For me it started around the age of 27 where I was both deeply struggling but also somehow made it look like I was glowing (with makeup, angles, covering up with hair see below)…

I believe the rise of AI will make blemishes that are imperfect more valuable in a sea of airbrushed “perfection.”

When these photos were taken in 2022 my entire life was realigning. I was walking away from a lucrative career and stepping into the unknown of my own heroine’s journey h/t Maureen Murdock!

The Heroine’s Journey framework maps the cycle beautifully: when a woman stops climbing the patriarchal ladder of success and turns inward, toward the self she abandoned somewhere along the way. 🦸🏻‍♀️

I was coming down from a multi-year high where I, like many also do, had mistaken intensity for safety.

Just as stock market was volatile, so was my environment, so was I and so were the people I attracted. My body was yelling at me to stop. It was time to jump off this cliff into the abyss.

What I wasn’t prepared for is after the leap, things actually got a bit messier aaaand harder to explain to people who wanted the clean response to “what do you do?”

Enter my cocoon; everything i had been had to dissolve…. a total ego death and total identity shift... & oooof I wanted to bypass this part!!

Where were my wings already? I had to become soup before I could grow wings…

I wonder if we’re slowly forgetting that the mess is the thing.

I needed to be still and sit in the dark. I needed to decompose and fall apart before I could genuinely and authentically be seen for everything I am - all parts not just the superficially glazed over ones.

I needed to let the darkness purge and my patterns come to the surface to be understood.

I cried and let go of A LOT; understanding that this was indeed a dark night of the soul and I had only one option: to go inward; something I was never trained or taught how to do.

This was a total and complete sacred emptying as much of my shadow material rose to the surface to be seen, understood, integrated and cleared.

As I felt my feelings and reconnected with my body and FEMININE - my own knowing started to develop… a remembrance of my birthright as an intuitive healing force.

As my own gifts came online, my creativity, sensuality, and psychic blasting through the roof I knew I couldn’t ignore this call to return; I came back to “status quo” same-same but different; and with a calling and a mission to spread light about alchemizing shadows to light; and in order to do this, we must actually look and listen, first.

Back into the “matrix” of and corporate America — oy vey! But, this time carrying the quiet sparkle of knowing there is another way, and that we don’t exist in extremes or black/white.

I come with the understanding that the greatest frontier isn’t out there at all, but within, if only we’re willing to look inward with the same curiosity we reserve for the external world.

I am committed to alchemizing shadow into light; to being a womb-man can hold complexity, who isn't afraid of the dark corners or the disconcerting, probing questions (you can thank my Scorpio stellium), who can hold multiple truths at once, and who doesn't shy away from discomfort. I am the one who knows the mess is where the meaning lives. As the heroine of my own journey, the TRUTH is what I brings back from the underworld.

Every crevice of your dark corners deserves your attention.

I hope this inspires you to look, to listen, and to pay attention to the greatest authority on earth: you. 🖤🐛🦋

With love,

Madeline

I feel alone.

I’m deep in luteal, inside the chrysalis of a two-year love now dissolving behind me. Everything has gone a little gray, including the weather. Part of me wants to vanish behind noise-canceling headphones, sunglasses, and a well-practiced RBF. Another part aches, absurdly, to be seen.

There’s the old tug: make a bid for connection, soften the ache, reach for someone. I know that reflex well; but I also know this season is asking me to go in, so I’m not taking the bait.

I’m emotionally unavailable right now.

I’m grieving the relationship, the many relationships before it, and something more insidious: society’s script for where I was supposed to be at thirty-one. The shame of not having it “figured out” by now… whatever “it” is. Beneath all of that sits an older, more existential grief: the rarity of feeling truly met at all (in all the depth a scorpio stellium requires 🙄).

This is why my last retreat felt so revealing; it was facilitated by two men, Cielo and Ivan, alongside the extraordinary Cyrena, for a circle of women.

So much happened that I could write ten of these, but one declaration rises above the rest: I experienced the sheer sacredness of the masculine.

I experienced the safety, protection, and devotion of men aligned with their purpose; of service to it rather than performing service to extract something in return.

I could feel their humility, their groundedness, their surrender to the work.

I could feel, like ZERO, energetic leakage.

I realize: women need men for our healing, too, to calibrate against; our inner masculine tunes itself to the men around us.

The distorted masculine outside creates a hypervigilant masculine inside.

My own animus, the part of me that protects and decides, learned its distortions from unsafe men, and it can only relearn from safe ones.

In their presence, I didn’t have to armor up or over-function. My nervous system could exhale, reorganize, and soften into the safety of their container.

I had never felt this kind of safety with men before. I’d caught it in fragments and glimmers, but here it was, head on: men who had done enough of their own excavating that they could hold and stay with our big feelings without dodging, minimizing, condemning, fleeing, or possessing.

I swirled into a lattice of gratitude and grief.

Have you ever grieved something the very moment you finally received it?

Grief that only women had signed up.

Grief at how rare men like this still are.

Grief that a whole room of women melting into safety was itself proof of how long we’d gone without it.

It turns out this isn’t just me…

The data says a whole generation of women is carrying it too.

Morgan Stanley economists, in their “Rise of the SHEconomy” report, project that 45% of women will be single and childless by 2030, up from 41% in 2018. If accurate, that would make single, childless women the fastest-growing cohort in the United States.

The reasons offered: later marriage, career focus, financial independence, personal fulfillment, and the one that matters most: higher relationship standards.

Women are done, and the anger is warranted. I feel reverberations of suppressed and expressed anger in woman after woman: fresh from a breakup or divorce, or still inside a relationship that asks her to parent instead of partner; to cajole him toward humility, toward accountability, toward feeling his feelings at all. The exhaustion of leading a horse to water, standing there, waiting, hoping…

Over-functioning is not devotion; I know this one intimately, straight from my own blueprint. In fact, behold a time capsule, something I wrote during an earlier stretch of my life, the first time I let myself be truly single, after years of partner-hopping:

I’ve historically run toward those so obviously not ready, then cast myself as the one to convert them. I’ve had many relationships. I’m still trying to count how many were true love and how many were trauma wearing love’s costume. It’s easy to blame the other person. But I was the one who chased. I was the one who magnetized.

At some point, I had to stop blaming only them and ask what in me kept choosing this…

I’d elevate the other person, lifting their frequency at the cost of my own. What felt like love was, in part, a way to keep from facing myself.

Relationships are the biggest spiritual mirror we’re given, if we’re brave enough to look.

As my capacity for compassion has grown, so has what I’m able to perceive. I’m meeting more integrated men now. The contrasts and tests are still abundant, I won’t pretend otherwise. But now I can hold the whole of a man, his arc alongside mine, without collapsing into it or fleeing from it.

I’m still in my post-breakup chrysalis, expanding my tenderness.

I hold more space for men now than I ever have, likely because I’m holding more space for myself than I ever have.

On some level, I believe Ivan and Cielo are anomalies, and yet they’re also proof of what’s possible. When men commit to working on their inner landscape, when the masculine and the feminine are integrated, shadow and divine alike, embodied rather than theorized... magic!

Outside, the gray is breaking and yellow sun spills through the window; it feels as if the sky decided to prove the point.

The café is emptying now, and I notice I feel less alone. My own inner masculine and feminine have found each other on the page, braided into the making of this very piece. Perhaps the integration we long to find in another begins, first, as a creative, life-generating, vital homecoming within. 🤍

P.S. Cielo and Ivan are now holding a retreat for men in the same magical place. If you’re a man reading this, I genuinely hope you go.

I was reminded of this recently, stumbling across words I wrote three years ago.

September 30th, 2023 — MADTHOUGHTS, Issue 13:

“I’m unpacking my propensity to select projects over partners. Why have I been drawn to emotionally unavailable humans? Why, when someone shows me their full attention and affection, do I shirk? I have historically run to those who are very obviously not ready, and I am the one to convert them into partnership. Now, I am tired.”

I wrote those words sitting by the ocean in Morocco, newly untethered for the first time in four years, freshly back from my first 200-hour yoga teacher training in Bali, cracking open, alone with the quiet, for pretty much the first time ever.

Now I’m writing from the mountains of Colorado, newly single after two years, and I can see a deeper layer beneath that earlier realization, one that has drifted back to the surface several years and a boyfriend later.

Now, I’m asking a harder question. Not just what I have been doing (chasing the emotionally unavailable, playing the fixer, helper, mother) but what hidden part of me actually craved these dynamics in the first place?

Here’s my answer: when I am busy managing someone else’s chaos, I do not have to look at my own. By rushing to put out other people’s fires I am looking away from myself in the most functional, noble-looking way possible. When I am dependent on such dynamics, I am robbed of the opportunity to elevate, take risks, and sit silently as I connect and embody HER, my higher self.

The great illusion of overgiving is that it’s loving. Kabbalistically, overgiving is taking, in that it has a hidden agenda; resentment blooms the moment I don’t get back what I poured out, when I don’t receive what I decided I was owed from my martyrdom of self-sacrifice. Overgiving asks “what’s in it for me?” This is codependency, an intricate escape from the self, and it fuels love addiction.

While I am kneeling in the dirt, tending to everyone else’s flames, my own fires may be suppressed… but they grow wild in the dark.

What’s come up for me, again, is to LEAN BACK and practice receiving.

This is infinitely harder than it sounds, since receiving is not a passive state. Receiving demands a kind of stillness I can find uncomfortable, asking me to sit still and contemplate: what do I actually want? Not what I can offer, not what would make me useful, not what would make me appear capable and generous. What do I want to draw in? Who do I want to stand beside me?

I notice my resistance to receiving everywhere. I see it in the way I bat away a compliment before it can land on my skin, or in the way I physically wince when a man looks me directly in the eyes to say he is here for me. In the way I don’t fully read texts that are complimentary. In the sudden urge to hide my head in my hands when someone is honest about their intentions. In the way I linger in jobs and relationships long past their expiration dates, terrified of risking disappointment, letting others down, and god forbid they don’t like me. I see it in how I built an entire identity around being the glue. If I am the one holding everything together, I never have to ask if anyone is holding me.

My tikkun, the specific, sacred soul-work I came here to do, is about receiving. I am here to alchemize low self-worth into self-love; to learn in my bones that I am inherently worthy of receiving. I have preached this truth for years, and yet this spiral brings it back to me, again and again.

