felt like I had been spun around and shot out into a new dimension at that point. I am not even sure what I thought life would look like before I got there, but this was definitely not it.

It did not stop raining the entire time, everything was soggy because the canopy was leaking so badly. I could feel winter coming in hard and fast and I began questioning my life choices. My little bug-out felt anything but cozy and it seemed like things couldn’t get any worse. The accidental waterbed I was sleeping on became the catalyst for change.

After only 3 weeks rolling it got so bad, my entire plan-less plan came together. Desire pointed the way, and discomfort got me moving. How we react, is what changes everything. I couldn’t keep on with the way things were going. I called up an old friend to see if I could get some help fixing the leaks in my rig. Ten hours later, I was rolling up a new mountain I’d never heard of. The point is not to ignore the challenge, it’s to stop forcing it. Just be easy about it, because no amount of pushing up the wrong mountain ever gets you up the right mountain.

The next day I was standing on a mountain in the woods with a creek running below a 60’ green house, and a man with both the skills and interest to take on a cabin build, and host me on his land. We started building two days later.

I’m surrounded by big beautiful trees in all directions, with a south facing creek view from my cozy little cabin complete with a woodstove. The winter build had it’s challenges, and by no means a speedy process, however we got it done and I stayed warm and cozy all winter.

I dreamed it, of course it’s real. Life expands to the edges of our capacity, then asks us to grow new edges. Now that the bones are basically done, I’ve shifted my focus to Fairy Wonderland, the biggest garden I’ve ever had. After placing 15 or so retainer logs and shoveling what seemed like 100 tractor buckets of dirt, I planted the seeds. Now mother nature is doing her thing, it’s pouring rain and without a doubt, things are undeniably becoming.

Participating gives us experience. Experience teaches the body what no amount of thinking ever can. Sometimes when things aren’t working out, life isn’t saying no. It’s simply redirecting us. Before the truck, the cabin, the forest, or the flowers, what I have come to understand is that the deepest root of eroticism is the desire to merge with life instead of remaining separate from it. Life itself is an art of participation.

I’ve found that the easiest way to live in harmony with myself is to harmonize with the land. I’ve normalized soaking in the wild earth. Literally “being” earthy, rolling in it, walking it, talking to trees, and taking time to smell the flowers. I stare up at the clouds rolling by, while listening to the birdsong. At night, I make sure to pop out and have a word with the moon, sometimes mooning the moon, and more often I stay a longer for the stars.

Every season has a distinct energy, yet nature is constantly reorganizing. Her organized chaos is a reminder to me that perfection is a trap and there are all kinds of ways of getting to wherever it is we want to go. Desire changes, plans blow up and things evolve.

To become, as the Greeks understood long before any of us were born, limb-loosened by our own aliveness. The song was always there, Eros just frees it. The garden exists before the bloom, the photograph exists before the shutter clicks, and the future exists in the body before it becomes visible. This is where Eros becomes creative force.

Life wanting to expand itself through us.

For the last six years I’ve been moving, adapting, building, surviving, pivoting, creating, and solving. And somehow, I finally made it here. To my dream. The flowers are coming, and my throat chakra is opening up. I asked for freedom and I got it. Freedom comes with responsibility, loneliness, and 100% self-direction. I asked for a garden and I got one. It turns out big gardens are a shit ton of work.

Life is always doing this. Not because it’s punishing us, but because once we get close to something, we finally see the whole thing. The dream. The reality. The contrast between them. It’s enough. But of course we still want more.

Mountains come with rain, bugs, isolation, muddy dogs, infrastructure projects, and uncertainty. It’s pouring rain and I’m sitting in a crooked cabin swatting bugs, questioning existence, writing mythology essays about Eros, while a man with a purple beard installs my vertical ballet bar in a grove of trees just outside my cabin.

From a distance we see the dream. Up close we see the reality. And then we get to decide what still matters.

The lesson, as far as I can tell, is simple:

Fuck around and find out.

People always see the dream. Here are the receipts.

The visual diary. The story behind the story.

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They called him lysimelēs. Limb-loosener. And here is the part that should stop you: that word, limb-loosening, was the same word Homer used for a death-blow on the battlefield, for what sleep does to a warrior, for the moment before dissolution. Sappho knew exactly what she was doing when she borrowed it for Eros. She was saying that love and death share the same mechanism, that both ask you to stop defending your edges, to let go of the self you have been gripping so tightly, to come undone. There is more hidden in the word. Melos, the Greek root for limb, also means melody, a song-road. So the limb-loosener is also the melody-loosener. Eros does not just soften the body. He frees the song inside it.

The philosopher Empedocles saw all of existence as two forces in an eternal wrestling match: Love and Strife. Love pulls things together and Strife tears them apart, with the universe cycling endlessly between union and separation. Your numbness is not the absence of Eros. It is Strife winning a season. But like winter, it cannot hold forever. The word eros itself, in its oldest form, means lack, want, the desire for what is missing. This is not a word of fullness. It is a word of reaching, a root toward water, a flower toward sun, you toward life. Eros is the ache in the gap between what is and what is longed for, which is why grief can live inside it, and why Sappho called it glykypikros, bittersweet. The sweetness and the ache are not opposites. They are the same sensation felt at different depths. In the Orphic tradition, Eros was born from an egg laid by Time into the womb of Chaos. Before matter, before form, before anything, there was already wanting. The universe did not begin with a particle. It began with a longing to connect.

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The forest amplified me yesterday. Every thought, every frustration, every unfinished thing, every swallowed emotion. I screamed so loud the woods threw it back at me. Not gracefully. Not as a soft, grounded woman breathing through discomfort. I mean fully, loudly, human. And, it was not even about the thing itself. It never really is.

