There’s a strange feeling that comes with watching someone use your words. Especially when those words were born from seasons that nearly broke you. The healing. The grief. The accountability. The rebuilding. The nervous system work. The quiet moments nobody saw.
It’s easy to learn the language. The internet is full of it now:
healing,
alignment,
regulation,
authenticity,
divine feminine,
shadow work,
sovereignty,
growth.
But true embodiment is different.
True embodiment is lived. It’s natural. It flows. It changes the way someone moves through the world consistently, not just the way they speak about themselves publicly. It shows up in behavior, emotional regulation, accountability, humility, relationships, and patterns over time.
And maybe that’s why this has bothered me more than I want it to.
Part of me wonders if I should simply rise above it. Maybe I should. Maybe imitation really is a form of admiration in some strange way. But another part of me struggles with watching deeply personal truths and hard-earned insight become performance pieces for someone else’s identity.
Because when someone borrows the language without fully doing the work underneath it, something can feel emotionally disconnected. Almost like trying on an identity instead of becoming one naturally.
And honestly? It feels less malicious and more like an identity crisis.
Carl Jung talked about the “persona” — the social mask people create in order to navigate the world and be accepted by others. But he also believed that real growth comes from individuation: the lifelong process of becoming fully integrated and authentically yourself.
That process requires honesty. Shadow work. Accountability. Self-awareness. It requires facing the parts of ourselves we would rather avoid instead of constructing an identity around appearing evolved.
But the saddest part is that people are ultimately doing themselves a disservice when they bypass that process.
The whole purpose of going through difficult things and doing real inner work is not to appear healed. It’s to actually transform. To become more self-aware. More accountable. More emotionally honest. More capable of healthy love, healthy boundaries, and authentic connection.
And the truth is, I am still doing the work too.
Real spiritual work is a practice. It’s ongoing. Sometimes you have to integrate the same lesson many times before it truly becomes part of you. There are still things I want to heal, things I want to improve, places where I still fall short. But the point is the willingness to keep learning. To keep becoming more conscious. More honest. More embodied.
That pursuit matters.
Spirituality as Performance vs Practice
Sometimes it feels like people are living inside of a movie — performing healing instead of embodying it. Curating an identity instead of allowing transformation to quietly reshape the way they move through the world.
Charles Bukowski once wrote:
“Beware those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.”
And while that may sound harsh, I think there’s truth hidden inside it. Real embodiment does not depend on constant performance, validation, applause, or audience approval. It exists quietly too. In solitude. In consistency.
Because the choices we make when nobody is watching are called integrity.
One of the things I’ve come to believe is that energy responds to authenticity.
Not perfection. Not performance. Not curated spirituality. Authenticity.
People feel it. Relationships feel it. The nervous system feels it. And I think, in many ways, life itself responds to it too.
Because when someone is truly embodied, there is coherence between their words, actions, values, and energy. Things flow differently. Trust forms differently. Presence feels different. There’s less effort required to maintain an image because there’s less fragmentation underneath it.
And the opposite is true too.
Performative energy often creates dissonance. Even when people cannot consciously explain what feels “off,” they can usually feel the inconsistency somewhere underneath the surface. The body notices. Relationships notice. Life eventually notices.
You can temporarily curate perception.
You cannot sustainably fake energetic coherence.
And honestly, this is something many spiritual traditions have warned about in different ways for centuries.
In Buddhism, suffering often continues until attachment, avoidance, illusion, and unconscious patterns are truly seen clearly. Lessons repeat because the deeper understanding has not fully integrated yet. Karma is not usually viewed as punishment, but as consequence, pattern, and unfinished learning returning again and again until consciousness deepens.
You cannot spiritually bypass a lesson and expect life not to revisit it.
And I think about Jesus telling his disciples to go out into the world and carry his teachings forward. The point was never simply to preach at people. It was to live the way he lived. To embody compassion, humility, integrity, accountability, forgiveness, and love through action — not just language.
One of the more dangerous things about spirituality is that it can also become performance.
People can learn the language.
They can learn the aesthetic.
They can learn how to sound wise, enlightened, healed, awakened, embodied, conscious, evolved.
But sounding spiritual and practicing spirituality are not always the same thing.
