Part of me wonders, who the fuck wants to spend time taking a closer look at the way the inner critic shows up in their life when the world is what it is? But I persist, because from where I stand, what the world needs more of are people who are AWAKE AND ALIVE, who are clear seeing, who have feet planted in actual reality not propagandized reality, and while there are probably infinite roads that go in those directions, one of them is to come out of the fog of the inner critic so that you can stop being blind/stuck/scared of what it is we/you are here to do.

The stakes are high! And I’m calling for being responsible for your shit. Response-able. Doesn’t that sound like a better focus for your precious attention than just continuing to react to life from your most patterned conditioning?

Apologies in advance for mixing all the metaphors…

This week’s inspiration:

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
― Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

It was the first few months of the pandemic, and, like everything else, my gym was shut down. I, like everyone else, was pent up at home, and my number one baseline maintaining practice—getting my ass to the gym multiple times per week—was unavailable. I was doing my best to expend energy and get my heart pounding by doing dumbbell and bodyweight workouts on the back deck, taking the dog on increasingly long walks, and rolling out my yoga mat for Glo.com yoga every morning. I bought a pair of sneakers and, despite myself, took up running. I trail ran through the backside of McLaren Park, the southside that overlooks Visitacion Valley and the hulking mass of Cow Palace, the side with far less people and far more coyotes, and I had never run before, I mean, of course I had, but not really, not like that, feet pounding the dirt, music as loud as I could stand it in my ears, taking it seriously rather than just getting it over with. Halfway through, I would pause and gaze at the most southern-point of the city, the bay shimmering, the sky never not moody. I would pause, catch my breath, and keep going.

Slowly, slowly, I was almost to the point where I could run the entire three-mile loop without stopping, including a short section that was particularly steep. One day, I was running up it. I was breathing hard, heaving my body up the dirt. I was just about to the top when a voice drowned out the music playing in my ears. The new voice said: “Come on, mi amor. You can do it.”

That day I would have made it, I would have made it up that tough stretch of hill for the first time without breaking to rest, but instead I paused, but for an entirely different reason, I paused to have a blink-and-its-already-over spurt cry, because I was in disbelief:

Did I just refer to myself as mi amor?

The first gift was the waking up—the lightbulb shower moment I wrote about in my last essay. After a life—my whole damn life!—being so absorbed by the voice of the inner critic that I had mistaken it for my own, suddenly being able to disidentify from it enough that I could simply observe the voice vs. be absorbed into it offered immediate relief, a full-body exhale after not realizing I had been unconsciously holding my breath. But this relief was immediately accompanied by a sense of bewilderment: how could I have not been aware of this? What took me so long to wake up? And of course: What *else* was going down behind the scenes that I was not aware of?

Though it hurt to recognize how cruel I had been to myself, the expanded awareness was also an invitation to do something about it.

And so, for the next 1.5 - 2 years, I did. I threw the book at it:1 I learned about thoughtwork, which gave me my first tools for pushing back on the critical inner voice, and began reinforcing new thoughts like my life depended on it. Morning pages became a source of deepening mindfulness and expanded self-awareness rather than a vehicle for scraping away at old wounds. And most important of all, I leaned into self-compassion as a rigorous practice versus an abstract idea I might only wistfully think about from time to time.

Slowly, slowly, over time, far more time than my mind demanded it should take, these efforts culminated enough that I had a damn near religious experience right there in the middle of a sweaty run, halfway up a hill in a neglected park on the forgotten side of San Francisco many residents in bougier neighborhoods do not even know exists, with no one but the bugs and the hawks and the crows and the nasty little squirrels as my witness.

“Mi amor!”

This is how it goes: small efforts, most of them deeply unglamorous, oftentimes tedious and boring (at best), confusing and frustrating (at worst), and rarely—if ever—something worthy of sharing on social media—these efforts accrue until one day something happens that delivers you incontrovertible evidence that this shit is working. You gain access to the next level of the game. This new access reveals new territory, expanded abilities, and is accompanied by a (bewildering) sense of freshness. And once you start collecting evidence, it is so much easier to stay the course even—especially—when it is hard.

I am one of those (annoying) people who describes herself as having always been a “seeker.” But the dial really turned up when I quit drinking in 2017. After the initial fast and furious adjustments (not least of which were learning to be a person who no longer had a go-to substance to “take the edge off,” plus the very not small life explosion of breaking up with someone I had been with for eight years and then subsequently moving into a house with friends), I settled into a pretty low-key existence. There was very little happening externally that I or anyone could point to and say, hot damn, look at Dani go: I was still eating all the same foods over and over, still moving through the same daily routines (write, work, gym, dog walk, dinner, yap with roommates, stare at the wall, sleep), still plugging away at my increasingly elaborate practices, still working the same jobs, still drinking more coffee than made sense for a chronic insomniac, still having the same angsty conversations about money, love, and life, the universe, and everything.

But inside I was a garden.

Yes, I had quit drinking, the prerequisite for all that was to come. But I was still me. There was still a lot to figure out, stabilize, discover, become. But the friendlier my inner experience became, the more my external experience started to reflect that back to me. As I became more able to disrupt the myriad and often sneaky ways the inner critic would attempt to sink its hooks back in, it was like a fog lifting: instead of filtering my perception of reality through voices of the past and outdated, internalized rules and judgements, I could connect to actual reality, which is to say, truth. And turns out there is a very big difference between clear perception and perception that had been pre-judged before I could even look.

Shifting my critical inner voice was not some distant abstraction, some maybe-one-day-someday pie-in-the-sky concept. It is what brought me down to earth, into reality, and out of a mind that, left to its conditioned devices, would have kept me in a homeostatic shame spiral from hell for the rest of my days.

Clearing away the fog of the inner critic—meaning, educating myself on all the myriad, and often subtle ways it can still rear its funky head—helps me stay vigilant enough that I can catch it when it attempts its sneaky descent (the inner critic has certain “tells;” hopefully after reading this essay, you have the tools to understand what yours are), and redirect back to reality. It is what keeps me out of hell; it is what grants me every day a little more access to the garden, and everything that metaphor implies. And just as rising out of the fog of the inner critic naturally led to curiosity about my internal experience (what else am I not seeing?), so too did my clearer perception start to loosen the self-imposed limitations on what I might be capable of out there, in reality.

(This is me building a perhaps not-so-understated case that “inner work” leads to so much more than individual benefits; indeed, it is one of the ways to say FUCK YOU to the death machine and participate instead in creating something less shitty and bonkers in the collective).

Anyway: you can understand why this is important to me. For you, too; for all of us.

But none of that fog-lifting happens without first learning to recognize the fog when it rolls in. So now, without further ado, I shall step down from my soapbox: here are the expressions of the inner critic in the form of a little list you can screenshot and save to your phone. When any of the following are present, you have officially entered inner critic territory:

• Black-and-white or all-or-nothing thinking

• Perfectionism and procrastination

• Self-doubt, guilt, or shame spirals

• Performance fear or catastrophic thinking (”It’s all falling apart!”)

• A punitive inner voice using “should” or “should not” language

• Harsh self-criticism or comparison with others

• A feeling of being judged, attacked, or “not enough”

• Externalizing blame or feeling wary and defensive

• A voice that sounds like someone from your past (a parent, caregiver, or early authority figure)

• A physical contraction or tightening in the body—chest, throat, shoulders—this is often the earliest signal

It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.
Taylor Swift - The Inner Critic

It is a hefty list, I know. What brings me a measure of solace is recognizing that every single one of those bullet points (except the last one) describes an activity of the mind, not reality itself. And the more I can orient to the inner critic’s characteristics simply as habituated patterns—as antiquated (dis)functions of the mind, as nothing more concrete than the wisp of a passing cloud—the more choice I have about what happens next. I can decide whether something deserves my attention, whether there is some grain of truth worth investigating, or whether I want to stop grinding away at it and simply let it move along, dissolve, dissipate, poof, just like that, ahhh yes, there it is, there is that steady constant of blue sky that was always there (and will always be there), no matter how rough the weather system.

It also helps to have some practical, fog-clearing go-to’s:

IN THE MOMENT:

1. Observe + Identify. It is not super fun to realize an asshole has been driving the car of your life, but/and: observe + identify is the foundation if you want its hands off the wheel.

You cannot work with the inner critic if you do not recognize it. This is why it is so important that you know its characteristics (sometimes I encourage clients to keep the above list in their phone or wallet because just looking at the list can be a way of reality testing. You give language to your experience, and it starts to loosen its grip. You can say, oh, here is motherfucking perfectionism again; you can experiment with the below suggestions to discover what helps you snap yourself out of the thoughts that are pointing out the flaws, etcetera).

2. Notice the somatic signal. Somatics and embodiment have been in the self-care/self-development/wellness culture zeitgeist for at least a decade now, but what does it actually mean to listen to your body?

Most of you have had the experience of knowing something in your body but then the mind swooping in and overriding that knowing. Working with the inner critic means developing your ability to…stop doing that. When the inner critic descends like that fog I keep mentioning, there is a sense of confusion present: you get pulled deeper into the mind, into the story; you start scraping away at the wound as if doing so long enough will lead to its cure. Noticing the somatic signal disrupts all that. You learn your inner critic’s tells, you bring awareness into the body, and it goes maybe something like, oh, when my critic is present, I feel like my rib cage is collapsing and my throat contracts so much I can hardly speak. There is almost always a somatic association with the inner critic; the body registers the critic before the mind catches up. Your task is to use that signal as an early warning system, so that you can…

3. Defend yourself—actively. I remember realizing how weird it was that the way I talked to myself was not how I would ever talk to anyone else. What was up with that? If I was hanging out with a friend, and someone came along and started talking to them the way I talked to myself, I would stick up for them, I would push the hell back, I would throw up some fists/knock out some kneecaps if need be, but when it came to myself, I just…accepted all the meanness?

Counteracting the inner critic means befriending yourself which includes STANDING UP FOR YOURSELF. This is the most confrontational step. Match the energy of the inner critic: curse at it, yell, stare it down, walk away, use humor, ignore it. The point is not to be nice about it (enough with being nice already). This is not the time for gentle reasoning! The inner critic responds to force; experiment with telling it to BACK OFF.

4. Stay in your body. This is the through-line across all the steps. The body is the anchor. The inner critic pulls toward abstraction, rumination, and the past. The body keeps you in the present. So: connect to the breath. Wiggle your toes in your shoes. Look out the window. Put a cold washcloth on the back of your neck. Huff some essential oils. Go for a walk, do thirty jumping jacks, dance to a song you cannot help but shake your ass to. Grab the dog for a ten minute speed walk through the neighborhood. Make a cup of coffee or tea. Listen to music that enlivens you, headphones on, no multitasking. When in doubt, connect to one or more of the five senses.

AFTER THE FOG HAS DISSIPATED:

5. Reality test. Many of us were taught to question our reality as young people—to gaslight ourselves out of our honest feelings in order to stay safe, keep the peace, fit in, not rock the boat, etcetera.

Orienting to the expressions of the inner critic as functions of the mind is not about gaslighting yourself. If I am experiencing shame, for example, it is real because I am experiencing it. Reality testing is the ability to evaluate a situation based on what is actually true right now, rather than through the distorting filter of old internalized rules and judgments. If the inner critic says that was stupid, reality-testing is the process of genuinely investigating: was it? Says who? What is the actual evidence? What is just old noise?

Becoming more free from the inner critic is not learning to convince yourself that everything is fine. It is becoming capable of seeing what is actually there without the critic pre-interpreting it for you.

✅I missed a deadline → reality.
⛔️I’m irresponsible and always fuck everything up → verdict.

✅That conversation didn’t go the way I wanted → reality.
⛔️She thinks I’m an idiot → projection/verdict.

✅I’m procrastinating on this project → potentially useful information.
⛔️Because I’m lazy / incapable / obviously not cut out for this → critic.

You begin to assess yourself, others, and situations on their actual merits rather than through inherited verdicts. You take in feedback without it triggering a shame spiral. You recognize when you have genuinely made a mistake without concluding you are fundamentally worthless. And you recognize when the critic is simply wrong, and dismiss it without being destabilized.

OVER TIME:

6. Track the pre-attack tells. As you hone your ability to catch and respond when the fog of the critic lays itself over you, you will learn its “tells,” meaning, what happens in your body just before the critic activates. With practice, you will be able to respond more quickly and effectively. The fog will still come for you; you will just spend less and less time lost in it.

Note that nowhere in this essay have I suggested getting rid of the inner critic.

I am in the business (literally and metaphorically) of wholeness. If I were to block, get rid of, banish, kill any part of me—even and especially a part that, while not uncomplicated, is inherent to just about every human psyche—I would perpetuate the very habits and patterns that would keep me fumbling about in hell and cut off from accessing the garden.

My mi amor moment was a big deal because it was evidence of a significant tonal shift where my inner dialogue (finally!) transformed from criticism to encouragement. This caused a massive uplevel in my basic quality of life that was not contingent on anything changing externally and opened up the doors of curiosity about what else was possible—doors that otherwise would have remained under lock and key.

What I know now is that that moment, momentous as it was, was not the finish line. It was an initiation into the next level of the game.

At the time, I thought this is it! I did it. I transformed the cruel voice with a loving one. But as my understanding of the terrain of the inner critic expanded, I kept uncovering the increasingly sophisticated ways she still showed up—like last December on silent retreat, where I noticed that I was spending many minutes in meditation running an increasingly long checklist of all the ways I would be better when I returned to “normal life.” I visualized myself returning from the expansive retreat experience as a New Woman, a disciplined woman who never skipped flossing her teeth, never went for that second (or fifth) serving of whatever delicious situation was on a table in front of her, never hit the snooze button, never skipped her daily meditation practice; who was never impatient with her family, whose trajectory at the gym was always upward, who joyfully cooked every meal from scratch, who was diligent about methodically building her business instead of flying by the seat of her intuitive pants, who never, ever gossiped, who—you get the idea. And though it felt inspirational and motivating in the moment, when I traced it all back I saw that this planner part of me was just a nice cover for the perpetuation of perfectionism, which is, as you have now learned, a domain of the inner critic.

Once I realized this, I could more easily return to the breath—but not before sending Planner Dani out into the surrounding hills, clipboard in hand, to traipse about doing her thing without me having to be involved.

The aim is not to replace the inner critic with some relentlessly positive affirmation machine. The aim is to disidentify from it enough that something more intimate and authentic can have room to make itself known.

And what would make itself known? How about: creativity. How about: more willingness to risk and experiment and yeah, fuck up. More capacity to hear myself—to be still and know. More tenderness. More aliveness! More of the juice of what keeps me human and not a motherfucking cyborg (not yet). More room to move toward whatever is calling for my attention instead of a forever subservience to the inherited voices telling me who and how I am supposed to be.

These days, the game is not about eradicating the voice that has far more disguises than cruelty: perfectionism, urgency, planning, comparison, defensiveness, the endless project of self-improvement. Instead, it is hearing it and knowing I have a choice. I do not have to go where it tells me to go. The critic can criticize. Planner Dani can plan. Perfectionism can make its pitch. The fog can roll in. None of this requires me to abdicate my spot in the driver’s seat and just go along for the ride.

Finish lines are myths (even death is another initiation). The weather still rolls through.

But the weather is not the sky. And there is a garden full of seeds that needs tending.

⛓ Links ⛓

• A basic introduction to thoughtwork

• A basic introduction to self-compassion

• A basic introduction to fierce self-compassion

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes. It’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative three-dimensional coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

If you are curious about coaching with me, I would love to connect. We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

Subscribe now

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter (((resonated))) for you.

Thank you.

This week’s inspiration:

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live – but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.”
~Parker Palmer

“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.”
~Carl Jung

In my last essay, Field Notes from the Funk, I built a case for developing the aspect of human consciousness that observes; the inner part one might orient to as the Observer. I wanted to demonstrate how, over time, developing a different relationship with the mind can lead to a greater sense of freedom. As a person learns to observe their experience without becoming absorbed into it, different choices become available, optional suffering is surfaced, and conditioned patterns can loosen their grip. Victim consciousness—the belief that one is at the mercy of their circumstances, and that life is happening to them—recedes, and agency expands. Whereas the relentlessness of the unexamined mind has a predictability to it, the territory of the Observer is ripe for creativity, possibility, and the power to become the author of one’s experience versus a hopeful bystander with their fingers forever crossed in the hopes they might think their way into a different life.

This week’s companion piece aims to draw the lens in even closer and illuminate a particular mechanism of the psyche—what is colloquially known as the inner critic. It’s an astonishingly effective piece of psychological machinery. Its job is to evaluate, compare, anticipate danger, and keep us behaving in ways it thinks ensures our safety and belonging. Left unexamined, it blocks access to the Observer, and can become so pervasive that we conflate its voice with our own.

But first, a story.

In early 2018, I was six months sober from alcohol. I was checking all the boxes: I was waking up early to commence what would surely have registered in the Guinness Book of World Records as the Most Elaborate Morning Ritual the world had ever known. My days had structure. I was obsessed with my routine. I was spending an abundance of time at home, writing, futzing with my house plants, and drinking so. much. coffee. There were countless Friday nights where I crawled into bed before the sun was down because I did not know what else to do, and sleep was the wisest choice I could think of. I had started walking away from bummer friends and leaning toward more wholesome ones. I was attending a recovery group. I was reading the Quit Lit, I was never not listening to sobriety podcasts. I was sort-of-kind-of figuring out how to be social. And then, one day, there was a lightbulb moment in the shower:

What’s the point of any of this if I still hate myself?

As the steam rose around me and the water washed away the initial shock of insight, I realized that I had been subconsciously operating under an expectation that all my “problems” would go away once I quit drinking. And while it was true that I had made great strides, what I understood that day was that it would not matter how many boxes I checked if I could not figure out how to shift an inner dialog that was always at the ready to point out my flaws and failures, that insisted on constantly comparing me to my lightyears ahead of me peers (hello, my fellow late-bloomers, I love you), that would have me forever rubbing my face in the stench of past mistakes.

I feel an ache in my sternum as I write this, remembering the pain of self-hatred.

Have you heard the saying, “wherever you go, there you are?” Beyond the initial insight that lit the showertime lightbulb over my head, what I also understood in the wake of that moment was that it did not matter how successful I was if my fundamental experience of life was still filtered through the shitty scripts that were constantly running through my head. The practices I had painstakingly been curating were important, because intuitively I understood that creating the inner conditions for transformation to occur required structure. And, I could not deny that the next step in the process had to include getting to the bottom of why my inner dialogue was such an unrelenting jerk.

Without turning the light of one’s awareness inward, the mind tends to run on autopilot. The bummer is that for most of us, autopilot is a bit of an asshole: not only can it keep us from enjoying the ride, but it can also go as far as to actually thwart us from arriving at our desired destinations.

Just like a fish does not know it is wet, the myriad expressions of the inner critic largely swim under the radar of consciousness. Developing the part of ourselves that observes opens the door to the subconscious, a necessary skill if we want to create distance and eventually disidentify from the hold the critical part has over us. But left to its own devices, there is an insidiousness to the inner critic: it is just the water we are swimming in.

So: what is the “inner critic?” Where does it come from? Why does it exist?

Think of the inner critic as a protective mechanism whose only job is to keep your unruly ass in line. It is intrinsic to the psyche (every human experiences this, though the flavor of intensity is different from person to person) and develops as a response to your earliest experiences (you can imagine how the voice of the inner critic for a child growing up in a loving, supportive, nurturing home would be different than that of a child growing up in a home where they are shamed or judged or neglected—or worse).

This mechanism is shaped not only by the spoken and unspoken rules of family, but also by whatever culture and society you were raised in. As a young person, long before you had the mental capacity to question or evaluate—let alone notice—any of this, the inner critic absorbed the messages surrounding you, and what was once the voice of parents, teachers, churches, peers, or culture slowly became your own.

It makes sense that the psyche would fortify a mechanism to protect you from whatever conditions were present in your childhood. At first pass, you can see how this is a wise response. The bummer is that without conscious intervention, this mechanism rarely updates itself. It continues enforcing those spoken and unspoken rules even after you have outgrown whatever world you were in that created them.

In the inner critic’s attempts to keep you inside the boundaries of what once felt necessary for survival, the very adaptations that may have helped—don’t be too much, don’t disappoint anyone, stay quiet, work harder, make everyone happy, don’t be so emotional—can actually hold you back from becoming fully yourself.

And then you find yourself in your early 30’s with a lightbulb shower moment that almost brings you to your knees.

The problem is not that the inner critic exists (it is a near universal human experience that serves a biological function and, like it or not, it is not going anywhere). The problem is when, left unexamined, its messages are mistaken as truth.

You know the story of The Wizard of Oz?

Just like when Toto went for a sniff behind the curtain and exposed “The Great and Powerful Oz” as just another mortal, so too does the inner critic begin to lose its power the moment you break through its illusion and observe it for what it is. Once this happens, you still might not know how to respond differently; the critic will probably still be the dominant voice in your head. But something irreversible has happened: the spell has been broken.

At first, simply observing the voice of the inner critic is the end goal. If you think about how long these thought patterns have been ingrained, simply observing them is cause for celebration—or at least, some quiet self-acknowledgement. My next essay will deep dive into the different expressions of the inner critic (from the overt to the subtle, and everything in between), how to identify the unique ways it tends to show up in your unique life, and how to begin your own practice of working with this mechanism so it stays along for the ride, but no longer has its hands on the steering wheel.

It took me a couple of years to soften the meanness of my inner voice. I am now quite quick to offer myself gentle comfort when I fuck up or am hurt or disappointed, or when I catch myself in a funky frame of mind—I can shepherd myself through those moments instead of berating myself through them.

Rilke said,

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

If criticizing myself worked, I would be the most transformed person on the planet. But to be liberated from the forces working overtime to convince me that homeostasis is the goal—and not growth, risk, adaptation, novelty—requires a fundamental turning toward myself with softness, kindness, and care. This is a(nother) lifelong practice. And I say yes, because I understand that here is the possibility of a gentle unfolding where I am no longer ruled by my thoughts, where I remember my intrinsic goodness, and where I have access to my essential nature, which is to say, who I was before all those aforementioned unspoken rules laid themselves over me. It is where I get to be the most human version of myself, which is to say, participating in actual reality instead of an idea or fantasy of reality; experiencing joy and spontaneity as a feature of my everydays; trusting myself to meet all the moments—this moment, this moment, even *this* moment—alive, awake, awestruck.

⛓ Links ⛓

• First up: if you have been digging these last couple of mind-themed essays, get your eyes on this one: “You’re probably addicted to thinking: On how to break the deepest habit and live more intuitively.” I have been following Alex’ work for some years now and this is one of his best.

• “Men aren’t needed anymore, and they’re struggling to adapt to being wanted” as someone who loves men, but is also bewildered by how many (straight)men build their identities around hating women, I found this piece to be an interesting, nuanced take on whatever the hell is happening out there right now.

• I am always on the lookout for ways to break my phone habit and this had some nice suggestions: “10 uses for a pocket notebook to keep you off your phone.”

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes. It’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative three-dimensional coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

If you are curious about coaching with me, I would love to connect. We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

Subscribe now

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter (((resonated))) for you.

Thank you.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” ~Viktor Frankl

“You can do it like it’s a great weight on you. Or you can do it like it’s part of the dance.” ~Ram Dass

1.

In February I found myself in a funk, or, The Funk, as I referred to it in break-of-dawn morning pages. I’d wake up with a sense of dread in my gut. The sweet mundanity of my days, normally suffused with a decent amount of rosy satisfaction, took on a darker, more angsty hue. And, most frustratingly, shitty old stories I thought were decidedly in the rearview came out of retirement for another haunt.

Like clockwork, all the familiar signals showed up: I felt ungrounded, and out of control. I worried that this is where I live now. A wave of urgency took over, everything in me demanding that I pull the fire alarm and redirect all my focus to figuring The Funk out. My body scrambled to discern whether I should fight, flee, or freeze.

I’m 42 years old which means this was not my first (or even four-hundredth) rodeo. Because I (luckily?) have had so much experience with and am at this point a bit of an expert in navigating funky frames of mind, I was able to catch myself before becoming completely absorbed. I had just enough wherewithal to both be in the activated, habitual response, and to be able to observe the drama unfolding.

