Thoroughly touched by my husband’s gesture to create a post, Lucky 21, in honor of our upcoming wedding anniversary. We created a little poetry book for our guests at the time (see above) and here is the poem we both picked to share.

Sometimes

by Sheenagh Pugh

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Listening to your embodied heart is one of the truest, well-est ways to stay on your path. May it happen for you.

To your exquisite unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or want to explore your 5D-to-3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Learn what others are saying: https://monishamittal.com/1-on-1-sessions/

You can schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more and discuss payment plans. Current packages on offer are:

• Package of 3 Sessions: $444

• Package of 6 Sessions: $777

“Flower, I command you to open up!!” has never worked in the history of everything.

~ John Roedel

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a (sometimes) weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. 💞

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). 🙏🏽

• Check out the Creatrix Play Party happening on August 5th.

Squee! At 10 p.m. on a Friday night, I discovered that an article I'd submitted in May had been published. Five minutes later came a bigger surprise: it had been selected as the feature article in Mensa Foundation’s newsletter, Insights with a beautiful introduction by the Foundation’s president. If you’d like a deeper look at why I use play and somatic practices in my work: When Giftedness Feels Too Much

Yes, I squee-ed for a few minutes about the spotlight. But the deeper joy was realizing that something I’d been carrying silently mattered to another group of people carrying similar struggles and questions. Priceless.

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

As the summer starts her descent, it is a time to bask in the abundance of the season and take stock. This letter wants to remind you of your own sweet blossoming.

Hoping the crickets are singing to your heart.

Summer Blooms. For our second playgroup in a new Northern Virginia location, a collaborator and I chose to play with the abundance of summer and what was ripening in our lives.

Turns out we were right on schedule. Returning home, I learned August 1st was Lammas, a traditional pagan holiday that celebrates the first harvest and marks the midpoint between summer solstice and the autumn equinox.

Li-Young Lee taps into the fruition and abundance vibe of summer in From Blossoms.

extract from From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.

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More often than not summer draws us back into relationship with nature—we grow vegetable gardens, frolicking in pools or the ocean, and delight in the abundance of flowers (and insect noises) all around us. Summer is the time of open bloom.

To reflect on your own growth this year, I invite you to muse on these questions1:

• What is visibly growing in your life right now or coming to fruition?

• What is done growing? In what areas of your life does energy feel like it’s closing or waning?

• Where is the spark of possibility or fuel for your fire?

When Growing Is Invisible to the Naked Eye. Yet, summer is only one season. The full sun is only one part of the day. Why is it that we expect ourselves to be perpetually in bloom, perpetually in the light?

When we expect constant progress that we can see and measure, we forget that we too are nature—that we too live as seasons.

Earlier last week, my heart was completely taken by this post by poet .

It reminded me that self-compassion asks us to honor a pace of growth that our eyes can’t see. You know what is connected to nature’s pace? Your body.

I remember the first time I stood in awe realizing how many processes my body was running on my behalf at the same time—but it was so silent, I wasn’t taught to value it. All I wanted was it to behave on my terms. Oh, the times I’ve begrudged and bemoaned this body standing on a scale.

Maybe that is one of the deepest invitations of self-compassion: releasing the timelines we have imposed on ourselves and trusting the wisdom of what is unfolding beneath the surface.

Just like a seed becomes a flower because the conditions for blooming have been patiently cultivated, so too is your body constantly tending, repairing, integrating, releasing, and resourcing You for your own becoming.

This body operates from wholeness. It’s full-bodied, not an isolated data point or problem to be solved. It is a living system, constantly communicating across layers of experience that our thinking mind cannot fully track.

This body is where I found my anchor for self-compassion.

What if discovering your sacred timing is not force, but learning how to partner with your body? What if the question is not, “Why haven’t I bloomed yet?” but “What is being patiently cultivated for my blooming?”

Mary Oliver’s poem, Roses, Late Autumn speaks to this natural order.

from Roses, Late Autumn by Mary Oliver

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what
Or any other foolish question.

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How You Meet Yourself Matters. The thing I want to say to you is that this is the great work. We spend so much energy wondering whether we're becoming who we're meant to become. But perhaps the deeper invitation is simply to meet ourselves compassionately while becoming.

As John Roedel’s insight teaches, would you yell at a flower or your pet for how it is growing? Many of us grew up in homes that thought the answer was yes. Some of us internalize those voices as strong inner critics. I remember the first time I became aware of this strong voice yelling at me in my head, distinct from me.

I had a vivid dream: I was sitting on the porch of neglected decaying house looking out at a sizeable plot of land. An elder gardener was valiantly tending to the flowers and vegetables suffering from neglect.

Dismayed at my own negligence, I started talking back. Thank you for your opinion but I’ve got this.

You too have a wise gardener inside you. And your plot contains the multitudes—inner children of all ages, ancestral inheritances, your unique soul essence.

Because our growth is not linear, self-judgment kills. It wilts your blooming, stops you in your tracks. Meeting ourselves with self-compassion not only stills the inner critic, but it also recovers our authentic power.

So next time, in a moment of acute fear, doubt or self-criticism:

• Take a deep breath placing your hand on your heart.

• Ask yourself if you would speak to a flower, animal or child in this way.

• If the answer is no, in your next breath, summon your inner wise gardener to join you. Know they are patiently and wisely cultivating your inner soil.

• Ask, “What would my wise gardener tell me instead?” What conditions does your tending need to grow in the direction of your choosing?

Whatever the trajectory of your highest unfolding, self-compassion will always lead the way. To your exquisite unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

Selected Readings + Announcement

• When Giftedness Feels Too Much, Monisha Mittal

• From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee

• Roses, Late Autumn, Mary Oliver

• The Layers, Stanley Kunitz

If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or want to explore your 5D-to-3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Learn what others are saying: https://monishamittal.com/1-on-1-sessions/

You can schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more and discuss payment plans. Current packages on offer are:

• Package of 3 Sessions: $444

• Package of 6 Sessions: $777

Hey everyone...I’m playing with something new. 💛 And it’s all about feeling the vibes.

One morning, after my morning meditations, instead of trying to make progress on my book, I came to it from a frequency of genuine delight and curiosity.

To my surprise, my creative project responded. It came out to play, and I found myself enjoying a wondrous degree of flow.

It got me wondering...

Every creative endeavor—a poem, a book, a piece of music, a workshop, an artwork, even a business idea—carries its own distinct frequency. Yet when we finally sit down to create, that feeling is often replaced by thoughts like: Where do I start? Where is this going? Is this enough?

What if Play is a frequency that invites your creative idea to flow with you?

What if we could meet the essence of our creative projects with greater connection and clarity...together?

Hence was born the idea for a Creatrix Play Party next Wednesday, August 5th at 1 pm EDT.

Sign Me Up

You’re Invited!

Yes, for now it’s a Pop Up experience. I’m so excited to create a welcoming place where we can connect with whatever you’re creating—a book, poetry, music, art, workshops, crafts, a business idea, or even just something quietly calling to you.

This is On Behalf Of what wants to come through You. We’ll move and play together using the InterPlay system, meet and connect with your project’s unique essence, spend time with reflective journaling prompts, and settle into co-working space so you can be with your project from a place of flow rather than pressure.

To learn more, go to the Classes page of my website, scroll to the middle. Once you click the Sign Up button.

Or, you can select Sign Me Up below. Then, select August 5th from the calendar, and you will receive a confirmation. An email with the Zoom link and calendar invitation will follow.

Sign Me Up

I’d love for you to join us and see what wants to emerge. Depending on your response, I can also offer it again at another time.

Questions? Reach out to me at monisha@monishamittal.com.

“I want you to tell me about every person you've ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you.” ~ Andrea Gibson

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. 💞

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings:

• Royal Heart,

• Freedom to Move, (Check out this new Substack!)

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

This loving business takes guts. I don’t think I realized before this week how much my work is about the courage it takes to love, especially ourselves.

Hearts and Laughter. I was fortunate enough to spend my July 4th weekend with ten thousand others at Red Rocks who valued having their hearts crack open as time well spent. This is what spoken word poet did for a living, and we gathered to honor them by viewing their last live performance.

The thing with Andrea is that they are so hysterically funny, the way only someone who utterly embraces their humanity can be. On stage was all of it—grief, laughter, and through it all this utterly-devastating-in-a-good-way love of being alive.

I began recording the audio of the spoken word performances, to remember them. But soon, I realized the more alive moments were in between the performances, how they found absurdity and wonder even in the hardest moments. Describing a brutal chemo session that left their skin yellow from the toxicity to their liver, they recount a harrowing driving home encountering not one, but two tornadoes along the way. Somehow, this devastating story has us all geezing out with laughter as they conclude in an understated way, “It was all rather dynamic.”

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I want to call your attention to this stanza from Andrea’s poem, Royal Heart:

from Royal Heart, by Andrea Gibson

Call in your royal heart
Tell it bravery cannot be measured by a lack of fear
It takes guts to tremble
It takes so much tremble to love
Every first date is a fucking earth quake

No one wants to tremble like this. In quaking vulnerability. The moments when our deepest fears, insecurities, and old wounds rise to the surface. And yet, these moments are precisely the threshold where our wholeness is waiting for us.

Hearts and Guts. I recently experienced this entire process unexpectedly—all the way from the quaking to the wholeness.

Someone challenged me in a professional interaction in a way I had never experienced before. Afterward, I felt utterly defeated: Maybe I’m not actually good at the thing that lights me up. Maybe I’ve been fooling myself all along. I was ready to give up on this road.

Instead, I let the shittiness be. I went for a walk, felt everything without trying to fix it, and tuned in. What came back was clear: Other people are allowed to have their own experience. You don’t have to manage it. Stay in your offering. Without drama or debate, I chose to trust what I had to offer.

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Then it happened again.

This time, I noticed a bossy tone creep into my voice that I didn’t like. Not controlling, just trying to make the interaction go a certain way. Yikes, what was up with that, I wondered?

The second I asked this question from a place of open wonder, I could feel my inner child gasp. She was startled by the realization that because she never knew how to belong with other children, she believed that relationships required hierarchy. If she didn’t want to be beneath others, she had to be above them.

In an instant, my heart cracks open. It had never been about power. It had been about belonging. I felt her innocence within the strategy—the best a little girl could do with what she had been shown. Oh how I embrace her.

In total flow, I feel tenderness mixed with inexplicable joy flood my system. I know it is this buried aspect of self—the part that always knew who it was, in equality with others—coming out of its hiding spot. I fill with awe and gratitude for the person who challenged me. They are simply going through another version of what I am going through.

Within moments, my whole system fills with beams of lights, light waves I didn’t know I could hold. Here is my wholeness.

Hearts Uninhibited. Now, I just wanted to love on the human who challenged me. The next time, I meet them from a place of equality instead of protection. And in that space, something shifted for both of us. I got to love on someone freely, seeing them as me. And I had the privilege of witnessing someone meet their own quaking vulnerability with courage, choosing a deeper layer of self-compassion than had been available before.

I write this precisely because vulnerability is something we feel into. It can feel daunting but at its basic function, it is the process of feeling and express aspects of our self that are the most scared, small, terrified, powerless, ashamed, unworthy and more. I love having tools to support this expression, but being willing to stand at this doorway is No. Small. Feat. It requires a courage we don’t always feel capable of.