We’ve seen this happen over and over again with public spiritual figures, self-help leaders, gurus, pastors, yoga teachers, and “healers” who built entire identities around enlightenment while privately behaving in ways that were manipulative, exploitative, dishonest, abusive, or deeply unhealed.
Because spirituality can become a persona just like anything else.
That’s why true practice matters so much.
Real spiritual work is not about curating an image of wisdom.
It’s about accountability.
Humility.
Integrity.
Self-awareness.
Compassion.
Emotional regulation.
Consistency.
The willingness to continually confront yourself honestly.
And that work is rarely glamorous.
Sometimes spirituality is quiet.
Sometimes it is uncomfortable.
Sometimes it means admitting you are wrong.
Sometimes it means recognizing you still have lessons left to learn.
The people doing real work are usually not trying to convince everyone they are evolved.
They are simply trying to become more conscious human beings little by little over time.
You can cosplay the Queen of Cups for a while.
You can learn the language.
You can master the aesthetic.
You can memorize the quotes.
You can curate the image of softness, wisdom, intuition, compassion, sensuality, healing, emotional depth.
But eventually embodiment reveals itself.
Because the real Queen of Cups is not a costume.
She is emotional intelligence.
Self-awareness.
Compassion with boundaries.
Depth earned through experience.
Intuition grounded in reality.
The ability to remain emotionally present without drowning in performance, fantasy, projection, or manipulation.
And that kind of energy cannot be sustainably imitated long term because it is not built from appearance.
It is built from integration.
Eventually the nervous system tells the truth.
The relationships tell the truth.
The patterns tell the truth.
Some people want to be awake without being willing to open their eyes.
Because awakening sounds beautiful in theory — until it requires accountability.
Until it asks people to confront their patterns.
Their wounds.
Their projections.
Their contradictions.
Their ego.
Their avoidance.
Their dishonesty.
Their coping mechanisms.
Their shadow.
Real consciousness is not just feeling spiritually inspired.
It’s being willing to see clearly.
And sometimes clarity is uncomfortable.
Sometimes awakening means realizing you have hurt people.
Sometimes it means grieving illusions you wanted to hold onto.
Sometimes it means recognizing that the identity you carefully constructed is not fully aligned with who you truly are underneath it.
That is why embodiment matters so much.
Because true awareness is not performative.
It changes the way a person lives.
Remembering
And honestly, I don’t even know if I would call it an awakening anymore.
For me, it feels more like remembering.
Sometimes it happens doing the most mundane things — driving on the highway, washing dishes, watering plants, cooking dinner, running trails, sitting quietly with music playing in the background.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing performative.
No audience.
No altered state necessary.
Just moments where the separation softens and I can feel the deeper connection and flow underneath everything again.
And maybe that’s part of embodiment too.
Real spirituality is not always found in grand declarations, ceremonies, aesthetics, or curated identities. Sometimes it’s found in ordinary life. In presence. In awareness. In the quiet ability to feel connected while fully inside your humanity instead of trying to transcend it.
Not escaping life.
Entering it more fully.
Maybe that’s why true wisdom often becomes quieter over time. Less about appearing awakened and more about learning how to live consciously, honestly, compassionately, and authentically in the smallest moments of everyday existence.
The pain is supposed to teach you something.
The discomfort is supposed to deepen you.
The work is supposed to free you.
Eventually the nervous system tells the story.
The patterns tell the story.
The relationships tell the story.
The consistency tells the story.
The fruit always reveals the garden.
And to be clear — I don’t believe I own spirituality, healing, or any of these concepts. None of us do. Human beings have been searching for meaning, healing, sovereignty, and connection for centuries. We all borrow language, wisdom, inspiration, and insight from each other along the way.
But spirituality without embodiment can become performance. And words without lived experience eventually lose their weight.
Because ultimately, enlightenment is not something you perform.
It is something you practice.
My daughter called me from college the other day and we ended up talking about boys, relationships, and heartbreak. She had just gone through a breakup and was feeling a little down, and afterward it really got me thinking about the deeper patterns underneath the people we choose and why we choose them.
When I was eight years old, I told my stepdad I wanted to learn how to swim. So he picked me up and threw me into six feet of water.
Was it terrifying? Absolutely.