Going against those aforementioned signals felt like going against reason, sense, safety, and nature itself. But experience has taught me that right when I want to speed up is the precise moment when what would actually help is to slow down; to reconnect to feet on floor, breath in lungs; to probably drink some goddamn water; and, after I was more settled, to assess from as objective a vantage as I could muster.

Sometimes (often), it was only the thinnest of threads that kept me tethered to the more helpful perspective of observer. And that thread was just enough of a reminder that in almost every moment, I had a choice: I could approach my experience with curiosity and care versus self-abandonment. In practice, this looked like: attending to the needs of my creature body; like taking the intentional seat of observer and simply watching the shitty thoughts passing through like a bummer weather system instead of becoming absorbed by them; and most definitely, like offering myself a stream of soothing reminders every time my mind would start wilding out that I could indeed trust that life would eventually deliver me back to a more buoyant place like it had all 399+ times before.

One (hard-won) life lesson is that my only job when the bummer weather systems are passing through is to be a shepherd. For whatever reason (I have my hypotheses which I’ll share below), seasons of funk roll through. While I am in one, my job is not to force the funk, to figure out the funk, to finesse some fabulous fable of What I Learned from the Funk. I am instead meant to be a shepherd for the part of me that is caught in a storm. I guide and steer and attend. I observe with kind, present attention. I offer care, shelter, gentle encouragement, and whatever the metaphorical equivalent of an umbrella would be. I allow The Funk to run its course, and of course the course always lasts longer than my mind is comfortable, but I keep going, because that thread is just enough of a reminder that there is always, always, another side. And it is only after the storm passes and I am lying under calmer, friendlier skies that I can review my field notes and start to spin some sense from the experience.

The thing that fascinated me this go around on the funk carousel was how nothing had changed in my circumstances that I could point to and say, this is why I’m here. During my season in The Pit (which, less impressively, had nothing to do with the hit HBO series), the reasons for my suffering were clear: I was under great financial stress. An unhealthy relationship had just come to an end. And, not inconsequentially, I turned 40, which turned up the existential dial to eleven.

But in February, there was no clear reason for my foray into funkdom. I could speculate (and you can bet I have spent so much time speculating) about the perhaps more subterranean causes for it: a slight uptick in stress due to some big client deadlines; the subsequent dearth of enough do nothing, stare-at-the-wall, creative time; the background frequency of the chaotic breakdown of the global world order. These reasons make sense! And I’m sure contributed to the malaise. This time, however, something in me pushed back: while I knew The Funk was real, because I was experiencing it, I’d been in similar places so many times before that this time, I could question its veracity.

What emerged was a question: What if I could just orient to The Funk as some bizarro function of my mind, versus something external that I needed to fix? What if I could just…snap myself out of it, instead of perseverating, ruminating, rubbing my face in The Funk? What if this was just a maladaptive thought pattern, and not actually something that needed spelunking and excavating?

It has taken me a long time to develop my awareness enough that I can discern when I am responding from my default, autopilot, conditioned programming, and when the response is actually in alignment with who I am underneath all the noise. This is a pretty way to say: I’m increasingly able to call myself out on my own bullshit. In this case, I put my situation under the light of my awareness and saw that I was the one keeping myself stewing in it. In other words: my suffering was optional.

Once I saw that, The Funk dissipated like the fog out of a machine in a grungy club.

2.

I am someone who learned from a young age that the way to tolerate my inner experience was to numb it.

Blessedly, (blessedly!) I have come a long way. And though I have devoted my life to waking up, I would be a liar if I did not admit that I still have to be vigilant against creeping backslides into dissociative, anesthetizing behaviors if I am not careful. Currently, these behaviors include: falling into scroll-holes (at times, for entire evenings or afternoons); eating past comfort (I can always trace this back to something I don’t want to feel); getting lost in the fantasy of early romance (I love men, but these days the vibe is far more “guilty until proven innocent” than “benefit of the doubt”). These behaviors are far less harmful than the substances I used to depend on to cope. And while I do not judge myself for these behaviors (sometimes a dissociation session is harm reduction), ultimately, they are out of integrity for who I say I am and who I desire to become. As someone who wants to be awake for life—even the hard parts—and not some fragmented shuffler along-er, crossing her fingers that she can fly under karma’s radar, I know that it is my responsibility to play the hand I was dealt.

For me, this means learning to be—and stay—present. And the way I have learned (the way I am learning) to do this is to intentionally strengthen my relationship to the part of me that observes.

Interestingly and unexpectedly, what this has required is a full-sail disidentification with my intellect. Turns out, when it comes to becoming a person who wants to like–dare I say, love—herself; to be liberated from the past instead of perpetually reenacting it; and to decondition from funked-up programming and outdated scripts, I actually have to develop agency over my mind so that it becomes a helpful accomplice versus a critical, undermining, judgemental asshole.

A result of being socialized and enculturated in the West is that I pedestalized the intellect over other forms of intelligence. I know now that this is profoundly limiting. When the mind is the dominant filter for my experience, so much of what brings texture to life is left out: I stay cut off from a heart spacious enough to feel it all without folding in on itself. I let my brain talk me out of the wisdom of my animal body even though the body does not lie—something I could never say of my mind. I am disconnected from spirit, which is to say, from the greater web of life, from all beings, from a deeper knowing that guides me in discerning what is mine to do with my precious time on the planet and that has nothing to do with capitalism or productivity or earning a living.

The human brain is extraordinary, obviously. But left to its own devices, it can be a total tyrant.

Left unexamined, I know exactly how seasons of funk are going to go—all those “familiar signals” I named in Part 1. And even though my mind will try so hard to come up with a fresh thought that saves the day, in actuality it just zips me right back into the loop of old patterns, the playbooks of which I know like the back of my hand. But if I can watch my experience instead of being swallowed by it, then experience becomes something I can learn from rather than just suffer through. If I can relinquish my fight for control, possibility has space to pool in, and it is from this pool that I can consider fresh choices.

Sense making is important. Part of reviewing my field notes is to learn from the experience, not so that I never go there again—because I will of course go there again—but so that the next time I find myself lost in a haze, my navigation skills are more finely tuned.

Ram Dass talked about life as curriculum, a concept I have been experimenting with for the past two years. When I can view whatever I am dealing with as something happening for me, versus something happening to me, I am no longer a victim of my circumstances. I will still give myself the grace to not worry about mining the lessons until I’m on the other side, but I no longer insist that whatever is happening in my life should not be happening, because it is what is happening. I work with what is in front of me instead of rejecting it.

This applies to everything from the frustration of having to wait in an unexpected line, to maneuvering through challenging life seasons, to the bigger, more impactful life events, like illness, death, and dying.

This is not easy, in case that needs to be said. It is not easy to be trundling along, just moving through my days, only to find myself in murky territory. It is frustrating to make progress, to pile up evidence of progress, to begin reaping the benefits of progress, only to backslide, slip, regress. But if I apply “life as curriculum,” to The Funk, a slide back into the scroll-hole is not a failure of the project of waking up; it is part of the syllabus.

With the connection to the part of me that observes stronger than that which would criticize, I can remind myself that no system in nature—if it is to sustain itself—is in constant expansion. I can reframe backslides as requisite points of integration, places ripe for sense-making and learning, versus opportunities to shame or blame. The shepherd shows up; the judge is quiet.

Training my mind is not exactly fun. I have a long way to go to be able to welcome seasons of being tossed into pits and funks, loops and spirals. But what keeps me nosing my way forward through the difficulty is not only the relief of reaching the other side: it is that every time, I come out a little more free. More myself, more at peace with who and how I am. More open. More able to move and bend with life, instead of running from it or raging at it or gripping tighter on some illusion of control. Less and less at the mercy of old scripts, I become the opposite of numb: alert, clear, connected. Present in my own life.

3.

It is one thing to shepherd myself through a season of funk. It is quite another to shepherd myself through the collapse of an empire.

Living through collapse is not a story that I can just reframe, like I might the stories I harbor that would insist upon my unloveability, fucked-uppedness, brokenness. The reality of these times has real consequences, consequences that have pierced even the most seemingly solid of privilege bubbles, from which I, a self-employed-unpartnered-child free-woman supporting herself in a very expensive state and city, have benefited.

So let me be explicit: I don’t think developing a different relationship with my mind is all I have to do to girl-boss my way through the apocalypse.

Self Made is about taking responsibility for my experience and recognizing that no external force is coming to rescue me. As someone who spent most of her life operating under the delusion that someone/something—whether that be a man, a boss, a job, a mentor, a therapist, a witch—would eventually come and save her ass from every bad decision, from every learned helplessness, from all the nonstop inner chaos and drama, I still need daily reminders that while outside support is helpful and necessary, ultimately, so much of what it is to become a mature and increasingly whole, balanced, healthy person is an inside job.

That being said: there is a fine line between taking care of myself and falling into the trap of self-optimization, because the latter gives me only an illusory sense of control. As the news of the world spins faster and faster and every day some structure I was trained to believe formed the bedrock of society is carelessly dismantled, counting minutes in meditation and tracking workouts at the gym and doubling down on rigid routines can make me feel like I am staying one step ahead of things. And who would blame me? Like you, I am human, with a human nervous system, which is to say, a biological drive that prioritizes safety and security as paramount to my literal survival.

I cannot pretend that an undercurrent of fear is not permeating my days. What I do not know is precisely how it is affecting me. In dreams? In my subconscious? If I get to be 80 years old, what will I know about the impact of these times that I cannot currently see because I am too close to it?

My worries belie a legitimate vulnerability: yes, knowing that no one is coming to save me and that it is up to me to be responsible for my actions and behaviors does give me agency. What it does not offer, however, is omnipotence. I do not know, I cannot know, what the world will be on the other side of collapse.

Maybe I am only speaking for myself, but it is excruciating to not know.

Uncertainty is a universal human fear. Fear is an uncomfortable emotion. It is understandable that I would do what I can to either reestablish some sense of control, or, to turn away completely (cue all my go-to anesthetizers).

And so I ask myself—what are some other options? How do I apply whatever wisdom I have to this moment, not so I can life-hack my way through, or distract my way through, but so that I can adapt? How do I accept a curriculum of learning to work with fear, lest I be dragged along by it? What does it actually look like to surrender to reality, and to cease any insistence that it should be some other way?

I know that strengthening the part of me that observes is a path of adaptation, because it is not only how I interrogate the stories and scripts that I never had a say in writing, but it also lights the way for what is mine to do. It is not a superfluous undertaking to cultivate agency of body, mind, heart, and spirit, not only so that I may be guided in the right direction, but so that I can hear what the guidance is saying in the first place.

And though my commitments place me mostly in the realm of individual transformation, I also know that every transformed individual translates to a transformed collective. When I extrapolate the self-interested aspect of Self Made—individuals taking responsibility for their experiences and recognizing that no external force is coming to rescue them—and place that lens on the collective body, a path forward starts to reveal itself. Something fresh becomes available when we accept reality, when we release the promises of society and culture, when we turn to each other instead of some mythical figurehead. We become a body that adapts its relationship to uncertainty enough that we can continue to be effective and engaged, instead of only ever reacting to what is being served up by the media and the people in power who are wildly overplaying their hand.

What my February funk taught me is that my worldview doesn’t fly out the window when things get hard. Indeed, hard times are intrinsic to the curriculum. And next up on the syllabus is learning to stay with the discomfort of both not knowing what is on the other side of this moment in time, while at the same time trusting that adaptation is possible, even if certainty is not.

Along the way, I will lean into what makes me human: Fortifying the web of connection to the people in my life and orbit (I am currently working on getting to know my neighbors in a more genuine way). Whenever possible (would that it were more possible!), prioritizing leisure over productivity. Saying yes to invitations and showing up, body-mind-heart, for the people that I love. Getting on the floor and rolling around with the 13-year-old dog. Staying true to my daily meditation practice even though I spend most of the 30 minutes longing for the bell to ring. Remembering that the algorithm is not reality; adjusting my work life so that I am increasingly face-to-face and away from a screen. Reminding myself that anytime I feel helpless, or hopeless, the right next action is to connect.

Perhaps adaptation as nothing to do with certainty, or control, or chasing some perfected ability to remain calm while the world rearranges itself. Maybe it looks more like creating the conditions to stay in relationship—to my body, to other people, to reality as it is.

I do not know what comes next. But lately when I lose the thread, I remind myself that order and disorder are not in opposition. They too are in relationship; one always precedes the other. As institutions wobble and old certainties dissolve, the part of me that observes knows that the game is to stay equally awake for both what is collapsing, and what is being revealed.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes. It’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative three-dimensional coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

If you are curious about coaching with me, I would love to connect. We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

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SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

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Thank you.

For the past ~2 years, two things were happening: My work expanded beyond being primarily recovery focused, and I experienced the toughest season(s) of my adult life. This Substack was a reflection of my lack of clarity: how to write about “what I do” in a way that didn’t just sound like woo-woo abstract nonsense? How to write from my experience when I had very little capacity other than just making it through the day?

This is an essay I thought would take me a week to write that ended up taking a whole month. I’m so excited to share where I’ve been, where I’m at, and where this is heading. The below may well be perspective shifting, and I hope you join me for the ride ahead.

This week’s inspiration:

“It is chaos’ great destructive energy that dissolves the past and gives us the gift of a new future. It releases us from the imprisoning patterns of the past by offering us its wild ride into newness. Only chaos creates the abyss in which we can recreate ourselves.

Most of us have experienced this ride of chaos in our own lives. At the personal level, chaos has gone by many names, including “dark night of the soul” or “depression.” Always, the experience is a profound loss of meaning—nothing makes sense in the way it did before; nothing seems to hold the same value it once did. These dark nights have been well-documented in many spiritual traditions and cultures. They are part of the human experience, how we participate in the spiral dance of form, formlessness, and new form. As we reflect on the times when we personally have descended into chaos, we can notice that as it ends, we emerged changed, stronger in some ways, new. We have held in us the dance of creation and learned that growth always requires passage through the fearful realms of disintegration.”

Margaret Wheatley - Leadership and the New Science

1. ESTABLISH (personal - individual)

For the better part of the past decade, the crux of my life and work has centered around recovery.

First it was mine, of course. Eight-and-a-half years ago, I finally dragged myself out of the darkness of self-anesthetization and into the light of sobriety. I had always known there was something off about my drinking, and I have journal entry after journal entry to prove that my relationship to alcohol was never not a struggle. And, when I was finally done, it was like something had flipped: like I had finally passed my hands over a light switch after spending much of my adult life fumbling around in a dark room.

At first, and as my fellow travelers on this (strange, bewildering, and <ultimately> healing) path will understand, recovery became my whole personality. Those early days of boozelessness were rife with illuminating aha’s, and bigger, point-to-able moments of change that came fast and furious. I’d been conditioned to believe that quitting drinking would be a perpetual deprivation, and I could hardly comprehend that by simply removing this single substance from my life, the opposite immediately came true: I wasn’t deprived. I was free.

And lest this come across as if leaving behind my old way of being was some easy breezy process, let me reassure you that despite my introspective nature, the expanded level of self-examination sobriety immediately required was also deeply challenging. I was in new territory. After so long taking the edge off, after so long shapeshifting my behavior based on my perception of whoever was in front of me expected or wanted, I was thrust into developing an actual identity and strengthening my sense of self. I had to learn to observe my inner critic, rather than be absorbed by her insistence that I only ever deserved to stay small and stuck and wallowing in self-loathing. I had to take responsibility for my life instead of operating as if I were a victim of it.

Blessedly, the benefits far outweighed the challenges. I was all-in. I Googled “alternatives to AA” and found a community that introduced me both to group facilitation and to the most brilliant, open-hearted group of women, some of whom are now my closest friends. When COVID hit, I started writing here. The community grew. There were so many of us! So many of us enlivened by this fresh approach to recovery that did not require the adoption of any labels, that sought freedom from shame rather than perpetrating its reinforcement, that actively leaned into a perspective of rebelliousness—that “creating a life we don’t want to escape from”1 was a form of activism in a society that would love nothing more than to keep us numbed out, disengaged, and consuming.

As someone who never felt like she fit in, this was my first genuine experience of belonging. For my little outsider heart, let me tell you: this was a high more exuberant than any other I’d experienced. This was what I’d been seeking. I’d found my fellow misfits, and we were making our own rules. In this game, I got to choose a different orientation to my struggles: namely, that turning and facing the things that made me use alcohol in the destructive way I did did not make me deficient, nor forever fucked up; instead, recovery could be an invitation to step onto The Path—a daily practice of liberation and healing that would eventually make me so whole I wouldn’t be able to help but pour out in all directions.

So when a professional opportunity arose within the very organization that had helped me take my life back, saying yes seemed like the natural, logical next step.

💖 It was there I started coaching 💖

I can’t understate what this meant. Coaching tapped me into my first sense of vocation: as someone who had never known what she wanted to be when she grew up, to then, in my late 30’s, basically stumble upon what felt like an inevitability, like the perfect culmination of all my lived and professional experience up to that point—and to know that all my confusion and struggle and wandering had actually primed me for this precise undertaking—well. It was like a core puzzle piece I hadn’t known was missing finally clicked into place and the prerequisite for this being possible was recovery.

And these were some of the years I was most alive. Even when COVID hit, I was writing, I was expanding community, I was living deeply on purpose. There was this brief span in 2022 after I left that dream job (things sadly got real twisted) when my baby business was blooming and the words were pouring out and The Path felt like a red carpet that would just keep unfurling in front of me in this positive, forward moving, upward trajectory type way. I’d made my way out of the darkness; surely it would be all uphill from there, right?

What’s that sound? Ahh yes, it’s the Karmic Washing Machine2 gearing up to take me for a SPIN.

The thing about substance abuse is that the substance abuse is a symptom of something deeper.

The root causes of my suffering were a profound scarcity programming. My internalized sense of lack had her hands on the wheel, foot on the gas, driving the bus of my subconscious.

I gained so much traction those first 5 years of sobriety. And then, right on time, life handed me the next phase of The Curriculum.

From mid 2023 until the end of 2024, I spent nearly every waking hour in what I came to call—quite unaffectionately—The Pit, where I was forced to confront the ways the default programming was still subtly writing the scripts. This looked like: multiple monetary crises that forced me to finally face my learned helplessness around finances, and how I’d spent my entire adult life shirking all responsibility around taking care of myself financially beyond the present moment. It also looked like dating a (long!) string of men who validated my internalized worthlessness, and treated me as disposable, or barely worth the effort. And then I turned 40 in The Pit, which, yeah, there’s nothing more existential than waking up to the fact that you’re finally figuring out how to be an adult when your life is already half-over.

🥳

Because I experienced myself as fundamentally lacking, the algorithm of reality had gotten real good at serving me up experiences to support that belief. Before I quit drinking, this looked like trying to heal the wound of lack by smearing it with a (literal) substance that kept me just numb enough that I could continue to coast along with plenty of evidence that sure, a less miserable life was possible—but only for other people, never for me.

It took five years of recovery to develop enough strength, stability, and self-worth that something in me could trust that I could handle the deprogramming required to address the deeper issues that were still driving the damn bus.

My only job while I was in The Pit was to do whatever I had to do to climb my way out; indeed, it would have been inhumane to force the lessons of The Pit while I was in it. I kept waiting to fall apart, so it was a surprise when I understood that, blessedly, the five years of prerequisite curriculum had created in me a new cosmology. Something in me kept whispering keep going; promised that, at some point, the lessons would come; and it was this voice that reminded me that even though I was getting my face mashed into the dirt again and again, there would be another side. And that the challenges—The Curriculum—were being served up precisely in the way they needed to be in order for me to learn and heal exactly what I needed to learn and heal to continue the work of becoming a whole, integrated person, a person who might actually affect actual change in her life and the lives of others instead of perpetuating the same old bummer programming, no matter how subtle.

I did not fall apart. I became more me. More cohered. More aligned. More capable of discernment when the old programming threatened to convince me to scrape away at the scabs before they could make way for scars.

2. EXPAND (relational - communal)

It was around 2022 that I began to notice a pattern in my coaching practice.

At the time, my niche was still recovery. All of my clients were people who, like me five years prior, understood that something wasn’t right with their substance use and wanted support outside of traditional, mainstream recovery modalities.

The pattern was this: right as a person began to gain some traction (which could look like: developing consistent practices, deepening self-awareness, stringing together longer and longer periods of total abstinence, discovering how to stay with discomfort instead of immediately fleeing from it), there would be a moment where things would go…chaotic.

This could look a lot of ways, and always involved a slip back into the default, patterned behavior they had been working so painstakingly to disrupt.

Not only was this true again, and again, and again, with multiple dozens of clients, it had also been true in my lived experience. I had lived this very pattern at the end of my drinking: if only I’d considered that those final benders were actually antecedent to something new.

Naturally, questions bloomed:

🤔 What if chaos was a function, and *not* a bug?

In traditional recovery circles3, these side-quests into chaos can get shrouded in shame. People are told they have to start over, and any progress that had been made is minimized or ignored. Tail between legs, they return to community spaces embarrassed by their “failure.”

Because my approach was not beholden to any of the above, curiosity could lead the way. If a person could stay curious about the backslide, instead of wallowing in the muck of shame, these moments could be rich learning opportunities: a data point versus a damnation. A slip did not have to fall under the category of moral failing, and as soon as a person could unfetter themselves from other people’s made-up rules about what constitutes a “successful” recovery, it became far easier to simply stay the fucking course.

As soon as a person started to accept that slips were inherent to recovery, and not a sign they had failed, I noticed that the raddest possibility would begin to emerge: these chaotic strays from The Path were often signals that a breakthrough into some new level of development was imminent.

🤔 What if chaos was a mandatory phase that preceded transformation?

Convinced I was onto something, I took to the internet. My curiosity led me quickly beyond basic search terms like “chaos and recovery” and into the territory of chaos theory. I was astounded to discover that by adapting the fundamental principles through a more creative and therapeutic lens, chaos theory4 actually gave me a playbook I could apply to just about everything: my individual work, my work with clients, and, um, my approach to what the hell it might look like to stay engaged and positively contributing to humanity even in the face of the bizarro-land seemingly endless era of chaos and collapse being played out on national and global stages.

The pattern wasn’t only specific to recovery coaching clients. It kept showing up even after I became an Integral coach5 and the work expanded to include a fuller spectrum of concerns. My hypothesis of chaos as requisite for individual transformation continued to prove true regardless of what challenges a person came to me for support with: the greater changes they were seeking were always preceded by periods of confusion, “backslides” into erratic or undesired behavioral patterns, and a dislocating descent into meaningless.

Under capitalism, the expectation is the line moves up and to the right—a forever upward trajectory until death. If you slip—if the line plateaus, or, God forbid, goes backward—it’s a failure. And while it makes sense to expect that result from a machine, when it comes to human behavior and development, the process looks less like a straight, upward moving line, and more something like this:

As I learned more about the fundamental principles of chaos, the lens through which I’d been programmed to understand reality dissolved. I had new eyes. It was nothing short of a thrill to see that the periodic descents into chaos I had experienced, and that I saw reflected in my clients’ experiences, could be related to not as problems to be solved, not as failures of effort, or motivation, or morality, but instead, as an accurate reflection of how reality—how life itself—actually functions, expresses itself, and evolves.

Because I was already working with these principles, by the time I fell into The Pit, a thread of trust kept me on course. And though everything in me wanted to either flee or freeze, it was the trust in the playbook that allowed me to keep the faith. I did not give up. I did not give in. I did not abandon myself. I continued to show up to my practices even though they were scarcely bringing relief, because they gave something non-harmful to do in moments I didn’t know what else to do.

And then (blessed impermanence!), I made it to the other side.

What chaos taught me is that darkness and deepening were happening at the same time. Yes, I was digging myself out of The Pit. But that wasn’t the full story. I was also on a concurrent path of integration. The chaos of The Pit served me the exact experiences necessary to force the total reorganization of my internal puzzle pieces and delivered me to the next phase of my development, and none of the peace and ease I’m experiencing now (also impermanent!) would be possible without my time in the dark.

And isn’t this is the aim of self-development?
To become more whole, more ourselves?
To be so free from the default programming that we can actually create, innovate, and adapt into something beyond?

As the language honed and the framework developed, what had started as a hunch in my coaching practice became something I could confidently name, and not just name, but make a case for backed up by actual science: chaos *wasn’t* a detour from the path. It was the path. And the people I was working with—regardless of presenting issue—were not failing when their efforts went sideways. They were in the necessary, messy, disorienting middle of integrating into someone new.