It was the accumulation of little inefficiencies, little delays, little workarounds, little moments where life starts feeling harder than it needs to be. What I was really craving was basic structure so that my nervous system was not spending all day compensating for disorder.

The problem is the holding pattern. The gray zone. The “almost.” Almost settled. Almost stable. Almost ready. Almost moving forward. Almost able to begin.

Humans are not meant to live indefinitely in limbo. We need movement. We need agency. We need to feel capable of shaping our environment, not just reacting to it. Somewhere inside prolonged waiting, the nervous system starts to fray. One frustration becomes ten. One unfinished thing starts carrying the emotional weight of everything beneath it.

I wasn’t upset about the two liters of hot tallow that flooded the cabin like a busted river dam, coating everything in its path. I was grieving momentum, grieving the version of myself that feels clear, capable, creative, alive, and moving.

The moment you snap is rarely about the moment itself. It is usually everything the body has been carrying for too long finally spilling over. Disorder. Uncertainty. Overstimulation. Unresolved stress. The accumulated weight of constantly compensating.

Mental fragmentation drains life force. Every unresolved stressor takes up cognitive bandwidth. An issue that should have taken 15 minutes max, suddenly becomes four months of calls, uncertainty, charges, confusion, interruptions, emotional spikes, and waiting. It stops being “just a problem.” It becomes a repeated nervous system activation. Every time it resurfaces, the body re-enters the same stress loop.

Thoughts build momentum.

When we repeatedly focus on stress, the brain strengthens the neural pathways associated with stress. Attention becomes magnetized toward whatever confirms the emotional state we are already rehearsing: threat, frustration, lack, unfinished business because attention trains perception. The brain is constantly pattern-matching.

So if I keep rehearsing the story that I’m overwhelmed, that nothing works, and that everything is hard, my nervous system starts scanning for evidence to confirm it. And confirmation is easy to find.

A single frustrating thought is rarely the problem. It is the unconscious momentum that follows it. One thought attracts another thought like it. One emotional state recruits more evidence to support itself.

Before long, the nervous system is no longer responding to the present moment. It is responding to the accumulated emotional atmosphere created by repetitive focus.

So how do we stop thinking about the thing we cannot stop thinking about?

We interrupt the loop. We stop feeding the spiral long enough for the nervous system to shift states. And the fastest way to shift internal dialogue is through the body.

That’s why sensory rituals matter.

Sensory rituals help interrupt momentum and guide attention back into the present moment before the spiral deepens.

A practice of coming home to yourself through movement, breath, touch, sound, nature, rhythm, and meditation. Small sensory anchors that help the nervous system shift states before stress gains more momentum.

I move things through my body. I stretch and dance. I garden. I breathe deeper than I was breathing five minutes ago. A walk through the woods, or almost any repetitive physical task, can become a moving meditation when attention and breath are brought into it.

Meditation is not always sitting perfectly still in silence. Sometimes the nervous system needs movement before it can access stillness. Especially when we are carrying stress, grief, overstimulation, ADHD tendencies, or emotional buildup.

I anchor my focus to something constant like the rhythm of footsteps, the sound of water, the crackling fire, the wind in the trees, or even the hum of the fridge compressor when I cannot get outside.

And then something important happens.

Perception widens again.

It’s wild how fast it works. I remember beauty. Possibility. Desire. My connection to it all. And my energy shifts almost instantly. From crying to laughing, to calm. And suddenly I can hear my own signal again clearly.

There are always going to be gremlins. People gremlins. Technology gremlins. Money gremlins. Bureaucratic gremlins. Internal gremlins. Tiny little forces constantly trying to pull our attention away from our own signal.

Gremlins will always find ways to crash our lane. The practice is learning how to return so we do not stay there. The goal is recalibration. Recovery. Learning how to shake that shit off faster. Returning to yourself faster.

This is why sensory ritual makes sense. Scent, smoke, texture, forest air, movement, breath, water, touch, sound. They are anchors. They pull attention out of compulsive thought loops and back into the body.

You can barefoot your way through life if you want to. I did through parts of Mexico. But tactile tools can help. The same way a wrench makes it easier to loosen a bolt, sensory rituals can help loosen the grip of a spiraling mind.

I am essentially talking about energetic hygiene. The same way people shower dirt off their skin, they need ways to clear accumulated psychological noise too.

Attention is energy. Where we place it matters. What we rehearse matters. What we normalize matters. What we repeatedly return to matters.

Because this is the modern nervous system: a body trying to stay human inside constant stimulation. A mind trying to stay coherent inside endless information. A heart trying to stay open inside systems that constantly ask it to brace.

Human attention is constantly being pulled, bought, sold, redirected, monetized, and exhausted. The product is increasingly human focus. And if we are not careful, we begin mistaking fragmentation for awareness. We think being flooded means being informed. We think being reactive means being engaged. We think being constantly available means being connected.

That is why tangible life matters.

Beneath the opinions, algorithms, pressure, and emotional static of modern life, there is still the garden, the morning light, the trees, the body, the breath, the fire, the meal, the walk, the making.

Simple tactile things. Things you can touch, smell, hold, grow, walk through, and breathe into. Things that reconnect attention to direct experience instead of endless abstraction. Things that help us hear our own signal again.

The things that remind the nervous system:

here.

now.

this.

For those asking about the sensory rituals, smoke blends, forest tools, and tactile practices referenced throughout this piece:

WYLDE GOLD

nature-based rituals for body + space.

the woods work.

There were detours. Versions of plans that didn’t hold. Each one felt like an answer at the time. I just kept moving, and somewhere along the way, I started losing my fucks.