But he stayed there watching me the whole time. If I truly needed him, he would have stepped in. Still, he understood something important: at some point I had to stop standing safely at the edge and learn how to trust myself in the water.
I think about that story often when I think about relationships, healing, and emotional growth.
Because in many ways, relationships eventually pull all of us into deeper emotional water. At first, attraction and chemistry can make things feel effortless. But over time, relationships begin asking much more of us. They ask us to communicate honestly, regulate our emotions, navigate conflict, vulnerability, disappointment, attachment, intimacy, accountability, and trust.
And eventually, no matter how much someone loves us, no one can swim for us emotionally.
That is where so many relationships begin to struggle.
A lot of people think relationships fail because the feelings disappeared. But often the feelings are still there. What breaks down is the ability to emotionally function together in a healthy, sustainable way.
At the core of many failed relationships is emotional misalignment.
Not necessarily lack of love.
Not necessarily lack of attraction.
But misalignment in how two people communicate, attach, regulate emotions, handle conflict, express needs, give and receive love, or grow over time.
One person may seek closeness while the other withdraws. One may need clarity while the other avoids difficult conversations. One may value emotional consistency while the other thrives on unpredictability. Over time, those differences create chronic emotional friction.
And ironically, many people mistake emotional activation for compatibility.
Attraction and chemistry are not just emotional experiences — they are also biochemical activations happening inside the brain and nervous system. Dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, serotonin, cortisol, and norepinephrine all influence attraction, attachment, excitement, anticipation, and emotional bonding.
The fascinating part is that the brain does not always distinguish between what is emotionally healthy and what is emotionally familiar.
Sometimes intense chemistry is actually the nervous system recognizing familiar emotional patterns, inconsistency, longing, or attachment dynamics we have experienced before. What people interpret as “sparks” can sometimes be anxiety, emotional activation, or unresolved conditioning rather than true compatibility or long-term alignment.
One of the hardest things about relationships is realizing that feelings can be real and still not be enough to sustain a healthy partnership.
In healthy relationships, that initial activation naturally settles over time. The nervous system calms. The intensity softens. Ideally, what replaces it is something deeper: emotional safety, trust, consistency, friendship, mutual care, emotional intimacy, and secure attachment.
But in unstable or on-again-off-again relationships, the activation can keep reigniting because unpredictability itself stimulates the nervous system. The breakup creates pain and withdrawal. The reunion creates relief and emotional reward. And the cycle itself can become addictive.
The feelings are often very real.
But what repeatedly fails is usually not the chemistry. It is the emotional foundation underneath it.
Sometimes it is emotional immaturity. Lack of compromise. Lack of accountability. Inability to communicate honestly. Inability to regulate emotions. Or the inability to truly consider the other person’s feelings instead of operating only from one’s own wants, fears, wounds, or impulses.
That’s why some couples can love each other deeply and still continue hurting each other in the exact same ways over and over again.
Because chemistry creates activation.
But healthy relationships require emotional skills.
Emotional Safety and Compatibility
Safe relationships feel very different than emotionally activating ones.
Safe relationships feel calm. Consistent. Honest. Emotionally available. Considerate. Mutual. Secure. There is space for vulnerability without punishment. Conflict can happen without emotional destruction. Both people feel seen, respected, emotionally cared for, and psychologically safe enough to be fully themselves.
To someone used to chaos, inconsistency, emotional unavailability, or anxious attachment, healthy love can initially feel unfamiliar — even boring — because the nervous system is no longer operating in survival mode.
But over time, emotional safety creates something far more valuable than intensity:
peace.
And that leads to something even deeper: emotional alignment.
Emotional alignment is not about two people being identical. It is about two people being emotionally capable of meeting each other in ways that create safety, trust, reciprocity, and long-term stability.
It is the ability to communicate honestly. To care about each other’s emotional experience, not just one’s own. To repair after conflict instead of avoiding it or escalating it. To compromise. To listen. To regulate emotions instead of weaponizing them. To remain emotionally present even during difficult conversations.
Emotionally aligned couples are not conflict-free. They simply move through conflict differently. They create enough emotional safety and mutual respect to move through challenges without destroying one another in the process.