Of course, all of this was occurring against the backdrop of a much greater frequency of chaos. The pattern I had recognized in my own life, and then in the lives of my community, was also playing out in the collective. We weren't just in our individual Pits. We were in one together.

3. EVOLVE (interdependent - collective)

It’s one thing to apply what I’ve been learning to my own little life, to my own humble zone of relationships and influence. It’s quite another to apply it to how I orient to reality writ large. The stakes are high, and I’m just one person, who, like everyone else, is doing her damndest to stay engaged and participating even as the siren songs of consumerism, escapism, and whatever slop is beckoning from my phone screech louder than ever.

However: when I organize my understanding of life around the principles of chaos theory, I draw from the fundamental laws of nature itself. I have context inside the collective uncertainty and confusion, which allows me to trust what’s unfolding instead of resisting reality, clinging to “the way things were/should be/are ‘supposed’ to be,” or losing myself to fear. I have context for the disorienting loss of meaning we’re collectively experiencing, because I know that meaninglessness is a hallmark of chaos. I have context that reminds me that human beings are not machines, that we are adaptable, dynamic, interdependent systems that exist as integral parts of a web of relationships and that whatever is being born will only be possible if we learn to strengthen those relationships.

Which isn’t to say I don’t get scared. These are bonkers times! It’s scary to accept chaos’ invitation to relinquish <the delusion of> control and to stay present and awake as the lessons of the collective Pit work themselves over me. It can be isolating, sending me on retreat from the great web of connection of which I am never not a part and right back into unhelpful coping strategies. But when I apply the framework, I remember that not only is there always another side, but that by tuning in to the chaos instead of resisting, dissociating, or giving up, chaos reveals what’s next. Chaos and order are not in opposition; they’re in relationship. One always precedes the other.

When I was tossed into my own Pit, I had no frame of reference for what life would look and feel like on the other side—or if there would even be another side. But by staying close to the framework, even when my nervous system was wilding out, I was able to stay present and engaged in the hard work of rewriting the programming that had kept me perpetuating unhelpful patterns. And it was because I approached my circumstances from a fresh perspective that those aforementioned puzzle pieces stood a chance of reorganizing and settling into their proper places.

I imagine most of you reading this would agree that we’ve been in a collective Pit for some time — and that the hole seems to widen and deepen every day, sometimes multiple times in a single day. I imagine you, like me, are aching for relief; for order, justice; for a return to connection over polarization; for an offramp from the death machine and into something more honoring and respectful of the preciousness of all life.

I have no idea what’s going to happen. What I do know—and in the words of Albert Einstein (one of the fathers of new science)—is that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Our job right now isn’t to force knowing what’s next, but to become so curious, fine-tuned, and present that we don’t miss it when it arrives. By aligning with nature, we bring a more expansive intelligence to bear, beyond the limitations of the mind. We include the wisdom of our animal bodies. We include the wisdom of the heart, which is the domain of feeling and emotion, an aspect of experience that is often the most disconnected and ignored but is actually the key to deepening intimacy and connection with each other and life itself.

What I’m calling for is bigger than self-work. I’m suggesting that the curriculum of the times is for each of us, as individuals, to take on the commitment of evolving—not just for our own benefit, but in service to the evolution of the collective. The more free you become as an individual, the more free the world becomes. Every time you face a pattern instead of running from it, every time you choose presence over anesthetization, every time you act from alignment instead of programming, glimmers of a new world are revealed.

I experience these glimmers when I interact with really good art—when something rises to the surface through the noise and reminds me what humans are capable of. When I watch young women win gold at the Olympics and their joy is so effervescent and palpable, and so opposite of what happens in the world of the Epstein files, and I am connected, for a fleeting moment, to what might be possible if our society actually protected its children. I get glimpses every single morning when I wake up, brew coffee, light a candle, journal for forty-five minutes, meditate for thirty, and then sit there before the sun comes up just fucking basking in the sweetness generated inside my own system simply by connecting to my heart. I get glimmers in sessions with clients, when something fresh is illuminated and this third thing emerges that I didn’t plan or predict but that indicates the entrance into fresh territory and usually points to a deepened connection with the extraordinary soul in front of me. I get glimmers when I write, when I get my ideas on the page. I get glimmers when I study. I get glimmers when I’m in the presence of my friends, when we laugh and talk about what’s going on in our lives and brains and hearts and bodies and then we talk shit about pop culture and then we get all existential. I get glimmers when I’m in my body, when the conditions of a workout are as such that I am sliced right into the present moment, nothing beyond but breath, sweat, box, bar, rig. I get glimmers in nature, when I’m connected to awe and my own sweet insignificance. I get glimmers when I see certain patterns again and again—a cutie little wink from the universe that I’m right where I’m meant to be. I get glimmers during serendipitous encounters with random humans where I remember how fucking magical it is to just strike up a conversation with someone and see where it leads.

These glimmers are fleeting by nature. But the quality of feeling they generate is akin to what life could actually feel like, so much more of the time. And this is a quality we can build on. We can build on cultivating a deeper presence in our lives every single day. We can build on connecting to the wisdom beyond the mind—the wisdom of gut feeling and emotion, the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of deeper knowing and intuition. We can build on deepening relationships, and strengthening the web of connection of which we are never not a vital, interdependent part. We can build on learning to lean, bend, and maybe even dance with chaos, versus being knocked down by it.

I’m not enlightened enough to welcome chaos. I still resist it. And the more I resist, the more I struggle. When I approach periods of chaos with curiosity instead of doing everything possible to avoid, fight, or numb out through it, I allow space for a different way forward to make itself known. Free from the old operating scripts, innovation, creativity, and adaptation become increasingly possible. And though the nature of chaos is unpredictability, I find a sliver of solace in the fact that the playbook for individual transformation is the same playbook for collective transformation, and that sliver is just enough for me to stay the course.

Over the coming months, I’ll be laying out the syllabus. Not as abstractions. As lived, practiced, tested-in-the-mess-of-real-life principles for how to stay connected to yourself, your community, and the collective even as everything is falling apart, so you can be responsive to, and participating in, what’s already on its way. It’s a way to stay the course, to keep showing up more and more fully, and to establish trust that a new way of being that uplifts life is nearer than we can see while we’re in the muck of change.

Consider this essay a friendly hand, extending an invitation to each and every one of you to accept—and commit—to the great Curriculum of the times.

We’re at a choice point. Underneath the noise, there’s an opening happening right now into what’s possible. You can look at the state of things and think, jeez, what lousy timing — why did I have to be alive for this? Or you can look at the very same conditions and think, these are the times I was born into. I have a chance here — to grow, to awaken, to create — and it’s going to scare the hell out of me, but wow.

WOW.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes. It’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative Integral Coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

If you are curious about coaching with me, I would love to connect. We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

Subscribe now

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter (((resonated))) for you.

Thank you.

This Thursday morning at 9am PST, I’m teaching a free workshop on BASELINE—one of the most practical tools I share with clients.

But first, some context:

The Four Quadrants of Integral Theory

Developed by philosopher Ken Wilber, the Four Quadrants model offers a comprehensive map of human experience across four interconnected domains:

• I (Upper Left): Your interior individual experience—thoughts, emotions, beliefs, consciousness

• IT (Upper Right): Your exterior individual reality—body, brain, behavior, observable actions

• WE (Lower Left): Your interior collective experience—culture, relationships, shared meaning, worldview

• ITS (Lower Right): Your exterior collective reality—systems, structures, environment, social conditions

Understanding these four domains helps us see how everything in our lives is interconnected. When we tend to all four quadrants—not just one or two—we create sustainable change and genuine well-being.

This is the foundation of the BASELINE tool.

What is BASELINE?

BASELINE is a practical framework I created to help you maintain your well-being moment to moment across all four domains of your life. It’s your personal map for knowing what you need and actually giving it to yourself.

Within each quadrant, you identify 3-4 concrete actions you can take. Nothing abstract or aspirational—just simple, doable things. On good days, you might touch into several actions across all four domains. On hard days, one action per domain is enough to keep you tethered to yourself—to keep you operating at whatever a healthy BASELINE is for you.

The beauty of BASELINE: It teaches you to listen for what would actually be supportive to you—a unique individual with unique needs, fluctuating energy levels, and an animal body—instead of holding yourself to someone else’s standard of what self-care “should” look like.

You should attend this workshop if:

• You set intentions to start daily practices (meditation, journaling, exercise) and then beat yourself up when you inevitably fall short

• You’re tired of the failure/self-flagellation loop that comes from holding yourself to standards of perfection you’ll never meet

• You want practical tools that work in real time, not abstract advice about “setting boundaries” or “practicing self-care”

• You’re dealing with transitions, grief, stress, or Big Life Stuff and need concrete actions to take when you don’t know what to do

• You want to develop self-trust and inner authority instead of constantly looking outside yourself for answers

• Things feel TOO BIG right now and you need to remember what you can actually affect

• You’ve done this workshop before and want to update your BASELINE for who you are now and what you need in this season of life

What you’ll leave with:

• Your own personalized BASELINE map that you can use immediately

• A workbook (God I love a good workbook)

• The ability to identify what you actually need in any given moment—and the permission to give it to yourself

• A framework for staying grounded when all your usual tools fly out the window

All are welcome. Bring a friend—there’s something powerful about creating these tools alongside people you care about.

Thursday, 2/6 at 9am PST

Register Here

No recording; come live.

Questions? Comment below or respond to this email. Otherwise, see you Thursday morning!

If you are curious about coaching with me, I would love to connect. I have 2 coaching engagement opportunities—either virtual or in person at my home here in San Francisco—open for February start dates.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes. It’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative Integral Coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

Subscribe now

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter (((resonated))) for you.

Thank you.

Book an Alignment Session

And if you’re interested in joining me at one of the two sessions I’m teaching BASELINE next week, you can register here:

Sign up for Tuesday, 2/3 at 6pm PST here
Sign up for Thursday, 2/5 at 9am PST here
No recordings; come live.

This week’s inspiration:

New Year Prayer

Find a body of water, and be still
beside it for a time. Build a fire
and watch the flames. Sit on the porch.
Lie on the grass. Light candles. Take
a deep breath. Write a letter to
someone. Discover something new
everyday. Learn. Tell stories. Listen
to old people. Ask them questions.
Give to others when you can and treat
yourself occasionally. Read real
books and newspapers. Always buy the
grocery store flowers if they catch
your eye. Remember that there is power
in moderation. Learn to cook or bake
a new dish. Enjoy every meal. Savor
your food. Drink water. Any chance you get,
hold a baby. When the opportunity
arises, dance. Always swim or wade
in the water. Study leaves. At least once
this year, pee outside. Be completely
quiet. Turn your favorite song up
loud. Sing along. If someone makes you feel
bad all the time, get away from them. Laugh
with others. Laugh while you’re alone. Spend time
with animals. Don’t judge. Think this: “There but
for the grace of God go I” or “Everyone
you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Forgive others. Forgive yourself.

Silas House

“What do I do when I don’t know what to do next?

A Wilderness Survival Manual a century ago said ‘When (not if) you get lost: Stop. Have a cup of Tea. Climb a tree. Look at where you’ve been. Then, and only then, take a bead on where you want to head next. Go until you’re lost again, or arrive.’

We’re often desperate for the Solution, but if we start anxiously with only that we’re like a Squirrel on the Highway. Solution is the third step. The second step is Fairy Godmother territory: what are you really wishing for here? The first step is acknowledging what exactly has been going on in my experience? How did I get here? What are the chances I’ll just recreate history and wind up in the same place?

The goal of the process is coming to a felt sense of Safety and Certainty.”

Paul Gessford, MFT - Jacksonhole + Alpine Junction Counseling

When the world feels like it's unraveling, how do you stay present? How do you keep showing up without burning out or checking out? What is required to stay engaged?

What I know in my bones is that the second things start to feel TOO BIG; when everything in me is screaming for me to HURRY UP AND DO SOMETHING!; or, when I feel like curling up in bed with HBO for the rest of my life—what would actually help is to stop. To slow down, to soften into the wisdom of the present moment, and to remember all that I can actually affect, which is usually far more than I think when I’m in panic mode.

I can consider: How I show up in my relationships. How I serve my clients. How I treat whoever is in front of me. How I treat myself. I can ask myself: what is one action I can take right now that might make a difference, however humble, for another?

I spend a lot of time dreaming of having a bigger impact. Maybe you do, too. But if life has taught me anything, it’s how easily I can get stuck in a dream if I’m not paying attention. How easily I can waste time fantasizing, how much time I can think about taking action, instead of actually doing something. When I’m in fantasy, I forget what is mine to do.

In reality I remember:

What is mine to do is to stay present in reality;
to maintain agency over my thoughts, emotions, and nervous system in reality;
to strengthen the web of connection of which I am already a part in reality;
to pour everything I have to give into being of service in reality

My job is to discern what is mine to do, and then to go do it.

But how?

Self-development often traffics in abstract language. Metaphor, imagery, ideas, the language of possibility. This is lofty and aspirational, and can be motivating, but it’s not enough.

You’ve been told a thousand times to “set boundaries” or “practice self-care,” but what does that actually mean when you’re in the moment—exhausted, triggered, or spinning out?

When you’re dealing with Big Life Stuff (transitions, grief, betrayal, frustration, disappointment, heartbreak, stress, existential angst), you want answers right now. You want someone to tell you what to do. You get caught up in looping thoughts, perpetuating patterns that keep you in the stress response.

This is where something practical becomes essential.

Introducing: BASELINE

BASELINE is a tool I created to help you ground in the present moment and take non-harmful action when you don’t know what to do. The more able you are to maintain a steady baseline, the more able you are at staying engaged with the people and causes that matter most to you.

Drawing from integral theory’s understanding that human experience unfolds across four interconnected domains—your inner world (thoughts, emotions, beliefs), your outer world (body, behavior, actions), your relationships (connections with others), and your environment (systems, structures, surroundings)—BASELINE helps you tend to yourself holistically. It moves you from thought or imagination into action.

Here’s how it works:

Within each of the four domains, you identify 3-4 concrete actions you can take. Nothing abstract, conceptual, or hypothetical. On a good day—when you’re rested and have time and space—you might hit a few things in each domain. On days where that’s not the case, you know that touching into one action in each domain is enough to keep you tethered to yourself.

BASELINE allows you to be flexible. There’s a range from simple to more involved in each domain.

So often when the squirrels are unleashed in your brain or your skin feels too tight or you catch the inner-engine starting to rumble, all practices and tools fly out the window. In those moments, you can look at your BASELINE and take a non-harmful action. Sometimes it’s as simple as drinking water, or realizing you haven’t had a proper meal all day. Sometimes you need to get out and move your body in a way that exhausts those damn squirrels.

BASELINE is not about checking boxes and then berating yourself when you fall short. Instead, it’s a roadmap that moves you closer to what you need in any given moment. A tool that connects you to your inner authority rather than forcing yourself toward some unhelpful standard that keeps you stuck in a familiar loop.

It’s a way to offer yourself nourishment along the way. To disrupt the thought loops, if only briefly. To give yourself something to do in those moments where you don’t know what to do. To demonstrate to yourself you know what you need better than anyone else; to trust that you know what is yours to do, and to have the capacity to go do it.

The usefulness of a map—a tool that helps you organize and categorize both where you are, and where you would like to go, and that also reminds you of your vulnerabilities so you might stay alert as necessary—seems obvious early on.

Then what?

If you create a map of a coastline, and then return one year later, you will need to update the map. Coastlines are constantly changing due to the action of waves, currents, erosion, and tides. It would be ridiculous to think that the same map we initially created would still be at accurate representation of a dynamic, responsive, ever-shifting shore.

The same is true for you.

And perhaps you understand my emphasis on this tool. My intention is here is to remind you that no matter how experienced you are, or become, returning to the basics is always, always valuable.

Join me for a free BASELINE workshop next week

In this 60 minute workshop, we’ll create your personalized BASELINE together.

Every single thing I teach in this workshop is practical and immediately applicable to your life right now. You’ll also learn how to listen for what would actually be supportive to you—a unique individual with unique needs, fluctuating energy levels, and an animal body—instead of what someone or something outside of yourself is convincing you would be supportive.

You’ll leave with a workbook and your own BASELINE—precisely what is yours to implement right now. Today.

All are welcome. If you’re new to this tool, you’ll leave with a clear, actionable framework. If you’ve done this workshop before, this is a valuable opportunity to update your BASELINE for who you are now and what you need in this current season of your life.

Bring a friend. This work is powerful on its own, but there’s something about creating these tools alongside people you care about—witnessing each other’s needs, holding space for what matters to each of you. Plus, you’ll have a built-in accountability partner.

Two times available:

• Tuesday, 2/3 at 6pm PST // Register here

• Thursday, 2/5 at 9am PST // Register here

No recordings; come live.

What would it feel like to know exactly what you need in any given moment—and to actually give it to yourself?

What would it be like to be so solid and fortified from the inside, that you trust completely that you have everything you need to meet the moment—no matter the moment?

See you there <3

If you are curious about coaching with me, I would love to connect. I have 2 coaching engagement opportunities—either virtual or in person at my home here in San Francisco—open for February start dates.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes. It’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative Integral Coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

Subscribe now

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter (((resonated))) for you.

Thank you.

Read on for my interpretation, and all that spilled out as the result, of some wise words by (the magic that is) Andre3000.

Today’s inspiration:

Stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse.

Annie Dillard
Living Like Weasels

It is the job of evil to keep you from doing your work. We have to keep doing the work through dark times.

Toni Morrison

Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something beautiful.

Assata Shakur

-ONE-

2025 will go down in my personal mythology as the year I was busier than ever.

In April, I picked up a corporate, part-time mental health coaching position where I was required to maintain a caseload minimum of 16 clients per week, on top of the caseload I already held in my private practice. As a decidedly not Type-A personality, this tipped me into burnout territory faster than expected; working over 50 hours/week, plus dealing with whatever tasks inevitably rolled over into the weekend, meant I had very little leftover for my non-negotiables. My fitness declined. My eating habits were all over the place. I’d sit down to write, and my creative reserves were run dry. Alarmingly, I found myself watching the clock during later-in-the-day client sessions. And, despite promising myself every morning that I’d end the day by tucking into the increasingly tall tower of books on my bedside table, by the time I got into bed I had so little left in those aforementioned reserves that instead of reading, I’d end up on my phone, in a dopamine seeking scroll-hole nightmare (and though those hangovers weren’t as bad as they once were, I hated the feeling of waking up already disappointed in myself for participating in behavior in which I knew better than to engage).

No matter a person’s career, ideally, everyone would be operating more often than not from a full cup, with seasons of depletion few and far between. And though what I do isn’t more special or significant than what anyone else does, it’s also true that for those of us in therapeutic professions, it’s particularly out of integrity (i.e., gross) to compromise personal well-being while guiding others toward increasing their own. The less I was able to “walk my talk,” the yuckier I felt, especially when you consider that, for better or for worse, I am part of an industry already predisposed to its fair share of hucksters and charlatans, by the fall it was evident that something had to give.

And give it did. In October, a new opportunity came knocking and I was able to wrap up my corporate coaching role in a good way right before Thanksgiving. Since then, I have been basking in the return of 15+ hours per week, which has translated to recentering my nonnegotiables. All the space I’d been accustomed to pouring into a creative life opened back up: not that you’re paying that close attention, but I busted out two essays in December after barely being able to write all year. And, most delightfully, by turning in my phone within 30 minutes of arriving at the retreat center and spending seven days in meditative silence, I was able to fulfill on one of my retreat intentions: I broke my frustrating phone habit (the icing on that cake was that I read 4! books! in December).

2025 was also the year that the internet (finally) started to feel worse than it felt good.

Although I had already stepped away from Instagram—which was where I had spent most of my scroll time—and LinkedIn—which just, ugh, the most obnoxious and insufferable—I had slipped through the third door that was YouTube. Technically, it wasn’t a social media site. But with its video shorts and endless feed, I ended up using it the same way, which was to say, to numb out, distract, avoid, and anesthetize.

To a certain extent, I can give myself a generous pass for these types of behaviors, considering the chaos of the times. Navigating the complexities of modern life and increasing geopolitical crises under late-stage capitalism is NO JOKE to say the least, and I believe it can be supportive—even wise—to put my brain on the shelf for periods of time and allow myself the grace to just…zone out. And, when these behaviors become habitual; when they start to crowd-out that which would actually nourish me (I think about how I feel emerging from a scroll-hole, versus lifting my head from the pages of a novel); when they start to keep me from engaging, creating, participating, connecting in reality, affecting change in reality, well. This is how the weirdos in power win—>GAME OVER; this is how I perpetuate the current madness instead of doing what’s required to evolve from chaos into (a kinder, gentler, healthier, wiser, MORE FUN) order.

And then there was this: once my capacity opened up and I started to more thoughtfully address the unhelpful dopamine-seeking habits that had crept in (why do they always creep in?), a bell rang in my brain:

This is exactly what addiction is: continuing to engage in a behavior even though it causes more harm than not.

The thing about a bell is that once it’s rung, that’s it. You can’t unring it, as the saying goes. So the bell rang, and then I went and sat in silence for a week, and walked rolling hills in silence for a week, and I ate/slept in silence for a week; I had this right-on-time experience that (re)connected me to the preciousness—the miracle—that is a human life; I returned with a deep connection to what my life is for, and it turns out that what my life is for is not to sacrifice my attention (sitting for a week in silence teaches you something about attention) into an algorithm designed by a people who do not have humanity’s best interest at heart.

Being on the internet all the time skewed my sense of reality. Skewed my sense of my self, my identity. Skewed what I saw as possible for myself, because it had me constantly engaged in a game of comparison. Skewed my sense of possibility for humanity, because all I saw was the worst of it. Skewed my sense of my appearance. Of my chances at romance, and love. Of one of my most core beliefs, which is that despite everything, people are fundamentally good.

Being on the internet all the time kept me in a loop of delusion, not unlike the delulu loop I was in when I was drinking just enough alcohol to keep putting life off until tomorrow.

-TWO-

Early in November, my Instagram feed (this was right before I deleted the app again) was flooded with clips of acceptance speeches and performances from the 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s induction ceremony. Like most things pop culture, I don’t usually pay attention to these types of events, but this year it sliced into my awareness because both OutKast and The White Stripes were inducted, two musical groups that made great impressions on me during some of my most formidable years.

OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below and The White Stripes’ Elephant were both released in 2003. I was 19. I had lived in San Francisco barely a year. I was a music head in high school and had a crew of friends with whom I’d attend all-ages garage band shows (back before any of us had cars and we’d have to beg our parents to pick us up as late as possible, definitely around the corner from the venue so our cool older friends wouldn’t realize what children we were, as if they didn’t know just by looking at us). My musical interests were broad and ranging and to this day I always keep an ear bent to the fresh and new.

Any of you over the age of 35 remember that the music from these albums was everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. To this day when I hear that bass line opening The White Stripe’s 7 Nation Army, I’m back in Granada on my junior year abroad; whenever Andre3000’s ONE TWO THREE sets off Hey Ya! I am back in every bar, on every single dance floor, losing my damn mind, gyrating my body with such freedom that these days that song, for all its exuberance, actually makes me sad, for it connects me to what felt like such less complicated times. Or maybe most of us feel that way at 19—blessedly, blissfully unaware of what aging and adulthood would have in store.

These artists are extraordinary for their singularity, their essential-ness, the way they moved their respective genres forward, the way they experimented, the way they pursued exactly what was in them to pursue and did not shapeshift to suit the idiot desires of culture and fame.

They also survived. With so many artists losing themselves and even their lives to fame, it’s a miracle to witness our beloved artists become, or get on their way toward becoming, elders (and have mercy but what is western culture missing more than wise elders). And this is another way they move us forward, as they become examples of how to stay true and not bend. Neither band has released an album since the early 2000’s. They have all gone on their solo meanderings (aside from Meg White, who has gone full hermit, to which, I have to say, respect).

They are also complete opposites (at least on the surface) so it was the sweetest surprise to discover through the short clip below that they have profound love and respect for each other. Because of course they do.

Even through this shitty-ass clip, you bear witness to the way Andre is moved; and whether or not you are a fan of OutKast, you too are moved; and you can feel the way everyone in that room were also moved, how everyone in that room also felt a catch in their throats by this holy expression of artistry and vulnerability revealed by one of the great artists of our time.

