The longer I sit with rose, the more I realize she hasn’t only been teaching me how to soften. She’s been reminding me of a way of being that much of our culture has forgotten.

She reminds me that wisdom is not found by choosing one perspective on something, but by learning to hold complexity.

Through my practice with Authentic Movement, I first encountered this truth: growth requires the capacity to withstand the tension of opposing forces without collapsing into certainty. Wisdom emerges not from eliminating complexity, but from staying present long enough for a third path to reveal itself.

The rose embodies this tension effortlessly.

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She teaches that beauty and protection can live seamlessly together. That vulnerability and boundaries are not oppsoties. And boundaries without openness are not a full expression of one’s essence.

RELATIONSHIP AS PRIMARY

She teaches that relationship is not a distraction from life but one of its primary teachers. That sensuality is not indulgence but a way of inhabiting the world. That beauty is not decoration but nourishment. That flexibility is not weakness but the very quality that allows life to adapt, endure, and bloom.

These are qualities and ways of being we have often dismissed as inessential - and in doing so, we’ve diminished them. I think of them as qualities of “the feminine,” which I define as an essence and way of organizing our perceptions of reality rather than a gender - yet they are not simply feminine virtues. They are deeply human capacities. Without them, we become efficient but disconnected, protected but isolated, productive and unable to receive the fullness of life.

Perhaps this is why the rose has become such a profound teacher for me. She isn’t asking me to become softer instead of stronger. She’s asking me to remember that true strength has always included tenderness, relationship, beauty, receptivity, and discernment.

POLARITY, UNFOLDING, & BEAUTY AS MEDICINE

As I continue to learn that healing doesn’t happen through routines, but through through relationship.

Each time I sit with rose, I’m cultivating a relationship not just with rose, but with my body, with beauty, with my senses, with stillness, with complexity, with conflicting parts of myself, and with the process of returning over and over again.

Rose, like life doesn’t always crack your heart open. She coaxes it, at the pace of one’s own willingness to soften in the presence of her beauty, the same way all healthy relationships unfold. Not in an instant, but in an opening of layers, and an acknowledging of the required time, safety, and right conditions for growth.

And ultimately, she reminds me that beauty and protection, softness and strength, can exist together. That complexity and polarity don’t obstruct, but rather invite, wisdom.

WISDOM

Perhaps these are some of the reasons why the rose has appeared across so many wisdom traditions. The rose doesn’t force itself open. It opens naturally as a result of alignment with its own nature and relationship with the elements.

Some traditions describe the rose as the meeting place between the human and the divine. Others speak of the heart as an energetic gateway - a place where separation gives way to relationship.

Whether we understand those ideas symbolically or spiritually, they point toward the same invitation:

To become a vessel so that life can move through us again.

IMPERMANENCE & INNER GUIDANCE

Rose helps me to accept discomfort and reminds me that I can’t even depend on rose to always be there, that what the ritual is cultivating cannot depend on the ritual.

In her subtleness, rose reminds me that the qualities that already exist inside me:

softness...

responsiveness...

fierce protection...

beauty...

surrender...

presence...

flow...

unfolding..

are up to me to allow forth, not rose.

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PROTECTION + VULNERABILITY

As I look at roses - either the buds, or the full flowers in my garden, I am struck by the contrast between the softness of the petals and fragrance and the fierceness of it’s thorns. It reminds me that softness and a gentle blossom like that of the heart must be protected with fierceness that rivals it’s beauty.

More and more, I think this is what healing - and relationship - asks of us. To be fiercely protective of our hearts and souls. Not to abandon ourselves, but to remain open without disappearing, to stay soft without becoming porous, to protect what is sacred without closing our heart. To be open and protected at the same time.

Perhaps that is what the rose has always been trying to teach.

FLEXIBILITY

When I finish my ceremonial ritual, I allow the used roses to dry again so I can use them later in a bath satchet.

On days I don’t drink rose tea, I might take a rose bud bath or a rose petal foot bath, sit in my garden and be with the roses, or add rose to my water or hot chocolate.

There are as many ways to sit with rose as there are to weather transitions. She is flexible while never abandoning her form and essence.

SENSUALITY

The scent of the blossom and the feel of the petals against my skin or in the water immediately transport me. My senses become the portal to the consciousness I have cultivated with rose, and through them, my body instantly remembers how to feel and how to soften. With rose, my body feels and senses beauty as much I see it.

The greatest teachers rarely tell us what to do. They simply invite us into a different way of being. For me, this season, that teacher has been the rose. 🌹

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An Invitation.

The rose represents the natural unfolding of the self through the body and the heart - where clarity, connection, and growth emerge from within. it is often seen as a symbol of the soul unfolding into its full expression. In some traditions, it represents the union of the human and the divine. It’s tied to the heart as a gateway—not just emotional, but energetic.

The “rose field” is what I call the coherent, loving field of awareness created when we commune with rose as an archetype, a plant, and a body of wisdom.

In that loving field, discipline is soft. Boundaries are firm and felt.

If you’re in Los Angeles, and feel called to deepen your journey and cultivate the rose field, I invite you to join The Rose Body, an intimate container of 8 women navigating life after initiations of complex illness, heartbreak, and profound life transition. Weaving the practices of Authentic Movement, rose medicine, and community, we’ll explore what rose has to teach us through our bodies, by slowing down enough to listen.

Over our time together, we’ll create a sacred, loving field of awareness through which we can explore rose, Authentic Movement, ritual, and sacred witnessing to return to something increasingly rare:

Listening deeply enough that the body remembers its own wisdom. Not performing transformation, but living it, through practicing:

• unfolding, beauty, protection, and vulnerability

• intuition over conditioning

• embodiment over performance

• wholeness over fragmentation

• relationship over control

• self-trust over external authority

• opening without abandoning yourself

• relationship over extraction

• staying open and boundaried

• reconnecting to tenderness without losing strength

• beauty and healing from alignment instead of effort

*Authentic Movement is a transpersonal movement practice that involves, art, reflection, and deep witnessing. Each week we will move through a different theme connected with a different aspect of the body. Rose will provide a gentle additional witness to our transformation.

If you’re called to help me cultivate the rose field here on Substack, you can support my work by:

🌹 Hitting the ♡ icon below

🌹 Sharing in the comments: Where is the rose inviting you to soften, open, protect, or trust a little more in your own life?

🌹 Sending this essay to someone who might enjoy sitting with the rose.

🌹 Joining The Sanctuary, The Well’s membership community for deeper conversations, practices, and reflections

I’ve spent much of my life looking for healing in the next practice, the next insight, the next teacher.

Some teachers arrive as people. Others arrive as heartbreak, illness, or unexpected seasons of life. Every so often, one arrives as a flower.

Or perhaps returns to you as one.

Looking back, I realize the rose has always been quietly woven through my life. As a little girl, I was inexplicably drawn to them. My family has a photograph (that has become something of a family legend) of me smelling a rose, completely enchanted. My grandfather lovingly cultivated his roses, a tradition my mother carries on, despite losing a few in years past to deer who love them just as much. Sometimes I wonder if tending the roses is one of the ways she stays connected to her father.

On the other side of my family, my Ukrainian heritage carries its own reverence for the rose, though I wouldn’t begin to appreciate that until much later in my life.

I didn’t think much of these threads until I started working with rose myself. Between my grandfather’s connection with them and the rose’s place in my Ukrainian ancestry, I can’t help but wonder whether my lifelong attraction to them was more than aesthetic.

Perhaps some connections are inherited before they are understood, and perhaps our deepest teachers don't suddenly appear, but quietly accompany us through our lives, waiting until we're ready to recognize them.

Most mornings lately, I make tea from a handful of dried rosebuds. The delicate floral scent wafts from the tea into my olfactory nerves, which gently blossom in anticipation of what’s to come. I take a sip and feel the warmth of the liquid flood through me. The connective tissue running through my body breathes and softens, and my heart relaxes like it’s making space for an old friend.

The ritual itself takes less than ten minutes, but somehow, it changes the rest of my day. Not because tea is magical, but because slowing down and forming a relationship with it is.

In many traditions, the rose is considered a symbol of the soul unfolding into its fullest expression. A meeting place between the human heart and something greater.

I didn’t begin drinking rose because I believed any of that.

I began because something in me longed to soften and surrender.

While preparing the delicate elixir each day, I sit and meditate - informally - allowing my senses to receive from rose and guide me.

Afterwards I meditate more formally or lie down and allow my thoughts to wander or contemplate a specific set of questions. From these sessions, the following themes have emerged.

