In summer, each day invited us to expand. We followed the impulse to flower and yield; to stretch out, romp, and move; to say yes to every invitation.

But in September, the imagination begins to shift. Mornings and evenings are laden with the scent of change. And as our fidelities grow more modest—sharpening our pencils, organizing our closets and calendars—our attention gathers to the nearer world.

As a student of the migration of light for many years, I’ve come to trust the seasonality of practice. In the garden, not every task belongs to every season. There is a time to plant, a time to tend, and a time to harvest. There are pruning seasons and fallow seasons, too—intervals in which we make room for the conditions from which new life can grow.

These inward times may not look like much from the outside, but they are essential, making release and regeneration possible. Our nervous systems and psyches are made for this: breath, reflection, reciprocity, return, creative discipline. The metabolic gestures of a real life.

For his recent birthday, my son received a tiny terracotta pot with a few clover seeds in a paper package. He planted them in soil and sprinkled a few drops of water each day—and within a week, small, green, marvelous sprouts appeared.

Sometimes, we must sprinkle water over soil and wait. Sometimes, we must watch and learn to pray. Sometimes, we must cover the field with clover and let it rest. We must rest.

This, too, is a practice.

~

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. ... We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. . . We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
- Wendell Berry, “The Long-Legged House”

~

This season, I find myself turning toward what most anchors my attention: my children, and the privilege of accompanying them in their little worlds; my work as a psychotherapist, teacher, and fellow human; and the teachings that sustain and quietly elucidate my days. The work I care most about depends on these forms of nearness.

At a moment when the internet is increasingly organized to reproduce itself—when generated material arrives in ever-greater volume, and we find ourselves questioning the authenticity of a written voice, and wondering what will become of us in an endless loop of data—I am listening to the wisdom of fatigue and giving myself permission to step out of an accelerating current.

Like you, I want to keep faith with a more human scale. Rather than sliding into the logic of perpetual production, I am committing to a more respectful relationship with time. This means making room for the actual dynamics of the psyche, being more intentional about how I inhabit my creative principles, and allowing this work to emerge with genuine energy and form.

To that end, as a simple step, I have decided to close the paid membership option here. This publication will continue, freely offered. The archive of meditations and classes that was previously behind a paywall is now available to everyone. I’m sure that here and there The Guest House will open into a longer essay, a practice, or a conversation that arrives through inspiration—but not because an editorial calendar requires feeding.

Friends: I want to express my gratitude for the generosity with which you’ve supported this body of work over the past two years. I hope it has served your path in some small way, and that you will continue to cultivate the permissions and rituals your spirit needs now, however this practice of unburdening makes sense in your life.

Let’s keep finding ways to gather, share our stories, serve one another, and develop our respect for this living world. I’ll be right here, and perhaps more so, leaning into the tender and irreductible nature of being human.

With a bow from my desk on a fresh September morning.

Shawn

Upcoming Gatherings

+ September 20-26, 2026: Yoga, meditation, and culinary arts in the key of autumn harvest at Ballymaloe House, County Cork, Ireland.

+ November 20-22, 2026: A Doorway Into Thanks: A Mary Oliver Retreat co-taught with biographer Lindsay Whalen at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, MA. Registration now open.

A Practical Note for Paid Subscribers

As of September 1, your payments have been paused.

You will retain access to the full archive of classes, guided meditations, and playlists.

The Guest House will continue, freely offered. You don’t need to do anything to keep receiving these newsletters, essays, and offerings.

If you have a question about your membership, please reply directly to this email or write to info@shawnparell.com.

Please note: a small audio issue caused the class to record without the accompanying music.
As always, here is the link to this month’s playlist that you can turn on at home to accompany your practice.

A dog’s retching yanks me from sleep. I’ve been floating between worlds all night, and suddenly I’m across the room before a thought can take shape. The dense atmosphere of a dream lingers as I kneel to wipe the floor, then thins as my mind reaches for it. I was in a foreign place, though the landscape felt familiar. I was with friends, though they were not themselves. There was a house. The house was a river. Its rooms were water.

With a sigh, the dog returns to bed. The house settles back into stillness. I move mutely to my meditation cushion. Incense lit, tea steeping, for a time, I watch tendrils of smoke and steam mingle in the dawning air.