There was a nostalgia there, too, at least for me. And it wasn’t just the nostalgia for the delusion of simpler times. It was the nostalgia for a time when so many more of us were spending time in little rooms making things far more than whatever the hell we’re doing now.

The irony was not lost on me that all this came to me while scrolling half my afternoon away on the couch. It’s also true that the moment I saw this, I deleted Instagram, YouTube, and my beloved Mahjong from my phone, threw it in the junk drawer in my kitchen, and stepped outside.

-THREE-

“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”

In the days and weeks after catching that clip of Andre’s acceptance speech (if you didn’t watch the clip, please do, or the rest of this essay won’t make sense), I couldn’t get the idea of little rooms out of my head. I kept thinking about what humanity misses out on the more fractured our attention becomes; how, the more we distract ourselves, the less and less able we are to hear the quiet inner call that persists long enough that eventually, we can’t help but be lured into our own little room to do the thing that only we can do—indeed, to do the thing we are uniquely meant to do.

The role of the Artist is to slice through the noise. To wake us up, to shake up our limited conceptions. To inspire, and ignite imaginations. To light a fresh path, or simply to brighten the next few steps. The artist goes into their little room, plugs into the cosmic circuitboard, and emerges with that which resonates in the collective body.

What if discovering your version of what Andre is referencing in that clip—that thing you’re meant to do in your little room—isn’t a retreat from a world on fire, but an equally necessary action as any of the more visible, external actions you might take to address the chaos, injustice, and collapse?

The big tech dum-dums (can we agree to stop calling them elites) would much prefer a passive, perpetually consuming populace. What if by spending time in your little room is the way for you to discover why you are on this planet at this precise moment in time?

Because let’s be honest: the majority of us are not going to make any sort of meaningful impact by hanging out on the internet. And though this is not a call to become Luddites, nor to hide away from what needs attention in reality, it is a suggestion that learning, and remembering, how to live, happens from the inside out.

We cannot wait to spend time in our little room until times are better or more stable. The tipping point we’re all waiting for (i.e., evolving from chaos into a kinder, gentler, healthier, wiser, MORE FUN order) happens as the result of individuals working on two levels simultaneously: the external and the internal. We simultaneously have to be in the world, and we have to be in our little rooms. To only focus on one and neglect the other might get results in the short term, but does not lead the evolution of human consciousness, and therefore, an increase in freedom for all beings, which, I don’t know about you, but I certainly would very much like to see—even a tiny fucking glimpse would be nice—in my lifetime. And my lifetime (universe willing) is, statistically speaking, already half-over.

But dani—I hear a question humming in the ether—who has time to hang out in little rooms when the world is on fire?

Two things came to me after weeks spent sitting with Andre’s words:

1. You don’t have time not to hang out in your little room, and

2. You don’t have to consider yourself an artist—or even leave your house—to access your little room, because the little room is inside you.

Here’s an exercise:

Imagine a body. Perhaps this body grew up in a family system that could not protect this body, nor nurture it in the way that would have it thrive. Perhaps this body has experienced trauma, or oppression. Perhaps this body has a certain shape, color, ability, class, brain, orientation, gender, that makes it challenging to simply exist inside this shared narrative reality that insists that certain bodies are superior to others. Now, add the effects of culture, and society, and tradition, and religion on this body. Now think of the impact of these different factors on this body as dissonance, a minor key that throws the whole system into eerie, confusing territory.

Now imagine a guitar. Visualize this guitar being tuned. Notice how you respond to the emergence of harmony. You don’t have to be a musician to know harmony—because you don’t just hear it, you feel it. Something in your biology responds to resonance: you know when it’s there. You do not have to figure this one out. You might need to learn to listen anew, or differently, or more deeply. But the capacity is right there—right here—in your mammalian body.

When you start spending time in the little room inside you, you can start attending to the effects of your unique frequency of dissonance. You slowly begin to dis-identify from it—so, for example, you can be a body that experienced trauma versus being a traumatized body. So you can become someone who clocks when the weird, unhelpful, numb-out habits start to creep in instead of being at their mercy. So you can begin to heal, shed, re-write, re-member what’s necessary to operate from your natural harmonic nature versus your minor-key programming.

Over time, a freshness; and a knitting together of that which for so long had to separate.

As you create harmony from dissonance, you make it possible for the people in your orbit to do the same. As one of my teachers says (and to use a metaphor I think Andre and Jack and Big Boi and Meg would dig): you become a tuning fork. You’re just out there, reverberating your own unique, essential frequency, and just your presence alone is enough to call others into their own unique, essential frequencies (and to consider what might be disrupting their capacity for attunement), and then there y’all are just vibing, and creating, and making the thing y’all are meant to make, and showing up the way y’all are meant to show up, and serving the way y’all are meant to serve—including, easing the burdens of the folks in your families and communities who are literally just trying to survive, so that they get to access their little rooms, too—and being whom y’all are meant to be, and this is as much a form of activism as all the other more visible efforts in which you may or may not take part.

You make time every day to go into your little room every day. On those days you might also be

• protecting your neighbors from ICE agents

• looking for a new job after you lost the one you thought was a sure thing

• scared about the loss of environments and ecosystems and clean air and water and earth

• raising children and caring for aging parents

• participating in direct action

• navigating the ups and downs of depression, anxiety, recovery, and/or

  —etcetera, etcetera, etcetera

Every day you enter your little room, where you create conditions to connect to this resonant body. With practice and attention, you become someone who can hold more, who can be more of service, who can more effectively be with the trouble of the world (including your own broken heart), because when you attend to your unique frequency of dissonance, the more clarity you experience and the less you get in your own way.

Notice I’m not advocating getting rid of dissonance. You attend. You try curiosity over judgement, shame, frustration, impatience. You do not rush, or force. Because the dissonant parts of you probably won’t ever go away (!) Instead, these parts become sort of like peculiar little sidekicks that every now and then come around and rustle things up but for the most part, you can look at with increased lightness, gentleness, even tenderness. Even humor. You’ll still get sucked into the old frequencies, but what you discover in your little room is how to shift out more skillfully, quickly, and kindly.

Over time you integrate; over time you harmonize. You learn to catch yourself in patterning, conditioning, and weird habits. You turn and face that which needs attending (this is often where the support of a guide comes in) so you can heal and grow from what you’ve been through. You catch glimmers of what it is to be a resonant body out in the world, and the glimmers feel good enough that you can’t help but keep going. And despite your insistence that you are not an artist, not really, what starts to happen is that you can be innovative, adaptable, creative. As the baseline frequency regulates, you can see fresh opportunities unfettered from what seemed possible before.

Incidentally, these are the exact skills necessary to not just survive apocalypse, but to participate in what will unfold on the other side.

And when I think about what the hell any of us are doing when it comes to “self-development”—babes, this is it.

-FOUR-

I want to look back on my life and be able to say without a doubt that I did everything in my power to move human consciousness forward. And if I want to move consciousness forward, I have to do more than talk about moving consciousness forward. I have to spend time in my little room, with my resonant body. I have to become a tuning fork. I have to “practice like my hair’s on fire,” because it is.

At the same time, I must adapt to existing with perpetually burning hair; I must learn to live with the discomfort of change, namely, that change, whether it’s change in my body or the collective body, is on its own timeline. I wake up and do what I am meant to do, and then I let it all go. And then I wake up the next day and do the same. I accept the paradox of fighting the good fight with the urgency it demands, while understanding that I’m in this for the long haul. Because the type of change I long for and that I’m fundamentally committed to is not beholden to, say, election cycles. This is why, no matter how lovely the imagery is, or how curious you might be about hanging out in your little room, it’s actually really fucking hard, because in addition to all the good stuff you uncover, what is also revealed is that change happens on far slower timelines than a human brain conditioned under capitalism expects or would like.

Living with burning hair takes a certain level of fortitude that not everyone is up for, so for those of you are, what I’m saying is, you have a responsibility.

The tipping point I’m devoted to toppling over (even though I might not live long enough to see it) doesn’t happen because I sacrifice myself, whether for a noble cause or at the altar of capitalism. It happens every time I remember that tending to my own frequency is itself a form of service, because it is how I stay in the game. It’s a prerequisite for becoming—and here’s another buzzword: embodying—the change I wish to see, because its how I can show up unburdened from the very habits and patterns that kept me stuck and perpetuating dissonance out in reality.

So yeah, I’m out here, waving my hands in the air, gesturing manically toward the metaphorical doorway into your little room because when enough of us plug into resonance, well. Goodness is inevitable.

Not greatness; greatness sets the bar too high. But goodness? Yeah. Doesn’t that sound so nice?

I’ve got my hand on the dial, ear to the speaker, attuning to what’s already here, ready to emerge through the static.

-A-

If you’d like some practical support toward taking up residence in your little room, I’m teaching a free workshop this month (at two separate times to account for time zones).

The workshop is Establishing a Baseline. Every single thing I teach in this workshop is practical and immediately applicable to your life right now. You’ll also learn how to listen for what would *actually* be supportive to you—a unique individual with unique needs, fluctuating energy levels, and an animal body—instead of what someone or something outside of yourself is convincing you would be supportive.
All are welcome, and if you’re already familiar with this tool, this is a great opportunity to revisit and update your BASELINE.

Sign up for Tuesday, 2/3 at 6pm PST here
Sign up for Thursday, 2/5 at 9am PST here
No recordings; come live.

-B-

If you are curious about coaching with me, I would love to connect. I have 2 coaching engagement opportunities—either virtual or in person at my home here in San Francisco—open for late January or early February start dates.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes. It’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative Integral Coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

Subscribe now

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter (((resonated))) for you.

Thank you.

Today’s inspiration:

Yes, I know, there are gifts
to wrap, meals to plan, dusty corners
to clean, items on the very important list
still waiting to be checked off. And
as always, there is a holy invitation
to stand beneath this open sky moment,
to do nothing but enter
all the way—no strand of you
anywhere else. A holy invitation
to pause all that pulls and listen
to the poetry inside your pulse.
I have laid out a blanket of softness—
please, won’t you join me?

A Holy Invitation
Julia Fehrenbacher

Dearest readers,

Today, winter solstice 2025 (summer solstice for my friends in the southern hemisphere), I extend to you an invitation to consider a Sacred Pause.

A Sacred Pause gives you the chance to experience little sips of freedom, of what and how life could be and feel, at any moment, no matter how chaotic or busy or difficult your current circumstances—or the world’s current circumstances—may be. With practice, these simple pauses offer deeper, and more readily available, access to a way of being that enables you to respond to life, instead of continuing to react from patterns you long to disrupt because they perpetuate pain for yourself and others.

As you barrel toward the end of the year, it can feel impossible to press pause. You might feel a sense of being split: you want to slow down, and you’re told that this is the time of year for both retrospection and forecasting, but the demands on your time seem unabating. Right at the time you most want to rest, everything is moving faster and clamoring for your attention harder than ever.

Then there’s the background frequency of this moment in history, and what it means to bear witness to, and experience, the collapse of structures, institutions, and even nature itself, all that felt foundational to basic societal and human existence. No matter how directly impacted you are by the immediate effects of this collapse—whether you live somewhere with shifting weather patterns, or you’re losing important benefits, or you’re figuring out how to support yourself and your family in the face of rising costs of living, or you’re terrorized by masked agents swarming around, kidnapping people who don’t have the “right” papers—this background frequency and its effects on the collective are unignorable.

A Sacred Pause connects you to the opposite of collapse. When you pause, you connect to the inner light that unites us all as humans—the light of innovation, creativity, adaptation, that part of you that, when attended to, will light the way toward all that is emerging on the other side of chaos.

And there’s no better time to connect to the inner light than when the light outside is darkest.

A Sacred Pause can happen any time. A Sacred Pause does not require much time, let alone an empty calendar. It’s something that can be invoked at any moment you catch yourself overly saturated with information, overly stimulated by the too-muchness of the season, or at any moment you catch yourself operating from your default programming.

A Sacred Pause can be:

• Noticing your feet on the floor.

• A brief body-scan, letting shoulders drop, belly loosen, forehead soften.

• Ten slow, easy, connected breaths.

• Moments of awe with a wild animal or beloved place in nature.

• Connecting with gratitude: the wonder of this body, these people, this land, this planet.

• A ritual (see below for a suggested solstice ritual)

It’s a “Sacred” Pause because it’s in the pause that you get to connect to your higher self, your higher nature, that part of you that not only yearns to be more free, but knows that freedom is possible. This is the part of you that keeps showing up and knocking on the door. This is the part of you that not only knows a different world is possible, but is also oh-so curious about your unique place in this life-sustaining (and probably far more fucking fun) new game.

Ritual offers structure for this pause. Solstice is a meaningful time to practice it. Regardless of how spiritual or not spiritual you consider yourself, the human psyche is wired to respond to ritual, and by enacting your own, you participate in the type of action that human beings across all cultures have incorporated for millennia.

Step out of the madness of a holiday hijacked by capitalism, the madness of having a packed-to-the-gills social calendar during the time of year when the mammalian body is meant to be at rest. Give yourself the gift of planting seeds of your truest longings, intentions and desires, both for your own little life and for the whole damn terrible beautiful world, setting out what you’d like to create, and seeing what bears fruit come spring, and beyond.

The following is a simple ritual you can do solo or with others.

🕯Solstice Fire Ritual 🕯

Tools:

• Paper and pen

• A vessel you can safely burn paper in

• A candle/match/lighter

• A fan/feather/piece of paper or cardboard.

• Something else you can light but that won’t burn as quickly as a match. You can use sage, palo santo, a candle. I use wooden/bamboo skewers:)

Step 1: Take the paper and pen and make a list of everything in your life you’d like to release, let go of, be free from. Get it all out. Include everything. This can be things in reality - like, say, an obligation you’re burned out on, or something immaterial, like, say, self-doubt.

Step 2: Rip or cut each item from your list into its own strip of paper

Step 3: Use the safe container to burn each strip of paper, one-by-one. As each strip burns, use whatever you’re using as a fan and be sure to fan away from you all the smoke that’s generating from the burning, sending it on its way. If you’re practicing this ritual with a friend, you can ask them to fan the smoke away from you.

Step 4: Take the skewer (or whatever else you’re using) and before you light it, sit quietly and presence yourself to all you would like to create, all your dreams and wishes for spring. Cup your hands around the item and breathe your wishes into it. Once you are complete, light the item and allow that smoke to drench you. I like to use a hand to wash the smoke over me, and then I finish by allowing the smoke to hover for an extra beat or two over my heart ❤️‍🔥

Step 5: Finish by burying the stick in the ground, or making sure to wait until whatever you’re using has fully burned itself out.

Step 6: Sit quietly in the after effects of the ritual. Don’t rush. Let yourself linger until you are complete.

Here at Self Made, with social media (hopefully) a thing of the past, and with my increasingly attuned creature-body laying an ear to the ground, I hear deeper calls for meaning, connection, magic, and nature.

Again, from this week’s Animas Valley Institute missive (emphasis mine):

The world that is coming is right now gestating in our aching grief and in our wildest and deepest imaginations. The world that is coming is forming underground like the fruiting bodies of fungi whose fantastic possibility is nurtured by dark, fecund decay. The world that is coming is being called forth by innovation and imagination

My particular focus here at Self Made is supporting the journey of people designing unconventional life paths—those willing to step outside their programming and into the territory of their truest longings. I work with worldview interrupters, pattern breakers, and people committed to responding to life rather than reacting from old conditioning, to participating in creating what’s unfolding no matter how scary it is to let go of the way things were.

Our world is changing so fast. The old scripts don’t work anymore, and yet the pull to keep following them is relentless. Meaningful community—however you find or create that—holds the heartiest resilience in uncertain times. A truer way of being is struggling to be born through the cracks of your conditioning, taking form in the depths, from sacred pauses, ancestral wisdom, outlandish imagination, and intentional actions on behalf of your most authentic self and the future you’re building for all generations to come.

At December Solstice and always, I send you heartfelt blessings for all the ways you show up in this world—unfiltered, imperfect, and exactly as you are.

And if you give the Fire Ritual a try, I’d love to hear how it goes <3

Note: I have 3 coaching engagement opportunities open for January and February 2026.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes, and it’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-to-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly, and follow a co-created, collaborative integral coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter helps you.

Thank you.

Today’s inspiration:

I am making a home inside myself. A shelter
of kindness where everything
is forgiven, everything allowed—a quiet patch
of sunlight to stretch out without hurry,
where all that has been banished
and buried is welcomed, spoken, listened to—released.
​
A fiercely friendly place I can claim as my very own.
​
I am throwing arms open
to the whole of myself—especially the fearful,
fault-finding, falling apart, unfinished parts, knowing
every seed and weed, every drop
of rain, has made the soil richer.
​
I will light a candle, pour a hot cup of tea, gather
around the warmth of my own blazing fire. I will howl
if I want to, knowing this flame can burn through
any perceived problem, any prescribed perfectionism,
any lying limitation, every heavy thing.
​
I am making a home inside myself
where grace blooms in grand and glorious
abundance, a shelter of kindness that grows
all the truest things.
​
I whisper hallelujah to the friendly
sky. Watch now as I burst into blossom.

The Most Important Thing - Julia Fehrenbacher

May I be filled with loving kindness.
May I know peace and ease.
May I be safe from inner and outer harm.
May I be joyful and free.

May we be filled with loving kindness.
May we know peace and ease.
May we be safe from inner and outer harm.
May we be joyful and free.

May all beings, without exception, be filled with loving kindness.
May all beings, without exception, know peace and ease.
May all beings, without exception, be safe from inner and outer harm.
May all beings, without exception, be joyful and free.

I’m still sensing into what’s different, on the other side of retreat. I am so much softer. If I’ve had other baby bird moments, this is next level. The image that came to me (in no small part thanks to one of the afternoon dharma talks) was of a lit candle in my heart. And what I’m up to now is tending to, protecting, keeping soft, focused, careful and caring watch over the little flame, so it stays lit. Something was lit in me this past week, and it feels like everything. And I’m so very aware of how easily I could slide back into the old ways, how easily that little flame could be extinguished if I don’t tend to it, and not just here and there, but every day, as many times as possible each day. And I want to! That’s the beautiful part. I have been yearning for this my whole life, so of course it feels - yes - precious. Something precious awoke in me. And now I get to make a life that is an expression of that preciousness, an expression of my devotion. Ten times more than I already have. I get to make a life of practice; I get to make practice my life.

Something that clarified over the week: I’m ready to make my work my life - to go all-in. This snapped alive in me during another one of the dharma talks, one about the Five Hindrances. Specifically, the fifth hindrance - doubt. I saw how little faith I have in myself to become who I want to become, who I know is in me to become. And the beautiful light the teacher illuminated for me: the way through doubt is to remember all I already know. To have courage.

2026 is a fire-horse ride of courage.

By the third day, I relished in my work assignment: cleaning pots after lunch. No longer trying to hurry up and finish, instead, taking care to dry every last drop of damp.

This note from my sister, on the bulletin board the morning of the 4th day, which was the hardest day. I must have read and re-read the words fifty times.

I’m so curious how I’ll be while driving. I got in my car yesterday; didn’t feel much different. Is it possible to relate to other drivers the same way I would to someone moving “too slow” in the dining hall? Can I remember that actual human beings are driving these cars? It’s embarrassing to admit that this is such a thing for me. But it is, and like everything everything else, offers an opportunity to practice. Can I meditate while driving? Can I be magnanimous toward idiots (can I not relate to “bad drivers” as idiots?)? Can I continue to examine that part of me that goes into such a fucking RAGE on the road? Who drives as if everyone should immediately scatter from me?

One thing I noticed is now I spend most of my life not present. When I’m moving too fast, I’m not here. I’m not in life, I’m in my mind, in the idea or concept of my life. And - ok - going as slowly as you have to go while on retreat, it really hits you (it really hit me) how if I want to make my life my practice, I have to design it so I move about 50% slower than I currently do.

Nature TV:

Hawks, kites, robins, deer, one majestical great-horned owl whose stealth sail through the sky I caught at dusk on the first evening; hummingbirds, wild turkeys (their shimmering, iridescent-in-the-sun feathers make up for their sorry saggy faces); one great egret; one precocious gopher; families of quail (who always seem so stressed out); banana slugs!; one peregrine falcon, and finally, so many mushrooms, the names for which I only knew two: turkey tails and amanita muscaria.

One of the talks was around the practice of dana - generosity. Something was said at that brief talk that ended up being one of my more impactful lessons, one of the more explicit lessons (so much is still so subtle, percolating, yet to emerge). It was about how as we wake up, it is our responsibility to be awake out in the world. That what we do in practice is so much more than a solo self-development situation. And I needed to hear that, to be reminded of that, because it helps me know my role, helps me remember that very little is about ME. It’s about who and how I’m being with and for others. It’s me taking a stand, standing on steady inner ground, for transformation, for evolving consciousness, for liberation, for kindness; for what it actually looks like to move through the world heart-first, to stop shying away from, or minimizing, or diminishing my light, the light of the teachings, the light of our omnipresent interdependence.

Does this make sense? Is it overwrought? Probably. Much of this is—obviously—still cooking for me. What I’m trying to say, I think: I really got it, viscerally, in this body, that this is so much bigger than me. I get to BE an open heart in the world. I get to BE a tuning fork. And not only to I get to, it’s my responsibility.

(((Nothing to do)))
(((Nowhere to go)))
(((No one to be)))

Let
your
face
fall
off

While on retreat, on the third night, under a rapturous full moon, I turned 3,000 days sober. Eight+ years. It was so - here’s that word again - precious to be there during that random little milestone. How is it even possible that ten years, a whole decade, is not far off? I mean really, wow, how has that much time passed? Obviously I didn’t get to see the app blinking at me in celebration on the actual day. The moon bore my witness instead, and equally magically, when I got myself up and began my foggy eyed morning meander down to the dining hall for a couple of coffees before the first bell rang, she was still out at 5:30 the next morning, low on the horizon on her way toward setting.

Noticing: twin extremes of both elaborate romantic fantasies and vicious vendettas toward other retreat participants.

Noticing: how much of what happens in my brain are ongoing lists of all the ways I’ll be and do better when I get home. Is this the way the inner critic shows up these days? A subtler, softer version in lieu of the overly critical voice of the past?

Noticing: I love my apartment. I long to live somewhere more quiet and beautiful.

Noticing: not even halfway through a meal, I’m thinking about seconds.

Noticing: I’ll never be an impatient walker again.

I have barely been on my phone since returning. There is nothing on there for me to do, for one, because before I turned my phone in I deleted every app that had me hooked. For another, I’m kicking butt at leaving it be. It’s been lights out by 8:30pm since I’ve been back. I know I’m still digesting so much. And I’m so fired up, so very itching for more. Which is helpful, it’s the fire I need to get myself to show up for community sits even when it’s cold, and my house and dog are so cozy.

I looked at one news blog yesterday but aside from that, I haven’t tapped back into anything. No YouTube, no podcasts (except Ram Dass), no other social media. I logged out of LinkedIn because goddamn, why do I go there at all, it’s one of the most insufferable online spaces. And holy hell, it feels so good to be unhooked. And I’m realizing in this very moment that I fulfilled on one of my primary intentions, which was to snap out of the dopamine seeking cycle I’ve been powerless over recently. Now I must be diligent, disciplined. And perhaps even more than invoking the rigidity inherent at least to some degree in those words, I must stay so much more s l o w moving. This relates to the dopamine seeking, because it’s when I’m moving too fast that the defaults are their strongest. When I’m slow, I can be thoughtful, intentional; when I’m slow, I have the chance to respond differently.

One afternoon, as we ambled our slow walking meditation ways down to the dining hall for lunch, a flock of turkeys where pecking their way across the path. The couple of people in front of me were visibly so excited (in lieu of screens, all week I was thrilled by these moments of Turkey TV), and began gesturing excitedly to make sure that whoever else was nearby made sure to notice, and it was one of those moments where we were all just spilling over in delight, and you know delight is so much better when it’s shared, but of course we couldn’t say anything to each other, so instead we paused and bowed to the idiot turkeys, smiling wildly at each other, and yes it was sacred and holy, but also, silly and ridiculous, and now I’m reconnecting to gratitude for those weirdo birds for giving me one of my favorite moments of the week.

I had lunch with ______ yesterday, and I enjoyed myself, and it was the first time I was relaxed and myself around her, and she responded: it was the first time since I met her that we genuinely connected, that she was actually present with me. I know that the reason I was able to finally be myself was because of my experience on retreat, all that shifted for me as a result. I am more connected to myself, to my center. I am so much more relaxed, and at ease, with myself, my life, what I’m up to, who I am. I’m experiencing myself differently.

