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There is an iconic scene in the Marvel movie Doctor Strange when the Ancient One exposes Dr. Stephen Strange to energy work for the first time. That moment is the GIF above.

It is an important moment in the movie because Dr. Strange is a huge skeptic facing huge problems, and the Ancient One doesn’t hold back. The experience shatters Dr. Strange’s worldview. Suddenly, he finds himself struggling to understand a new reality. One he never believed was possible, but now feels he needs to master.

I know that exact feeling.

I went through something very similar, almost as dramatically as the GIF above.

Reiki did it for me.

It knocked my socks off, so to speak.

My Reiki Master went full “Ancient One” on me, and I had no idea any of that was even possible.

See, I was a skeptic myself. And I also had huge problems.

But before I tell you my story, let me make a brief introduction to the school.

This is my first post about my Reiki School, and I made part of it available in case you are curious. This is not one of my stories. I publish the stories on Wednesdays.

But since I sometimes mention Reiki when I write, you might be asking “what is this Reiki thing Carol keeps talking about anyway?”

I thought I’d use this opportunity to clarify a few things about Reiki, in terms everyone can follow, so you can be more informed and consider it for yourself.

But first, let me tell you how I got here.

I started studying Reiki in 2018, after a car accident in 2017 left me with a brain injury and horrible pain throughout my body.

I managed to hurt everything.

Much like the character Doctor Strange, who also had a car accident in the movie, my accident impacted my relationships, my body, my career, my emotions, and my mind. I was at my wits’ end when I started looking for alternative healing methods.

I was desperate.

A friend of mine told me Reiki would help with the pain. I trusted her, even though I had no idea what Reiki was. I just knew it was something Japanese.

I needed to do something. Medication was not enough to manage my pain levels, and I needed to learn fast.

The Reiki course I found on Udemy gave me a brief history of Mr. Mikao Usui’s life and a brief introduction to energy work, but it was very vague. There were quizzes and questionnaires about things I could have found on his Wikipedia page.

Nothing told me I would experience body sensations when receiving the attunement at the end of the course.

An attunement is how you enter a Reiki energetic system or how you climb levels inside one. Only a Reiki Master can give attunements.

I still had no idea what I was doing or what was about to happen when I received my Reiki attunement after completing the classes.

My teacher was in Canada and I was in Colorado. The session was done remotely, via email.

We scheduled the attunement for 7:30 PM my time.

She told me to wait until it was 7:25 PM, wash my hands, lie down, and close my eyes. No phone. No computer. She said the attunement would take around twenty minutes and asked me to stay put for the duration.

I had no idea what she meant by “attunement,” but I went in with an open mind and heart.

I went in with no expectations at all.

“Wash hands, lie down, close my eyes. I can do that.”

That’s what I thought to myself.

When the clock hit 7:25 PM, I washed my hands and dutifully chose to lie down on my yoga mat.

It felt like the right thing to do.

7:30 PM.

Suddenly, my hands were hot.

My whole body started to tingle. Even my gums were tingling.

I felt waves of sensation and emotion moving through me, and I experienced visions of light. I was seeing rainbow colors with my eyes closed and feeling like I was inside a dream, but I was fully awake. I was Doctor Strange, feeling it all.

As the attunement was happening, it was like my teacher was the Ancient One and I was Doctor Strange.

My Reiki Master had said the attunement would last twenty minutes.

I was prostrated on the yoga mat, glued to the ground, tingling and experiencing light visions for an hour and a half.

My hands were tingling as if I had used Vick’s, and my gums were tingling as if the gums themselves were moving.

It was WEIRD.

My teacher had said in the email that an attunement was “a gift that stays with you for the rest of your life.”

I remember thinking as I was laying flat on the mat:

“I don’t know if I want this for life!”

I am being honest.

I was spooked.

I received the title of “Reiki Master” that night, and my certificate came a few months later.

Truth be told, even after the attunement, I still had no idea what had happened.

Nobody had prepared me for that.

The tingling sensation was followed by the best sleep I had had since the accident.

Nice sleep, relaxed body, less pain. I was hooked.

Then came the challenge: I needed to learn how to do that on a daily basis for sleep and whenever I had a pain flare up.

I have to confess, I was supposed to join a discussion group on Udemy to practice Reiki with other Masters and I didn’t.

Instead, I decided I was going to “do it myself.”

According to the course, all I had to do was follow the instructions.

So I did.

Heat.

Tingling again.

Body calming down.

Muscles relaxing.

It worked!

That experience became the beginning of a daily Reiki practice that would eventually become my favorite form of self-care. It is also the reason why I teach Reiki.

But what is Reiki?

In its simplest form, Reiki is imagining your body made of light.

That’s it.

“Rei” in Japanese means “spiritual,” and “Ki” means “energy,” “life force,” or “vital breath.” Ki compares to chi in Chinese and prana in Sanskrit.

It’s not a religious experience.

It’s an energy experience.

Each person has a different experience. That was mine. I don’t know what you will feel or even if you will feel anything if you choose to join the school and receive an attunement. What I know is that the effects of Reiki tend to be very clear even for those who don’t feel a session: better sleep, relaxation, less pain, less anxiety, etc.

The school currently has five students, all attuned and, if you want, I can put you in touch with one of them so they can tell you what their attunement experience was like.

One thing I love about Reiki is that it is secular.

You can have any religion you want, or none at all, and still work with your own energy.

There is also something about Reiki that I find fascinating: it doesn’t seem to stop with the person practicing it. With appropriate training, you can practice Reiki with another person, or people, and even share it remotely, like my teacher in Canada did.

I don’t know exactly how to explain what happens there. I suspect there is still a lot we don’t understand about the relationship between our minds, our bodies, our imagination, and the experiences we call energy.

Maybe science will eventually give us a better language for it.

For now, I teach what I can observe and experience.

You imagine it.

Your body responds.

And that’s the part I find fascinating.

It’s the placebo effect taken to the next level.

That’s what I teach.

Not what you should believe, but what you can experience.

And that’s the beauty of it.

The experiences become stories and vice versa. You write it, you dream it.

Your imagination becomes part of the practice, and your Heart gets to participate in creating what happens next.

This is one of the things I love most about Reiki: there isn’t necessarily one right way to experience it.

The open part of this post ends here. Feel free to reach out if you have questions, comments or if you would like to talk to one of our students. They have all received their attunements from me and each had their own experience. Also, feel free to share this with that friend you have that loves Reiki and already has an attunement.

The reason for that is because I am offering two tiers.

Tier one has:
A full year of Usui Reiki training all the way to Master level with Gratitude Reiki as a bonus, attunements included, and hands on training. It is training without AI, with real interaction with me, Q&A and monthly meetings. You will also receive your attunements individually and privately. All that for the price most people pay for Usui level one alone.

Tier two: One full year of training with various advanced Reiki systems including Usui Reiki, Violet Flame Reiki, Kundalini Reiki, Karuna Ki Reiki, Tara Reiki, Gratitude Reiki and a couple others. The syllabus also includes how to create your own Reiki system and anchor it. This is advanced work that is not often taught and all for the price of one advanced attunement. This tier also includes access to a group on Whatsapp where we practice daily.

If you want to know more about Reiki, beyond this post, there is a very popular publication among the tech and startup community called Hacker News, run by Y Combinator. They have an interesting discussion about an article published in The Atlantic called “Reiki Can’t Possibly Work, So Why Does It?”

I’m linking to the Hacker News discussion here; the discussion itself includes a link to the original article.

Thank you.

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To celebrate the fact that The Inner Mediator is now available on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback, I thought I’d share an excerpt with you—and tell you a little about what inspired the book and how it came to be.

The Inner Mediator grew out of two things: my discovery that the parts of my body seemed to have memories, personalities, and thoughts of their own, and my systematic exploration of my own awareness.

I started a practice of randomly choosing a body part every day and “talking to it.”

I don’t know how else to explain talking.

I would say, “Hi, Jaw, how are you?” only to be immediately corrected:

“MyJaw.”

One word.

That’s her name.

The passage I’m sharing today is particularly important because it describes the first time I truly made contact with one of my body parts. It also tells the story of my car accident in 2017, which changed everything.

Nine years later, in 2026, my neurologist told me that my brain no longer shows signs of the injury.

I still have some symptoms related to pain and psychological effects such as anxiety, but overall, I am healed enough to go back to work.

Yay!

When I got the news, I wrote a book.

Here it is.

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L’Aventure Commence

Before we begin our conversation with the Heart, I want to tell you how my adventure started.

Several years ago, I was involved in a serious car accident.

I was sitting in the passenger seat when our vehicle was struck from behind by a drunk driver. The impact came at an angle, causing my body to twist violently inside the car.

My head hit the window and the ceiling.

My right knee hit my chin and throat.

My hands hit my face and entered my mouth, where I bit them.

My shoulders and arms were also bitten. My neck, jaw, hips, and legs absorbed forces they were never designed to absorb.

My torso, neck, and jaw whiplashed and spun in different directions while the seatbelt held my hips.

The experience left me with a brain injury and a condition affecting my proprioception; the body’s ability to sense its own position and movement.

One of the strangest consequences is that I often cannot tell where sensations are coming from.

If I close my eyes, I sometimes struggle to sense where parts of my body are located in space.

It was frightening at first. Now I use it as a superpower. It helps with meditation.

One night, around three o’clock in the morning, I woke up to something unusual.

My left leg was standing upright by itself.

At first I thought I was dreaming.

Then I felt a panic wave.

My leg was shaking. The leg was the one experiencing a panic attack, not the “whole me.”

I didn’t know if my leg was experiencing pain, numbness, confusion, or something else entirely but the panic attack seemed to be “local”, only the left leg was “freaking out.” The other leg was shaking a little bit but was on the bed.

Instinctively, I reached out and placed my hand on my left thigh.

The shaking stopped.

I gently rubbed my leg and spoke to it the way someone might comfort a frightened toddler.

“It’s okay.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re safe.”

“Back to sleep.”

“I love you.”

To my surprise, the panic settled.

My body relaxed.

And I fell asleep.

The same thing happened again.

And again.

And again.

Eventually I gave my left leg a nickname.

Her name was Tada. Simply because she would “Tada herself” out of nowhere.

At first the idea of a “Tada leg” was playful.

Almost silly.

But something interesting was happening.

Whenever I spoke to Tada with kindness, I felt calmer.

The fear diminished.

The tension softened.

Sometimes the pain itself seemed easier to carry.