Starting over doesn’t look the way you think it will. It’s messier. Quieter in some ways, louder in others. Freeing all the same. There’s no clean beginning, no moment where the old life ends and the new one begins with ceremony. You just keep going. And at some point, you realize you’ve crossed something.

What began as necessity became transformation. With no subjects to photograph, I became both the observer and the observed. Self-portraiture became the mirror. A way to examine identity, solitude, and my relationship with the natural world.

On the other side of letting go, I found a feeling. A playful, fearless version of myself that didn’t need everything mapped out. I started asking different questions. What happens if I follow this? If I don’t force it? If I just begin and stay in it?

The field work is primal. Physical. Instinctual. The camera stopped being something I used to capture and became something I moved with. The path wasn’t linear, but it was always clear, especially when I couldn’t think my way through.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I became the naked neighbor. Not a decision. Something I walked into. A kind of freedom that came from having nothing fully formed. I had left one life and landed in another without the same structure, environment, or identity.

There was still friction. I was temporarily living under my parents’ roof. Starting over. Moments where it felt like I was doing something I shouldn’t be, even though nothing about it was wrong. I could feel the tension around it, the unspoken projection. But I wasn’t ashamed. Why would I be?

Once you’ve been published nude, people place you somewhere. They decide what it means. You shoot nude and suddenly you become something defined.

No.

It was never about being hot. It was about being in my body without adjusting, without performing. Just existing. Letting it move. Letting it feel. I was becoming something I didn’t have language for yet. And I wasn’t interested in slowing down to explain it.

Self-portraiture felt good. It brought me back into my body. It reconnected me to something real I couldn’t access when I was overthinking or trying to control the outcome. The camera stayed constant while everything else shifted. It became a way to witness change before I had language for it.

There’s a part of me that likes being seen. I won’t deny that. But presence is different than performance. I’ve never been interested in outside noise, especially when something is still forming. I let the work have its own space. Let it develop in the dark, the way anything living does before it can hold light. Because the work was being in it, open, moving, learning myself without interpretation.

There was this field I kept returning to, I called it the field of dreams, where everything felt possible. Between control and trust. Structure and instinct. Who I had been and who I was becoming.

Detachment became connection. Love all, attach to nothing, connect to everything. It wasn’t about holding on. It was about experiencing fully without needing to keep it.

The end result is just a trace of something that was alive in the process.

Six years of becoming, documented quietly while I learned how to come home to myself.

The photographs were never the point.

The play was.

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This is part of a larger body of work, a collection of field studies, and moments that were never meant for performance, just presence. If you want first access when it’s released, stay close.

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It started with palm trees and ended in pom-poms, the brightest colors I could find, dancing around for no reason other than I felt like it. Stay with me.

Of course I went LA. Where else do you go when you’ve been living inside an illusion long enough to call it home?

In Los Angeles, certain things feel normal because you see them constantly, reinforced socially, tied to status, youth, desirability. Your nervous system quietly settles: this is baseline. Then you leave, and something shifts. You’re somewhere else, looking back, and it hits you: oh… this is actually a look. Not neutral. Not universal. Just localized conditioning wearing the face of reality.

Oh shit. I went LA.

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It’s actually kind of funny. I opened my phone to text a man on the internet. That was the task. A simple, achievable, human task. Instead, I ended up questioning AI, modern consumption, creativity, attention spans, and the general state of existence. Which feels proportional.

Because that’s where we’re at. No one is just doing one thing anymore. You open your phone to send a message, and you’re reconsidering your life choices, re-absorbing 47 opinions you didn’t ask for, doing literally everything except sending the message.

People are either worshipping AI or rejecting it like it’s the end of creativity, like using it means you’ve lost your voice and you’re destroying the environment. And I just. What the fuck are we talking about?

AI is a tool. A pencil is a tool. A camera is a tool. A drill is a tool. None of these things make you good at anything. They don’t give you taste, perspective, or depth. A tool makes it easier to get the job done, more effectively, efficiently, or precisely. That’s the whole thing.

It is never about the tool. It’s about the eye, the voice, the feeling, the perspective, the lived experience behind it. The best camera is the one in your hand. Yes, there are differences at a professional level, but an artist is an artist. If you have the eye, the feeling, the perspective, it comes through regardless.

Did the thought come from a lived place, or was it generated to fill space? And at the end of the day, how does this even affect your life? If you don’t know what you want to say, no tool will save you. And when you have something to say, tools help you say it better, faster, and cleaner. The noise is being amplified because AI exposes generic ideas wrapped in polish at scale. And once you see it, you see it everywhere. Empty. Flat. Over-polished. Trying to sound like something instead of being something.

Nothing original is coming through because attention is fragmented. But who’s to blame when the standard of living now is boxes, living in them, thinking inside them, staring into them. The collective habit is overstimulated and under-lived. Heads down. Ears filled with noise that isn’t theirs.

I care deeply about the environment. Which is exactly why the conversation around AI being "so bad" for it feels misplaced, and disproportionately loud. Like we’re zooming in on the smallest, newest piece because it’s the easiest problem to point at. Are we seriously going to sit here and debate whether using AI to write a caption is the problem, while everything else keeps running exactly the same?

The biggest drivers follow a clear hierarchy: industrial agriculture stripping the soil until it can’t give back. Fossil fuels underneath almost everything. Mining tearing into the earth and leaving toxic aftermath. Fast fashion producing more than we could ever wear. Plastics that break down but never truly go away. All of it moving through a global transport system that keeps the whole cycle alive.

Beneath all of it, the same rhythm: things aren’t made to last. Everything faster, cheaper, disposable, with zero relationship to where it came from or where it goes. The world built for convenience. The way we make, buy, and use things is either part of the pressure or part of the repair.