Practice teaches us to notice what’s here. Gradually, our attention steadies and we begin to perceive what is real—the interplay of spirit and matter, psyche and body—through the tuning fork of our awareness. We grow quieter, more supple, more receptive—less beholden to neurosis and fixed assumptions. What we lose in certainty, we gain in texture and attunement.

As humans, especially now, our well-being depends on how honestly we inhabit the faculties of our aliveness. What do we know to be true, and by what inner or outer measure? How much doubt do we allow in the margins of confirmation? What may appear real, yet on closer examination, carries the subtle signature of an illusion? And, inversely: where have we developed trust in modes of knowing that defy rational explanation?

In classical yoga philosophy, pramana offers a basic epistemic map. It names three valid sources of knowledge: direct perception (pratyaksha), inference (anumana), and trusted testimony (sabda). I know the river is cold because I have placed my hand in it. I know the river is cold because it flows from glacial melt. I know the river is cold because someone I trust has told me so.

Of these, direct perception carries the weight of fact. Yet fact alone does not confer context. The elephant’s tail may still seem a pestle to a blind man, as the Buddhist parable goes. Here, the animal’s trumpet or a friend’s account can augment our own perception. Thus, these three sources of knowledge uphold one another.

But in Paris last month, standing beneath Hilma af Klint’s paintings at the Grand Palais, I sensed how this era of dissolving certainties is inviting us to loosen and refine our frameworks for human intelligence. Knowing is not the intellect’s final stamp of approval. It is a function of our embodied, psychic, and spiritual capacities—and it keeps calling us to widen what we recognize as real.

Born in 1862, af Klint painted vast, abstract diagrams of a reality folded within this one: swirls of color, spirals, botanical forms, and galaxies. Her pioneering abstract works, begun as early as 1906, were long kept hidden and revealed only, at her direction, decades after her death. Working with a circle of women known as The Five, she participated in séances where language and image moved through them. One presence, whom she called Ananda, instructed her to create a series of paintings “for the temple.” These “pictures for the future” were meant for the future, for an audience who could see beyond the pastoral and parlor depictions of her time.

Standing before af Klint’s paintings a century later, I considered what it takes to be faithful to what arrives through intuition—to stake our knowing on image, or symbol, or an inner insistence just beyond explanation.

Carl Jung described intuition as that which “mediates perceptions in an unconscious way… and has the character of being given.” Distinguishing it from the more rational functions of thinking, sensing, and feeling, Jung characterized intuition as irrational, bypassing conscious logic to immediately grasp hidden patterns, meanings, and future possibilities.

In the years surrounding the First World War, Jung recorded dreams, visions, and dialogues with figures arising from his psyche. He came to understand that aspects of the psyche “produce themselves and have their own life.” The Red Book was later compiled as a document of these encounters and his willingness to be reshaped by them during an epoch of social collapse. His family kept the manuscript hidden for decades, wary of how the public would judge Jung for its contents.

Certain ways of knowing do not sit neatly within pramana. They are not quite direct perception, not quite inference, not quite testimony, unless we expand the aperture of perception to include dreams, images, symbols, and phrases that arrive unbidden. These belong to another register, one involving a relationship with what we do not fully understand. A mingling with mystery. A participation.

An increasing number of my therapy clients report consulting AI about the emotional content of their lives. I feel ambivalent. On one hand, it seems to help people articulate their inner life with greater clarity and identify practical therapeutic tools. On the other hand, if deferred to prematurely, AI’s logic can displace the authority of these clients’ own process, pulling them away from their attunement to the questions themselves.

As artificial intelligence becomes an ever more seamless extension of cognition, my concern is what happens to the musculature of our knowing. Will we still value entering the river to feel for ourselves? Or standing beneath a painting whose frequency has waited a century to be transmitted? Or cultivating the integration of direct experience, the rigor of inference, and the discernment of who and what we trust?

The meaningful questions of our lives ask something of us in return. Some questions are not meant to be resolved or even unveiled too directly. Some things must be distilled in time—granted permission, respect, faithful return, and a tolerance for not yet knowing.