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SOFT DISCIPLINE

When I’m in this journey, I find that messages of letting go, accepting discomfort, and embracing gentleness rise and fall away. Something about the familiar smell of the flowers feels like it’s relaxing the muscle of my brain and the sheath of my spirit. I feel rose making contact with the blocks in my energy field, not to change them, but to bring presence and awareness to them.

For much of my life, I unconsciously believed stability lived somewhere outside me: in my health, in relationships, in productivity, in money, in getting enough done, in being someone who had it all “figured out.” Every loss threatened to take part of me with it, and showed up in my body as instability in the form of joint sublaxations, illness, or pain.

Rose quietly invites me into a deeper layer within me that I can access when people, jobs, health, or money shift. On hard days, I can meet the discomfort of each little loss with presence, gentle awareness, acceptance, and a profound knowing that I am connected to something greater.

Through this, I’ve learned something I don’t think I could have learned through effort alone.

The opposite of anxiety isn’t certainty. It’s a practice of returning. Of consistency and a softer kind of discipline.

Not the rigid kind of practice that insists, Do this every day or you’ve failed. The kind that calls me back because I miss it if I skip a day, not because I fear what will happen if I don’t practice.

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SUBTLE UNFOLDING

When we try something new, there is often the hope or expectation of big lessons. Instead, rose has taught me healing doesn’t happen through intensity, but rather through unfolding.

If I miss a day, it’s okay. Rose medicine will greet me with the same familiar scent, the same gentle presence the next day, or the day after. The practice isn’t asking for perfection and it isn’t delivering huge shifts. It’s delivering subtlety and grace.

To sit with rose, I don’t have to try hard, be pleasing, perform better, or strive to become someone. I just have to sit, presence myself, listen, and feel. In doing so, I am embodying qualities of the feminine that are often forgotten in our day to day world.

In this practice, I let go of the endless optimization of wellness and routines, and realize something not entirely surprising: when I stop trying to “heal perfectly,” my body softens on its own, and healing can begin to unfold naturally.

Rose reminds me that healing isn’t some huge shift, but a series of small ones that happen when I return again and again.

Over the last few months, rose has taught me many things. These are only the first of them. There are other lesson rose keeps teaching - ones about beauty, protection, and what it means to remain open without abandoning yourself. Subscribe if you want to hear them, I’ll share those next.

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An Invitation.

The rose represents the natural unfolding of the self through the body and the heart - a place where clarity, connection, and growth emerge from within. it is often seen as a symbol of the soul unfolding into its full expression. In some traditions, it represents the union of the human and the divine. It’s tied to the heart as a gateway - not just an emotionally, but energetically. The “rose field” can be thought of as a coherent, loving field of awareness that’s cultivated when we merge our heart consciousness with th energy of rose.

If you're in Los Angeles, I invite you to cultivate the rose field in person on August 10. Together we'll explore what she has to teach us about healing - not by striving or fixing, but by slowing down enough to listen.

If you’re called to help me cultivate the rose field here in this Substack community, you can support my work by:

🌹 Hitting the ♡ icon below

🌹 Sharing in the comments: What does the rose remind you of? What practices, rituals, or teachers have been medicine for you lately?

🌹 Sending this essay to someone who might enjoy sitting with the rose.

🌹 Joining The Sanctuary, The Well’s membership community for deeper conversations, practices, and reflections

There’s a lot of clickbait talk out there about “setting boundaries,” but what’s missing from all the chatter is how to observe where we may actually be demonstrating weak boundaries in our lives.

If you take a step back and look at how you feel in your day-to-day life, you can get a lot of information. Are you often rattled by different situations? Do you find yourself needing to vent regularly? If so, these, and other cues may be signs you need to bolster your energetic boundaries.

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Before you start trying to set boundaries, you might want to notice where you are failing to set them, so you can identify your starting point. Here are 3 indications you may not be setting boundaries in your life:

1. You feel anxious or on edge a lot of the time

Anxiety (as well as some other difficult feelings like anger and resentment) very often points to unmet needs. We often think if we are anxious, we need to “fix it,” “get over it,” or soothe ourselves out of it. While some aspect of self-soothing is necessary, the first step is understanding that anxiety is actually a deep communication from our body about what we need.

2. You find yourself avoiding being around people because you find it draining

While some people naturally may be less social than others, if you find yourself reactively avoiding people, there’s a good chance you find it hard to have your needs fulfilled in the presence of others.

3. You often feel resentful

Boundaries are dictated by our feelings and needs. Resentment points to needs being squashed or unmet. If this is a chronic feeling, it’s very likely that you don’t advocate for or make sure your needs are met. For example, if you feel resentful of your partner for never taking out the trash, your need for a clean and orderly home is not being met. This could be met through discussions with your partner. Perhaps you end up hiring a cleaner or perhaps they commit to a schedule that feels right for both of you.

If any of the above feels true for you, it’s worth taking a deeper look at what needs are going unmet - and what makes it difficult to identify, express, or protect them in your relationships. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of self-awareness or the language to communicate our needs. Other times, it’s rooted in fear: fear of conflict, rejection, disappointing others, or losing the relationship. Many of us were never taught what healthy boundaries look like, so we mistake people-pleasing, over-functioning, or self-sacrifice for kindness.

I start all my clients with this simple two-step needs check-in:

1. Pause and ask: What am I needing right now? Is it rest, honesty, reassurance, space, support, clarity, appreciation, or time? Rather than focusing on what the other person is doing, turn your attention inward and identify the need beneath your discomfort.

2. Ask yourself: What boundary would help protect or honor that need? It might be saying no, asking for more time, expressing a preference, making a request, or simply taking a pause before responding.

Remember, boundaries aren’t about controlling other people—they’re about taking responsibility for your own well-being.

If this feels challenging, you’re not alone. It can be especially difficult to change these patterns if you’re surrounded by people who benefit from your weak boundaries. As you begin setting healthier limits, not everyone will welcome the change. That’s why support matters. Whether through trusted friends, therapy, coaching, or a supportive community, having people who encourage your growth can make it easier to recognize your needs, trust your instincts, and practice expressing your boundaries with greater confidence.

If that’s you, think about how you can bring more of these things into your life.

The Sanctuary at The Well is one resource I’ve designed to create a community and resource center for empowerment, support, and encouragement for sensitive souls to reclaim their mental, emotional, and physical health. In contains exclusive access to customized guides, community, and direct access from me through AMA threads.

If you are looking for 1:1 support with boundaries, reach out to me here for a free 15-minute consult to connect with a coach or clinician.

If you enjoyed this post, you can support my work by:

• Hitting the ♡ icon below

• Sharing your experiences and reflections below in the comments! What’s a boundary you’ve set recently that made you feel proud—even if it was scary?

• Sending this to a friend who might want to subscribe

There’s something I’ve been tending for a while now.

A library. A threshold. A place you can return to when you need to remember who you are beneath the noise…and a budding community.

I call it The Portal because it’s a doorway. It holds courses, meditations, somatic tools, and resources built around the things I care about most: how we love, how we relate, how we come home to ourselves.

My mission at it’s core is to be a portal for love in all it’s forms - not love as a feeling, but as a field. A frequency. The thing that becomes possible when a person stops abandoning themselves and starts holding themselves in spirit.

That’s what the Portal is designed for.

To help you enter the work at the intersection of the nervous system, the body, the psyche, and the soul. Clinical rigor and mystery, science and soul, the practical and the numinous, masculine and feminine, body and mind, shadow and light. - these are all essential to healing.

The Portal is a collection of meditations, exercises, tools, handouts, and courses - designed to be a resource for you to use intuitively. You can use the Breakup Portal within it when you’re going through a breakup to give structure, permission, and holding to your grief. You can use The Portal Community to be held in like-minded community. And you can access all of it via an app on your phone. I personally use the meditations throughout the day and before bed to ground my spirit and assist my nervous system in letting go into sleep.

There are courses, or portals, specifically for grieving, breakups, dating, burn out, and nervous system regulation, and meditations targeted to everything from a quick attunement practice or gratitude drop in to sleep and self-compassion meditations.

The Portal contains the deeper tools to help you find sanctuary in yourself.

It’s meant to be a facilitation tool to deepen relationship to ourselves and others. It’s best used in conjunction with a guide or coach to anchor that intention of relationality, but easy to navigate even without that.

What’s available to you as a Sanctuary member:

Full access to the course library, meditation library, tools, and resources — normally $22/month, at 50% off for 3 months. Drop in whenever you need grounding, a reset, or something that meets you in the middle of a hard moment. Courses include the Metta Date Map, The Break Up Map, The Burn Out Map, somatic practices, communication tools, and more. You can cancel any time.