I celebrate each and every version of me. The 2023 maiden could name the pattern, understanding she was the common denominator… that was the beginning of her accountability (yay); she was asking what she was doing. This version, the 2026 version, is asking why she was doing it (yay).

This distinction matters because it shows soul and emotional growth. Also, there’s a space between diagnosing a behavior and understanding its true function. The behavior was choosing people who could not fully show up. The function was to keep my gaze safely locked outward, eons away from the frightening project of becoming fully actualized myself.

As Marianne Williamson wrote: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” By remaining in the safety of fixing, managing, and controlling, I block the very path that leads to my most expressed self and divine vibrational matches.

True intimacy, as I wrote three years ago, is into-me-I-see; it means letting myself be witnessed and honoring my own perspective of myself first.

If I cannot hold my own worth, the applause of a thousand people will never matter. Without that internal anchor, their regard will always feel slightly fragile, entirely unearned, and ready to vanish in the wind.

I feel the liberation even as my fingers type these words.

And so it is.

I watch a friend get engaged, scroll past a pregnancy announcement, and I feel not enough. A friend buys a house, another has her second kid, squeezes me in for coffee before a married couples dinner, and there it is again: an ever increasing hum that I have fallen short because I don’t exactly “fit.”

I’ve spent way too much money on every form of “healing modality” you can imagine: retreats, trainings, reiki masters, therapists, somatic healers, chakra balancers, psychics, and a few outright scam artists. I sat in discomfort on purpose, repeatedly, because somehow I thought this would be over if I felt through it enough… the void.

It’s Shabbat, aka Friday night. I’m alone, nursing a migraine, pounding ginger shots. I really shouldn’t be looking at screens, but I’ve got my blue light blockers on. I’m lying on my biomat, trying… yet again… to figure out what deeper wound still needs tending to.

How much more excavating do I have to do before this gnawing, grating, ever-persistent low-grade fuming feeling leaves?

BUT… and here’s what I unlocked on my most recent therapy walk… What if I’ve been obsessing over soothing something that was never mine to begin with? Conditioned beliefs that seeped and smeared their way into my mind, parasitizing it…so deeply embedded that I mistook them for my own thoughts, my own fears… so utterly enmeshed that it’s taken me 31 years to begin untangling them.

The insidious nonsense of “not enough” didn’t come from me or my life. It was inherited and consumed from everything around me: the messaging, the metrics, the reward systems that taught me, from a young age, that enoughness wasn’t inherent. It was something to be earned, worked for, paid for, and suffered for. I was taught to contort, squeeze, suppress, and warp myself to fit into the narrow, specific shape of what a conventionally “made it” life was supposed to look like. This belief, false belief, was planted within me so deeply to the point where I believed it was my own.

This isn’t mine, though. It was handed down through generations before me, woven into our culture, all around me… we all can be lured into these stories.

I realized this with my therapist last week, and it’s clear I’m still deep in the thick of processing it. I started laughing… no actually laughing… after going from full-on freaking out to this sudden, lightning-like clarity. I was cackling at how urgent the timeline around having children had started to feel. The deeper layer was I don’t even know if I want kids or if that urgency is something so ingrained and culturally programmed.

The cackles came from realizing just how much I had constructed, how much of a figment this so-called “urgency” really was. It’s the same story that says a woman’s worth has an expiration date; that at 31, I should be scared into fear tactics of freezing my eggs because my fertility, and therefore somehow me, is running out; that I need to fill in my natural lines with poison just to maintain something I’m supposedly losing as if existing in time is a form of eroding damage.

I know it’s not true and I have known for a while. But knowing it is different from releasing it, so I release it here.

Linearity isn’t me and I am learning to be OK with that. I am an alien of sorts (Aquarius moon). I can rest in the knowing that I am doing my work, not numbing, not bypassing, not performing healing.

So, enough with the stories of not enough. I am enough.

May we all find our way back to that.

This piece is deeply moved and inspired by Miss Educated By Tash Doherty’s Whose Shame Are You Carrying?

Yesterday, I was supposed to attend a psilocybin ceremony. The night before, I started to feel sick as I was hit with congestion and a head cold. Earlier in the week I told myself it was allergies… the pollen count is high here and I could sleep it off. Underneath the mental gymnastics, though, I knew my body was off-kilter. I called the facilitator.

Met with a melodic, sing-song voice, she explained that the ego often creates resistance as a way to protect us from receiving the medicine; she suggested that what I was experiencing was my ego and subconscious attempting to block the process.

I remember thinking: I am pretty sure my ego is not making me physically sick but ok… I guess the body keeps the score.

I reiterated that I was inquiring because I felt physically unwell and wanted to know whether it was safe to participate (not because I was having spiritual resistance); this was especially important considering it would have been my first time in this type of ceremony.

She then reiterated that the $111 I paid was nonrefundable. Mmm k… again… wasn’t asking or thinking about the money… was just checking to see if this was safe….

I was curious and even excited to try plant medicine, but I also respect that it carries real risks… and more importantly, I respect my own wiring. I come from a family with intense mental health dynamics, and I’m aware that without learning how to regulate my emotions and steady my mind, I could have easily followed a similar path. I’ve done my work, and it’s made me attuned to my own signals.

At the same time, I’m highly open and sensitive; I feel things deeply, and I can dissociate or “leave my body” with relative ease. I don’t take this combination lightly, even if, likely, I would have been fine.

For someone like me, going into a ceremony feeling physically compromised, on a first time, no less, wasn’t a risk I was willing to absorb.

The space holder’s sing-songing didn’t soothe me; quite the opposite, it felt bypassy, something like “K sweetie no worries. Have some soup. Love, light, and rainbows.” It felt like we were speaking past each other. She felt detached, as she kept repeating her song in a drifting cadence: “You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine, you’ll be fine.”

We ended the call with her literally singing to me, telling me the ceremony was centered around me, so I had to come. She had rented a house with a yard, in nature, because she knew I would appreciate it. According to her, the entire gathering had been reshaped around my presence.

So… I had to come?

Whatever else was true about the situation, this was definitely pressure; soft and spiritualized, but pressure nonetheless.

After I hung up the phone, still sitting with that heavy feeling in my chest, I called my friend Daniella.

Daniella also works with medicine, but what stood out was how she actually listened and reflected. I laid everything out: my body feeling off, the practitioner’s “soothing” tone that didn’t match the underlying pressure, the repeated financial reminders (we were told again and again to bring $333 in cash the day of), and the insistence that I had to come.

Then, I asked, “Do I go or not?”

She said: “So you’re asking me if you should push the system override button. I’m flipping it back to you… do you?”

Daniella didn’t assure me I would be fine, and she didn’t repackage my physical hesitation; but she held up a mirror and allowed me to see what I was actually asking her to validate, without “shoulding” me. She made it clear, without ever dictating my path, that this was my call. It was my body, my knowing, and my decision to make.

What I noticed from this contrast is there’s a difference between a teacher who overrides your intuition and one who returns you to it. My spiritual “ick” comes from the former, something I’ve witnessed far too often in this space unfortunately.

Another friend pointed something out: this didn’t feel aligned with a grounded, heart-led presence, one that guides rather than persuades. It raises questions: who is genuinely there to serve, who listens and makes you feel heard, rather than chasing a payment or planting ideas just to get you to say yes?

Hanging up the phone with Daniella, I felt grateful for the expansion this moment brought me. I noticed that this was a moment of healing - and it didn’t come from saying yes to some insane breakthrough, aggressively pushing past my fears, or diving headfirst into a consciousness altering experience. My work here was in choosing “no.”

Shortly after, I texted the practitioner to share how I was feeling:

Me: Hi, I slept 12 hours and still feel sick. Given everything on the disclaimer and the fact that it’s my first time, I want to go into ceremony feeling well and strong. Thanks for understanding.

She tried to call me, then replied:

Practitioner: Ok my love. I understand. As a reminder, the $111 deposit is nonrefundable. Hope you feel better soon.

She brought up the deposit yet again… ICK! Yet another confirmation that I had made the right choice. It left me feeling as though the focus was more on securing the $111 (and the remaining $333) than on the supposedly life-changing, upside down experience of the people she was guiding.

Making this choice wasn’t dramatic, but nonetheless, I listened to the quiet, inconvenient voice of my intuition. As a recovering people-pleaser and “yes girl,” this felt especially brave.

I will continue listening to the sometimes uncomfortable voice of my internal GPS. I hope this inspires you to do the same and not press the system override button.

In love and gratitude,

Madeline

I still felt lowkey hollow.

What I yearned for wasn’t better content, but better connection.

We live in a world where we scroll, consume, and perform online as if our attention is an endless resource. It isn’t. I explored this in a piece called The Energy Audit, reflecting that showing up everywhere means showing up nowhere, and that maybe the most radical act is to become disengaged (with everything) and discerning (with where our eyeballs go).

A recent piece in The Free Press tracked the rise of news avoiders: people across all age groups checking out of media, not out of apathy but exhaustion. One person described the news landscape as “mountains of cocaine.” Another said, point blank, “I’m just happier.”

Science backs them up: constant consumption raises cortisol, shatters focus, and causes wild mood swings. Obviously, it’s not healthy for the brain to be bombarded with content designed to shock, divide, and soothe you, all within the same 30-second scroll.

I knew this. I still kept scrolling.

I thought curating my feed to kundalini chants and Balinese beaches would make me feel better, but my lived reality didn’t change; I was still locked in the same posture of consumption, avoiding my own creator consciousness.

What actually solved the lowkey hollow problem was human contact in the flesh. A conversation that included eye contact in real time, whether it was a barista, a neighbor, a coworker, a confidant, or my grandmother. A walk outside without my phone (that has become an appendage). Meditating. Hearing my own thoughts before someone else’s unsolicited opinions on how to balance my hormones or selling me on GLP-1s (no thanks). Being present in a work environment that feels uplifting to me. I’ve spent recent years in my own transformation, and in the midst of it all, guiding others through transformation became my direction. Helping others regulate, reconnect, recreate… LIVE, without cameras and captions.

The most surprising thing about my cleanse was how little I missed the drug supply that is social media. Like, at all.

I am not ready to give up all socials completely, but changing my relationship with it feels significant.

My intention is to make my in-person contact more exquisite than anything I could curate online.

I am on the market for more nourishing human to human connection. You?

