I did surprisingly little research before heading to the Monroe Institute.

That was intentional.

I didn’t want to read a hundred people’s accounts of what had happened to them and arrive with a checklist of what was supposed to happen to me. I didn’t want someone else’s experience—or expectations—coloring my own.

Honestly, I didn’t need much convincing anyway.

When I got the email about the documentary, I just knew.

I was supposed to go.

So I applied.

I got accepted.

And I went.

No exhaustive research. No weighing the pros and cons. No existential debate about whether flying across the country to spend a week exploring altered states of consciousness with a bunch of strangers was a reasonable thing for a fifty-one-year-old woman to do.

What I Thought I Was Going There to Do

I knew Robert Monroe as the out-of-body guy.

I’d read his books. I’d had dozens of out-of-body experiences of my own. But surprisingly, I had never actually tried very hard to induce one.

It seemed like a lot of work.

And I had other things on my plate.

My out-of-body experiences had always just happened spontaneously, so I figured if they wanted to keep showing up uninvited, great. I wasn’t going to spend hours lying perfectly still trying to force the issue.

But Monroe seemed like the perfect place to finally learn.

In my mind, I was going there to figure out how to control my out-of-body experiences, understand who these “helpers” were who always seemed to be around when they happened, and—most importantly—learn how to trigger the experiences whenever I wanted.

Then I could go do really cool shit.

Visit the pyramids.

See ancient civilizations.

Travel back in time.

Explore places I couldn’t normally access.

Basically, I had a very modest agenda.

It wasn’t until my second day at Monroe that someone explained something I probably could have learned had I bothered to do even fifteen minutes of research beforehand:

Gateway Voyage isn’t an out-of-body-experience program.

It’s more like a sampler platter of different states of consciousness explored through the Monroe Institute’s programs.

Oh.

That actually came as a huge relief.

Because in the days before leaving, a tiny voice had started creeping into my head:

What if I’m the girl who shows up for a documentary about consciousness talking about all the out-of-body experiences she’s had...and then can’t have one?

That felt like a lot of pressure.

I had started getting genuinely nervous that I would spend the entire week lying in my little bed thinking, Hello? Anyone? I’m ready to leave my body now.

Finding out that wasn’t actually the point of the program allowed me to relax.

Which was good, because apparently my body had already decided to create some drama of its own.

The Strange Thing That Started Before I Left

About six weeks before Monroe, I started having dreams where I was dizzy.

In the dreams, I would be spinning or doing something that would naturally make me dizzy—and I could actually feel the dizziness in the dream.

That had never happened to me before.

I was intrigued, but I didn’t give it much thought.

Then, about three weeks before I left, I was sitting on the couch watching TV with Jason when I suddenly had a small bout of vertigo.

I’ve only had true vertigo once before in my life, shortly after Connor died, during a period when my body and nervous system were carrying an almost unimaginable amount of grief, trauma and loss.

That episode was horrific.

This wasn’t anything like that.

This was mild—some dizziness, a little nausea, enough to make me feel off but not enough to completely take me down. I drank ginger and peppermint tea, used some peppermint oil, went to bed and felt fine the next morning.

A few days later, I had another dream where I was spinning.

Then, a couple of days after that, another small bout of vertigo.

And then...nothing.

For the next couple of weeks, I felt fine.

I mostly forgot about it.

Until I got to Virginia.

Charlottesville

Because I couldn’t get a flight into Charlottesville that would get me to the Monroe Institute in time for the start of the program, I flew in the day before.

A handful of us participating in the documentary had done the same thing and were staying at the same hotel, so we connected and decided to go to dinner together.

Charlottesville has a charming downtown area with shops and restaurants lining a pedestrian street. We arrived on a Sunday evening, so most of the stores were closed and everything was relatively quiet.

We wandered down the brick-lined street, restaurant patios filling the center, and eventually landed at a little Italian place for dinner.

And almost immediately, I realized something:

These were my people.

We were sitting around talking openly about extraterrestrials, out-of-body experiences, altered states of consciousness and all kinds of things that, in normal conversation, require you to first carefully assess your audience.

You don’t casually drop, “So, who do you think the beings are that help pull us out of our bodies?” into dinner conversation with just anyone.

At least I don’t.

Usually.

But nobody at this table flinched.

Nobody gave anyone the Ohhh...okay look.

Nobody suddenly became extremely interested in their bread.

We shared stories about experiences we’d had, how we’d ended up applying for the documentary and what had brought each of us to Monroe.

It was exhilarating.

One of the men, who had flown in from Australia, told us he had submitted his application for the documentary and booked his flights the same day—before he’d even been accepted.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who just knew I was supposed to be there.

Although booking an international flight before getting accepted was definitely a stronger commitment to the knowing than I had made.

When I got back to my hotel that night, I called Jason and told him how incredible it felt to sit with a group of people and talk openly about all of this without anyone immediately assuming you had lost your mind.

Even more meaningful was that nobody had to believe the same things.

There was curiosity.

Openness.

A willingness to listen.

That alone felt rare.

Then I hung up, climbed into bed and turned on the TV.

And that’s when things got weird.

You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me

I was lying there watching television when suddenly my vision changed.

The TV seemed to zoom away from me.

My peripheral vision narrowed until it felt like I was looking through a tunnel, and a massive wave of vertigo washed over me.

My equilibrium was completely off.

I remember thinking:

You’ve got to be kidding me.

I had flown all the way to Virginia for this experience, and now, the night before I was supposed to arrive at Monroe, I was going to get sick?

Absolutely not.

I decided the best medical intervention available to me at the moment was denial and sleep.

So I went to bed.

When I woke the next morning, the intense vertigo had passed, but there was still an underlying dizziness. I felt unstable on my feet.

We had about a forty-five-minute drive to Monroe, and I was worried I would get carsick.

Still, I got dressed, packed my bags and headed downstairs to meet the shuttle.

When the van pulled up, I walked outside expecting a driver.

Instead, the door opened and out jumped Jonathan Braue—one of the executive producers I’d interviewed with during casting—along with a cameraman.

Oh.

We’re filming already.

Good to know.

I suddenly became acutely aware that I was slightly dizzy, wasn’t feeling great and was apparently now expected to look documentary-ready.

I climbed into the van.

There was already one woman inside named Avery, who, as fate would have it, would soon become my roommate—and very quickly, a close friend.

And off we went.

The Monroe Institute

The Monroe Institute sits on hundreds of acres tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

The property is beautiful—lush, quiet and secluded, with this enormous quartz crystal sitting toward the back that looks as though someone dropped it there from another planet.

We were the first group to arrive, so we got a little time alone with the center before everyone else showed up.

The first thing I noticed was the heat and humidity.

I live in a desert, so the air felt thick and heavy, almost like it had weight to it. It was a stark contrast to the energy of the property itself, which felt peaceful and calm.

Then I noticed the crows.

A murder of them surrounded the property, cawing as they soared from tree to tree.

I love crows. I’ve always thought of them as messengers, so seeing them there felt significant to me—almost like a little nod that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

When we checked in, we were shown to our rooms.

I had been nervous about sharing a bedroom.

I like people.

I also really like having a door I can close on people.

Instead of one roommate, I discovered I had two.

Perfect.

The three of us had been assigned to a downstairs room affectionately known as the Bachelor Pad.

Why three women were put in the Bachelor Pad, I have no idea.

But it turned out to be perfect.

My roommates were wonderful, and the room became our little home base for the week.

Our beds—called CHEC units, although I quickly began thinking of mine as my Bed in a Box—were essentially enclosed sleeping compartments wired with speakers and headphones.

We slept in them at night.

We also meditated in them.

A lot.

I had no idea yet just how much time I was about to spend inside that box.

Twenty-Four Strangers

That first evening was mostly orientation, dinner and introductions.

We gathered around couches and tables, talking and getting to know one another.

Again and again, I heard people say some version of what I had felt the night before:

It is so nice to be able to talk about this stuff.

There were twenty-four of us from wildly different backgrounds.

There was a physicist in his seventies who had worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.

A former New York City police officer.

Engineers.

Professors.

People from tech and business.

A woman living with stage-four cancer.

A man living with chronic pain.

A mother searching for some kind of continued connection with her two sons who had been tragically killed in a car accident.

And a couple of Instagram influencers.

On paper, many of us probably had very little in common.

But that night, none of that seemed to matter.

I wanted to know everyone’s story.

Why were they here?

What had happened in their lives that made them curious about consciousness?

What had they experienced that they couldn’t explain?

What were they hoping to find?

I could have stayed up all night talking.

But eventually we climbed into our respective Bed in a Boxes and went to sleep.

We had no idea yet what the week was going to ask of us.

So...How Is This a Documentary?

Within a couple of days, I had settled into the rhythm of Gateway Voyage.

No cell phones.

No watches.

No clocks.

No technology.

For the first couple of days, one question seemed to come up over and over:

“Does anyone know what time it is?”

Turns out, giving up your sense of time is a bigger ask than you might think.

Our days went something like this...

Wake up.

Breakfast.

Instruction.

Bed in a Box.

Meditate.

Come back.

Process what happened.

Ask questions.

More instruction.

Bed in a Box.

Meditate.

Come back.

Process.

More instruction.

Bed in a Box.

Meditate.

Lunch.

Repeat.

Dinner.

More instruction.

Meditate.

Process.

Go to bed.

One evening, I called Jason and he asked what we had been doing.

I explained the schedule.

There was a pause.

Then he said:

“How is that a documentary?”

Fair question.

From the outside, twenty-four people repeatedly climbing into little beds and lying perfectly still doesn’t exactly scream cinematic masterpiece.

But something was happening there.

And by the time I left Monroe, I wasn’t sure the most important part of the experience had anything to do with leaving my body.

When I arrived at Monroe, I thought the extraordinary part would be whatever happened when I closed my eyes.

I thought I might learn how to leave my body on command.

Maybe meet my helpers.

Maybe finally figure out how to go visit the pyramids.

That isn’t exactly what happened.

I didn’t have some earth-shattering out-of-body experience while I was there. I didn’t blast out of my body, travel across the universe and come home with the secrets of consciousness.

There were interesting experiences.

There were things I couldn’t completely explain.

There were moments that made me question what I thought I understood about consciousness.

But the thing that affected me most while I was there wasn’t what happened when I closed my eyes.

It was what happened when I opened them.

It was the people.

Twenty-four strangers walked into that building carrying twenty-four completely different lives.

Grief.

Illness.

Pain.

Questions.

Skepticism.

Curiosity.

Hope.

We had different beliefs and different reasons for being there. We didn’t agree on everything, and we didn’t need to.

We simply became willing to be curious about one another.

To listen.

To sit beside someone when they were hurting.

To celebrate someone’s experience even when it was completely different from our own.

To hold space for things we couldn’t explain.

Somewhere between breakfast, those endless trips to our Bed in a Boxes, the processing sessions, the laughter, the tears and repeatedly asking, “Does anybody know what time it is?” something happened.

We became connected.

And that alone changed me.

I went to Virginia wanting to learn how to leave my body.

Instead, one of the most profound things I experienced there came from being fully present in it—with twenty-three other people willing to do the same.

At the time, I thought that was the lesson.

I’m beginning to wonder if Monroe wasn’t quite finished with me yet.

Another thread from my heart to yours

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Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned through this entire journey is how to trust my own intuition.

Not because I’ve always been right.

But because I’ve learned that when we encounter something we can’t explain, everyone wants to explain it for us. And more often than not, those explanations tell us more about the person offering them than they do about the experience itself.

Over the course of just a couple of years, I began having some pretty wild experiences.

When I shared them with people I considered knowledgeable in the spiritual world, many were genuinely astonished by how much had happened in such a short period of time. Several told me it was as though I had been put on the “spiritual awakening fast track.”

I wasn’t trying to be on any fast track.

I was just trying to understand what was happening.

One of the strangest experiences began while I was falling asleep.

It didn’t happen every night. Sometimes it would happen two nights in a row, then disappear for weeks before returning without warning.

Just as I drifted toward sleep, I would feel an intense vibration surge through my entire body.

Not a little tingling.

It felt as though every cell in my body had suddenly come alive.

The vibrations were so powerful I was convinced they were shaking the bed. I was certain my husband, peacefully asleep beside me, would wake up.

He never did.

He never felt a thing.

Meanwhile, I was lying there wondering if I was about to vibrate right off the mattress.

Naturally, I started asking questions.

I asked teachers. Healers. People who had spent decades exploring consciousness and spirituality.

No one had an answer.

Some people thought it was energy work.

Others believed my body was healing.

A few even cautioned me to be careful, suggesting something might be wrong.

At first, I searched for the “correct” explanation.

Maybe my guides were working on me.

Maybe dormant DNA was being activated.

Maybe something else entirely.

Eventually, I noticed something interesting.

Every explanation reflected the beliefs of the person giving it.

The experience never changed.

Only the interpretation did.

So instead of asking everyone else what they thought was happening, I started asking myself a different question.

How does this actually feel?

Did I feel afraid?

Unsafe?

Like something was wrong?

Or did I feel curious?

Every single time, the answer was the same.

I never felt afraid.

I never sensed anything harmful.

In fact, I felt oddly peaceful.

So instead of resisting the vibrations, I stopped fighting them.

I relaxed into them.

I became curious.

Eventually they would fade, and I’d drift off to sleep.

Looking back, I realize those vibrations taught me something long before I understood what they were.

Sometimes you don’t need an explanation before you can trust an experience.

Around the same time, something else began happening.

In my dreams, I would suddenly become lucid.

I might be sitting in a chair when the floor beneath me would begin to melt away. The moment I realized I was dreaming, I could feel myself being pulled somewhere else entirely.

I started calling them “dreamscapes.”

Sometimes I found myself flying over landscapes I had never seen before.

Other times I explored worlds where every living thing was miniature—tiny dragonflies, bees, and animals no larger than my hand.

What struck me most wasn’t what I saw.

It was what I felt.

I could feel the delicate legs of a tiny dragonfly crawling across my palm.

I could smell the air.

Taste food.

Feel textures.

Everything seemed as real as waking life.

At the time, I didn’t connect these experiences with the vibrations.