This is part of what my mission — to be and create portals for love, healing, embodiment, transformation, and integration of all the parts of you so you can become the fullest expression of yourself day by day. Portals where the nervous system, heart, and soul can all find their way home.

The more portals we enter, the more spaces for the divine to enter our lives.

Love is the medicine. This is a portal.

You already belong here.

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While everyone has some level of sensitivity, sensitivity is on a continuum. Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) are those of us with a particular trait that makes us more sensitive to energy, sounds, environment, relationships, transitions and more. HSPs comprise about 20% of the population, 30% at most.

If you have a hunch you are highly sensitive, there’s a good chance you are. You can read more about it here or take the quiz here!

Below are 11 things that are particularly important to your happiness if you are an HSP.

1. Downtime

HSPs need regular time to withdraw to a quiet space and lower your stimulation level. This isn’t antisocial—it’s how you recharge and stay regulated. It allows for HSPs systems to regulate and higher creativity and productivity to emerge. The paradox is more downtime for HSPs actually equals greater productivity.

2. Transition Time Between Events

Hectic days are kryptonite for HSPs. You need buffer time between activities, a schedule that allows time between appointments rather than being packed back-to-back, and permission to move through life at your own rhythm (which may change moment to moment.)

3. A Soothing Home Environment

Your space matters deeply. Fill your home (or at least one room) with things that help you feel safe and grounded—soft (or weighted) blankets, low lighting, calming scents, books, whatever helps you decompress.

4. A Good Nights Sleep + Ample Recovery Time

Sleep isn’t just rest for you; it’s how you reset your overstimulated system and restore your ability to function. Skimp on sleep, and everything becomes harder: you’re more reactive, more overwhelmed, more emotionally flooded. Prioritizing it allows you access to all your gifts—creativity, empathy, insight, presence.

5. Minimal but Healthy Conflict in Close Relationships

Tension and disagreement don’t just bother you—they can make you physically ill and create disturbances in your flow that disrupt your productivity. You need relationships where issues are addressed respectfully, not with volatility, avoidance, projection, or harsh criticism.

6. Supportive, Emotionally Healthy Relationships

Research shows HSPs thrive in supportive environments and get more benefit from emotionally healthy people than others do. You need people who are attuned and kind, who understand your sensitivity, and don’t create drama, disrespect your boundaries, or use your sensitivity against you.

7. A Slower Pace and Freedom from Time Pressure

Rushed deadlines and packed schedules rattle you more than most. You need work and life situations where you have adequate time to complete tasks without constant urgency breathing down your neck.

8. Comfortable Clothing and Physical Environment

Scratchy fabric, tight waistbands, harsh lighting, or uncomfortable temperatures aren’t just annoying—they can derail your entire day. You need the freedom to create physical comfort without judgment.

9. Regular Meals and Blood Sugar Stability

You get “hangry” faster than others because you’re sensitive to blood sugar changes. You need consistent eating patterns and snacks available to prevent crashes that affect your mood and nervous system. Finding a diet and eating pattern that is attuned to your system is key. Fad diets and following rigid dietary advice is more unsettling to HSPs than non-HSPs.

10. Permission to Say No

To extra work, extra plans, unrealistic expectations—from others and yourself. You need the boundary skills to protect your energy without guilt, and people around you who respect those boundaries.

11. Beauty, Meaning, and Depth

You’re deeply moved by art, music, nature, and experiences that have emotional richness. You need these things in your life—not as luxuries, but as essential nourishment for your sensitive soul.

If you are an HSP reading this, hopefully this list gave you a sense of empowered validation. Despite what society may suggest, HSPs aren’t “too needy”— they just have a different nervous system that requires specific conditions to thrive. When you honor these needs instead of fighting them, you unlock your gifts: creativity, empathy, intuition, insight, and the ability to experience life more deeply than most people ever will.

Stop apologizing for what you need, and start designing a life that actually works for your brain.

If you enjoyed this post, you can support my work by:

• Hitting the ♡ icon below

• Sharing your experiences and reflections below in the comments!

• Sending this to a friend who might want to subscribe

The Repronizer 4D: First Impressions (My Complicated Feelings)

In my quest for healthier hair and fewer (but more effective) styling products in my life, I have been researching this particular tool for years. Years of watching tutorials, reading reviews, and stalking before and afters has bolstered my desire to try the seemingly mystical bioprogramming hair tools. I don’t remember where I originally heard about bioprogramming, but ever since then, I’ve watched every YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram I could find - all of them glowing, and none of them (aside from the brand’s own content) claim to be affiliates. There is limited information about the Repronizer or the other hairbeuron tools anywhere, so I thought I’d add to what’s out there.

The Hairbeuron line of products, of which the Repronizer 4D is a part, are a set of heat tools from Japan that claim to repair your hair rather than damage it. The claim is the repair intensifies with each use. The claims are based on vague allusions to quantum physics and no clear information about how this occurs.

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The Repronizer 4D is the lower end of the hairdryer line, costing upwards of $500 if purchased new, with higher-end models costing upwards of $1000. The Repronizer claims to “bioprogram” and repair hair by drawing “excess moisture” out of your body into your scalp and hair. You can use it on your face and skin as well as your hair for this supposed moisture blast transfer.

When I finally came upon one IRL in my stylist’s salon a few months ago and she let me run it through my freshly washed, freshly waxed salon hair, I almost jumped for joy.

I left with hair as smooth and glassy as the water in a harbor on a sunny Sunday morning. My skin glowed with the halo of sheer contentment - and maybe some of that bioprogrammed air.

I bit the bullet and ordered one on ebay.

After weeks of anticipation, the package arrived. I quickly unboxed it, washed my hair with intention, and dried my hair according to the bioprogramming instructions: a 2:1 heat:cool shot ratio.

And…

I ended up with a completely normal, slightly frizzy blowout.

No sea glass hair. No transformation.

I blew the air on my face, and without that halo of contentment, I didn’t notice any difference there either.

I’ve been sitting here with my slightly dried out ends as I contemplate the gap between my experience and all the hair stylist’s glowing Instagram reviews living rent-free in my head.

My working theory: salon-prepped hair is a different canvas entirely. The wax. The products. The professional technique. Maybe all three.

I’m not ready to call it. I’m going to keep testing and I’ll report back, but so far, my hair is not “repaired” or “bioprogrammed” but just “slightly disappointed.”

Have any of you tried it? I want to know everything.

And please let me know if there are other products you would like to see a review on.

UPDATE:

I have now been using these tools for several months, and am still not seeing a major difference. I will write another post with pictures in the coming months. Subscribe for updates.

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• Hitting the ♡ icon below

• Sharing your experiences and reflections below in the comments!

• Sending this to a friend who might want to subscribe

• Joining The Sanctuary

I read a statement online recently that said “We used to have hard working men and feminine women. Now we have hardworking women and feminine men. That’s the real climate change.”

Oof.

While not unequivocally true, there does seem to be some cultural evidence of this phenomenon. Both the harsh tone of this comment, and the kernel of truth in it speak to a deeper confusion about gender roles at this moment in history and the social justice-y shame-based attempts to mock men into a different way of acting.

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The problem here is that subtle shame only serves to reinforce the problem it is articulating. Men are more prone than ever before to inaction. Inaction tends to be part of a nervous system response to stress. Using a blaming tone to suggest that men are somehow deficient without offering a new direction for change that would be more satisfying to everyone involved only serves to cause more stress and shutdown. Hence, more inaction.

We hear about “gender wars,” we see social media posts imbued with references blame, shame, the “me too” movement, women and men opting out of dating, the “manosphere,” “male loneliness epidemic,” “toxic masculinity,” “toxic femininity,” the stay-at-home mom movement, and much, much, more.

It’s subtle but pervasive messaging, and important to name for what it is - a division between genders, and a subtle verbal war between the sexes.

Now, this article is not at all to blame women for “making men feel” this way or to blame men for “not manning up,” or even to blame society for everything from the hormones in our water supply to the larger lack of culturally shared values like integrity. Blaming doesn’t help fix the issue, or even help understand the cause.

Rather, it’s to create more awareness and understanding. In order to solve a problem, we must all have a shared understanding and a shared reality. Currently, men and women are living in different realities - curated by different responses to how they present in the world, and different specialized media targeting.

All the talk about the “male loneliness epidemic” revolves around cultural causes and solutions like “men aren’t graduating college” or “men need to man up,” but what remains invisible is the actual issue that needs to be addressed.

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What needs to be addressed are the invisible forces happening inside men that have never been collectively named or held: loneliness, generational and personal trauma, loss, and the ways that shows up differently for men than it does for women. (Don’t get me wrong, it’s happening for women too - women are just generally more resourced in coping socially from generations of work around these issues.)