Who or what might be waiting for you on the other side of the scroll? 🌅

Some things I noticed when I wasn’t scrolling:

A snail this morning on my walk! Perfect metaphor for containing energy and slowing down…

The sun setting just as I am about to post this article (and go for a nature walk!)

Musings yesterday on nature walk^

My pilates class got canceled due to “unforeseen circumstances,” so I took the nod to do less, and brewed many cups of Egyptian licorice tea and watched the city be swallowed while I tried to “do” some work. The air smells like wet pavement and salt, and the skyline is smudged gray, dissolving into itself.

My body is in its own inner winter… my moon and the moon are in sync: I am encased in this energetic dip as the veils thin. This is my sacred season and what it asks of me is a cleanse, a quieting, a willingness to go under; “psychic surgery” if you will, feeling beneath the belt.

I’ve written about cyclical living before, about the act of actually honoring your body’s rhythm instead of overriding it with caffeine and sheer will. This is my body’s built-in dissolution state; it’s a quiet season where whatever culture labels as inconvenient or bitchy is ACTUALLY my subtle and physical bodies whispering: be still to hear and to feel. Oh and stop talking to so many people, stay within.

Most of us never get this quiet. It’s uncomfortable, and besides… we have too much to do. Right?

But I still feel it: a damning, familiar pull toward productivity, a storm of guilt that I should be doing more… like actually study for a comprehensive exam (it’s tomorrow btw), volunteer for more tasks at work, call back my friends who I haven’t spoken to in weeks, workout? More, move, do something.

An old, gnawing voice, predicated on guilt, and it has been running my life. And yet somewhere beneath it lives the KNOWING: that I must cocoon to feel, and I must feel to understand, and I must understand if I want to teach.

Guilt has swallowed me; I reflect on how much of my choices, my relationships, my sense of self are run by it. The tricky part is that guilt can masquerade as loyalty, as love, as generosity, as being a good person: a martyr. And yet my very best relationships aren’t built on guilt, but on something freer, something unconditional.

How would I show up in the world if I didn’t need to PROVE my goodness?

Tonight, instead of attending a cacao circle, I found myself shifting course after a transcendental acupuncture experience. Leaving in a dreamy, otherworldly state, only to collapse on the couch, in an attempt to study.

My mirror arrived in the form of my dad. When I started venting about my car needing an expensive repair, he said, “I am exhausted, Madeline.” Feeling initially dismissed, I replied, “Same,” and before long, I erupted into a storm of tears, and I realized how much FEELING I was suppressing for my daily duties, especially as a space holder for OTHERS.

This past month has left me holding on by a thread. I’ve been carrying things I haven’t let myself fully feel and process: the weight of working with people in the depths of recovery, the final stretch of a two-year marriage and family therapy program, loved ones moving through mental health crises, plans constantly unravelling. I’ve been so busy holding it together (not inconveniencing anyone, trying to keep up with responsibilities, trying to be “good,” et cetera) that I never let ALL OF IT land.

Cacao would’ve been cute - but I needed TO CRY not TO CUTE.

How many healers have I paid to evoke feelings, when the most feeling springs up at home?

When I finally let it out, I laughed through the tears. Between realms. As the wave of emotion passed, I felt calm wash over me in a hug…. something shifted and left. Guilt dissipated from a storm into a fog, like the city outside my window.

There is nothing to prove.

This isn’t some self-help essay about having it all figured out. This is me at 31, on the brink of a milestone, moving in with my partner for the first time, and watching myself sabotage the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had.

I can enumerate a thousand hours of talk therapy, somatic coaching, retreats, workshops, a year of celibacy and still, here I am: picking fights, criticizing, scanning for any sign to flee and repeat my pattern of partner hopping.

As a burgeoning COUPLES THERAPIST, Dr. Gottman would not be pleased: I am criticizing, stonewalling and name-calling. I’m scanning for signs that he’s “not right” so I can threaten the relationship and run, like I have done again and again. Yes, I am a Sagittarius and this is my tikkun. IYKYK.

Some lessons spiral back again and again, each time asking for a deeper layer of unearthing. The best at least I can do is choose to stay aware in the now, to love the frightened part of me, and to give her grace in this process. This is a love letter to my sabotaging self, and it will start with a limiting belief that is STILL playing out….

“I don’t trust men.”

I know where this comes from…. but that is a separate substack.

Somewhere, despite my awareness and consciously choosing differently, this belief keeps resurfacing, now playing out in my current relationship. It reminds me that, no matter how much cognitive, energetic, and embodied work I’ve done, there is still more to this onion.

Add to that the cultural moment we’re in: only a few months ago, British Vogue lit a match with the viral “Is It Embarrassing To Have A Boyfriend Now?” discourse. I got on this bandwagon with my De-Centering Men & Centering Ourselves.

Research shows that single heterosexual women report higher well-being than single men, alongside the broader “men’s crisis” conversation about loneliness and disconnection. In many ways, men may “need” partnership more than women do, especially as women’s economic autonomy increases. I’m financially safe so I won’t be trapped by money… So what, exactly, am I afraid of?

Self-Sabotage, My Old Friend

In my year of celibacy, I did a deep dive into all my relationships. What I found was a pattern so consistent it was embarrassing; I chased unavailable men… power, distance, status. I learned how easy it was to turn desire into a game, and how “winning” fed my ego. A therapist once said, “Maybe you like the way they sparkle at you in a way you never got.” Curious. Then came the ones I actually tried to date….

The unstable divorcée: we met when he still had a ring on. Obviously, that devolved.

Orthodox hottie: “safe” from the sleazy wall street womanizer games (he was shomer shabbos and all), but sleazy in a different way: controlling, slick, and threaded with quiet misogyny.

Corporate “cool man” (but also a pushover): I treated him like shit because he actually liked me and couldn’t stand up for himself, which only made me walk all over him more (and lose all attraction).

Depressed, moody man: the “relationship” consisted of booty calls, except for one night spent holding his hair back while he puked from food poisoning.

Serial womanizer: riddled with abandonment wounds and a financial miser (we split my birthday dinner and I am still salty). I cracked him open for a beautiful minute before discovering he had been lying to me over and over about other women, including sleeping with one right before spending an intimate week with my extended family.

It was easy to demonize this one in particular. He betrayed me! But when I went deeper, I saw the truth: he had done exactly what I had done to so many men before him. He told me he was unavailable, he showed me the truth, and I played his game, choosing to look the other way.

Throughout all of these, I was the common denominator.

What Changed

Over a year ago, I wrote extensively about forgiving this last one and, more importantly, forgiving myself. I realized I couldn’t hate him without hating the parts of myself that had acted the same way. As I wrote: “Princesses love a project; queens won’t accept one. And at this moment in time, I was a princess.”

I also realized I had been playing hero and mother in my relationships, helping partners elevate and mature at the expense of my own growth. I was pouring into others to avoid pouring into myself.

So I did the only thing that felt both natural and inevitable: I ran. I searched the world in a chaotic spiral: Tel Aviv, Bali, back to Tel Aviv, then Morocco, then Miami, then San Diego, then back to Bali, until I finally collapsed into Miami, near my parents. I went celibate and began writing a lot. I started my newsletter, weight lifting, lots of yoga, dancing, chanting, oracle card pulling; grounding every morning, feet on the earth, trying to remember what it felt like to belong to myself and to let something go. I lay on a biomat with healing crystals, listened to healing frequencies, explored tantra, qi gong acupuncture - overcoming my fear of needles as these found emotional knots my body had been carrying (especially in my womb), where so much of my story had been stored.

Most importantly, I sat with my unbearable feelings without outsourcing them to other people, places, or things.

After all that work, I got clear that the next person I’d let in would be my husband.

Enter: A (Somewhat) Healthier (and Definitely More Honest) Relationship (+ My Inability to Handle It)

I found my current partner. Someone fundamentally different from those I had been drawn to before; someone who actually wants to be with me, who’s ready for commitment, who is doing his own work in his own way.

We’re about to move in together… and I’m losing my mind.

We’re failing Gottman’s Four Horsemen test spectacularly: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, stonewalling. I’m the one throwing criticisms. When he gets defensive, I criticize more, then stonewall with “I need space.” (This is especially embarrassing because I am choosing to become a couples therapist).

I am creating drama. Blaming him, poking, scanning for any little sign that he’s “not right” so I can pull the escape hatch. I blow things up, name-call, threaten the relationship.

As I have a month left of Saturn in Pisces, of course this lesson is coming to a head and begs the necessary question: What the fuck am I doing? I realize: The Real Fear Isn’t What I Thought!!! My fear is NOT men themselves but the feeling of being TRAPPED. Also given my relationship history somewhere my psyche processed that if I attach my individual identity disappears into them (codependent sagittarius).

So now that I’m about to attach for real, really, truly, all-in attach, my nervous system is FLARING. Every criticism I lob at him is my terrified inner child swinging wildly, trying to maintain control, trying to find the exit before she gets trapped.

My Toxicity

After all that time, money, and energy spent on my own healing gunk, I’m sad to report that I still carry toxicity in my veins. I wish I could say it was only trace amounts, but I’m not so sure. This is my dark feminine, Kali, Scorpio Stellium, whatever-you-call-it side of me. Instead of blaming him for being “toxic,” which is SO much easier, I must look into myself instead.

This is what I uncovered: I don’t yet trust what still feels like an elusive fantasy: a healthy partnership. Given my history, I’ve been wired for haywire - for things to fall apart, so sometimes, staying feels unsafe. I spent years choosing men who couldn’t choose me fully. Now that someone has, I am petrified of the next step and quietly, unconsciously preparing for the worst.

My inner child, tween and teen is trembling, terrified of this new venture.

As I wrote in a moment of clarity: “If I am name-calling him, I am mean to me.”

I don’t have a neat resolution…

I’m writing this from the middle of it, as a form of therapy, as a way to see myself clearly. I’m seeing the pattern, naming it, and choosing to stay instead of creating more chaos to justify leaving.

I know the work is never done, but I am evolving in it. While I’m not proud of the name-calling yesterday, for the first time, I’m bringing my awareness to my present relationship instead of just analyzing past ones.

The work, I believe, is measured by my willingness to witness myself and course-correct, while giving myself grace and my partner gratitude, instead of only understanding it all in hindsight, once the relationship has already incinerated.