They felt like separate mysteries.

Then something else began happening.

I started becoming aware of what I could only describe as my “ethereal body.”

I didn’t know what else to call it.

I simply knew that part of me no longer felt confined to my physical body.

Whenever these experiences happened, I always sensed two helpers with me.

I never saw them.

But I could hear them.

Feel them.

Sometimes I would bump into what felt like a wall, and I could sense them gently guiding me through it.

Occasionally I felt them doing what seemed like healing work.

Sometimes it was even uncomfortable or briefly painful.

But just like the vibrations, I never felt afraid.

I always came back to the same question.

How does this feel?

And every time, the answer was the same.

Safe.

Helpful.

Loving.

So I kept exploring.

I kept paying attention.

And I kept looking for answers.

At some point during all of this, I stumbled across a book called Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe.

I bought it.

Put it on my bookshelf.

And promptly forgot about it.

I have a bad habit of buying books much faster than I can actually read them.

About a year later, I came across the same book again.

I bought another copy before realizing I already owned it. When I went to put it on my shelf, I saw the copy I had purchased the year prior.

That felt like more than coincidence.

I took it off the shelf and finally started reading.

Within a few chapters, I was stunned.

For nearly two years, no one had been able to explain what I had been experiencing.

Yet here was a book, written before I was even born, describing those same experiences in remarkable detail.

The vibrations.

The sensation of leaving the body.

The helpers.

The altered states of consciousness.

I couldn’t believe it.

I wasn’t reading fantasy.

I wasn’t reading someone trying to convince me of anything.

I was reading someone carefully documenting experiences that sounded astonishingly similar to my own.

I cannot adequately describe the relief I felt.

Not because I suddenly had all the answers.

But because I finally realized I wasn’t alone.

Robert Monroe called them Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs).

For the first time, I had language for something I hadn’t even known how to describe.

Ironically, after reading the book, I didn’t become obsessed with trying to induce more OBEs.

If they happened, great.

If they didn’t, that was okay too.

My attention naturally shifted toward dreams, lucid dreaming, and dream interpretation.

Those felt like the path I was supposed to follow.

Then one day I downloaded the Monroe meditation app.

As I explored it, I discovered something that completely surprised me.

There wasn’t just a book.

There was an actual place.

The Monroe Institute in Virginia.

People traveled there from all over the world to participate in immersive consciousness programs.

I read about their flagship program, Gateway Voyage, and immediately turned to Jason.

“I really want to do this someday,” I told him.

“Maybe next year.”

I signed up for their newsletter.

Then I went back to my life.

A few weeks later, an email arrived in my inbox.

The Monroe Institute was filming a documentary.

They were looking for participants.

The moment I read it, something inside me simply knew.

I was supposed to be there.

There wasn’t any logical reason to think I would be selected.

Hundreds of people would apply.

But logic had stopped leading this journey a long time ago.

So I filled out the application.

Recorded my one-minute video.

Blocked the dates off on my calendar.

And quietly assumed I was going.

Jason laughed when I told him.

“Of course you applied,” he said with a smile.

I’m not entirely sure he believed I’d actually be chosen.

Months passed.

We were supposed to have heard by April if we had been selected for an interview. April came and went, and I didn’t hear anything.

For a brief moment, doubt crept in.

Then an email arrived explaining that they had received more than 600 applications and needed additional time.

Then something even stranger started happening.

My dreams changed.

Nothing in my waking life had shifted.

But my dreams began telling me something significant was coming.

I’ve learned to pay attention when that happens.

A couple of weeks later, another email arrived.

I had made the shortlist.

I was invited to a casting interview.

After the interview, doubt returned once again.

Jonathan, the executive producer, explained that they were trying to create a diverse cast.

I remember thinking...

Well, that’s probably not great news for me.

There couldn’t possibly be a shortage of middle-aged white women navigating healing, transformation, and spiritual awakenings.

But every time doubt surfaced, that quiet knowing surfaced too.

So I kept my calendar clear.

I kept making plans as though I was going.

And then my dreams shifted again.

This time, there wasn’t even a question.

I knew.

A few weeks later, the acceptance email arrived.

I had been invited to participate in Instructions for Leaving at the Monroe Institute.

Later, I discovered I wasn’t the only one who had simply known.

Several cast members described having the same certainty.

One of them, David from Australia, was so convinced he’d be selected that he bought his plane ticket right after submitting his application, before receiving his acceptance.

Now that’s confidence.

Or intuition.

Or manifestation.

Or maybe something else entirely.

I still don’t know.

And honestly...

I’m okay not knowing.

Because by then I had learned the most important lesson of all.

I didn’t need to have every answer.

I simply needed to trust what felt true.

I thought I knew why I was going to the Monroe Institute.

I intentionally avoided reading about other people’s Gateway experiences because I didn’t want their expectations to become my own.

I wanted whatever happened there to be entirely my experience.

I thought I knew what I was going for.

I had no idea what was waiting for me.

The universe has a funny way of doing that.

Just when you think you’ve figured out the destination...

it quietly changes the journey.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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After the experience with Matt, I found myself paying closer attention.

Not because I suddenly believed I had stumbled into something mystical.

Quite the opposite.

I wanted to understand what had happened.

I was still looking for ordinary explanations.

I just wasn’t dismissing everything quite so quickly anymore.

So I started keeping notes in my phone.

Not a journal.

Not pages of profound insights.

Just a running list of things that made me stop and think, Well...that was odd.

One morning, the sound of my alarm pulled me out of a peaceful dream.

Before I even opened my eyes, one word was repeating in my mind.

Dosha.

Over and over.

Dosha. Dosha. Dosha.

It wasn’t part of the dream.

It wasn’t something I had been thinking about before I fell asleep.

It was simply... there.

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and typed the word into my notes before I got out of bed.

Later that afternoon, curiosity got the better of me.

I opened Google.

Dosha.

It was real.

A Sanskrit word used in Ayurveda, the traditional system of Indian medicine. It refers to the fundamental energies that govern the body and mind.

I stared at the screen for a minute.

I had never studied Ayurveda.

As far as I knew, I’d never even heard the word before.

The most logical explanation was that I’d encountered it somewhere years earlier and forgotten. Maybe I’d heard it on a podcast. Maybe I’d read it in passing. Our brains store an astonishing amount of information without us realizing it.

It was strange.

But one strange experience doesn’t make a pattern.

A few weeks later, it happened again.

Another unfamiliar word.

Shiva.

Then later, another.

Then another.

Each time, I’d wake up with a word repeating in my mind. Each time, I’d discover it was something real—usually something I’d never knowingly encountered before.

I still couldn’t explain it.

Then the words became names.

One night, I had two completely different dreams.

The only thing they shared was a single name.

Marcella.

The next day, I mentioned it while talking with someone about my dreams.

“Who’s Marcella?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I laughed. “I’ve never even heard that name before.”

Her expression changed.

“My grandmother’s name was Marcella.”

She went on to tell me that the day before, completely out of the blue, she’d been thinking about her grandmother. It stood out because they hadn’t been especially close, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d even thought about her.

Neither of us knew what to make of it.

I added another note to my phone.

Around the same time, I had another dream that seemed entirely unremarkable.

It was filled with Indian people.

No message.

No conversation.

They were simply there.

The next morning, my first client arrived.

He was a young boy who had been adopted from India.

For a moment, I just stared at him.

The dream from the night before came rushing back.

As I worked with him, I had the unmistakable feeling that his ancestors wanted him to know they were with him. That although he had been separated from the family and culture of his birth, he had never been separated from their love.

I can’t explain why I felt that.

I only know that it felt as real as any thought I’ve ever had.

I told his mother about the dream and shared what I had been feeling during our session.

Tears started streaming down her face.

She thanked me and said she was deeply grateful to receive the message.

I couldn’t explain what had happened.

I only knew that I couldn’t ignore how often these moments were beginning to occur.

None of these experiences proved anything.

On their own, each one could be explained away.

Coincidence.

Memory.

Pattern recognition.

A remarkably creative subconscious.

Maybe all of the above.

I still don’t know.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking, How do I explain this away?

And I started asking a different question.

What if curiosity is more important than certainty?

That question changed everything.

Because once I gave myself permission not to have all the answers, I found myself exploring questions I’d never imagined asking.

Questions about consciousness.

Questions about intuition.

Questions about where ideas come from.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the first person to wonder.

The more I read, the more I discovered that some of history’s greatest musicians, scientists and writers had described remarkably similar experiences.

Paul McCartney has said he woke up with the melody for Yesterday already playing in his mind. He spent weeks asking other musicians if they’d heard it before because he was convinced he must have unconsciously borrowed it from someone else.

Keith Richards kept a cassette recorder beside his bed. One morning he discovered that he’d recorded the guitar riff that would become “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” followed by nearly an hour of snoring.

Chemist August Kekulé credited a dream of a snake swallowing its own tail with helping him understand the ring structure of benzene—one of the most important discoveries in modern chemistry.

These weren’t people claiming to be psychic.

They were artists, scientists and innovators describing moments when their greatest ideas seemed to arrive rather than be consciously created.

I wasn’t ready to draw any conclusions.

But I couldn’t stop asking the same question they had.

Where do ideas come from?

That question would eventually lead me to books I never expected to read, experiences I never imagined having and, ultimately, to a man named Robert Monroe.

A man whose work would change the course of my life.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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The First Time I Couldn’t Explain It

When I began my healing journey, I wasn’t looking for mystical experiences.

I wasn’t trying to become more spiritual.

I wasn’t trying to communicate with guides or explore altered states of consciousness.

I was trying to heal.

That’s it.

At the time, I was carrying the emotional weight of experiences I hadn’t fully processed. Childhood wounds. A difficult first marriage. The death of my son, Connor. Years of stress. Years of pushing through.

Like many people, I had become very good at functioning and not nearly as good at feeling.

So I started doing the work.

Meditation became part of that process.

At first, it was exactly what you’d expect.

I sat quietly.

I tried to calm my mind.

I wondered whether I was doing it right.

Sometimes I would notice colors or geometric shapes behind my closed eyes. Occasionally, thoughts would arrive that felt different from my normal inner dialogue. I assumed it was simply part of learning to meditate.

Then one morning, something happened that I couldn’t file away quite so easily.

I was just waking up when I heard a very clear male voice say:

“Angela, I’m sorry to tell you that Matt Smith is going to die on the motorcycle.”

Not his motorcycle.

The motorcycle.

That wording stuck with me.

I remember lying there wondering where that thought had come from.

Matt was someone I had known years earlier, but we hadn’t spoken in a long time. We weren’t close. There was no reason I should have been thinking about him.

I didn’t know what to do with it.

Part of me assumed my brain had simply produced something random in that strange space between sleeping and waking.

Another part of me couldn’t shake it.

A couple of weeks later, I was meeting Matt’s sister-in-law for coffee.

By then, I’d completely forgotten about the experience.

Until something on her shirt triggered the memory.

I still don’t remember what the image was.

Only that suddenly I heard those words again in my mind.

So I asked her a question.

“Does Matt have a motorcycle?”

She looked at me strangely.

“No,” she said.

I immediately felt relief wash over me.

There it was.

A perfectly reasonable explanation.

My brain had simply made up something bizarre while I was half asleep.

Then she added,

“He doesn’t own one, but he and some friends are leaving in a couple of weeks for a motorcycle trip. They’re renting motorcycles.”

I felt my stomach drop.

Suddenly, the wording made sense.

Not his motorcycle.

The motorcycle.

I told her what had happened.

Not because I believed I could predict the future.

Not because I thought I had some special ability.

Honestly, I wasn’t even sure why I was telling her.

Only that the experience had felt significant enough that I couldn’t keep it to myself.

She immediately called his wife.

Thankfully, Matt didn’t die.

To this day, I don’t know what happened.

Maybe it was coincidence.

Maybe hearing the story caused everyone to be a little more careful.

Maybe my subconscious somehow connected dots I wasn’t consciously aware of.

I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I could no longer dismiss the experience as easily as I had dismissed others.

For the first time, I found myself sitting with a question that didn’t have an easy answer.

What if there were things happening that I simply didn’t understand?

That question didn’t change me overnight.

It didn’t suddenly make me more spiritual.

It didn’t erase my skepticism.

If anything, it made me even more curious.

Because once you’ve experienced something you can’t easily explain, it’s hard to go back to assuming you already know how everything works.

That single experience became one of the first breadcrumbs.

Not because it gave me answers.

Because it made me willing to ask better questions.

I had no idea that it was only the beginning.

Over the months that followed, more experiences would arrive—strange words I had never heard before, dreams that seemed oddly specific, and moments that became increasingly difficult to explain away.

One by one, they would lead me somewhere I never imagined I’d go.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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Four years ago, my life looked exactly the way I thought success was supposed to look.

Amazing husband. Check.

Great career. Check.

Healthy, happy kids. Check.

Travel, adventure, beautiful home. Check.

From the outside, I was living a life many people spend decades working toward. I had spent decades working toward it myself. And the truth is, I was genuinely happy. This isn’t a story about being miserable and pretending otherwise.

But underneath all of it was a quiet, persistent feeling that I couldn’t shake.

There has to be more than this.

Not more money.

Not a bigger house.

Not another promotion.

Just... more.

More meaning.

More connection.

More purpose.

At the time, I couldn’t explain it. I only knew that something inside me felt restless.

I was working in the high-stress, male-dominated world of software sales. The work was intellectually challenging and financially rewarding. It provided opportunities I will always be grateful for. It allowed me to travel, support causes I cared about and build a beautiful life with my family.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that my bank account was growing faster than my soul.

I’d hit goals I once dreamed about achieving and instead of feeling fulfilled, I found myself asking, Now what?

Every mountain I climbed seemed to reveal another one behind it.

So I tried to fill the gap.

I volunteered.

I donated money.

I served on boards.

I looked for ways to contribute beyond my career.

Yet the feeling remained.

If you’ve ever ignored a whisper from life, you know what happened next.

The universe is remarkably patient at first.

It nudges.

It plants ideas.

It sends little moments that make you pause.

But when you continue ignoring those nudges, eventually it stops whispering and starts using a bullhorn.