There is mutual consideration. Mutual accountability. Mutual effort. Both people understand that relationships are not sustained by chemistry alone, but by emotional maturity, consistency, respect, and the willingness to grow together rather than against each other.
Without emotional alignment, relationships often become exhausting. One person chases while the other withdraws. One overfunctions while the other underfunctions. One self-reflects while the other deflects. Over time, love begins carrying the weight of unresolved emotional patterns it was never designed to hold.
And perhaps one of the clearest signs you are emotionally compatible with someone is how your nervous system feels around them over time.
You feel emotionally safe instead of emotionally confused. You do not constantly question where you stand. You can communicate honestly without fear of punishment, manipulation, withdrawal, or volatility. Both people care about understanding, not just being right.
There is consistency between words and actions. Emotional repair happens after conflict. Boundaries are respected. Vulnerability is not weaponized. Both people feel emotionally responsible not only for themselves, but also for how they impact one another.
And while attraction and chemistry may still exist, the relationship gradually feels less like emotional survival and more like emotional partnership.
That kind of love feels steady.
Grounded.
Safe enough for both people to keep growing.
We have all heard the saying:
“Beauty is as beauty does.”
But what does that really mean?
Looks fade. Bodies change. Chemistry fluctuates. Life humbles all of us eventually.
Physical attraction absolutely matters, especially in the beginning. It is often what initially draws people together. But over time, the brain adapts to familiarity. The intense dopamine-driven activation that accompanies new attraction begins to settle, and what remains underneath becomes far more important.
Because eventually relationships stop surviving on novelty alone.
What begins to matter more is how someone treats you when life gets difficult. How they communicate. How safe you feel with them emotionally. Whether they are emotionally available, accountable, considerate, self-aware, and capable of growth.
You can be deeply attracted to someone physically and still be emotionally incompatible with them.
And over time, unresolved emotional immaturity, inconsistency, selfishness, avoidance, dishonesty, volatility, or lack of empathy can slowly erode attraction itself. The nervous system begins associating the relationship with stress instead of safety.
On the other hand, emotional safety, trust, mutual respect, emotional intimacy, consistency, and genuine partnership often deepen attraction over time in ways that physical chemistry alone cannot sustain.
Because while attraction may spark a relationship…
Character is what ultimately determines whether love can survive real life.
Childhood Conditioning, Attachment, and Rescue Dynamics
And so much of this begins long before we ever start dating.
The relationships we witness as children shape us more than we realize. We learn about love, conflict, safety, communication, boundaries, affection, inconsistency, abandonment, and trust by watching the adults around us. We absorb emotional patterns long before we consciously understand them.
Some people grow up learning that love feels safe, steady, and emotionally available. Others grow up learning that love feels unpredictable, conditional, emotionally distant, chaotic, or something that must constantly be earned. Without realizing it, many people spend years recreating familiar emotional dynamics because the nervous system often mistakes familiarity for safety.
That is where patterns begin.
Some people repeatedly choose emotionally unavailable partners. Others are drawn toward anxious dynamics, inconsistency, intensity, or relationships where they feel they must constantly prove their worth. Sometimes we think if we just love harder, stay longer, communicate better, become more desirable, or help heal someone enough, the relationship will finally become what we hoped it could be.
To someone who wants to be saved, it can feel like safety. Relief. Finally being chosen, protected, understood, rescued from loneliness, pain, fear, instability, or themselves.
To someone trying to save another person, it can feel like purpose. Love. Devotion. Being needed. Being important. Being the one person who can finally reach them, heal them, or help them become who they are capable of being.
But what is it really?
Sometimes it is trauma bonding. Sometimes it is attachment. Sometimes it is codependency. Sometimes it is unhealed wounds searching for resolution through another person.
Because real love does not require one person to abandon themselves in order to carry the emotional weight of another.
I don’t really believe in saving people. I believe in helping people save themselves. Giving them space, offering support when asked, maintaining healthy boundaries, and allowing them the dignity of choosing their own healing and growth.
Still, some people desperately want to be saved, while others feel deeply compelled to rescue. And so many relationships are unconsciously built inside of those dynamics.
Many people never stop to examine why they choose the partners they choose. They repeat the same emotional patterns, the same wounds, the same instability, just wearing different faces. Sometimes we are drawn to people who mirror old conditioning, unresolved pain, familiar chaos, or unmet emotional needs without even realizing it.