I am feeling everything, and I am feeling that commitment is both delicious and dangerous at once..

This is about relearning safety and feeling safe enough to relax, after lifetimes of surviving on high alert.

I used to think healing would feel like climbing a mountain: begin at the bottom, reach the summit, look back at the pain below. Now, as a mystical astrologer, I know it’s more like orbiting a planet; the same landscapes rush by, dizzying, even blindingly familiar, but each time I pass with more self-awareness and less shame.

I embrace every lesson with the spiral of life.

I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you.

Madeline

Not the forced confidence I used to manufacture, not the spiritual bypassing of “everything happens for a reason,” but an actual, embodied knowing.

The last few years had been a long unraveling: Saturn Return, Kali, the Year of the Snake, all of it. TLDR: I quit a “stable” finance job without a next step, embracing a nomadic life that took me across countries, through retreats, and into countless trainings. At first, it was exhilarating. Then sitting with myself oscillated between uncomfortable and soothing. After a while, my lack of direction, my stuckness in “the void,” became unbearable… I didn’t know which way was up. Who was I, and what did I come here to do?

In the midst of my ego death, the place where I was living went to war. People I knew were murdered. Everything that had been “my life” collapsed overnight.

I returned to the states at 28, depressed, living in my parents’ apartment. It wasn’t pretty.

Indeed, my life needed to be razed to the ground before I could build new foundations (Hello, Kali).

To find my footing, I worked the front desk at yoga studios, meditated constantly, and explored every healing path that called to me: astrology, somatics, bodywork, womb healing, qi gong, tantra, you name it. I even toyed with studying acupuncture (still might) and enrolled in a holistic health certification, paying $8k before realizing I was studying on a screen what years of lived experience had already taught me.

Throughout it all, I was in therapy twice a week, healing the PTSD I had carried across continents.

At 29, I had no idea what I was doing with my life.
At 30, I began to understand my shift was from seeking to service.
At 31, that understanding finally locked into my bones.

I’ll always be a curious student of the world. But somewhere in all that searching, the knowledge I’d been accumulating had become wild ivy that needed a trellis to grow, somewhere to give back.

Under the guise of growth and development, I realized I was hiding; I had gotten addicted to learning, to receiving, to feeling like I was improving simply because I was consuming more information.

There’s a dark side to this kind of accumulation, even in the name of self-development, when the ever-ongoing receiving of knowledge becomes avoidance of actually being in the world.

I kept gathering tools, but at a certain point, they weren’t asking to be studied anymore, they were asking to be embodied, used, implemented.

The harder initiation (the one no course could teach) was stepping forward and offering it. Messy action is good action - and this was difficult to digest and act on as a recovering perfectionist.

Finally teaching my first yoga class (after four teacher trainings). Finally letting my voice be heard… I am just now starting to share my singing voice with the community. Finally showing up as me, and many times that looks messy. Finally, accepting the okay-ness, the “safety” in the mess.

Becoming a psychotherapist and working with people in recovery, helping them find their way back to themselves before drugs and alcohol, feels like a homecoming.

Each day, I use the same tools that once helped me find my way: meditation, breath, sound, gentle movement, and honest, vulnerable discussion.

On weekends, I teach yoga at a fancy hotel. The setting and demographic may look different, but their nervous systems are just as overstimulated, just as overwhelmed, just as desperate to exhale.

The work I teach invokes the feminine principles we’ve been systematically conditioned out of: safety, softness, feeling, intuition, connection, community. These tools are the scaffolding that holds us when everything else falls away. At 31, I feel grateful to be a steward of this work.

Thank you for reading and engaging; I hope my writing inspires you to be messy and be you.

With love,
Madeline

Me, this year, on my birthday. It was a perfect day of teaching yoga (and chanting for the first time in my class) and enjoying the beach and meals with friends and family.

I was rushing to yoga. The irony wasn’t lost on me; full-moon energy demands a release so potent that some Ashtanga studios even close for it (and now I see why). But my mind, as always, was three steps ahead of my body… that is, until I tripped, quite literally, over my own feet.

My left hand hit the pavement and was sliced open by my glass water bottle. Blood. Panic. Lightheadedness. I need to be horizontal on a couch before I faint (shoutout to the Pura Vida in Sunset Harbor and my kind neighbor, Luis for nursing me until my Mom rescued me for medical attention).

The day had already been exhausting: teaching classes, seeing clients, jamming in “just one more thing” for myself. Instead, I landed in urgent care, eight stitches later, with a diagnosis that went beyond the physical laceration: a severe case of not knowing how to stop.

Message received: SLOW. DOWN.

This wasn’t my first warning. Life kept teaching me the same lesson, each time more dramatically, a spiral tightening around the core belief I cannot seem to shake.

I couldn’t write in my journal (I am a lefty and this was my left hand).

I couldn’t drive (the universe was literally telling me to take a back seat on my life).

I couldn’t work or work out (no more 7am pilates, hello more REM sleep).

I couldn’t even hold a fork or braid my hair before bed (I wore my hair in a greasy bun for a week).

I couldn’t open a jar of honey from the farm stand (my usual secret ingredient for joie de vivre).

My usual escape routes (productivity, staying busy, constant doing) were null.

The stillness was somewhat itchy and restless, yet also deeply nourishing.

My Coffee Experiment: Cutting the Cord

Stripped of my routines, I finally noticed how frantic my own system had been all along (ironic for a yoga and meditation teacher… but we teach what we most need, right?). I got honest about my mornings: the quasi-desperate reach for espresso, the jolt I relied on to pry my eyes open. That initial cortisol spike, layered on top of my naturally wiry system, was feeding my internal rush (and already elevated vata dosha, iykyk).

Undeniably, it was my time to cut the cord with my joyless compulsion around coffee (not necessarily caffeine). In the spirit of cutting down not out (yet), I swapped cold brew for matcha and ceremonial cacao, sacred drinks made to be sipped slowly, with intention. Making them myself adds to the nourishing process.

I felt the difference:

• Restorative sleep. I dreamed deeper.

• A softening in my body and face… the muscle tension started to drop.

• Calmer moods. The edgy, reactive buzz was replaced by delicious, chocolatey spaciousness.

• Slower mornings, softer starts.

• Clearer, more lucid intuition and easier access to this psychic space.

Why Is It So Hard to Slow Down?

In the quiet of my new found serenity, an intuitive surge of two core beliefs came to the fore (which of course I am working on with my somatic therapist, Vesa):

1. “It’s not safe for me to relax.”

2. “I am only worthy when I’m doing things.”

I realized how deeply this programming runs, not just in my own consciousness but through generations. My ancestors, fleeing persecution and pogroms, could never relax. It was literally unsafe for them to do so.

Underneath routine and hustle, a simple truth waited:
I am a human being, not a human doing.
You are safe to relax. You are worthy all the time.

We’ve been taught that our worth is measured by how we fit into someone else’s world: by our desirability, our ability to be chosen, our capacity to support, soothe, or shape ourselves around another person.

I spent most of my life orbiting around the idea of love, of being chosen, of making it work at the expense of listening to myself. Now I see others doing the same thing: looking to me to be their orbit or their answer.

I don’t want to participate in this cycle anymore, neither as the one seeking, nor as the one sought.

I’ve spent years understanding my own addiction to external validation: how I made men my higher power, how I relationship-hopped through the familiar cycle of idealization, devaluation, withdrawal, and replacement. I wrote and read about it voraciously. I sat with it in PAINFUL STILLNESS, grieving the fantasy that no one is coming to save me. I committed to a month of celibacy, then many months longer, then emerged different.

But lately, I’m grappling with the flip side of this coin, and it’s also quite icky: What happens when someone else makes me their higher power?

As I step further into leadership (teaching yoga and meditation, facilitating individual and group work in addiction, and training to become a family therapist), I keep encountering mirrors of my former self.

Who was she? A bright-eyed yet exhausted girl starving for validation, my Maiden. I was seeking someone to make me feel relief, better, whole, enough... I so badly wanted someone to sweep me off my feet and save me.

Both positions, the seeker and the sought, are just different ways of avoiding ourselves.

Understanding Love Addiction

For years, I operated from a simple but devastating equation: If I just keep supporting him, he will love me, and then I will be whole.

I was drawn to emotionally unavailable men like a moth to a flame. The mama’s boy, the narcissist, the f*ckboy, the divorcé: anyone I could fix, manage, control, elevate, or mother. If he was healthy I wasn’t attracted to him. By tending to them, I was evading my own deficiencies (it was easier to find someone else’s broken pieces than to look at my own).

I threw myself into bolstering their self-esteem because doing so fed mine (ugh, hello codependency). I helped them shift careers, start businesses, begin therapy. For a short while, I was satiated…. but I was placing my identity in being their girlfriend rather than just being an individual in my own right. Whenever I ended one relationship, I always had another lined up; I hopped because I couldn’t sit with myself.

I raised their frequency at the expense of my own. I made them my higher power.

Here’s what that actually looked like on the ground: checking my phone compulsively, waiting for his text, my stomach dropping every time the screen lit up and it wasn’t him; canceling plans with friends on the off chance he might be free, then spending the night alone when he wasn’t; obsessively replaying conversations, analyzing every word, every pause, every shift in tone for hidden meaning. Was he pulling away? Was I being too much? Oy vey!!! Calm down Madeline. But I can’t… why isn’t he responding to my texts. I need to know he’s not flirting with another girl - he used to be a womanizer before he met me.

The high of being wanted, lusted after, followed by the inevitable crash when I realized he wasn’t God…but a mere flawed mortal who couldn’t save me. Then I’d bargain and convince myself I could make him a mensch if I just loved him hard enough, was patient enough, made myself indispensable enough… he’d be different (not a liar or not so selfish)... but of course, he never was.

I was always feeling empty by the end and JUST COULD NOT anymore. So I’d walk (more accurately fly, sometimes across the world) away and then find another. The pattern was pretty much identical each time: Idealization. Devaluation. Withdrawal. Replacement. Over and over until one day I finally saw it clearly enough to stop.

This, my friends, is love addiction.

As a burgeoning therapist studying the DSM-5, I found myself fascinated and weirdly frustrated that love and sex addiction aren’t formally recognized diagnoses. But working with substance abuse addicts in recovery, particularly, I’ve come to understand something crucial: all addiction lies at the root of the same wound. NOT ENOUGH! Whether it’s alcohol, heroin, gambling, food, work, sex, or love… the mechanism is identical.