+ Join next month’s yoga & meditation class on Thursday, August 20. Only on Substack - a thank you to paid subscribers.

+ Find me at YogaSource in Santa Fe every Wednesday morning, 9-10:15 am MT / 11 am-12:15 pm ET for Dynamic Practice. This class is fully analog—live and in person. Register through the studio here.

+ I’ll be returning to world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland, Sept 20-26, 2026, with Erin Doerwald. This retreat will feature yoga, meditation, farm-to-table meals, and curated outings—plus rest, nurturance, and imagination. Just a few spots left. Check out all the details here.

The Tender Harvest ::: An Autumn Retreat
Sept 20-26, 2026 at Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland
With &

Dear Friends,

So many of us rush through most days. We answer the emails, tend to all our responsibilities, and carry the invisible weight of becoming who we thought we were supposed to be. All the while, somewhere beneath the relentless momentum of it all, some tired part of us asks essential questions like what would it feel like to tend to the life that’s here?

Retreats can feel like coming up for air. They create space to reconnect, recenter, and rest, so we can return with a clearer, more inspired perspective and deeper energetic reserves.

This September, Erin and I will return to Ireland for The Tender Harvest, a week at Ballymaloe House in County Cork. There will be yoga and meditation, delicious chef-prepared meals gathered from the organic garden, cliff walks above the Atlantic, tea by the fire, and the particular kind of wonder that arrives when you allow yourself to step outside the daily grind and fully awaken the senses.

Our Autumn Equinox retreat timing is a chance to redefine balance, to savor the harvest, and to remember what it means to be fully alive in a time that so often pulls us away from ourselves.

A handful of spaces remain, and we would love for you to join us.

You can learn more and register at shawnparell.com/ireland.

register today

Come away to renowned Ballymaloe House in the Irish countryside. Through yoga, nourishing meals, cliff walks, and quiet moments of reflection, this retreat invites you to slow down, reconnect, and rest in the harvest of your life.

Tucked into the quiet countryside of County Cork, Ballymaloe House is a family-run estate known for its warm hospitality, award-winning cuisine, and understated elegance.

Our home for the week will be filled with garden views, fireside tea, deep bathtubs, and the peaceful rhythm of the Irish countryside.

Our 2024 retreat at Ballymaloe was lauded as among the most rejuvenating experiences of most participants’ lives.

That’s why we’re delighted to return for The Tender Harvest—another weeklong immersion amidst the golden hues and organic bounty of this world-class country manor and cooking school.

P.S. All levels of yoga experience are welcome. This is an ideal retreat for folks who are yoga “adjacent,” so you’re welcome to bring a fellow traveler who might pass on daily yoga but otherwise would enjoy long walks, meditations, meals, great company, and Irish cultural immersion.

join us

Limited spots remain. Payment plans available.

Hope to see you there!

I was puttering around on my desktop last week—doing anything to avoid beginning this draft—when an email arrived from , Director of the Salomé Institute of Jungian Studies, psychotherapist, and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. I’m connected to Satya’s work through a yearlong course in Jungian psychology, so it felt synchronous that her voice should reach me in the midst of a procrastination I had entered but not yet named.

In her newsletter, Satya reflected on how AI-generated content has begun to drain her motivation to write, or at least to write in the digital landscape:

“The existential (or is it creative?) concern is not only that I don’t know that I can keep up; it’s that I’m not sure I want to.
I don’t want to feel frenzied for any reason, let alone in order to keep pace with robots.”

I felt an immediate resonance. A similar resistance has been gathering at the edges of my awareness in recent months. As ever, I am drawn to the practice of writing; I feel reluctant, though, to keep step with machines, and wary of the subtle infiltration of AI’s manufactured voice into the written word. Its outputs are refining by the day, but its velocity, seamlessness, and casual superiority register as categorically inhuman. Even the term content betrays the shift: it names a product, not a process. Writing still implies the grist of a mind at work.

Momentarily, I consider abandoning the whole imperfect enterprise of these essays. Why compete with the speed of light? Human attention—my attention—has already been profoundly shaped, even warped, by life in the digital age. Like Satya, I am unwilling to have my nervous system further conscripted into that race.