In 2022, I was at the peak of my career. I finished the year as one of the top sales representatives in my company and closed the largest deal in company history. I also came in second place, missing the number one spot by 1% during the final week of the quarter. Not that I’m keeping track. Clearly I’ve moved on.

I should have felt victorious.

Instead, I felt strangely empty.

Not because I wasn’t grateful. I was.

Not because I didn’t appreciate the accomplishment. I did.

But I had spent years believing that reaching the next level would finally bring the fulfillment I was looking for. And standing on top of that mountain, I discovered something unsettling.

The view wasn’t what I thought it would be.

After years in SaaS, I knew how the game worked. My territory was tapped. If I wanted another successful year, I would likely need to move to another company and start climbing again.

Normally that’s exactly what I would have done.

But I was tired.

Not physically tired.

Soul tired.

I didn’t want another mountain.

I didn’t want another quota.

I didn’t want another version of the same story.

So I stayed.

The following year, layoffs swept through the company. Technology is a volatile industry and after enough years you learn to recognize the signs before everyone else does. When the meeting invitation appeared on my calendar with our VP of Sales and Head of HR, I already knew what was coming.

What surprised me wasn’t the layoff.

What surprised me was the relief.

When the call ended, a calm settled over me.

There was no panic.

No anger.

No desperate scramble to update my résumé.

Just a deep knowing.

This chapter is over.

The fear I thought I would feel never arrived.

Instead, it felt like someone had opened a door I hadn’t been willing to walk through on my own.

What I didn’t know was that another chapter had already begun.

About a year before the layoff, I had started what I thought was a healing journey.

I wanted to feel better.

To understand myself better.

To work through old wounds I had spent years carrying.

I had no idea that journey would eventually throw me face-first into a spiritual awakening.

At the time, I would not have described myself as a spiritual person.

If anything, I oscillated somewhere between agnostic and atheist.

The only reason I never fully embraced atheism was because of a handful of experiences I couldn’t explain. Moments throughout my life when I sensed something around me. An energy. A presence. Something that felt real even though I had no framework for understanding it.

I believed there was probably more to existence than what we could see.

I just didn’t know what that “more” was.

As I began healing, I started doing something I had spent most of my life avoiding.

I started feeling.

I learned how to connect with my emotions.

I started unpacking the stories and beliefs I had carried since childhood.

I worked through wounds from my first marriage.

I confronted grief I still carried from the death of my son, Connor.

And as layer after layer began falling away, something unexpected happened.

The world started getting a lot stranger.

Or perhaps more accurately, I started paying attention.

Looking back, I understand something now that I didn’t understand then.

Healing isn’t just about feeling better.

It’s about removing the layers of conditioning, fear, grief and old beliefs we’ve accumulated over a lifetime.

And when enough of those layers fall away, something else begins to emerge.

Yourself.

What followed would eventually lead me to channeling classes, out-of-body experiences, conversations that challenged everything I thought I knew about consciousness and, somehow, a documentary filmed at The Monroe Institute called Instructions for Leaving.

If you had told the software sales version of me that this was where the road was leading, she would have laughed in your face.

In a few weeks, I’ll be heading to The Monroe Institute to participate in a documentary called Instructions for Leaving.

Four years ago, I didn’t even know what The Monroe Institute was.

Now I’m preparing for an experience that has the potential to challenge everything I thought I knew about myself and the world around me. In many ways, that journey is already well underway.

Over the last few years, I’ve had experiences that I can’t easily explain. Experiences that forced me to question assumptions I had carried for most of my life and opened the door to possibilities I never would have considered before.

Trust me when I say this journey was not on my vision board.

But somehow, every step led here.

Looking back, I can see that the journey didn’t begin when I found The Monroe Institute.

It began the moment I stopped dismissing the things I couldn’t explain.

In the next part of this story, I’ll share some of the experiences that made the world start feeling a whole lot stranger.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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One of the longest and hardest things I’ve had to work on in my healing journey is self-love and acceptance.

If I’m being honest, I can’t remember a time when I simply accepted and loved myself exactly as I was.

I grew up in a home with five sisters and a mother who were all deeply focused on weight. Diets were discussed the way other families discussed books, hobbies, politics, or travel. Weight loss was a constant topic of conversation—it still is.

No one intended harm. The women in my family inherited those beliefs from the generations before them. But somewhere along the way, I absorbed a message that would follow me for decades:

If you wanted love, acceptance, and approval, you needed to be thin and beautiful.

That belief settled into me early.

I remember being in third grade and hearing comments about my “bubble butt.” I remember feeling self-conscious before I even understood what self-consciousness was.

In fifth grade, my mom lost so much weight that she could wear a pair of my jeans. In the mind of a ten-year-old girl, I didn’t think, My mom has become extremely thin.

I thought, I must be fat.

Whenever our family gathered, conversations revolved around gaining weight, losing weight, this diet, that meal plan, calories, points, carbs, and pounds.

As if our weight was the most interesting thing about us.

As if our bodies were our greatest accomplishment.

Or our greatest failure.

The message was subtle but constant:

Smaller was better.

So I spent much of my life trying to become smaller.

And the irony is that even when I succeeded, I still wasn’t happy.

The photo above was taken when Jason and I were celebrating my 40th birthday in California.

At the time, I was in the best shape of my life. I was teaching five Pilates classes a week, doing yoga every day, and CrossFit several times a week.

Looking at the photo now, I see a woman who looks strong, healthy, and beautiful.

But that’s not what I saw then.

I remember sitting down at dinner and hearing my thighs audibly touch.

That tiny sound ruined the evening.

Instead of enjoying the meal, the company, the celebration, or the trip, I spent the night mentally calculating how to lose more weight.

How to get leaner.

How to improve myself.

How to fix what I believed was wrong.

I eventually posted the photo on Instagram, but I cropped out the lower half of my body because I thought my legs looked fat.

I couldn’t let people see my legs.

I was terrified someone would look at the picture and see what I saw.

All I could see were flaws.

Looking back now, I wish I could go hug that woman and tell her she was already beautiful.

But she wouldn’t have believed me.

That’s the part that breaks my heart now.

I had become the thing I thought would finally make me happy.

And I still couldn’t see myself clearly.

I have dozens and dozens of before-and-after photos.

Dozens of notebooks filled with weights and measurements.

Years of tracking macros, calories, protein, carbohydrates, and body fat percentages.

By that point, I had been dieting for so long that I didn’t even need to write anything down anymore.

The numbers lived in my head.

Every bite of food came with calculations.

Every restaurant menu became a math problem.

Every social event required strategy.

I often skipped dinners, parties, and gatherings because there wasn’t anything on the menu that fit my macros.

I told myself I was being disciplined.

The truth is, I was terrified.

Terrified of eating the wrong thing.

Terrified of seeing the number on the scale the next morning.

Terrified that one meal would undo all of my hard work.

Food wasn’t just food anymore.

It was guilt.

Anxiety.

Math.

Control.

I remember taking a trip to St. George with Noah to visit my parents.

One evening we went to Tuacahn to see The Little Mermaid.

I wanted a treat so badly.

A piece of candy.

Some licorice.

Something.

But I wouldn’t let myself have it.

I knew exactly what would happen.

I would gain weight.

So I sat there surrounded by people enjoying their popcorn, candy, and snacks while I fought with myself the entire night.

When we got home, I laid in bed and cried.

Not because I didn’t get the candy.

Because I was furious.

Furious that everyone around me seemed able to enjoy a simple pleasure while I felt trapped.

Furious that I couldn’t stop thinking about food.

Furious that I couldn’t stop thinking about my weight.

Furious that I had spent so much of my life chasing a body that never felt thin enough, no matter what I did.

Looking back, it wasn’t the licorice I was grieving.

It was freedom.

The prison wasn’t my body.

The prison was my mind.

Then my body started speaking to me.

First it was panic attacks.

Then migraines.

Then adrenal fatigue.

Then weight gain.

There were countless symptoms in between, but the truth is, I didn't really start listening until the weight started coming on.

That’s when I panicked.

I hired a trainer.

Worked with a nutritionist.

Saw specialists.

Tweaked hormones.

Followed meal plans perfectly.

No cheating.

No shortcuts.

No excuses.

I knew my way around a meal plan.

I knew my macros.

I knew my calories.

I knew exactly how much protein, fat, and carbohydrates I had consumed by the end of the day because I carried a running tally in my head at all times.

Even with all of that effort, the weight continued to come.

Every month I expected things to turn around.

Every month I expected the scale to move back in the other direction.

Instead it kept climbing.

Five pounds.

Ten pounds.

Twenty pounds.

Thirty pounds.

Forty pounds.

Fifty pounds.

Nearly sixty pounds.

I remember standing on the scale staring at the number and feeling panic wash over me.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

I was doing everything right.

I was eating the food.

Doing the workouts.

Following the plan.

My body wasn’t following the rules anymore.

The truth is, the weight gain wasn’t just changing my body.

It was dismantling who I thought I was.

For decades I had believed that discipline, fitness, and maintaining my weight were part of my identity.

I knew how to lose weight.

I knew how to control my body.

I knew how to make the scale move.

Until I didn’t.

And without realizing it, I had tied so much of my self-worth to those things that when the weight came on, it felt like I was losing myself.

At first, I viewed my body as a problem to solve.

But eventually I began to wonder if my body wasn’t betraying me at all.

What if it was trying to save me?

What if all those symptoms weren’t evidence that my body was failing?

What if they were evidence that it had been carrying more than it could sustain for far too long?

The hardest realization wasn’t that I had gained weight.

The hardest realization was that I hadn’t loved myself when I was thin either.

The same voice criticizing me in a larger body was the same voice that criticized me in a smaller one.

The body had changed.

The critic had not.

That realization changed everything.

Because it meant the weight wasn’t the problem.

The belief was.

The belief that my worth was tied to my appearance.

The belief that being lovable meant being small.

The belief that acceptance was something I would earn after I became more beautiful, more disciplined, more perfect.

Healing has been learning to challenge that belief.

And it hasn’t been easy.

I still have good days and bad days.

I still catch myself standing in front of a mirror and feeling shame begin to creep in.

But now I stop and remind myself what this body has carried.

This body gave birth to two incredible boys.

This body has carried me through unimaginable grief.

Through loss.

Through healing.

Through adventures, travel, laughter, friendships, and countless meals shared with people I love.

This body has adapted.

Recovered.

Survived.

And something remarkable happened along the way.

As I stopped fighting my body, my health improved.

The panic attacks disappeared.

The migraines disappeared.

The debilitating heartburn disappeared.

The adrenal fatigue improved.

My hormones stabilized.

I stopped needing medications.

I am not the size six I once was.

I am much bigger.

But I am also healthier than I was then.

Recently, my mom sent me a text.

Some neighbors had dropped off a large tray of Rice Krispie treats.

She was touched by the gesture. Living completely at home these days, those small acts of kindness mean a lot to her.

But in the same text, she mentioned that there were so many treats she might gain ten pounds eating them all.

She’s ninety years old.

And after a lifetime of being a mother, a wife, a grandmother, and living a full life, the fear of gaining weight is still there.

My response was simple:

“Eat the damn Rice Krispie treats.”

Because that is not the ending I want for my story.

I’ve heard stories of women in nursing homes refusing a piece of cake in the final chapter of their lives because their self-worth is still tied to self-control, restriction, and remaining small.

That breaks my heart.

I don’t want to spend my final years counting calories.

I don’t want my self-worth tied to self-denial.

I don’t want to look back on my life and realize I spent decades trying to become smaller.

And I don’t want to spend the next twenty years waiting to love myself either.

Because that’s what I’ve been doing for most of my life.

Waiting.

Waiting until I lost the weight.

Waiting until I looked different.

Waiting until I finally felt good enough.

My goal now is something entirely different.

Radical self-love.

Radical self-acceptance.

Not someday.

Not ten pounds from now.

Not when my body changes.

Now.

Exactly as I am.

Because life is too short to spend it standing in front of a mirror negotiating my worth.

I want to become freer.

I want to take up space.

I want to enjoy the meal.

I want to laugh with friends.

I want to experience life fully in the body I have today, not the body I used to have or the body I think I should have.

My body has been one of my greatest teachers.

Long before I started helping others understand the messages hidden in their symptoms, emotions, and experiences, my own body was trying to get my attention.

The lesson wasn’t about weight.

The lesson was about worth.

And perhaps that’s why this has been one of the hardest parts of my healing journey.

Because it required me to stop measuring my worth by my size and start seeing myself through a different lens entirely.

For most of my life, I believed self-love would come after I changed myself.

What I’m learning now is that self-love begins when we stop asking ourselves to become someone else.

And maybe that’s the real healing.

Not loving every part of ourselves every moment of every day.

But finally deciding that our worth was never up for debate in the first place.

The lesson wasn’t about weight.

The lesson was about worth.

And I am finally learning that both were mine all along.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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The Body Keeps Carrying What the Mind Avoids

I used to think being strong meant pushing through.

Ignoring exhaustion.
Suppressing emotion.
Staying functional no matter what was happening internally.

And for a long time, it worked. Or at least it looked like it worked from the outside.

I could compartmentalize.
Stay composed.
Keep going.

But eventually, my body started speaking in ways I could no longer ignore.

Because the body carries what the mind avoids.

And the longer we suppress our emotions, override our intuition and disconnect from ourselves, the louder the body becomes.

We are taught to fear emotion.

To fear crying.
To fear anger.
To fear grief.
To fear vulnerability.

We are taught that feeling too much makes us weak, irrational or unstable. So many of us learn to suppress what we feel in order to survive, succeed or simply keep functioning.

But the fear of our emotions is often far more damaging than actually feeling them.

Because emotions do not disappear just because they are ignored.

They stay in the nervous system.
In the body.
In the muscles.
In the breath.
In the tension we carry every day without even realizing it.

And over time, what was once emotional can begin showing up physically.

Anxiety.
Chronic tension.
Burnout.
Fatigue.
Digestive issues.
Sleep disruption.
Autoimmune flare-ups.
Numbness.
A constant feeling of being “on.”

The body was never designed to carry years of unprocessed grief, fear, anger or stress without consequence.

Your body is not betraying you.