The alternative isn’t extreme. It’s intuitive. Intentional creation. Fewer, better things. A return to taking what you need and using what you take. The real conversation isn’t about perfection or cutting everything out. It’s about remembering that the way we make, buy, and use things is either part of the pressure or part of the repair.

Someone asked me the other day what equipment they should get to start creating content, and I laughed. Just make the thing. Sit with it. Figure out what you’re even trying to say before you worry about how to say it with a thousand dollars worth of gear. Because here’s what actually happens: you go get all the equipment first, and now you’re learning the tool and the art at the same time. Both are strangers. It’s twice the overwhelm and half the creative energy. There’s so much you can do with nothing. Half the stuff people buy before they’ve even started ends up sitting there, expensive and unused, because the work would have told them they never needed it.

Take what you need. Use what you take. That goes for gear, and it goes for AI.

Lately I’ve been going in with a broken iPhone propped on my Yeti mug. Or a rock. Or a stick in the mud, whatever I can find while I’m out there barefoot in the moss. Sometimes there’s a bit of finagling, but a stick in the mud works, and there’s nothing to carry.

For professional work I use a heavy Canon, which is a lot to manage on adventures. I wanted something smaller, still pro, something I could carry without it taking over the whole experience. So I bought a three-thousand-dollar camera. I wasn’t going to get insurance, but the salesman said if anything happened, bring it back, it’d be replaced for another three hundred. Perfect. I took care of it. Did everything right. Salt air got in anyway. Corrosion, the one thing not covered. Three thousand, three hundred dollars gone. After many phone calls and lost emails, I hauled that camera all over the country planning to return it in person. Somewhere along the way, broken and unused, it disappeared.

If you use any tool correctly, it’s not outsourcing, it’s amplifying. Compressing time. Instead of opening twelve tabs, filtering opinions, and second-guessing yourself, you just go: this is what I’m sensing, help me sharpen it. Then you move. The risk is not AI. It’s outsourcing your intuition with it.

What does make a difference in this life is presence and posture. Sit up. Drop your shoulders. Unclench your jaw. Take a breath. Look around. Take notice. Here you are, and there is probably something beautiful right in front of you right now, even if it’s just a clear, quiet moment.

Create. Think. Use tools if and when you need them, and put them down when you’re done. You are a creator regardless of your tool arsenal. No one has ever lost themselves in a wrench.

Breathe.

All images shot by Amy Lynn Grover
Playa del Carmen, Mexico

Shot on a Fuji XT5
the camera that broke

Nervous system regulation is often treated like something you practice, something you do, something you work at. But more often, it is something you stop interrupting. Your heart is capable of more than just pumping blood. It is a rhythm, a signal, a conversation happening inside your body all the time. And when you are in the world we have built, that conversation gets drowned out by noise, notifications, expectations, performing, holding, bracing. Your heart starts trying to keep up instead of simply being.

A dysregulated system does not just feel anxious. It quietly reshapes your life. It distorts your decisions. It makes you say yes when you mean no, stay when you should leave, and chase things that were never meant for you. What gets labeled as confusion or self-sabotage is often just a nervous system trying to return to what feels familiar, even if what feels familiar is tension.

You can think of the Earth and heart connection as both a metaphor and a measurable relationship, and it becomes clearer the moment you step out of abstraction and into contact.

At the most literal level, your heart is an electrical organ. It generates the strongest rhythmic electromagnetic field in your body. The Earth also generates a field, subtle but constant, produced by lightning activity and resonating in what physicists call the Schumann resonances. These frequencies fall in a range that overlaps with human brainwaves and, interestingly, with the rhythms of a calm, coherent heart.

This does not mean your heart is plugged into the Earth in some mystical circuit. What it suggests is entrainment. Biological systems synchronize with stable environmental rhythms when given the chance. Your heart rate variability, which reflects adaptability and resilience, becomes more coherent when your nervous system is regulated. And one of the most reliable ways to regulate the nervous system is through natural environments.

But you do not need the science to feel it. You feel it the second you stop trying so hard.

When you stand in a forest, your visual field widens, your breath deepens, and your attention shifts from narrow focus into something softer and more receptive. This is what psychologists call soft fascination. It reduces stress activity in the brain and increases parasympathetic tone. The heart responds almost immediately. It slows down, becomes more rhythmic, more efficient. Your internal signals become clearer. You feel more.

It is not just something you feel. It becomes something you can see.

Nervous system regulation is one of the most underrated beauty shifts there is. It changes how you carry yourself. It changes how your face rests. It changes how you are perceived without you trying to be perceived at all. There is a quality to a regulated body that is unmistakable. The eyes brighten. The spine restacks. There is less tension held in the jaw, the brow, the subtle places that quietly shape how you look. The body is no longer conserving energy for defense, so it begins directing that energy toward restoration. It is beauty that cannot be bottled.

The Japanese practice of Shinrin-yoku documented this decades ago. Time in the forest lowers cortisol, reduces blood pressure, and improves heart rate variability. But those are just the measurable edges of something deeper.

You do not regulate your nervous system through effort. You stop placing it in environments that require constant defense, and the body begins to regulate itself.

Before my cabin in the woods, I spent fifteen years living in beautiful, sunny California. I loved it there. I was successful there, creatively charged. But Los Angeles was hard. There was constant pressure between immigration cycles every two years and the uncertainty of whether I would be able to stay inside a system that never fully held me. And layered on top of that was everything else. Work, relationships, social energy, movement, and the cost of keeping up.

It was a hurricane.

Even when I first slowed down, I thought I had already come back to myself. Then again while I was traversing across the country, there was freedom and pure joy in the adventure and immersion into the wild. I began following the feeling instead of forcing the outcome. That is what led me deeper into the woods, onto the rocks, into the rivers, back to the trees, and back to my body. Not as an idea, but as a way of living.