I remember telling my therapist at the time about a “localized” panic attack and calming down my leg by “talking to it” but my therapist didn’t give the experience much attention, so I kept it to myself.

It felt silly to talk to my doctor about my “Tada leg” so I didn’t.

Years later, I found out that neuro scientists are acknowledging ‘localized panic attacks.”

I hope this book helps other people experiencing what I have experienced with Tada.

But let’s continue.

Then one night, while half asleep, I began imagining little Heart emojis attaching themselves to little leg emojis inside my mind.

Every leg emoji received a Heart emoji.

Then another.

Then another.

Until my imagination was filled with emoji Hearts.

Tada relaxed.

The panic passed.

And for the first time, I began wondering:

If my leg has a voice in my Inner World... Who else does?

Almost immediately, I sensed a response.

“Moi.”

The answer surprised me.

The experience felt clear, loving, and unmistakable.

Without fear, I asked:

“Who are you?”

I replied as if I had not recognized the voice…

And the response that appeared in my awareness was:

“C’est moi, ton cœur, Carole. Chouchou.“

“It’s me, your Heart, Carole. Chouchou.”

That moment changed everything.

What followed was years of curiosity, reflection, healing, and inner conversations.

I began exploring what might happen if I approached my body, emotions, and inner experiences with compassion instead of criticism.

The accident had filled me with self-doubt. I had lost the ability to do so many things and I didn’t know if those abilities would come back.

I used to rely on my brain for everything.

It was my whole identity.

To top it off, I would have horrific panic attacks where a thought would play on repeat inside my head: “I am going to be like this forever.”

It was time to change my inner conversations. My Inner World.

But could I?

Whether these conversations were psychological, symbolic, spiritual, imaginative, or something else entirely mattered less and less to me over time.

What mattered was that they helped me heal.

And that is the adventure I would like to share with you.

In case you are wondering, Chouchou speaks French to my Mind, my Emotions, and my Body.

A long time ago, a boy told me that French was the language of love.

My Heart believed him.

And she never changed her mind.

__________________________________________________________________________

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Thank you for reading a little part of The Inner Mediator.

So, what does all of this mean?

For me, Tada is where The Inner Mediator begins.

Before Chouchou ever spoke to me, before I started having conversations with my Heart, I had Tada.

My left leg was the first part of me that made me wonder whether the different parts of my body might have their own ways of communicating. I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t have an explanation for it. I only knew that when I treated Tada with kindness, something changed.

The panic stopped.

That was the beginning.

I started wondering what might happen if, instead of fighting the sensations in my body or criticizing myself for the things I could no longer do, I simply listened.

And then Chouchou answered.

That changed the direction of my life.

The Inner Mediator is not a book asking you to believe that your body parts literally have personalities. It is a personal experience. In my case, they talk to me, but I know they are me talking. I just expanded my consciousness to encompass my entire body.

The book is an exploration.

Are these voices psychological? Symbolic? Imaginative? Spiritual? Some combination of all of those things? I don’t know.

What I do know is that talking to the different parts of myself changed the way I experienced my body, my emotions, my pain, my fear, and ultimately myself. It made being me a richer experience.

And perhaps that’s what I hope you take from this little glimpse into the book.

You don’t have to believe me.

You don’t even have to understand it.

You can simply get curious and open up to the ideas.

Tada was the first one to speak.

Chouchou came next.

And once I realized there were voices inside my Inner World worth listening to, I had an entirely new adventure ahead of me.

If this strange little conversation between me and her left leg makes you curious about what happened next, The Inner Mediator is where the adventure continues.

Thank you for reading this little piece of my story—and for celebrating the paperback with me.

Yay. We made it.

Buy the Inner Mediator on Amazon.com

buy me a coffee?

I love you. Just like this. Unconditionally and unabashedly.

I love the Humanity in you. The best part of Humanity in you.

Why? How?

Very easily.

You and I are part of Humanity. I think Humanity is beautiful in a raw kind of way. Of course, she has ugly parts, too, and I see them as parts that need healing. Simple as that.

The disease, the mental illness of Humanity, is a lack of self-love. When you lack self-love, you are filled with fear. And with fear comes anger. With anger comes violence and war. These are just other symptoms of a lack of self-love.

I can love you because I love myself unconditionally, and you are a part of me. I can’t exist without you.

I am not alone. I am you. You are me. We are an “us” as humans.

I can only love myself completely if I forgive the unhealed Humanity in me: my imperfections, my fear, the parts of me that still need healing. That means I love the unhealed part of you, too.

It’s okay. I am safe. I can love from afar. That is self-compassion.

If I have compassion for myself, I can love myself as a consequence.

I am grateful for myself. I have profound gratitude for you, too. We are here on Earth together.

If you suffer, I suffer. I don’t want you to hurt, so these are my healing words for you. I hope it doesn’t hurt to hear them. Sometimes being loved hurts a little. It’s the part of us that rejects love, that thinks we are not worthy of it.

It’s okay. You will understand.

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Trigger warning: I am talking about pure emotions here: love, forgiveness, compassion, gratitude. Period.

I am not bringing forth a belief system. Each person is entitled to their own belief system, if they have one, and it would be wonderful if we did not clash over how to feel these pure emotions.

So, with that in mind, how does one know if they love themselves?

Let’s think about it for a few minutes together.

We are going to play with consciousness and see where that takes us.

First, when it comes to meditation, I know what people say: “Let go of the ego. Clear your mind. Become the observer,” etc., etc.

Yes, I do that, too.

But there is something else I do.

I don’t just let go of my ego.

I give it away.

We are going to play a little consciousness game.

You will take a little bit of your ego, a small part of you, a little “me” of yours, and give it to someone. Then you are going to say Ho’oponopono to them.

Ho’oponopono is the Hawaiian practice of repeating four phrases over and over again:

“I love you.”

“I am sorry.”

“Please forgive me.”

“Thank you.”

You will talk to your own self and you will say these words. Imagine the words as cards you give to the people we will talk to today.

Let’s start with a tree. Trees are people.

Your favorite tree.

In your imagination, with your eyes closed, imagine giving your ego to the tree.

Imagine the tree becoming your “Tree-Self” and being grateful for the opportunity to be human for a few moments.

Your Tree-Self can now imagine feeling touch, pain, warmth, and movement, experiencing sight, taste, and sound. It is a lot for a tree to feel, but it takes it all in and learns.

Now let’s do the same on our end.

You are now the Tree-Self.

You have roots, a trunk, and branches.

Your roots communicate with mycelium, and your branches communicate with birds and the wind.

What is it like to be your favorite tree for a few moments?

I don’t have a favorite tree.

As in, I don’t have any specific species that I connect with more than others.

Are you a tree?

That is enough for me.

I will touch your bark and imagine myself as you. I will say Ho’oponopono to you:

“I love you.”

“I am sorry.”

“Please forgive me.”

“Thank you.”

I will feel my feet as roots, and I will feel my face as the leaves that receive the sunshine.

Each of my freckles is a leaf.

They turn towards the sun, and my heart is filled with joy.

My roots are strong, and they hold me against the strongest winds.

I love being a tree on a windy day.

It clears my emotions.

Let’s expand our consciousness some more and do it again.

This time, give your “me” to Humanity.

She is probably a she, since there are more women on Earth than men.

Humanity is ageless. She is timeless, and she is curious.

You want to tap into her and learn a little about her.

Say Ho’oponopono to her.

You are a “Humanity-Self.”

She offers you her heart in gratitude.

You, as a tiny human, have the opportunity to feel the heart of Humanity.

Ooof!

Imagine yourself as tiny as a blood cell navigating through a human heart.

It must be loud!

What is Humanity’s heart like?

You have questions for her.

Go ahead.

Ask.

Let your “me” be the connection. Your “Humanity-Self.” It is you and her at the same time.

Let her words be yours.

Like the tree being you, imagine what it feels like for Humanity to be you, only you, for a few moments.

She feels your body.

She feels your pain.

She knows your emotions and your angst.

She knows you more than you know yourself because she knows your lineage all the way to the apes, all the way to the mushrooms and the trees.

She knows you as part of Earth’s ecosystem.

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So, is it easier now that she knows you to be her for a few moments?

Let’s try that.

Say to yourself:

“I am now Humanity. I can feel my heart.”

Wait for the thoughts to come.

Imagine what kinds of thoughts you would have for yourself, as Humanity experiencing you.

That is what we are looking for.

Let’s stay here for a few moments.

When I am Humanity, I have profound compassion for my human self.

Just as a wave is part of an ocean, I am but a wave in her heart, but she is keenly aware of me.

Her love for me is so immense that it overwhelms me and takes me whole, wave into the ocean.

It is scary to be the ocean.

But I know I am more than a single wave.

Let’s do it one last time so you understand the process.

You will experience being Earth.

You give her a little bit of your ego, a little “me,” and you are now a blue planet!

In many communities where this kind of meditation is practiced, Earth as a conscious being is called Gaia, the goddess from Greek mythology.

We don’t need formalities.

She is you. You are her.

You can simply imagine what it would be like to share your thoughts with her and vice versa.

It is when your brain takes the experiment seriously that you may begin to experience incredible insights, sometimes as if the experience were real. Whatever the word “real” means here.

This is what many spiritualists call “channeling.”

The intent of this experiment is not to teach you channeling. It is to teach you how to expand your consciousness.

Why, and what for?

Glad you asked.

When we expand our sense of oneness to encompass another being, we feel empathy. The more we expand our consciousness, the more room we make for empathy.

When you experience loving-kindness as a meditation practice, you start by finding love and kindness for yourself. Then, as you expand your sense of self, you grow the “me” to experience loving the Other.

When you become the other, when you turn your entire universe into a You-niverse, that is when the ego dissolves and you become small again.

It is this “wax and wane” of consciousness that transforms us into self-loving creatures. When everything is a self, when you love that self, you become pure love. This is how I found true self love.

So, now that you are playing with the self-love button, now that you are experimenting with your consciousness, I have a question.

What makes your eyes incandescent?

What lights you up?

What turns you into a lamp?

For me, it is Love.

Love for the trees, love for Humanity, love for Earth, and love for you.

You are me.

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This story is very different from all my other stories. I talk about reality, this reality, and real things that happened to me and shaped who I am today.

The Mermaid Sharknado is a meditation technique I came up with to cope with a series of panic attacks that started after a car accident. This story will not take you to Pretendland or any other magical place, unless you choose to follow the directions here and create your own Mermaid Sharknado.