It is communicating.

I know this personally.

There have been periods of my life where my body spoke clearly long before my mind was ready to listen. Times where stress, grief, fear and emotional overwhelm showed up physically because I was still trying to push through instead of truly acknowledging what I was carrying.

That experience changed how I understand the relationship between emotions and the body. I began to realize how important it is to stay connected to what we are feeling — not as weakness or emotional fragility, but as an opportunity to listen before the body has to start screaming for our attention.

I think this is where so many people misunderstand healing. Healing is not becoming less emotional. It is becoming less afraid of your emotions.

People are afraid of feeling.

Afraid of what will happen if they finally let themselves slow down enough to feel what has been carried for so long.

That they will fall apart.
That grief will swallow them whole.
That once they start crying, they will never stop.
That anger will make them unlovable.
That feeling everything they have suppressed for years will simply be too much.

So instead… they keep going.

But emotional suppression requires energy.

So much energy.

The nervous system stays in survival mode. The body stays tense. The mind stays hypervigilant. And eventually the body begins waving red flags that can no longer be ignored.

And this is where the real damage often happens.

Not from feeling our emotions.
But from spending years suppressing them.
Suppressing our truth.
Suppressing who we are.

What I have learned is this:

The body whispers before it screams.

And many of us were taught to ignore the whispers.

Healing begins when we stop treating our emotions like inconveniences and start recognizing them as messengers.

Not something to fear.
Not something to suppress.
Not something to outrun.

But something to listen to.

Because your emotions are not the enemy.

Disconnection is.

And the moment we begin reconnecting to ourselves — to our bodies, our emotions, our intuition — the body often responds in ways that are profound.

Not because we have become weak.

But because we have finally become willing to listen.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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I was listening to The Telepathy Tapes—specifically Ky’s interview with Elizabeth Gilbert (Season 2, Episode 21).

And listen—if you haven’t heard this podcast yet, go fix that. Not right this second. Finish this first. But then… go. It will rearrange something in you.

Anyway.

Elizabeth was talking about love—not the kind you chase, or perform, or try to earn—but something else. Something bigger. She described it as an energy you can actually access. Channel. Sit with. Receive from.

She suggested writing letters from that place.
From love itself.

Asking to receive a message from love felt… surprisingly vulnerable.

Which caught me off guard.

It’s not like I haven’t done uncomfortable things before. But this felt different. Quieter. More exposing.

My chest tightened a little when I thought about it.

Maybe I was afraid love wouldn’t have anything to say to me.
Or worse—that it would, and I wouldn’t feel worthy enough to receive it.

Or maybe it’s just this—
when you truly open yourself to love, you also open yourself to loss. To pain. To everything that comes with caring deeply about something you can’t control.

I’m not entirely sure what it was.
I just know something in me hesitated.

And then—
I leaned in anyway.

I’ve gotten good at being uncomfortable.

So I asked:

What do you want me to know?

And this is what came through.

Read more

I’ll be standing at the counter, chopping vegetables, the house dim around me. Jason walks in, flips the switch, and suddenly the room floods with light. I always jump and say, “Let there be light,” half joking. He laughs every time. And every time I’m startled by the same realization — I didn’t even know I was standing in the dark.

I’ve always been good at functioning in low light. Cooking. Cleaning. Mothering. Surviving. You’d be amazed what you can get done without ever turning the lights on.

The thing about low light is that it doesn’t feel like darkness. It just feels normal. You adjust to it without realizing you’re adjusting. Your eyes learn how to make sense of less. You stop reaching for what you can’t quite see and start working with what’s right in front of you. After a while, you forget there’s another way to live. You stop questioning it. You don’t think, this is dim. You think, this is just how things are.

When I look back now, I can see how much of my life was lived that way. Not in crisis. Not in chaos. Functioning. Working. Showing up. Getting things done. From the outside, everything looked fine. More than fine.

I had built a life that worked. A career that looked successful. A home that looked stable. A version of myself that people could rely on. I was capable. Independent. The one who could handle things. And I did.

But my body was telling a different story. I just didn’t know how to listen to it yet.

The panic attacks. The migraines. The constant low hum of anxiety that I had learned to ignore. The heartburn I treated like an inconvenience instead of a message.

I didn’t stop. I adjusted. I swallowed antacids. I pushed through. I showed up anyway. I didn’t miss work. I didn’t cancel plans. I didn’t fall apart. From the outside, it looked like strength. From the inside, it was something else.

It’s strange to realize, looking back, how much I normalized. How many things I experienced that should have made me pause — but didn’t. Not because I was ignoring them. Because I didn’t know they were off.

Sometimes it showed up as panic attacks.

I remember walking through the grocery store one afternoon, just doing normal things. Grabbing what I needed, moving through the aisles. And then, out of nowhere, my heart started racing. Not subtle. Not gradual. Sudden. My chest tightened. My breath got shallow. That feeling like something is wrong, even though nothing around you has changed.

I remember trying to act normal. Just breathe. Don’t make a scene. You’re fine. I finished my shopping. Checked out. Walked to my car. Drove home. As if nothing had happened.

Another time, it didn’t stay contained.

It was during a particularly stressful stretch. Noah had gotten a DUI at eighteen. I had just been laid off from my job. Everything already felt like too much. I was sitting in the front room talking to Jason. He was frustrated about something — I don’t even remember what it was now.

But I remember what happened in my body.

It felt like I was being crushed. Like something heavy had dropped on top of me and I couldn’t get out from under it. Not just anxiety. Overwhelm in a way I didn’t have language for.

I put my head between my legs and told him I couldn’t deal with anything more than I already was. I don’t think he had ever seen me like that before. I hadn’t really let anyone see me like that before.

And even then, I didn’t think: something is wrong.

I thought: this is just a lot right now.

That was normal for me. Notice it. Minimize it. Keep going.

I didn’t think of it as my body trying to tell me something. I thought of it as something to manage. Something to get through. Something that needed to be quieted so I could keep functioning.

It never occurred to me that my body wasn’t the problem. That it might actually be the only part of me telling the truth.

Jason started noticing things before I did. Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that called attention to it. Just in the way he watched me.

The way I kept going. The way I didn’t slow down. The way I moved through my life like there was no other option but to keep functioning.

He would say things sometimes — not accusing, just observing. That he was worried about me. That he didn’t think I had actually dealt with Connor’s death. That he was afraid one day it was all going to catch up to me at once. That I was going to have a nervous breakdown.

At the time, I didn’t see what he was seeing. I thought I was doing what needed to be done. Holding it together. Showing up. Being strong. I thought I was fine.

It wasn’t until I started doing my healing work that everything began to shift. And not in the way I expected.

I thought it would feel like relief. Like things getting lighter.

Instead, I was exhausted.

A kind of exhaustion I had never felt before. Not the kind you fix with sleep. Something deeper.

He would ask me why I was so tired. And the only way I knew how to explain it was this: my body was finally doing what it hadn’t been allowed to do for years. Rest.

When you live in survival mode for long enough, your nervous system adapts to it. It learns to stay activated. To stay alert. To keep going. Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline keep your body moving, focused, functional — even when you’re overwhelmed, even when you’re grieving. Especially when you’re grieving.

And for a while, it works.

Until it doesn’t.

Because the body doesn’t forget what the mind avoids.

When I finally stopped pushing through and started allowing myself to feel — really feel — everything I had been holding, my nervous system had to recalibrate. It had to learn how to come out of that constant state of activation.

And that takes energy. A lot of it.

The kind of energy that makes you feel like you’re moving through water. Like everything is heavier than it should be. Like your body is asking for something you don’t fully understand yet.

I didn’t have language for it at the time. Just the feeling. And the awareness that something in me was changing.

There wasn’t a single moment where everything changed. No big realization. Just small ones. Stacking. Quietly.

Moments where I would notice something in my body and not immediately override it. Moments where I would feel something and not dismiss it. Moments where I would catch myself pushing through and hesitate.

It didn’t feel like transformation.

It felt like noticing.

And every once in a while, there would be a moment like the kitchen.

The light flipping on. The room flooding.

And me realizing — not for the first time, but in a way that landed a little deeper each time — I didn’t even know I was standing in the dark.

I had built an entire life that worked in low light.

And I was very, very good at it.

And every once in a while, there’s still a moment like the kitchen.

The light flipping on. The room flooding.

And me realizing — again —

I didn’t even know I was standing in the dark.

But I can feel it now.

The difference between pushing through and actually being okay. The difference between functioning and being connected.

My body knows.

And for the first time in my life, I’m starting to listen.

Another thread from my heart to yours

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She looked at me and said, “I feel completely abandoned.”

It caught me off guard.

Abandoned felt like a surprisingly big word for what was happening.

Not disappointed.
Not inconvenienced.

Abandoned.

The business where I do healing work recently announced that it will be closing. It’s one of those places that has helped a lot of people. The woman I work with is extraordinary at what she does and over the years she has walked alongside many people through some of the hardest chapters of their lives. Over the past year and a half, I’ve stepped into that work alongside her—sitting with people in their unraveling, witnessing what it takes to heal. Real healing has happened in those rooms.

So when the news came out that we were closing, people had reactions.

Some were sad.
Some were surprised.
Some were already asking where they could go next—not ready to let go of the work, or the people who held them in it.

But that word stayed with me.

Abandoned.

Because it made me realize how easily something that helped us through a crisis can quietly become something we believe we can’t live without.

Many of us find a person, a place, a practice or a routine during a difficult time in our lives and it becomes a lifeline. It steadies us when everything feels like it’s coming apart.

And that’s a beautiful thing.

But sometimes what begins as support slowly becomes something else.

We keep returning to the same place, the same person, the same routine not because we still need it in the same way, but because it once helped us survive something hard.

Humans are very good at holding onto what once worked.

Even when life is quietly asking us to move forward.

Change has a way of exposing that.

When something we’ve relied on disappears, it can feel less like change and more like loss. Sometimes even abandonment. Not because anyone actually left us, but because the structure we leaned on is no longer there.

And suddenly we’re standing on our own again.

That’s an uncomfortable place for most people.

But it’s also an interesting one.

As I thought about it later, I realized we do this in other places too.

We hold onto patterns we learned as children because at one point they helped us make sense of the world.

Maybe being quiet kept the peace.
Maybe being strong meant no one had to worry about you.
Maybe we learned that we had to be perfect to receive love.

Those patterns weren’t mistakes. They were strategies.

But sometimes the very things that helped us survive earlier chapters of our lives quietly follow us into places where they no longer fit.

And when life changes — when a person leaves, a relationship shifts or a door closes — those old patterns can wake up and whisper the same story they learned long ago.

You’re being left.
You’re on your own.

Even when that’s not actually what’s happening.

Because the purpose of good healing work isn’t to make people dependent on it forever. It’s to remind them that the capacity to heal was inside them the entire time.

I know that because my own healing didn’t begin in a therapy office or a healing studio. It began in the quiet aftermath of losing my son, when the world had split open and none of the structures that had once held my life together made sense anymore.

At first I looked everywhere outside of myself for answers. Books. Teachers. Practices. Anything that might help me understand how a person survives something like that.

And many of those things helped.

They steadied me while I learned how to breathe again.

But over time I realized something else.

Every tool, every practice, every person who helped me along the way was really pointing me back to the same place.

Inside.

People can absolutely help us along the way. In fact, we often need them to. We borrow strength, perspective and safety from each other while we learn how to find those things within ourselves.

But eventually the training wheels come off.

Life has a funny way of doing that.

Sometimes through choice.
Sometimes through circumstance.
And sometimes through a door quietly closing.

And while that can feel unsettling in the moment, it also opens the possibility for something else.

New experiences.
New perspectives.
New teachers we haven’t met yet.

Or the quiet realization that maybe we’re stronger and more capable than we thought.

Support is a beautiful thing.

But it was never meant to be the thing that holds you up forever.

The real work of healing is remembering that the strength you thought you were borrowing…

was yours all along.

And sometimes change is the moment life gently hands it back.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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Four years ago, my body interrupted my life in the middle of an ordinary morning.

I walked into my kitchen to do something I had done countless times before.

I headed straight for the cupboard where I kept my prescriptions. There were a lot of them. Bottles lined up like tiny soldiers: several for hormone-related issues, one for migraines, one for anxiety, something for heartburn and a few others meant to manage whatever new symptom had decided to show up that month.

I had become very efficient at managing symptoms.

Open cupboard.
Grab bottle.
Swallow pill.
Carry on.

But that morning, something strange happened.

Halfway across the kitchen, I stopped.

Not because I changed my mind.
Not because I forgot what I was doing.

I stopped because something in my body refused to let me take another step.

It wasn’t dramatic. No lightning bolt from the sky. No voice booming from the heavens.

It was quieter than that.

A feeling in my gut. A kind of knowing that arrived all at once and settled into my bones like truth.

All of these health issues weren’t random.

My body wasn’t broken.

It was grieving.

Years earlier, my son had died. And like many people who are good at being “the strong one,” I had done what seemed necessary at the time. I kept moving. I kept functioning. I kept showing up for everyone else.

I handled logistics.
I managed responsibilities.
I survived.

What I didn’t do was fully feel it.

Grief has a strange way of finding a home when it isn’t given space. Sometimes it moves into the body.

Migraines. Panic attacks. Strange rashes. Heartburn. Weight gain. Exhaustion that sleep couldn’t fix.

I had been treating the symptoms, but I hadn’t been listening to the message.

Standing there in my kitchen, I suddenly understood that if I wanted my body to heal, I would have to do something I had spent most of my life avoiding.

I would have to feel what I had never allowed myself to feel.

So instead of opening the cupboard and taking my medication like usual, I did something completely different.

I walked over, gathered every bottle and threw them away.

It wasn’t a carefully thought-out medical decision. It was a moment of clarity. A commitment to myself.

I didn’t know what healing was going to look like.

I didn’t know how to do it.

I only knew one thing:

Something had to change.

Standing there in my kitchen, staring at the empty space where those bottles had been, I felt two things at the exact same time — terrified and oddly certain that I had just crossed some kind of invisible line. There was no going back to pretending I was fine.