I did a lot of work and then (there’s always more), there was another shift. I did not realize how much I was still carrying until I landed fully here in the woods, on the mountain, with the creek running through it. Something in my body took a deeper exhale than I knew was possible.

And that changed everything.

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There was a moment I realized I could do whatever I wanted. Not in a reckless way and not in a delusional way, but in a fully aware, fully embodied way that felt grounded in reality rather than disconnected from it. I had been living out of my truck, moving through the forests and backroads across North America, following whatever called me next.

I was somewhere up a forest service road, deep in the trees, completely alone. This whole area had been an ancient forest, the kind you can feel even after it’s gone. You could see it in the scale of what was left behind. I set my camera down and climbed up onto a tree stump, that was once a massive living tree. I remember standing there bare to the breeze, imagining what it was like to be that tree. Rooted. Powerful. Fully in its place.

At the time, I felt this pull to protect the woods, even though I didn’t know what that meant or how I would do it. So I did the only thing I could in that moment. I embodied it. I stood there as if the forest was still whole, as if nothing had been taken, as if that life was still moving through the land.

It was emotional. There was a heaviness to it, but there was also strength. It felt like reverence. Like I was standing there saying thank you to the trees that had once stood on that land, and to the land that still was. I wasn’t separate from it.

That’s when it clicked. There is a version of you that doesn’t need permission. A version that moves, decides, trusts herself in real time.

I’ve never been someone who asked for permission. In fact, I’ve always done whatever the fuck I wanted. But that day, I believed it. Not as attitude or rebellion, but as something real. Something embodied. Nature, in her purest form.

Every time you step into the wild, you are taking a risk. You could meet anything out there. A man. A bear. A cat. But I was never careless. I was aware. Constantly checking my surroundings. Every mile a decision, every single step I took was a decision. Every interaction was something I was feeling into and choosing in real time. That is what made it safe.

I’ve felt protected through everything I’ve moved through in life. It’s something I’ve always carried with me. I’ve never moved through the world expecting something bad to happen. And if I look at the moments that proved it, the ones where things could have gone wrong but didn’t.

The day my truck battery died is one of them. I had no idea my light settings had been reset after a service, and I was out there alone, about thirty miles up a forest service road when it happened. Just me, my dogs, no cell signal, and a dead truck. I didn’t know how I was getting out of there. And then out of nowhere, something happened that I still think about to this day…

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I’ve been thinking about things all day and it’s starting to ruin my vibe. I keep catching myself in the same loop. Where is that thing. Do I need more of those things. Why do I have so many of these things. Why did I bring that thing in the first place.

I started thinking about all the things I’ve owned, the things I thought I needed, and the things I definitely did not need. The things that made me angry, the things that got broken, the things I replaced, the things I paid to store, the things I carried across the country, now looking back and questioning why. The things I refuse to throw out and the things I wish I had let go of sooner. The things I thought defined me and the things that absolutely did not. The things that made me feel like someone, and the things that quietly made me tired and sad.

There were funny things too. I’m the girl who got her dog a dog. That kind of logic made perfect sense to me at the time.

All the things.

When I lived in LA, I had everything. All the shoes, bags, dresses, luggage, a mountain bike, a ballet barre, a full gym setup, and a gym membership on top of that. I had everything I could have imagined. All good things, really good things. And I kept accumulating more. More was the baseline, and somehow, more was still never enough.

I went LA with things. How could I not. I was living inside one of the most beautiful places, surrounded by beautiful things, and I love beautiful things.

I’ve always loved making things beautiful. It’s something I naturally do. Spaces, pieces, moments, everything, I always see how much they can become more.

I’m not a minimalist or anti-thing. I just don’t want to manage my things like a full-time job. After all the moving, there were too many moves. Things packed, unpacked, lost, broken, replaced, and carried forward again. Somewhere along the way, the weight stopped being physical and became something else.

And as I write this, I’m sitting in the cabin I built, tucked into a cozy little nook in the mountains, surrounded by forest, overlooking a babbling creek, with my wood stove burning. I’m wearing the same holey tights I’ve been living in for the last four months, and somewhere along the way, they became holy.

I’ve never felt more like myself.

I set out on the road, living out of my truck, and within weeks the plan changed. I found myself in the woods, building a cabin with only the bare basics I had packed for the road.

This journey home brought me closer to the source, where there is already so much. I found myself asking how many things I actually need to start this new life, knowing I’m going to need to think about them, maintain them, and carry them forward.

In the thick of the woods is where it all became clear.

All I really need is to be prepared.

The woods don’t care what you wear. It’s about comfort, ease, and flow. I only brought five pairs of tights, and that’s what I wear on repeat. All of them are now holy. Everything that was once nice is turning into threads or becoming workwear. The bonus is I don’t think about it. I just live in them. There’s one pair with a particularly big hole, but I throw a plaid on top and keep going. And honestly, if someone wants to sponsor that level of commitment, I’m open.

There’s this quiet contemplation I keep coming back to. Do I go back and get it all. And if I do, where does it all even go. How do I get it here. What am I actually bringing forward. There are some things I truly want, but the rest of it becomes a whole production. Moving it here, placing it or finding somewhere to store once again, just so I can have my things again.

And this is where I stop myself. Maybe it would just be easier to start over.

Freedom is not about having more. It’s about not worrying about things, about having a kind of figure it out energy. It’s about needing less between me and the moment.

We’re here to do things.

There’s no decision fatigue, no wondering where anything went. I only brought three knives and forks out of the set, and I just learned they take away from a primal part of being human and digesting food, begins with actually connecting to it. So I’ve started eating with my hands, feeling it, being more connected to it.