We are seeking something outside ourselves to regulate or numb out our grief, pain, anger, sadness… whatever feels unmanageable inside.

We are trying to fill what some call a god-shaped hole with anything that promises relief.

Elizabeth Gilbert captures this in her new AMAZING book (I binged) All the Way to the River when she describes the addict’s simple prayer: “a desperate plea to not feel this, whatever this is.”

The substance or behavior changes, but the escape remains the same. We are trying to get away from ourselves. Why is it so hard to JUST BE with ourselves?

Love addiction makes another person responsible for our sense of wholeness, our emotional regulation, our very sense of self.

By managing and monitoring others, I was hiding in their stuff as a way to evade my own.

John Berger wrote that women “watch themselves being looked at,” that we’ve been conditioned to see ourselves through the eyes of others rather than our own. I relinquished the seer, vocalist, and creator of my own existence and handed that power to someone else. It wasn’t until I sequestered myself (first for a month celibate, then many months longer) that I realized I had been running from myself for most of my life.

The Script Flips…

I’m leading in ways I never have before and I have done a substantial amount of work on myself (and yet, as they say… we’re always in the process of healing….)

When someone else starts treating me like I have the answers, when they look to me to validate their worth, to tell them they’re okay, I both bask and recoil; because, I know what it feels like to wait for someone else to tell you you’re okay, to scan their face for the microexpression of approval, to shapeshift your entire being based on their microexpressions, to walk on eggshells in fear of rejection or sudden scorn, to believe that if they validated you enough, the gnawing emptiness inside would finally stop.

While the flattery feels sweet for a minute, I know I am not the answer, but merely the screen they’re projecting onto to avoid meeting the demons lurking within.

I’m watching them do exactly what I did not too long ago.

Addiction seduces: If they need you, you must be valuable; if you can fix them, you are worthy… you can be their teacher, their healer, their guide, and THAT STATUS right there proves you’ve transcended your own wounding.

But I haven’t.

Both sides of this, making someone your higher power and being made someone’s higher power, are ways of avoiding the same terrifying thing: sitting with our own ooey gooey insides that are SO weighty, grief-stricken and sometimes nauseating.

Ugh. The empowering, gnawing, relieving, grating truth: No one can save us other than ourselves.

The Trance of Unworthiness

This is what Dr. Tara Brach calls the trance of unworthiness, and I see it everywhere…. It’s pretty much baked into our culture. Dr. Brach describes shame as creating a “separate, deficient self,” this feeling that we’re fundamentally flawed and need something outside ourselves to complete us. Whether we’re seeking that completion in another person or offering ourselves up as someone else’s completion, it’s the same trance…. it that keeps us hypervigilant, scanning for proof of our worth, performing to earn approval, subconsciously seeking out or creating drama because at least drama feels like connection, like something, when the alternative is the void of our own company.

To break the old pattern, it’s as simple as “choosing different” but this sounds easier than it is… THE END.

lol jk.

I wish I could wrap this essay up with a neat bow: I healed my addiction to validation, and now I’m free! While I’ve come far, I won’t ever be “cured.” Addiction stays with us even if we’re not acting on it. Some days I feel “I am enough” and it integrates into my veins and cells as total truth (typically in my follicular phase); other days it feels like BS and I feel like an imposter (usually in luteal).

I realize this is all okay…. I wax and I wane. I am a woman after all.

We All Have This

Especially as women, we’ve been taught for so long that our worth is measured by how we fit into a man’s world; I lived that, managing at the expense of myself, until it became utterly unmanageable.

Then I surrendered to transformation and something bigger than myself (hello years spent by the water in Tel Aviv and Bali).

The work isn’t to transcend my humanity and become some enlightened being who never doubts herself, but rather to keep noticing when I’m in the trance and to practice self-compassion.

I practice vulnerability and honesty instead of performing perfection. I remember that I am already enough… not because I achieved enough-ness, but because that was never a question that needed answering in the first place. ;)

In gratitude and continued unraveling,
Madeline

That belief carried me to Bali years later for a yoga teacher training and another "all are welcome" women's spiritual container. I went in with that same excitement: eager to connect with sisters from around the world, to see past conditioning and separateness to our shared humanity. The promise was inclusivity.

While at first it seemed we were all one, everything shifted when the facilitator mentioned Israel. The energy changed, at least within me. Suddenly, my Jewish identity, my experience as a woman living in Israel, the fullness of who I was…felt eerily unwelcome….

I wasn’t coming in neutral. My people were being vilified in the news daily. My brothers and sisters were being killed and I had been diagnosed with PTSD. One girl who had actually come to my own women’s circle, Dorin, a 25-year-old Pilates instructor, was killed three weeks later at the Nova festival (see Dorin below):

I was already carrying so much grief. I hadn’t come to rehash geopolitics; I came to connect with women, to practice yoga, to find some reprieve. I was dealing with enough. Weren’t we supposed to be all the same in that circle? It was a Women Rewilding retreat, for goodness’ sake!

Yet somehow, even in a remote Bali retreat where I'd signed up for a rejuvenating escape, blame still crept in. How were we still finding enemies in a space claiming love and unity? If even in a circle dedicated to feminine healing, unity, and compassion, people can create new enemy classes… what was really going on?

A Paradox I Keep Witnessing

This experience crystallized something I'd been seeing in conscious communities: spaces that preach unity and take a “f*ck the system” attitude, yet simultaneously build other subsystems that STILL separate.

I say this with humility, because I've been on both “sides” and seen through the illusion of sides in general. The very idea that there are only two ways to see complex issues keeps us trapped in blame cycles. During COVID, I found myself swinging between trusting mainstream narratives and questioning everything, listening to voices from opposite extremes. I know how easy it is for me to fall into blame while believing I’m standing in absolute truth.

At one point I was fully in the “f*ck the medical system” camp and I still stand by some of those views, ESPECIALLY still on hormonal birth control (listen to my story on The Serpentine Path Podcast). Yet, at the same time, I can’t deny that modern Western medicine has its place. Haven’t antibiotics, emergency care, and surgeries saved countless lives? The paradox is everywhere. It’s so much easier to hate the whole system than to sit with the complexity that both harm and healing exist within it.

I've found some members of the “conscious” community create new categories of enemy, new reasons to feel superior and judge, new ways to avoid real integration under the guise of righteousness.

In certain circles where “all are welcome,” conversations somehow devolve into fixation on one country, one identity. Is this really oneness? Or still, another form of blame and division?

A wise sister once told me: There is enough bad going on out there. Just because I'm not choosing to look at it, doesn't mean I don't see. I focus my energy on what I can control: on bringing more light into the world. Thank you Maya Kramer :)

My Own Journey with Blame

Blame is seductive and addictive: it is an easy way to offload anxieties without taking accountability for my own bullshit.

Why take personal responsibility when it's easier to blame a group of people? This scapegoating is the same psychological mechanism that fueled the Third Reich’s rise to power.

I'm not above this; I used to blame when I was angry, pointing fingers at “the matrix,” America, my ex-boyfriends, and men writ large as the root of all that was broken. It felt righteous, justified, and honestly, easier than looking deeper within myself.

This started shifting when anti- “system” rhetoric also became antisemitic rhetoric.

The more I got down to it, I stopped plugging into news and started plugging into myself, stopped looking “out there” and started going “in here.” I discovered I had a lot of rage and anger inside me. I had a war inside me! So I could either focus on the war out there, or focus on my own internal war.

Maybe your story isn’t about Israel/Palestine — in fact, it probably isn’t. I simply ask you to notice wherever blame sneaks in, because the dynamic is always the same.

What I Discovered When I Zoomed Out

I started asking myself: What is this system actually providing? What freedoms do I take for granted? What would my life look like without these foundations? The answers have been humbling. When I examine my daily reality, I'm struck by freedoms that billions can only dream of:

• The freedom to dissent and protest openly: Even my criticism of the system is protected by that same system. The very act of questioning is safeguarded.

• The freedom to show up as all of who I am: Proudly Jewish, proudly a woman, without hiding or diminishing either identity. I can wear my חי or Star of David, let my hair flow uncovered, and take up space in rooms my ancestors were barred from.

• The freedom to express myself fully: My opinions, my body, my appearance, my beliefs. I can publish these words without fear, dress as I choose, and live according to my own values.

• The freedom of movement: My passport opens doors to exploration, opportunity, and connection across the globe. I can leave if I choose to, and return when I'm ready.

• The freedom to build and create: I can start a business, write a book, launch a platform, all without asking anyone’s permission.

• The freedom of access to education and opportunity: World-class resources that shape minds and change lives, available to me in ways they aren’t to billions of others.

What This Means for How I Show Up: I’ve lived in other countries and seen different systems up close. Through that lens, I’ve learned that gratitude is fuel. When I appreciate what I have, I protect it. When I acknowledge my privileges, I use them more consciously. This shift from blame to gratitude has required me to:

• See abundance where I once saw scarcity

• Find grace in imperfection

• Hold complexity instead of seeking simple villains

• Take responsibility for my part in creating the world I want; to "be the change I want to see"

• Include rather than exclude, even when I feel the urge to exclude (that's just my prejudice, and I must overcome it)

• Question my own righteousness and lenses of “superiority”

An Invitation to Look at Your Own Day

The most powerful activists I know aren’t driven by anger or the need to create enemies. They’re fueled by love for what could be, grounded in gratitude for what is. Anything that requires dehumanizing others isn’t spiritual growth; it’s just another form of separation.

Who are you tempted to exclude from your vision of unity? What would it look like to take full accountability for your life without blaming anyone or anything?

For me, gratitude is the antidote to blame. It doesn’t erase imperfection, but it changes how I meet it. The shift from scapegoating to self-responsibility is where my healing began: in circles, on yoga mats, in my own nervous system.

If this piece resonated with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's your relationship with gratitude and criticism? How do you balance appreciation with activism?

Act I: The Golden Prison

The path seemed so clear: I was privileged enough to attend a top university and score coveted jobs at bulge bracket firms. About 5 years in, exhaustion and irritability became my constant companions. Time for myself was nonexistent: my soul and mental health were both crumbling under fluorescent lights and too many migraine inducing flashing screens.