When we call men out without offering tools — without calling them in — we amplify the crisis.

Today’s post is just another starting point for a dialogue around this, one small movement towards healing. These kinds of small moments are how we can begin to mobilize a healthy, grounded movement for men to move out of their nervous system responses (from fight to flight to freeze) and into collective social healing.

The Social Crisis

• In 2021, 15% of men reported having no close friends — a sharp increase since 1990. Western Oregon University

• Among younger men (Gen Z / Millennials), many report that “no one really knows me well.” Many have only one or two confidants. Western Oregon University+1

• In a 2023–24 Gallup poll, 25% of young U.S. men (ages ~15-34) said they felt lonely “much of the prior day,” versus 18% of women. The Washington Post

How to Call Men In

Calling men in does not mean becoming a therapist or teacher to a boyfriend or male friend. It means lovingly having boundaries while bolstering, supporting, and promoting practices and tools for men. This can be through creating offerings or promoting the offerings of others, or passing along supportive tools and resources:

• Spaces where men can share without judgment: men’s groups, mentorship, relational therapy (i.e. The Mankind Project)

• Techniques for emotional literacy: Courses, coaching, therapy, and groups that teach language for what’s happening in the body, mind, and heart (e.g. recognizing overwhelm, grief, shame).

• Relational practices: 1:1 facilitated somatic therapy, breath work, movement, awareness of the nervous system.

• Somatic practices: Practices that help men be in touch with their bodies in a relational way, like Authentic Movement, nervous system support, Safe & Sound Protocol

• Rituals of vulnerability in men’s groups and safe spaces like retreats and workshops: storytelling, honest reflection, safe confession.

• Practicing relational repair and deep seeing: learning to listen, to be heard, to build trust, to receive care, to be seen in romantic partnerships and friendships

Calling someone in doesn’t excuse harm, but it opens the possibility of healing. What are some other ways we can call men into a collective emotional healing? Share in the comments below

The Call

If you’re a man feeling called to this work, there are spaces being created for exactly this kind of healing — not through shame, performance, or perfection, but through nervous system repair, honest reflection, and real connection.

Because calling people in creates the conditions where change becomes possible.

That’s part of why I created The Well Way: Safe & Sound as a way to experience the Safe & Sound Protocol (SSP), a tool for regulation, relational healing, and learning how to reconnect to yourself and others from a more grounded, coherent place.

The Well Way Pilot offering begins in late May 2026. Sanctuary members will receive 10% off.

I also offer Authentic Movement, coaching, and courses focused on embodiment, emotional awareness, confidence, and deeper connection.

Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in safe enough relationships, communities, and fields.

And often, healing starts not with being judged…but with finally being seen.

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Bring a cup or a bowl, a pot, a kettle, an intention, and a small altar to beauty. We’ll meditate and connect with beauty together.

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“Beauty…feels less like an idea and more like a quiet reordering of attention that I recognise, without fully being able to explain it.” —

Urvasi’s writing: The Ethics of Tenderness

Walk in Beauty D…

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Everyone talks about red flags—those glaring warnings that set your nervous system on fire, and have your friends telling you to “run”—but no one ever mentions green flags. Green flags are the quiet, steady signals from your trusty nervous system whispering “this is safe.”

As HSPs, we’re wired to sense danger. Our nervous systems are finely tuned alarm systems, scanning for what could go wrong. Here’s what we forget: that same sensitivity can detect safety, kindness, and genuine connection…if we know what we’re looking for.

Relationship researcher Logan Ury identified six core qualities that predict long-term partnership success in her book How Not to Die Alone. These aren’t the butterflies-in-your-stomach feelings or the chemistry that keeps you up at night. They’re deeper signals and qualities that let you—and your nervous system—finally exhale.

The Six Green Flags Your Soul Recognizes

Here are 6 green flags, and some reflection prompts to ask yourself about your potential partner.

1. Emotional Stability and Kindness: The Ground Beneath Your Feet

Emotional stability isn’t about never feeling big emotions—it’s about having a container for them. It’s the ability to self-regulate, to pause before reacting, to meet intensity with presence rather than volatility.

Notice this: How do they treat the barista who got their order wrong? The stranger asking for directions? People who can’t offer them anything? Their ex? Kindness isn’t performative when no one’s watching. Emotional stability, clear boundaries, and maturity reveal themselves not in calm waters, but in storms.

Ask yourself: Does their presence settle my nervous system, or activate it?

2. Loyalty: The Long Game of Love

Loyalty isn’t just about fidelity—it’s about showing up. It’s about someone who tends to relationships over time, who doesn’t discard people when things get hard or boring.

Notice this: Do they have old friends? Long-term friendships are evidence of someone who knows how to stay, how to repair, how to honor history even when the novelty fades.

Ask yourself: Do they have a sense of roots, or are they always starting over? Do they value loyalty or is it too easy for them to discard whatever isn’t working for them?

3. Growth Mindset: The Willingness to Evolve

A growth mindset is spiritual work in action. It’s the humility to know you don’t have all the answers. It’s vulnerability as a practice, not a performance.

Notice this: Can they apologize without defending? Do they celebrate others’ wins without dimming their own light? Are they curious about their patterns, or committed to their stories? Do they seek therapy, coaching, or other growth opportunities—and actually apply what they learn?

Ask yourself: Does this person want to become more of themselves, or stay exactly as they are?

4. Bringing Out the Best in You: The Mirror That Reflects Gold

The right person doesn’t complete you—they reveal you. They create space for parts of yourself you’d forgotten existed.

Notice this: After spending time with them, do you feel more like yourself, or less? Do you laugh more freely? Think more deeply? Move through the world with more confidence or curiosity?

Ask yourself: Does this person expand me, or contract me?

5. Fighting and Resolving Conflict Well: Sacred Disagreement

Here’s the truth: 60% of relationship conflicts are perpetual and unresolvable. The question isn’t if you’ll fight—it’s how you’ll fight, and whether you can find your way back to each other afterward.

Notice this: After conflict, can one of you extend an olive branch? Make a gentle joke? Name what you appreciate? Do you feel heard 80-90% of the time, even when you disagree? Or does every argument leave scar tissue?

Ask yourself: Do our fights bring us closer to truth, or further from trust?

6. Making Hard Decisions Together: Co-Creating Reality

Partnership is a daily practice of choosing together. Not one person leading, not one person following—but two people navigating complexity as a team.

Notice this: When faced with a decision, do they ask for your input? Can they hold space for your perspective while maintaining their own? Do they approach problems with curiosity or control?

Try this: Plan something together that requires decision-making—a trip, a meal, a project. Watch how you navigate the small choices. They’ll tell you how you’ll navigate the big ones.

Trusting What Your Body Already Knows

Your sensitivity isn’t a liability in love—it’s your compass. When you’re with someone who embodies these green flags, your nervous system knows. Your shoulders drop, your breath deepens, and you stop performing and start being.

Red flags scream, while green flags nurture and whisper.

If you’re an HSP who’s learned to listen to the subtle signals, who’s practiced tuning into your body’s wisdom, who’s cleared the static of past gaslighting—you’ll hear them.

And when you do? Trust that knowing.

Your intuition has been waiting for permission to guide you toward something real.

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Being sensitive is difficult. Not only is the world already loud, unwelcoming, fast-paced, and unfriendly to sensitivity, but HSPs also need more support and skills to adapt during transitions, collective changes, and relationships. On top of that, HSPs also have to deal with more unsolicited negative feedback - people “othering’ us, shaming us, telling us we’re not normal, or we need to “toughen up” and be less sensitive.

In an inherently aggressive culture like modern America, these subtle temperament prejudices are hard not to internalize. The only way to combat these introjected biases is to understand, revere, and celebrate less common and less valued differences like high sensitivity.

Until we are able to do this, we will likely try in subtle ways to conform in order to be more “normal” and less us. The problem with this is that HSPs are like orchids. For an orchid’s unique beauty to radiate and an orchid to thrive, specific and attuned care instructions are necessary. If we care for an orchid how we care for a daisy (in this metaphor, by conforming to modern society’s ideas of how we should be,) we orchids still won’t turn into daisies, we’ll just be an orchid without a bloom.

So, here are a few tips, partly sourced from The Highly Sensitive Person in Love by Elaine Aron, Ph.D., that can help you to thrive as an HSP:

1. Information about your trait - a lot of it. Informative, neutral, and positive information to combat negative cultural messaging and feeling ostracized as part of the 20%.