Go figure.

There is very little that stands between me and living now. Less to manage, less to think about, and more space to just be in it.

Right now, the only thing I really get excited about is wood. I play with it in all its stages, from bark to core, from green to dry, from structure to ash. It does something, and then it becomes something else. I chop it, burn it, work with it, break it down, build with it, and watch it change form.

Money comes and goes, time only goes. There will always be more of it, but it will never be the same moment twice, and because more is always coming, we mistake that for having plenty. Money leaves evidence, you can track it, measure it, watch it rise or fall. Time behaves differently, it disappears without a trace, and what disappears is what we question the least.

Years pass this way, not through catastrophe or dramatic mistakes, but through small, socially approved leaks. Scrolling, waiting, filling space with things that do not nourish us. Entire decades can vanish like this, not because people intend to waste their lives, but because time is rarely accounted for in the moment.

Modern culture reinforces the illusion that busyness is something to admire. The more you have going on, the more important you must be. But busy is often just unexamined time expenditure, and a full schedule is not proof of a meaningful life. Very often it is proof of the opposite. Busyness does not equal competence.

When someone says they are busy, what it often reveals is disorganization and an inability to choose what actually matters. Wealth is not created through busyness. It grows through alignment, momentum, and the patient stacking of what actually works.

Another way time slips away has less to do with what you are doing and more to do with what you keep repeating. People live on loops without realizing it. The same thoughts, the same reactions, the same patterns playing out day after day. A thought repeated enough times becomes a belief, a behavior repeated enough times becomes identity, and over time those patterns begin to shape the direction of a life.

And the longer you stay in that space, the heavier everything becomes. Momentum slows, decisions feel bigger, and what should be simple starts to feel complicated. Clarity does not arrive first, movement does.

Slowly through repetition time erodes. You are not just spending time, you are practicing something, and what you practice, you become. Yet, the simplest way to interrupt that pattern is almost too simple.

Movement in the body, even in small ways, shifts your state and creates space between what was automatic and what can be chosen. And if you cannot move, place yourself somewhere that is moving. Movement creates momentum.

The woods clarify this. There is constant progression and zero waste. The forest does not force growth, it supports the conditions that allow growth to happen. Nothing is rushing or competing, yet everything is advancing in a kind of quiet, coordinated order.

Nature is abundant.

The sun rises every morning, water continues to flow, birds sing their songs, and growth builds on top of growth. Nothing is wasted. The forest does not try to be abundant, it simply is. The system supports the conditions that allow life to thrive, and abundance becomes the baseline.

A forest is an active energy system. Trees exchange nutrients, share resources, and support one another through underground networks. Energy is constantly being transferred, recycled, and used to build more life. It is a living system of circulation, not accumulation, and it is something you can only understand by being inside of it.

When you spend time in nature, your system responds. Your breathing slows, your mind settles, and your body begins to regulate. You stop pushing against time and start moving with it. That shift changes how you think, how you move, and what you choose.

Not everything people call a waste of time actually is. If something restores you, if it gives you energy or allows you to be present, then it serves a purpose. The issue is not the activity, it is the effect. Some things create momentum, and some quietly drain it. The difference shows up later, in how you feel and in what your life is becoming.

There are small ways to shift this that do not require you to change your entire life. You can sneak it in. A stretch while you are cooking, a few breaths while something heats, a moment of movement in the middle of something automatic. It is not about adding more, it is about changing how you are already moving through what exists.

Time is not experienced evenly. An hour can feel full and alive, or it can pass without leaving anything behind. The difference is not the clock, it is your state. When you are present, time feels rich and complete, even if it seems to pass quickly in hindsight. When you are disconnected, time feels tight and insufficient, as if there is never quite enough of it.

Time follows attention. What you focus on is what your life begins to organize around. If your attention is scattered, your time will feel scattered. If your attention is clear, your time begins to feel intentional. You are not just spending time, you are directing it.

Most people think time is something they need to manage, but it is shaped far more by what they allow. Where your time goes follows what you say yes to, what you tolerate, and what you avoid. Boundaries protect your energy and give direction to your life. Allowing creates space for what is working to expand. Strong boundaries around what drains you, and open allowance for what grows you, that is where time starts to feel different.

The pace of modern life is distorted. I feel it every time I think about stepping back into it, even for an afternoon. People could look at the way I live and turn their noses up at the lack of amenities, and that’s fair. It’s a different choice.

From Beverly Hills to the bush, I have lived both. I understand the appeal, the energy, the momentum. But that pace is not yours. It pulls you into something that feels normal until you step away from it. Distance gives perspective, and what is normalized in the masses is far from natural.

In reality, it is not about having more time. It is about being intentional with where it goes, because everything you do has an exchange rate, and you feel the tax immediately when you are out of alignment. Your body always knows.

Every hour eventually becomes a memory, and memory is the only place time ever goes.

Is this how you want to spend your life?

For a long time my practice was built around intensity or long holds, breath steady while everything burned. I loved pushing to the edge, you’re not done until you are shaking. Meanwhile everything inside the body asks to come out of the pose. There is something deeply clarifying about staying in a posture when it becomes difficult. Yoga, at its core, is the practice of being with sensation. It teaches you to remain present inside intensity and find calm in the chaos. By expanding your window of tolerance, it trains the nervous system not to panic when things tighten, both on and off the mat.

But somewhere along the way my relationship with intensity shifted. What began as a practice of awareness slowly drifted into something else. The edge became the goal. The burn became the measure of whether the practice was working.

Looking back, I can see I had become very good at one particular skill: endurance.