My fellow coworkers in their 40s: tired eyes, overweight, photos of families they barely saw, donned in expensive suits and eating at NYC's top restaurants (Le Bernardin, Le Cirque, Le emptiness), would lean in with urgent warnings: “Leave this place before the golden handcuffs make it impossible to leave.”

They were prisoners of their own prosperity: chained to paychecks they couldn't afford to lose. Even though they despised the work, quitting wasn't an option. They had mortgages, tuition payments, and families depending on them. Who would hire a burned-out 40-year-old banker at anywhere near the same pay?

The vow to myself crystallized: I'd escape before becoming another hollow shell shuffling between client calls and compliance meetings. After witnessing brilliant minds atrophy (not to mention my face full of pepperoni cystic acne) I was clear: no amount of money was worth this life. My healing and happiness mattered more than any paycheck.

Act II: The Spiritual Bypass

But here's where it gets messy... and hypocritical.

When I fled my corporate life three years ago, I used the money I'd made from years in finance, plus the generosity of my parents, to travel around the world and learn. I didn't know what the result would look like, I just knew I was unhappy and needed a fresh start.

While I was busy demonizing money and hamster wheel success, it was quietly funding everything that made me who I am today: four yoga trainings, meditation and sound healing certifications, reiki mastery, coaching programs, countless retreats, every pilates class and trainer, therapist and healer I worked with.

Money funded my entire holistic and spiritual education. Heck, I'm using a boatload of it right now to pay for my master's in family therapy. Yet I conveniently ignored this fact while judging people who “lived for money.” I just avoided looking at my bank account entirely.

This, my friends, is spiritual bypassing at its finest. Saying “I don't care about money” while using it to fund your life; preaching “abundance isn't just about money” while racking up debt in the name of abundance is total avoidance (with an enlightened masquerade).

Don't get me wrong: true abundance DOES exist beyond money. I'm BEYOND abundant in relationships, experiences, culture, food, love, nature, health… the most important things that don't require a price tag. But completely ignoring money is plain denial, at least in the life I'm living. I'm still climbing out of the debt my warped “abundance mindset” created.

The Mirror in Relationships

My money wounds infected my relationships too.

I attracted partners who mirrored my “money doesn't matter” delusion perfectly. Some lived paycheck to paycheck with accounts hitting zero regularly; others had money but wouldn't spend much on me, while I helped fund their lives. I accepted crumbs, completely unconscious about money in relationships. Really, I was just unconscious about my own worth.

Every relationship was teaching me the same lesson: how I handle money is how I handle myself.

The Overgiving Trap

For years, I gave away my wisdom, time, and energy for free. I told myself this was about service and being kind, but the scarier truth was that I didn't believe I was worth paying for.

The contradictions were everywhere. I'd drop many hundreds and sometimes thousands on mentors without hesitation, but asking clients to invest more than a few hundred in working with me? I'm still learning to do that. I let jealousy poison my view of my partner's success. Eventually, all these poor decisions caught up with me, and I had to drain my investment accounts to cover debt.

I could finally see what I'd been doing: bleeding myself dry while not believing in myself. I'd love to claim I'm past all this, but something came up just last week that proved I'm still a work in progress. The difference now is that I recognize the pattern as it's happening. I can name it, drag it from shadow to light… perfect work for my Scorpio stellium.

Act III: Boot Camp for Sacred Boundaries

Everything shifted this year when I took a structured 9-to-5 job working in a rehab with addicts. It's not corporate. I make far less than I ever had on salary, but the purpose fits my Scorpionic nature perfectly. This is life and death work. For the first time, I can say without shame: the steady paycheck feels incredible.

Drug addicts are professional manipulators by necessity, and they can detect weak boundaries from across a room. Addiction is the ultimate boundary collapse: between self and substance, self and others, self and reality. So when you're bleeding energy and enter a space of energy vampires? Yeah… not great. The job became a boot camp for energetic survival. I had to learn to tune the f*ck up, fast.

This work forced me to see my own addictive patterns, not with substances, but with giving. I was addicted to being needed, to proving my worth through “generosity,” to avoiding the discomfort of asking for what I deserved. Just like my clients took whatever they could get, I'd been giving whatever I had. Both patterns stem from the same wound: not believing we deserve better.

In this environment, boundaries aren't just a "recommendation," they're life support for me AND them. I learned how to give from overflow, rather than depletion. I learned how to say NO, and sometimes be fierce, unrelenting, even formidable.

Working with people whose entire existence has been about crossing lines taught me exactly where mine needed to be drawn. They became my greatest teachers in energetic sovereignty.

Armed with these new boundaries, I was finally ready to rebuild my relationship with money from the ground up.

Act IV: The New Relationship

Money is neutral territory and I'm the one who gives it meaning. As I developed income streams rooted in actual purpose: healing work, intuitive readings, group facilitation, yoga instruction… each revenue source began serving something bigger than my bank account.

Structure used to feel like a cage, but now it's my foundation. It lets me create from integrated abundance rather than the fake kind that avoids the hard stuff.

I'm calling in conscious choices now: fewer facials, more financial cushion. I don't need another outfit or piece of jewelry… I need to feel contained across all systems: mind, body, spirit, bank account. This minimalist approach is quintessentially Virgo and unexpectedly therapeutic for my ADHD chaos. In the dark of this new moon, what are you paring down?

Some love to shame money, but broke healers help no one, especially themselves. When I charge appropriately, I'm teaching people how to value transformation. When I spend appropriately, I am teaching myself discipline and discernment.

If you've been wrestling with your own money shadows, if this topic makes you squirm, lean in… I'm right there with you. Something is ready to be healed.

With a loving, Scorpionic sting,
Madeline

My body was staging an intervention, screaming what my mind couldn't yet hear: How you’re living isn't working for you.

The real transformation would take 3 years of complete dissolution.

The Seduction of Surface Solutions

We live in the age of instant everything. The algorithm feeds us overnight transformations: lose 20 pounds in 10 days, build a six-figure business in 30 days, find your soulmate with one weird, winky trick. This feels intoxicating because it feeds our deepest fantasy: that we can shortcut our way to the life we want.

Every quick fix I tried: pills, diets, business courses, only addressed symptoms. Nothing touched the root: base-level stress, the trance of unworthiness (as Tara Brach calls it), the parts of myself I’d abandoned to fit into boxes that were never meant for me.

My life was systematically out of alignment.

The Myth of Overnight Success

Think about hot relationships that announce themselves with fireworks, then incinerate just as quickly. Real love percolates, building trust through mundane moments and conscious work that isn't glamorous.

The same is true for every “overnight sensation.” What we don't see are years of invisible work, gestating in the cocoon.

But what does this actually look like?

Real, long-lasting results come from the art of strategic dissolution, often difficult but extremely necessary time spent falling apart so something truer can emerge. Strategic dissolution is intentional. It's the conscious choice to dismantle the parts of life that aren't working, even when they look successful from the outside.

It's strategic because it's not just destroying, it's composting. Breaking down the old structures so their nutrients can feed whatever wants to grow next. The caterpillar doesn't randomly dissolve; it dissolves with purpose, guided by an intelligence deeper than conscious thought.

Most people avoid this phase because it looks like failure: giving up things others envy, choosing uncertainty over security, trading the known misery for the unknown possibility. This is where real transformation lives: in the space between who one was and who one is becoming, when neither caterpillar nor butterfly, just soup with potential.

Becoming Soup

I did something radical in a culture that worships the grind: I stepped off the hamster wheel completely.

The cocoon phase isn't pretty. The caterpillar literally dissolves into soup, what scientists call “imaginal discs.” Complete breakdown that looks like death but is actually becoming. I lived in my own version of that soup:

• Moved countries to escape calcified patterns

• Ended relationships that looked perfect but felt hollow

• Quit the prestigious industry slowly killing my soul

• Started processing what my body was trying to tell me

But mostly, I did the unsexy work of systemic undoing. I grieved the version of myself I thought I was supposed to be and I let go of people. I slowed down so dramatically that I felt shame from the shoulds, but something deeper knew this was necessary: nervous system recalibration, generational patterns finally being interrupted.

Non-Linear Nature of Change

Here's something that ISN'T sexy for sales: healing and success aren't linear processes.

In my journey, rewiring my nervous system took at least one year. Building authentic relationships? I'm still working on that. In terms of love, I had to go completely abstinent for a while to rewire my attachment patterns.

Some days felt like regression—trading a "successful" life for confusion and chaos. But this was part of the necessary dissolution.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I felt more like myself than I had since childhood, though I barely recognized who that self was becoming.

Compound Effect of Deep Work

Lasting change happens at the root level, through compound interest, not surface adjustments.

One boundary doesn't heal codependency, but practicing them daily for years rebuilds a sense of self.

One meditation doesn't erase trauma, but consistent practice rewires the nervous system's fight/flight default.

One conversation doesn't save a relationship, but years of practicing vulnerability creates a container of everlasting connection.

We become who we are through repetition, not revolution. Through addressing roots, not managing symptoms.

What Emerges from the Dark?

Three years later, my skin is clear, and for the first time, so is my sense of purpose. I’m finally doing soul-aligned work: guiding others through their own transformations as a psychotherapist-in-training, a yoga and meditation teacher, and a group facilitator for women and those in addiction recovery.

The work I do now didn’t exist in my old life. I couldn’t have imagined facilitating groups for people in recovery, helping women reconnect with their bodies, or studying to become a therapist. These weren’t career pivots, they were callings that emerged from my own dissolution.

For so long I couldn't even name what I was becoming... I was IN IT. I had to become soup before I could grow wings.

In a world obsessed with shortcuts, maybe the most radical thing we can do is embrace the cocoon years, trust the dissolution, take the long way home to ourselves.

Real transformation asks for time, surrender, and trust. We can't skip the dark; we learn to breathe through it.

Subscribe for more on the messy, non-linear path of becoming human.

Recently, I've been caught between wanting to be online, to share my wisdom, while also being completely sidelined by it all.

I've been trying to understand why this keeps happening, and I found language for it in philosopher Byung-Chul Han's concept of "the burnout society.” Han philosophizes that we've moved beyond external oppression to something worse: self-exploitation. Indeed, we're not being forced to work ourselves to death or post everything we're doing, we're choosing it, indoctrinated to believe that more is always better. More posting means more business, more visibility, more healing, more authenticity. But at what cost? Is this cruel math of infinite exposure always a good thing?