I am struck how repeatedly Big Love’s invitation is to be more of our authentic self.

I am struck that courage is the prerequisite for self-compassion. (I didn’t know courage was at the heart of the space I offer for others.)

Most of all, I am struck by how we get to be this resource for each other, holding our hands outstretched, for the hard stuff. I fall, you pick me up. I do the same for you.

An Exercise. If you want to find a way into courage and self-compassion, try listening to a favorite love song and imagine your soul, body, Higher Self, spirit team or guardian angels singing it to you. And they are. Here is one I have enjoyed recently:

Celebrating every courageous step you take! With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

When you appeared it was as if
magnets cleared the air.
I had never seen that smile before
or your hair, flying silver. Someone
waving goodbye, she was silver, too.

Rita Dove, Happenstance

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

This week, I am reminded of extraordinary moments where a human crosses our path and opens doors to possibilities we couldn’t imagine. It is just like this poem by Rilke, where he writes about a stone sculpture. It doesn’t speak, nor even move, but its mere presence provokes something undeniable in him about his own life:

from Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The Women in the Blue Skirt. Sometimes life gives us role models in passing. We don’t know their names, but something in their BodySpirit lodges in ours. Somehow, they leave us with a picture of who we want to become.

On a bright August day high above Lucerne, I walked along a curved mountain path lined with wildflowers beneath a blue sky. My travel companion and I had just graduated college and were making our way through Europe with our youth-hosteling backpacks strapped on. We had escaped the heat and crowds of Rome by train and ferry into the cool mountain air. Every now and then I took in the pungent smell of cows, making me laugh at the thought that the hills really were alive—just not with the sound of music. Excited about exploring the new vista, I was less excited about this companion I barely knew and whose travel preferences were different from mine.

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Then I noticed an elderly woman walking toward us, her arm hooked into that of a gray-haired man, her soft blue skirt swaying with each step. As they approached, she slowed down to greet us. Her face was deeply etched with wrinkles, her white hair wild above her glasses. As she stopped and turned to face us, I saw a smile that lit up her whole face. Her blue eyes danced with fire. She beamed at us as though being alive was the most delightful surprise.

I don’t remember who spoke first. Her delight was palpable. She wanted to know where we were from. She spoke as though happiness could arrive at any age and in ways no one could predict. She wished us well and turned back to her companion. They kept walking while she turned back one last time, smiling that mega-watt smile, giving us a wave and continuing down the path with the same buoyant spirit. I watched until the flash of her white hair disappeared among the wildflowers.

Oh this picture of possibility! That’s what hit me in that moment. Though this stranger appears briefly in my story and didn’t give any direct advice, her whole demeanor spoke volumes. She embodied a possibility I couldn’t have imagined—to be this age, this carefree and this happy, but wanted for myself.

Who has crossed your path and quietly given you a glimpse of who you hope to become, just by being themselves?

Precious Intersections. This week I lit a candle for two souls who transitioned within days of each other. Both were people I considered Great Souls, whose mere presence served as an example of how to be better than my now self.

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Sherryl Lin Taylor is my Angel of the Not Carrying and Loving Anyway. The mother of two addicts, she set out to discover how to love them. Gaining an unshakeable knowing that each one of us is guided and held by our own cosmic support team, she learned how to love others on the physical and multidimensional planes without fixing them or carrying what wasn’t hers. She kept living that love—marrying the love of her life, adopting her granddaughter, and ultimately embracing her terminal brain tumor diagnosis with conscious, embodied presence. To get a sense of this remarkable human, check out this video of her speaking about her life with tumor.

A young man in his early thirties, Sol lived from an embodied light that touched everyone he met. He stood in it with the quiet strength of a tree—steady, grounded, and unwavering—directing it not toward himself but towards nourishing the light in others. You could not help but walk away touched by the light of this man who embodied service, showed up for others all over the world, and was always up for connecting with an easy smile. I met Sol for one weekend, a month ago, and I feel like a candle I didn’t even know existed in my body got turned on.

It is honestly a privilege when humans like these cross your path: people who make you want to better just by being themselves.

Who on your path quietly asks you to become greater than your now self? What do they stir in you? Where might that flame grow if you allowed it?

Leave a comment

We know life is precious. Now more than ever, it is time to amplify your own light to lift up others. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

I want you to live forward but see backward, farther and deeper into the past, because in a relativistic universe you don’t have any other choice. I want the stale billion-year-old starlight of a distant galaxy to be your reward.

~ Katie Mack, from Disorientation

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a (sometimes) weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings + Announcement

• Disorientation: A Science Poem, Katie Mack

• A Seeming Stillness, David Whyte

Announcement. I am delighted to announce my mentor and friend Andrea Hylen’s new book, Follow the Clues is now available on Amazon. This book is about navigating change —and hearing your voice in a world filled with noise. I had the honor to serve as a reader and highly recommend it. Founder of Heal My Voice, Andrea wrote this to show what it looks like to follow the clues and listen to your intuition in real life.

Dear Dancing Souls and Embodied Hearts,

Slightly different format today. The heart of the invitation today is to deepen your self-trust. Your body knows the way.

Equations and Imbalances

Why is the whole Universe an equation? Because the Universe runs on energy and the laws governing energy favor balance. If you place an ice cube in warm water, thermal energy moves from warmer to colder until both reach the same temperature. Lightning discharges severe electrical imbalances between the clouds and Earth. Wind itself is caused by air moving from areas of high pressure to low pressure–again to find balance.

Relationships too are an equation.

We constantly refine and define our relationship equations in ways big and small. Parents establish a particular equation when a child is born committing to caring for them until they can do so for themselves. Newlywed equations for relationships are re-evaluated at Year 1, and morph into something very different in Year 20 and beyond. Some friendships last precisely because their equation never requires changing.

The Energy of You. Your presence (how you show up in the relationship), when and how you listen, speak, what you say and choose to give are all aspects of our energetic currency. What we receive, explicitly and implicitly, is the exchange. These energetic exchanges are at the heart of human relationships.

Visible or not, they speak to an underlying reciprocity that keeps the equation alive. This reciprocity is relational flow and is another layer of economy we belong to. Here is David Whyte from A Seeming Stillness.

A Seeming Stillness by David Whyte

And this breath, in this body, able,
just for a moment to give and to take,
to ask and be told, to find and be found,
to bless and be blessed, to hold and be held.

In a way, you and I each carry a set of determinants (needs, preferences, desires, constraints, expectations) hanging out on our side of the energetic equation. We see how we fit. We calibrate and adjust to the roles others play in our life.

Yet, as complex human animals with a psyche, we are not always conscious of our determinants. Who knows what mysterious force draws you to a person—or what you want from someone you admire? Regardless, our equations direct how you want others to interact with you.

Sometimes the exchange gets thrown off. There is a hidden expectation that cannot be met. You outgrow the need for whatever the relationship was feeding before. When the energetic imbalance grows beyond what the relationship can address, the equation no longer holds.

When an Equation no longer Holds

Recently I had to end a relationship. I did not see it coming, but my body did. On the final morning of a shared deadline, my collaborator of four weeks announced she wanted to restructure our shared document —she had gone so far as to create a new file, undo several sections of my authorship, re-arrange it into another story and asked for my sign-off, as if this still signaled “collaboration.”

My body had been signaling something was off for several days—my system was increasingly anxious, alert, and withdrawing. I had one foot in my adult integrated self, and one foot in a terrified inner child whose voice, creativity, and sovereignty were continually overridden. To navigate this according to my truth, I called in resources–for the trauma, for professional guidance, for emotional support. Forged in the fire and grit of this last year, a new rallying cry rose from my depths:

Stay in Power, not in Control.

Amidst this, I pull this card. Notice how one hand is outstretched and one hand holds a sword. An embodied depiction of my inner mantra.

In this case, power meant following the compass of my inner authority—the willingness to remain loyal to what we know in our deepest self, even when the outcome is uncertain. It meant articulating a boundary, not a wall.

It wasn’t easy. My inner child was quaking in fear, yet my voice spoke for me. Though the current of expectations were flowing against me, I stood by me. This is why our inner work is invaluable. We learn to distinguish habituated fear from present truth and listen to what the inner child is asking for.

A poem from my inner work

how is it 
that my little one wants to come to the edge of your pain 
and say:
it’s ok, let me sit by you awhile.
if you want, you can tell me.

By the time of the meeting, I had already disentangled my inner child from the notion that an external force had authority over me. I saw objective differences in our working styles. In that final exchange, the pattern was clear: despite my request for boundaries, my agency in the process was being taken over rather than shared. Something in me recognized that I could not consent to the existing equation. My experience was exactly like the next stanza in the same David Whyte poem:

continued from The Seeming Stillness (David Whyte)

We are all a sun-lit moment come from
a long darkness, what moves us always
comes from what is hidden, what seems
to be said so suddenly has lived
in the body for a long, long time

The rest of the day, I fill with immense peace, calmness and clarity. I knew what closure I wanted and wished her well. Amazingly, No hurt, no wounds, no residue.

This Body and Big Love

Sometimes the work of Big Love isn’t to maintain a connection. It’s learning to recognize when the equation no longer honors our inner integrity or coherence. More fundamentally, it’s trusting ourselves enough to leave without abandoning ourselves, even when societal or relational expectations say otherwise.

Here is one of the fruits of inner work: not that we become immune to disappointment or conflict, but that we learn to trust our own experience. We stop arguing with what we know. We stop requiring permission to honor it.

This is the path your body holds for you. Your body is a super-highway of energy exchange. It knows what’s not in balance for you long before your mind. There is no need to shirk from those nudges or question them.

Embodied, you remain tuned into the present moment as your alive (not alert) Self, moving as the Queen of Swords with one hand outstretched and one on the sword.

To be sure there are steps in this process: learning to listen to your body’s wisdom, feeling icky feelings, accepting your needs whatever they are, making new agreements with your inner child, and formulating words to request boundaries and honor the relationship. If you want support in any of that, reach out. I am a trusted guide.

The Multi-Dimensional Heart Perspective

Between my human Self and Infinite Self is the part of me that is integrating the two. My embodied-heart Self knows that: when it is no longer in one person’s interest to be in relationship, the path of growth for both souls is outside the existing equation. This can feel confusing or painful to the human Self, but when it is truly aligned for you to exit the equation, then it is also aligned for their soul path in the bigger picture. (In fact, as soon as I let go of this opportunity, another one arrived the same day).

This is precisely the confusion Arjuna experiences in the Gita, as Krishna reminds him to remain faithful to his own soul path:

Your body knows that your full coherence is found in this alignment between heart, soul, body. You are equipped with all you need to feel and know it.

To your exquisite unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or want to explore your 5D-to-3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Learn what others are saying: https://monishamittal.com/1-on-1-sessions/

You can schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more and discuss payment plans. Current packages on offer are:

• Package of 3 Sessions: $444

• Package of 6 Sessions: $777

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a (sometimes) weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

This poem is making the rounds on the internet! It has come to me three times already. I also want to share the author’s painting that he was showcasing in the original Facebook post. Click on the word painting to see thumbnails with various closeups. So here it is for you, long and worth it.

Thank You 
by Matt Moberg

I think every human being
eventually has a moment
where they are standing outside in sweatpants
that have lost the will to be pants,
holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket,
or some other receipt from the universe
that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.”