There is a difference between practicing discomfort and overriding yourself. For years I trained myself to remain calm inside discomfort, and I became extremely skilled at enduring it. What makes this realization strange is that my entire life has been built around movement and training.

I did not arrive at this perspective casually. My relationship with discipline formed early and was reinforced for decades. I started dancing at three years old. Soon after came figure skating, skiing, and snowboarding, later varsity sports, cross country, and track. Physicality has always been a language my body speaks fluently.

Eventually I studied it more formally. I completed a 500-hour yoga certification and trained in personal training, Pilates, TRX, Power Plate, and Zumba,. I also spent years working with some of the best coaches in Los Angeles, people who understood biomechanics and discipline at the highest level.

There was a stretch of time when I lived in Los Angeles and my entire day revolved around output. I would wake up early to hike, then head to spin class, then yoga, then train clients. Movement was constant. From the outside it looked incredibly healthy. I was lean, strong, and the yoga girl people pinned to their fitness mood boards. Discipline was visible and so was definition.

But if I am honest, there was compulsion underneath it. Movement was not only devotion. It was regulation through exertion. I felt my best when my entire body was sore.

Looking back now, I can see the nervous system component more clearly. Many of us become addicted to intensity without realizing it. The nervous system begins to associate exertion with regulation. When everything burns, the mind becomes quiet. When the body is exhausted, there is relief. It can feel like clarity, but sometimes it is simply depletion.

Modern fitness culture rarely teaches people how to feel good, rahter push harder, stay longer, do more. Sweat becomes proof of worth. Pain becomes evidence of progress. The body becomes something to conquer instead of something to live in. And the patterns we practice in the body rarely stay confined there.

How you do one thing is how you do everything.

If you train your body through force, you often start living your life the same way. Pushing through signals, ignoring discomfort. That pattern began showing up everywhere for me: in relationships, in work, and in the way I stayed in situations long after they stopped feeling right.

Somewhere along the way endurance started to feel like virtue. I believed that if I stayed long enough, endured enough, proved my loyalty through discomfort, eventually something beautiful would happen. But pain is not a currency that guarantees transformation. Some things do not improve with endurance. No job or person will change simply because you stayed.

When the nervous system learns to tolerate pain, it can begin to crave it. Not consciously, but through familiarity. The body returns to what it knows how to survive, even if it is more painful than leaving. The mind begins mistaking suffering for meaning.

You overhear women talking about getting ready for a birthday or an event and it becomes a full checklist: hair appointments, nails, facials, Botox, lips, laser, IPL, spray tans, fillers, skin resurfacing, extensions, brow lamination. Another facial. Another appointment. I wish I were exaggerating, but the list goes on.

There are so many ways to alter your appearance that you can spend entire weeks preparing to be seen.

I realized this in a very ordinary moment when I cut my own hair recently. Not a dramatic transformation, just a trim. The actual cutting took maybe a minute. And it reminded me how much time I used to spend maintaining myself when I lived in Los Angeles. A hair appointment alone could consume an entire day — driving across the city, sitting in traffic, hours at the salon processing and styling, then driving home again.

An entire day devoted to maintenance.

And that was just one item on the list. Hair, nails, facials, treatments, appointments stacked between workouts and errands.

It’s not that any of those things are inherently wrong. But there is a point where maintenance starts to replace living, where entire days disappear into managing the surface of your life instead of actually inhabiting it. Yes, discipline has its place. Caring for your body matters. Movement matters. Health matters. But those things come from respect, not correction.

You do not need to carve yourself into something acceptable. You already belong here. There is nothing to fix. You are fucking amazing exactly the way you are.

Hello. You are nature.

Not a project to be optimized.

For a long time, I did not realize how loud that constant correction had become. When you live inside it, the noise feels normal. The endless improving, adjusting, optimizing. It just becomes the background hum of everyday life.

It wasn’t until I stepped away from it that I noticed what my nervous system had been carrying. When I moved into the woods, my nervous system unfolded in ways I cannot quite describe. The constant sense of needing to fix myself slowly faded, and with it the tension I had been carrying for years. And slowly, the body softened.

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Filming yourself is not inherently narcissistic. It can be an act of self-witnessing. Many people discover strength, sensuality, or coherence they did not know they possessed until they see themselves reflected back. The camera can reveal presence that doubt had concealed, dissolve shame, and even restore a sense of agency. Watching yourself inhabit your body can feel clarifying, sometimes even exhilarating.

But self-witnessing can quietly become self-surveillance, and the shift happens gradually. At first, the camera simply captures experience. Then experience begins to anticipate the camera. A thought arises and part of you measures how it will land, while a movement unfolds and part of you evaluates how it reads. Over time, the observing self grows more dominant than the experiencing self, and you begin narrating your own life as it happens. This is where fragmentation begins.

There is the embodied self, the one feeling wind on skin, laughing without wondering how it looks, breathing without bracing. There is also the broadcast self, framed, curated, aware of permanence. When these two remain in conversation, there is integration. When the broadcast self becomes primary, you begin living slightly beside yourself. You are present but also watching, alive but also editing, expressing but also optimizing.

The nervous system does not interpret this as trivial. Humans evolved in tribes where visibility meant inclusion or exile, where to be seen was to belong or to be cast out. That circuitry remains intact. The body does not calculate follower counts or market size; it registers exposure. The scale of the platform is irrelevant, because a hundred followers is still magnitude and a small following still operates inside potential amplification. Anything recorded has the potential to travel well beyond its origin, and the organism responds accordingly.