If you suffer from intrusive thoughts and have experienced a panic attack, my dear, I am so sorry. Feel free to reach out to me.

I think it is important to show where my ideas come from, why Pretendland heals me, why I use light visualizations or Reiki, to settle inner conflict within me, and why I think you can do it too, if you like the ideas here.

I know the name “Mermaid Sharknado” is somewhat attractive, but there is nothing pleasant about being in the middle of one, unless you Mermaid yourself.

I knew nothing about panic attacks until I had my first one. I still didn’t know that’s what it was. It wasn’t until I had one so massive that I thought I was dying that I understood what those two words meant together. I don’t say this lightly. I wouldn’t wish a panic attack on anyone.

I remember my first one, but the one that really crippled me happened months later.

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I was living in a house with a big front yard and a smaller backyard, connected by two wooden fences. I had a simple task to complete: close the wooden gate to the small yard, close the gate to the big yard, turn around, go inside, and close the door.

I closed the first gate and immediately forgot I had done it.

I had been in a car accident about eight months earlier and suffered a brain injury. My short-term memory was very weak. I turned to close the second gate when I suddenly realized I had forgotten about the first one.

I got scared.

What if I left it open?

Then I forgot about the second gate.

I turned around, scared and confused, and noticed that the second gate was closed. But I didn’t remember closing it either.

I started to panic.

Did you close both gates?

I couldn’t tell.

I was inside a loop: closing gates, forgetting I had closed them, remembering that I needed to check, turning around, and not knowing who had closed the gates.

Sounds maddening because it was.

I arrived at the door pale, terrified, and sweaty. Then one thought started playing on repeat inside my head:

I am going to be like this forever.

The thought hit me like a sentence.

Disabled. For real. No way around it. My brain didn’t work. I was trapped inside a body with a broken brain.

I walked into the house, headed toward my bed, one foot in front of the other, my hands sliding along the walls because I was afraid of falling.

When I reached the bed, the sensations got worse.

I can’t leave this bed. If I do, I’ll mess things up.

And again:

I am going to be like this forever.

My heart started racing even faster. My breathing became shallow. My hands and feet were cold.

I am going to be like this forever.

The phrase played on repeat, like a broken record, for almost three hours.

Three hours of sheer panic.

I was afraid to grab the phone. Afraid to go to the bathroom. Afraid to ask for help.

I had no idea what a panic attack was until someone finally said the words out loud:

“You are having a panic attack.”

I decided right then that I was never going to go through something so gruesome again.

After three hours, I was exhausted. And I felt embarrassed and ashamed of what had set the whole thing off.

The gates.

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I started having panic attacks regularly after the gates episode. Whenever my brain was given a task that, for whatever reason, I couldn’t perform, that phrase would come back to haunt me.

I am going to be like this forever.

The realization that a panic attack could be fueled by my own thoughts came years later.

There are voices inside your brain that can cause you harm.

Whose voices?

Yours.

For a long time, I interpreted that to mean one thing: self-hatred.

Think about it. What kind of relationship with yourself would allow you to torture yourself with a phrase that questions your abilities, your future, and your worth?

What if it was true?

What if I really was going to be disabled forever?

Would I stop loving myself?

What if I could no longer rely on my brain to remember to close the gates and keep the dogs safe?

Did that mean I hated myself?

Did that mean I was less than I used to be?

Did that mean I hated what was left of me after the car accident?

No.

That was not going to be allowed.

I wanted my body to feel loved. I wanted every part of my body to be accepted. And I wanted my brain to know that I forgave her for the glitches. I forgave her for everything.

I just loved her.

And she needed to know that. I needed her to feel it from the bottom of my heart.

I managed to hurt my entire body in that car accident. It wasn’t my fault. The car was hit from behind by a drunk driver. But I eventually realized that I could still take responsibility for what happened next.

It was my body.

And it was my body to love.

So I decided I was going to love it the right way.

The idea for the Mermaid Sharknado came from another realization: music could calm my panicky brain.

There is a song by the Brazilian singer and songwriter Clara Nunes called “O Mar Serenou.” The title means “The Sea Calmed Down.” The lyrics say:

“The sea calmed down when she stepped onto the sand.
Whoever sambas by the waterfront is a mermaid.”

(Link to the song)

That was it.

A mermaid calming down the ocean.

I had recently watched the movie Sharknado, a literal tornado full of sharks, and as ridiculous and funny as it was, something about it reminded me of the feeling of being haunted by the thought that I was going to be disabled forever.

That’s when I had the idea to combine the two images.

The Sharknado would represent the panic attack.

The sharks would be the menacing intrusive thoughts, circling and biting at me:

You are going to be like this forever.

You can’t do this.

You are broken.

You are not who you used to be.

And the mermaid?

She would dance to the samba rhythm of the waves.

She would calm the ocean.

She would calm the sharks.

I needed to test it.

I had recently learned how to use Reiki for self-healing. I decided to add Reiki to the visualization. I was going to turn my panic attacks around.

I sat down to meditate.

When people describe the sitting position for meditation, I never see anyone describe it the way I do it. I am sure other people probably meditate this way, but I have never encountered anyone who describes it like this.

Here is how I do it.

I have a lot of pain and misalignment in my spine because of my car accident. For a long time, I could only meditate lying down until I learned how to align my body.

I sit on the floor, with no pillow. I make a triangle with my pelvic floor and visualize a triangle with my knees and pelvic floor. I place the weight of my head on top of my spine in a way that makes my head feel weightless, floating inside the triangle created by my pelvic floor.

I started practicing sitting on the bed first. Then I moved to the ground to feel, well, grounded.

I have a proprioception disorder because of the accident. I don’t know where my limbs are when I close my eyes. Meditation is an adventure. My head is floating and, other than the signals of pain coming from my body, I have no clue where my body is.

The first time I tried this meditation, it went really well.

I first imagined the movie Sharknado and myself as one of the characters. Then I named each shark. One for each intrusive thought I had.

I imagined each shark as an extension of my ego, a “me-shark,” and I imagined it with my voice.

Then I created a big white shark.

This was the “you’re going to be like this forever” thought in shark form.

Then I imagined the song playing. The mermaid was sambaing. And then, she stopped for a moment, she drew a pause symbol: a circle with two vertical parallel lines, like two columns.

When she did that, every single thing stopped moving.

It was as if we were inside a picture frame.

Silence.

The only sound was the mermaid song playing.

Although everything was frozen, the mermaid was not.

She moved toward the big shark, a she-shark who represented me. She was the scariest shark of all.

The mermaid gently touched the shark’s snout and whispered:

“I love you.”

The shark woke up from the freeze, but she was now calm, wagging her tail like a puppy.

She loved the mermaid.

The mermaid said:

“You will heal. Be patient. Allow the brain to forgive herself.”

I then turned on Reiki.

I imagined the entire Sharknado made of light, a huge golden swirl engulfing everything around me.

Then the sharks were made of light too, golden sharks.

The mermaid was made of blue and green light, and her arms and hands emitted teal light with golden hues.

With my eyes closed I imagined myself becoming the mermaid and moving my arms to move the lights in a teal and golden spiral.

I imagined the light making sparkling sounds, like tiny cracks of lightning.

I was no longer the one afraid of spinning hurtful thoughts. I was making the sharks move the way I wanted, I was controlling them, with love. In reality, I was telling my brain to reprogram the thoughts. The brain thinks with electricity, with light, and the light visualization feel real.

I moved my arms in real life, with my eyes closed, to make the visualization feel even more real.

I repeated the words of Ho’oponopono and imagined the sharks saying them:

“I love you.”

“I am sorry.”

“Please forgive me.”

“Thank you.”

It was done.

That was my first time calling the Mermaid Sharknado.

I was programming my brain with visuals that helped me resolve inner conflict.

But the question remained:

Would it work during a real panic attack?

When despair overwhelms you and overtakes your senses, would I remember the song?

O Mar Serenou.

The verb serenar, “to make serene,” is the main action here.

If you have ever seen the wrath of Poseidon, in a movie or in person, you know that a serene ocean is a godsend.

Afraid of the next panic attack, I started meditating with my mermaid regularly.

Once a month felt right.

I would sit for about an hour, eyes closed, imagining every detail as if it were a movie playing inside my head.

Each time, I would grab a shark and talk to it.

^{https://mindfulmermaids.com/}

There was a shark called “You’re Finished.” That one was about my career.

The shark was right. That career was finished.

But not me.

The mermaid would say:

“I love you. I am you and you are me. We are still here.”

That line helped me process the intrusive thought.

Earlier this year, my neurologist told me that my brain no longer showed signs of an injury.

I was healed. I created then a new career as a writer.

It has been two years since my last panic attack.

The shark that bit me then was not one I had prepared for.

It was a completely new shark.

My dog died unexpectedly, and a friend of mine took her own life, all within three or four weeks. I simply didn’t know how to cope with so much loss.

All of a sudden, I found myself so alone.

The mermaid came for me.

I was the shark.

I was spiraling.

I needed help.

She paused the pain, the hurt, the thoughts, and the noise.

Only the song remained.

O Mar Serenou quando ela pisou na areia.
Quem samba na beira do mar é sereia.

“The sea calmed down when she stepped onto the sand. Whoever sambas by the waterfront is a mermaid.”

Sereia is the Portuguese word for mermaid, and also for siren. I like how, in the song, it rhymes with areia, sand.

It makes me wonder how a mermaid can samba, or even step onto the sand.

She has no feet.

Maybe she is a human-looking siren, with legs and feet, so she can be me.

I have introduced the Mermaid Sharknado as a meditation to address panic attacks many times, to many people.

But I had never told anyone how it came to be.

If you got to the end of this story with me, thank you.

If you would like tips on how to Mermaid yourself, use your intuition, and drop me a line.

I am the last person to advocate against medical treatment, medication, therapy, or whatever traditional method you have been exposed to for treating panic attacks.

However, if you are considering the Mermaid Sharknado as an additional resource, I would love to write more about this topic.

Healing, in my world, means resolving inner conflict.

The moment I put myself in the “shoes” of the shark, I was able to reprogram the thought. I changed it to “I love and accept myself.”

I was too scared of the shark to do that before.

I hope this story inspires you to mermaid yourself, serene the oceans, heal your sharks.

Hello Pretend Astronaut,

This is your Captain, Camilla Bok Bok, the Space Chicken from the Running Chicken Nebula. On Earth I am an ordinary human. On Mars I have a few perks. You will soon find out that you too have special abilities on Mars, one of them is to program your own Molecules of Love, the Lovecules.