That moment was the beginning of a journey that eventually led me into dreamwork, breathwork and deeper emotional healing. Not because I was searching for spiritual practices, but because my body had finally gotten loud enough that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. What started as a desperate attempt to feel better slowly became a path that would reshape my life in ways I never expected.

And the strange thing is, once I started listening, my body had a lot to say.

It turns out the body keeps track of the things we try not to feel.

And sometimes healing doesn’t begin with a diagnosis.

Sometimes it begins in a quiet kitchen, when you realize your body has been trying to tell you the truth all along.

I could not have imagined what was about to unfold.

Here’s the strange thing about healing: once you truly decide you’re going to do it — not just dabble, not just try another quick fix, but really commit — life has a funny way of placing the right things in your path.

For me, the first doorway into real healing wasn’t another doctor or another prescription.

It was breathwork.

Not the kind of breathing you do in yoga class while politely stretching your hamstrings. I’m talking about intentional breath that reconnects you to the parts of yourself you’ve spent years avoiding.

Ancient and indigenous cultures have known for thousands of years that the breath itself is healing. Long before modern medicine began studying the nervous system, these traditions understood that the breath could calm the mind, release stored emotion and help the body restore balance.

Most of us are just now starting to remember what they already knew.

Through breathwork, I began reconnecting with my body.

And what I discovered was slightly horrifying.

I had been living from the neck up for most of my life.

My body was basically just a transportation device for my brain.

This didn’t start when my son died. It started decades earlier, when I was a little girl learning — like many of us do — that certain feelings were inconvenient, uncomfortable or better left unspoken. So I did what many capable, high-functioning people do.

I learned how to override them.

Once breathwork helped me reconnect with my body, something else happened that surprised me even more.

I started to feel my feelings.

I know that sounds ridiculous.

Of course I had feelings. I was a human being walking around on the planet. But when I really looked at it, I realized my emotional vocabulary had been incredibly limited.

I operated on two settings:

“I’m fine.”
or
“I’m annoyed.”

That was about the full range.

If you’re curious what I mean, try a quick exercise with me.

Sit comfortably.
Take a slow inhale through your nose and a gentle exhale through your mouth.
Do that five or six times.

Now place your hand over your heart.

Feel it beating beneath your palm.

And ask yourself a simple question:

What am I feeling right now?

Can you actually name the emotion?

Or do the answers sound more like:

“I’m fine.”
“I’m stressed.”
“I’m tired.”

Here’s the thing — those aren’t actually emotions.

They’re states.

Before I started doing breathwork, that’s exactly where I lived emotionally.

And slowly I began to realize something unsettling.

I had been carrying around a lot of emotional debris that I had never actually allowed myself to feel.

When I started learning more about emotional work, I came across research from Brené Brown showing that most people can only identify a handful of emotions in themselves. Meanwhile there are dozens of actual emotional states — grief, shame, resentment, fear, disappointment, loneliness, joy, awe, relief, hope, gratitude and many more.

And here’s the part most of us don’t realize:

When you refuse to feel an emotion, it doesn’t disappear.

Your body stores it.

Anger.
Grief.
Fear.
Shame.
Regret.

They don’t evaporate just because we’re busy being responsible adults.

They wait.

Sometimes for years.

Sometimes for decades.

Until eventually the body says something like,

“Okay. That’s long enough. We need to deal with this now.”

And that’s often when the physical symptoms begin.

Migraines.
Digestive issues.
Panic attacks.
Chronic fatigue.
Autoimmune problems.
Pain that seems to come from nowhere.

The body is incredibly intelligent. If we won’t listen to a whisper, it will eventually raise its voice.

What I began to understand on my healing journey is something that many holistic traditions have known for a long time:

When something is happening in the body, there is often an emotion, belief or unresolved experience connected to it.

That doesn’t mean illness is your fault.
And it doesn’t mean every symptom is purely emotional.

But the body and our emotional world are not separate systems.

They are deeply intertwined.

And once I began listening, I realized my body had been trying to tell me the truth for a very long time.

I had just never learned how to hear it.

But the moment I did, things began to shift.

My dreams started speaking more clearly.
My body began releasing things I didn’t even know I was carrying.
Emotions I had buried decades earlier started rising to the surface.

It wasn’t always comfortable. In fact, sometimes it was the opposite.

But little by little, something surprising started to happen.

My body began to heal.

Looking back now, I can see something else clearly.

When you decide you’re ready to heal, you don’t have to know exactly how to do it. You don’t have to find the perfect method, the perfect teacher or the perfect path.

You just have to start moving.

Pick something that feels even slightly interesting or supportive. Follow the thread. See where it leads.

Some things will resonate deeply.
Some won’t.

And that’s okay.

Every step forward has a way of revealing the next one. If something doesn’t turn out to be your thing, another door will appear.

That’s exactly what happened to me.

One step led to another.
One door opened the next.

And eventually, the path that began in my kitchen led me somewhere I never expected.

Toward healing.
Toward understanding my body.
And toward the work I now share with others.

Over time I began to realize something that has become central to the work I do today:

Our bodies are not broken.

They are speaking.

Symptoms, tension, fatigue, anxiety, chronic issues — they are often signals. Messages from the body asking us to slow down, pay attention and feel what may have been pushed aside for years.

But most of us were never taught how to listen.

We learned how to override.
How to power through.
How to keep functioning even when something inside us was asking for care.

The work I do now grew out of that realization.

Through breathwork, dreamwork and other healing practices, I spend time with people who are beginning to ask the same questions I once asked in my own kitchen:

What is my body trying to tell me?

And how do I start listening?

Because when we begin to listen, something remarkable often happens.

The body starts to release what it has been holding.

And healing becomes possible in ways we may never have imagined.

If this story resonates with you, you’re not alone. Many of us are just beginning to rediscover that our bodies carry wisdom, not just symptoms.

And sometimes the first step toward healing is simply becoming willing to listen.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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Sitting in a grief support group circle, I wait for my turn.

Hi, I’m Angie. My person is my son, Connor. He died of a drug overdose.

This year, I began volunteering at The Sharing Place as an adult grief support group facilitator. Before each class, we go around the room and say our name, who our person was, how they died, and the highs and lows of the prior two weeks.

It’s been 15 years since Connor died, and this year was the first time I ever said, “Connor died of a drug overdose,” without adding the familiar phrase that always followed.

For years, I would soften it.

He died of an accidental drug overdose on prescription pain meds — Oxy.

I felt like that disclaimer shielded me, just a little, from the judgment of losing a 13-year-old child to a drug overdose.

It felt easier for people to understand a prescription bottle than a street drug. Easier to place it in the category of teenage mistakes instead of moral failure.

It was a shield I wore to protect myself — not from the judgment of other people, but from my own shame.

I thought I was managing how others would see me. What I was really managing was what I believed about myself.

Read more

A couple of years ago, I was standing in my 89-year-old mother’s garage helping her with a small project. We had wandered in to grab a screw and a screwdriver when she lost her balance and fell.

It was dramatic. It happened in slow motion. She screamed.

I heard the hard, unmistakable sound of bone meeting concrete.

I knew immediately her hip was broken. There are some things you don’t need medical training to recognize.

We called the ambulance. They carted her off to the hospital, where she would spend several days in surgery and recovery. My parents still live in their own home and guard that independence like their religion. My dad insisted on sitting with her all day, every day.

Which is beautiful. And devoted. And also really freaking inconvenient.

He refuses to stay anywhere but his own house. He can’t drive himself to and from the hospital. So someone has to shuttle him back and forth every single day.

My phone didn’t just light up — it stayed lit. Text after text stacked on top of each other. Updates about medication. Doctor appointments. Who was taking Dad. Who was staying with Mom. Who could help. Who couldn’t.

I sat at my desk trying to work while my nervous system quietly flooded.

There’s a specific kind of anger that doesn’t start loud. It starts tight. A buzzing behind the ribs. A heat in the jaw. A story forming before you even realize you’re telling it.

By the time I walked into the living room, I wasn’t thinking anymore.

I picked up the pink pillow from the couch — soft, harmless, deeply unprepared for what was about to happen — pressed my face into it and screamed.

A full-bodied, guttural, lifetime-of-swallowed-anger scream.

Not just about hospital logistics.
Not just about driving my dad.

It was stored-up anger. The kind that accumulates quietly over decades. The kind you swallow when you decide you’re “fine.” When you tell yourself you don’t need anything.

It was anger I didn’t even realize was still there.

And it came out all at once.

I was furious that I was expected to rearrange my life to take care of my parents when I had spent most of my childhood feeling like I was fending for myself.

That was the headline.

What sat beneath surprised me.

I was angry at my siblings. I was angry that none of them had ever really taken care of me either. I was the baby and not one of them ever stepped up to make sure I was okay. Not when I was little. Not after Connor died. In my family, being the youngest didn’t mean you were protected. It just meant you were smaller.

And yet here I was, still the one who felt responsible. The one who felt obligated to step up and provide the things I was never given.

The speed at which I built that narrative was impressive.

That was the moment I realized I wasn’t as healed as I thought.

I was well aware of my childhood issues, particularly with my mom.

I genuinely believed I had worked through them.

Apparently not.

Read more

What if before we came here—
before the bodies,
before the names,
before the mess—
we made a plan?

Not a rigid one.
Not a checklist.

A game.

What if we sat with our team, our guides, our higher selves, and decided what we wanted to heal, what we wanted to learn, what kinds of love and courage we wanted to experience?

And then we dropped ourselves right into the middle of it.

Ready.
Set.
Go.

I don’t believe the purpose of life is to avoid risk or keep things tidy. I don’t believe anyone said, “I want to go to Earth, work an 8 to 5, stay comfortable, and die having played it safe.”

I think we wanted more than that.

I think we wanted texture.
Contrast.
Joy sharp enough to feel in the chest.

And I think those moments when life veers unexpectedly—when something ends, begins, or cracks open—are Easter eggs. Hidden clues left behind by the version of us who knew the terrain better than we do from inside the game.

The invitation isn’t to control the outcome.
It’s to participate.

To follow intuition when it whispers.
To take the risk when curiosity lights up.
To say yes when something inside you says, This matters.

When I look at my own life through this lens, a pattern appears. Not a straight line—more like a trail of breadcrumbs laid just far enough apart that I had to trust the next step before I could see the one after it.

My life has been a series of nudges followed before I knew how things would work out.

Not reckless leaps.
Quiet, internal yeses.

Somewhere along the way, trusting that things would work out—even when I couldn’t see the path—became a belief I carry without thinking about it. Not optimism. Not blind faith. More like muscle memory.

It shows up most clearly in my work.

I had been in the nonprofit world for nearly six years when I was suddenly laid off. At the time, my life was already in pieces. I had recently been divorced. My son Connor had died. I had short-sold my house because I could no longer afford the mortgage.

It felt like devastation stacked on devastation. Like the universe had mistaken me for someone with endless capacity.

What I couldn’t see then was that a new level of the game had opened.

On nights and weekends, mostly for fun, I had been teaching Pilates. A few of my regular clients worked in tech and raved endlessly about their jobs. One day—without a plan, without a strategy—I asked if their company had any openings.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting behind a desk in my first-ever sales job at a cybersecurity company.

When I say I knew nothing about tech, I mean nothing. Acronyms sounded like a foreign language. I didn’t know what I was building—only that I was building something. I had no idea how that career would end up supporting me and my son Noah. I just followed the nudge in front of me.

Tech did what tech does. Layoffs. Promotions. Long hours. A monster year where everything clicked. And then—again—I found myself on the wrong side of another layoff.

This time, though, I had breathing room. Not forever-time, but enough to ask better questions.

So I listened.

I got certified in breathwork. I focused on healing my nervous system. I let my body release things it had been holding for decades. And still, I knew—deep in my bones—that breathwork alone wasn’t the whole picture. Something else was calling.

I even received a call from a former company offering me another role. On paper, it made sense.

I said no.

A few days later—as if the universe wanted to be unmistakably clever—a friend called and told me the woman she saw for FootZoning was looking for someone to work alongside her and was willing to train the right person.

I had no idea what FootZoning was.

I went anyway.

I listened. I learned. I was stunned. I took the classes immediately and stepped onto a path I hadn’t known existed a week earlier.

I’ve been living on my savings (and the support of my hubby) while I figure out what this chapter is asking of me. That well isn’t endless. As the numbers shifted, I had to look at the structure clearly. The arrangement made sense for a season, but it didn’t leave enough for me to grow into something sustainable.

I didn’t know the solution.
But I knew one would show up.

Then one afternoon, over lunch, my boss sat us all down and told us she had just realized her lease was up at the end of June. Five-year terms only. She needed a break. She wouldn’t be renewing.

And there it was.

The next path opening—clean, undeniable, perfectly timed.

Two weeks earlier, I had a dream where she told me she was going on vacation, but it was okay—I would still be able to work. She went on her way. I went on mine. My path was beautiful. I described it in my dream journal as living inside a Van Gogh painting.

At the time, I didn’t understand why our paths were separating, but my dream was clear.

Now I do.

So here I am. Trusting again. Looking for a space of my own to do this work. Knowing that the only way forward—the only way this becomes sustainable—is by building something that belongs to me.

This is the part of the game no one prepares you for.
The level where you can’t see the map—only the next step.

And still, you step.

Because if this life is a game, I don’t think we win by staying safe. I think we win by following the clues. By saying yes when the door cracks open. By trusting that the version of us who planted the Easter eggs knew what they were doing.

And maybe, when we look back—however you imagine that moment—the only real question won’t be whether we got it right.

Maybe it will simply be:

Did you live it?

So here I am, trusting that the path unfolding in front of me
will be beautiful—wild with color, imperfect, alive.

Like living inside a Van Gogh painting.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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I want to talk about healing.
But not the version that looks good on Instagram.

I mean the kind where you think you’ve already done a lot of work—because you have—and then something else shows up anyway. The kind where you’re tired, annoyed and honestly a little offended that the universe thinks you’re still not done.

That kind.

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There’s a process called Cutting the Ties That Bind, developed by psychotherapist Phyllis Krystal. It’s a therapeutic approach that uses symbols and visualization to help release subconscious bindings—those invisible ties that keep us tethered to old wounds, outdated roles and patterns we didn’t consciously choose.