And then the sky bruises purple.

And the air touches your face
like it knows your whole story.

And suddenly you realize:

all the real is actually unreal.

The dirt.
The breath.
The weird little bones in your hands.
The fact that we are here,
on a floating rock with pollen counts,
paying bills,
missing dead people,
loving living people
who say “leaving now”
while still fully naked and looking for socks.

And still,
the moon clocks in.

No applause.
No benefits.
No note from management saying,
“Great work being ancient and luminous again.”

Just the moon,
working nights
like a single mother with no applause,
packing silver lunches
for every dark thing
that still has to rise.

Tell me that isn’t holy.
Tell me there is a better word
than sacred
for the way light keeps returning
with no guarantee
we will actually stop and take note.

I know people who believe in therapy,
probiotics,
tarot,
twelve-step meetings,
manifestation journals,
and waiting exactly eleven minutes
before texting back
so they do not appear emotionally available,
even though their whole nervous system
is standing in the driveway holding flowers.

And underneath all of it,
every ritual,
every doctrine,
every smoothie with chia seeds,
the prayer is the same:

Please let me be loved.
Please let me be forgiven.
Please let this strange little life
mean something
before my lower back
submits its formal resignation.

What is going on?

For real tho—What is this place?

This unbearable tenderness
of being alive long enough
to watch steam lift from coffee in winter
like a soul practicing leaving.

To see your friend laugh so hard
they slap the table
as if joy is a mosquito
they are trying to kill.

To hear a child say “pisghetti”
and, for one shining second,
realize language
has finally been improved.

I know I already noted this in the first piece,
but the older I get,
the less use I have for certainty.

Certainty has never made me pull over
because the sunset looked like God
dropped a jar of peach jam
across the whole midwestern sky
and decided to be lazy
and not clean up.

Certainty has never made me gasp
at rain on hot pavement.

Certainty has never found me
in the cereal aisle,
holding Captain Crunch,
suddenly remembering
that everyone I have ever loved
was made from stardust,
hunger,
and a series of decisions
we probably should have slept on.

No.
It has always been awe.

Awe was the first church.

Before steeples.
Before committees.
Before men got involved
and started making rules about skirts.

Awe was there
with its wild hair
and muddy feet,
saying:

Look.
Look again.
Look until looking
becomes love.

Awe, and soup.

Awe, and someone rubbing your back
when you are sick.

Awe, and old couples at Target
arguing gently about avocados,
as if marriage is not one vow
but ten thousand errands
performed beside the person
who knows exactly
how you like the cart pushed.

Maybe gratitude
was never meant to sound elegant.

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Damn.
That woodpecker is trying
to beat that tree from itself.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you, body,
for continuing to drag me through this world
despite the many slim jims
I have done to you
at gas stations.”

Maybe gratitude sounds like:

“Thank you to the dogs
who lose their entire minds
when we come home
as if we have returned from war
and not Walgreens.”

For me, that might be my gospel.

That joy that does not wait for us
to be impressive but only needs us
to come through the door.

Because the truth is,
this life is devastating.

And ridiculous.

One minute you are 22 and invincible,
driving too fast,
eating gas station nachos
with the confidence of a Greek god.

The next minute you are googling,
“Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?”
and the answer is,
apparently,
“Welcome to the second half of your life.”

But even now—

even tired,
even grieving,
even emotionally held together
by iced coffee, playlists,
and one very specific wolves hoodie—

we keep finding reasons
to stay soft.

We plant tomatoes
even though grief is real.

We bake bread
even though the news is on fire.

We send photos of the sky
to people we love
with captions like,
“LOOK,”
as if beauty is an emergency
and we are all volunteer firefighters.

We keep saying,
“You have to see this,”
because wonder
is the oldest form
of resurrection.

So here’s to the believers
and the atheists
and the agnostics
and the people whose entire theology
is just trying not to cry
in the DMV line.

Here’s to the people clinging to faith.

Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax
and oat milk
and the one group chat
where nobody pretends to be okay.

Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos.

The accidental mystics.

The ones who can contemplate mortality
for six straight hours
and then become emotionally attached
to a perfect peach.

The ones who know
despair has a mouth,
but so does laughter.

May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty
in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

May we never become so polished
that we forget how to stand
in the Starbucks line of existence
with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open,
feeling the enormity of it all
rattle around in our bones
like thunder
looking for somewhere to laugh.

And may we remember:

whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one was prepped for—

all’ve it is astonishing.
that we are here.
that we have loved enough to be ruined.
that the moon keeps showing up.
that bread exists.

So pass it on.

Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.

Take it in as you take it down.

And then go outside and look at that moon.

To your exquisite unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.”
— Antonio Gramsci

Thank you to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my writing ($10 or more). ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below) to support my book. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings:

• The Times They Are A-Changing, Bob Dylan

• Poppies, Mary Oliver

• Say Yes, Andrea Gibson

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

Coming up to the part of my walk that rounds a curve, I am assaulted by the sweet scent of honeysuckle. It’s twilight, and the air is redolent. It’s as if the dusk magnifies their musk, the day’s heat helping it linger so it’s nearly sickly sweet. From the stream, frogs bellowed their baritone notes. In the dusk, I barely make out the deer nibbling young grass on the other side of the bank. The greens are deepening. I glimpse white magnolia blossoms opening. I inhale deeply, filling my nostrils, letting the memory of this spring-leaping-into-summer evening linger.

This love letter honors our wounds and the young adults in our life—the 22 to 33 year olds making their brave way in the world, the pulse of life they bring to us all. As the food critic in Ratatouille so elegantly put it, “The new needs friends.”

Their new may be the salvation for us all.

Shaped by Pressure. For much of my life, I carried the feeling that I was making wrong decisions. Even when I succeeded, the focus from my family always landed on what was missing. When I graduated from Harvard and entered public-sector economic development in New York City, it wasn’t that I had beaten out dozens of candidates for a coveted role or stepped into meaningful public-sector work applying my community development experience. The concern was that I was only making $40,000 a year.

This shaped me, and the choices I made, deeply. I developed a habit of living under pressure, constantly trying to prove myself worthy of respect, belonging, and love. I even let go of significant opportunities to remain tied to a family system that deeply misunderstood me. Underneath was a fear of ending up alone.

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About a year ago, much of my life began to still—as paid work and freelance projects dried up, so too did my drive to create. It’s been terrifying. Beneath the quiet, something deep is clearing out. My polished efforts, driven by fear or proving, didn’t get far. Those arising from a natural spark flowed into fruition with surprising ease.

What if life was asking me to become more alive?

Our aliveness can’t be forced or managed. It’s spontaneous, lives in this body, and at times feels like a puppy wagging its tail.

A Dot in the Lineage Spiral. This weekend, a younger family member called me upset after conflict with a parent about career choices. As they spoke, something in me stirred. I saw my life less as a disconnected series of painful choices and losses, and more as part of a lineage. Maybe there is a generational pattern of fear, pressure, survival, and children learning to override themselves in order to feel safe or loved. That was me! And I did this three decades earlier when wiggle room was narrower and consequences more dire.

The song, The Times They Are A-Changin’ by Bob Dylan has been calling to me. Here’s an excerpt:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’

About 25 years ago, I helped realize the first U.S. literary festival for South Asian writers in Washington D.C. At the end of that first day, after multiple rounds of panel discussions where authors’ stories came alive, I was struck by the constant march of human lives across time. Without fail, I could see how it is every generation’s birthright to pause and ask, What do I want to carry forward, and what do I want to do differently?

This is how families evolve. This is how cultures and societies evolve. The new emerges through individuals becoming more alive than the conditions they inherited.

The same tensions are part of this inflection point we are in — those on the side of the land, animals, equality, humanity versus the security and control offered by a system rooted in patriarchy, colonialism and extraction economics. (Politically, Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, would say our “new” is seeking mechanisms to consolidate power. This rideshare co-op is one model.)

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Oh to have had affirmation and self-trust at that time. I have spent years trying to ease my story of rupture and loss—lost love, family, career, friends and significant professional opportunities. The cost of pushing against inherited patterns has been enormous. The choices that felt extreme make more sense when I remembered to see them through the lens of survival, dignity, and belonging.

Radical Acceptance. In that conversation, for the first time, I could feel purpose amidst the ruin. I could offer someone else the perspective I never had. I could help protect their aliveness before they spent decades trying to earn it back. And I could offer a realistic view of tradeoffs so they could be empowered in making good choices for themselves.

I stood with truth and love in my heart for my nibbling. At the end of the call, the pressure in my system—one that views my life through the lens of personal failure—stopped. Instead, compassion flowed in my chest.

I could feel the part of me that had been pioneering a different way, carrying my candle of “new” forward ever so imperfectly. I felt part of something much larger — a human story, a family story, and a larger healing story. From Mary Oliver’s Poppies:

Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But also I say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.

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This sense of purpose is helping me clear and accept my past—the painful choices I faced, the less-than-optimum choices I made, and consequences I deal with for securing a sense of dignity and safety. Acceptance is allowing me to let go of blame and judgment, without needing to prove anything first.

What aspects of your life require radical acceptance, embracing where you’ve been and are?

Your Aliveness. This is a joyful miracle. Life doesn’t want to prove anything to me. It’s asking me to assume I am fundamentally and radically WONDERFUL and then make choices to dance with it from there. The fastest way to shift from lack is to connect with what makes you feel alive--in my case, loving a young adult.

We now know the body carries far more across generations than we once understood, shaping our nervous systems and ways of relating.

What if some part of your life has not simply been about personal success or failure, but about expressing and becoming more alive than the conditions you inherited?

Take heart in this: your aliveness matters — not just for you, but for the people connected to you, backwards and forwards in time. No matter how it appears, there is this stream of Big Love under all of it.

Following your aliveness is another tool in these historical times. It’s not selfish, it’s not avoiding reality. It’s a way of nourishing the parts of you that require tending to bloom. As always (lately), here is a nudge from Andrea Gibson, from Say Yes:

This is for the no becoming yes
For scars becoming breath
For saying I love you to people who will never say it to us
For scraping away the rust and remembering how to shine

Do you hear this? To your scars becoming breath. This inspires me to offer this 3-breath dance:

• 1 - Take a deep breath, and affirm “I embrace myself and the choices I made the only way I knew how.” Exhale. Notice how you feel.

• 2 - Take a second breath, and affirm, “I embrace my purpose in this lineage, in the present, past and future, beyond my knowing.” Exhale. Notice how you feel.

• 3 - Take a third breath, and affirm, “I welcome the emerging new.” Exhale.

Scan your body. Place a hand where things feel better and affirm this part of you. Savor this moment of connectedness and uplift right now.

Your walk is sacred. To your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $444 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $777

“In mathematics, the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.”

Georg Cantor

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings:

• Obituary for Robert F. Cunningham, Alan Cunningham and Monisha Mittal

• Geometry, Rita Dove

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

This letter is part an ode to my father-in-law, his beloved Atlanta, and an ode to living. He would have appreciated the quote above because of his tinkering mind—a trait he passed down to his son.

Dying. The sands of time have moved on. My father-in-law, Robert Cunningham, took his last breath early morning of April 18th. I ask that you read the obituary that his son and I crafted so you get a sense of his quiet brilliance which spoke most through harp strings.