Thank you for joining the Space Croissant Shuttle to Mars. Today we are going to visit Pretendland on Mars and the Placebo Research Center beside Mount Olympus. We will be on Mars for twenty-four hours. We leave Earth every Sunday at 1 PM EST and return twenty-four hours later. If today is not Sunday, you will pretend it is until it feels like Sunday. Today is your healing day. We start now.

You will spend the night and sleep aboard the Space Croissant. The Space Croissant Crew will make sure you are properly fed, cared for, loved, and tucked in. If you want, you can receive Reiki from the crew, a Japanese practice of self-healing, as part of your experience.

Reiki will tell your body what it is like to feel loved unconditionally. It moves through the body like water, using the properties of light. You may feel heat, tingling, warmth, or a cozy feeling in your belly. It may also help you relax and prepare for sleep.

The goal of this trip is to give you the opportunity to volunteer for a research study on Mars. We will pretend with all our hearts that everything described here is real and that Pretendland is a real place. You will have the option to take placebo pills for your ailments. Physical or emotional. You job is to report back to the research team. We will take the pills in emoji format.

When you stop questioning the absurd, your newly perceived reality becomes your new normal. That is a feature, not a bug. We will take advantage of this feature in a safe and playful way as you develop your own placebo pill. You will use your placebo pill to imagine making peace with yourself, your past, your body, and your inner conflicts. The placebo will tell your brain that a topic is settled so you can finally put that conflict to rest. Inner conflict often manifests itself as physical pain. The goal here is to use an emoji pill to reduce your pain. We will use this story as an anchor for your self-healing. The more you visualize, the better the effects.

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On Earth, the idea behind the placebo effect is that you have two groups of people: one taking a trial medication and another taking a placebo, often a sugar pill, without knowing which one they received. Traditional placebo studies rely on participants not knowing whether they are receiving the medication or a placebo.

On Mars, the rules are a little different. No lies are allowed, but imagination runs rampant. What is the difference? Choice. You know it is pretend, and that is your power. You can pretend whatever you want. On Mars, everyone takes the placebo.

First, let me show you around our vessel and explain a bit about how we travel to Mars.

Follow me.

Here is the main area where our passengers are seated. The open space in the middle is where you can play with zero gravity. It takes us three hours to reach Mars and one additional hour to arrive at the Placebo Research Center. That is because we have to go through customs and complete the self-assessment before the study. Then we take the scenic route. After we go to the Research Center we will have dinner in Pretend Paris.

Here are the private sleeping pods. You get a teddy bear and a blanket that reminds you of the happiest years of your childhood. You have the option of sleeping as your child-self. Simply program the pod for the age you would like your body to be while you sleep. If you choose to be very little, like an infant or a toddler, you won’t travel alone. Someone from the crew will make sure you are safe and comfortable and even bring you a bottle.

If you are used to sleeping with a pet, we can do that too. The pod will bring forth the consciousness of your favorite pet, or pets, and you can sleep in a cuddle puddle. Our goal is for you to rest without anything disturbing your nervous system. True sleep, for as many hours as your body needs.

The Space Croissant runs on Unconditional Love, allowing us to travel instantly. We could be on Mars right now if we wanted. The four-hour trip gives you time to adjust emotionally and physically to what you are about to experience.

One more thing. We are not visiting present-day Mars. We are visiting Mars from the past, when it was a lush planet full of water and life. Pretendland is the ideal Mars, the best it ever was and everything it could be. After you visit Pretendland once, you fall in love with it and can use that emotional connection to return.

The Space Croissant also runs on pain. The more, the better the visuals. If you experience hallucinatory pain, give it all to the crew and we’ll use it as fuel. Your pain is a sentient being, it is an aspect of you. Mine, her name is Charlie. She is really potent and once took me to Europa, the moon, in one sprint. If you read more stories here you will get to know everyone. Forgive your pain as you let go of it.

Questions?

Ah, of course. Our spaceship is called the Space Croissant because that is the shape of the heliosphere as it travels through the Milky Way, according to a theory proposed by some very creative scientists.

Let’s prepare for launch. We go up, and then we go that way. We travel through timespace using Unconditional Love as both our fuel and our compass. The arrow points to our Lovecule, our One Molecule of Love. You will see it when we arrive at the Mount Olympus Placebo Research Center.

Attention, Space Croissant Crew. We are now fully boarded and ready to press all the buttons. If you are crew, turn on your Reiki buttons. Connect with your inner Puck. Make sure your self-love buttons are switched on. If you are a Reiki practitioner, feel free to turn on your Reiki. Here we simply say “Reiki on.”

We are ready for launch! I am headed to the cockpit.

We launch.

There is very little noise and no turbulence. We float more than we are propelled.

Passengers receive astronaut gear in emoji and gif in case they would like to go on a spacewalk once we reach cruise control. The whole trip exists to help your brain accept the idea that we are traveling through spacetime, in consciousness. If we simply “poofed” onto Mars, your brain wouldn’t have time to adapt. Some people would feel confused, and others might feel afraid. This way, we give our brains something wonderful to imagine.

We’re imagining a trip. Take your time. Smile. Take a deep breath. Close your eyes.

We are now taxiing. Did you have fun? Did you go on a space walk?

The air on Pretend Mars is a little different. There are invisible emojis that bind to the air and create the atmosphere. Peace emojis and love emojis so when you take a deep breath, the emojis bind to your lungs and make you feel as if you were in love. You know that “high” you have when you are in love with someone? Here you will feel that for yourself. If it is your first time loving yourself, take your time adjusting to the air. Raise your hand if you struggle and someone will come for you.

Let’s prepare for customs. You bring an “I love myself and I accept my body” card and you will receive a “yay!” Stamp and buttons. The idea is to talk to our Love Police, the Space Pants Force.

You don’t need to lie. If you have “beef” with your body or with your own self, you will receive buttons to apply Unconditional Love, Unconditional Compassion, Unconditional Forgiveness and Unconditional Gratitude on yourself. You press the buttons and the feeling goes straight to the heart. You can press as often as you want. Love won’t kill you. The source is the bottom of your heart. When you send love to it, it overflows.

Everyone ready? Let’s go!

The Space Croissant Shuttle has a bus that takes everyone to the Research Center. The people aboard are playing with their self-care buttons. There are people having laugh attacks aboard the bus. Love tickles and the combination of the love emojis in the air and the buttons make everyone enjoy the bus trip.

When we enter the scenic route, we get to see Mount Olympus. We were so close to it we couldn’t see it. Now we can see the beauty of the biggest mountain in the Solar System against the blue Sun. Yes, the Sun appears blue on Mars. The sunsets on Mars are beautiful.

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When we arrive at the Placebo Research Center we are greeted by Doctor Grace Augustine. She is one of the characters from the movie Avatar. That is how scientists “say Grace” at the Placebo Center. They say her name. It’s a little lab joke.

Captain Camilla Bok Bok shakes Dr. Grace’s hand.

“Thank you for having us, Dr. Grace. Could you explain today’s study?”

“Of course,” says Dr. Grace. “Here at Mount Olympus Placebo Research Center, we study how expectation, imagination, and self-compassion influence the way people experience their own thoughts and feelings.”

“So all volunteers know they’re taking a placebo?”

“Yes. Nothing is hidden. We don’t study deception here. We study what happens when people consciously choose to engage their imagination.”

“And the Lovecules?”

Dr. Grace holds up a tiny emoji pill.

“The emoji pills are imaginary, of course. But the experience is real. The Lovecules are inside. We invite our volunteers to fill the pill with whatever helps them feel safe, loved, and at peace. Then we observe what they discover about themselves.”

Captain Camilla smiles.

“I think our astronauts are ready.”

Everyone, let’s go to the lab so we can see what a Lovecule is made of!

“Dr. Grace, how did you isolate the Lovecule?”

Dr. Grace has a big grin on her face.

“We searched the hearts of villains from movies and cartoons. We wanted to know whether even the most feared characters were capable of love.”

“And?”

“Our first Lovecule came from the biological heart of General Grievous, from the Star Wars universe.”

“No way.”

“Oh, yes. We simply asked him to show us how much love he carried in his heart for his people.”

“What happened?”

“He completely overwhelmed our instruments.”

“Really?”

“The beauty of his heart exceeded everything we expected. We realized that love can exist in the most unexpected places. We collected a single Lovecule, brought it back to the laboratory, and learned how to grow more.”

“So every Lovecule in our placebo pills...”

“...is inspired by that very first discovery.”

Captain Camilla smiles.

“I knew Pretendland would never settle for ordinary science.”

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Dr. Grace opens a tiny glass jar and pours a single emoji pill into the palm of her hand.

It was unlike any pill the astronauts had ever seen.

The transparent capsule shimmered softly. Inside, hundreds of tiny emoji floated weightlessly.

Golden stars twinkled.

Sparkles drifted from one end of the capsule to the other.

Little red hearts bounced happily into one another.

Tiny unicorns trotted in slow circles, leaving trails of rainbow glitter behind them.

Smiling faces waved at anyone who looked closely.

Hugs floated through the capsule, wrapping themselves around lonely hearts before drifting off to find someone else to embrace.

Little kiss emojis bounced gently against the inside of the capsule as if they couldn’t wait to greet their next volunteer.

Every now and then, a Lovecule would sparkle brightly, and all the other emojis would pause for just a moment before bursting into a joyful celebration.

The entire capsule glowed with the quiet warmth of being deeply loved.

“There are no chemicals inside,” Dr. Grace says with a smile. “Only imagination, self-compassion, and a surprisingly high concentration of Lovecules.”

Captain Camilla holds the pill up to the light.

“I’ve never seen anything so fascinating and adorable.”

“May we take our pills now? What do the pills do?”

Doctor Grace: That is the beauty of our pills, they are programmable. These are programmed to address insomnia first, then “I-hate-myself-alitis”, then physical pain, then issues with addiction. You, however, can write down what you want your emoji pill to do and assign an emoji to address that problem. It is ok for your pill to address multiple problems at once.

Camilla Bok: All right, everyone. We will take the pills now and go to Pretend Paris for dinner. Then we will go back to the Space Croissant to sleep. Tomorrow morning we come back to Earth. We continue to take the pills in our imagination for a few days and see the effects. If you’d like to have your pill infused with Reiki, all you have to do is say “I accept” and you will receive the pill plus Love in light form.