2. Reframe your past in light of your sensitivity. Take inventory of events that negatively impacted your self-confidence, i.e. parental or familial messaging about certain habits or needs or a friend making fun of you for crying. Rewrite the story from the perspective of a compassionate parent and HSP expert, noting what you needed in that particular situation that you didn’t get - an ally, help regulating your nervous system, better family support, etc.

3. Resources to heal the effects of your childhood or family. HSPs are more vulnerable to adverse experiences or even subtle undercurrents of criticism and devaluation and therefore impacted more subsantively and negatively by these. They are also more easily able to improve than non-HSPs - but only with good support. Seek supportive treatment to help reframe the past, learn tools for the present, and deal with any secondary issues that may have arisen from adverse past experiences (depression, anxiety, C-PTSD - none of these are inherent to the HSP trait, but may need extra care and attention when they manifest in an HSP).

4. Help regulating your nervous system. HSPs are wired differently with finely-tuned nervous systems. In a world that doesn’t teach nervous system regulation skills, HSPs are especially vulnerable to difficulties. Overarousal in particular can be a problem; having therapeutic support as well as support defining a lifestyle that is conducive to sensitivity is essential.

5. Support interacting with the world. HSPs have so much to offer, but need to offer it in a way that lives within their window of tolerance and is imbued with kindness and compassion. Society’s current emphasis on doing jobs that you love is supportive to HSPs.

6. Self-devotion. HSPs tend to be empaths and can easily be overly aware of the needs of others, as well as conscientious about taking up too much space. Reframing your relationship with being self-centered as being devoted to yourself can help. Allow yourself to be at the center of devotion, respect, and reverence.

7. Permission to have boundaries with your sensitivity. Your sensitivity is a gift and an offering to those you are in relationship with. It’s important to remember not everyone is entitled to it and give yourself permission to maintain your boundaries and say no.

As an HSP myself, these have been invaluable - though often hard to remember to implement.

That’s why I created The Sanctuary at The Well, our member community, where deep, soulful people can support each other in remembering who they are and how to live in a way that supports their sensitivity. Upgrade for access to the community, our guides, and live Transmissions.

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Comment below if any of the above are things you can implement in your life this week, or if you have other tips that HSPs can benefit from.

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I have been thinking about what it means to be healthy, and what I’ve come to is that it’s not the absence of illness but the presence of connection. Connection to ourselves, to spirit, to a community, and to a sense of influence over our bodies. And not just a general sense of connection, but a deep and lasting felt sense of trust in that connection.

Our healthcare system creates our felt sense of “unhealthiness” and illness as it labels us without giving us access to that palpable mind-body-sprit-community connection. We can barely connect to the right medical professional or our insurance, let alone a sense of peace and well-being as we navigate endless waiting lists, waiting rooms, overworked and undertrained professionals, bureacratic offices, unhelpful insurance companies, and a widespread lack of knowledge about many of the modern health conditions we are facing as well as what real health actually looks and feels like.

Don’t get me wrong - I do believe in Western medicine. Doctors have invaluable skills, and if you need their skills, you can (usually) count on them to come through. But, I believe Western medicine reflects a societal mind-body disconnect that keeps us disempowered on a mental, emotional, and often physical level. It labels patients as victims of illness and doctors as authorities on wellness.

The truth, I believe, is that we - as patients - are the ultimate authority on our own health and wellness, and doctors are simply holders of knowledge and guidance. When we give our power away to them, we lose a tiny piece of ourselves and our wholeness, our connection. When we ally with them as equals instead, and they take a supporting role in bolstering our inner knowing, we can gain that part back.

I don’t want to put all the weight on doctors or Western medicine though. The disconnection is a larger social problem as well. We need communities, emotionally supportive relationships, and places where we can express our pain and be held in it - something most doctors, thanks to insurance and limited resources - don’t have time to do.

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Our pain may be physical - or at least manifest physically - but there is always an emotional and spiritual component. Whether those emotional and spiritual components drove our symptoms or are the result of our symptoms, they are a part of our wholeness, a part of our “illness,” and a part of our health and healing.

The way this disconnection manifests in our society is manifold - through the mental health crisis, the declining quality of life, the rise in chronic and complex illness, and general expanding sense of loneliness, divisiveness, devaluation, disconnection, and devaluation of relationships.

This train of thought got me thinking about what I can offer to heal this.

As a trained facilitator and therapist, what I can offer is a space for us humans to come together to be with our collective longing, fear, pain, and all the really real aspects of our lives. Not to fix, but to heal through collective care, empowerment, and growth.

Having gone through complex and chronic illness that no doctor could diagnose or tell me how to fix, I understand how healing works firsthand - the nonlinearity, the emotional and spiritual aspects of it, the whole-life habits, routines, and identities that must be destroyed and reborn, and the role that other women invariably play in guiding me to exactly where I need to be.

I understand the desperation for answers, the frustration, the willingness to try anything, and the anger when the one thousandth new supplement I tried does, yet again, nothing. I understand the deep longing for someone - a doctor or anyone - to tell me what to do. I also understand the little moments where a light bulb goes off and I think to myself “ah, this is my next step.” I understand the power in being with that frustration until the next step appears to us in some roundabout and unexpected way.

My fellow women navigating similar health conditions are the untrained researchers, detectives, doctors, and empaths. They carry a knowledge of medicine that is instinctive and intuitive, even if they don’t know it. Even if they feel disconnected from it, frustrated, and sick with longing and illness. Sometimes their intuitive medicine will manifest directly through a skill like herbalism, acupuncture, therapy, or medical training. And sometimes, it just manifests in the way they somehow, after many grief-stricken days or nights, and weeks or months or years of trying, figure out how to heal themselves when no one else can.

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If I can gather these women together in a circle, the collective wisdom is palpable and exponentially amplified. But more than that, the power of just being and holding space for the pain without someone telling them it’s not real, it’s in their head, or it needs to be fixed - is magical. Something happens in the space where women gather simply to share, commune, heal, and hold. The body exhales. The stories that have been waiting - the ones too textured for daily interactions and too raw for a dinner party - finally have somewhere to land. The longing we all carry, can for a moment be replaced with just being in presence. And, for a moment, we can sink into the feeling of belonging.

To simply be in presence is to belong.

No one is required to be healed, positive, or on the other side to belong.

Being in circle is the medicine.

Illness reorganizes a woman. So does grief, heartbreak, betrayal, and any kind of spiritual or emotional pain. So does the slow accumulation of being asked to be smaller, quieter, more manageable. What a circle like this offers isn’t a cure for any of that. It’s something deeper and more magical. It’s a collective, ancestral, vestigial relational knowledge that lives in the body of a group, not just in any single body inside it.

We have been taught to reach for information, doctors, protocols, frameworks, and pills when we are in pain - to look outward for the answer. But some of what we are longing for isn’t insight, it’s witness to our inner world. It’s shared presence, relational support, and emotional space to just be that we crave. A room that doesn’t need you to be anywhere other than where you are.

That relational presence is the medicine we hold as Medicine Women.

An invitation

Join our next interactive live Transmissions: Illness as Initiation on this topic on Thursday April 23 at 4:45 PM PST.

The next Medicine Women gathering takes place on April 27 at The Kinn in Los Angeles. If you are in the area — or if something in this piece is pulling at you — I would love for you to be there.

Details in the link below.

1. Rahua Voluminous Shampoo - Yuka Score: 86/100 (Excellent)

I love the smell of this shampoo. It’s scented with essential oils to smell like paolo santo, a rich, resinous wood. It’s a unique scent but the hippy in me loves it. To me, it smells rich, luxurious, and natural - which matches the gold and white branding.

The shampoo itself cleansed my hair well and gave it volume. It didn’t lather as well as conventional shampoos but it did lather, and it left my hair feeling volumized and clean, albeit a tad dry. Major pro of this shampoo is how non-toxic the ingredients are and how pretty it looks in your shower! Pros: smell, Yuka score, brand mission, volumizing Cons: drying, difficult to later.