When we came home from hospice, I was immediately struck by how much of Dad’s presence remained in the house. He used his hands to build his home and life. I don’t know anyone else like this.

You feel him in the picture rails on the walls, the detail on the ceilings, the location of the outlets, the shape of the door jambs. You see his mind and hands in his instruments —harps, a veena on the wall, clavichords, and his own invention the hammerchord, are either display or furniture. His mathematician’s eye is displayed on canvases where he enjoyed painting the shapes and textures he observed. I mean, he’s everywhere. He loved his house.

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Remarkably, it serves as a way to be with him, even when he is no longer here. We feel him. I wonder—has his spirit decided to take up residence or is his physical presence simply imbued into the floorboards and furnishings? It’s exquisite, and comforting.

Here is another way to experience him—a video of someone playing one of his harps (posted by the Atlanta Harp Center). Please play it as a way for his spirit to play on.

Swedish Death Cleaning. I came back galvanized by how much stuff was in that house, determined to declutter my own. This life is just so Physical. For decades I have kept many boxes of memorabilia, filled with nostalgia and regrets from the 80s. Most of all there are mounds of letters and postcards. I’ve held onto the early promise of my young life, and underneath has always been a part that has wanted it back.

I have never known how to face the brokenness of my life, the ruptured relationships and career paths. I’ve opened these boxes many times, but cowering before the gaping void, I’d close them and shove them back into closets. Not this time. A strange energy came over me saying, I can do this!

And I did. I held my past life in my hands. The abundance of my light in my 20s, flowing around the world. The moment it went underground. My need to feel wanted back then and the shadow of people-pleasing that had its limits. I held that contagious openness of youth and celebrated that aliveness, along with the friendships that have remained and developed through middle-age.

The most personal reckoning has been letting go of decades of self-blame. I saw that I faced difficult choices at a time I didn’t have resources, support or inner capacity to make different ones. I’m left with embracing the light that is still in me, and how it, like self-love has to go on its own journey and mature. Finally, I’m clear.

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Living. Letting go it seems is part of how I find my place—as Mary Oliver describes—in the family of things.

Grateful for my local communities at this time, I have been living through music and connection. Invited to a friend’s jam session, I joined in singing songs for three hours. I am just starting to learn to hit notes and learn the intervals on a scale. After a week of tiredness, this clears the energies out of my entire system. Even at 11:30 pm, I felt refreshed the entire drive home.

I have a particularly sweet memory of my father-in-law from the early days of dating. On a visit to his workshop, he excitedly handed me an instrument after learning I could read sheet music. Nervously asking him where C was on the thing (because I hadn’t played anything in 15 years), I played a few bars, looked up and saw him watch with pure delight.

Tonight, at choir practice, when turning the pages of the sheet music, I felt him again. This time, a big smile on both our faces.

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This love life-line we are in is longer than you think! With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is give us.” ~ J.R.R Tolkien

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings:

• 4. , bell hooks (from Appalachian Elegy)

• Altars of Light, Pierre Joris

• A Poetics of Light (scroll to #3), Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

Right now, I am celebrating the amazing role models I have for living an intentional, purposeful life. Both clients and friends, who wake up to face the sun each morning, and ask how they can live their light.

Midlife and Fuel. Mid-life has, amongst other things, a way of altering our natural body chemistry. As Ronnie Ann Ryan, an intuitive coach, notes in this podcast about the Fire element:

Midlife is often “a moment when what used to work no longer does. Old identities might feel restrictive and patterns might feel exhausting.” ~ Ronnie Ann Ryan

OMG, yes. Have you found this?

On the surface, it’s conventional to bemoan loss in middle age. But how wondrous that there is this rite of passage, another chance to discover and align with who we truly are?

Energy never lies. The entire wiring of how I get things done is changing. In particular, “pushing” doesn’t take me anywhere at all. In fact, my writing flow stops (and stops feeling good) when I push. I tire quickly.

My system is no longer willing to respond to the degree of masculine (push) energies I used to previously drive my life. In fact, this entire way of producing income—from systems that demand masculine thrust as the indicator of performance—ended in 2024.

When I tilt towards fueling myself with feminine (receptive) energies, I find aligned flow. Feminine energies demand receptivity to feel alive. Pivoting to a receptive state fills me with softness. Instead of feeling life as constant pressure that robs me of time, I fill with spaciousness. I listen, I discern, I choose. My energy is more efficient.

In midlife, fuel comes from clearing away the false and aligning with what’s true.

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Midlife and Fire. The podcast reminded me of Fire’s role. By reducing everything down to its essential building blocks, it accelerates transformation.

Yes. And, I’m learning that even amidst the ruin, Fire wants you to be honest about your desires.

Real transformation can occur because my natural desires can serve as the compass orienting what I build and why.

How amazing is this? Even amidst ash, lie scoops of opportunity.

This is also a blueprint for how to navigate the Fire raging in our country (and now the world).

In the podcast, Ryan shares the questions Fire asks whenever it enters our life:

• What’s ready to be released?

• What truth is trying to surface?

• What no longer fits?

This is exactly what mid-life is!! It’s one gigantic process of letting go, letting in and allowing, and taking aligned action from this truer core.

If you are trying to make things work from “how they used to be” and they don’t work, you can stop blaming yourself and instead, step into the dance of discovering who you are becoming. In this, I find no better poem for mid-life then Bell Hooks’ 4. from her collection Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place.

extract from 4. 
by Bell Hooks


here in this untouched wood

a dirge a lamentation

for earth to live again

earth that is all at once a grave

a resting place a bed of new beginnings

avalanche of splendor

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Fire and Water. Ever since the New Year of the Fire Horse, I am finding a special interplay between the elemental wisdoms of water and fire. In Daoism, the union of Water (Kan) and Fire (Li) produces an elixir—a natural elixir which comes into being when emotional awareness meets your divine spark. This is the practice of cultivating your Qi through Qi-gong. Water is kidney energy flowing downward to nourish your roots. Fire is heart energy, flowing upwards and activating. In my recent experience, it feels like Shakti, a snake of life-pulsing energy rising from my yoni up my spine.

This video uses both elements to get your qi going. My favorite flow is at the end, where the elements of fire and water are stoked enough to give rise to a ball of your life-force qi—one that not only animates you, but also illuminates you.

While the video likens it to growing like a lotus out of the mud, for me this beam of light rises through my core like a tree trunk.

Is it possible that intentionally stoking your inner water and fire alchemizes your light?

And it is all about becoming, as Pierre Joris writes in his Altars of Light.

dark through light is movement
   dark through light becomes,
is becoming,
     to move through
light is becoming,

Lifting Your Light. In real life, water is intentional self-care: actual water, actual rest, actual movement. Fire is about stoking the embers in your heart. Mid-life provides us another opportunity to give ourselves permission for this.

Exercise. Imagine yourself as a capillary system where your water and fire travel together. This is your living radiance. Now imagine that radiance having roots, into the earth. Use your breath to water these roots. Feel your radiance growing.

Intentionally, nourish yourself not for Doing your great life, but as a Being. As you intentionally nourish your radiance, you glow.

Your energy will never lie. Follow the arc of your energy into aligned action and you will begin dancing with life again.

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With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $444 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $777

Imagination is more important than Knowledge.

~Einstein

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

• Update: The book is sent. Like my taxes, it is in the hands of a professional. It feels like crossing a make-believe finish line—I know there’s rework (the conclusion was a hodgepodge!) and more feedback coming. Still, I’m happy.

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

Fragility. To be honest, coming into midlife is to become aware and honest of our own fragility. So why a letter on imagination?

I have at least 3-5 different letters started that are digitally “ripped” up. That is to say, this musing ties into a larger one about middle age, the elements of water and fire, and the desires that remain in our bosom.

But when COVID came, and then AI and then Trump 2, clearly my landscape is no longer the same. The systems that be are making it harder for ordinary people (without wealth capital) to survive: there are less jobs, where they exist they pay less, cost of living spikes are now baked in, and so on. So…I come to imagination.

Mars and Water. When I was a little girl riding in the back of my father’s 1970’s rust green Plymouth, the newscaster was talking about NASA’s Viking missions to Mars. He said something about not finding water and concluded that therefore, there were no signs of life.

I am about 8 years old in this scene and even then, I am offended by the utter human-centricity of it all. I am disgruntled by the hubris. I asked out loud, with slight belligerence:

Why did he say there is no life?

My father does his due diligence as a parent, explaining the connection between water and life.

But, I bellow, what if life on Mars doesn’t need water? What if it lives on something else?

I remember my father laughing, in a startled kind of way. The way adults do when kids say something completely kooky but potentially true.

I still stand by this. Haven’t you noticed how creativity is a much grander force, one that surpasses the imagination? How can it be that when some Beings exist purely as light, that everything in the galaxy needs our version of water to live?

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When I took facilitation training and learned that conversations have an Open, Middle and Close, I realized that I am not a natural born closer. Far from it. I stand for the Open—the ultimate Possibilitarian.1

Through the looking glass. Perhaps, just like that inspiration from the Bereshit Rabbah that suggests every blade of grass has an angel that whispers “Grow Grow,” so do we have a team of spirit guides and Higher Self that know the promise we each came here to be.

How often do we give ourselves a chance to view life from this perspective? I call it the 720° view—all around us not like a fishbowl but from above.

We can use our imagination as a way to tap into this as a future reality.

Exercise: What if for a moment you climbed into your heart, and imagined the day, the week, the month and year of the future you, living the life you desire? Feel that buzz in your heart. Go ahead, give it a tone. Make it alive right now.

This isn’t merely an exercise in fantasy. It’s because our imagination has the power to alter our reality. It provides a new perspective on the steps that can be taken in the here and now to steer our ship into the imagined reality.

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I have said it before—our capacity to daydream and imagine is underrated, particularly in our workplaces. As a girl, I could slip into imagination so easily, especially on a swing. It felt like pure free-flow. Somewhere in the expanse is a fluid flow of dreams, seeds and song, all unique and natural to my Being.

As an adult, I am much more likely to feel these acute aches of middle age—a dear friend who announced she is dying, the reality of aging parents, the letting go of lost opportunities. I can feel the discomfort of realities I can’t force or fix.

Imagination, then, is also a meeting point. It is a place I can reconnect, even for a few moments, to the side-by-side realities —to alternate timelines my True Self sees for me. Then, I can ask for guidance from this perspective, this place of the wider view, rather than the energy of ache or lack.

This is everything in my human existence. It has the ability to pivot my entire perspective and frequency. Now the hum I’m sending to the Universe has my place in it.

Exercise: One way to stoke your imagination is by using two simple words: What If? Use this as a prompt to name your desires and see how they feel in your body.

Mary Oliver. I leave you with this poem inhabiting my heart. It is from a book of Mary Oliver poems which I believe I must have. This is stanza “1” from a longer poem.

Evidence

by Mary Oliver

1.

Where do I live? If I had no address, as many people
do not, I could nevertheless say that I lived in the
same town as the lilies of the field, and the still
waters.

Spring, and all through the neighborhood now there are
strong men tending flowers.

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But
all beautiful things, inherently, have this function -
to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory
to the world, that good teacher.

Among the swans there is none called the least, or
the greatest.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in
singing, especially when singing is not necessarily
prescribed.

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.