The dopamine loop deepens the split as engagement begins to function as a variable reward. Sometimes response surges, sometimes it disappears, yet the unpredictability strengthens the reinforcement. Dopamine is released not only when approval arrives but in anticipation of it, and checking gradually becomes reflexive until the feed itself feels like a pulse. Belonging, in evolutionary terms, is survival, and when applause becomes quantifiable, belonging begins to feel measurable. Identity slowly reorganizes itself around reception.

The fracture is subtle. You do not feel addicted; you feel attuned. You do not feel inauthentic; you feel strategic. You refine edges, soften truths, heighten moments in the name of resonance. Slowly the internal reference point begins to shift. Instead of asking whether something feels true, you begin asking whether it will connect. Connection and approval begin to merge.

Then something stranger happens. You watch old footage of yourself and feel both admiration and distance. That version of you appears more embodied, more magnetic, more alive. You feel almost jealous of her, as though she exists preserved in an archive while you remain in production. The recorded self becomes an artifact, and the living self becomes the producer. You begin chasing states you have already captured.

This is where the split becomes real. The self divides between the one who feels and the one who monitors feeling. One part of you is inside the moment, while another stands just outside it, watching. The danger lies in living under continuous evaluation, mistaking documentation for experience, and allowing the observing self to eclipse the feeling self.

And yet there remains a way through. Filming can become an act of reclamation when the body leads, when expression originates in sensation rather than anticipation and the camera shifts from judge to witness. The difference lies not in the act of recording but in the order of authority. When the body leads, the image becomes a document of aliveness. When the image leads, the body begins working for its own projection.

We now live inside two identities at once, the local organism and the global image. Participation is not the threat; forgetting which one is primary is. To remain human in a recorded era requires deliberate unobserved existence, relationships that are not mediated by metrics, conversations that leave no record, and proximity that allows nervous systems to synchronize without commentary. It also requires environments that do not evaluate you at all. An algorithm is not a tribe, texting cannot replace resonance, and visibility cannot replace attunement.

The nervous system still belongs to a mammal, not a metric. It regulates through rhythm, through breath, and through contact with the living world. Forest, ocean, wind, and sky are not aesthetic backdrops but forms of recalibration. Life requires privacy, rhythm, and spaces where expression does not anticipate evaluation. It requires moments that are never translated into content.

All the world’s a stage, but the stage has grown permanent. There was a time when performance belonged to a place and an hour, when the body could exhale once the room emptied and the role dissolved at the edge of a doorway. Shakespeare understood the architecture of human life as a series of entrances and exits, costumes and scripts that shape us across time. He recognized that identity is seasonal and that we inhabit different versions of ourselves as we move from youth to age. What he could not have imagined was a world in which the stage never dims, where the audience never disperses, and where performance becomes a continuous condition rather than a temporary expression.

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The body, however, still knows when it is being watched. Something subtle shifts in the musculature and breath. The shoulders rise slightly, the breath grows shorter, and the nervous system begins to scan for cues of approval, threat, or response. Even before language intervenes, the animal within registers the presence of eyes. In our era those eyes are often mechanical. A camera alters the chemistry of a moment. The simple act of pressing record introduces the possibility of replay, of permanence, of being witnessed beyond the room. Words begin to organize themselves differently when they may travel farther than the space in which they were spoken. It is biology meeting magnitude.

For most of human history, communication was local and embodied. We spoke to the people in front of us, and news traveled slowly enough for the nervous system to metabolize it. Today, we broadcast to audiences we cannot see and absorb information from places we will never visit. The human organism evolved for proximity, not planetary visibility. Yet we live as though we are meant to address and absorb the concerns of billions. The body does not interpret this as abstraction. It interprets it as exposure. What follows is not a critique of performance, but an examination of what it does to the body.

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It is to remain perceptive in a world that constantly invites you to go numb. The word sensitive comes from the Latin sensus, meaning perception, feeling, awareness, understanding. It comes from sentire, to feel or to experience. From that same root we get sensation, sensory, sensibility, consent, sentiment, sentient, and sensual. All of these words return to one simple truth: to be human is to feel. Sensitivity is not weakness. It is the capacity to register life as it is happening.

Somewhere along the way, we began treating desensitization as maturity. We call it resilience when we override our discomfort. We call it strength when we tolerate what unsettles us. We call it normal when something chronically feels off. But desensitization is simply the dulling of perception. It is what happens when we ignore signals long enough that they stop speaking loudly. The body whispers before it screams. The nervous system adjusts before it collapses. When we stop listening, we do not become stronger., we become less calibrated.

To remain sensitive is to stay sentient.

The word sentient means capable of perceiving or feeling, and that capacity is the baseline of being alive. It is what lets you walk into a room and sense tension before anyone speaks, feel the air change before a storm, or notice when something beautiful is happening and slow down enough to stay with it. Sensitivity becomes an internal barometer, quietly measuring alignment, safety, and truth.

Desensitization creates distance, first from the body, then from intuition, then from the environment and from truth itself. The more insulated we become, the more abstract life begins to feel. We wrap ourselves in fabric, in roles, in identity, in distraction, until sensation dulls and the world becomes something we think about instead of something we touch. When I skinny dip in the mountains, I remove the insulation between my body and the world.

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The nervous system does not distinguish well between memory and rehearsal. It responds to what is repeated. Each time the story is revisited, the body braces. The jaw tightens. The shoulders lift. The breath shortens. The physiology mirrors the past, even when the danger is no longer present.

Repetition builds structure. Structure becomes posture. Posture becomes personality.

Over time, the story of what was turns into a belief that feels like truth. But what feels like truth is often practiced tension. We call it resilience. Sometimes it is simply vigilance that never turned off.

What we often want is to keep the identity and lose the discomfort. We want relief without dismantling the story that built us. But letting go is not about erasing the past. It is about refusing to keep organizing yourself around it.

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