It seems that the part of me who would get shy, and want to hide, minimize, downplay, and feel embarrassed about what I do has evaporated. I’ve never had a career, I’ve had so many jobs, and I’m seeing that there was embarrassment there, like, oh, what’s dani up to now. And that embarrassment has been coloring the way I show up for what I do, because I had an assumption that whoever I was speaking to would raise an eyebrow, would think I’m just another weirdo who can’t get her shit together. Something happened on retreat and that whole story finally composted. I know it’s the result of various factors, not least of which is having entered the midlife portal, and all that causes a person to confront. I’m observing myself sharing what I do with the space and grace I used to deny myself when I’d immediately go to shame.

Huh. That’s what it was. Shame.

How deep some things go. How relentlessly they linger. I hadn’t named it, recognized it as such. But shame—that’s what it was. And for that to finally be released? To let myself stake a claim in all that I’ve painstakingly created these past eight years? To stand in the light? It’s a fucking baptism.

Speaking of baptism: I finished writing the above, and I sat, so present, so absolutely flooded with the gifts of my life—health, and not just mine, but my god, to have a healthy and thriving family; with the fact that I can sit here, in the holy dawn, utterly content with myself, my life, this point in my life, this sweetest of seasons; to feel that gratitude wash through my skin, muscles, bones; for the reminder that makes itself known on the heels of gratitude to allow myself to stay in the goodness, the sweetness, to wallow and relish and steep and marinate in it, to give myself fully to it, knowing that it’s not going to last, because everything in this life is impermanent. It all hit me. I haven’t spurt-cried like that in some time.

And I give my tears to the earth, that sacred witness;
I give my tears to all the women in my lineage, who didn’t get a say in their lives;
I give my tears to all the former versions of me, those scared versions, those stuck-in-shame versions.

I kept showing up, and now I’m letting myself be here.

Quick note: I have 3 coaching engagement opportunities open for January and February 2026.

Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes, and it’s also a space to explore what it means to be human. You’ll experiment with practices, activities, and exercises that are designed to support you in behaving increasingly in alignment with your values, and to discover how an outcome of new behaviors is a life that becomes an expression of those values. These are six-twelve month commitments where we meet twice monthly with a co-created, collaborative integral coaching plan for you to get curious with, live into, and embody.

We start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and intuitive guide based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter helps you.

Thank you.

Without you this newsletter is nothing. For $5/month or $50/year, you support my writing. Can you participate in keeping it alive? I’m deeply grateful to everyone who makes this writing possible.

Subscribe now

You also get access to a monthly Group Coaching Circle. Once per month, paid subscribers are invited to a monthly coaching circle. I’ll be rotating the time to accommodate different schedules and time zones. Bring a topic that is on your heart or your mind and let’s see what’s possible.

October Coaching Circle is Friday, 10/17, at 12pm PST. I’ll be playing with different days and times to accommodate schedules and time zones <3

Today’s inspiration:

"Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed."

- Terence McKenna

In the safe, humdrum bubble of pre-adolescence, I believed that once I became a grownup, it would all be up from there. I would only get better, smarter, richer, happier. I’d have my own money! A house, a spouse, kids, a dog—maybe even a cat. There’d be frequent vacations, sophisticated adventures, a glamorous career. I’d be surrounded by friends and family, all of whom were also on their own upward trajectories. A cornucopia of choice would be readily available at all times, anything I could dream or want or imagine just sitting pretty on a platter for my own personal taking. I believed adulthood to be synonymous with happiness and I spent much of my childhood wanting to hurry up and get to some preordained arrival.

Even into adolescence, when things started to get hard and confusing and at times quite dark—when evidence started to accumulate that the adults in my life definitely did not have everything figured out, and it became harder to ignore the holes poking into my little girl belief system—I bored down deeper into my imagination, stubbornly holding fast to the belief that as long as I got to adulthood, I’d be guaranteed the inner sense of having “made it,” and that life would be better from there.

Imagination is a powerful force. In my case, it kept me so deep in fantasy that I began opting out of the present moment. And yes, I’m talking about substances, but also, by living in a constant future trip, I could move through my life without taking any action in the here and now. Subconsciously, I believed the wanting was enough for a dream life to be delivered to my doorstep, and I continued to wait for something external to bestow upon me everything I’d projected onto the fantasy “arrival” I’d been waiting for since I was a kid. So you can guess how singularly terrible it felt when, over a decade into adulthood, I looked around at my peers hitting all kinds of milestones while I was still sort of shuffling along, waiting for my life to start.

A constellation of crises occurred between 2015-2017, making the cracks in my cosmology harder to ignore (though, damn, did I try to ignore). Managing my emotions had already been a full-time gig for much of my life, and now the dial was turned all the way up on the familiar shitstorm, a trifecta of anxiety, insomnia, depression, and now panic, sitting all smug at the base of my throat, threatening to choke me the hell out at any time.

And you know where this is heading, don’t you.

I quit drinking, and yes, queue all the trumpets (when I stop and remember, I can still hear them singing, and the song is a joyful—if utterly exhausted—relief). Nothing that I am or have now would have been possible without this choice, the prerequisite that had me finally turn and face my life, the act around which the before and after spins, the nexus demarcating the death of one story, the birth of what is now being written.

It sounds pretty! I know. Reality was (is)—you guessed it—messy as hell.

Here’s how it went:

I was out there in the after, a recently hatched chick, a snake in mid-molt. I was obsessed with more life, I wanted to wrap life in a tortilla and eat it. Urgency tinged everything and there was no time to waste. I got to work. After so much time treading water, I was desperate to start swimming. I got a decent dog-paddle going. I was so fucking grateful my teeth were on the verge of falling out of my skull. I didn’t know how to do anything but I was learning. I committed to that most exquisite thing: a practice. Glimmers of what it might be like to be a person who could trust herself shivered up my skin and became the lanterns that guided me through the mess(es). The how was less important than the why, and at first the why was, I never want to feel that way again, until it too was transformed, and what remained was a single word, and that word was liberation, and suddenly I had a north star—clouds be damned—suddenly the wait was over, giving way to full permission. I had no idea how I’d fire up the tin-can I was piecing together, but I finally had a direction.

Ok let me slow down.

Eight years ago, the want was this: to quit drinking. The why was self-preservation. That was it. That was as far as I could see. It took time for what was next to reveal itself to me

Discovering my wants and desires was a process. Not knowing what I wanted, let alone why I wanted what I wanted, had kept me chasing shadows for a very very long time. I had to learn that it was OK to want things for myself. I had finally started to listen to that long-silenced inner voice, that thing inside me that had me turn and face my life, that part of myself that had me make the choice that returned me to the land of the living. My only job was to nurture this part of myself, to extricate myself from other people’s trajectories and culturally sanctioned markers of success in order to step into, or at least toward, my potential as defined by nobody but me.

I knew that I wanted to feel more free. I wanted to have a say in my life, instead of only ever tolerating it. The closer I got to the what, the less important the how became; indeed, getting hyper focused on the how often scraped away at the wound of perfectionism and only served to distract me from the what and the why. When I focused on the what and the why, it was then that the how naturally opened up. Why did I want to change? Once I knew what I wanted, and why I wanted it, it was much easier for me to figure out how to get there. If I was to remain a puddle on the floor, it would be much harder to get organized, to mobilize, to have any sort of conscious direction.

The how is less important than the why and the what. So how do we figure out what we want? Or why we want what we want?

My inclination here was to Google, like, a quiz or something that would have me figure out my values, which is another way of getting closer to the why and the what. And this is definitely a helpful tactic. If you know your values, it’s easier to make decisions because you can weigh the decision against whether or not it aligns with who you say you are. But linking to a quiz would be disingenuous of me, because that’s not how I figured any of this out.

If I tried, I could sit and list off some values. Integrity comes to mind. Friendship is in the top three. Joy, beauty, goodness, and self-discovery are big ones. But I’m not walking around with these words in my head. Instead, I know my values because they show up as a feeling in my body that translates to yes or no, signals I trust as those inner lanterns I’m always referencing.

And I think what I’m getting to in this essay, in what has turned out to be a very stressful excavation, is that part of this work is going beyond knowing your why and your what. You have to feel it, and the reason you have to feel it, physically, in your body, is so that when that thing shows up—the “thing” being a “yes”—there is an internal recognition. Here’s an example: when I’m at a table with friends, and we are sharing food and talking shit and laughing, laughing, laughing, I feel joy. It shows up in my body as an effervescence in my skin, a warmth in my chest, water at the corners of my eyes, a lightness in my big dumb head. This is important. Now, when I’m out in the world—and not inside a planned moment that is curated for joy to emerge—and joy shows up, I can name it, I can pause and let it in, let the good imprint into my bones. This is important, because this is the way our body points us in the good directions. Tapping into feeling reveals the how (it’s also an important reawakening for those of us who maybe spent hella time low-key (or major key) anesthetized).

The opposite is true, too. I also want to recognize when no shows up in my body. I know so many of you reading this, maybe all of you, know what it is to erase your no, to “go-with-the-flow,” to cede your knowing to another, to “not make a fuss,” at best, and at worst, to abandon yourself completely. Your head will get you into trouble far more often than your body and a big part of this is practicing putting your intellect on the shelf, recognizing when it’s getting in the way. You focus instead on developing enough strength in who you are to no longer talk yourself out of your knowing. To honor yourself with your no.

I don’t know if I can list how to develop this knowing. I don’t know if the way I experience a “yes” or a “no” will feel the same to you. I don’t have your same history or lived experience, so for me to prescribe a set of steps to take to get there is probably a waste of all of our time.

Here is what I will say: if you want to change your life, you have to befriend yourself. If you feel like shit all the time, none of this matters.

For me, befriending myself means spending hella time alone. It’s words on the page, thousands of pages, 99% of which I will never read again. Early bedtimes, the same meal over and over, so damn boring. It’s flipping the bird to the inner voice who wants to convince me that I am fucked up, and instead being relentless in my practice of speaking to myself the way I would to one of you, until one day I’m running up a hill all sweaty and grunting, and who is this person referring to herself as “mi amor?” It’s reminding myself that I’m a human and not an android and that one of the things that makes me most gorgeous and dare I say lovable are my mistakes. It’s transforming a little more every day into a redwood tree. It’s setting my sights on a future direction and then forgiving myself again and again when I fall short. It’s rest. It’s sticking up for myself. It’s letting myself have a voice, it’s staking the claim of belonging right here.

I want to want things that make me feel good, dammit. I want satisfaction. I want my general feeling to be satisfaction over everything else. Life will hand me all the other feelings, plates of hot steaming shit I will have to navigate. And, I want the feeling of being satisfied to be the baseline. If this is what I most want, then it follows that I might start to consider what I need to help me feel that way, how I might cultivate satisfaction on the regular. Yes, a certain, baseline amount of money and security is helpful (as my friend Nicole says, “Money doesn’t buy happiness but it can provide freedom”), if not required. But satisfaction is also how I practice fine tuning my knowing to even NOTICE the feeling.

Here is satisfaction, currently:

• Laughing with friends

• That spent feeling after a workout

• Eating just enough, not too much

• Savoring the moments when I do indulge and not judging myself or assigning moral value to food

• Reading fiction

• Having conversations with certain beloved humans that reorder my inner puzzle pieces

• The fifteen seconds after hitting “send” on these newsletters

• Rolling around on the floor with the Tater, giving him scritches under his chin, behind his ears.

• Being inside a coaching session with another human

• A tidy home, a home that is every day more and more an expression of me

• The (rare) good night’s sleep

What I am present to, rereading this list: none of these things have anything to do with productivity. None of these things cost money. All of them are the most precious.

Growing up, I thought happiness was a given. I thought that life would only become easier to navigate as I aged, and that my own evolution and growth would be linear, organized, simple. So much of my pain, which I know now to be universal pain, was caused by bumping up against reality, which is the opposite of linear, organized, simple. Indeed, I had to learn the hard way that life only gets worse, more complicated, more difficult. I had to learn to work with reality, rather than fighting against it (or, more precisely, checking out of reality completely).

It so happens that this is a fundamental law of the universe.

Entropy is a very complex situation that I am not smart enough to describe. But basically, it means that everything that exists is shit and will only become shittier.

I’m kidding! (sort of).

I found this article helped explain it in a way that didn’t break my brain:

Here's the crucial thing about entropy: it always increases over time.

It is the natural tendency of things to lose order. Left to its own devices, life will always become less structured. Sand castles get washed away. Weeds overtake gardens. Ancient ruins crumble. Cars begin to rust. People gradually age. With enough time, even mountains erode and their precise edges become rounded. The inevitable trend is that things become less organized.

This is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is one of the foundational concepts of chemistry and it is one of the fundamental laws of our universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system will never decrease…

In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The pull of entropy is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases.

If you want to change your life, you have to create a daily, forever practice to stave off your own entropy.

You have to assert effort. You have to put systems, practices, structures in place to counter entropy. Otherwise, everything will carry on devolving and breaking down. This doesn’t mean that you stop entropy. That is impossible. Part of this process is acceptance of a baseline futility—you know, that no matter how healed you are, how healthy you get, you and everyone you know and love are all going to die.

You accept reality, and then you create an ongoing, daily practice that fosters conditions in which change can occur. It helps to fall in love with your practice.

It is this love that will sustain you when you hit life’s inevitable plateaus, losses, struggles, disappointments, it is this love that becomes the refuge you sought outside of yourself.

Your practice gives your imagination a job. Your practice helps you recognize the what and the why, so you can feel into the how. Practice is what has you actually do the work of becoming responsible for your life—and even allows you a say in how you might design your life. It is what helps you create community and beauty and meaning in the face of knowing that you have no control over any of this. It is what holds the burning, and let it be known, this is a forever burning.

I am still me. I have changed so much in my life but I am still me: messy, judgmental, jealous. Wild in my raging, minuscule in my fears. The difference is that I know who I am. I know how to work with myself, and I don’t let anything keep me from the only thing that means anything, the only thing that works, that makes any sense at all, and that is showing up and practicing, on an on, forever, until I do arrive, because it turns out that there is an arrival after all, and it’s right here, right here, right here, only this road, full of all these lanterns that light the way, so long as I pay attention.

Self Made updates:

• This fall I have space for five four three new coaching engagements. Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes, but it’s also a space to explore what it means to be human, and how to become more human at every moment. These are six-month commitments where we meet twice monthly with a co-created, collaborative integral coaching plan for you to follow, live into, and embody. I don’t do hard sells; we start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

• I have turned paid subscriptions back on! In addition to essays and first access to events, workshops, retreats, and all the other things I conjure up, I’m excited to share a new monthly offering for paid subscribers: one Friday/month, I’m hosting a Coaching Circle, where you can come with something you’re working with and engage in some spotlight coaching. October Circle is Friday, 10/17 at 12pm PST.
  
  If Self Made is or has been supportive to you, I invite you to subscribe.

  Subscribe now

SELF MADE empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and step boldly into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Integral Coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber.

Subscribe now

You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter helps you. 

Thank you.

Quick reminder that I’ve turned paid subscriptions back on.

Subscribe now

For $5/month or $50/year, you support my writing.

You also get access to a monthly Group Coaching Circle. Once per month, paid subscribers are invited to a monthly coaching circle. I’ll be rotating the time to accommodate different schedules and time zones. Bring a topic that is on your heart or your mind and let’s see what’s possible.

First Coaching Circle is THIS Friday, 9/19, at 2pm PST. I’ll be playing with different days and times to accommodate schedules and time zones <3

This week’s inspiration:

Antilamentation

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Dorianne Laux

Late summer 2017: after a very very dark night, I quit drinking after ten years of knowing something wasn’t quite right with my relationship to alcohol but feeling utterly unable to stop. A daily journal keeper, I was about six months sober when I decided to revisit the notebooks that were piled up on a high shelf in my closet. I wanted to retrace my steps; I wanted to put together a map of my past, to understand and make sense of how I’d gotten from there to here. I was curious how I’d gotten so stuck for so long.

I’d been struggling in the dance of moderation with two left feet in shoes that didn’t fit for years (PSA: it’s a shitty, shitty dance), and I knew that by paging through ten years worth of journals, I’d be revisiting this struggle. What I didn’t expect was the degree to which alcohol featured in those pages. When you journal every day, much of it is mundane, boring, day-to-day life stuff. To see how much I agonized over my drinking, and how desperately I wanted to quit, and how many times I failed spelled out on page after page, year after year, was too much for those starry-eyed, full of wonder days of early sobriety. I re-shelved the journals and there they shall remain (until I burn them for some future birthday letting go ritual).

20 September 2017 (3 days alcohol-free)

Why would I drink like that, if not for extreme self loathing? People who love and respect themselves don’t drink like that. I want to be a sober person. I want to be comfortable in social situations without drinking. And sure I don’t binge drink the way I once did, and, obviously, it’s still possible. I feel I’m standing on shaky ground. I have so little trust in myself. My personality. Even my thoughts and opinions. When I’m around people I’m great but in my quiet moments alone I’m a big mess. And I feel such a greater anxiety about the world….

24 September 2017 (7 days alcohol-free)

My internal state feels so precarious and fragile right now, lately. I can no longer handle the bullshit. I need a significant break. I’ve been listening with renewed enthusiasm to Tara Brach’s podcast, and it's been an absolute lifeline for me these past two difficult weeks. Her three most recent dharma talks seem like they were written only for me. Knowing that they weren’t— that she talks about what she does because of their universal nature—reminds me that I’m not alone. And I’ve been feeling quite alone. Isolated. I don’t yet feel out of the woods, but I do see a path forward, a light in the distance. There’s a newfound tenderness for myself. Still not the default- far from it- but perhaps a glimmer of how it could be. How I might get to a place where I can be gentle with myself. Not hate, loathe, and be so constantly ashamed. Because what’s exhausting, and even more concerning, is how thoughts create reality, and that is NOT the reality I want. I want freedom, kindness, grace, creativity, simplicity, self-expression, honesty, forgiveness. I listened to one of her meditations last night before bed and I’m afraid. And I knew I was afraid, am afraid, but last night it hit me why, and I knew the why was true because the moment it hit me so did the tears: I am so afraid I will never find success. That my life will always be like this, feel like this: a constant push of a boulder up a hill. And I have plenty of evidence of failure, there are quite literally dozens of failed pursuits in my wake. And if the same happens here? I might die. So I’ve come to some threshold. If I don’t change, I will have the same results. And I want to change more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, more than I want to be a successful writer: I want to find peace in my heart.

25 September 2017 (8 days alcohol-free)

As much as I feel a growing tenderness sprung up inside me ever since last week’s rock bottom hangover, right there alongside the tenderness is so much grief. Perhaps the two go hand in hand. Perhaps to feel truly tender is to feel the weightiness of what’s real. The more tender I feel toward myself, the more my heart erupts in sadness. Something is happening. I can taste it in my mouth, the acridness of anxiety at the back of my tongue, in my teeth; my skin shivers something rotten is invading my nose. And my eyes! My ears! Take me to a place where I can rest my eyes, relax my ears. Every day an assault. And for what? This is the question I’m asking. How might I live in a way that aligns with my values? What *are* my values? Am I willing to be honest? Am I willing to take a bold step into my life as an artist? ...this past week, for the first time in what feels like a millennia, I actually believe it might be possible that I change. That I *can* retrain my thought patterns. And I might even have a bit of hope. Cautious hope. I have no idea how to do it but I’m starting to trust that this process might have more to do with allowing than doing. I’m not even sure how to write about it...I want to love and care for myself as I would my dearest friend. Befriend myself. And start to make choices based on how I want to BE rather that what I want to DO. I don’t know. Spelled out that way, it still feels a bit simplistic. But there’s something there...there’s something there, and I’m curious. Curiosity is a much sweeter feeling than jadedness. Certainly better than despair, that island I’ve spent years wallowing on. I’m still there much of the time. But I’ve begun work on a boat. I’m getting off that island. And I’m going to create my inner and outer worlds in a way that aligns with the future I want so badly to believe is possible. And I’m not sure what that looks like. But I’m curious. And cautiously hopeful. And - oh! - Forgot to mention! I’m going to experiment with a prolonged sobriety. See what arises...wish me luck.

27 September 2017 (20 days alcohol-free)

I want to make choices about my life based on feeling, not thinking. Thinking is what’s gotten me into all the trouble. Thinking, and drinking. So now I’m entering a world of feeling and abstaining. And I pray the messages will come clearer.

11 October 2017 (25 days alcohol-free)

What happened to me, to the girl who would travel with only a tiny daypack between countries by herself to renew a Visa in Vientiane? Who could stay in falling apart shacks for $4/night in Bali? Who shoe-stringed all summer across Europe? That girl seems so distant. I pray she hasn’t disappeared for good. I want to conjure her back. And then I want to go beyond. Because even back in those wild days, I was still tamped down. I don't think I’ve been or felt fully expressed since very early childhood, preconscious memory. I’ve always been hyper-aware of my body, the space I inhabit. I’ve always been debilitatingly self conscious. It wasn’t until I discovered substances that I was able to fake otherwise. I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d learned to deal with anxiety at a younger age. But now I’m having to actually deal with it and it’s fucking terrifying. Undoing, relearning decades and decades worth of habitual thought patterns...Even if the greatest action I can take is to learn to sit comfortably in silence with myself. The self, myself, the scariest frontier. But I’m done looking externally for answers to my issues. I need to befriend myself, to raise the white flag in my heart…

14 October 2017 (27 days alcohol-free)

I want to learn who I am, really, because lately I am so full of confusion. How much of my personality is actually mine, and how much is me acting? Am I really so gregarious as I behave around people? What would happen if I didn’t automatically jump to make sure the other person was as comfortable as possible? What would happen if I focused on my own comfort and let the other person be responsible for theirs? Sounds relaxing, haha. So how do I do that? Can I do this?

I think that when people hear statements like “I was utterly unable to stop” they imagine that I was a person who hid my drinking or drank all day every day or whatever other images we associate with being a “functioning alcoholic.” It wasn’t like that for me. By the time I quit, I was barely drinking. What made me utterly unable to stop until I finally did was that I could not imagine a life for myself without alcohol. I couldn’t imagine socializing without it, unwinding without it, celebrating without it, grieving without it. I still associated drinking with being pleasurable and I couldn’t imagine giving up something that brought me pleasure, no matter that when I really got honest, the pleasure only actually lasted about an hour at best, until the warm punch of the initial buzz wore off and I either continued to chase it with more drinks or went home feeling low-key bummed out, either way waking up the next morning feeling ambivalent and anxious and tired or worse, which is ultimately what I struggled with and is what got me to finally quit—I knew there had to be more to life than just tolerating it.

In the story of my own transformation, like other tremendous changes that occur slowly, slowly, then all at once, quitting drinking wasn’t an option until it was the only option. I could not imagine a life without alcohol, because the stories I’d been told about what it would look like to be booze-free were so limited. Until I discovered a new vision for what was possible, the specter of sobriety loomed like a prison sentence. That story was incomplete, limited by a lack of imagination. After a lifetime spent beholden to a certain story about alcohol, suddenly, by stepping away, my imagination stepped forward.

I drank because it made me “edgy;” I drank to take my edges off. Both sides of the edge became stories I was no longer interested in participating in.

There is a freedom inside the act of transforming something that was once impossible into something possible. A confidence emerges, hones, and strengthens when that impossible thing integrates, and becomes second nature. Faith in ourselves develops as we begin to trust that nature. Then one day, something happens—we are triggered, or a challenge arises, or our backs are up against a wall—and we find ourselves responding in ways that keep us well rather than destroy us. We look around and our lives are unrecognizable. We have been made anew. But we have to be willing to question our stories. We have to be willing to examine and move beyond our own limitations, to actually walk the edge rather than throw ourselves off it or shy away from it completely.

I share the details of my individual story because it’s in my nature to constantly toggle my attention back and forth between the micro and the macro; the individual and the collective; how I might make sense of the grander scheme or current events by filtering them through my personal experience. Collectively, we are living through an opportunity to make the impossible possible. We are questioning our collective stories. We are bringing history long covered up out into the light. We are suspended inside the messiness of death and birth. This is a time of great trouble and unrest but also great imagination—every single one of us is living into what’s possible.