But then I pause. Because keeping pace is not, and never was, the aim of this work.

In 1884, William James insisted, in his early challenge to Cartesian dualism, that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.” Emotion, for James, arises from embodied sensation—from the interplay of pulse and breath, fascia and nerve synapse. What, then, are we encountering in AI’s frictionless outputs, if not language severed from the very conditions that allow for feeling?

Beyond its basic communicative function, writing is one of the ways humanity has revealed itself to itself across generations. Its deeper value—like all art—is metabolic. The artist’s task is to sustain attention—to lower a bucket into the shadowed recesses of the psyche and draw up something true. Something we can hold up to the light and marvel: this has been here all along.

Silene stenophylla—the narrow-leafed campion—offers a botanical echo of this process through millennia. Revived from 32,000-year-old tissue preserved in the frozen burrows of Arctic ground squirrels, its cells were coaxed back into bloom. Its resurrection gestures toward the truth that creation unfolds according to its own tempos, on timescales that exceed human urgencies. No algorithm can hasten such an emergence. It belongs to the potential of living systems. Silene stenophylla stands for all that has yet to be brought to light.

My family is moving through a health circumstance that has re-angled the light on everything. I find myself asking, with unusual clarity, what it means to be human. What is this brief and improbable flare of existence, this particular arrangement of spirit and days—and what, in fact, matters within it? I am learning that no intelligence outside nature’s intelligence—the one that moves through this body, shaped by my relationships, my encounters, my losses and blessings—can do this work for me. Integration is not transferable. It is slow chemistry, the metabolism of meaning, made possible by contact and time.

In this unprecedented modern experiment—this “rough initiation,” to borrow Francis Weller’s phrase from In the Absence of the Ordinary—we are tasked not only with preserving our shared existence, but with tending the intricate ecology by which we make sense of being human at all.

To that end, I was struck by ’s remarks to about how he prepares for interviews. He described the option of relying on a production team to generate questions—augmented, no doubt, by AI—and his commitment instead to the slower labor of reading and thinking his own way into his subject matter. It is through this integrative process that he becomes acclimated to the terrain of his guest’s inner life.

Klein’s learning process is unmistakably estuarine. Like a river meeting the sea, he begins at the edge of his own knowing and encounters the salinity of another’s perspective, allowing it to permeate and reshape his understanding. We may learn to live alongside artificial intelligence, and make good use of it, but this kind of convergence, this gradual and reciprocal deepening of awareness, still belongs to the meeting of living minds.

As writers, readers, and human kin, we are now asking questions at the threshold between what can be offloaded and what cannot. We recognize ourselves in one another’s fitful impasses and revelations. I find myself wanting, more clearly than ever, a human-paced, human-proportioned life—one in which instinct and intuition remain intact, in which I can not only hear another’s words, but discern the place from which they have arisen. And so I must remain faithful to slow, estuarine processes that bend the psyche toward dignity and insight. We feel our way, and grow, and ache, and fall away, and arrive again. This is how we are human.

Reflections from an incredible bounty of springtime spirals in County Cork, Ireland, during the month of April, 2024. (Still a few rooms available for yoga & meditation retreat in Ireland this September 20-26, 2026! Grab one here.)

On the perennial nature of joy, after my dear Uncle Ray’s celebration of life in North Carolina last April, 2025.

Guided Meditation + Music Alchemy

Previously reserved for paid subscribers, this guided meditation and springtime playlists are now free for everyone here. A simple thanks for your friendship—thank you for reading, listening, sharing, and being part of The Guest House.

+ Join next month’s yoga & meditation class on Thursday, May 7.

+ Find me at YogaSource in Santa Fe every Wednesday morning, 9-10:15 am MT / 11 am-12:15 pm ET for Dynamic Practice. This class is fully analog—live and in person. Register through the studio here.

+ I’ll be returning to two beloved places to offer retreats with friends in the coming year: Beyul Retreat, in the pristine wilderness surrounding Aspen, Colorado, May 21-25, 2026, with Wendelin Scott; AND world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland, Sept 20-26, 2026, with Erin Doerwald. Each retreat will feature yoga, meditation, farm-to-table meals, and curated outings—plus rest, nurturance, and imagination. Just a few spots left. Check out all the details here.