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Your imagination is a superpower. We’re going to need it to create this new world. To your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

For those who read Rob Brezny’s astrology publication, today it contained a snippet of a poem from Jane Hirschfield. When I looked it up, I liked it so much I wanted to share it with you.

Here, food:

Da Capo
By Jane Hirshfield

Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.

Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.

Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.

Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.

No matter my lackluster diet or exercise program. No matter whatever impediment is in your way. You can start Here. Do not pass Go.

Begin again. I’m learning: the Fire Horse wants you nourished for your ride.

Your Feet and not Knowing. In the process, remember what Deborah Quibell advises in her poem, Loosen Your Grip.

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It’s your feet that hold your knowing. What direction? What pace? Let them orient you. It’s OK to take small steps, to walk slowly. The other day, prior to a meeting, I turned to my body to get insight into how to best prepare for the meeting. (Yes, you can do this!) I began walking very slowly in tiny steps so my body wisdom had time to rise to my awareness. (This bottom-up processing is a core aspect of your body’s operating system.) My body sent me a pop song that gave me the perfect starting point for the meeting.

Your Heart. Ask what truly matters to your heart. Imagine a dragon (my version of a Fire Horse) breathing fire in it — there is a purpose in this light that you direct. This is where I am now. The next step is remembering how to climb onto the dragon’s back, onto the seat of our true power, and taking the reins.

To your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

“I feel the promise of spring, not as something fleeting, but an emerging solidness of things.” ~ Monisha Mittal

My gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings:

• A Wild and Precious Life: Remembering Andrea Gibson, Amber Tamblyn

• At Last the New Arriving, by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

• How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best, Andrea Gibson

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

The world is burning. My path of truth and peace still comes from a focus on my inner journey. Right now, I’m playing with an emerging inner radiance. Did you know there is a kind of trapdoor in our bodies, and if the lid is lifted, a beam of light shines through?

Listening and the world. As I continue to seek nourishment from their spirit, I read the memoriam Amber Tamblyn wrote about their friend and poet in Poetry Foundation. Found this gem. After the 2024 election, Andrea posted a letter in response to a friend’s despair by admitting they stared blankly at the wall for an hour. Sitting with it, they were reminded of the moment the oncologist told them that the medical system could no longer do anything for them. Amidst the “expected fear and grief”,” they said they also felt relief. It was the first time they felt “my life is in my hands.” And this is the phrase they shared:

I want to listen to this. I want to ask what I want from this life and give my hands over to it. Especially during these destructive times, I find it a powerful question affecting everything from my house cleaning schedule to the writing assignments I take on and when and why I might return to a job. How do I want to show up, where and why? Same for you:

How do you want to show up, where, for who and why?

Under this type of collective awakening is a shift in purpose, motivation, and assumptions. Because:

When the so-called leader of the free world abdicates caring for the lives of its citizens, everyone must find a way to stop following and start leading.

Denver’s mayor has now ordered its police force to detain any ICE officers who assault or shoot residents.

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The Uplift. Today something returned. The lightness of a spring breeze—not just metaphorically, but in me too. Nearly a year’s worth of weight and stress and uncertainty fell away. I felt light, uplifted—buoyant even.

I have many muses; I trust you do too. The one I want to thank now is the one that guides my fingers, taps out something akin to the sense of my feelings, and finds the exact poem to match. This time I simply typed in “uplift” in my search.

This is the poem I want to share with you today.

At Last the New Arriving
by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Like the horn you played in Catholic school
the city will open its mouth and cry

out. Don't worry 'bout nothing. Don't mean
no thing. It will leave you stunned

as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut
who's told he won the whole damn purse.

It will feel better than any floor
that's risen up to meet you. It will rise

like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother's hands. She'll come back,

heaven having been too far from home
to hold her. O it will be beautiful.

Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys
won't kill you for it. Shake your head.

Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize
you are. What a lucky sack of stars

Desert, Cauldron, Uncertainty. The lines about the fighter with his eyes swelled shut who’s told he won is when I knew this was right for me.

Remember about a year ago, when I entered some kind of vast desert and watched my underlying motivations dry up, one after the other? It wasn’t depression (not even close), more like a terrifying nothingness. I was lucky to find others who had hewn this road, including Martha Beck who compared it to Dante’s journey, just when you think you’ve given up enough, there’s more.

And there was! The desert was followed by the cauldron of my husband’s illness and our joint unemployment. Just like the trials of the world, my trials were about stripping away motivations and assumptions.

In times like these, Andrea counsels in their poem “Instead of Depression“:

from Instead of Depression
by Andrea Gibson

Hibernating animals don’t even dream.
It’s okay if you can’t imagine
Spring. Sleep through the alarm
of the world. 

The strange thing is that circumstances haven’t changed much. The uncertainty about not having a map in real life is still the same!

Yet, I am finally feeling lighter. I am more inclined to say No to most initiatives than I am to say Yes. When I do say “Yes”, it is much stronger. I can’t say much about what or how this happened—just that it did.

And today, the uplift was real. It was 82 degrees outside in March. An unexpected, expensive medical bill was waived in minutes. Our cat came through emergency dental surgery quite well. I designed a pre-launch for my husband’s book which created a real wave of support and purchases.

I feel the promise of spring, not as something fleeting, but an emerging solidness of things.

The Sunbeam and the Ring. For months now I’ve held a focus with daily discipline in a way I’ve never known before. With only twenty pages left in my book, I lifted my head up last week and took a break.

For a couple of days, I walked around a bit dazed. Then, I felt a familiar depression at my edge, even the faint chemical numbness began to appear. “Ah,” my awareness said, “this is me without intense purpose and focus. Who am I now?” I was so surprised to find myself so close to depression again!

Right next to it, I noticed my sorrow hovering, also on an edge. If I walked toward it, it had the same acute signature it always has: “No one wants me, no one sees me.”

This sorrow has history and depth so that’s just a fractal of it. This time, instead of succumbing to either emotion, I could walk up to these feelings and feel their intensity, or I could walk back and feel them soften.

When I turned to my guides, it wasn’t to fix any feeling, but simply to ask: what feeling would most serve me now? In an instant, a sunbeam energy emerged —steady, solid and easy to rest in. Interestingly, when I wrote about the trying times in The Dance of Confidence and Humility, I shared Mark Nepo’s quote from The Book of Soul:

By midday, I could feel all these energies at once: the depression, the sorrow, the sunbeam—like points on a circle in my belly, like a ring! I could sense them all at once. I didn’t push any away, but chose to breathe into that sunbeam until it filled me.

The magic of the uplift is that it showed up on its own and that it felt solid enough to trust, even amidst the same uncertainty. Like the prize fighter, I felt a little stunned at first. Just like the prize fighter, the uplift isn’t about overcoming anything but being in concert with this inner sunbeam. Again, I share a fractal from Andrea Gibson:

from How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best
by Andrea Gibson

By nighttime, I was intimate
with the difference
between tying my laces
and tuning the string section

of my shoes, made a symphony of walking
away from everything that did not
want my life to sing.

This energy of renewal pervades my body, heart and mind. I get to direct its focus.

Humility this Time. Sharing this with a friend she asks me with eyes of wonder, “But Monisha, how did you identify that question for your guides?”

I listened to her heart-felt question until I heard the answer. It’s true—my question required personal humility. Looking back at all of it, and consistent with Martha Beck’s summary of Dante, I have come to realize I never know what’s next, what I may be asked to give up, make room for or let in. All I know is I can stop acting or reacting out of fear.

Perhaps this is the true path of being “in concert with” your inner sunbeam. We can choose to be less scared and possibly, listen with more humility.

Then, allow that sunbeam to fill you up.

With so much love for your unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.” ~ Maya Angelou

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts and meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

  

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings:

• Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today, Emily Jungmin Yoon

• You are Who I Love, Aracelis Girmay

• Wedding Poem, Ross Gay

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

You know how we in the East are just now thawing out from the massive snowpack of January 25th? For nearly three weeks, we’ve been crunching over ice-packed paths just to reach our cars. And yes, another round is on the way today into tomorrow.

We think of new ways to melt cheese, sip steaming mugs of coffee or tea, and use little space heaters whenever we need.

from Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today by Emily Jungmin Yoon

I read a Korean poem
with the line “Today you are the youngest
you will ever be.” Today I am the oldest
I have been. Today we drink
buckwheat tea. Today I have heat
in my apartment. Today I think
about the word chada in Korean.
It means cold. It means to be filled with.

Winter Alchemy. Then, last week, I heard it: birdsong. Clear and unmistakable outside my morning window. After a winter of radio silence, I heard it a few days in a row. This weekend my husband steps outside to a green lawn and runs right back in, practically singing, “The crocuses are up!” (and the hyacinths, narcissus, and daffys).

Just like winter, so much of this world’s alchemy happens in the realm of the invisible. Just because we don’t know see it happening doesn’t mean the world is only falling apart. It is falling apart in some places and coming together in others.

My gaze is on the Minnesotans who put their bodies and spirits fully on the line; New Mexico’s Truth Commission looking at Zorro ranch, and the U.N. call for an investigation into the Epstein files as crimes against humanity.

Where are you resting your gaze? I say make room for the whole picture, as much as you are able.

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Stir it Up—the Reckoning. This Epstein file iceberg is massive-- like a moving glacier, carving through everything in its path. I’m questioning the narratives I grew up, the ones that never sat right. Who decided football players and cheerleaders were the popular ones? Who decided hip adults pair off at bars and happy hours? I’m seeing the tentacles of a predatory, toxic masculinity that oversexualizes kids, making it dangerous to feel human emotions—even in elementary school.

This administration’s tumultuous actions are stirring a pot of myth-making that has shaped American life—explicitly and implicitly—through the narratives of European white-male elites. Land, resources, rules of allocation that favor privilege —all underwritten with myth that shape our “pursuit of happiness”. The duplicity is staggering, but the willfulness is more revealing. The Trump administration’s lies feel increasingly desperate, clinging to old-world entitlement and domination. Add the silence of CEOs not willing to admit their quiet enablement and the pattern is clear: duplicity by design.

Trust your own body, heart, and mind.

Time to trust your own body, heart, and mind. Whether you work a job or navigate disenfranchisement, this duplicity hits your skin all day long. Your body has known it even when your mind was not allowed to name it. Whatever part of the beast constrained your choices—you knew. Now people are challenging narratives on multiple fronts: the supposed benevolence of police force, the dictates of girls’ fashion, the untouchability of elites, and more.

Part of this reckoning is processing your grief, and anger.

This reckoning includes grieving what this duplicity has cost you: blood, sweat, tears, lack of opportunities. It’s real.

Then, look closely at how these constraining narratives affected your life. Which lies do you most want to illuminate for others? A reckoning poem by Aracelis Girmay:

excerpt from You Are Who I Love, by Aracelis Girmay

You who did and did not survive
You who cleaned the kitchens
You who built the railroad tracks and roads
You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and 
     birds, you are who I love
You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or 
     without your saying
Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.

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The Courage of the Seed. Still, there are lies that people willingly tell us, and there are the lies we unwittingly tell ourselves.