2. Evolvh Ultrashine Shampoo - Yuka Score: 84/100 (Excellent)

I have used Evolve off and on since the brand started and I have to admit that I liked the smell and performance of the original shampoo far better than what it has “evolved” into now. This shampoo lathers quite well for a natural shampoo and has strong cleansing action. It volumizes my hair but leaves it feeling a bit dry. I resorted to doing my first wash with Evolvh and then my second wash with a more balanced and moisturizing shampoo just to use up the product. If your hair and scalp run fairly oily, this might be a better match for you. The good news is they sell travel size products so you can try it without much risk! Pros: Travel sizes, versatility, lathers well, Yuka score, Cons: Scent, leaves hair dry

3. Monat IR Clinical Thickening Shampoo: Yuka Score: 51/100 (Good)

Since trying Monat, I’ve becoming a bit of a loyalist, even joining their Market Partner program so I can sell product to friends and family at a discount. This is the product I started with and it was a game changer for me. It has a nice thick consistency when lathering in my hands. I notice it doesn’t lather on the hair super well on the first round of washing, but the second round lathers quite richly. I love the subtle minty scent and the product leaves my hair feeling soft, clean, shiny, volumized, and moisturized. The major bonus is that the melatonin and caffeine in it extend the hair’s growth phase and stop hair loss in it’s tracks - that’s what got me sold on this product after a bout of post-Covid hair loss. In addition, ingredients in their patented CAPIXYL™ (a blend of red clover extract and peptides) strengthens and thickens hair. Pros: Performance, smell, texture, Cons: Slightly lower Yuka Score

4. Monat Black Shampoo and Conditioner : Yuka Score: 50/100 (Good)

I was super skeptical about this as I have fine hair that can easily get greasy at the roots - I’ve never been a shampoo/conditioner combo fan. However, I tried this shampoo on recommendation from my mentor from Monat. She described Monat Black as “luxurious” and “amazing” and recommended it for several of my clients. That got me curious. I felt I needed to try it if I were to recommend it to people in the future. My mentor was right and it blew me away. Again, it has a subtle minty scent that I find refreshing. It is a slightly thicker consistency than the IR clinical thickening shampoo and lathers a bit better. It left my hair feeling even healthier and more moisturized than the IR clinical alone, without flattening the roots or minimizing volume at all.

Pro: Performance, smell, texture, Cons: Slightly lower Yuka Score

I hope this helps fine-haired folks sift through some of the low-tox hair options out there. Once I work my way through these products I plan to test out some other products and add to this guide.

Contact me if you are interested in personalized recommendations from Monat and I can create a cart for you with discounted pricing (it’s also available online for a higher price.)

Next up: I plan to try Attitude, Carina, Majestic Pure Biotin Shampoo, and Inner Sense Shampoos.

Comment below if you have any favorites or there are specific low-tox brands you’d like me to prioritize. DM me if you’d like more info or VIP prices on any Monat products.

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Conspiracy theorists will tell you to question everything, but I’d like to reframe that for us today. Questioning everything weakens your field and ultimately disempowers you because it fractures and disperses your attention into multiple facets of reality that are outside of your control. Your attention, and where you place it, is your power, and gives you the ability to have control over your actions and your life.

Reality Is Malleable. Here’s How to Work With It.

If instead of questioning everything, we simply start with the underlying assumption that everything is malleable and nothing is completely and unchangeably true, then we can begin to ask selective questions that empower us and focus our attention rather than fracturing it. Here we get to play in creation and instead of asking “What’s true?,” we can ask “What do I wish to create here?”

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This question organizes your attention, gives your nervous system direction, and moves you from fragmentation into coherence, where change can actually happen.

This question helps identify an intention (the way we can best direct our attention or power) and the outcome we want to amplify. Instead of placing our focus on questioning what is and empowering a frequency we don’t want, like, or agree with, we are shifting our focus towards what we want to create and moving towards a new frequency.

The same principle applies to resistance and fighting realities we don’t want to accept. Like the common phrase goes, whatever we resist, persists. This means, whatever we try to fight, we unwittingly strengthen. Instead of focusing our attention on resisting what we don’t want, we can pause and return to the assumption that reality, and our perception of it, is malleable.

From there we can ask “What do I want to create?”

The Field Follows Your Focus

The next step then is to become aligned with what we want to create.

For example, if you’re trying to get over someone — the more you suppress thinking about them, the worse you feel and the more obsessive your thoughts. Or, in body image terms, the more you hate a part of your body, the more you focus on and empower that part of your body. You deepen the fixation rather than resolve it.

Instead, if you can acknowledge that the thoughts you have that are making you feel bad are not even true, but just malleable aspects of reality, you can begin to create the reality you do want.

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Steps for shifting your reality:

1. Observe what’s happening without believing it’s the truth

2. Ask “what do I want to create here?” “What do I want to happen?”

3. Cultivate the feeling you would have if that were true + expand that feeling in your body. This changes your frequency.

4. Relax your nervous system through meditation, Safe and Sound Protocol, or other tools to come to a state of stability and coherence (a state where you feel in harmony rather than conflict).

5. Vision your new reality from a relaxed state.

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Recently I went to a meditation event where the facilitator told participants to “be flexible” with others even when something doesn’t feel right. She elaborated saying that showing flexibility is an extension of your compassion and empathy.

While I’m in agreement that we should have compassion and empathy for others shortcomings, and even that we should consider what others are going through when they do something that doesn’t feel right to us, I felt myself stiffen at the conflation of “flexible” with compassion and empathy. Before telling myself I should “be flexible” about my stiffening reaction, I took a moment to reflect on why this “teaching” sparked a tingling heat sensation in my chest. I realized “be flexible” is a phrase often spoken to women to deflect accountability and ask women to do subvert their needs for the needs and benefit of others. The demand on women to “be flexible” shifts the focus off of what a woman needs or asks for and instead highlights their lack of flexibility as a problem. The reality is that just “being flexible” doesn’t actually contribute to the integrity, health, and complexity of real relationship - which is to hold one’s own needs in balance with a situation and another person. When we subvert our needs rather than address them contextually, the resentments build up like plaque in the relationship that gets harder and harder to address.

As someone who grew up in a family system characterized by minimizing, denial, control, and gaslighting, I recall prompts to “be less sensitive’ and “be more flexible” in response to basic requests. This was often paired with hypocrisy that others didn’t heed their own advice and were not “being flexible” themselves.

Gaslighting - a term that originated from the movie Gaslamp - is a form of emotional abuse in which one person’s reality is denied completely, making the victim question their reality. Gaslighting can be intentional - as when an individual deliberately tries to manipulate another person's perception of reality to gain an advantage like control or power - or unintentional, as when someone minimizes or dismisses another person’s experience out of their own biases, denial, or lack of awareness.

Intentional gaslighting is associated with narcissistic abuse whereas unintentional gaslighting can come from all sorts of other mental health issues. Gaslighting is, at best tolerated, and at worst, encouraged by American' society with it’s “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” at all costs mentality.

Regardless of the intent behind the gaslighting, the impact of someone else denying a person’s reality has an undeniable impact on one’s nervous system. When a person’s reality is validated, vagal tone is strengthened. This bolsters our sense of attunement and self trust as the communication between gut and brain is validated. Think of moments when you shared an emotion and the other person empathized with you. How did that feel in your body?

When, on the other hand, someone minimizes or gaslights you, the vagus nerve connection is interrupted and disrupted, creating a parasympathetic nervous system response - like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (people-pleasing). Oftentimes this may look like an increased heart rate and feelings of stress. Imagine a time you expressed a feeling and the other person argued with you, i.e. you said “I feel sad that I got sick,” and the other person responds with something like “You’re not sad, and you’re not sick.” How would you feel in your body hearing someone else deny your experience and mirror a reality that is incongruent with what you know to be true?

I use these examples to illustrate how subtle the difference is and how commonplace unintentional gaslighting can be.

In the “be flexible” lecture mentioned at the beginning, the facilitator gave the example of someone being thirty minutes late to a meeting and encouraged people to imagine “being flexible” and considerate of the late person’s experience. Naturally, there was some resistance in the class. What I would say is that we should absolutely be compassionate and empathetic that the person may struggle with being on time. Our response may be more flexible if this is out of character or the first time it happens. We may need more information before we can know how flexible to be. Or, we may ourselves struggle with chronically being too flexible and our work may be to speak up. At the very least, if we are in some kind of ongoing relationship with this person we also need to locate our own feelings and needs and find a way to communicate them, act from them, or protect them.

The task in relationship is not to unilaterally apply flexibility as a value when so much of the chaos and disruption in relationships is caused by flexibility, or it’s opposite pole, rigidity. The task is to align wth our truth - our needs underneath our feelings - and find a way to navigate it in relationship. We should respond to our own reactions rather than reacting from a triggered state, but this does not automatically suggest the right reaction is flexibility.

In this example, we could choose - exercising patience, adhering to our schedule, offering an alternative time, cancelling altogether, abdicating any future planning with this person, having a discussion with the person about our feelings, or a number of other choice permutations. All of these include varying degrees of flexibility and rigidity, but we need to start by identifying our capacity and our needs, and negotiating from that place. From the place of aligning with our needs, it is not hard to hold the other person with compassion.

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Betrayal doesn’t just break your heart. It breaks your body’s sense of safety.