The core idea is simple, but not easy:
you stop letting your past run the show and start relying on your own Higher Consciousness as your guide.

You don’t erase your history.
You don’t vilify your parents.
You don’t pretend nothing hurt.

You just stop dragging what no longer belongs to you into the present.

Now, I’ve said this before, I’m saying it again, and I’ll say it many more times: healing is not linear.

It’s not a straight line forward.
It’s a spiral.
Round and round we go.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know this about me—I always follow my dreams. And I mean always. My dreams don’t care how much work I think I’ve done. They don’t hand out gold stars. They just point to whatever still needs attention and shine a very unflattering spotlight on it.

I’ve done a lot of healing work.
Inner child stuff.
Grief.
Learning how to share my feelings—which I truly abhor.
Identifying wounds. Questioning my reactions. Noticing patterns. Trying to respond instead of react.

It’s a constant, daily practice.

And still.

My dreams kept calling me out.

Not gently. Not subtly.

Apparently, I was still emotionally armored to the point of being… let’s call it unapproachable. My dreams called it “cold” and were not shy about pointing it out. They were even less subtle about where that armor came from.

Mom.

sigh.

After months of being repeatedly informed—by my own subconscious and spirit team—that I was not as healed as I’d like to believe, I decided to get some help. I began to work with Michael Sheridan and the Aisling School, the same place where I’ve learned everything I trust about dream interpretation, to begin Cutting the Ties That Bind.

Here’s what this process actually is—and what it is not.

It does not mean you hate your parent.
It does not mean they were terrible.
It does not mean you want nothing to do with them.

It means you identify the traits and patterns you unconsciously absorbed and decide—consciously—which ones you’re done carrying.

You keep the good.
You release the rest.
And you do it with compassion. For them and for yourself.

There was never any question which parent I needed to work on.

I used to get really angry about how mothers get blamed for everything. I thought it was bullshit. And sometimes it is. But I’ve come to understand something that’s uncomfortable to admit.

A mother plays a foundational role in helping a child feel unconditionally loved. And when that belief isn’t fully there—I am loved without earning it—it quietly affects everything.

Relationships.
Self-worth.
How safe it feels to need anything at all.

This isn’t about blame.
It’s about impact.

Fathers matter too. They teach us something different but just as essential—that we are allowed to take up space, that we belong simply because we exist.

When either of those messages is missing or distorted, we adapt. We become hyper-independent. Expect perfection. We learn how to be strong.

And at some point, that strength turns into armor.

Healing doesn’t stay theoretical.
It gets personal.
It gets messy.
And it asks you to look at things you’d rather believe you already handled.

The first step in this process is deceptively simple.

You get a piece of paper.
You draw a line down the middle.

On the left, you list all the negative things—what your parent did, what didn’t happen, the traits you picked up and the ways they show up in your life now.
On the right, you list the positive.

That’s it.

No analysis.
No editing.
No being fair or generous or “seeing both sides.”

Just honesty.

And here’s the thing: the list isn’t fixed. It grows. As your dreams start revealing what’s underneath the surface, new patterns surface. New memories. New awareness. Things you didn’t think were connected suddenly are. The list becomes a living document of what’s ready to be seen.

So I sat down with a pen and paper and started my list.

Negative:

Anger
Shame over my body
Neglect
Judgement
Conditional in love and support
Neglected
No support
Ignored me
Made me feel alone
Didn’t show up for me after Connor died
Bury her head in the sand
Has favorite children – I am not one
Can’t just be happy for me
Not nurturing – disconnection from feminine energy
I don’t listen to my intuition because mom didn’t listen to me
I compare myself to others
I don’t see the value or worth in my gifts
Mom didn’t support me so why would my spirit team and intuition/high self
The way I was raised negatively impacts my relationship with Jason
Annoyance
Lack of patience
Didn’t protect me from my bully brother
I don’t know how to be vulnerable
I don’t know how to share my feelings
I don’t know how to ask for help or rely on others

Positive:

Love of the theater
Love of dancing
Self sufficient
Belief I could do anything I wanted
Strong woman role model – was not submissive

I stopped when I was done and just stared at the page.

I hadn’t even noticed while I was writing, but neglected and ignored showed up more than once. Same wound. Same theme. Different wording. Apparently my subconscious felt the need to really underline that one.

And that positive list… I mean—can we even call it a list?

Still, there is something important here. Something I don’t want to gloss over or minimize.

In a conservative LDS family, I was never made to feel less than because I was a girl. My mom genuinely believed I could do anything I wanted, and I believed her. And for that, I am deeply grateful. I was never repressed. I was never told to be smaller.

That matters.

And—this is where things get uncomfortable—gratitude doesn’t cancel out pain. Both can exist at the same time. They do exist at the same time.

Here’s the thing about dreams. One of the many things, actually.

They will tell you what needs to heal.
And they will tell you when what you’re working on is actually healing.

How cool is that?

It doesn’t matter what modality you’re using—talk therapy, energy work, breathwork, FootZoning, ThetaHealing, yoga, meditation, Reiki, visualization—if it’s working, it will show up in your dreams. Dreams don’t care about the method. They care about movement.

That’s why this process is guided and led by dreams.

You set the intention to let go and heal everything on the negative side of the paper. You do the visualization—twice a day—using the process outlined by Phyllis Krystal. And then you watch. You pay attention. You see what your dreams start to uncover, disrupt and rearrange.

And I cannot stress this enough:

This is not an easy process.

It’s not gentle.
It’s not tidy.
And it does not care how “far along” you think you are.

Michael and his team warn you right up front: your dreams are going to turn dark.

That’s the point.

You want them dark. You want your subconscious to drag everything you’ve buried—everything you’ve survived by stuffing down—into the light. This work isn’t about comfort. It’s about excavation.

Healing is not linear—yes, I know, I already said that. And just like I promised, here I am saying it again. There’s no guarantee you won’t have to do this work more than once. In fact, you probably will. Healing has a way of circling back, usually when you’re convinced you’re done.

As I’m writing this, I’m ten days into a process that can take anywhere from ten to twelve weeks. And let me tell you—these ten days have been a doozy.

I have this image that my spirit team is standing around like a group of very concerned teachers saying, Okay, we have to give her this absolutely terrible dream… but let’s do it right when she falls asleep so it’s the first one. Then we’ll follow it up with a few nicer ones to soften the blow.

It feels like, this hurts us as much as it hurts you.

I’ve had terrifying dreams. One where I was being held down by an invisible force—like experiencing sleep paralysis inside a dream. I’ve felt dark energies in my space that don’t belong there, and I’ve had to cast them out—forcefully. I even had a demon appear in a dream that I was actively removing from my space.

I don’t say this to scare you. But just as there are negative people in the world, there are negative energies too. What matters is remembering that you have complete sovereignty. Nothing has the authority to stay where it isn’t welcome. To me, this kind of darkness doesn’t signal danger—it signals exposure. When old material is being brought into awareness, it doesn’t always leave quietly. Darkness rarely likes being seen, and this feels like what happens when something long buried is finally being pulled into the light.

So I banish them like I’m in a battle.

And here’s the part that surprised me.

Through all of this, I remembered something I haven’t thought about in decades. When I was a little girl—around eight years old—I used to feel these dark entities around me sometimes. And somehow, even then, I knew how to push them out. I knew how to claim my space.

How did I know how to do that?

Honestly, I have no idea. It feels like something I learned somewhere else. Another lifetime, maybe. Some deep remembering that never quite left.

You may have heard the phrase that when we heal ourselves, we heal forward and we heal backward. This points straight to epigenetics—the idea that we carry the trauma of our ancestors in our bodies and nervous systems. Indigenous peoples know this. Jewish people know this. Black people know this.

The suffering doesn’t just disappear. It travels.

But here’s the amazing, glorious thing: when we do our own healing, we don’t just help ourselves. We help our ancestors. And we help future generations. This isn’t just my work. I come from a long line of motherless daughters—women who had mothers, but not the kind who could really see or hold them. My mom felt about her mother the way I’ve felt about mine. And her mother felt the same about hers. This quiet ache, this absence, this learning to mother ourselves too early—it’s been passed down for generations.

When something doesn’t get healed, it doesn’t disappear. It just keeps looking for a place to land.

This has been showing up vividly in my dreams.

Dreams of visiting ancestral land.
Dreams of uncovering things that were buried on that land.
Dreams of being inside an ancestor’s home.
Dreams of being handed a massive stack of heavy envelopes—stuffed with information about my lineage, my people, my past.

And maybe the most unexpected part of all of this: my grandma—my mom’s mom—has been showing up every single day.

She passed away a long time ago. We were never close when she was alive. And yet, somehow, I feel closer to her now than I ever did then. Proof that relationships can heal and deepen even after someone is gone.

When I first started opening up to the spiritual world—and to the possibility that our loved ones don’t actually leave—I began experiencing something called clairalience. It’s when you smell things that have absolutely no physical explanation. People often talk about smelling cigarette smoke when no one is smoking.

I experience this in different ways, with different scents. And one of those smells is menthol.

Out of nowhere, I’ll get the strongest hit of menthol. No reason. No source. The first few times it happened, I was confused. And then one day, intuitively, I wondered if it was my grandma.

So I called my mom and asked if Grandma used to use mentholatum a lot.

She laughed and said she rubbed it on everything and everyone.

Aha! Grandma.

For the last ten days, she’s been cheering me on—showing up again and again with her signature scent. A quiet, comforting reminder that I’m not doing this alone.

Thanks, Grandma.

Another rule of this process: you have to feel your feelings as you move through it.

No bypassing.
No “high vibration only” nonsense.
No yoga. No meditation. No breathwork. No energy work. No uplifting playlists.

You feel it to heal it. Fully. In your body.

If you’re angry, you stomp around the neighborhood on a walk. You scream into a pillow. You punch a punching bag. You let it move. What you don’t do is stuff it down or immediately try to elevate your mood.

At the end of my first week, I was wrecked.

I was exhausted from restless sleep, bad dreams and uninvited visitors. Emotionally drained. The anger and sadness were bubbling closer to the surface than I’m used to allowing.

Jason had been out of town, and Sunday morning I was going to pick him up from the airport. I texted him a warning:

“Forewarning. I need food. I need you to hold me while I cry. I need sex.”

Sex would likely fall into the category of regulating yourself with something pleasurable. I know this. I’m not an idiot. I just didn’t care.

He was more than happy to oblige.

I wasn’t sure if the crying would come before, during or after the sex. But I knew one thing for sure—the food had to come first.

When he opened the door and climbed into the car, I smiled and said, “Welcome to the shit show.”

After eating, phase one complete, I stood up and said I was ready for phase two. I walked over to him, fell into his arms and completely lost it. I sobbed and listed everything I was upset about. He just held me while I cried.

No fixing.
No defensiveness.
No rushing me through it.

When the tears finally dried, I felt proud of myself.

I had never—not one time—done that in my fifty years on this earth.

Turns out, I do have a heart after all. Somewhere under the armor. Somewhere past the survival strategies. Turns out the Tin Man and I both got our hearts. I didn’t even need ruby slippers—just a little courage and someone willing to hold space.
Although, if someone is offering ruby slippers, I’m not saying no.

Phase three… I’ll spare you the details.

Here’s the thing I’m really starting to learn on this healing journey:

When you actually let the people who love you show up… they do.

That may sound obvious. It wasn’t to me.

For fifty years, I kept even the people I loved most at arm’s length. Not because I didn’t want connection, but because I didn’t trust it. Somewhere along the way, I decided it was safer to need less than to risk being disappointed. I told myself I was independent, strong, capable. And I was. But I was also braced.

What I’m realizing now is that the bracing cost me something.

Letting Jason hold me while I cried wasn’t just about that moment. It cracked open a belief I’ve been carrying my whole life—that needing someone was dangerous, that asking for support would somehow break me if it wasn’t met.

Instead, it did the opposite.

Being met didn’t weaken me.
It softened me.
And that might be the most beautiful gift this work has given me so far.

I plan to keep writing about this journey through Cutting the Ties That Bind. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll keep coming along for the ride.

And if anything in this encourages you, let it be this: you can show up for yourself. You’re allowed to need support. You’re allowed to let yourself be held. You’re allowed to heal. It is never too late to change how you relate to love, to healing, to yourself.

I’m continuing this journey through Cutting the Ties That Bind with paid subscribers. Not to withhold, but to hold—because this process is unfolding in real time and I want to share it with care and intention as it continues. If this resonated and you want to keep walking with me, I’d love to have you there.

Please share this with the people you love—or with anyone you think might enjoy following the shit show.

With love,

Angie

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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We live in a world obsessed with light, love and good vibes only.
Especially in spiritual spaces.

Smile through it.
Rise above it.
Transcend it.

Here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud:
Sometimes life isn’t light and love.
Sometimes it’s brutal.
Sometimes it’s unfair.
Sometimes it’s really fucking terrible.

And telling people to bypass that reality isn’t spiritual.
It’s harmful.

Anger has become one of the most forbidden emotions in our culture. No one wants to be labeled “the angry one.” Anger makes people uncomfortable. It’s seen as dangerous, unhealed, un-evolved. Especially for women.

Feeling anger does not make you an angry person.
It makes you human.

We don’t have emotions by accident. Every one of them exists for a reason. Anger isn’t a character flaw — it’s information. It shows us where something isn’t right, where a boundary has been crossed, where truth is being ignored.

Suppressing it doesn’t make you evolved.
It just teaches your body to carry what your voice was never allowed to express.

Men are supposedly allowed anger, but even they aren’t. They’re taught to fear it — afraid it will make them seem violent, threatening, out of control. So what do we do instead?

We repress it.
We swallow it.
We store it in our bodies.

And it eats us alive from the inside out.

I never thought of myself as angry.
I rarely lost my temper. I didn’t blow up at people.

I thought of myself as happy. Calm. Grounded. Steady.
I didn’t believe I was carrying anger in my body at all.

A few years ago, that belief was tested.

There was legislation passed that made me furious. I live close to the Capitol, and there was a protest happening. Jason and I walked up, and I stood there surrounded by people shouting, chanting, waving signs, expressing their anger freely.