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.” —D. H. Lawrence

The sky is a flawless blue above the high mountain desert of Northern New Mexico. Though the air is thick with dust and pollen, transitional winds sharpen the senses and sweep away winter’s accumulations. White blossoms rise from the upturned branches of the apricot tree, though the ground beneath them cracks with thirst.

Strange, precarious, hopeful, persistent—spring is arriving like this.

The disturbing footnote beneath every casual conversation about the weather is the acknowledgment that winter never truly came. There was no white hush of falling snow, no soft crunch of boots on morning trails. Instead, we drifted mildly between seasons. And now, as one season seems to step over the stalled breath of another, some animal part of us still seems to be waiting for what should have been.

Meanwhile, my son runs into the kitchen sobbing. He has found his black betta fish floating belly-up among artificial sea grass and smooth glass pebbles. He holds our hands and dares to look again at the body of the fish that drifts motionless with its long, obsidian streamers. He asks us unanswerable questions. Inside this clear bowl with its fabricated landscape is a miniature initiation with a force more surprising and less negotiable than anything he has known.

So, we speak softly about the kingdom of the living, and how every living thing will one day cease to be as it was, about energy, and spirit, and how time moves all things.

The earth tilts, and so must we. Even in grief, the world continues making its arrangements, asking us to gather ourselves and show up for its manifold losses and resurrections.

For one example, house finches are nesting in the transoms above my downtown office, their tangled warbling made of brief, insistent notes, repeated and rearranged over and over again. Their lives are delicate, I know, but their song carries no hint of brevity or mourning.

Equinox offers a momentary balance in the forward thrust of light. It reminds us how we, too, can find our way to equilibrium, and thereby resource the heart as it learns to bear its own weather. Framed by all manner of human suffering, current and perennial, simple acts of care can become green shoots rising up through hardened soil. A hand held, a stranger respected, a woman rested—these are all defenses against despair.

“Care”—from the Old English caru, cearu—once referred to the burdens that bend the heart: “sorrow,” “anxiety,” “concern,” “grief.” In this sense, the impulse to nurture began as a name for the wound itself. Before it meant to tend or guard, to care meant to ache, to remain near the pain.

True care does not hover above suffering, nor does it rescue; it simply shows up with a willing heart and persists. What appears small is not, therefore, insignificant. The heart hears the finch’s song and remains willing to listen, not because it is promised anything, not because the world is kind or comforting, but because it still knows how, and that counts for something.

+ Join next month’s yoga & meditation class on Thursday, April 9, at 9 am MT / 11 am ET. A replay will be shared via email shortly thereafter.

+ Find me at YogaSource in Santa Fe every Wednesday morning, 9-10:15 am MT / 11 am-12:15 pm ET for Dynamic Practice. This class is fully analog—live and in person. Register through the studio here.

+ I’ll be returning to two beloved places to offer retreats with friends in the coming year: Beyul Retreat, in the pristine wilderness surrounding Aspen, Colorado, May 21-25, 2026, with Wendelin Scott; AND world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland, Sept 20-26, 2026, with Erin Doerwald. Each retreat will feature yoga, meditation, farm-to-table meals, and curated outings—plus rest, nurturance, and imagination. Just a few spots left. Check out all the details here.

Just as there are darkened seasons in human history—times when the structures sustaining civilization collapse and humanity finds itself grasping at branches, falling between worlds—so too is every individual subject to phases of undoing in the metamorphosis of a lifetime.

Entering the chrysalis is rarely a matter of choice. We would resist if we could. We awaken with a pit in the stomach, a visceral unease that signals change, sometimes even before we can name its source. We realize we have entered a dream with no solid ground—and no turning back. Loss feels imminent and thick, along with the uncertainty of what comes next or how we will get there. We try to keep moving, flailing about, mistaking busyness for effectiveness. We hoist the blueprints of our former lives above our heads to keep them dry, attempting to shore up what is already dissolving—working very hard, as all creatures do, not to die.