After betrayal or abandonment, many people try to think their way back to solid ground. We analyze the relationship. We replay conversations. We look for explanations that will finally let us relax.

But the nervous system doesn’t heal through logic alone. It heals when it no longer feels braced for impact.

This is why betrayal cuts so deeply—it doesn’t only fracture trust with another person. It destabilizes your internal sense of being, or of feeling safe and sound in connection itself. HSPs are prone to feeling relational ruptures and this sense of threat to safety even more deeply than others.

Emotional wounds don’t just live in your mind. They are wired into your nervous system.

That’s why more than cognitive tools are necessary for rewiring the patterns and dysregulation around those wounds.

Nervous system dysregulation is not a character flaws or relational immaturity. It is an adaptive responses formed in challenging environments - often in relationships where closeness was inconsistent, overwhelming, or unreliable.

If we found ourselves in these relationships in childhood, our nervous systems may have become wired to feel stress in relationship. This may lead to selecting and/or avoiding situations that recreate existing wounds. In terms of attachment styles, the nervous system connects a particular belief system to the wound:

The dismissive avoidant system learned: I survive by not needing.
The anxious system learned: Connection can disappear at any moment—stay alert.
The fearful avoidant system learned: I want closeness, but I will always get betrayed.

Different strategies and beliefs are formed around the same core wound: connection doesn’t feel regulating—it feels risky.

So when betrayal like cheating, secrecy, emotional triangulation, sudden withdrawal occurs it doesn’t just hurt emotionally. It triggers the body’s nervous system response around those earliest wound, and confirms the belief: I was right not to relax.

Because this is patterned into our nervous systems, insight alone often isn’t enough to shift our sense of well-being. If your nervous system is still in threat mode with no calming influence from the outside, insight can feel like explaining fire safety to a blazing fire. In fact, your nervous system thinks it needs to stay alert to protect from impending danger. It’s trying to help you.

Betrayal and relational wounds live in the autonomic nervous system—the part of you that scans for danger before thought ever arrives. Until that system experiences safety again, your body will keep responding as if loss is imminent.

This is where nervous-system-based healing becomes essential.

“Safe and sound” is not a mindset. It’s a physiological state.

The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) is a music therapy designed to bring the body into the state of safety, connection, and well-being. Based on the work of psychologist Stephen Porges, PhD and his Polyvagal Theory, the SSP delivers vibrations to the vagus nerve via specially-filtered music designed to mimic the mid-range frequencies associated with the human voice and exercise the middle-ear muscles. In this way, it aims to gently retune the nervous system toward cues of safety—especially social safety. For many people with attachment wounds, safety was never consistent enough to wire in.

When the nervous system begins to experience safety without effort, something subtle but profound shifts:

Hypervigilance softens, longing becomes less desperate, distance becomes less necessary, and a sense of something soft and vaguely familiar starts to return to the body.

Not because you forced yourself to trust again—but because your body no longer believes closeness equals danger.

The basis of the Polyvagal Theory is that the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS - our automatic nervous system response center) is constantly reflexively scanning the environment for safety cues (this is called neuroception) and has a hierarchy of how it responds to threat, which I’ll outline below.

Polyvagal theory recognizes that these reflexive responses often developed in response to relational trauma and must be healed through relationship to a healthy, attuned nervous system. This is called co-regulation, and is the basis for healing. This co-regulation is a key component of why SSP is only offered with clinical support by a certified professional.

The three hierarchical states of the Autonomic Nervous System are:

• Ventral Vagal (Social Engagement): The most adaptive and recently evolved mammalian system that generates calm, safety, and connection, regulates heart rate and allows for face-heart connection.

• Sympathetic Nervous System (Fight/Flight): The system that mobilizes for action when danger is detected and is responsible for anxious responses.

• Dorsal Vagal (Shutdown/Freeze): The oldest, reptilian system initiating shutdown or immobility in response to severe life threat and responsible for avoidant responses.

Betrayal and nervous system regulation healing aren’t about trusting faster, but slowly surrendering to a new nervous system state that allows us to feel naturally more safe and connected.

This is especially important in a world where we are often told that healing means being more open, more forgiving, more understanding, no matter what your nervous system is saying.

Real healing often looks like attunement to our natural responses and needs first, and protection of our own system next, in other words, greater selectivity without shutdown.

When the nervous system has a ground of internal safety, relationships can start to change. The SSP does this through the use of a five hour music playlist, that the listener receives with a therapist or practitioner first and then on their own.

The music is filtered in such a way that the background noise in it stimulates the middle ear muscles, which stimulate the vagus nerve (the largest cranial nerve that connects the brain to the gut), helping the body move out of the body’s automatic stress response and into the ventral vagal nervous system. That’s the part of the nervous system that generates feelings of safety, calm, and connection.

In my experience delivering and receiving SSP, I’ve seen results that are subtle, profound, and variable.

Each person needs a different approach to delivery, yet almost everyoen finds benefit from the combination of coregulation, attunement, and guidance with the music itself.

People tend to feel a subtle sense while listening or right after that everything is okay, or they may just find themselves able to sleep better at night. These moments may be brief and fleeting at first, or they may be more profound, but they show that change is possible, and it doesn’t always require working against your natural nervous system responses.

Safe and sound isn’t always something someone can give you, but it’s something your body can learn to remember gently, gradually, and with the right kind of support.

If betrayal shattered your sense of reality, attachment feels exhausting, or love feels like vigilance instead of nourishment, it doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means your nervous system has a wound that needs to be met, not managed.

That is where real healing begins.

If you would like to see if the SSP program might be a fit for you, please schedule a time to consult with me here. I’ll also be doing a Substack Live on nervous system regulation with Q&A at the end so keep an eye out or DM me for details. If you enjoyed this post, you can support my work by:

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When people aren’t energetically clear, you can feel it before you can explain it.

It’s the indirect stuff that’s meant to land like a tiny little firework in your energy field: flirting in front of you, liking something in a group chat you’re part of, suddenly following you on a new platform, pretending they don’t know something you know they do, or pretending they don’t see you when they walk by. It’s rarely overt, it’s often out-of-sync with the preexisting relational rhythm, and it’s difficult to name without feeling dramatic—but you can feel the impact, like a plastic tag scratching your skin under a sweater. The impact is subtle, persistent, and meant to be irritating. It leaves you wondering: Am I making this up, or was that meant to get my attention?

Unclean energy triangulates, tests, pokes, and waits to see if you react. It is often characterized by bold statements that don’t match reality like “I don’t do drama.” If something leaves you feeling subtly off, disrespected, or confused, that’s all the data you need. You don’t need proof of intention or to understand better what’s happening. You don’t even need to respond (in fact, your power may lie in not responding.) You only have to validate that what you feel is real. From there, declare to yourself what is happening. The permission the other person has over you ends the moment you reclaim the truth and stop letting someone else energetically dominate the narrative with their messy moves and lack of clear communication.

Clean energy, on the other hand, is direct and does not leave you feeling confused. Anything less than that - anything unclean or unclear - can be corrected with your own clarity. Pause, validate yourself, and recognize that if they were capable of meeting you with directness and clarity, they would. And, if they can’t, you can put their dirty energy in the trash can of your mind and pass right on by (found that phrase on the internet, and I love it.)

Finding your voice isn’t always about confronting every sideways move someone makes. Finding your voice is, however, about trusting your internal signal and letting your behavior stay rooted in your values and interests instead of being pulled into a dramatic game you never wanted to play in the first place.

Sovereignty is defined by Merriam Webster as “the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable power or authority a state possesses to govern itself, its people, and its territory without outside interference…Key aspects include internal control and external independence.” Energetic sovereignty is a similar power over our own thoughts, words, and actions.

When you stop giving credence to unclear energy with your thoughts, words, and actions, your presence gets quieter and a lot more powerful. You are able to step into choice and true energetic sovereignty.

Next time, instead of reacting to their bid for attention, turn toward your own reaction to it with steadiness, clarity, and validation - and let your silence speak for itself, I choose to focus my energy elsewhere.

If you enjoyed this post, you can support my work by:

• Hitting the ♡ icon below

• Sharing your experiences and reflections below in the comments!

• Sending this to a friend who might want to subscribe

If you are looking to become more empowered in love, life, and leadership through therapy or coaching, reach out here.

If you’re dating, you’re probably all too familiar with an experience in modern dating that’s so subtle, so normalized, and so easy to dismiss that many of us don’t even realize how much it’s affecting us.

It’s not the deeper pain of abandonment, betrayal, or heartbreak I’m referring to here. It’s the tiny, chronic micro-rejections: the barely visible but fully palpable moments when someone signals:

I’m here… but not fully.
I’m interested… but not enough.
I want access to you… but not intimacy.
I like you… but I won’t choose you.