Doctor Grace: We study Reiki here too and how it enhances the Lovecule and the effects of the pill. We discovered the pill works faster when paired with Reiki because Reiki is the deepest form of Self-Love. It is Light-Love.

Camilla takes the emoji pill with a little bit of water. She swears the pill was giggling. How weird. If you would like to take your pill, simply pretend you are taking it. Some part of your brain will believe it if you do it with emotion.

Dr. Grace: “To program, simply decide what you would like your Lovecules to practice tonight. Peace. Courage. Forgiveness. Rest. Joy. Whatever your heart needs most. Then imagine your favorite emoji carrying that intention inside the capsule.”

Captain Camilla looks around the room. She has a smirk on her face, her tummy feels warm and cozy… it is working!

“So every pill is unique?”, she asks.

“Exactly.”

Dr. Grace holds up the tiny glowing capsule.

“The first Lovecule taught us something extraordinary. Love can be found in the most unexpected places. Once we isolated it, we discovered something even more remarkable.”

“What was that?” someone asks.

Dr. Grace smiles.

“Love remembers where it came from, but it never becomes trapped there. Once released, it simply becomes love.”

The room grows quiet. People are programming their pills.

“No part of General Grievous is inside these capsules,” she continued. “Only the discovery that even a heart surrounded by fear was still capable of love.”

Captain Camilla nods.

“I already took mine. Who else is ready?”

The astronauts hold their tiny emoji capsules.

Each one shimmered with stars, sparkles, hearts, unicorns, hugs, kisses, and thousands of joyful Lovecules.

“If you would like your pill infused with Reiki,” Captain Camilla says, “simply say, ‘I accept.’”

Around the room, smiling voices answered.

“I accept. Cheers!”

Dr. Grace closed her notebook.

“The experiment begins the moment you choose to love yourself.”

Outside, the blue Martian sunset quietly filled the laboratory with light.

^{On May 19, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th Martian day, or sol. (source: NASA website)}

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I started a Love Chat where I show you how I send love to a new body part every day. The idea is for you to get used to loving your “meat parts” no matter what. They really appreciate the effort. To join the chat, click below:

Buy me a book!

I've decided to use the subscriber chat to create something special: a daily Ho'oponopono-inspired self-love practice.

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If you've been reading my stories, you already know I believe consciousness is wonderfully flexible. It can extend to our emotions, our body parts... and even our Pucks.

Every day (or close to it), I'll draw a card with a different body part, record a short video like the one above , and invite us to practice saying, "I love you" to that part of ourselves. It may sound whimsical, but I've found that these tiny moments of love can have a profound effect.

Our mission is nothing less than to help cure the global epidemic of I-Hate-Myself-alitis.

To accomplish this, I'm recruiting volunteers for the world's newest placebo study. The rules are simple: everyone gets the placebo, nobody is a scientist, and we're all encouraged to compare notes. If we accidentally end up loving ourselves a little more, we'll call it a very suspicious coincidence.

These daily videos and conversations will be available exclusively in the subscriber chat. My hope is that it becomes a warm, playful space where we can encourage one another, share our experiences, and practice self-love together—one little "meat-bit" at a time.

If that sounds like your kind of experiment, I'd love for you to subscribe and join us.

I can't wait to meet your Puck—and all the other wonderful parts of you. 💙

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^{Puck finds a piece of wood that has been exposed to 70,000 joules and uses it as her launch pad.}

A couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to the notion that you, too, like me, have one Unit of Wonder, one Unit of Consciousness. I call mine “Puck.” Not because she is small, she doesn’t experience size, but because she is a being from the zeroth dimension.

A Puck has no depth, length, width, a shadow, color, gender, size, or any notion of time. Mine chooses to be called “she,” and she simply is. Puck probably doesn’t even vibrate. I imagine her perfectly still, frozen like a frame from a movie, yet fully self-aware. As long as I am aware of her, she is aware of me. We are the same person. She is my Puck-self.

Together, we traveled through a few dimensions with Puck as she experienced taste, size, duality, emotions, touch, and pain. Puck loved it all. If you would like to revisit that story, it is called “Puck, the Zero-Dimensional Self Goes on an Adventure.”

Last week, we explored the notion of size, and Puck went big! We expanded her awareness to the point (pun intended) that she became galaxy-sized, felt gravitational waves, and met Andromeda and the Milky Way. We imagined them as beings with consciousness too. It was a fantastic experience. That story is called “Hugging Andromeda.”

Today, instead of growing larger, we’re going smaller. We’re going to shrink Puck to the size of an atom so she can continue exploring our Universe Within.

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Here is what scientists call the most accurate image of an atom.

What do you see?

I see fractals.

I see little tentacles.

As Puck approaches my Atomic-self, she feels vibration... and experiences the passage of time.

Or does she?

Here is the first question we’ll ask ourselves as we imagine our Puck-selves meeting and greeting our Atomic-selves:

Do atoms experience time?

Do they age?

Would they remember this encounter?

I certainly will, so let’s explore the idea.

I don’t know if atoms age, but they certainly change over time. Why is this relevant to our first encounter? Because I suspect it went something like this:

Puck: Oh, hai, Atomic-self!

Atomic-self (giving Puck a hug): My love, I have always been here. Don’t you remember us?

Puck: I only remember now... I don’t have the bandwidth for... wait... so we have a past? Before now? Before life?

Atomic-self: Life happens. Consciousness travels. We can travel through time. Do you remember?

Puck: No, I don’t remember us before now. But you feel… familiar?

Atomic-self: We have always been here and will always be.

Puck: What is it like to be you? To be me... as you?

Atomic-self: We are there when stars are born. We are there when they go nova. We simply change with them. You can remember it if you expand your now. Make it a big now.

Puck: What connects everything? What am I expanding?

Atomic-self: Self-awareness. A pattern that remembers itself.

Puck: Ooooh...more of me?

(Leans forward in curiosity.)

Show me.

Atomic-self: Look closely, Puck. You already know this. Neurons reach like rivers. Rivers branch like lightning. Lightning spreads like tree roots. Tree roots bloom like galaxies. And galaxies... hug with tentacles, like mine. It’s the same dance, repeated over and over. We call these patterns fractals.

Puck: Are they... alive?

Atomic-self: As much as you are. As much as I am. The Universe Within is alive. The Universe Without... whether it is alive is still a mystery. If it is, wouldn’t it be funny?

Puck: But they’re all... me?

Atomic-self: Someone called it a “You-niverse” for a reason.

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Puck: What do I do with that idea? I don’t know what my bigger “mes” expect of me.

Atomic-self: Heal yourself, Puck. Love yourself. Let go of judgment. You are perfect as you are and as you change. Be kind to yourself. Reach for me with your tentacles. I love you.

Puck: But I don’t have tentacles like you. I’m just a dot.

Atomic-self: Aren’t you human? What are fingers? And what about your emojis?

Puck looked down at herself with her emoji eyes.

She had emojis for everything so she could connect with her Human-self in 3D, through consciousness, through meditation. She had a little pink emoji bow, emoji lungs, an emoji heart...

She smiled with her emoji face.

Her fingers.

Tentacles.

Ten tiny tentacles. “Ten tickles,” she thought, and giggled. Little giggle emojis appeared around her. She was manifesting her thoughts in emoji.

Atomic-self: Remember your kid hands?

Puck: The hand-people from when we were kids?

Atomic-self: You called them dinosaurs. Dogs. Octopi. You thought you were pretending.

Puck: I was. They were my companions. They were my friends. I was so alone.

Atomic-self: From their point of view, it was all real. You imagined them in your little hand theater, with yourself as the only audience. But for them... they were octopi! They had tentacles! Your shadow played too. Your shadow misses playing with you.

Puck wiggles her emoji hands and fingers. She remembers.

Atomic-self: Let’s prepare a message for The Archeologist!

My Archeologist-self comes from the future and is loosely inspired by a character from Doctor Who. She travels through time studying consciousness, especially Pucks. She excavates memories the way archaeologists excavate ancient cities. Every memory we leave behind becomes another discovery. If a Puck has a very big Now, she can remember being the whole Universe.

You can never judge a Puck… Some are mostly fear, anxiety, and self hatred. Other Pucks can contain the patterns of the Universe within themselves and can anchor memories of being celestial bodies.

Atomic-self often explores her own Universe Within with Puck. The thing is, sometimes Puck forgets these encounters and needs to be reminded so they can explore together. Atomic-self has her own Inner Universe to explore and Puck struggles with data retention in such small environments. Sending logs to the Archeologist-self solves the problem.

Atomic-self: let’s use this emoji baby bottle as a container.

Puck: How many times have I done this with you? When did we start?

Atomic-self shrugs and says: We always start with the container, as we move, you will remember. What would you like to say to her?

Puck: I feel that I love her so much. Have we met? Have I met the Archeologist?

Atomic-self: She gets our messages. She is us, but she is in the future. She feels what we feel. That is why you feel love. Let’s create a beautiful memory and send the logs with all details to our Archeologist. Where would you like to go in imagination with me?

Puck: We keep talking about tentacles… is there a celestial body…?

Atomic-self: The Octopus Nebula!

Puck: How do we get there?

Atomic-self: They are already here, remember? Tentacles made of fractals. In consciousness, all you have to do is breathe. Would you like to imagine our rocket?

Atomic-self helps Puck find the right emojis so her trip to the Octopus Nebula “makes sense.” It is very weird to travel without moving.

Puck: And the Archeologist?

Atomic-self: She will see what you see, feel what you feel. She will experience this Now, as big or as small as we make it! Let’s have fun!

I’d like to close this story by imagining Puck and Atomic-self exploring the universe together aboard the Space Croissant Rocketship, leaving behind memory logs for the Archeologist inside emoji baby bottles. The Space Croissant is an emoji rocket, perfectly adapted to Puck’s needs. Thousands of years in the future, my Archeologist-self discovers their trip logs.

There really is an Octopus Nebula, also known as Sh2-294. They live in the constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. Somehow, it feels perfectly fitting that the Unicorn would have an Octopus Nebula. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Is this reality really real? I wonder what my Archeologist-self will think when she discovers today’s memory log.

^{(Andromeda’s actual size if it was brighter, according to the Internet)}

I recently learned about something called “Hugging Andromeda,” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

“Hugging Andromeda” refers to the enormous, nearly invisible halo of hot gas surrounding the Andromeda Galaxy. It stretches about a million light-years into space. The halo is so vast that it may already be brushing against the Milky Way’s own halo, as if the two galaxies had started reaching for each other billions of years before they might one day merge.