This weekend, our coupledom sprouted new tenderness. My partner started being vulnerable first. Oh lordy, what a game changer. If our authentic emergence is a seed under the winter freeze, then I discovered a core part of me—the part that learned no one else would take care of her—still lies protected under husk! Oh, the opening that is becoming possible. Immediately I am reminded of Mark Nepo’s courage of the seed:

Do not forget to shed loving light on your own blind spots. You know who I trust to tell the truth more than anyone else? Your body.

Your body distills information into simple truths, just like poetry.

Read this GORGEOUS poem by Ross Gay! I feel the body’s quiet love here:

excerpt from Wedding Poem, by Ross Gay

where the sunflower curled its giant
swirling of seeds
around the bird and leaned back
to admire the soft wind
nudging the bird's plumage,
and friends I could see
the points on the flower's stately crown
soften and curl inward
as it almost indiscernibly lifted
the food of its body
to the bird's nuzzling mouth

Birdsong. Which leads me back to birdsong. You can trust in who you are becoming amidst our shared tumult. The process is grinding you into your pearl of authenticity.

In a guided meditation the other day, I let my body lead a movement in response to a question I was carrying. Where am I and where should I plant my focus? My body swings me into a rhythm, I begin drumming a rhythm, sounding my soul note in regular beats out to the world. This refers to all the spaces I am venturing into, offering my brand of somatic communication through InterPlay.

Then, my body shows me how this drum beat grows my tree trunk. The tree is getting taller, the roots are strong. Then, from no where, my body layers in another element. My throat opens, sounds come out. They overlay the underlying beat. First a whistle, and then a melody. My own birdsong.

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Grow your tree trunk. Let the bird in your heart find sanctuary in that tree. Free your own birdsong. To your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $444 (Yes, you can shift blocks in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $777 (savings of $125)

“Do you know whales will follow their injured friends to shore, often taking their own lives so to not let a loved one be alone when he dies?” ~ Andrea Gibson

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider other ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Poems, Talks:

• Whale Heart, Simon Heathcote

• The One Ridge, Mark Nepo

• Homesick: A plea for our planet, Andrea Gibson

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

Happy Valentine’s Day dear hearts. The most loving companion I can think of you spending your day with is your own true heart. But like most things that are real and true, this isn’t something reserved for one day. This love letter wants to fill you with Big Love and with the sound of your own heart-centered awakening and power.

Real quick, we are entering a powerful set of meta-energies next week. The Aquarius new moon—which signals humanitarian new beginnings—arrives on a solar eclipse and the first day of the Fire Horse New Year. Get ready for powerful fire energy with nourishing self-care in the days beforehand.

Oh, on a personal note, the Whoosh continues. 🌞💃🏽The quiet joy of my work that leaves everyone having more of themselves, as individuals and a collective, created a flow of glow last week. I named it flow glow. I am receiving more writing opportunities. I also posted chapters 6-10 to my Readers Circle page!!

Big Love. Your heart is a big, beautiful place. Your heart is as big as a whale. Your heart is your sacred connection to Big Love. Your body is connected to it. Your Higher Self swims in it (I’m pretty sure) as does any entity on your spirit team that has evolved to the frequency of unconditional love, like your guardian angels, and some ancestors.

I have never written about Big Love as a list, but as my Valentine’s card to you, here’s a start:

Big Love wants you to love yourself.

Big Love knows that when you step into right relationship with yourself, your Yes-es and No-es help everyone else come into right relationship with their self.

Big Love doesn’t judge but accepts that your deeply human self may need to get a little judgy sometimes.

Big Love delights when you can accept yourself so fully that you’re ready to laugh, especially at yourself.

Big Love knows you are in process: a human being in a veiled dance with your divine self, whose truth unfolds in layers.

Big Love bows with infinite love to your humanity.

Your body is connected to Big Love at all times.

Big Love knows there is enough room on the planet for all humans. Your body knows you can come into harmony with all in your surroundings.

Big Love knows you are ready to play when you truly accept who you are, even if you can’t name it yet.

Big Love knows you are here to remember who you truly are—a unique Divine being in human form. And it sends everything in its power, from body to birdsong, to help you remember!

I also want to share a Hindu hymn that gives you a taste of Big Love’s sweet sound.

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Takeaways:

• Your heart is a portal to Divine Love.

• When you learn to listen, truly listen to your heart stream, you can receive guidance. Your heart is alive with subtle, nuanced information which include your feelings.

• Your body knows how to translate your heart stream into felt sense. You can learn to tune into this place in your chest and listen—to yourself, and to others. You can do this by shifting your focus…such as on a walk, washing the dishes.

Sacred Listening. I encourage you to listen to this Tara Brach teaching on listening “with the ears of the Heart.”

She gets at an essential piece I learnt when working with Non-Violent Communication techniques: you can listen to your feelings, and to those of others; you can listen for the feelings under the surface feeling, and then to the unspoken (unmet) needs of the other person. So many of us put up shields and lash out with very strong emotions simply because we have such little practice articulating and asking for our need. In his book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, Mark Nepo illuminates that this type of listening is one continuous act.

Somatic Takeaway: Practice finding the need under your real feelings and you will instantly feel PEACE in your body. Once you can be honest with yourself about your need, your body immediately relaxes.

Poetic Takeaway: The body doesn’t need nor like to use a lot of words. There are so many other ways to feel and express. This is why the body loves poetry, a form of expression that distills truth, much like itself. Here is an excerpt from Mark Nepo’s One Ridge poem (link above) which is in itself an excerpt from his book Seven Thousand Ways to Listen:

An excerpt from One Ridge, by Mark Neop

We can listen our way out
of howling, the way the heart
can soften the wolf we keep
inside. We can last by listen-
ing deeply, the way roots
listen for the next inch of
earth, the way the old turtle
listens all he hears into the
pattern of his shell.

The Sound of Many Feet Walking. And speaking of peace, what powerful actions can come from listening to your whale heart. I come from a culture that respects feet. When we bow, we bow to the feet of our teachers, our parents, our (many) Gods. This is never about subjugation, ever. It is about humility, respecting the ground these larger-than-life mortals have walked before us, all we have yet to learn at their feet. From touching the feet of our elders (pranama) to taking off our shoes when we enter our homes and temples, honoring feet is an everyday ritual in most homes in India.

Have you ever heard the sound of hundreds of feet walking their walk at once? I have heard it twice—once during prime commuting time at the massive transit hub that is Tokyo Station in Japan’s capital, and once at the primary train terminus in Bombay (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, formerly Victoria Station) at the same hour of morning. Immediately, I knew to quiet myself and simply take it in. It wasn’t just sound—it was vibration, each step demonstrating independent agency expressed collectively.

And now, my heart has a glimpse of this for a third time. The monks.

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In full disclosure, I am beating myself up about this. They were in my backyard, and I could not pull it together enough to show up in person. I am keenly aware their visit will be part of every historic retrospective of these tumultuous times. But my former classmate, Michele Kelemen of NPR, took a personal video of them marching in front of the State Department—and I heard it again. She graciously agreed I could share it with you.

Yes, you have to tune out the surface noise, tune in with your heart, but then, it’s unmistakable. Thud-thud. Thud-thud.

There is a distinct thud-thud when hundreds march. Nonverbally, I hear commitment, purpose, a whole and complete expression of: “I AM HERE. This is my reason for being right now.” Beneath it all, their feet are speaking peace as purpose. I feelt the power of this for you and me—even through a clip.

Do you hear what my heart is hearing?

• Your commitment has a vibration that transmits to the entire Universe. You don’t have to speak it. Your body speaks it.

• When your feet march in coherence with your heart-purpose, you are powerful. In fact, whenever you act in alignment with your whole truth, you are unstoppable. Your holy power in a human body is enough.

• Collective power begins with your individual agency. Stand so clearly in your own alignment that your movement strengthens the whole.

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That’s where we are at in these United States! When you listen to your heart, you can take up as much room as a whale. To your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

“What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole?” ~ Andrea Gibson

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Readings:

• Play as a Powerful Antidote to Overachieving, Monisha Mittal

• Every Time I Ever Said I Want to Die, Andrea Gibson

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

It’s here! As an admirer of Emmaly Perks’ work, I’m thrilled to be a guest author in her publication, a rising star in Substack’s Education category. Y’all know I openly identify as a recovering overachiever. This was a wonderful opportunity to combine research on the benefits of play for adults with insights from my own work facilitating play. My article, Play as a Powerful Antidote to Overachieving, It explores the neuroscience of play, its role in childhood development, and how those same mechanisms can cultivate safety, creativity, and ease in adulthood.

It’s free to you for the first 48 hours—take a moment to read it!

Play as Presence. This weekend, my co-leads and I welcome twelve bodies into an immersive introduction to the system of InterPlay. InterPlay cast its spell, both on the participants and leaders. No where else have I found a magic that brings people into such SOLID rootedness, lightness and openness — with themselves and with each other. The “scene behind the scene” —that is, the confabs between my co-leads and I, was particularly filled with ease, fullness and fun.

Of all the “p” words I encounter as I experience embodied play, today I want to talk about presence. The day the program started was littered with obstacles—from water‑main breaks outside my house to a detoured crawl through rush‑hour traffic with unexpected snow‑packed roadblocks, all the way to the final turn onto a narrow, steep driveway. Yet, I didn’t put mental energy into any of it. I simply kept noticing.

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I have to say, the rigamaroles were impressive, edging on daunting for my human self. Staying with what “is”, the water turned on 30 minutes before I had to leave letting me shower. Allowing two-hours for what is normally a one-hour drive allowed me to stay with the adventure of it all and arrive with 10 minutes to spare. I am not saying it wasn’t a lot. It was—but in embodied presence, there was less emotional drama and more energy efficiency. Which helped me immensely when people began arriving!

In embodied presence, there is less emotional drama and more efficient use of your energy.

I offer this not as another summit to climb (now I have to be present?!), but to share that your ability to play with life is totally linked with your ability to stay present. AND your body loves to play so playing is a natural glidepath to present.

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Healing and Transformation. One of the explicit assumptions in InterPlay is that you are not broken and there is nothing to fix. Through InterPlay’s movement forms, I first experienced a connection to my own inner “wholeness,” which I have since learned is a super power of climbing into your body. To me it feels like a soft assurance. It tickled me to find the line in the quote above from Andrea Gibson’s poem, Every Time I Ever Said I Want to Die (link to spoken word above).

Today, I resource you with this prior post about filling with soft assurance.

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You can also read about the underlying deep-i-ness of this type of embodied play from the workshop experience on this Facebook post.

I ask for your blessings as I bring this resource to other bodies, some of which are on the front lines of the cruel devastation we find ourselves in in this country.

In the mean time, to your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ~ Mary Oliver

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selections:

• In Praise of Dreams, Gary Soto

• The Way It Is, William Stafford

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

I saw another Substack author who, at the end of the year, provided their paid subscribers an accounting of what all their funds had made possible. I would like to do the same for you. Some to share with all of you but the bulk for paid subscribers. Plus, the gift of a special poem.

Stafford’s poem is exactly what’s up in my end of the world. “There’s a thread you follow,” he says. I too am following a thread, and it is same as one from decades ago. I can feel it more now than ever and I’m not letting go. (It’s not letting go of me either).

Your heart. I want it to stay open. I realize that is the simplest way for me to share the reason for writing these love letters. Life is hard—good golly we are each so courageous just for entering its fray! I want us all to keep an open heart, one of the most difficult challenges of all. It asks much of us but gives true wealth in return. The thing is, wow, the adventures this heart can take you on!