A big part of recovery is taking back agency over our stories, and giving ourselves permission to change the narrative we tell about ourselves—and the world. So many of the conversations I’m hearing in my social circles and among clients is a conversation around sustainability: how do we endure? Recovery is like activism in that we have to find ways to sustain ourselves inside a complicated practice for the rest of our lives. Once we are past the initial tumble in the whitewater of early sobriety, how do we then swim into deeper water? How do we stay?

Recovery and activism go hand in hand for me now, because both call me to do the work of making love visible out in the world. Of breaking down any barriers inside me that keep me from loving myself, and therefore, my neighbor. Of being peace, not just talking about it. Of having difficult conversations. Of reconciliation and forgiveness and accountability and reparations. Of holding a vision for a new world, even in the midst of so much trouble and pain and grief.

Last night I was out to dinner with my favorite person who is also booze-free and in discussing how I wanted to celebrate my soberversary (meditation group! Who even am I), I had a moment of visceral memory of the beginning. I felt the feelings of those first most earliest days, the feelings of those first most earliest years come over me. The glory of that dawn of awakening: I never had to drink again. The sense of wonder-eyed, curious innocence that arose as shame washed off me like cheap hair dye down a drain. The exuberance of so what else is possible as a near permanent effervescence in my chest. The relief at finding a group of people like me, of finding belonging for the first time in my life, of the spontaneous healings that occurred as the result, and continue to, blessedly, these years later.

I am a different person than I was mid-September 2017. This is true in the literal sense, in that a human body’s cells are constantly regenerating. But my soul feels different, too. The wonder has tempered. The magical thinking that lingered some years longer has been replaced with two feet more planted in reality and a more, well, sober view of reality. The excitement is more distant: a day is coming where these yearly updates will be retired. And after making sobriety not only my whole personality, but my whole career for a while, and spending the first handful of years of sobriety being very OUT AND PROUD, unashamed, unabashed, very public with my musings and activism and voice, I am more tempered now. Private. Less obsessed with visibility. More interested in depth and development, which are slower, softer, quieter processes that aren’t served by the urgency of the algorithm.

As we used to say: quitting drinking is what thrust me into creating a life I didn’t want to escape from. It was the prerequisite for everything. And, let me be clear: while certain things are easier—most importantly, the inner dialogue is kinder, and quicker to offer comfort over judgement—life is still what life is. The biggest difference is that I’m available for all of it. I can show up. Every year that passes my capacity to be with what is expands.

The lessons of sobriety have waned; what persists, no matter how much time passes, is gratitude. I feel it now, sitting here in the dark, lit candle calling all muses blinking gently on my altar, little dog softly snoring on the couch, sound of the garbage collectors doing their pre-dawn service just outside—that familiar buzz in my heart, a dampening at the corner of my eyes.

This year’s antilamentation is a declaration of freedom: of regretting nothing, of knowing that everything, everything in my life had to happen exactly the way it happened for to become who I am, who I needed to be; every single experience served up precisely and exquisitely for me, my own cosmic curriculum.

I started this newsletter five months shy of my 3 year soberversary. Here are prior essays:

One Thousand Days Free
Foot off the pedal, burners on low
Four years free
Five years free
Six years free
Seven years free

Self Made updates:

• This fall I have space for five four new coaching engagements. Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes, but it's also a space to explore what it means to be human, and how to become more human at every moment. These are six-month commitments where we meet twice monthly with a co-created, collaborative integral coaching plan for you to follow, live into, and embody. I don’t do hard sells; we start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

Connect with Dani

• I have turned paid subscriptions back on! In addition to essays and first access to events, workshops, retreats, and all the other things I conjure up, I’m excited to share a new monthly offering for paid subscribers: one Friday/month, I’m hosting a Coaching Circle, where you can come with something you’re working with and engage in some spotlight coaching. First circle is THIS Friday, 9/19.
  
  If Self Made is or has been supportive to you, I invite you to subscribe.

  Subscribe now

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and say hi! I *always* love hearing from you.

Friends! Thank you for being a paid subscriber of Self Made. This is my invitation: please join me for our inaugural Community Coaching Circle this Friday, 9/19 at 2pm PST.

These monthly coaching circles serve multiple functions: for you to receive support; for you to offer support to fellow attendees, and to get to know me and this community. I will be …

Read more

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

-- David Wagoner

Good morning, hi, happy Tuesday.

I bet you’ve been wondering where I’ve been. Just kidding ha ha I know you haven't been wondering because I know that the noise out there is just as cacophonous for you as it is for me.

The truth is, I’ve been wondering where I’ve been. These have been a curious past few months, which is a mostly honest if not totally accurate word that doesn’t quite convey the confusion that’s also been present, a sense of having drifted from my center—and recognizing such— but not having the bandwidth to do what I knew it would take to return.

As I muddled my way through this most murky of seasons, the weather was the perfect reflection of my inner state. This summer in San Francisco has been our coldest since 1982 😵‍💫. It got above 70 degrees once in all of July. I’d look out the window and not be able to tell if it was 8am or 11am or 5pm. There was a dislocating quality to it, and I’d move through my days as if floating in suspended animation, doing all I could to trust the forced hibernation even as everything in me longed for bare legs, sun on shoulders, sweat dripping down spine, and spending as much time as possible outside.

The thing about fog is that it clouds your perception of reality. It casts everything in a homogenous hue, stealing color, texture, and richness. It reduces overall visibility. And, it convinces you that isolation and solitude make far more sense than making an effort to connect with and participate in life.

The silver lining is that I’ve been through enough foggy seasons—metaphorically and literally (this is my twenty-third summer in this cold-ass city)—to be able to hold onto a thin (but mighty!) thread of remembrance that when the fog lays itself over me, my job is not to fight it, but to relax into what-is, and to attend to what I can actually attend to, which is rarely—if ever!—what my brain would insist. I know that I can’t think my way into change, and so instead I stay close to skin-muscles-bones: I stay close to my practices, I nourish myself on a physical level, and when the mind starts running, I am reminded by my higher self that the lessons will arrive right when they’re meant to, which they always do.

When I’m in a season of change—when my vision clouds up like a molting snake—the experience is challenging enough without me putting additional pressure on myself to hurry up and transform, already. I know that I have to move at the speed of change, a timeline that isn’t up to me.

If it sounds like I’ve made peace with this! I haven’t. Being in the fog of change, no matter how many times I’ve been there, never gets easier. But if I’ve gleaned any wisdom, it’s knowing that during foggy seasons, my only job is to hold onto that aforementioned thread, because just knowing the thread is there is enough for me to stay the course.

Anyway! I had an experience recently that sliced through the fog and gave me the clarity for which I’ve spent the past three months seeking. This clarity revealed answers to bigger, more existential questions I’ve been sitting with of both the personal and professional variety. More interestingly, it illuminated answers to bigger spiritual inquiries I’ve been holding for, oh, the majority of my life.

Additionally, blessedly, the experience reconnected me to this newsletter project. After writing here weekly for five years, in May and June of this year the writing well was so dry it frightened me. And every time I’d try to push myself to get some words down, even a brief little something to connect with you all, the response from my body was not yet. I had nothing to say, and so I gave myself permission to simply STFU until I did.

And now I have something to say.

Every client shows up to my metaphorical doorstep beholden to stories about who they are and how life is. Think of these stories as lenses through which they see the world: they color everything. These stories impact their self-esteem and self-worth, their access to possibility, the health of their relationships and communities, and their sense of connection to the larger web of life.

One of the benefits of having a coach is that we do not live inside our client’s brains and therefore do not have the same allegiances to their ideas about The Way Things Are. Part of my job is to hold up the mirror of possibility, and to extend a persistent, unwavering invitation into reframing, reshaping, reconsidering, and eventually, being liberated from the tired scripts that keep people stuck, and out into a place of expanded aliveness, agency, meaning, purpose, and ease.

Sometimes clients are aware of their stories, and the reason they’ve come to me is because their intellectual understanding of why they are the way they are hasn’t translated to behavior change or meaningful action toward fulfilling the deeper call of their hearts. These are often people who have spent time in traditional therapy and are longing to move from understanding into action.

Other times, clients have no idea the degree to which their scripts are running their life, and there’s a process of illumination that unfolds over the course of the coaching engagement.

I, of course, have plenty of my own stories.

During this recent Season of Funk, as I started calling it, I realized that I had started to experience myself as narrowed. My interests had narrowed; moving around and being up to something energizing out in the world had narrowed; what I felt access to and available for in my imagination had narrowed; and, most disconcertingly, my connection to creativity, and the mystery and wonder of being a human alive had narrowed. I noticed with great bewilderment that certain scripts I thought I’d overwritten were back with a vengeance: all of my neuroses were just right there.

I asked myself,

What am I to do? Am I to just keep plodding along and checking boxes and staying busy?
—or—
am I to turn and face those mechanisms that are keeping me out of the garden?

Three weeks ago, I attended a workshop through my coaching school. Within 30 minutes of us settling into the room they’d rented on the beautiful (and SUNNY) Dominican University campus and getting started, I felt myself arrive. And it was more than a physical arriving; at the risk of sounding hyperbolic (what else is new) it felt like my soul dropped back into my body after being on the lam since April

here I am here I am here I am here I am here I am here I am here I am here I AM HERE!

The workshop turned out to be 2 1/2 of the best days of my life. Because the teaching was experiential—there was no sitting in front of a whiteboard, passively taking notes—and because we were a group of peers, each devoted to our and each other’s growth—we got to go beyond simply learning concepts and tools, to embodying a different, fresh, new way of being (which, incidentally, is the aim of any Integral coaching engagement).

Ever since, I’ve been walking around, care-bear-staring anyone who even glances in my general direction.

You see, I’d spent the better part of the last three months just swimming in my own significance. I’d been putting so much pressure on myself to be further along than where I was.

And then on day two of the workshop, a lightbulb (bless the lightbulbs!) buzzed on and I realized—and I really got this, not just as a concept, but in my bones—that the stories I drag around are optional.

I can drop them at any time: I can drop them now, I can drop them now, I can drop them now.

〰 The story about there being something uniquely wrong with me? Optional
〰 The story about being “too much?” Optional
〰 The story about being unlucky in love? Optional
〰 The story about being a late bloomer? Optional
〰 The more subterranean stories that keep me in the fog of scarcity, shame, self-doubt, judgment of self and others? Optional, optional, optional

—and so on and so on, I had a somatic experience of just dropping it all.

This isn’t easy. But when I got it—when I experienced myself in that completely free way, and realized that that way of being is available to me now, now, now, now—it felt as simple as taking off a pair of too-tight pants.

Ahhhhhhh.

The experience I had at the workshop was integration. I am less fragmented, more cohered, unburdened by the weight of the stories I’d been carrying aloft, Atlas-like, for most of my life.

This leads me to my update:

One of the revelations of the weekend was an unexpected reimagining of the story I’ve been telling myself about my past. The narratives I’d been dragging around are those of late bloomer, of being lost in the fog of addiction, of self-neglect, so many stories that had me looking at my past through a pretty sorry lens. The reimagining is understanding that everything I did, even the times I went astray, afield, adrift, my pursuits were always those of a seeker. My life has always been a spiritual pursuit of understanding the bigger, more existential why of life.

When this reimagining hit me, it released me from another too-tight article of clothing. What an exuberant relief to recognize the following:

〰 It doesn’t matter what I “do”: it doesn’t matter what job I have, how much money I make, what I wear; it doesn’t matter if I ever become an in-demand coach with high-profile corporate clients and a fancy Rolodex (tell me you all still remember Rolodex).
〰 It doesn’t matter what’s on my resume, it doesn’t matter how productive I am or am not.
〰 It doesn’t matter what boxes I check or don’t check, what milestones I reach or don’t reach.

What matters is waking up.

If this is what my life is for, than every single thing I do—from cleaning my house to answering emails to driving around in my car—is an opportunity to wake up. Instead of just getting through these mundane moments (that, ahem, make up a whole life), I have been delivered into a new practice of chopping wood, carrying water.

Because what am I actually doing here? What else should I be doing with my time? What are the skills that I’m meant to learn, if not the ones that help me free myself from old scripts, old stories, old behaviors, old actions, all that murk that keeps me suspended in fog and perpetuating all I say I want to dismantle, and out of tune with all I might participate in creating? How can I be actively engaged in shaping a new world if I’m still stuck in made-up stories that keep me out of reality and lost in the fog of the mind?

I had multiple experiences in the early 2000’s that made me weary of all things spiritual. Because of those experiences, I let the pendulum swing all the way to the other side: the side of critical thinking, logic, science, evidence. This was an important education, a necessary one that helped me develop myself in ways that have made me more impervious to the influence of gurus, charlatans, hucksters, charisma, and so on. I no longer outsource my own knowledge or discernment, a lesson for which I’m forever grateful.

And! If I know anything about self-development, it's that on one hand, it involves commitment, action, and attention. It requires a dedication to new—and observable—practices in reality. It is more often than not facilitated by routine, structure, and consistency.

But there's also a mysteriousness to it. And to deny the mystery, to deny those ways of knowing that you cannot map or count or quantify, that you certainly can’t see, or even explain half the time, is to discount an incredible opportunity for richness and texture and depth, a greater expression of the multidimensionality of your humanity, and access to an intelligence that doesn’t exclude the mind but encompasses a beyond you can hardly grok when you walk around with your brain as the dominant filter for your experience.

What SLICED through the fog this summer is the skin-muscles-bones clarity that the pendulum between SCIENCE and SPIRIT that shivers in the space just behind my sternum has found it’s calmer center. The update is that I am no longer dancing around the claim that my life is for waking up, that this is what I’m up to, both personally and professionally.

Part of why I’ve held back from sharing my devotion is for fear of being judged. So here’s the caveat:

Just in case that part of your brain that’s wired to categorize things in black/white, either/or is FLASHING FLASHING

but what about all the injustice and death and degradation happening in the world!

—I’m not suggesting that you ignore what’s happening in reality while you pursue inner awakening. Instead, and as always, what I *am* suggesting is that you plant yourself firmly in the messy middle between these two extremes, that you stay engaged in the deeper work of the soul and spirit—not when you have time for it, not when things settle down and stabilize (that isn’t happening in our lifetimes). But now.

Because what is the question of our times, if not a spiritual one?

If you want there to be a continued evolution beyond the structures in collapse—and of you want a chance at participating in the more conscious reordering that’s on it’s way; if you want us to get better as a species, and for the collective to be less dominated by our shittiest, most basest instincts; if you want to break free of the patterns that keep you stuck on a hamster wheel of someone else’s design, you have to wake up.

You have to wake up.

You cannot have a new world out there if you do not create a new world right here. The individual and the collective are inextricably linked and utterly interdependent on each other—and you have so much more of a say in the unfolding than you can imagine.

Said another way: if it’s true that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, than it follows that for all the breakdown, collapse, and death the collective is currently experiencing, the opposite is also true. When you attend to your inner work, you stay attuned to this opposite—which is to say, all that is being revealed, emerging, and being born.

Both paths must be walked simultaneously—there's no either/or here, no choosing between inner work and outer engagement. They must exist and express themselves at the same time.

My newsletter reemergence is a declaration:

I place myself and my work at the interplay between these two poles, that when acted upon in tandem create what constitutes the great spiritual work of our times, which is the evolution of human consciousness, and our active participation in ushering in the new world.

I am devoted to this within my own body, my own knowing, my own heart, and I am devoted to this alongside all of you.

I am here holding a mirror, and I invite you to come take a look.

So this is my late summer update. Here I am, laying down all the things that I’ve learned about marketing a business, and staying active on social media, and networking, and relationship building, and having a content calendar, and—at least for this moment—I stand before you as a person who is up to something bigger.

Here I am, throwing my voice out into the ether, hoping that it lands on one of you, and that as a result you feel moved to turn and face the things that you uniquely need to face in order to be free, and to feel yourself deeply engaged in the reality of your life, and not some foggy proxy reality.

Self Made updates:

• When I let you know that this fall I have space for five new coaching engagements, consider everything I wrote as an introduction to what I'm inviting you into. Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes, but it's also a space to explore what it means to be human, and how to become more human at every moment. These are six-month commitments where we meet twice monthly with a co-created, collaborative integral coaching plan for you to follow, live into, and embody. I don’t do hard sells; we start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

  Connect with Dani

• I am turning paid subscriptions back on! In addition to essays and first access to events, workshops, retreats, and all the other things I conjure up, I’m excited to share a new monthly offering for paid subscribers: one Friday/month, I’m hosting a Coaching Circle, where you can come with something you’re working with and engage in some spotlight coaching.
  
  If Self Made is or has been supportive to you, I invite you to subscribe.

  Subscribe now

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and say hi! I *always* love hearing from you.

Learn more and register

Registrations are rolling in for Self Made’s second annual SUMMER CAMP, a five week (we start 7/14) hybrid summer course that combines asynchronous lessons and community, 1:1 coaching, and a choose your own adventure experiment.

This gently structured program will support you in slowing down and connecting inward so you can head into fall feeling confident in your ability to ADAPT, CREATE, AND INNOVATE, and be more strategic with your energy, attention, and focus.

The Details

Each week will begin with a video lesson. Each lesson will have an associated practice or tool, plus a guided visualization, meditation, or breath exercise. In addition, you will choose one path of focus - you get to choose your own adventure.

Paths include:
🌻 5 weeks of daily meditation or mindfulness practice
🌻 5 weeks of NO SOCIAL MEDIA
🌻 5 weeks of creative practice
🌻 5 weeks of…??? (sobriety? spending time in the garden? moving your body every day? You get to choose.

🌀 You will stay connected asynchronously via Slack as your schedule suits you.
🌀 You’ll get two 1:1 coaching sessions with me on the topic(s) currently closest to your heart.
🌀 There will be multiple ways to connect live throughout the five weeks if you so desire.

Register

Click the button for additional details and don’t hesitate to reply to this email if you have any questions.

Today’s inspiration:

“Heaven is living in your hopes and Hell is living in your fears.”

Bonanza Jellybean
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - Tom Robbins

I spent my junior year of college in Granada, Spain. This was 2005, and though Craigslist was a robust entity back in the states, in southern Spain the way you found an apartment was by wandering around the city and ripping phone numbers off those ad posters with people’s contact information fanning out like teeth across the bottom. We were encouraged to not live with other Americans, and I shared a piso with a Spanish woman from Granada and another exchange student from Naples. My room overlooked the same courtyard as another student’s who would become one of my closest friends (to this day!), and when our cheap phones ran out of minutes we would whistle across the courtyard to each other, make plans from our windows, wander about the tiny city ordering too many cafés or tubos of cheap beer with a (free! tapas are free in Granada!) tapa, a generous custom that felt like a miracle every time, even thirteen years later when I returned for a quick visit as a much older and utterly sober thirty-five year old.

In Spain, afternoons were for siesta. Everything except some cafés and restaurants closed for three full hours in the afternoon, and so did the university: I had classes in the morning and evening, and that long-ass break smack dab in the center. What would I do with my free time?

At first I did my best to cram in as much sightseeing as I could. Sometimes this meant dodging the dry southern Spanish heat of of late-summer-early-fall by catching my breath in the cool pews of dark cathedrals. Other times it was climbing up to the Mirador de San Nicolas, staring at the Alhambra and eating gelato while locals played flamenco and tourists fumbled over castanets. More often than not it meant walking, sweating, stuffing my face with overripe figs, feeling even more out of place than I already did by dint of being the only weirdo out on the street.

After some weeks of this, I gave over. I’d come home to my apartment, eat, and lay around. Sometimes I’d do homework. Sometimes I’d watch episodes of Shin-Chan, dubbed in Spanish from Japanese. Sometimes I’d collage, or paint, something I hadn’t had time for in years.

My inner rhythm slowed. I began to unwind.

This was the pre-smart-phone era, and also the year I made a Facebook account, which at the time still looked like this:

Years later I spent another year abroad, this time in the mountains of Northern Thailand, and my rhythm slowed again. Each time I returned to San Francisco after an extended trip away, I vowed to hold onto this sense of slowness. I committed to continuing on in my American city life in a way that honored what had come to be one of my deepest values: simplicity. And I don’t mean this in the minimalist sense, that aesthetic that’s become ubiquitous in all of our internet feeds (though I do own very few things); more, it’s a choice to live slow, to savor my days, to be present with myself and the people in my orbit, to work hard, but not too much, and ultimately, to take a stand against that thing in our culture that has us feel like something is deeply wrong when we have a few hours of downtime.

You know what is the opposite of these values? Scrolling away my time, which is to say, my life, on social media.

Mine is the last generation that experienced a computer-free childhood. As an elder millennial—the generation which, you might be surprised to learn, spans the years 1981-1996—nobody I knew had a computer in their house until junior high. Computers were already around, however: I remember having computer lab a few times per week in grade school, where we’d clack away at the keys, learning to type, finishing out the hour with a few trips down The Oregon Trail. I remember getting an at-home computer in eighth or ninth grade, which would have been 1998 or 1999, and playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? setting up my email account (lovelydani@hotmail.com, omg), and typing up essays for my English classes. I remember the dial-up modem—such a specific noise (close your eyes and listen, I know you hear it too)— the sound an electronic proxy of nails-on-a-chalkboard. Occasionally I dipped my toe into message boards and chat rooms, but entertainment online back then was not what it is now and I’d quickly grow bored, or be distracted by someone hitting me up on my pager (RIP to all the pagers).

I finally got an iPhone in 2012, a later adopter not so much by choice but because those were the broke-ass years, the $500/month rent years, the living off beans, tacos and cheap booze years, and for a long time I could not justify spending my pennies on a pocket-sized computer (I held onto that Nokia 3310 as long as possible, and had a couple of unmemorable flip phones after it’s demise). Anyway, I finally got one. I remember sitting at Shotwells with Dave, and downloading my very first app: Instagram. I am nostalgic for the early days of Instagram, before the onslaught of ads, before everyone became a brand, when it was still inane and innocent and we thought those sepia filters made us artists (RIP to the early days of social media, back when it still felt friendly and uncomplicated).

I know I’m not alone in how much I struggle with social media. I revisit the past to shine light on how much hanging out online has changed, and to remember that it didn’t always feel so confusing. “Social media habits” didn’t used to be a concern. Now, it’s so bad that even the phones themselves include software to help you control yourself (which I don’t even bother with because I just…override them).

Sometimes, I try to remember how I spent my time before I carried the whole world in my purse. As a kid, as a teenager, what did I do to pass the time? College was the first time many of us had our own computers, but aside from homework and downloading music from Limewire, the computer just kind of sat there, a hulking, whirring backdrop to a life spent—doing what? I want to reconnect to these things so that I might return to them now. I weary of how much of my life I funnel into a screen.

I fantasize about what it would be like for it all—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok—to just disappear. I imagine a return to a time that in my memory is far simpler, even as I acknowledge that comparing the desires—not to mention responsibilities—of the woman I am now to the girl I was at 10 or 12, while a fun little thought experiment, is ultimately a false equivalency. I know that to call for abandoning all social media that would be as absurd as wishing we’d all throw our TV’s out the window. Mostly, all of this remembering is just another doorway into the ongoing inner-conundrum I am never not in conversation with, which is to say, a persistent longing for all that would open back up: Attention. Time. Dignity. Entire relationships. Less stress and urgency. Peace of mind (can you imagine).

As someone who is building a business, I am in a conversation with social media always. I want it to be this easy breezy thing where I can just post and not get so hung up about everything but I can’t, and I’m tired of trying to push through this. None of it is “easy breezy.” Maybe it started that way. But it’s morphed, not unlike how a certain substance was fun and easy breezy and worked and made things better, until it absolutely didn’t and I realized how much it was detracting (murdering) rather than adding to my life.

At least once per year, I hit saturation. On Instagram, I know I’m hitting saturation when the echo chamber starts to rankle: Everyone I follow has similar beliefs to me which means I’m getting an inaccurate sense of reality; our similarities mean the same memes get reposted over and over; I get to the end of my feed and again and it’s at the end of the feed where shit gets particularly weird. I deactivated my Facebook account two years ago, which I haven’t missed. Even Substack1, where I’ve been writing for five years, feels echo-chambery, in-crowdy these days: suddenly the people I subscribe to are reposting each others’ work over and over and I’m sitting here wondering about all the ideas and perspectives I’m missing because I do that human thing where I’m seeking out other people just like me and therefore if I'm not careful it's very easy for my sense of reality to become limited at best, skewed at worst.