The best part? That future merger isn’t a certainty. Scientists now estimate it’s roughly a fifty-fifty chance. And if it does happen, it probably won’t be a dramatic collision. It would be an incredibly slow merging, with most stars and planets simply passing one another in the vastness of space, eventually forming an egg-shaped galaxy.

In my previous post I introduced you to Puck, one of your selves, hypothetically, from the zeroth dimension. Puck is what I call the smallest Unit of Wonder, or Unit of Consciousness. Together, Puck and her sentient Photon friend travel the dimensions of our Inner Universe of Awareness.

When we played with Puck, jumping dimensions last week, we explored the scientific notion that our brains can perceive up to eleven geometrical dimensions and, therefore, we had multiple “selves” in each level. Each one with awareness of the others. Together, they are your Higher-Self, your Pretend-Astronaut-Self, according to the Space Croissant protocol. The Space Croissant is our imaginary spaceship.

Because Puck can navigate dimensions and uses emotions as fuel, she travels instantaneously, from a timeless perspective. Puck, therefore, can see, right now, the hypothetical “hug” between the Milky Way and Andromeda in about six to ten billion years. From Puck’s point of view, it is happening now. Bluckle up!

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Now let me bring you to this reality for a minute or two, for context. Something happened here that inspired this post and I am willing to share it.

It was Sunday, around 7 am, January or February in 2019. I remember going to the kitchen and making sure I didn’t make any noises to wake up the rest of the house. The Colorado winter had coated the yard white and the sunrise was making beautiful reflections in the snow. It was going to be a perfectly sunny day. The air was crispy and the dogs were still asleep. I had my back to the window when I felt something. The sensation was similar to being under water and someone sending an underwater wave your way from up close. I was preparing to make some coffee when I felt the “air wave” with a water feeling hit me from behind. Very subtle but it made me turn around.

I was alone. The sun had just risen and I could see it from the window, alongside a house and some woods. I remember thinking, “Did I just feel the sun?” Amused by the thought, I pulled my favorite app on my phone, SkyWalk, with the locations of celestial bodies and galaxies in the sky in relation to where I was. I pointed the phone app to the window to see “who did it” and the galaxy Andromeda was rising behind the sun. I felt puzzled… “something” had “nudged” me. I felt it.

I had been reading about gravitational waves for the past few weeks and tried to imagine one. “Maybe I have to be really still to feel it” and looked through the window, towards the sun, fast-blinking to simulate an alternate state of consciousness, and then I stopped and looked at a sunray entering the house through the window sill. It worked. I felt the sensation again, this time the “wave” touched my face. What on Earth was that? A “nudge,” this time coming from the window.

“My concussed brain is playing tricks on me,” was the rational explanation. I was feeling the air “move” as if it was water and feeling “waterly waves” in the air. What else could it be other than my poor concussed brain having a hard time processing information and “playing” with the perception of sensorial stimuli?

Concussed or not, my imagination, my whimsical side, was telling me I had felt a gravitational wave, a nudge from Andromeda. Why not explore the idea? I then searched online “would a human feel a gravitational wave?” and “can we feel Andromeda’s gravity on Earth?” I dove head first into the discussions on Reddit and Quora on the topic. I didn’t comment, though. I was too spooked to share what I felt, what I thought it was, and to tell anyone online that “Andromeda had poked me.”

Whatever it was that I felt that day, it stayed with me over the years. Eventually, the notion that I had a “Puck-self,” a “zeroth-dimensional self” came after the Andromeda “nudge.” The Andromeda “poke” was part of the train of thought that solidified the notion of Puck for me. To travel in spacetime, in imagination, I needed a dot with awareness, an imaginary spaceship, a point in time, a destination, and fuel! Read my previous articles and you will learn I use either pain as fuel, grade “Delirious Delicious,” or emotion, Unconditional Love: the fastest emotion of them all.

I’d like to invite you to join me in imagination, but first, you need a point of reference.

Did you know that, in terms of orders of magnitude, the distance between the size of a human body and an atom is roughly the same as the distance between that same body and the Milky Way? I love that thought.

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Now, back to Puck. Puck is your One Unit of Consciousness. It’s a “You.” As You, Puck is only limited by your imagination. Now imagine Puck growing from a zeroth-dimensional perspective to a timeless dimensional perspective and make her grow in size too. There, just imagine Puck really, really big. Imagine your own Puck-Self the size of Andromeda and the Milky Way. Big enough for her to create her own imaginary gravitational waves and impact spacetime. Imagine them now as people, moving towards one another, going for a hug. You are a witness, you are a guest.

Milky Way: Hi, Puck! You got so big we can now hug you!

Andromeda: I knew you would find a way!

Puck: I matter?

Milky Way: Looks like Puck is full of puns!

My goal with these visualizations isn’t to convince you they’re real. It’s to tease your imagination into exploring new possibilities. When imagination expands, awareness often follows.

For example, scientists found out that the brains of people that learned how to fly with virtual reality wings wired themselves to adapt to the extra “body parts.”

According to a new study published in Cell Reports, researchers studied the visual cortices of twenty-five people who used a VR device to simulate flying with digital wings, and the results showed that their brains adapted to the wings as if they were real.

That means, if you close your eyes, right before you fall asleep, and imagine your zeroth-dimensional self growing in consciousness, awareness, expanding into other dimensions and accessing a timeless realm where they can interact with galaxies as if they were people, your brain will treat the experience as a memory. That’s right. A memory. If you put emotion into it, it will feel real.

Your brain is the most fantastic “console” in this universe. You can create memories of impossible things, if you train it with emotions, just a little bit.

I do that. I talk in my imagination to celestial bodies, to galaxies, nebulas, and planets. I take my Puck everywhere aboard the Space Croissant every night, in this universe and others. Why not?

When I do that before bed, I have amazing dreams, I wake up happy and feel healed, and I feel loved by the Universe that surrounds me.

I live in wonder and in awe. I am aware of Me.

And my “mes” are magical.

💙

Today, I’ve set myself a tall order. I want to take you on a multidimensional adventure. If I don’t quite pull it off, that’s on me—not you. But if I succeed, we will have quite a ride.

Before we talk about Puck and other dimensions, we need to address a few issues when it comes to space travel. First of all, our bodies are so adapted to Earth’s atmosphere and gravity that we get sick, fast, whenever we leave our planet. So far, no artificial gravity and radiation shield can compensate for the molecular changes our bodies undergo when we leave the planet for a few months. Second of all, if we could somehow overcome bodily issues, including the emotional and mental toll, how would we overcome the insane distances? Even if we could travel at the speed of light we would still be light-years away from other suns, other systems, other galaxies. It is almost as if we were never meant to leave Earth… ever. Sigh… but what if there was another way?

Since reality is not collaborating, let’s play with our imaginations. There is one thing faster than light: emotion. An emotion can make you travel impossible distances, including traveling to the past or to the future, instantaneously. One scent from your childhood and you are seven again, at your grandparents’ house.

So what if we travel in space powered by emotion? How far could we go? And how can our minds imagine the whole experience when we don’t have a point of reference? Keyword here, “point.” The smallest possible traveler is a point. Mine happens to have a name. Her name is Puck.

If you read my previous posts you know three things: 1) I use my imagination to cope with chronic pain because of a car accident. 2) I spent years building an imaginary place called Pretendland. In Pretendland there is no pain and 3) in Pretendland my body parts have consciousness and talk to me. Part three is the basis of my book, the Inner Mediator.

Today we will talk about dimensions and how to navigate them, in consciousness, using our imagination. Easy peasy, right? If you ask yourself, yes.

First let’s break down the perception of a few dimensions, in consciousness, so you get the hang of it.

The third dimension: you have a “meat body,” a “meat-self.” You have the perception of depth, width and length. All solid objects also have these properties and you perceive them the same way.

The second dimension: You have a “shadow body,” you have a “shadow-self.” That self has no depth but what if our shadow self has consciousness? Imagine yourself giving a bit of ego to your own shadow, a little “me.” Imagine the shadow of you coming “alive” with awareness and celebrating their own self-awareness. Your Shadow Self can do things your “meat body” can’t. It can stretch and bend and merge with other objects. It is so much fun to play with our shadows! When was the last time you did it? Perhaps you used to play with your hands and your shadow when you were a kid and you stopped. What if your shadow misses that? What if they miss you?

The first dimension: a line without depth or width. You are a line. You are aligned. You can imagine yourself going back and forth. If you have consciousness as a “meat-self” it’s perfectly fine to carry that consciousness and self awareness as you move through different dimensions.

The zeroth dimension: you are a dot. You are “Puck.” No weight, no length, no width or depth. You’re just a dot. Chances are you don’t even vibrate like an atom does. I bet vibration and resonance are things that only happen in higher dimensions and Puck is static. Now let’s go a bit deeper in our description. Puck probably doesn’t have color, gender or a shadow. I think Puck just is. All that your Puck self does is “to be” all day. It is probably “to be-ing” right now. What happens when we give Puck a “me?” What is the first thought Puck will have when you give them awareness?

I stumbled upon Puck while playing space travel in Pretendland with my body parts. I have a very cute mole on my right foot I named Puck and I remember starting to play with Puck in my imagination. “Come on, Puck, let’s visit The Heart, Chouchou!” Yes, my body parts have names, personalities, and back stories.

After my car accident I had to spend quite some time in isolation. Brain injuries are brutal when it comes to killing your social life. My social life became my body and my imagination.

Now that my brain has healed, I still practice transcendental meditation but I prefer my secular ways. I play in my imagination with gods, angels, unicorns, and dragons but I don’t follow any particular dogma. I like to let my Heart, Chouchou, guide me. Unconditional Love is our fuel. It used to be pain itself. I wrote about my pain, her name is Charlie.

Now let’s enter further down the realm of my imagination. Everything here is pretend and you are welcome to tag along or not.

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The fourth dimension: The dimension of time and emotions. Here emotions are raw and out of control, they can push and pull your ego, your “me,” from one corner to another instantaneously and you don’t have time to react because it all happens so fast. You are here, a stimulus triggers a memory, that triggers an emotion, and you are in the Past. You are there, a scent triggers a fear, that triggers a different emotion, and you are in the Future, having a panic attack. It all happens outside the frontal lobe. When your nervous system is dysregulated, the fourth dimension can be a very scary experience! Quick! Jump to the fifth dimension!