I am experiencing the strangest of feelings. Like I am finally learning how to climb onto a saddle and ride a horse, steer its direction. Or maybe it is a fire horse, or a dragon. I don’t know yet but again, I didn’t know I held the reins in my hands. So much to learn in this new phase.

This letter shares with you the Whoosh that’s entered life since January 1. I am so grateful for my new and long-time subscribers.

To your exquisite unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!

Real Progress

1. Ninety-seven pages! 📖That’s right. The first 97 pages of my book are revised equating to 10 chapters of my book. (Well...I am about 2 hours away from some editing in Chapters 8 and 9). These chapters cover two non-verbal languages as examples of how the body communicates (Energy and Movement). More than that, I have found my right relationship to the book—I see how I am literally weaving real research with my lived experience and healing story. Here’s the thing: I’ve always been a story weaver! Even when I wasn’t called that, that is what I always paid for at work: weaving disparate strands into a larger picture. 📖Finding my home base has truly helped my confidence and commitment. 🌠

2. Building (Research) blocks: 🕵🏽I’m not just weaving research with lived experience—I’m weaving research across disciplines. I’ve been studying body and play wisdoms through neuroscience, trauma and psychology, embodied cognition, improvisation, dance and movement studies, and consciousness research.

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“When you stay vulnerably true to your experience, you will never lose your place.” ~ Monisha Mittal

Deep gratitude to paid subscribers. Welcome to all. If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of uplifting my work. You can:

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

  

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected Poems, Talks:

• Diving into the Wreck, Adrienne Rich

• Kindness, Naomi Shahib Nye

• How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best, Andrea Gibson

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

Since Sunday, my energies have been gradually…careening. I kept trying to center and re-focus. I knew I was out of alignment, but with no idea of how to get back in. Honestly, it’s the mystery of not knowing in these moments I find most challenging

This morning, I woke with a keening in my heart. In a group chat, a facilitator asked what would support me best right now. The question forced me to acknowledge a need I hadn’t yet admitted: I want to be witnessed and held.

Whoosh. Did I share with you that my word for 2026 has come in? It’s Whoosh. That’s right. Michael Jordan has his Swoosh and in our household, we have our Whoosh. Inspired by a basketball story we experienced in 2025, it’s that unexpected uplift: when the basketball makes the net, when an article suddenly gains a new audience, when a phone call comes in with an opportunity. THAT’s my word!

It was the same this morning. No sooner had I named my need than—whoosh—a friend left me a voice-text offering the kind of witnessing I was craving. It is hard to persist in the unknown, leaning on my heart for orientation. Many days it feels like a welcome blast. Other days…it’s just hard. Her message has me blubbering over my phone.

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Ten minutes later, I’m sitting across from a dear friend who’s taking me out for my birthday (on Saturday!!). Our waiter’s name is Angel. With her, I can be all of me—3D, 5D, brown girl, wife, aunti. She is another kind of brown, high-frequency, and much softer on the feminine spectrum than I am. Most of all, I get to stay vulnerably true to everything I notice and feel. I’m not only met; I start having fun—with her and her baby girl. Our shared frequency rises and rises. On the way back to our cars, we spy a red rose on the sidewalk.

Friendships, people…true friendships that catch you and fling you back up to your high-wire, are everything. May we be this for each other in these turbulent times.

Takeaway:

• Acknowledge your needs. In my case, my lack of focus and feeling off was that I was denying a human need for witnessing and encouragement. Those signals were my body’s way of alerting me to get back to my truth.

• Let your Higher Power know your need. Once I admitted the need to myself, I could admit it to my entire other-dimensional spirit team. It’s your truth they want to hear. Let the Universe conspire with you.

• Talk to your friends. Find a relationship that lets you be authentically you. Let them know what support you could use. Of course, coaches and therapists quality but I am talking the type of friend who can see through your bullshit and want to lift you up anyway. If you don’t have one now, let your Higher Power(s) know you would like this!

Stay Vulnerably True. When I say “vulnerably true”, I mean feeling your feelings without overwhelm. Why? Many reasons, but my favorite is the feeling after I’ve managed to ride out the intense emotion. Here is this amazing rush from my heart that let’s me know I can trust all of me, my whole experience. Here, it’s so crazy, but I could trust my need for witnessing. Rather than push over it, I found a way to let myself have it.

This ability to feel your feelings, without overwhelm, is the key to staying tethered on your path with an open heart.

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This ability to feel your feelings, without overwhelm, is the key to staying tethered on your path with an open heart. This is why the brutality and stupidity (yes I have to put this out there) of the current regime is so challenging for all of us. It legitimately disturbs our inner sense of humanity. Without clear outlets, shutting down that piece of you can seem a rational choice. What is an antidote to feeling too much but to feel too little?

Your Felt-Sense Knowing. But this is the short stick, the fool’s gold. Your feelings are a whole entire language from your body to you. By the way, I am referring to “primary feelings.” These are your real feelings, not from your personality or your thoughts, but sourced from your body. Various psychology researchers have developed lists of these primary feelings (e.g., Ekman, Plutchik, Izard, Thompson), and though they fluctuate, there are no more than ten. They include fear, anger, surprise, sadness, and happiness or joy. Trust the felt-sense signals from your body—they are true to your experience. Science knows that information arising from the body travels upward pre-cognitively, so these feelings are received with more neutrality.

This is the power of your somatic knowing.

The point is, trust yourself by trusting the experience you are having. Trust the experience you are having by staying vulnerably true to it.

This is Adriene Rich’s gift in the Diving into the Wreck. A must read, I can’t believe I only found it now.

from Adriene Rich's Diving into the Wreck:
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed.

This is an intimate exploration. Only you are having your experience. You are the only one having the depth, shape, acuteness of it. Avoiding certain feelings, or their intensity, fragments not only your experience, but your sense of self. You feel less whole. By ignoring these feelings, you miss out on vital communication your body sends you about your experience. In this mystery of living, when you find a way to keep breathing through it readies you for the next thing. For Naomi Shihab Nye:

Gibson urges us to go further. About their cancer diagnosis, they begin:

As I pointed out in my Anger article, your feelings, pleasant or unpleasant, orient you--one way or another, they provide direction. This is also my tie into the intro image. When you stay vulnerably true to your experience, you will never lose your place.

When I listened, my body wanted me to remember that delight and ease can be part of the way I approach my work. It wanted to point me back to a frequency where my work flows with ease and aliveness for me. Even the criteria for this is only something I can define. Like this, I am learning how to co-create with the universe.

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How to Stay You and True in Disturbing Times. As a follow up to last week’s letter I want to provide you a string of “resources” or rather (and perhaps this is more true), inspirations. Someone in a writing group felt that they were seeing so many masculine forms of responding to situations. While that may be true on the DHS/ICE and DOJ side, I want to share what I see as a merged masculine/feminine response from ordinary citizens.

Here is my true message. Act or not act, it’s all OK. Follow your inner nudges and find ways to stay aligned to what your body/inner-truth asks. You were born at this time for a reason. You asked to be here. Remember, ’s newsletter last week—delight is an essential ingredient for your aliveness—that is for your cells and your soul. As long as you stay vulnerably true, you will find your particular ways of “acting” in ways wholly right for you.

As long as you stay vulnerably true, you will find your particular ways of “acting” in ways wholly right for you.

• Tea for You? — Your action can be simple. This image of a human offering cups of tea to protestors is seared in my mind.

• Letter to Senator from your Inner Authority — I loved this letter. To me, it is a perfect example of how simple and powerful your inner truth can be. Indignation, righteousness are not the hallmarks of inner truth. Your Inner Truth is way too relaxed in itself and clear to mess with those distractions. She articulated a reasoning and argument that you don’t hear in the media and used her voice to express it. She is happy for you to use this to send to your representatives! Or convive your own!

• Up in Arms (?) — Bear with my punny muse for a moment. It strikes me how this is truly a moment for our arms (and feet) to shine. Arms serve tea. Arms (hands) write letters. Arms print whistles on 3D printers.

  Scour the internet for first-hand accounts of how citizens are organizing non-violently. People are singing in the faces of ICE rubber men. They are buying salt and returning it at Target to slow down business and protect workers from deportation. Find who and what inspires you.

• Call Your Representatives at the least for this one tactical action. I learned ICE funding was only granted through January 30th. Using these action steps from Indivisible.org, you can get register your voice to terminate additional funding.

The truth is there are people using their creativity, ingenuity, and chutzpah to protect others in their community. Your spirit of rebelliousness knows how to delight itself—let it get inspired.

To your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.” ~ Malcolm Gladwell

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selections:

• Fire, Nikita Gill

• On Your Strength as a Woman, Nikita Gill

• An Example of a Wonderful Letter to a Senator, Sidney Michalski

• Where I Stand, Spirituality with Sam (beautiful example of truth telling)

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

Today, I want to talk about the value of Fire. Because, I want to talk about an emotion some of you may be wrestling with right now: ANGER.

If you are still evaluating the ICE man’s actions…then this post is likely not for you. I am not putting my energies into finding analyses to convince you. I do suggest you watch this 39 minute video by Heather Cox Richardson to find the spine of truth behind the lies. School yourself on the unnecessary cruelty (and its escalation) of ICE and ask yourself why.1

So. Many. Emotions

There is no one feeling, no one response you or I are having to what is happening in our country—dehumanization of immigrants, illegal extraction and killings in Venezuela, and now the murder of Renée Nicole Good.2 In a Facebook post where I shared feeling anger, people shared various emotions they were having: heartbreak, despondency, frustration and indignation.

Through our wise leaders, the InterPlay community is playing with how these external events land in our bodies, even when we are not directly involved. My leaders counsel perspective—you can physically take these pieces from your body and hold them out, to have a line of sight on them. Make your choices from there.

No matter how you find yourself responding, it’s a struggle, right?

In one way or another, I feel we are all struggling with how to live our own lives while this shit is happening around us. It has been that way for me. I am working on a large creative project—unpaid, with little income right now—and that’s stressful enough. With regards to external events, I am a fish swimming in a sea of dismay one event after another. It affects each of us in its own way, visible or discernible. And it’s ALOT.

Anger is a Healthy Signal

Still, I want to talk about anger. Because during these singularly unique and tumultuous times, I’m finding anger to be one of the healthiest emotions I can have.

I’m finding anger to be one of the healthiest emotions I can have.

Waking Up. Why? Because, as I wrote in an article last spring, there is an inherent purpose to the chaos and brazen destruction the Trump regime is bringing. Or rather, the only “good” this can bring is to continue waking people up to the lies the powerful elite have been telling us. Waking up those who seem too comfortable obeying external authority and with the demarcations of privilege that society revolves around. If you don’t wake up, you risk being the old women in this scene from the movie Brazil, blind to the havoc around you in order to eek out “the good life” (note, the revolutionaries in the movie are attempting to free this society from totalitarian rule).

With the old constructs between private sector and public sector being destroyed, I am waking up to how little investors value human capital in its own right. As I wrote last spring in The Fire This Time, I feel this chaos is forcing each one of us to find our personal tipping point—the point where non-action becomes action.