Inside, I was raging.
Absolutely livid.

And yet I stood there completely silent. Frozen. Unable to yell. Unable to move. Unable to express a single word of how I felt.

That moment shook me.

Why could everyone around me express their anger, while I couldn’t even open my mouth?

Around that same time, I was introduced to breathwork. If you’ve never experienced it, it can be intense. Energy moves. Emotions surface. In a room full of people, that energy has to go somewhere. Sometimes the release is crying. Sometimes shaking. Sometimes a scream.

When the facilitator said we were going to scream, my eyes practically popped out of my head. I see that same look now when I teach.

When the moment came, I surprised myself—I screamed. Being in a room with thirty other people gave me permission. No one was focused on me. I could disappear into the sound.

What surprised me more was this:
I didn’t feel angry.
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t wail like others around me.

That made sense. I had never expressed so-called “negative” emotions in front of other people. I stayed composed. Controlled. Calm.

But over time, as I kept practicing connecting to my body and my emotions, something became very clear:

I had been carrying anger in my body for a very long time.
Long before Connor died.
His death didn’t create the anger—it compounded it.

That’s when my physical symptoms exploded.

Here’s what I’ve learned:
emotions are energy.
And energy has one rule—it must move.

Life is hard. Sometimes devastating. When something painful happens, we don’t always want to feel it. So instead of acknowledging our emotions, we stuff them down. Over time, they become trapped energy.

Our bodies need flow to function. When energy gets stuck, the body suffers. We get sick. We disconnect from our bodies so completely that we stop listening—until the body gets loud. Until it has no choice.

I see this every day in my FootZoning practice. People come in with symptoms and ailments that have no clear explanation. And slowly, with time and trust, we begin unraveling the emotional history their bodies have been carrying—anger, grief, fear, shame, sorrow.

As those emotions are finally allowed to move, the body begins to heal.

There’s no coincidence that women make up roughly 88% of autoimmune disease diagnoses. We are taught to endure. To smile. To sacrifice. To care for everyone else first. To never express anger. To carry shame—for our bodies, our motherhood, our worth, our needs.

Those expectations live in our bodies.

In my opinion, that statistic tells a story.

Healing requires reconnection. Listening. Trusting intuition. Using our voices. Letting anger exist without turning it into violence or self-destruction. Anger isn’t the enemy—it’s information.

So much violence in this world comes from unexpressed, unprocessed anger. Energy with nowhere to go eventually explodes.

This is why I’m on a mission to get people to feel their feelings.

Here’s a simple practice I give every client:

Close your eyes.
Take a slow inhale through your nose.
Open your mouth and make an audible sigh.
Imagine stress leaving your body.

Do this for a few minutes.

Then place a hand on your heart and ask yourself:
How am I actually feeling?
What emotions am I carrying with me today?

You might feel nothing at first. That’s okay. Disconnection takes time to unwind. This is a practice.

When an emotion arises—anger, grief, fear, shame—acknowledge it. Don’t fix it. Don’t judge it. Breathe through it.

I promise you: if you let it move, it will pass. And it won’t lodge itself in your body.

Our bodies speak constantly.
Constipation asks: what are you holding onto?
Digestive issues ask: what aren’t you processing?
A backed-up liver asks: where is your anger?

This work isn’t easy. I’ve been at it for years. I recently realized I was deeply stressed about something—while appearing completely calm to everyone around me. Even Jason had no idea. That calmness is a skill I learned early. It kept me safe. It also kept me disconnected.

Telling him how I actually felt took courage. He joked that it only took me fifteen years to figure it out how to share my feelings.

Baby steps.

I spent nearly fifty years disconnected from my emotions. This doesn’t change overnight. But as I’ve practiced feeling, expressing and releasing—my body has healed.

No more panic attacks.
No migraines.
No heartburn.
No mysterious rashes.

Your body is not against you.
It is extraordinary technology.
It is always trying to heal you.
Always trying to protect you.

Your emotions are not the problem.
Ignoring them is.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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This is something I’ve wanted to write for a long time, but I didn’t have the language for it until now. People have called me “strong” for years, and I’ve smiled and accepted it even though it never felt like a compliment. This piece is my attempt to tell the truth beneath that word — what strength actually cost, what it silenced and what I’m learning to choose instead. If you’ve ever been praised for surviving something you never wanted to endure, this is for you.

People tell me all the time how strong I am. That I’m the strongest person they know. They say it like it’s a compliment, like it should land as something I’m proud of.

I hate it.

Not because it isn’t true, but because strength was never something I wanted to be known for. Strength wasn’t a personality trait. It was a survival strategy. And it came at a cost no one ever asks about.

When people call me strong, what they’re really saying is you survived something unbearable. But “strong” is easier to say than that should never have happened to you. It’s easier than sitting with the grief, the unfairness, the loneliness of it all.

Strength makes other people comfortable.

It reassures them that devastation is survivable, that life moves on, that tragedy can be neatly folded into a story with an ending that feels acceptable. My strength becomes proof that things work out. That people endure. That everything is, somehow, okay.

But strength didn’t feel like empowerment while I was living it.

It felt like staying upright because there was no other option. It felt like swallowing pain so it wouldn’t spill onto anyone else. It felt like learning, very early on, how to hold everything myself.

Strength wasn’t about bravery.
It was about necessity.

And the part that rarely gets acknowledged is this: the stronger I appeared, the less anyone checked on me. The less room there was for my grief. The less permission I had to fall apart.

Being “so strong” often meant being alone with what I was carrying.

People call you strong because they don’t know what else to say.
Because strength makes suffering palatable.
Because if you’re strong, they don’t have to sit with how much you endured alone.

Strength is a compliment that often lets other people off the hook.

I never set out to be strong.
I adapted.

And there is a world of difference between the two.

Strength Wasn’t a Choice

I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel like I had to be strong.

I’m sure it started early. When my brother Jared was born and everything shifted. When I was suddenly left to take care of myself. I didn’t grow up in a family where we looked out for each other. We looked after ourselves. You learned quickly not to need too much. Not to expect someone else to catch you.

I can’t recall a time when I allowed myself to fall apart.

Even after Connor died.

I remember getting ready for his funeral. My mom and sister came to take me to Costco to buy picture frames and print photos for the service. I was a zombie, wandering the aisles under fluorescent lights, pushing a cart like I was doing an errand instead of preparing to bury my child.

At one point, I had to use the restroom. I went into the stall without looking at myself. When I came out to wash my hands, I finally caught my reflection in the mirror.

Greasy hair.
Sunken eyes.
Hollow cheeks.

I remember looking at myself and thinking, You have got to get it together.

Not gently. Not kindly.
Like a berating.

I’ve since heard other parents who have lost children or spouses talk about staying in bed all day, about being unable to move, about the world stopping completely. I remember feeling almost envious of that kind of collapse.

I never allowed myself that.

I stayed upright. I kept moving.

And I lost those things anyway.

Strength didn’t save my life the way I thought it would. It only kept me from feeling the full weight of what was already happening.

What Strength Required Me to Silence

Fear, shame, regret and anger were all there. I carried them constantly. I just never expressed them.

The shame was the heaviest.

My child died at thirteen from a drug overdose. At the time, he was the youngest death in Utah tied to the opioid epidemic. That fact alone felt like a verdict. What kind of parent lets that happen? What kind of mother misses something so catastrophic?

I lived inside those questions.

I replayed everything. Every decision. Every moment. Every sign I might have missed. I should have known. I should have done more. I should have seen it sooner. I should’ve all over myself until shame became a second skin.

Because I was rebuilding my entire life at the same time — my home, my work, my sense of stability, my identity — I didn’t feel like I had the option to fall apart. So I compartmentalized. I put Connor’s death in a box and shoved it as far down as I could reach so I could keep functioning.

That’s what strength demanded.

Grief doesn’t disappear when you do that. It just moves. It goes into the body. That’s where emotions go when we don’t allow ourselves to feel them. They settle into muscle and breath and posture. They wait.

I carried my grief the way I carried everything else — silently and alone.

I never voiced my needs because I didn’t know how. That wasn’t something I was ever taught. Needing felt foreign. Asking felt unsafe. I didn’t have language for what I required, only an internal pressure to keep going no matter what it cost.

Strength didn’t make room for my fear.
It didn’t tolerate my anger.
It had no patience for regret.

So I swallowed all of it.

The Cost No One Saw

My health began deteriorating almost immediately after Connor died.

I started having panic attacks. At first, I told myself that was probably normal. That it would pass with time. And while the panic attacks did become less frequent, something deeper had shifted. I couldn’t carry stress the way I used to. The demands of my job, daily life, simple decisions — everything felt heavier.

I was easily overwhelmed, but I learned early how to keep moving and never show the cracks.

It felt like my internal vessel was already full. Overflowing with emotion I wasn’t releasing. So the smallest additional stress tipped me over the edge. Things that once felt manageable suddenly felt impossible.

After Connor died, I threw myself into advocacy. I became deeply involved with the local prescription drug awareness campaign. I spoke at schools, addiction and recovery seminars, hospitals. I worked with local government on awareness efforts and prescription take-back events.

I showed up. I used my voice. I did the thing people applaud.

And after — sometimes during — almost every speaking engagement, I would leave with crushing heartburn. The kind that stopped me in my tracks. The kind that felt like fire moving up my chest.

As anniversaries approached — Connor’s birthday, the date of his death — my body would start signaling in other ways. A migraine that came out of nowhere. A strange, unexplained rash. Symptoms without a clear cause, but always with familiar timing.

My body knew what I wouldn’t let myself say.

I’ve always struggled with vulnerability, but during this time it hardened into something even I didn’t recognize. The hyper-independence was off the charts. I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t lean. I didn’t soften.

I survived by containing everything.

And my body paid the price.

Who My Strength Served

My strength served everyone around me — with the exception of myself and Noah.

It made it easier for people to be with me. Easier because they didn’t have to see the raw, unfiltered truth of what it actually looks like to lose a child. They weren’t asked to sit with me in my grief. They didn’t have to witness the mess of it, the way it dismantles you from the inside out.

From a distance, strength is comfortable.

It allowed people to look at me and say, Wow, she is so strong. I could never do that, without ever having to come close enough to feel what it cost. My strength made tragedy easier to observe. Easier to admire. Easier to keep contained.

The truth is, being strong is one of the loneliest experiences there is.

When you’re strong, you become the one who depends on yourself. Not because no one cares, but because your strength leaves no visible opening. People assume you’re okay. They assume you’re handling it. They assume you don’t need much.

And eventually, you start assuming that too.

Strength taught me how to survive without support. It also taught me how to keep people at a distance without meaning to. I didn’t allow others to show up for me because I didn’t know how to let them. I didn’t know what it would look like to be held in the middle of something so unbearable.

Strength worked — until it didn’t.

It stopped working when my body made it clear that all of my health issues were connected to one thing: I had never allowed myself to sit in the beautiful, ugly mess of grief. I had managed it. Contained it. Organized my life around it.

But I hadn’t felt it.

Strength had kept me upright.
It had also kept me alone.

And eventually, the cost became impossible to ignore.

The Loneliness of Being “Okay”

After the service, people drifted away.

That happens a lot after a death. There’s an initial surge of presence — meals, cards, condolences — and then life resumes. People go back to their routines and assume you’re doing fine. Especially if you look like you are.

Friends and family checked in less and less. Not out of cruelty, but assumption.

Even my parents, who had lost two children themselves and knew this kind of grief intimately, didn’t check in. And I didn’t ask for help. The silence wasn’t one-sided. It was mutual.

I had been taught, explicitly and implicitly, that you can only rely on yourself. That no one is really coming to take care of you in this world. Strength wasn’t just survival — it was the rule.

To admit I wasn’t fine would have required a kind of vulnerability I couldn’t imagine at the time. It would have meant opening myself up to more pain. To disappointment. To being seen in a way I didn’t know how to survive.

So I stayed contained.

I did all of that speaking — schools, hospitals, recovery spaces — but I did it with distance. With armor. I kept myself just far enough away from my own rawness to stay safe. There was purpose in it, yes. I wanted to help. I wanted to create awareness.

And there was something else underneath it, too.

A quiet fuck you to anyone who wanted to judge me.

I remember after a news article was published about Connor’s story, someone commented, This is why you need to do more than just watch movies with your kids. I had mentioned watching a movie with Connor the night he died.

That comment gutted me.

Because Connor and I did so much more than that. We read books together in bed at night. We went snowboarding almost every weekend. We did art projects. We went shopping. We hiked. We talked. We lived our lives together.

But grief invites judgment. And strength becomes a shield.

That might have been when strength stopped feeling empowering and started feeling isolating. When I realized that no matter how much I showed up, no matter how much good I tried to do, there would always be someone ready to reduce my motherhood to a single moment they didn’t understand.

So I stayed strong.
I stayed defended.
I stayed alone.

What I’m Choosing Now

I have learned so much on this journey. And I want to be clear about something: I am not grateful that Connor died. I would do anything to bring him back. There is no lesson worth that cost.

And still — both things can be true.

I can see the gift his early departure gave me, even though I never asked for it. The gift of finally tending to the old wounds I’d carried my entire life. Wounds that existed long before Connor and would have continued shaping me quietly if they hadn’t been forced into the light.

His death dismantled me in a way nothing else ever had.

It taught me how to sit with people in their grief without trying to fix it or rush it or make it easier to look at. It taught me how to stay present in the unbearable. How to listen. How to hold space without asking anyone to be strong for my comfort.

I have become more loving. More accepting. More empathetic. Not because suffering ennobles us, but because grief strips away the illusion that we’re separate from one another.

Now, I’m learning something new.

I’m learning how to be vulnerable. How to love fully without bracing for impact. How to allow people to show up for me instead of managing everything alone. I’m learning how to voice my needs — something I was never taught how to do — and to trust that they might actually be met.

I’m learning how to release emotions and trauma from my body instead of asking it to keep holding everything for me. How to let my body heal instead of demanding resilience from it.

And I am deeply passionate about helping other people do the same.

Not by telling them to be strong.
Not by glorifying survival.
But by reminding them that they don’t have to carry everything alone.