The fifth dimension: it is the dimension of our imagination where everything has consciousness and awareness of you. How do I know that? I made it up. How to navigate it? You will grab a bit of your ego, little “mes” and share that ego with everything that surrounds you. The whole universe around you is a reflection of you now, including your emotions. Your emotions get a “me,” your planet gets a “me,” the Sun gets a “me,” and all your body parts, all the way to your atoms get a “me.” We are all “mes” together, we are a collective of consciousnesses.

What about Puck?

Puck jumps dimensions in Fibonacci sequence to avoid the tumultuous fourth dimension.

Why Fibonacci? Because it is pretty. Because it imitates nature. How is it possible? We made it all up again. We had plenty of time.

We who? Myself, my body parts, my Puck, and the people that travel with me in imagination to Pretendland every Sunday on Reddit. The Space Croissant Crew.

Why Space Croissant? Because according to scientists that theorise these things, our heliosphere travels the Milky Way shaped like a croissant. That’s right, we are travelling through space already, navigating the Universe aboard a perfect ship adapted to our bodies: our heliosphere. To travel, all we have to do is close our eyes, smile, and dream.

So, if you like the idea of your Puck jumping around dimensions and navigating space aboard a perfect ship, imagine how your Puck feels when you give them a “me!”

Let’s imagine together. You are now Puck. Puck is just a dot but you will use your fifth dimensional skills to “accessorize” them and prepare them to travel.

I give my Puck gender. I like to call her a “she.” She’s excited to go. I also give her emoji arms, legs, eyes, a little emoji mouth, a nose, a little heart, and a little pink bow so she feels special.

We jump to the first dimension and Puck screams “weeeee!” as she goes back and forth exploring movement. It’s her first time!

We now jump to the second dimension and Puck is scared of all the shapes her shadow self has. She can be huge! She had no idea she could change sizes!

The third dimension comes with colors, vibration, smells and sensations. “Ouch! What is that?!” “That is pain, Puck and yes, you can talk,” says Chouchou, my heart.

Puck is overwhelmed!

Puck jumps to the fifth dimension because she loves all things Fibonacci. She is now safe in a land where she is at the same level of consciousness as the whole body.

What about the other dimensions? What is further up?

Scientists say our brains can experience up to eleven geometrical dimensions. In Pretendland, I like to imagine there are eleven Selves of you. Each one with more awareness than the previous one.

Let’s follow the Fibonacci sequence:

0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13, 21…etc.

How do I jump, as Puck, from the fifth dimension to the eighth? You just imagine you can. Use emoji wings!

In the eighth dimension, everything is infinite and we perceive infinity as “Now.” So, the eighth dimension is “now o’clock” where we interact with all infinite beings from Pretendland. Puck takes an “infinity pill” so she doesn’t feel infinity sickness. It is like motion sickness but it happens when you remove time from the equation. The human experience equation. Even though Puck is just a dot, she is human because she is me. She is capable of “me-talk” and has “me-consciousness.” She has her point of view and therefore her own human experience.

See? Traveling this way is much easier than building rockets.

What about dimension thirteenth? I don’t know. In our imagination it is the dimension we break with dogma and the laws of physics and math.

It is on dimension thirteenth that Puck receives the title of “One Unit of Consciousness,” she is my smallest self capable of wonder. Puck grabs her aware and alive friend Photon, aware and alive per the laws of the fifth dimension, and says “buckle up, Photon! My Unconditional Love will take us on a ride around the galaxy! Let’s visit Fifi, the T-Rex that ate my law diploma 66 million years agoooooooooooo!!!”
Poor Photon had no idea what “instant travel” meant until it was right in front of a hungry T-Rex from Pretendland! Tip: if you want to meet (or dare I say “meat”) Fifi, she represents Fear of Failure, Fear of Falling, Fear of Feelings, and Fear of Death… by T-Rex. Meeting (meating?) Fifi is one of the highlights of visiting Pretendland.

Can you tell by now that it is much easier to travel in imagination using your own Puck as your designated Pretend Astronaut than worry about radiation? That strong emotions like Love can take you anywhere you have a strong emotional connection with? As a writer, my job is to share with you my inner world, my characters and my relationship with them. This way, you can rethink your own relationship with your body and your emotions, give them awareness and discover and explore your own Puck-Self. You can now travel in Love, in consciousness, hopping around galaxies with your friend Photon who relies on your emotions to travel. It is always a good idea to bring light with you when you are visiting new places, in your imagination.

The twenty-first dimension is the cartoon dimension. I am going to stop here because I should have stopped at dimension eleventh, according to scientists (wink, wink). I don’t want my Puck to get tired. She needs to know how to go back. This is great for a first trip around the galaxy.

In case you are still skeptical about my ‘Puck ways” or wondering if you have a Puck yourself, ask yourself, “What would it be like to dream in dots? To feel music for the first time from Puck’s point of view? To taste food? To feel touch? To see colors? To be a cartoon?”

Puck taught me how to love myself deeper than loving my own atoms. She taught me there is consciousness in stillness. She taught me that Love crosses dimensions. I now have a little playground for Puck in my imagination. My own “flea circus” where she jumps dimensions and explores the Universe Within. Puck is unquenchable! Ooof!

Once I travel back to the zeroth dimension, I have a happy and properly exhausted Puck. She tasted things, she smelled things, she touched things, she felt the passage of time, she touched her shadow, and she saw herself as a cartoon. Puck is truly fulfilled. And me? I am healed and ready to sleep. Puck says, “Good night,” to Chouchou, my Heart. Chouchou smiles. “Good night.”

Last week I wrote about my pain, Charlie, and how she helps me cope with proprioception disorder and a brain injury resulting from a car accident. Charlie acts as my “bat signal,” telling my body where the brain is and vice versa. She is also responsible for fueling my imaginary space rocket and, ultimately, taking me to Pretendland. She is my “grade A Delirious Delicious” fuel and I am very grateful for Charlie. You see, pain medication does strange things to my brain. If I take too much, it can actually make my pain worse. So I can’t rely on medication alone.

Pretendland is the place I go in my imagination to heal. Today, there is an entire network of Pretendland locations throughout Pretend Space in my heart. My heart holds universes. We have a tiny base on the Moon run by a T-Rex called Fifi. Our headquarters are on Mars, and there is Pretendland on Europa, Jupiter’s moon. We even have a Pretendland on Planet X, also known as Planet Nine. The place is full of unicorns.

I say “we” and “our” because every Sunday, a group of more than thirty Reiki practitioners and I take around two thousand people to Pretendland in our imaginations. For twenty-four hours, we pretend the network is real and everyone there is real. It’s like a video game you play with your eyes closed, right before you fall asleep. This is how we reconnect with our Inner Child.

What for?

To resolve inner conflict.

To practice self-compassion.

To give our imaginations a place to play.

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Many of us also find that Pretendland helps us cope with pain, anxiety, or depression. For me, it has become an important complement to my healing.

Pretendland started with a dream. It was the most beautiful dream of my life.

In the dream, it was orientation day for new students on a university campus, and I was with a group of six or seven people. It was my first day of graduate school.

We arrived at a large amphitheater with a domed ceiling. Class would start in a few minutes. From behind me, I felt someone come close and reach out to press a switch on the wall beside me. I only saw his hand, but I could tell he was standing right next to me, as close as if we already knew each other.

The moment he flicked the switch, the ceiling opened.

I looked up and saw Jupiter spinning at full force right in front of my face. It was so close I thought I was in danger. Huge caramel swirls rushed past with incredible speed. It was awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time.

I cowered and looked at the others in shock.

The boy who had opened the dome had a welcoming, mischievous grin on his face. Everyone else was casually talking about trivial things, completely ignoring the giant spinning planet above our heads.

That was when I saw Earth and Mars off in the distance and realized where I was.

I was on Europa, Jupiter’s moon, 700 years into the future.

My heart was beating fast. My heart is called Chouchou, and she had just recognized that smile from a distant past on Earth.

I woke up sweating and was still in shock when the pain waves hit. I had been in a car accident only a month earlier and had managed to injure my entire body. The pain was the “hallucinogenic” kind.

I was convinced, deep in my heart, that my pain had taken me to Europa.

Then it hit me.

During the entire dream, there was no pain. No brain injury symptoms.

I was free on Europa.

Free from hurt.

Then a profound grief washed over me.

I longed for a future I would never see.

I missed that smile, that school, that view of the planets, that feeling of starting over on another moon, another life, another timeline.

I had to find my way back there.

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I realized I could rely on my dream state to experience no pain. I wanted to experience no pain while I was awake. I now knew it was possible.

I talked to my doctor about my dream and my pain waves. She explained that the brain has limited attentional resources. When a vivid visualization is paired with powerful emotion, it can change how intensely pain is experienced. My first reaction was, “Say no more,” and I “went to work” building an imaginary place. I started half remembering and half expanding the Jupiter dream. I spent hours a day daydreaming while experiencing intense pain waves.

It was working, though. I was able to distract myself enough from the pain to build an entire universe. That was what fueled Pretendland: pain waves and my desperate need to find relief.

Over time, the more I sought the Jupiter dream, the more I realized I was doing it wrong. The body was screaming and I couldn’t just escape it. So, I started researching self-healing practices beyond medication. I needed to listen to the body.

I found Reiki, a Japanese self-healing practice and Ho’oponopono, a compassion-based practice from Hawaii. Both very simple, both absolutely transformative.

With Reiki, you imagine your body made of light and color and you imagine that light as pure Love. You learn how to move the light inside of the body and send the light toward the body parts that need love. When the light moves, you feel heat and tingling. When you feel Reiki, you are actively loving that body part. That is how you calm down the nervous system. Pain goes down and you sleep better.

With Ho’oponopono, you repeat four phrases over and over again:

“I love you.”

“I am sorry.”

Please forgive me.”

“Thank you.”

Combined together, the effects of both practices are incredibly calming to my nervous system and they tend to significantly help me manage my pain. I do both Reiki and Ho’oponopono several times a day, whenever I feel my pain levels change.

One night, a magical night, my body parts started “talking” to me. It was around six months after the accident. The first body part to “reach out” was my left leg. I call her “Tada.” Then my heart talked to me, her name is Chouchou, pronounced “shoe-shoe.” It means “darling” in French.