Your Tipping Point. The tipping point is where we discover what we are personally willing to stand for. The right we are willing to stand up in the world. Not from guilt. Not from ego. But from clear, directed conviction. This happened to me with my husband’s illness and caused me to step into an advocate role as I coordinated his care.

We are not taught about healthy anger.

We are not taught about healthy anger. I do have role models, largely women, who embody (past and present) this for me. God bless them! But I was also raised with very unhealthy anger from a parent, and for most of my life I shied away from it. Anger, I’m told, lives in my liver (according to Chinese medicine) and, comes out when I drive (according to my husband. Jersey strong, Min, he says as I curse and spew).

But this—this idea that a police-state thinks it can just shoot whomever it wants, so three children lose their mother— NO. FUCKING. WAY. I am ignited. I heard someone say today that this killing was the shot heard around the world. I hope they are right. I hope it causes us to rise up like the French Revolution…in non-violent ways, of course.

At its essence, anger lets us know when someone or something is not okay for us. That is a healthy signal to listen to.

According to Karla Mclaren, M. Ed, an emotions and empathy expert, “No other emotion can do what anger does, and no other emotion can support you in the ways that anger can. Simply put, anger is a necessary and magnificent emotion that can improve your life and your relationships in astonishing ways.”

When anger shows up, she encourages us to ask:

• What do you value?

• What must be protected and restored?

The Feeling Under the Feeling. This might not be your tipping point, and that is wholly OK. But whatever feeling you are having I ask you to get in touch with the feeling under the feeling. There always is one. Feelings of sadness, hurt, fear, insecurity or outright powerlessness can lurk under the anger and make us feel vulnerable. If anger isn’t your primary emotion, getting in touch with feeling under the feeling allows you to get honest with what needs your attention the most right now.

Anger as power and agency

The other reason I want to call out anger is that anger and power are directly related. Our own sense of powerlessness can suppress anger as an honest emotion. When we believe it’s not okay to feel angry—or when we’re afraid of the intensity—we deny the signal our emotional body is sending us about a violated boundary.

When anger clarifies, it orients us. It shows you where to place your focus, energy and conviction. This type of anger, born of inner conviction can ignite healthy action in the world. But when our power center is out of balance, that same anger can collapse into despondency or even depression.

Embodied Exercise. If you want to play with this, place a hand somewhere on your body that feels steady. Now allow yourself to feel the anger and notice where it resides in your body. (You may notice heat or pulsing). Notice where the anger is without trying to fix it or resolve it. Now, ask the anger, if it doesn’t have to fight right now, what does it want you to know? Just feel what you feel. If it leads you to a more vulnerable emotion, simply acknowledging the next emotion is ENOUGH. Your body has more peace when you are honest with your feelings. That is all that is ever asked for.

When it’s time, you can go back to the anger as ask it if a boundary has been crossed and if so what? If you want, you can give yourself 15 seconds to fully feel the anger and ask it, is there an aligned action for me to take even for an hour? Sit with the question in curiosity and see if something comes.

Your body will always tell you what is right FOR YOU. Knowing your truth, your honest truth is a key purpose of any emotion, especially anger. Being clear about it can feel self-regulating in itself.

You have the power

Ultimately, I want to remind you of your power.

You are enough.
You have the capacity to feel your emotions without being overtaken by them.
Your emotions are a valid part of your experience.

And you do have power.

You have the power to feel your feelings. Remember, you can howl in the privacy of your own living room. You can even gather a group to howl with.

From a higher perspective, making the choice to not abdicate your power is the key to staying in alignment. In alignment, your human power connects with infinite, divine power. So at the least, make time and space to acknowledge your fire. For me, real anger burns in a sacred circle in my torso, near my solar plexus.

Anger can dissipate because we do not have sufficient outlets for it. You see that now: so many GOP representatives have ceased to be accountable to their representatives, choosing instead to be accountable to their donors.

Unity and Moving Mountains

Moving Mountains. All I know is that, in my anger at how my husband’s condition deteriorated through the sheer apathy of his health care provider, I moved mountains. My small “I’ found itself accompanied by forces known and unknown, until we were navigating within and across health care systems. 💪🏽

I don’t know what the right channel for my anger is yet. I don’t have answers either. But what I do know is that the answer is unity—holding hands together.

I once had the opportunity to sit on dirt ground with about two dozen village women in northern India. I told them my story—how simply for following my desire I had been disowned (verbally, and as it turned out, temporarily) by my father. The women knew then that I understood something of their power calculus. Sister, they said to me, the men beat us for wearing slippers. How can we take the advice of these health workers who ask us to wear slippers and have jobs?

I am 23 in this story, y’all. All I had (besides my own courage that took me all the way to this spot) was the knowledge my community organizer teachers passed to me. I did not know what I was going to say. Opening my mouth, these words came through: “One hundred years ago, American women did not have the right to vote. But they came together. They marched and they spoke. The truth is, they can kill one of you, but they cannot kill 50 of you.” The words lit a fire under the women, who did organize, who did become health workers, and who did wear slippers.

Wonder and Choice

I don’t know how, but I know that this is that type of moment.

For now, I will begin with finding one hour to take action. That may mean asking my senators and representatives real questions. It may mean going to my state legislators and asking what is being done to keep ICE out of my state. I hope I can find and join a network. Maybe mothers about drunk drivers is MADD about this also? If you have suggestions, link me up. All I know, I want to find others to organize with. Like Dumbledore’s Army.

All I know, I want to find others to organize with. Like Dumbledore’s Army.

But most of all, I have the power to go direct with my Higher Levels (aka Spirit team + Higher Self) and let them know: I have had Enough! I am no longer willing to live under a regime whose festish and fantasy is to rule via police state. I do not want to acquiesce in 1000 small cuts until violent authoritarianism is the full-on norm. Show me my aligned action for this moment. Then, hold the question with wonder. And watch the clues come in. And choose.

You can too. Remember, none of us will be asked to do “more than” we can – so do away with guilt and soothe the overwhelm. Always, find what is right for you.

And if power feels like too much now, then simply sit and ask your Higher Levels for courage. That never fails. More than ever, life asks us to have this. Not alone, together.

To your exquisite unfolding. With my hand in yours. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you want support for your emotions at this time and want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)

Midlife feels like many acts of letting go—yet teaches that letting go allows for letting in. ~ Monisha Mittal

If you are a free subscriber and enjoy the poems, writing, or meditations, consider these ways of further uplifting my work.

• Like, comment, or share posts. You can also share my meditations. 💞

• Connect with me to schedule 1 on 1 Somatic Play Dates. 💫

• Use the Fuel Me button below to support my book writing! Donations of $5, $10 or more are welcome. ☕

• Upgrade to become a paid subscriber (button below). Paid subscribers can elect to receive regular installments of my draft manuscript as I finish them. 🙏🏽

Because Human-ing is harder than Adulting. This is a (nearly) weekly publication for heart-centered warriors, swimming through this thing called Life.

Selected readings:

• Elegy: in Coherent Light, Anne Stevenson

• Burning in the Rain, Richard Blanco

• For my Niblings in Anticipation of their Birth, Sam Sax

• The Miracle of the Bees and the Foxgloves, Anne Stevenson

Dear Embodied Hearts and Dancing Souls,

Did you know? The seasonal cycles offer their own clues as to how nature intends for you to unfold as a living biological creature. Yes, winter means slow down but did you know that despite what the Gregorian calendar says, this is still the time to cocoon, dream, and imagine your seeds? I love the idea of this time as liminal space. I love that we can dream the reality we want, and those dreams can crystallize into this reality as small seed offerings. The poems today move from letting go to letting in.

This letter holds micro reflections as the calendar turns forward. Each reflection holds questions for you.

Reflection 1. 2025 was a year of not knowing anything. 2026 begins with saying hello to the resilience that engendered.

What is the essence of how you approached life last year? What are you left with as you begin this one?

from Anne Stevenson’s Elegy: in Coherent Light:

My brain’s a film, I’m made of timed exposures,
And pounding my ears and eyes with waves of light—
These animate flakes, these pictures I call sight. 

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Reflection 2. In that unknown, life asked me to let go of a lot. In the Chinese zodiac 2025 was the year of the snake, for shedding old skins. Like a snake, you, me, we hold on to identities as our way to relate to the outer world. It’s tough letting them go—whether through relational loss, illness, income loss or other, 2025 spared no prisoners. It asked us to face our unknowns and the fear that resides amidst the not knowing. Let go of what you think you want, it whispered.

What identities, false desires or old ways of being did you shed? Did it leave you lighter? What is something authentic to build on?

From Richard Blanco’s Burning in the Rain:

Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet
by sheet on the patio and gathered them
into a pyre. I wanted to let them go
in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding
beside the azaleas and ficus bushes,
let them crackle, burst like winged seeds

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Reflection 3. For the first time since I was 7 or 8 years old, I managed to not shield myself in protection or feel hurt with family. In an epic family gathering, 22 people (tall and small) over four generations came together in Palms Spring to celebrate my father’s 90th birthday. I found moments of connection amidst the mass togetherness.

It’s crazy nuts being with 22 people for seven days! My sisters and parents and I had little family support growing up—no grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins who remained in India. And now, our children have cousins! Our children have children! Those great-grandkids have aunts and uncles right within our nuclear family. What treasures time can bring. There is fullness here. My Body-Spirit felt held, a space to rest. Feeling grateful for this epic full circle and for the gifts of embodied presence.

What has become easier for you after you shed old skin?

From Sam Sax’s For My Niblings in Anticipation for their Birth

there are so many words for you children &
none of them are dirty—tho not all of them
are yours. now as you eat what your mother eats
her fear is your world torn & thrown to birds.
but still the light is thick in the trees. the callery
pears are loud this season & my throat is bright
with flowers for you both. such beautiful flowers
i hardly have the words.

Making Room: This is what I mean by the quote at the top. Many of you know my sparkly disposition—it can be mistaken for a “positive point of view” but that’s not it. It is actually the light inside, swimming with true grit, to find its way out. This year put me and others through the wringer. I’ve come to see grief as nearly a constant aspect of being alive.1

But when you let go of what you’re holding onto, you make room—room for what your True Self wants, room for the next thing the Universe wants to bring you, even room for becoming something you need for the next phase of your journey. Amidst the mysterious unknown, timing is everything. For you must have your lived experience. That’s why I love the Blanco poem above: the rain wouldn’t let his pyre of memories burn. Transformed into puddled rivulets, he lives with them another day.

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We never know. We don’t know what is next. But we continue to let go of what we’re asked in order to let in what wants to arrive. In the process we are textured, shaped, defined and refined. This is the subtle promise in Anne Stevenson’s second poem, of bees who pollinate the fox glove flower “undistracted by a Mind, or a Design, or by desire.”

Be assured of a glowing golden light even amidst the weariness. Let’s breathe in that golden light, hand in hand. You plant your oak tree and I’ll plant mine.

To your exquisite unfolding. Stay #heartwoke!

Monisha

If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, depressed or want to explore your 5D to 3D guidance, I invite you to dive into Somatic Transmission sessions with me. Tap your somatic intelligence to live and lead from your vital center.

Schedule Your First Session choosing one of the options below. Not sure? Schedule a 30 minute free Discovery Call to learn more.

• Package of 3 Sessions: $397 (Yes, you can shift blocks and triggers in just 3!)

• Package of 6 Sessions: $666 (savings of $144)