The days of innocuous photo sharing and hitting thumbs-up button on your pal’s dumb status update are no more. Every time I come up for air after losing myself in the scroll, I feel worse. Worse about myself, my days, how I’m living. Worse toward my fellow humans. Worse about the state of the world. I notice that my memory feels more shot than usual (hello, midlife).

I’m in the conversation of…what if. What if I let it go? What if I trust that I can still build things without it? What if this is the next stage of the Self Made experiment—the experiment that is both my business, and my life—the one where I actually practice what I preach, which is that I know what I need better than anyone else?

Something else happened last week that solidified my resolve to take (yet another) social media break.

I’ve been helping a friend with a project, which included getting some art supplies delivered to a venue in a different state. So I called up the nearby independent art supply store, and had truly the loveliest exchange with one of their staff, who helped me find the somewhat difficult to source material and was able to organize delivery from another staff member, saving me from finding an external courier. This involved multiple phone conversations over three days, and I was so grateful for the above-and-beyond service. And it just made me think—I have no idea the political beliefs of the woman I spoke to. But based on the geographic location, there’s a decent chance her beliefs, her world view, are night-and-day to mine. And yet. We had this sweet exchange. And it left me with such a soft, warm feeling. And yeah, I know there are legitimately shitty people out in the world, lurking about. But I also know that most people are doing their best to not be shitty. And when I spend too much time on social media, I forget that. The world goes binary, and if I’ve learned anything in my 40 years on the planet, it’s that when I start seeing things in black and white terms, it’s a signal to me that I’ve disconnected from reality.

Social media exists in reality. But it is not the thing itself.

As I look around at what’s happening, um, everywhere, it seems important to stand in reality, to the best of my ability. It seems important to look for pockets of connection and opportunities for relationship building. It seems important to behave as if it’s possible that we can treat each other with positive regard, because it is.

I believe that there’s a whole world of connection and depth and opportunity and collaboration and innovation abounding outside of my screen. I’m going to spend this next quarter experimenting with that (yes, I’ll be participating in Summer Camp right along with everyone who signs up).

Read more and register for Summer Camp here.

I’ve always been a seeker. But it’s taken me many many years to understand that what I was seeking was not some great supernova of insight that would finally reveal to me my purpose and place in the world, but something far more mundane and quotidian. What I was seeking, what I sought to recreate after long periods of time away from home, and what I am infinitely protective of now, was/is a basic sense of satisfaction. Of wanting what I already have. Of going to bed at night with an easy stomach and a quiet heart. Of redirecting my attention when I get caught in the swirl of comparison. Of trusting that the way I do things is the way I do things.

Away from my screen, I am agog at the wonder of small things. The way the neighbors on my block look out for each other, and even Tater (Rosa across the street regularly leaves treats and toys under my front gate for the little chompers). How the scrub jays screech and wail, the squirrels scamper about with their cheeks popped full of acorns, the spiders slink through still open windows and into the corners of my bedroom in their familiar early summer arrival. Then there’s the stop-you-in-your-tracks-abundance of blossoms fireworking off the magnolia tree, my inability to not go out of my way to cross the street and stick my nose in every last one.

What I’m saying is: Time is precious. I’m saying, despite everything, that I am still in love with the world. I’m saying, also, is I can hardly believe what’s arising in the giving over — space! wildness! joy! connection! presence! I’m saying that most people are more good than not. I’m saying that we have a say in this. Still. I’m saying it’s not too late. We have a say in shaping what’s happening, what will arise out of the messiness of these times. But not if we’re disconnected from reality.

If you will be choosing this as your adventure, here are my suggestions:

• DELETE YOUR ACCOUNTS for five weeks. Or just sign out of them

• If you’re like me, and the temptation to “just check in real quick” is too big, you might have a trusted person change your passwords (I had my bestie change my passwords to remove all temptation)

• This is a great option if you know you’ve hit media saturation, and, despite your best attempts, you’re having a very challenging time putting down the device and being out in real life.

• There will be a dedicated Slack channel where you can hold yourself accountable, give and receive support, and share resources/ideas/suggestions/pitfalls/progress

Sign up!

SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, Integral coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1. Check out the “About” page for more information about our online community and click any of the “Subscribe Now” buttons to become a subscriber👇🏽

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You can also support this work by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others, and letting me know how this newsletter helps you. 

Thank you.

Today’s inspiration:

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

~Albert Camus

Thank you to everyone who’s signed up for Self Made’s second annual SUMMER CAMP, a five week hybrid summer course that combines asynchronous lessons and community, 1:1 coaching, and a choose your own adventure experiment.

SUMMER CAMP IS FOR YOU IF~

🌀 You're ready to loosen the grip of your inner critic so you can stop getting in your own way when it comes to pursuing the deeper longings of your heart
🌀 You want to define success on your own terms rather than through external validation or capitalist metrics
🌀 You long to unleash a bolder, more creative, rebellious side of you—but you are stuck on where/how to start
🌀 You sort of kind of understand what it means to trust the unfolding of your life, but you could use some support actually doing so
🌀 You're caught in cycles of overthinking and control, wanting instead to trust divine timing and co-create with reality
🌀 You are curious about your curriculum and having conversations with other like-minded individuals who are also curious
🌀 The thought of a flexibly structured “choose your own adventure” summer camp experiment sounds fun and admittedly haven’t had much of that in a while

Get the details and register

Keep scrolling to read the inspiration for ~SUMMER CAMP~

One of the primary conversations I have with people is how much time they spend time traveling. And though I wish I were referring to spaceships, blackholes, wormholes, and time machines, alas, it’s nowhere near that exciting.

“Time traveling” is what I call it when people spend large amounts of time either ruminating on the past, or future tripping. They are either lost in elaborate do-over fantasies, or they’re magically thinking light years ahead. They spend so much time time traveling, they get confused. They begin to mistake time traveling for reality. They are so deep in their own minds, they forget about bare feet on dirt, warm sun on skin, cool breeze lifting hair off a salty neck, stone fruit and summer squash sending taste buds to Saturn, spontaneous human connection, boredom, downtime, the languid quality of a summer afternoon. They are time traveling, which means they are missing this moment, which is to say, they are missing their life.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how so much of the past bunch of years have been about getting through. Getting through the ups-and-downs of an all-over-the-place economy. Getting through a certain presidency. Getting through a pandemic. Getting through endless wars, endless national and global instability. Getting through climate chaos.

I had a moment recently where I thought,

if a bolt of lighting were to smite me down right this second,
I would be so disappointed.

I’d be disappointed because I don’t want to die feeling disconnected from the miracle of it all. I don’t want to die feeling like most of my efforts were spent either getting through my life, or careening around past and present on a time machine of my own making (which is to say, one I could kick to the curb any time I want).

Getting through is a natural, common-sense, understandable response to the ugliness, trouble, chaos, and uncertainty of the world. I just wonder—and worry—what if there isn’t somewhere to get through to? What if this is it? If this *is* it, how do I want to be? How do I want to feel? What do I want to devote myself to—what would I be a disciple of? What would be required to stay in conversation with my higher self, my creative spark, the fullness of an uncluttered attention span?

Summer Camp seeks to experiment—in community—with having a go at some of these answers.

Learn more + register

The Details

Each week will kick-off with a video lesson (you can find information about the lessons here). Each lesson will have an associated practice or tool, plus a guided visualization, meditation, or breath exercise.

In addition to the above, you will choose one path of focus - you get to choose your own adventure.

Paths include:
🪐 5 weeks of daily meditation or mindfulness practice
🪐 5 weeks of NO SOCIAL MEDIA
🪐 5 weeks of creative practice
🪐 5 weeks of…??? (sobriety? spending time in the garden? moving your body every day? You get to choose.

🌻 You will stay connected asynchronously via Slack as your schedule suits you.
🌻 You’ll get two 1:1 coaching sessions with Dani on the topic(s) currently closest to your heart.
🌻There will be multiple ways to connect live throughout the five weeks if you so desire.

$333!!!

Yes yes sign me up

❤️‍🔥 Listening to Ram Dass as I traipse through the neighborhood with the Tater;
showing up sweaty and stressed to an in-person meditation group after hustling across town to make it on time and immediately remembering the sweetness of sitting with other humans;
❤️‍🔥 head thrown back in the biggest laugh I’ve had in weeks at dinner with two best friends;
❤️‍🔥 last minute burritos with visiting family whose flights got delayed;
splayed out on the gym floor, salty and spent after a workout;
❤️‍🔥 the open space of curiosity and possibility, wonder and imagination that arises with a client;
❤️‍🔥 lavender spears in the neighbors yard that demand a squeeze and sniff;
❤️‍🔥 sharing a smile with a stranger;
❤️‍🔥 chit chat in the line for coffee…

These moments of presence are so fleeting. But they matter. Because these are the moments that place us in reality, that have us alive and awake to life. And this is what Summer Camp seeks to explore—our aliveness and presence, our focus, our creative ✨spark✨.

This summer, let us fortify the quality of presence not so we can hurry up and know, but so that we might bask in the process. Let us be free from our obsessions with figuring out. Let us loosen our jaws, smooth out our foreheads, relax our shoulders. Let us unspool from the contortions of our pasts. Let us imagine into what it might be like on the other side of control, that place where we take care of ourselves and each other, where we are forgiven, where joy and delight are just as present as everything else—

what a spectacle, so unexpected

—and we are radiant and at ease, more wild than ever, spines straight, skin soft, and oh, so this is it, this is what it looks like, this is everything we ever wanted.

Learn more + sign up

Sign up. Let’s play!

Friendliest of reminders that you are always invited to grab an hour of my time.

Schedule a conversation with Dani

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session. Let’s talk!

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and introduce yourself! I *always* love hearing from you.

My friend Toland Lawrence interviewed me recently on their podcast, After the Tower. Here’s a quick description: “In the tarot, the tower card represents those moments when everything suddenly falls apart and the foundations we had relied on crumble. This podcast is a space to talk about these transformative moments that have happened in our lives and how we found our way through to the other side.”

The Tower moment I spoke about was my choice to stop drinking in 2017. As I heard myself speak with the ease of authority, I kept thinking about how a human body regenerates itself every seven years. I am a different person now and this interview made me present to how deeply I’ve integrated this aspect of my experience.

🎧 Listen on Apple podcasts here.
🎧 Listen on Spotify here.

Would love to hear your thoughts and impressions!

Now onto this week’s essay, where I reflect on the lessons of May’s Trust Your Life coaching project—>

This week’s inspiration:

“Over and over again I have to remind myself that with trust comes more ease, more joy, less mental obsession, less energy leaks etc. And yet, I still spend a lot of time in the cycle of overthinking, trying to control, and so on.

I want to trust right timing, so I can spend more energy working WITH the universe to co-create, rather than cycling through old patterns of fear or anxiety about the WHEN and HOW.

I want to trust the universe to take care of the WHEN and HOW and do my part of staying focused on the WHAT and WHY.

I want to strike a balance of effort and ease, so I can find more flow in the surrender.”

-Trust Your Life coaching project participant

It’s been a month since Self Made last landed in your inbox.

May was busy: in addition to the normal stuff-of-life and business, I also had coaching sessions with the twenty-one of you who participated in May’s “Trust Your Life” coaching project. I spoke with people from all over the United States, plus international participants from Mauritius, Delhi, and the UK, respectively.

These conversations held a sacredness for me because self-trust has been the core focus of my own life since 2020. At the time, I was 3 years sober from alcohol, and while my behavior had changed considerably—I no longer feared what I might do, or not do—the brain doesn’t give up its obsessions easily, and all the mental energy that had been channeled into thinking about drinking needed a place to go.

The part of me that was so accustomed to life feeling like a low-grade constant struggle found a new focus: all I had to do was figure out how to control the present and predict the future, and nothing bad would ever happen to me again and I’d arrive at a place where life finally felt permanently peaceful and easeful.

Seeing it spelled out, it seems silly. But it’s not like I was consciously choosing to divert all that energy into another unattainable pursuit. All I knew was that something still felt off: I had finally freed myself from the Very Hard Thing—which was a Very Big Deal and a prerequisite for all that was yet to come. But what I couldn’t shake was the confusion over why that massive shift hadn’t immediately resolved all my issues. There were still mechanisms at play within my system, soul, and psyche that had me interacting with life as a punitive antagonist rather than a trustworthy partner.

In the absence of an active practice of trust, I’d simply traded trickster alcohol for the beast of perfectionism. BLESSEDLY, thanks to an illuminating shower moment (that I’ve written about ad nauseum), my awareness cracked open, ringing a bell in my brain rang that hasn’t stopped ringing since.

Thus began the tediously slow work of untangling the more subterranean inner workings of my experience from the funk of my subconscious. As I became more internally steady, the true transformation I sought became available: I could finally stop jumping through all the hoops to avoid what would actually make a difference, which was of course turning and facing those outdated mechanisms that my system was terrifically adept at keeping me on the run from. Said another way: I had resolved the symptom (alcohol); now I could get to the root cause.

The root cause was, ultimately, a profound disconnection from my core, essential self. In the void of this disconnection, the demands of the inner critic dominated, demands that only served to keep me mired in my conditioning and unable to experience the deeper longings of my heart. It wasn’t until I found a guide who helped shepherd me into the garden of self-trust that I developed the tools to put the critic in it’s proper place and begin a practice of receiving rather than controlling my life.

Even if your struggle isn’t related to a substance, I know you relate to at least some aspects of my story—A. because, you’re human, and B. because I spoke to twenty-one of you last month about self-trust, which gave me a decent glimpse into a sample size of what’s happening in the collective. May’s coaching project revealed that many of you are feeling cut off from a sense of aliveness, or are confused as to why you keep pouring your precious time and energy into perpetuating patterns that your logical mind knows aren’t helping but that you can’t seem to stop, or you’re still allowing your mental and emotional well-being to be contingent on external factors instead of cultivating it from within.

Here are a few of the themes that emerged:

The Gap Between Knowing and Trusting: Almost all of you expressed some version of "I know I have the answers inside me, but..." There was a consistent pattern of cognitive dominance—you’re great at intellectualizing the concept of self-trust; it’s in practice where you’re stuck. Every single one of your heads turned into affirmative bobbleheads when I mentioned balancing the wisdom of the intellect with that of the heart and body; every single one of you longs to connect to a visceral, felt-sense of trust instead of only grinding away at thinking about it.

The Grip of the Inner Critic: While everyone’s inner critic has its own unique flavor of expression (imposter syndrome; undermining confidence; keeping you caught in a cycle of fear over creativity and imagination), all of you identified a harsh inner voice as a primary obstacle to self-trust.

People-Pleasing and Self-Censorship: Many of you spoke of a disconnection from what you actually want because you’re so accustomed to prioritizing others' needs and comfort over your own.

The Hidden, Bolder Self: Several of you referenced a rebellious, creative, or bolder version that wants to emerge, but that actually expressing this feels too unsafe or risky. There's fear about the vulnerability required for you to stop playing small.

Success Redefinition: Many of you spoke of having achieved external markers of success while feeling internally unstable or unfulfilled—and wanting to create new definitions of what success means.

If you recognize yourself in these patterns, hello, hi, welcome to being human.

Self-development starts when you shine the light of awareness on your patterns. Just like self-compassion, self-trust is a practice, not something you arrive at. You don’t check “trust life” off a list. You cultivate it as a capacity over time, and your experience of it only deepens over time.

Based on five years of inquiry and experimentation, I believe it to have two definitions:

SELF-TRUST

1. Knowing that I have everything I need to meet the moment—no matter the moment, and:

2. Knowing that life is unfolding exactly as it’s meant to for me to become the person I’m meant to become and learn all the lessons I’m meant to learn.

The explicitness of a definition is helpful to me, because as long as I’m not experiencing the above more often than not (as many of you have heard me say: we are going for consistency over perfection), I know more deconditioning is required. Meaning: I know there are still distances left for me to traverse between head, heart, body, and ultimately, spirit.

Developing self-trust is a process of integration. As you became less fractured and more whole, you gain access to a fresh experience of yourself and life. And because this is a practice and not a destination, you get to start experiencing these things immediately. Even when you fall short of your expectations, even when you backslide or fail.

A practice of self-trust starts has to start within but the results give us the tools to be with our swiftly tilting reality as it is. What you gain through this process are the precise skills required to meet this current moment. Because a practice of self-trust has you interacting with reality as it is, instead of interacting with it based on the interpretations of reality the mind is feeding you. In reality, you are not time traveling to the future or the past. You are adaptable, innovative, agile, creative, and FORTIFIED—and these are the most important qualities the collective needs to raise consciousness and move into a future that is free of the outdated mechanisms we see on full display.

IF YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR!

First of all: thank you.

Second of all: if you’re curious about exploring these themes in a gently structured way with other aspiring punk-asses, Self Made’s second annual SUMMER CAMP begins July 14th.

Summer Camp is a five-week hybrid course and community for reducing the grip of the inner critic and increasing your ability to trust yourself to meet the moment - no matter the moment.

🌻 Practical weekly lessons
🌻 Live calls + asynchronous community
🌻 Two 1:1 coaching calls with yours truly
🌻 Multiple paths to “choose your own adventure”

The greatest inhibitor to self-trust is the inner critic so SELF TRUST SUMMER is all about getting unhooked from its grip and unleashing your inner champion.

I’m excited to adventure with you.

Get all the details and register here.

Or if you already know you’re a YES you can sign up—>

Sign Up For Summer Camp

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and introduce yourself! I *always* love hearing from you.

Calls continue for the Trust Your Life Coaching Project where, from May 1-31, I am gifting 20 coaching calls over 31 days.

*If you didn’t have a chance to register and the terms of the coaching project speak to you, reach out and I’ll get you on the calendar*

This week’s inspiration:

“Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure… and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”

Maya Angelou

How many of you can relate: you’re going through a period of transition—say,

a career change,
or a big move,
becoming a parent;
maybe you’re dealing with the aftermath of a breakup,
midlife!
or you got fired from your job in the middle of a recession,
or you’ve just lost someone or some creature you love;
perhaps you’re simply doing your best to exist amidst a greater backdrop of global and political insecurity, the noise and thrum from which increasingly colors every realm of your life.

The in-between space of transition is in and of itself complicated enough, but there’s your brain, ever eager to demand the most impossible thing: certainty.

You can’t help yourself: you go into project manager mode. Your vision narrows. Instead of being curious and open to the vast array of possibilities available at any given moment, you lose perspective.

In these moments, the last thing on your mind is how you might partner with the forces of change. You act quite the opposite; in order to be OK, you need to manage change and keep it under control every anxiety-ridden step of the way.

When chaos darkens your doorway and is sucking all the air out of the room, the idea of willfully softening and opening yourself up to it feels like going against basic human instinct. Anytime you experience chaos, your programming urges you to pull the fire alarm—to reassert control and prevent any additional breakdowns. Think about it: one of the most intense things a person can say to another is “you’re out of control.” But by relaxing control in the exact moment it seems most necessary, and seeing what might be possible beyond what you expect, or are most afraid will happen if you soften, you learn to trust the unfolding of your life. You can receive your life as it is, instead of wasting time trying to predict the future.

As you get more practiced at trusting the ebb and flow of chaos and order, you can pay more attention to developing strength of direction and purpose. This vision keeps you on track, no matter what swirls about you. You learn to move and bend with the forces of change, instead of getting stuck in the illusion that if only you maintained total control, bad things would never happen.

Rather than being hooked in a cycle of unrealistic expectations of perfect outcomes and subsequent disappointment when you are in transition, stress, or upset, you are far better served by imagining and creating multiple paths forward. You can free yourself from the restraints of past events, experiences, and behaviors, and embrace hope and possibility.

You can widen the aperture of your potential.

Befriending chaos is a way of interacting with life as a collaborative partner.

This partner “insists that you put yourself in motion, that you learn to live with instability, chaos, change, and surprise…to move in harmony with life rather than to resist it.” (Margaret Wheatley).

It reminds you that chaos and order are not opposites; indeed, they are intrinsic to each other.

At tomorrow’s workshop, I’ll teach how the principles of chaos theory provides a model for change and transition. Specifically, you’ll learn SEVEN principles you can start experimenting with and that will hopefully start to shape your current experience in fresher, more generative directions. (in case it’s not obvious: these are not “one-and-done” type activities but rather skills and practices and we cultivate over an entire lifetime).

🌀 Details below. Mark your calendars, register, and see you soon 🌀

WHAT: Learn about Chaos Theory and its practical application for building personal and collective resilience through uncertainty.

You will consider how disorder, unpredictability, and lack of control are natural parts of change and growth, and discover a model through which you can reconstruct the default narratives you have about yourself and the world.

You'll leave the workshop with a concrete framework you can apply toward imagining, creating, and living a new future beyond the limitations in possibility insisted upon by the culture-writ-large.

COST: FREE

The workshop is 75 minutes plus a Q+A/conversation that will go fifteen minutes or as long as there are questions/comments.

*There will be a recording so please register even if you can't make it live <3

Sign up for free here

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and introduce yourself! I *always* love hearing from you.

Thank you to everyone who registered for the Trust Your Life Coaching Project where, from May 1-31, I am gifting 20 coaching calls over 31 days.

Calls began this week <3 I’ve been writing on Substack weekly since April 2020, and it’s a total dream to chat with you and see your faces and hear what’s on your hearts and minds.

*If you didn’t have a chance to register and the terms of the coaching project speak to you, reach out and I’ll get you on the calendar*

Read on to learn more and register for a *free virtual workshop* I'm teaching next Wednesday

This week’s inspiration:

I want to trust in the universe so much that I give up playing God. I want to stop struggling to hold things together. I want to experience such security that the concept of “allowing” —trusting that the appropriate forms will emerge—ceases to be scary. I want to surrender my fear of the universe and join with everyone I know in an organization that opens willingly to its environment, participating gracefully in the unfolding dance of order.”

―Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time you know I have somewhat of an obsession with the why behind human behavior and how so many of the ways we tend to default operate keep us from living lives in which we feel baseline good about who we are and how we’re living.

This obsession evolved into an interest in chaos theory. This was the result of a pattern I noticed my first year of coaching. At the time, I was working full-time as a recovery coach, working for a now dead organization, that, prior to its implosion, had delivered me to my own recovery. I worked with hundreds of clients during my tenure, some for as briefly as four weeks, others for many months, and others still who continue their work with me to this day. For most, if not all of them, I was often the first and sometimes the only person they’d ever opened up to about the way they were struggling. Meeting someone in their moment deepest struggle is sacred. It’s a gift I take seriously, because it’s the moment around which so much change can begin to unfold, spiral, emerge.

To say I was—am—invested is a gigantic understatement.

The means by which a person enters recovery (or whatever word you prefer—I’m attached to plenty of things, but labels aren’t one of them) are as unique as they are. But the methods by which they stabilize and begin to recover are pretty predictable.

As my coaching experience deepened, certain patterns emerged. There were specific boxes that when checked would more often than not lead to some fresh successes:

• Creating a toolkit.

• Learning to “force the pause,” and “play the tape forward.”

• Finding community, either in real life or virtually—even one trustworthy person could be more than enough.

• Experimenting with different strategies to address stress and discomfort.

• Making space to listen to one’s inner self, and then getting curious about the voices and stories rattling around inside.

• Drinking lots of water, getting in some consistent movement, improving sleep quality.

• Viewing slips and stumbles as opportunities for reflection and learning, rather than another reason to self-flagellate.

• Enacting boundaries where helpful.

You can see how these things would start to move a person in a more helpful direction.

But there was one pattern that stood out for its strangeness and unpredictability.

When people got to what was ultimately the tail-end of their drinking—which is to say, those last weeks or months, or sometimes years, before they were finally done—their behavior would often get a little bizarre.

➡️ They might have racked up dozens of days of abstinence, only to be waylaid by something small they’d been navigating up to then with grace and aplomb.

➡️ Or, the voice inside their head that urged them to drink suddenly reached a fever pitch after several days or weeks of quiet.

➡️ Or, on the everyday drive home from work, they might find themselves in the parking lot of the familiar liquor store, having no recollection of how they even wound up there.

Bizarre. Sideways.

Chaotic.

I noticed this phenomenon because I had experienced it myself. What I describe above is my story. Discovering that it wasn’t unique to me, and that not only was it not unique to me, but that it actually seemed to be a feature of change, not a bug, fascinated me to no end. It still does, hence my continued forays down multiple rabbit holes.

So I set out to answer some questions: why did this happen? And not just why, but what? What was this about, really?