So much unlearning here… especially, as I used to feel compelled to respond to everything, turning my attention into an endlessly available commodity. After all, caring is free, right? Nope. Energy is finite and time is our most precious resource. Somewhere along the way, in our culture of virtue signaling, I forgot that my presence is not a public utility. I cared more about being seen as a good person than actually being one, IRL.

The Weight of Witnessing

Every day, a new crisis demands our attention, our outrage. We're consuming trauma in fragments: disembodied and decontextualized; yet, it still lands like bricks in our mind's eye. Many times, I feel implicated and responsible to respond in some way. Especially when online movements pressure us to perform care, post solidarity, and “speak up.”

But this pressure creates the illusion of awareness while eroding our ability to think clearly, feel and process deeply, and respond from a grounded place. “Spreading awareness” (aka recirculating news and memes without context or action steps) about war isn't helping anyone, it's often just creating more rage and division, both within and around us. Yes, war is awful. And the big picture is rarely as simple as Instagram makes it seem.

Here's what's up: Scrolling through trauma isn't solidarity, anxiety isn't awareness, and performing care online isn't the same as being resourced to care in real life.

Our energy is not an infinite resource to be strip-mined by every worthy cause and breaking headline. There's a real difference between actually caring and performing care. Between being informed and being consumed.

The truth doesn't always have to scream, shock, or divide. This push toward controversy and outrage is exhausting. What if we circulated quieter, embodied truths? Ones less about convincing, more about embodying?

So… Who and What Deserves Your Energy?

This is the question I keep returning to.In a world where everything feels urgent, where every cause is righteous, how do we decide where to place our most finite resource?

So I started doing an energy audit, asking myself: who and what gets my attention and emotional labor? Showing up everywhere means showing up nowhere, and too much showing up creates noise. We need greater self-protection. Maybe the most radical act in a burnout society is becoming disengaged and discerning.

Boundaries aren't the absence of care. They're how care sustains itself. So I give you permission to not show up.

This is my ongoing rebellion against the burnout society. My energy audit continues.

“Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.” —Byung-Chul Han

What does your energy audit look like right now? Where are you showing up and where are you giving yourself permission to step back? If this resonates, share it with someone who needs permission to rest.

The contractions are getting stronger, can you feel them? The old world pushing against the new, the familiar structures groaning under the weight of transformation.

Every woman who has ever birthed knows this truth: pain is not punishment, but the price of bringing forth life.

Right now, we are in a month that embodies the archetype of the Mother: healing, nurturing, and the sacred art of home-making. The energy that knows home isn’t a place, but a feeling.

The name carries a profound paradox: Cancer, the disease that devours, and Cancer, the creative, cosmic mother; one consumes life while the other births it.

This is the razor’s edge of being alive: The same primal life force that can manifest as dis-ease becomes medicine when it’s wielded with awareness.

Tammuz

Jewish mysticism carries a parallel rhythm, etched with both sides of the coin in heartbreak and hope. The Hebrew month of Tammuz flows like a river of tears, marking the fall of Jerusalem's Holy Temple — not once, but twice across history. The 17th of Tammuz (which falls on July 22nd this year) began a cascade of destruction that ended with the temple in flames.

The temple was sacred because it held the Shekinah: the divine feminine presence. She is the nurturing, indwelling aspect of God that lives within creation, not above it. She was said to rest in the temple's innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies, the womb of the space.

The temple was destroyed first by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, then by the Romans in 70 CE. But Jewish mysticism teaches something profound: the real cause wasn't external enemies, but internal collapse, what the Talmud calls שנאת חינם/sinat chinam, or baseless hatred among the people.

A pattern resurfaced in both destructions: when communities lost their spiritual center, and stopped seeing each other in love, compassion eroded from within. What couldn't hold on the inside collapsed on the outside, they became vulnerable to forces that exploited those fractures.

She returns not through politics or institutions, but through us; through the way we rebuild temples made not of stone, but of consciousness.

When the temple fell, the feminine presence scattered, taking refuge in every act of kindness, every moment someone chooses love over fear. She went underground, waiting for humanity to rebuild: not just with stone, but with heart rooted in collective remembering.

She returns through us, not through politics or institutions, but through every moment we choose to see the (w)holy in the ordinary, and wholeness in each other.

History Rhymes, But We Hold the Pen

Is history repeating itself? Our modern “temples”—our communities, families, even our own inner sense of safety—are showing cracks. These aren't signs of doom, but contractions. Certain structures are crumbling because they can no longer hold the consciousness that's trying to emerge.

William Carlos Williams understood this alchemy of finding beauty in brokenness. In his poem “Between Walls,” he writes:

the back wings

of the

hospital where

nothing

will grow lie

cinders

in which shine

the broken

pieces of a green

bottle

(Shoutout to my former English professor and college advisor, Al Filreis, who introduced me to this poem and whose influence still echoes in my work today.)

This is what I see looking at fissures: not destruction, but refraction; the green bottle, shattered, becomes more luminous than it ever was intact.

I love the imagery of light catching in the broken places, revealing beauty we couldn't see when everything appeared whole.

Our temples today are everywhere and nowhere; they're not built of stone but of consciousness: the relationships we tend with loving intention, the moments when we choose vulnerability over armor, letting our walls soften just enough for source to stream through.

Our temples are built when we remember that our sensitivity allows us to feel the pulse of life itself moving through us.

We are not passive victims of these cycles. We are their architects, midwives, and sacred stewards.

The fallen temple was built by human hands, governed by human laws, vulnerable to human failings. But the rebuilding has a different flavor. Like shards of a green bottle catching light in the cinders, it’s built from the truth that separation was always an illusion: that we are all facets of the same divine jewel, more radiant fractured open than we ever were pretending to be whole.

This temple cannot be destroyed because it exists in the space between heartbeats, in the light refracting through our cracks.

If this stirred something true in you, please share and let it ripple outward.

The word mad has followed me my whole life: whispered, weaponized… and now, remembered in deep reclamation. Mad = emotional, unpredictable, unregulated, crazy, unhinged. Now it’s passionate and powerful, a remembrance for my wild, curly-haired girl who is assuredly stepping into herself.

To be consciously mad is a triumph, an expression of the truth we swallow when we strive to be digestible, rational, or polite. It’s the gut feeling we override for the sake of approval. We fear being different, weird, crazy, but this madness is our sacred spark. Housed in our wombs, our life force been swallowed, medicated, suppressed, and ignored, all to be liked.

While the reflex to be liked is our nervous system’s way of protecting us, equating approval with safety and belonging, it’s not the foundation for a thriving life. We’ve been conditioned to prioritize being palatable over being powerful, especially as women; the shame sewn into our longings is a cultural inheritance, it is internalized patriarchy.

My work with women is about unraveling these ingrained and subconscious survival patterns so we can live freely from our truth, not muzzled in fear.

My writing began as therapy, and then became a rebellion; a rebellion against the pathology of feeling deeply. Who decided it was unsafe to feel?

We see the cost of emotional repression and suppression everywhere. Depression, isn’t just a diagnosis, it’s a description: a pressing down of aliveness, truth, rage, grief, and joy.

We’ve been taught to manage symptoms, perform wellness, and intellectualize our pain. But knowing why you’re hurting is not the same as feeling it through.

I’ve met women who are maniacal about their health — tracking every metric of sleep, eating all the “right” foods — and yet their skin breaks out, their digestion flares, their periods are irregular if at all… their nervous systems hum with anxiety as they swallow pill after pill.

We can’t green juice our way out of emotional repression. We can’t supplement our way through what we refuse to sit with.

Stillness is the medicine, beyond all the running, planning, organizing, and overworking.

We’re not listening; in fact, we’re not even quiet enough to hear. We’re so outward-facing, so busy performing, wearing a mask that was never meant for us: the mask of the overmasculinized woman. She’s on a never-ending quest for “skinny,” and along the way, she’s lost — or completely dysregulated — her menstrual bleed. She’s hyper-productive, always on the go, running on fumes, yet commercially successful. Her forehead is frozen with poison, and behind her tired eyes, there’s a quiet emptiness. Beneath the polished “girl boss” veneer, she is suffering, and she is not to blame.
She is a product of a culture that taught her to perform instead of feel, to strive instead of soften.

With every creative impulse, with every expression of truth, we begin to chip away at the walls that confine her. She is slowly inspired to soften her grip on control.
She is reminded with YOUR creativity, authenticity and truth that it is OK to be messy.

My writing, I hope, provides some of that inspiration.

My writing a rebellion against the shame sewn into our longings. Why are we so censored — and self-censored — in asking for what we ACTUALLY want?
Who said it was unsexy to value and be proud of our work or to declare “I don’t like that” or “No thanks.” Why do we hold such a deeply entrenched belief that speaking our truth makes others uncomfortable, and if it does… so?

For centuries, feminine power has been mistrusted and often censored.
When the Romans fused with the early Church, feminine spiritual practices were outlawed. A woman’s wildness, wisdom, and knowing became dangerous… witches were burned and “hysteria” became a diagnosis.

The word mad traces back to the 13th century, “to be out of one’s mind.”
But what if that’s exactly where we need to go? Because this mind — the one shaped by patriarchy and perfectionism — is killing us, literally. You don’t need me to list the many health crises to know this is true.

With the severing of our connection to womb, our bodies, and our inner knowing, we find ourselves in a culture of disconnection, war, and burnout.

So yes, please! Take me out of my mind and into my body. Take me down into my womb, into my knowing. Bring me back to the version of myself that makes perfect sense to my soul: not the curated, logical version the world prefers, but the rooted, instinctual one who already Knows.

My work supports women in transitioning out of survival mode and into self-trust, through nervous system regulation, womb-based wisdom, and reconnection to what’s raw, real, and alive. This work is a remembering and a reclamation of your voice, rhythm, power, and flow.

We’re not here to be managed or pathologized, but to be free, trusting, seen, and beautifully mad and madly bemused.

Madly in love,
Madeline

P.S. If you’re ready to begin this kind of transformation, I’d love to support you. If something in your body said yes while reading this — I invite you to book a free 30-minute discovery call with me. We’ll explore what’s coming up for you, what kind of support you’re craving, and whether this work is the right next step on your journey home to yourself.
Click here to schedule your call.

I was flying back to New York when the plane abruptly aborted its landing. We touched the tarmac… and then took off again. My heart dropped. I’d never experienced anything like that. Have you?