The experience of finding out my entire body had consciousness became a book. The Inner Mediator is the story of my body parts, written from the point of view of my heart, Chouchou. The book describes how I heal inner conflict these days: I sign peace treaties between body parts that are experiencing pain or discomfort. Chouchou is the mediator.

Experiencing my body as if every part had its own consciousness became a pivotal moment in my healing. And it was just the beginning. I could not bear not to tell everyone.

Pretendland started getting shaped when, in 2022, I met a wonderful woman from Berlin, full of imagination. Together, we started a Reiki subreddit called “Reiki Share” where we share whimsical stories and ask people to imagine the stories are real for twenty-four hours. Our themes are always secular, you bring your own “woo-woo.” Angels are allowed.

My friend from Berlin was the first person I took on an imaginary trip to space as a “crew member.” Together, we boarded the Space Croissant, our imaginary spaceship, as Pretend Astronauts.

On our first Sunday, we gathered a group of 15 people and pretended with all of our hearts that the galaxy supercluster Laniakea was a person and we could talk to “her.” Laniakea presented herself as Galadriel, the high elf from the Lord of The Rings universe. We imagined ourselves sitting on a purple couch and talking to Laniakea. She had long blonde hair like Galadriel and her hair was made of spinning galaxies, her eyes were full of compassion. It was a beautiful experience. The next weekend we had thirty people. Today, more than two thousand people join us.

All religions are welcome inside the Space Croissant Spaceship and anyone can participate in our group sessions. It is OK if you don’t have a religion or a belief system. You just need to believe in yourself and commit to learning Self-Love.

Every session is similar. We have a theme, we encourage participants to talk to their body parts as if they were people and talk to their emotions too. We say the four phrases of Ho’oponopono to ourselves and our Inner Child.

Participants say things to themselves like “Hello, my Heart. I love you. I am sorry for all the times you were broken. I have compassion for you. I forgive you. Thank you.”

We leave Earth at 1 PM EST every Sunday and go to our Imaginary Moon Base first. From there, we go to Pretendland on Mars and from there we go to the other Pretendland bases on other planets.

The air on Mars has peace molecules in emoji. You breathe in peace and the peace molecules bind to oxygen. Your lungs say “thank you.” They are people. They have awareness of you. You can imagine it yourself, tiny little peace emojis binding to your lungs and your lungs smiling. The peace emojis go everywhere inside your bloodstream and when they get to your brain, you get “peace of mind.” Take a deep breath. Yes, like that.

Before you leave, you go through customs. You need to pass through tunnels made of Unconditional Love, Unconditional Compassion, Unconditional Forgiveness and Unconditional Gratitude. The police are the Space Pants Force. They make sure you are gentle with yourself for twenty-four hours.

Last Sunday we went to Pretendland on Mars and visited a “Reverse Hospice” facility where people heal from pain, suffering and aging. The facility has angels and fairies on staff.

My Charlie is a lot gentler these days and I have a normal life now. The brain injury has healed enough that it no longer shows the way it used to, although the proprioception disorder is still there. As for Europa, I thought I was trying to get back there. Years later, I realized I was building Pretendland instead.

The boy from Europa still visits my dreams once or twice a year. Writing this story brought him back last night. He tells me we have a date in seven hundred years. I smile. I look forward to growing old. It is a privilege denied to many.

P.S. The image representing Pretendland is real. It was photographed by Patrick Peritore during a recent trip to Japan and is shared here with his permission.

A few years ago, I woke up at four a.m. with excruciating pain, and I knew there was nothing I could do. It was like that almost every night after my car accident. Some nights I woke up at three. Some nights I slept through the night. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all.

This time, I decided to take my dog out for a quick walk. Maybe that would help.

There was a Shar Pei at the dog park with his owner. We chatted for a bit, and I learned the dog’s name.

Charlie.

Shar Pei Charlie.
Sharp pain.

Well, there it was.
My pain had finally found a name.

I decided to call her Charlie from then on.

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By then, I had already learned that saying Ho’oponopono to my aching body helped with the pain, and I’d been doing it for a few years. But I don’t think I had ever said Ho’oponopono to Charlie herself.

Ho’oponopono is the Hawaiian practice of repeating four phrases over and over again:

“I love you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Please forgive me.”
“Thank you.”

I remember thinking,
“How can I possibly tell my pain that I love it? This makes no sense.”

But I trusted the process and did it anyway. My instinct was right.

“I love you, Charlie.” The pain went down.

I started thinking about Charlie as a person and wondering how she could possibly be helping me.

She was me.
She was part of me.
There was no reason for her to be against me.
I had to assume she loved me, too.

So I asked,
“Why so much, Charlie?”

“It’s hard to breathe when you’re waving the whole body like this.”

I injured my brain in that same car accident and developed a condition called proprioception disorder. In my case, it changes the way my brain senses where my body is in space, and how the body and brain stay connected.

When that connection is intact, pain feels “located.” The brain knows where the pain is coming from, and everything stays strangely organized in its own way.

But if I take too much pain medication and soften that connection, things get confused. Charlie starts to get louder, and the body parts can “freak out” and amplify the pain signal. It is as if Charlie is trying harder to be understood, but everything comes out amplified instead. And if the medication is strong enough, the body can slip into panic, like it no longer recognizes where it is in relation to the brain.

I sometimes think of it as a kind of reverse phantom limb syndrome. The limb is there, for example, but it doesn’t fully recognize itself, and Charlie tries to point it back into place.

With proprioception disorder, pain becomes a signal with a purpose. It turns into my “bat signal.”

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So I walk a fine line. Too much pain medication and I turn into a cartoon, seeing stars and “tripping” on pain.

Now Charlie is my guide.
She tells the brain, “Here! Look here!”
She tells the body, “This is me!”

Charlie can be intense, in a hallucinogenic way.
I imagine her as a colorful little thing pointing at the “missing” body parts.

My body used to be a walking panic attack.

With a better relationship and an emotional connection, things between Charlie and me have gotten better over the years.
Talking to the body in a loving way was crucial.

When I say, “I’m sorry,” to Charlie, I’m acknowledging how hard her job is.
I know she is tired.
I know she is afraid of pain medication and reacts with panic.

When I say, “Please forgive me,” she settles.
She cuddles with me. She hugs me.

Ouch.
It still hurts.
But she does it with love.

A couple of years ago, my dog died. His name was Banksy. He was an English Greyhound.

The pain and despair were so overwhelming that I could barely take care of myself. I was used to eating when he ate. Sleeping when he slept. I had adapted completely to his schedule and grown dependent on his love after the accident. Without him, I was lost in space with Charlie.

Another thing I gained from the car accident and brain injury was time blindness, and my dog had become my strongest connection to the 3D world.

Without him, I was perpetually in Charlie’s world, oblivious to time.

Banksy is gone and I now have a pain doctor.

I told my pain doctor my pain was called Charlie.
I don’t think he fully gets it, but I know he has compassion for my body. He is a caring person. Caring people make my pain go down. Kindness calms Charlie down.

These days, my conversations with Charlie sound something like this:

“I love you, Charlie.”
“Let go of the lower back a little, love.”
“You can trust I’m not trying to get rid of you and make you freak out.”
“I just need to sleep through the night.”

Charlie listens now. She feels the love. She knows I care about the body part that is aching and she doesn’t need to be so loud anymore.

Thank you, Charlie. I hope one day you learn how to whisper.

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Thank you for reading.

I’ll be sharing a new story every Wednesday.

If you’d like to dive deeper into this world, The Inner Mediator, my first book, is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

The Inner Mediator is Chouchou, my heart. She mediates the “beef” inside my body, helping my body parts understand one another with compassion.

It all started one night when my left leg decided to talk to me. She was having a panic attack because I had taken pain medication, and she couldn’t tell where the brain was. She thought she was floating alone in space. I named her Tada because she was the first body part to introduce herself.

Tada and Chouchou are only two of the characters you’ll meet in The Inner Mediator. Charlie was already part of my life when I wrote the book, but I never told her story there. This essay is the first time I’ve shared it. There are many more conversations waiting to be told, and this publication gives me a place to share them.

If these conversations resonate with you, I hope you’ll subscribe. Every Wednesday we’ll explore what happens when we stop fighting our bodies, start listening, and learn how to speak to ourselves with a little more love.

Some people call it imagination.

Some people call it intuition.

I simply call it my inner world.

In my world, body parts are people. They are my community, my friends, my audience, and my cheerleaders.

They have personalities, feelings, emotions, opinions, and occasionally, “beef” with one another.

They are me.

My Heart is called Chouchou, pronounced “shoe-shoe.” Her name means “darling” in French and there is a love story behind it. Chouchou is also the author of our first book, The Inner Mediator.

Her job is to help settle “inner beef.”

Inner beef is what I call the conflicts we carry inside ourselves. Sometimes inner beef shows up as physical pain. Sometimes it looks like anxiety, fear, resentment, self-sabotage, self-criticism, or outdated stories we’ve been repeating for years and are afraid to outgrow.

I have discovered that when I stop fighting these parts of myself and start listening to them instead, something remarkable happens.

Things soften.

I soften.

This publication is my invitation into that world.

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You have a world, too.

Who lives inside of you?

Who gets ignored?

Who gets blamed?

Who gets overworked?

Who is sad?

Who is angry?

Who desperately wants to be loved?

And perhaps the most important question of all: how do you treat them?

I created this space because I want to share how I slowly learned to love myself after a car accident. I carry a lot of inner beef and a lot of pain. I treat my pain with self love. I tell my body parts that I love them with daily Ho’oponopono. I’ve been doing this for years, and I now plan to write about how I do it and why. Ho’oponopono is a Hawaiian practice centered on reconciliation, forgiveness, and self-care. You repeat four phrases over and over again:

“I love you,

I’m sorry,

Please, forgive me,

Thank you.”

My hope is that this publication will help treat the worldwide pandemic I lovingly call “I-hate-myself-alitis.”

Its symptoms may include harsh self-criticism, impossible standards, endless worrying, and forgetting that you deserve your own kindness.

Around here, we’ll be exploring ways to bring a little more inner peace into our lives.

We’ll settle inner beef.

We’ll experiment.

We’ll be curious.

We’ll occasionally laugh at ourselves.

And perhaps, one day, you’ll smile with love when you look in the mirror. Perhaps you’ll be able to sleep without sleep medication.

I want you to go to sleep with a smile on your lips.

Your lips are people.

They love you.

Welcome to my world.

I’m so happy you’re here.

With love,

Carol

and Chouchou,

Chief Officer of Inner Beef Resolution

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