If only I’d kept track of some of those early Google search terms, but they were probably something like “chaos and recovery” or, “chaos and addiction” or some such. None of the results moved the needle on my understanding; mostly, it was just confirmation of what I already knew, which was that….addiction and recovery can be chaotic.

Um, DUH, Google.

I wanted to understand why.

Since the word “chaos” was in “chaos theory,” I forayed in that direction. I’m forever happy I did, because what I learned gave me a framework for not only deepening my understanding of how addiction and recovery function, but also, for how life functions. It’s also shaped my worldview and my experience of being human, which in turn has shaped how I coach.

Incidentally! I will be teaching this framework at my FREE workshop on May 14th, 2025: Chaos Is A Friend Of Mine, and you’re invited to register.

Addiction is an inherently chaotic system. What I’ve learned is that so is life.

Life is fundamentally unpredictable, unstable, and chaotic. And instead of moving with life as life is, what do we do? We fight to control, manage, predict. My struggle with substance was the result of a failed effort to control how my life felt. It was a symptom, a response to feeling utterly out of control.

It just so happens that my method for addressing this lack of control still has stigma attached to it. But there are plenty of other more culturally smiled upon ways of trying to manage chaos. You know the ones: I’m talking overwork, perfectionism, busy-ness. “Being productive.” Ay, I feel nauseous just typing all that out.

What I know to be true (and the inspiration for next week’s free workshop you’re invited to):

The moment I began to be in relationship with chaos, instead of constantly trying to manage and control it, was the same moment I began to be in relationship to my *actual* life, rather than the *idea* of my life. It was at this moment that I began to *receive* my life, instead of constantly *driving* it toward some conclusion I didn’t even know that I wanted.

This doesn’t mean that my life doesn’t still get weird and hard. Of course it does. But I can say that life feels like far less of a fight. I can say that I have, well, more of a say in how my life is going, instead of feeling like I’m just being dragged along by someone else’s agenda. And, best of all, I can say that when things do get hard, I can trust myself to be with, and take action around, whatever is arising (instead of fleeing/numbing/anesthetizing).

Chaos is a Friend of Mine is an invitation into a new conversation about how embracing CHAOS might actually offer you the freedom you’re convinced is on the other side of all that neverending micromanaging. It’s an invitation to consider a way of being that isn’t contingent on perpetuating systems that are in collapse—a way of being that supports all life.

🌀 Details below. Mark your calendars, register, and see you soon 🌀

WHAT: Learn about Chaos Theory and its practical application for building personal and collective resilience through uncertainty.

You will consider how disorder, unpredictability, and lack of control are natural parts of change and growth, and discover a model through which you can reconstruct the default narratives you have about yourself and the world.

You'll leave the workshop with a concrete framework you can apply toward imagining, creating, and living a new future beyond the limitations in possibility insisted upon by the culture-writ-large.

COST: FREE

The workshop is 75 minutes plus a Q+A/conversation that will go fifteen minutes or as long as there are questions/comments.

*There will be a recording so please register even if you can't make it live <3

Sign up for free here

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and introduce yourself! I *always* love hearing from you.

Thank you to everyone who’s already booked a spot in theTrust Your Life Coaching Project where, from May 1-31, I am gifting 20 coaching calls over 31 days.

There are 4 calls still available.

This project is for you if:

• You spend your days beholden to a low-grade inner urgency, and no matter how much you accomplish, you can’t shake the anxiety that the other shoe is about to drop.

• You spend money and time on self-care, you’re invested in self-help, and you consider yourself a smart, self-aware person—so why the mean inner dialogue that talks to you the way you’d never speak to a friend?

• You want to feel connected to the wisdom and exuberance of your animal body—and you know you would feel so much better if you didn’t spend the majority of your days hunkered Gollum-like in front of a screen—and less like a brain dragging a body around.

• You know there’s a bolder, more creative, rebellious side of you that wants to be unleashed but you’re afraid of how people will react if you stop censoring yourself and playing small.

• You are active and informed when it comes to the global goings on in the world and long to contribute to actual change, but the degree to which your efforts lack effectiveness is demoralizing.

NOTE: Even if this project’s theme isn’t 100% resonant, if you’re curious about my approach and are interested in a coaching session, go ahead and sign up for a call.

Book a spot

Today’s inspiration:

My mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating eggs without salt

Which is a better way of saying—take the scenic route. Say I love you when it’s true. Drive 12 hours just to touch. Buy kumquats because they’re called kumquats. Call someone you love a little kumquat. Write letters. Recite poems. Be verklempt. Rise early to hunt the moon. Eat pastries whose names you can’t pronounce. Astonish everyone. Haunt everything. Sing, even if poorly. Press the peel for zest. We’re nothing but brief bodies. Hearts, fragile as parakeets. Spit, lips, and longing. All we’ve got is this skin. This necessary salt.

Joy Sullivan

I’m forty-one years old and it was only four years ago that I discovered what I wanted to do with my life. For a long time, the story I told myself was that I was a late bloomer. But a conversation with a friend a couple weekends ago had me consider something different.

“Sweaty Saturdays” at my gym are for partner workouts, and lately Jenny and I meet up to workout, and then walk three blocks to Arizmendi on 24th Street where we order iced dirty horchatas, sit outside in the sun-drenched (if we’re lucky) parklet, and catch up. Jenny is also a small business owner, and we were riffing on the state of our businesses, and what we’ve been thinking about and experimenting with, when it hit me that mine and Jenny’s career pathways were more similar than I’d realized. I blurted out, “If we wrote a list of all the jobs we’ve ever had, it would be the longest, weirdest list.”

(Jenny’s: moving to Dubai to be a live-in tutor to the son of a wealthy family; mine: spending summers as a kennel assistant at a facility for retired animals—dogs, cats, birds of prey, and six penguins—that had been in film and television).

In that moment, a shift: wait a second. Jenny has had a nonlinear career path, too. And it’s one of the things I love most about her, one of the things about her I look up to most. Jenny inspired me to pursue what was in my heart, rather that what was pragmatic.

What if I’m right on time?

🤯

So I spent the rest of the weekend with the mind-blown emoji having replaced my skull, and inside a fresh perspective: Perhaps I’m not as much of a late-bloomer as I’d thought.

I’ve attributed that distinction to the tangled period of my adulthood where I was anesthetizing myself with just enough alcohol to maintain the sad, stuck-in-place status quo instead of figuring out how I might start to have a say in my life instead of only merely tolerating it. I’ve been telling myself that if I hadn’t gotten so mixed up in such a strange direction, I would be somewhere different than where I am right now. The somewhere different is always an ambiguous, abstract idea of “being further along.”

I’m realizing right this moment, in real time, that there’s still some shame mixed up inside me.

When I quit drinking in 2017, the ceiling opened up so dramatically that it’s been hard not to believe that if only I’d quit earlier, I’d have gotten to that aforementioned somewhere different sooner. I have been hammering away at that story for almost eight years, grinding it into my overworked and exhausted neural pathways as an undeniable, 1+1=2 type truth.

But the conversation with Jenny made me start to question whether the late bloomer story is as accurate as I’ve been believing. To be clear, I don’t mean to minimize my experience with alcohol. There were long periods of darkness and confusion, and there are significant swaths of my twenties that are wiped from my memory. I still wish I’d had enough imagination as a young person to picture an adult life without alcohol, I definitely still wish I’d disentangled myself sooner.

And. Perhaps it could also be true that my issues with substances didn’t quite have the influence over my overall trajectory I’ve spent the last eight years convincing myself they did. Because what I’m realizing is that there’s as much a chance that my path would have been just as full of spirals and walkabouts as it has been, whether or not I ever took a sip of booze. Because maybe that’s who I am. Because maybe who I am is someone who cannot go in a straight line. Because maybe I drank because I didn’t fit into a linear trajectory, and I didn’t have the capacity at the time to accept that my way was bizarre and circuitous and—

—dear god, what would it be like to own that about myself, to learn to move and bend and glide with where my life is taking me, to stop it already with the shoving myself into boxes inside of which I will never fit, and then berating myself when my attempts never, ever work.

Because truly, this is what has caused me the most pain—not so much the not fitting in, but the story I tell myself about not fitting in. What I make it mean about myself that my life has gone differently than I was programmed to believe it was supposed to go.

“Three years ago I discovered what I wanted to do with my life.”

This statement implies that there was a moment of discovery, an “aha” that had me see something new and different from one moment to the next. But that’s not true, actually. Becoming a coach was a twenty year process for me. Those twenty years were full of experiences that when looked at all together create a constellation that coalesced as coaching. But if I look at any individual experience too closely, all I see are the fits and starts. It doesn’t tell the whole story.

Because what does it even mean to “figure out what I’m doing with my life?” I have always been a writer. Writing is not how I’ve ever earned a living, so does that mean it doesn’t qualify as what I “do” with my life? I have never made money on my creative work; does this disqualify me from the claiming myself as an artist?

If you look at my calendar on any given weekday, I am “doing coaching.” There are individual sessions, blocks of time that make up a day, a week, and so on. But when I scan out, coaching includes so much more: it is a vehicle through which I get to show up as fully self-expressed as possible. It is a way I get to explore the different facets of my humanity. It is an ongoing invitation for clients to consider their own self-expression, their own life experiments and explorations, and all the messiness inherent and in between.

And lest this sound more glamorous than it is, it also means that I don’t have much of a playbook for how to sustain this, for what this looks like over time. Anyone who spends any time on the internet knows that you can’t scroll for ten seconds without a coach’s profile sliding by. And now everywhere you look there are coaches coaching coaches (we are nothing if not prolific). There’s advice galore, endless marketing and business trainings. There are formulas I can follow from creators who promise me multiple six figures! $100k launches! Sell your programs while you sleep!

…but what if what I really want is to go down deep into the subterranean wilderness inside myself, to live in a way that allows me the space and time to do so, even though that means relinquishing the hustle and grind lifestyle that would be required to have the huge income and fancy life and all the glitz and shimmer that coaching influencers display online?

…but what if who I want to walk alongside and invite to work with me are people who are less interested in getting better at becoming more productive and efficient, and more curious about exploring their own inner wilderness, and creating something beyond the systems that so many cling to even as they crumble?

One of the things that strikes me about the conversations I’ve been inside over the past four years is how so many of you are also questioning your stories about yourself and your life. There seems to be a connection between an external landscape gone increasingly chaotic, weird, and uncertain, and an inner world clamoring for your attention with greater-than-ever urgency.

As the external structures from which you’ve historically assigned and derived meaning grow more dysfunctional, you are recognizing that safety and any semblance of reliability must come from within.

The call is coming from inside the house.

Government is not going to save you. Religion isn’t either. Fancy degrees aren’t quite the stability guarantee they once were, and cushy corporate jobs can dissolve overnight. I could go on, but I won’t, because I know you are as informed, if not more, than I, which means you’re as stressed, if not more, than I, so suffice it to say that reality is super strange right now.

Certainty went out the window back in 2016. For some of you, it was never there to begin with. Since then we’ve lived through a pandemic and now we’re witnessing nonstop death matches between old world fossils who are clinging to power like geriatric barnacles on the rusted out hull of the Titanic.

There is never, ever going to be a right time to be—to allow yourself the space and time to become—who you want to be.

You long for your creativity to occupy a greater space in your life: you want to make things with your hands, to experiment on the page, to start your own business, to explore the natural world. You are tired of constantly shoving your spark to the back burner. The consensus reality we’ve heretofore agreed upon as a collective has failed in its promises but you’re scared to pursue what’s in your heart—and wow, how you long to discover what’s in your heart—because that would require venturing into the unknown, and yeah, there are already so many unknowns right now.

But also,

“someday”

is never coming.

It’s 9:15 on a Saturday night, and I’ve spent most of the day writing, by which I mean, staring out the window, watching the way the late spring wind blows through the trees, slingshots the overhead lines, the way it shudders my single-paned windows. As I close out this already too long missive, I am present to a profound and surprising optimism.

We are living through such extraordinary times. As someone who has slowly, slowly, and extraordinarily painstakingly patched together a creative life and is able to support myself from my work, I am inviting you to center your creative longing. Even if only a little bit. It doesn’t have to be “full time;” it doesn’t have to pay the bills; it doesn’t have to take up much time. But take some time. Do whatever you have to do to create tiny buffers around your obligations so that you can practice a new way of being with yourself, your beliefs, and to create space around what you believe to be possible and true.

Not two weeks ago, a thirty second exchange with a trusted friend literally changed my worldview. I was able to release a burden I didn’t know I was still carrying. I became more myself, because I was able to accept a part of my story that I’d assumed was a glitch, rather than a prerequisite of the curriculum¹.

I’m inviting you to consider that your beliefs about yourself and the world might be due for some curious and gentle questioning.

It’s hard to go against the grain, swim against the stream, ditch the present state of affairs and make different choices. I’d be a liar if I said it was easy. It’s not! I wish it were. I have moments of ease, of tenderness and satisfaction. But mostly I’m staring into the void, careening through space on this pale blue dot like everyone else, doing my damndest to hold on and stay close to beauty and love and friendship and joy and all those extraordinary aspects of life that help fend off despair.

It’s hard to live by your values. It’s hard to know what your values even are because most of you can’t slow down enough to be with these types of questions. You’re afraid of what you’ll discover, not because it will be bad, but because you know that there’s a bell inside you that once its rung, there’s no going back.

Trust Your Life Coaching Project is an invitation into a new conversation about how developing self-trust is the path of freedom away from all the neverending micromanaging. It’s an invitation to consider a way of being that isn’t contingent on perpetuating systems that are in collapse—a way of being that supports all life.

If this calls to you, I want to gift you one hour of 1:1 coaching.

The Details

I am offering each call for free to support to anyone curious about how developing self-trust is a prerequisite for personal and collective liberation.

1. Book your session. Each project call is 1 hour. Conversations will take place between May 1st and May 31st, 2025.

2. Complete the short questionnaire. After I confirm your call, you will receive a short questionnaire. Please note that calls without a completed questionnaire within 48 hours will be canceled.

3. Show up to your call! I look forward to our time together.

Book a Spot

In the spirit of 🪞transparency🪞

Projects like this are how I give people who are curious about coaching an experience of working with me, and also one of the ways I connect with my ideal clients to fill the limited coaching spots I have available in my practice each season.

On the other side of this session, if coaching together seems like an ideal next step for both of us, and you express interest in learning more, wonderful, we can talk about that. HOWEVER! This is not a sales call in disguise and I will not “pitch” you on coaching without your explicit consent/indication of interest.

If an ongoing coaching engagement is not the right next thing, we’ll wind down our conversation with suggestions and resources to support you where you are. Yes, coaching is an investment but limited resources should never be a hindrance in you receiving the support when you need it.

Book a Spot

This project is *not* for you if:

• You have participated in a coaching project in the past 12 months

• You have completed a coaching agreement within the past 6 months

• You are a current 1:1 coaching client

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and introduce yourself! I *always* love hearing from you.

You’re invited to tonight’s bi-monthly Self Made community call.

✨Tonight (4/15) from 6-7pm PST. All are welcome.

Register for tonight's Community Call

Thank you to everyone who’s already booked a spot in theTrust Your Life Coaching Project where, from May 1-31, I am gifting 20 coaching calls over 31 days.

There are 8 calls still available.

This project is for you if:

• You spend your days beholden to a low-grade inner urgency, and no matter how much you accomplish, you can’t shake the anxiety that the other shoe is about to drop.

• You spend money and time on self-care, you’re invested in self-help, and you consider yourself a smart, self-aware person—so why the mean inner dialogue that talks to you the way you’d never speak to a friend?

• You want to feel connected to the wisdom and exuberance of your animal body—and you know you would feel so much better if you didn’t spend the majority of your days hunkered Gollum-like in front of a screen—and less like a brain dragging a body around.

• You know there’s a bolder, more creative, rebellious side of you that wants to be unleashed but you’re afraid of how people will react if you stop censoring yourself and playing small.

• You are active and informed when it comes to the global goings on in the world and long to contribute to actual change, but the degree to which your efforts lack effectiveness is demoralizing.

NOTE: Even if this project’s theme isn’t 100% resonant, if you’re curious about my approach and are interested in a coaching session, go ahead and sign up for a call.

Book a spot

Keep scrolling to read the full inspiration behind this season’s coaching project.

Life is a miracle but I didn’t always believe this.

I viewed life as an antagonist. During the hardest times, life was a fight: I didn’t understand why I kept behaving in ways that went against my values and best interests but also, I couldn’t seem to stop. Mostly, life was something to be tolerated, a Sisyphean slog on my way to better things that were surely on their way if only I worked harder, pushed farther, got better, improved myself, eradicated the darkness that seemed to cling to me like a nightmare version of a Peter Pan shadow.

All the ways I anesthetized myself to cope with life were not the problem. They were a symptom of the problem. And it wasn’t until I learned to deal with the symptoms—it wasn’t until I stopped doing the things that were causing the most harm—that I could address the problem, which is to say, that I could finally change the way I engaged with life. And what interests me now, what I suspect will forever fascinate me, is not the stopping (which I don’t mean to minimize, for the stopping was the first of many miracles), but everything that’s come since.

In my own path of self-development, what was required of me was fundamentally shifting my core beliefs and world view. Specifically, it required learning to trust my life as a good partner, and devoting myself to this new belief in the face of a culture that, should I continue to let it have it’s way with me, would have me swimming in perpetual lack at best, or at worst, utter malaise and resignation.

I couldn’t have done this overnight. The first thing I needed to do was to stabilize: To create habit and routine; to learn to keep my word; to take care of all parts of myself (instead of reacting to whatever was most chaotic in any given moment). And I did stabilize. The inner pendulum did come to rest in in a steadier center. But my self-worth was still in the shitter. I was still scraping away at the wound of neglect. And so began the deeper work, that internal excavation, without which I might have accumulated every last external measure of success while still continuing to experience life as something to manipulate, manage, and control, rather than receive.

I’ve had to learn to adapt inside of a culture that would keep me numbed out and consuming. Adaptation requires flexibility, curiosity, and interacting with reality as it presents itself, rather than how I think it is supposed to be or how I wish it was or how it used to be or how it is for other people. It is a dynamic process of moving with life rather than trying to force life to fit into some shape I’ve been conditioned to believe I’m supposed to want. It is how I move with myself rather than against myself.

It is how I relinquish the foolish pursuit of perfection and step into the gorgeous messiness of my full humanity.

These days, I know who I am and what I’m doing. I am fortified from the inside because I know how to protect and care for myself, unapologetically and uncompromisingly. This is not only a selfish undertaking, because it doesn’t stop with me. Indeed, the care that I show to myself pours over, and it is in this outpouring, it is in this newfound ability to move through the world from a place of fullness rather than lack or depletion, that I can stay engaged.

And this is one of the great questions of our times, isn’t it? How do we hold it all, and not get bowled over by it?

Everything in chaotic and the stakes are so high. I’m exhausted by how hard it is for so many of us to just EXIST.

It’s also true that this morning I woke up to the sound of rain.

Rain. I stared out the window, watching the rain fall with the same enchantment that I might watch a blockbuster on a big screen. Rain, for real, finally. I imagined the dry hills and valleys swelling, shoots of grass emerging, my beloved cypress and eucalyptus exhaling. All the urban flora and fauna cozying up in their holes and huddles; smell of piss in alleyways being washed away; reservoirs all over California nearing full capacity for the first time in my lifetime. My god, what a relief to be washed clean, to be made well again.

Rain falls. Eclipses send moon into shadow. World spins.

We keep on.

As a coach, my job is to keep both feet planted in reality—to fend off the enthusiastic and omnipresent temptation of magical thinking—and to work with what is. As an artist, my work is to hold always a forward vision, and to devote myself to this vision as my north star.

Inside of this simultaneity is the tension we hold: Staying engaged in reality—in truth, feet in the mud, not succumbing to the forces which would beat us down permanently, tending to the day-to-day-slog of incremental change over time—while at the same time learning to live in a way that disrupts all the same bonkers patterns and systems that would keep us forever stuck on a hamster wheel of death.

We are in a time of uncertainty. Instead of fighting reality, we need a new relationship with it, and this is part of the work of changing our belief system.

Now is not the time for rigidity. We must be flexible, and adaptable. We must look to nature, and artists, and young people, and all the endless possibilities that arise inside of ecosystems of community. We must shore ourselves up from the inside, not to hide away in our cute little apartments, but so that we can stay active in the world, so we can carry each other across the river when the time comes (the time has come).

The photo at the beginning of this essay is of Henri Matisse, a prolific artist who continued to make prolific work even after illness and deteriorating health rendered him with very limited mobility. I keep thinking about the way artists adapt, and innovate. I’ve been thinking about Matisse, and the way he adapted his art making his entire life. As he aged, and his health declined, he adapted: He fashioned different tools; he took over hotels and made them studios; he started cutting paper from his wheelchair; he fashioned a drawing stick to draw from bed. I know for myself that the second I find myself in less than ideal circumstances, my tendency is to abandon myself and my practices. The question I ask of myself now is how might I move with my life so I can adapt to reality and continue to do my work forever.

The miracle—which isn’t a miracle at all, but a law of nature—is that chaos always leads to order. Chaos and order are not in opposition; they are in partnership.

So here’s what I suggest:

Let’s be still, just for a minute. For just for a moment every now and again, let’s slow down. Let’s stay in bed. Let’s read, let’s catch up on the eleventy billion shows everyone else is watching.

Let us be so very gentle. Let us nurture each others’ hearts as we would a fallen baby bird: make a makeshift nest for it, nourish it with round-the-clock attention, sing to it, urge its feathers to grow thick and full, rich in color, all our favorite colors. Feed it treats from its surrounding environment, all its favorite seeds and nuts and grubs and bugs. Sugar water, too.

Let’s track all the new space inside us. Let’s relate to it not as an emptiness, but as pure potential, full of possibility. Let’s traipse about our neighborhoods, feel the rain on our faces, no destination. Let’s make friends with not knowing. Let’s consider that joy and delight might walk alongside us, despite ourselves—state of the world be damned. Let’s look up at the stars, and that ridiculous full moon, low slung on the horizon; let’s scritchy-scratch the tops of dogs’ stupid little heads, every chance we get; let’s listen for the high pitch of hummingbird, the hoot of owl, the sharp call of hawk; let’s make chit-chat at the deli, in the checkout line, with the nurse drawing our blood; let’s buy ourselves flowers, let’s light candles, incense, ideas, dreams. Let’s notice what is already on its way, that butterfly in our stomach, AKA, hope, right there, a flutter in the guts, not erasing the pain, but buzzing alongside.

Trust Your Life Coaching Project is an invitation into a new conversation about how developing self-trust is the path of freedom away from all the neverending micromanaging. It’s an invitation to consider a way of being that isn’t contingent on perpetuating systems that are in collapse—a way of being that supports all life.

If this calls to you, I want to gift you one hour of 1:1 coaching.

The Details

I am offering each call for free to support to anyone curious about how developing self-trust is a prerequisite for personal and collective liberation.

1. Book your session. Each project call is 1 hour. Conversations will take place between May 1st and May 31st, 2025.

2. Complete the short questionnaire. After I confirm your call, you will receive a short questionnaire. Please note that calls without a completed questionnaire within 48 hours will be canceled.

3. Show up to your call! I look forward to our time together.

Book a Spot

In the spirit of 🪞transparency🪞

Projects like this are how I give people who are curious about coaching an experience of working with me, and also one of the ways I connect with my ideal clients to fill the limited coaching spots I have available in my practice each season.

On the other side of this session, if coaching together seems like an ideal next step for both of us, and you express interest in learning more, wonderful, we can talk about that. HOWEVER! This is not a sales call in disguise and I will not “pitch” you on coaching without your explicit consent/indication of interest.

If an ongoing coaching engagement is not the right next thing, we’ll wind down our conversation with suggestions and resources to support you where you are. Yes, coaching is an investment but limited resources should never be a hindrance in you receiving the support when you need it.

Book a Spot

This project is *not* for you if:

• You have participated in a coaching project in the past 12 months

• You have completed a coaching agreement within the past 6 months

• You are a current 1:1 coaching client

SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA. 

Click here to learn about working with me 1:1 and/or here to sign up for a complimentary Alignment Session.

You can also support me by forwarding this to a friend, leaving a comment, or clicking the little “heart” button on the top of the post.

Or hit reply and introduce yourself! I *always* love hearing from you.