Instinctively, I reached for the hand of the woman next to me , a Saudi woman, and we breathed through the turbulence together, squeezing each other for dear life.

When we finally landed safely, she said Alhamdulillah. I replied, Baruch Hashem. We smiled, hugged, and she invited me to visit her in Riyadh. And I thought… maybe that was the whole point.

Later, I joked to my ChatGPT therapist that I needed a reframe: “You’re being protected. What looks like delay may actually be divine redirection.” While this Sagittarian optimism comforted me temporarily, I realized something deeper was stirring.

This full moon took place during Sivan, the Hebrew month that aligns with the western zodiac sign Gemini, also known as Te’omim in Hebrew, meaning “the twins.” You’ll notice the shared roots across languages: Gemini in Latin and Italian, Gémeaux in French, and Gemela in Hebrew. Across cultures, the archetype speaks to communication, multiplicity, and paradox. Gemini is the sign of both/and, not either/or.

In Jewish lore, Sivan is the month when the Torah, the central text of Jewish spirituality, was received at Mount Sinai. Kabbalistically, we’re taught this wasn’t the arrival of new information, but a remembering, a revelation that the truth we seek is already within. I know… “the light is already within you” sounds like every spiritual cliché. But this remembrance is less about spiritual performance and more about experiential integration.

While preparing a Kabbalistic astrology session for a client (a double Gemini in both Western and Kabbalistic charts), I was deep in reflection about paradox and duality. As life so often does, it moved a textural lesson into an embodied experience.

In the same week that I shared breath and blessings with a Saudi woman, grounding together through turbulence, another woman came at me with the opposite energy. Under the guise of care, she publicly and privately invalidated me, accusing me of spiritual bypassing for speaking about unity consciousness in the midst of war. Her moral urgency was suffocating.

I could breathe with one while the other left me gasping for air, terrorizing me while accusing me of causing harm in affiliating with my ancestral homeland. I found myself living both sides of the spectrum in real time: one woman chose connection over divide, while the other weaponized her righteousness and truth to erase mine.

There’s a powerful tale in the Torah (also found in the Bible) about Jacob, one of the spiritual ancestors of the Jewish people. One night, he wrestles with an unknown figure: some say an angel, some say God, others say a part of himself. By morning, he’s renamed Israel, meaning “one who wrestles with God.”

To me, this mirrors the essence of Gemini, Sivan, and the season we’re in — a time defined by tension, duality, and transformation. Growth doesn’t come from avoiding struggle; it emerges through it. Like Jacob, we’re called to stay with the discomfort, to wrestle with identity and truth, much of which lives in paradox. Integration begins when we stop resisting the dark, when we let it speak, breathe through it, and allow it to be part of us. It’s not light or dark, but light through the dark. Healing lives in the places we’re tempted to bypass. Sanctity, too, hides in the unresolved. Perhaps, we need that darkness more than we think.

So how do we move forward? We learn to hold opposites: To see another’s humanity and their limitations; to make space for conflict without collapsing into righteousness; to discern when “care” is genuine and when it’s shame masked as virtue. Life keeps showing me: there is no unity without division, no light without shadow.

I’m here for the presence in the tension… that’s what makes me whole, not perfect. Wholeness is the willingness to stay, to wrestle with it all. Are you?

In love,

Madeline

I am curious: has something like this ever happened to you? Where life mirrored your inner work so clearly it almost felt scripted? Where a stranger reminded you of our shared humanity? I’d love to hear.

If you’re desiring deeper, 1x1 work, I offer:

• ✧ Astrology readings (Western, Kabbalistic, and/or TrueSky)

• ✧ Oracle + Tarot for clarity and spiritual anchoring

• ✧ A healing container for integration, embodiment, and multidimensional self-trust.

  Let’s meet your darkness and your light, and wrestle with it, together 🤍

My Maiden mistook likability for appeasement, and appeasement for safety. Like many women are conditioned to believe, I thought being chosen by a man meant I was enough, and that being agreeable was the way to get there.

She was necessary. But she didn’t yet understand that discernment is a form of self-love.

Lately, I’ve been in conversation with friends and mentors about how discernment feels like the word right now. It’s our compass and our power, if we listen… because power lives in being self-led. Developing discernment marks a key shift in the transition from Maiden to Mother, archetypes we cycle through again and again. From the Mother, we eventually move into the Crone.

This Maiden–Mother–Crone archetype is part of ancient goddess traditions. Each phase represents a distinct form of feminine power and purpose:

• The Maiden is the part of us that longs, leaps, and seeks approval. She’s eager, she externalizes her power. The Yes Era. She often begins to soften around her Saturn Return (ages 28–30).

• The Mother is rooted, discerning, creative. She gives from overflow, not obligation. She says yes and no.

• The Crone holds the wisdom of endings. She teaches surrender and letting go, often activated during the second Saturn Return (ages 56–60).

These patterns appear across mythology, in figures like Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate.Carl Jung described archetypes as universal energies in our collective unconscious, symbols that show up in dreams, desires, and choices.
We don’t move through them linearly, but a Saturn’s return can mark a significant shift in how they live inside us, at least they did within me.

Threshold: Shedding the Maiden and Stepping into the Mother

The last time I was in Israel, summer 2023, I was still deep in my Maiden. It was the beginning of my Saturn Return, the quiet cracking open of everything I thought I was. An initiation, to say the least, an invitation into the Mother. When I say “Mother,” I don’t mean motherhood in the literal sense (though that may come). I mean the archetypal, mythic Mother, the one who midwives her own becoming.

That summer, I also birthed this Substack. My first post, Madly Bemused, marked a turning point, having just completed a master’s thesis on similar themes. I was full of theory — I could name the patterns, cite the research…

But the Mother transforms knowledge into embodiment — she wants to know how deeply you live what you preach and espouse.

My return (which is almost done, thank goodness) has been a transition from reading and writing about concepts to living by gut-discerned truths the mind can’t explain; from helping to holding, first with myself, and now with others.

My Mother Era

I’m birthing a business that’s as multidimensional as I am, one that doesn’t split spirituality and healthy living from clinical recovery work. This isn’t an either/or — it’s a yes, and.

This is not just mind-body-spirit, but a spirit-body-mind reordering that lets the soul lead and the body speak. The mind becomes a vehicle for communication and action, but it takes a back seat to what my body knows. In tuning into my feminine energy, I’ve learned to quiet the mind and listen instead to my body, my womb, my life force.

MadHealing is no longer a side project, it is my dharma and a framework for remembrance. Though becoming a psychotherapist has meant wrestling with “the mind” and “the system,” I’m not here to fit into it. I’m here to redefine what healing looks like, and to meet women where they are in a way that is embodied, mystical, and clinically sound, all at once. I am the bridge and the contradiction, just ask my astrology…

This is My Mother Era! She doesn’t reject the Maiden, but walks beside her, integrating her wisdom. I feel this transition so deeply, especially as I support women navigating large life thresholds. If you, too, are crossing from bright-eyed seeker to grounded guide, know this: You are not breaking, but becoming, and you are in damn good company.

Resonating?

MadHealing is open for:

1:1 Mentorship
A Maiden–Mother–Crone holistic healing container for women in transition. Includes nervous system resets, intuitive readings, reiki and energy clearing.

Astrology, Human Design + Card Readings
Western, Kabbalistic, and TrueSky-based chart analysis and/or Human Design Readings with intuitive guidance. Reiki infused card readings for confirmation, clarity, and more messages.

Please book a free clarity call to connect with me.

I look forward to helping you navigate your transition and becoming.

In love,
Madeline

Maiden Era pix taken By Isa Dani Green

She’ll be taking Mother Era pix this week before my Full Moon in Sag Circle coming up this Tuesday, June 10…

Depending on which system you use, your entire chart and signs could totally change. For example, in my case:

In western astrology, I’m a Sagittarius: an archetype I’ve always resonated with. A truth-teller, a seeker, forever questioning, forever moving. Expansive, rebellious, and fiercely committed to breaking through whatever box I find myself in, with fire as my fuel.

In sidereal astrology, I’m a Scorpio: an intuitive, deep feeler… one who is here to experience emotional alchemy through shadow work and big transformation, exploring the depths of the subconscious with water (my Scorpio Stellium in my western chart corroborates this, and it made sense to me).

HOWEVER:

In Kabbalistic astrology, I’m a Capricorn. An overly ambitious and annoyingly rigid earth sign? WTF? Honestly, when I found this out, I started doubting astrology. Capricorn?! That is so. not. me. (no offense Caps)

But with time, patience and trust of my teacher (shoutout Rachel Schwartz), I started to understand, within the context of Kabbalah: this is what my soul came to learn: how to create structure, stay consistent, hold responsibility, and work with time and routine, instead of fighting it. Interestingly, it aligns with my Midheaven, the path of career, contribution, and legacy, reflecting the deeper work of my tikkun, aka the soul correction I'm here to embody.

Through the lens of Kabbalah, it started to make sense. Of course I rejected it at first, it felt so foreign to who I thought I was… and that’s the point. The resistance was the signal: Capricorn aka divine masculine energy is what I came here to learn, respect, appreciate, and embody. I’d be lying if I said I had it all down. I don’t. But I know why I am here and I am learning and evolving with each transit (thank goodness I’m mostly out of my Saturn Return).

At first, the contradictions felt disorienting. Was I supposed to choose just one system? But over time, I saw the magic that I am all of it. Indeed, these systems don’t contradict, they inform and complete each other. Each one offers a different lens, a different layer, a different invitation into my personal, emotional, spiritual blueprint:

Tropical shows us our psyche and unfolding story
Sidereal reveals our deeper blueprint
Kabbalistic points to our soul’s mission and spiritual repair

These aren’t an “either or” but a “both and…”

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that one of my superpowers is building bridges between differences: between people, systems, emotions, and beliefs. I translate complex languages and frameworks into something grounded, digestible, and real. Making sense of what feels disconnected, and finding the thread that unites it all, is why I’m here.

One story isn’t enough. We hold it all, and in the words of Walt Whitman “contain multitudes.”

If you’ve been feeling pulled between versions of yourself, or between the frameworks meant to “define” you, I’m offering sessions that weave astrology, intuitive healing, somatic tools, and grounded therapeutic reflection.

In gratitude,
Madeline