We humans tend to see all this as failure. But for the caterpillar, entering the chrysalis is a devastation programmed for its survival and evolution. What can the larva comprehend of its fate as it surrenders to darkness and dissolution? Before it can be reconstituted, the caterpillar must pupate—which is to say liquify. Epithelial cells must break down, muscles and mandibles must be lysed by their own enzymes, and in this way, the caterpillar’s whole body must be reduced to a nutrient slurry.

Every winter, nature takes this serious turn. Fallen leaves coil in on themselves, roots retreat, seeds release, and death seems to wrap the living world. On the subject of what to do about it, here’s orientation from a recent column in our local magazine, the Santa Fe New Mexican —

“In winter, our arid steppe climate shows us the value of leaving things alone. Grasses left standing become shelter. Seed heads become sustenance. Evergreen shrubs offer cover from wind and predators when the world feels most exposed. What looks untidy to us is, in fact, a carefully balanced system of protection and patience. The garden does not ask us to fix it in January—only to witness it.”

The winter gardener knows not to fix depression, but instead to witness and accompany the world beyond our control. For the winter gardener recognizes the fallows as sanctuary, the outer casings of seed heads and pale grasses as fortresses of transformation, and death as a passage between birthing seasons. This is the winter gardener’s regenerative faith.

Similarly, but with respect to human development, renowned Jungian analyst and author Marion Woodman called the chrysalis “a twilight between past, present, and future,” a place where the psyche must “tolerate annihilation—just long enough for the new form to begin assembling itself.” She described the sojourn of life as a series of “border crossings between what we were and what we cannot yet imagine.”

For the caterpillar, the dream of the butterfly is carried by imaginal cells—tiny, sac-like clusters that, through the primordial twilight of metamorphosis, give rise to compound eyes, scaled wings, and an altogether more elegant anatomy. This is how a creature built for crawling holds within its body the potential for flight.

The most courageous way we can enter the chrysalis is with receptive attention. In his 1910 Oxford lecture, The Birth of Humility, anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett described metamorphic thresholds as “psycho-physical,” when body and mind falter so that “latent energies [may] gather strength for activity on a fresh plane.” “Pause,” Marett wrote, “is the necessary condition of the development of all those higher purposes which make up the rational being.” Similarly, James Baldwin attested that the darkest hour can “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error.”

We cannot push ourselves through the chrysalis, for healing is an act of presence, not of power. But within the domain of consciousness, with forbearance, nurturance, and attention, we can rediscover the forces shaping our evolution and develop faith in what is not yet fully realized, but becoming.

In Jungian terms, the collective psyche mirrors the individual psyche: what collapses in the outer world—painfully, though necessarily—reflects what must be reimagined from within. We have entered an era of deconstruction, when democratic principles, values, and norms are unraveling before our eyes. Transformation is implicitly demanded, for, as Marett counseled, “Not until the days of this period of chrysalis life have been painfully accomplished can [a person] emerge a new and glorified creature.”

Now is the time to consider the imaginal intelligence within us that already knows the way. Even now, beneath the hardened surface of days, something tender is organizing, cell by cell, into form. We may not yet recognize it, but we can keep watch, listen for its stirrings, and become stewards of what future is emerging. Soon will appear bare, arching green stems of winter jasmine, followed by white-cupped crocuses, blue-spiked grape hyacinth, and daffodils. And we will tell each other how, all along, the ground has been preparing for resurrection.

+ Join next month’s yoga & meditation class on Thursday, Mar 12, at 9 am MT / 11 am ET. A replay will be shared via email shortly thereafter.

+ Find me at YogaSource in Santa Fe every Wednesday morning, 9-10:15 am MT / 11 am-12:15 pm ET for Dynamic Practice. This class is fully analog—live and in person. Register through the studio here.

+ I’ll be returning to two beloved places to offer retreats with friends in the coming year: Beyul Retreat, in the pristine wilderness surrounding Aspen, Colorado, May 21-25, 2026, with Wendelin Scott; AND world-class Ballymaloe House in County Cork, Ireland, Sept 20-26, 2026, with Erin Doerwald. Each retreat will feature yoga, meditation, farm-to-table meals, and curated outings—plus rest, nurturance, and imagination. Just a few spots left. Check out all the details here.