Strength kept me alive.
Vulnerability is teaching me how to live.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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Healing isn’t tidy.
It doesn’t move forward in a straight line or resolve itself because we made a good decision once.

It ripples.

When one person does their healing, it doesn’t stop with them. It moves backward through bloodlines and forward into futures that haven’t even taken their first breath yet.

I didn’t understand this at first. I understand it now because I’ve lived inside the consequences of not healing—and because science is finally catching up to what many cultures have always known.

Research in epigenetics shows that trauma doesn’t just live in memory. It can alter how genes are expressed, particularly those tied to stress, emotion regulation and survival. Descendants of people who endured war, famine, enslavement or genocide have been shown to carry altered stress responses even when they themselves never experienced the original trauma.

The body remembers what the mind never knew.

The night before one of my FootZoning sessions, I had a dream that stayed with me. I was surrounded by Indian people—rows and rows of them. Calm. Smiling. Encouraging. There was no urgency. No message being pushed. Just presence.

I woke up confused and didn’t try to interpret it.

That morning, my first client arrived—an eight-year-old boy I had never met.

I walked into the waiting room and greeted his mother. Then, from behind her, a shy young Indian boy stepped forward. He had been adopted from India, along with his two sisters.

The dream landed in my body like truth.

Those were his ancestors.

They had come to witness. To say yes. To remind me that healing doesn’t happen alone.

This isn’t unusual for me anymore. When I work with people, their ancestors often show up—most often in dreams. Sometimes they stand quietly behind the person. Sometimes they feel relieved. Sometimes grateful. As if to say, We’ve been waiting for someone in this line to finally feel what we couldn’t.

Science would say this is about inherited stress responses, nervous system patterns and survival strategies passed down unconsciously.

I would say it’s memory moving through blood.

Either way, the truth is the same: what goes unhealed doesn’t disappear. It gets transmitted.

I once had a conversation with my mom that made this painfully clear. She told me her relationship with her own mother was one of strain. Nothing she did ever felt good enough. She felt overlooked and overshadowed by her brother—the golden child who could do no wrong.

She swore she would never do that to her children.

And she didn’t.
Not in the same way.

But here’s the part we don’t talk about enough: making a logical decision not to repeat a pattern is not the same as healing the wound that created it.

Because my mom never healed the pain of being unseen and not good enough, that wound still lived in her. And that pain doesn’t respond to logic. It responds to threat, safety and familiarity.

So the pattern changed shape.
The result stayed the same.

This is what epigenetics helps explain. Trauma doesn’t just influence behavior—it shapes how the body interprets the world. A parent doesn’t need to consciously repeat harm for the child to inherit the stress response. Children learn safety or danger through tone, presence, absence, emotional availability and regulation.

The transmission happens quietly.

A man grows up with an outwardly angry father and vows he will never raise his voice. So he doesn’t. Instead, he swallows his anger. He represses his emotions. He disconnects from his body. His nervous system never learns how to process anger safely.

His children don’t grow up with rage.
They grow up with emotional absence.

They learn that big feelings are unsafe. That emotions should be contained or ignored. That connection requires self-suppression.

The result isn’t better.
It’s the same wound wearing a quieter mask.

Children raised in these environments often develop anxiety, people-pleasing, hyper-independence, emotional numbing or chronic dysregulation. Different expressions. Same inherited stress response.

This is how trauma moves through generations.

Not because parents don’t care.
Not because they don’t try.
But because trauma lives in the body first and the mind second.

I tell Noah all the time that I never wanted him to grow up the way I did. In a family where feelings weren’t talked about. Where emotions were swallowed. Where I never felt safe saying this hurts or I’m scared or I need help.

And yet—that’s exactly what I did.

After Connor died, after I lost my house, after I lost my job, Noah was already terrified. He had intense anxiety. He was afraid of dying. Afraid to be alone. Afraid the ground would disappear again.

I didn’t want to add to that fear.

So I did what I knew how to do.

I hid my emotions.
I swallowed my grief.
I stayed strong.

And without realizing it, I taught him exactly what I had been taught:
Don’t feel it. Don’t show it. Keep going.

That truth hurts.
And it matters.

The hopeful part—the part science often leaves out—is that epigenetics also shows us something else: gene expression can change. Nervous systems can re-learn safety. Patterns can be interrupted.

Healing doesn’t erase the past.
It doesn’t change what happened, but it does heal the ones who lived it.

The work I do now doesn’t just help me.
It helps Noah.
It helps my parents.
It helps the ancestors who didn’t have language, safety or choice.
It helps the children who may one day come after me.

This work isn’t selfish.
It isn’t indulgent.
It isn’t optional.

It’s generational work.

We repeat patterns until we heal them.
And when we heal them, the entire line shifts.

Sometimes the ancestors come close enough to remind us:

Keep going.
You’re not doing this alone.
You’re doing what we couldn’t.

If something in this stirred recognition—not guilt or blame, but familiarity—pause with it.

Ask yourself:

• What patterns did I inherit without choosing

• Which ones live in my body, not just my thoughts

• What might change if I honored what my body learned to survive instead of judging it

Healing doesn’t require perfection.
It requires honesty, compassion and willingness.

If you’re doing this work, you’re not behind.
You’re not broken.
You’re participating in something much larger than yourself.

And that matters.

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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December 5th marked fifteen years since Connor died.

That number still feels unreal. On one hand, it feels like a blip—like I blinked and somehow fifteen years passed. On the other, it feels like forever. Both can be true. Grief is strange like that.

What feels especially strange is realizing he’s been gone longer than he was ever here.

Fifteen years ago, in the raw aftermath of Connor’s death, I found myself at a place called The Sharing Place. I don’t remember how I found it—grief fog erases details like that—but I remember what it was: a grief support center for children who had lost someone significant.

At the time, they had a year-and-a-half waitlist. Noah and I couldn’t get in. And by the time there was availability, we were already in therapy, already “doing the things,” already surviving in the way people praise but rarely question. So we never actually participated.

But I did tour the building.

There’s a small loft space there. You climb a set of stairs and enter a quiet, sacred room where children have hung photos and obituaries of the people they’ve lost. Hundreds of them. Faces. Names. Lives.

And somehow—out of all of them—one obituary drew me in.

I walked straight to it without knowing why. It was for a little boy named Cole. His obituary was beautiful. Tender. Alive with love. It stirred something deep in my chest.

Later that night—or maybe the next day, the timeline is fuzzy—I told my friend Jason about the experience. Jason, who is now my husband.

When I told him the name on the obituary, his face went pale.

Cole was his dear friend’s nephew.

This was before I believed in signs or synchronicities, but even then, I knew:
that wasn’t a coincidence.

Fast forward fifteen years.

I’m a big believer in giving back—your time, your money, your energy—if you’re able. So when I was at a gathering in September and a friend casually mentioned she had started volunteering at The Sharing Place, something in me quietly leaned in.

I was already volunteering. Survivor Wellness. Breathwork for people in recovery and cancer treatment. CASA work for children removed from unsafe homes. On top of running my own healing practice.

My plate was full.

But still—I felt the pull.

I reached out to the volunteer coordinator, and by some small miracle, there was space in the October training. I signed up.

That day shifted something inside me.

Yes, Connor was my biggest loss. But suddenly I could see the earlier ones more clearly: my brother Jared, who died when I was very young. My sister Lisa, who died when I was eleven.

I realized I never truly grieved them.

No one sat little Angie down and explained death. No one helped her make sense of the fear, the confusion, the rupture. I felt an unexpected tenderness for the younger version of myself—the one who kept moving forward because there was no alternative.

The training itself felt less like instruction and more like collective care. By the end of the day, my heart felt full, steady and surprisingly calm.

We were asked which group we wanted to work with. Toddlers. Young kids. Teens. Adults.

I said I’d love to work with the teenagers—but ultimately, I trusted they’d place me where I was most needed.

A few days later, I received an email letting me know I’d been placed with the adult group.

That was all it said.

I felt an immediate hesitation. A tightening in my chest. Working with the adults felt heavy in a way I wasn’t sure I was ready for. I worried it might toss me back into the depths of my own grief—into a place I had worked hard to climb out of.

Still, I reminded myself that I had trusted the placement process. And if this was where I’d landed, there was probably a reason.

On my first night, we met early for check-in, sitting in a small circle as the coordinator pulled up the list of families and explained the group I was stepping into.

Complicated grief.

I had no idea that not only had I been assigned to the adult group, but that I would be sitting with this particular one.

Complicated grief is the term used for losses layered with additional trauma—suicide, violence, legal battles—circumstances that make grieving heavier and more isolating.

Then she began going through the families.

Fentanyl overdose.
Fentanyl overdose.
Suicide.
Fentanyl overdose…

And suddenly, the placement made sense.

Connor died from an accidental OxyContin overdose—back when that was the epidemic. Now it’s fentanyl. Different drug. Same devastation.

I’ve also lost people to suicide and have seen firsthand the devastation it leaves behind.

I was placed there because I could sit in that space without looking away.

The room itself is simple. A hodgepodge of mismatched chairs pulled into a loose circle. Nothing curated. Nothing fancy.

The children arrive first—storming in with frenetic energy, coats flying, voices overlapping, alive in the way only kids can be.

The adults follow more slowly. You can see the weight on them before they ever sit down. Shoulders rounded. Eyes tired. Grief announcing itself without needing language.

Two worlds entering the same room. Both hurting. Both trying.

As the families shared their stories, a familiar ache settled in my body. Different lives. Same unbearable weight. I was reminded how impossible it is to grieve your own loss while trying to hold your children together. How exhausting it is to rebuild a life while barely breathing.

Memories surfaced. The overwhelm. The despair. The way every day once felt like carrying something unbearably heavy up a steep hill—its weight pressing down, pulling me backward, daring me to stop.

During one of our recent sessions, the conversation turned to the holidays.

Traditions we’re carrying forward. Traditions we’re releasing. New ones we’re attempting to create. And the quiet truth beneath it all—that sometimes, we’re not celebrating. We’re just getting through.

As I listened, a realization settled in gently but firmly.

I have no memory of the Christmas after Connor died.

None.

I don’t know if there were gifts. I don’t know if my ex-husband came over to share the morning with Noah. I don’t know what the house looked like, what music was playing, or if we even had a tree.

It’s a complete blank.

I found myself wondering if some of the people in that room would one day look back at this season and discover the same absence where memory should be.

This is a common effect of traumatic grief. The brain reorganizes itself in an effort to protect us. Memory is often one of the things sacrificed.

For years, I thought something was wrong with me.

Now I understand—my nervous system did exactly what it needed to do to keep me going.

Fifteen years ago, I went to one grief support group. I hated it. I couldn’t leave fast enough. Sitting in other people’s pain felt like a threat to the fragile structure I’d built just to survive.

I see now why.

I had constructed a careful barrier around my heart—to keep the grief, the rage, the shame from overwhelming me.

Over the last few years, that barrier has slowly softened. Not torn down all at once. Loosened. Piece by piece.

There are still remnants—but now, I can sit with people in their grief without it undoing me.

That feels like healing.

It feels like a quiet return.

I’m honored to sit with these families at the beginning of their journeys. Not to fix anything. Not to push them forward. Just to be present.

Grief doesn’t disappear.
But when we let it move—when we stop trying to contain it—it changes shape. It becomes less suffocating.

If you’re in the thick of it right now, especially during the holidays, know this:
Not feeling like celebrating is okay.
Not being able to sit in other people’s grief doesn’t mean you’re broken.
Sometimes just getting through the holidays is an accomplishment worth honoring.

And if you can’t remember things—days, moments, entire seasons—that’s normal. It’s your nervous system doing what it was designed to do: protecting you so you can keep moving forward.

Be gentle with yourself.

Sometimes survival looks like stepping away.
Sometimes healing looks like being able to return.

Fifteen years later, life brought me back to the very place I once couldn’t stay—just to show me how far I’ve come.

And if you’re not there yet, that’s okay.
You’ll arrive in your own time.

With love,

Angie

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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There’s something tender about saying your story out loud — watching the words you once whispered in the dark finally breathe in the open air.

When Steph from the Notable Peeps podcast invited me to share mine, I didn’t bring a script. I brought a heartbeat, a few deep breaths and the lifetime I’ve spent learning how to rise from the ashes.

Before the interview, I sat with a question that I’ve wrestled with for years:
What is my story?

Is it about the losses?
The years when everything seemed to unravel — my marriage, my son, my home, my job — one after the other like dominoes falling in slow motion.
Is it growing up Mormon, never quite fitting into the mold?
Is it being one of the rare women in SaaS sales, constantly having to prove I belonged?
Is it about finding love again — the kind that rebuilds a life? About how Jason and I brought our families together — his daughter, my son — and beginning a new chapter I never saw coming?
Or maybe it’s about starting over at nearly 50 — building a business, building a life and trusting that it’s never too late to begin again.

I couldn’t fit it all into a soundbite. But I’ve come to understand this:

My story isn’t just about what I’ve lost.
It’s about answering the call to more. To truth. To alignment.
It’s about listening — not just to the world around me but to the voice inside.

And for years, that voice came through my dreams.
Night after night, they told me: you’re meant to write. You’re meant to share.

I didn’t always know how to listen, but I’m learning.
I’m learning to trust that my message — my story — will find the person it’s meant for.
That it might offer a glimmer of hope, or be the sign someone’s been waiting for.

The words were always there. Waiting.

In the interview, Steph and I talked about how grief became a doorway.
How healing isn’t about going back but about becoming who you were always meant to be.
We talked about the hard things — but also about what rises from the wreckage: resilience, clarity and purpose.

If any part of this speaks to you, I hope you’ll listen.

🎧 Listen to my conversation on Notable Peeps — available wherever you get your podcasts.

I believe in the power of sharing our stories — not for attention but for connection.
Our stories are threads that tie us together even when everything else feels like it’s falling apart. Maybe mine is just one thread in someone else’s healing.

And if you’ve ever wondered whether you’d feel whole again — whether your voice still matters — this conversation is for you.

May it meet you where you are.
And may it remind you that even in the darkest night, your soul still knows how to rise.

With love,

Angie

Another thread from my heart to yours.

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