These moments are the paper-cuts of dating. They may not always make it into our breakup stories, but they seep into our hearts, creating a heaviness and jadedness that seems to come from nowhere but is a quiet accumulation of small dismissals.

Little Cuts That Confuse the Nervous System

A micro-rejection is any subtle interaction that leaves you feeling confused, unsettled, diminished, invalidated, or second-guessing, without enough clarity to name what happened. Like those moments where:

• They watch all your stories but ignore your texts.

• They say they’re “busy” but you see them online for hours.

• They text you flirtatiously, but don’t respond when you reply.

• They reply warmly one day and vanish the next.

• They talk openly about how important connection is or how important you are… and then disappear when it’s time to show up.

• They drop breadcrumbs instead of effort.

• They say “we should hang out” but never follow through.

• They orbit your online world like a satellite — close enough to feel present, but too far to land.

Orbiting is the most prevalent form of micro-rejection that keeps you in relational limbo.

Like other micro-rejections, orbiting keeps your hope and that nervous system thread between you alive without offering a real relationship. It activates your attachment system without giving your nervous system anything to hold onto. It creates the sense of almost: Almost chosen. Almost mattering to someone. Almost a relationship.

That “almost” is where the wound forms - the quiet hurt that tries to make sense of someone trying to keep you around but not valuing you enough to care about what you want or keep you for real.

Why Micro-Rejections Hurt More Than Big Ones

A big rejection is clear. Painful, possibly — but tangible, clean, and therefore actionable. If we know what happened, we know what we are getting over.

Micro-rejections, on the other hand, are destabilizing because they’re ambiguous and they settle into our wounded beliefs. They don’t wound the heart — they wound the nervous system and all those shadowy beliefs we’re vaguely aware of. They handicap our brain’s ability to make a decision from a place of certainty, calm, and clarity. They create a sense of ambiguous loss.

The ambiguity activates:

• hypervigilance

• rumination

• overanalysis

• self-doubt

• compulsive checking

• internalized shame

• the feeling that you’re “not quite enough”

• loss

• confusion

It’s not the rejection itself that hurts—it’s the lack of clarity. Clarity allows the mind to rest. Ambiguity forces it to work overtime and allows our wounds and attachment patterns to create and attach to negative stories about ourselves.

Why Women Feel Micro-Rejections Differently

Women are generally socialized to:

• read emotional nuance

• monitor connection

• attune to micro-cues

• internalize relational responsibility

• “make sense” of relational behavior that doesn’t make sense

So when a man orbits — watching stories but not reaching out, liking posts but not engaging, offering warmth but not consistency — women don’t just notice it.

They interpret it.

Women don’t just notice inconsistency — they feel it in their bodies. They feel the gap between what is said and what is done. They feel the nervous system jolt when interest is followed by silence. They feel the shame of “maybe I imagined it.” They feel the confusion of being pursued just enough to keep them attached.

Women, especially anxious-leaning or HSP women, tend to read micro-cues with high sensitivity. So micro-rejections often trigger:

• hypervigilance

• rumination (“What did I do wrong?”)

• self-blame

• attempts to “fix” the connection

• increased emotional labor

This comes from both socialization (caretaking + relational attunement) and biology (oxytocin-driven bonding and threat detection).

And because women tend to attach through emotional cues, not logic, these micro-rejections feel personal, even when they aren’t.

Why Avoidant Men Experience Micro-Rejections Differently

Men experience micro-rejections too, but the internal process is different.

Many men are socialized to:

• suppress emotional needs

• minimize hurt

• avoid vulnerability

• de-activate quickly

• protect themselves through detachment

• interpret ambiguity as rejection and withdraw

So when a woman orbits them but doesn’t give clear signals, they often respond with a cool distance rather than analysis.

Where a woman may spiral into:

“What did I do wrong?”

An avoidant man may jump to one extreme or another:

“She’s not interested.”

“She wants me.”

And move on.

Not because he actually feels less — but because he’s been taught to feel alone and process alone without feedback when it comes to his emotions. That detachment and alone-ness feels more comfortable and less risky than reaching out and risking rejection.

As with women, micro-rejections often hit men as confirmation of something they already believe about themselves:

“Women don’t really choose me unless I’m perfect.”

But because it’s not socially acceptable for men to name this pain, they internalize it as indifference, confidence, or nonchalance. So instead of spiraling inward, they:

• shut down

• deactivate

• withdraw

• assume disinterest

• avoid pursuing further

• move toward autonomy or a new connection

It’s not that they care less. It’s that they are socialized to disconnect from relational pain and have fewer places to put the feelings. So micro-rejections don’t lead to rumination — they lead to distance.

Many men feel the hurt but lack the language or emotional permission to name it, so they process it through action rather than emotion.

Why Ambiguity Can Be So Intoxicating — and Dangerous

Ambiguity (such as orbiting) is a behavioral paradox:

Someone shows just enough interest to activate your hope…but not enough presence to build connection.

This creates a psychological state called intermittent reinforcement, the same mechanism used in gambling addiction:

• unpredictable reward

• inconsistent attention

• occasional validation

• long stretches of absence

Your nervous system becomes hooked on the possibility.

And possibility is more addictive than certainty.

Ambiguity feels like connection but delivers:

• anxiety

• craving

• longing

• fantasy

• depletion

It is connection without commitment, attention without intimacy, and presence without availability. It is the illusion of being chosen.

The Cure for Micro-Rejections: The 24-Hour Clarity Rule

Micro-rejections lose their power when you stop interpreting them as feedback about your worth and start centering your experience on a positive self-belief.

Because the truth is:

• Someone’s inconsistency is not a mirror.

• Someone’s ambivalence is not your fault.

• Someone’s orbiting is not evidence of your insufficiency.

• Someone’s mixed signals are information — not destiny.

The next time a behavior leaves you confused, uneasy, or overthinking — a late reply, a warm message followed by a freeze, orbiting without engagement, inconsistency that hits your nervous system — try this:

• 1. Notice the micro-rejection.

• 2. Name it to yourself. Start to focus on and create a new belief you can get behind.

• 3. Neutralize the rejection by self-soothing and, if you need to, stating clarity to the other person.

  • This might look like saying: “Hey, I have enjoyed chatting but I’m getting mixed signals. I want to understand what you’re wanting from this relationship so I can figure out how I need to move forward.”

• 4. Give yourself 24 hours to watch what they do next. Not what they say. What they do.

  • If they re-engage with clarity → regulate + move forward.

  • If they drift back into ambiguity → step back, not in protest, but in protection.

  • If they orbit without real connection → disengage your attention.

Your nervous system deserves clarity. Your heart deserves consistency. Your energy deserves reciprocity. Your future deserves someone who chooses you without hesitation.

If micro-rejections are showing up for you, you’re not alone.

This is one of the most common wounds in modern dating, especially among sensitive, empathic, emotionally attuned people — the exact community gathered here.

If you want to explore these dynamics more deeply — how to interpret them, how to protect your heart, and how to build secure connections from the inside out — that’s what I write about here every week.

And you’re welcome to stay for all of it.

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Why Scripts?

Most men were never taught how to speak clearly under pressure. Male role models usually either got angry and blew up or shut down and withdrew, and without a better example, you learned to do one or both. It can be hard to find a middle ground in a moment you are feeling the urge to surrender to your automatic response – often, because of unconscious feelings of shame or guilt. Many men were taught they don’t deserve to take up emotional space or have emotions other than anger, so they suppress or only express anger. What can be helpful is having “defaults” or ready-to-use, automatic phrases you can lean on (like a default setting) instead of withdrawing, lashing out, freezing, people-pleasing, or overexplaining.

Here are 5 scripts that let you:

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Introduction

Your nervous system is the invisible thread connecting mind, body, and relationships.

The Autonomic Nervous System has two branches - Sympathetic (“fight or flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest and digest”). For Highly Sensitive People (HSPs), this thread is extra finely tuned — which means you experience both the beauty and pain of life more vividly.

But sensitivity doesn’t have to mean fragility. With the right tools, your nervous system can become your anchor, compass, and guide. This protocol is designed to give you:

• Daily rituals to regulate your system.

• Emergency resets when you’re overstimulated.

• Long-term practices to build resilience.

Think of it as your user’s manual for nervous system health. Why is nervous system health important?, you might ask. Because it’s only when we have a regulated nervous system and feel safe, that changing deep patterns and showing up in new and creative ways instead of habitual reactions - is possible.

This feeling of safety doesn’t have to be perfect, but just enough for us to feel more safe than threatened.

Nervous System Foundations

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