And sometimes, instead of slowing down long enough to truly heal, people move quickly from relationship to relationship trying to soothe wounds they have never fully faced. They seek validation, distraction, chemistry, intensity, or temporary comfort, but still find themselves repeating the same painful cycles over and over again.
The faces change, but the emotional dynamics often stay the same.
Breaking the Loop and Taking Accountability
One of the most interesting emotional dynamics in relationships is the difference between choosing to leave and being left — even when both people already know the relationship is struggling.
You can fully recognize that a relationship is unhealthy, incompatible, emotionally exhausting, or no longer working… and still feel devastated when the other person ends it first.
Because being broken up with often activates something much deeper than the relationship itself:
rejection,
abandonment wounds,
loss of control,
wounded self-worth,
grief,
ego,
attachment,
fear of being unwanted,
or the collapse of future possibilities we had emotionally attached ourselves to.
And that is why heartbreak can feel so different depending on which side of the ending we are standing on.
What happens when you finally break the loop?
At first, it often feels uncomfortable.
Not because the relationship was healthy, but because the nervous system had become conditioned to the cycle itself. The longing. The anticipation. The inconsistency. The emotional highs and lows. The temporary relief after reconnection.
Breaking the loop interrupts that conditioning.
And for a while, the silence can feel louder than the chaos ever did.
But over time, something important begins to happen.
The nervous system recalibrates.
The emotional fog starts lifting. Clarity returns. Energy that was once consumed by emotional survival becomes available again for self-awareness, peace, stability, healthier relationships, and personal growth.
Another deeply human experience is how painful it can feel when someone else moves on before we do — especially after an emotionally intense relationship.
Because another person moving on can activate comparison, rejection, wounded self-worth, abandonment fears, grief, unresolved attachment, and the painful feeling that we were emotionally more invested than they were.
And sometimes what hurts most is not losing the person — it is losing the possibility, the hope, the fantasy, or the future we imagined around them.
One of the most painful questions people ask themselves after ending a relationship is:
“Did I make the wrong decision?”
“Should I have tried harder?”
And the truth is, those questions can arise even when ending the relationship was absolutely the right decision.
Because grief does not automatically mean the relationship was healthy.
Missing someone does not automatically mean they were right for us.
And discomfort after separation does not necessarily mean we should return to what hurt us.
In emotionally unhealthy or unstable dynamics, those questions are often amplified by attachment wounds, intermittent reinforcement, loneliness, fear of starting over, nervous system conditioning, or unresolved emotional dependency.
But even in healthier dynamics, questioning ourselves after a breakup can still happen because emotionally mature people tend to self-reflect.
The difference is that emotionally healthy reflection eventually leads toward clarity, while unhealthy attachment loops keep people trapped in rumination and emotional bargaining.
Another important part of healing is learning how to take honest accountability without collapsing into shame.
It is very easy after heartbreak to place all of the blame onto the other person. Sometimes they truly did behave selfishly, avoidantly, dishonestly, immaturely, or hurtfully. But healing becomes much deeper when we are also willing to examine our own patterns honestly.
Not to punish ourselves.
Not to carry all of the blame.
But to become more conscious.
Because every relationship dynamic is co-created to some degree. Even when one person caused more harm, we still benefit from asking ourselves:
What did I ignore?
What did I tolerate?
Where did I abandon myself?
Where did fear override my boundaries?
What patterns did I contribute to without fully realizing it?
Growth begins when we stop viewing ourselves only as victims of other people’s behavior and begin recognizing our own emotional participation in the dynamic.
That does not mean excusing mistreatment.
It does not mean accepting abuse.
And it does not mean carrying responsibility for another person’s unwillingness to grow.
It simply means understanding that self-awareness requires honesty.
Because if every failed relationship becomes entirely “their fault,” we often miss the opportunity to see the wounds, fears, attachment patterns, coping mechanisms, and emotional habits we may still need to heal within ourselves.
And that awareness is not weakness.
It is maturity.
Repeating the Same Patterns and Hoping for Different Outcomes
One of the hardest truths about relationships is that patterns do not change simply because the people miss each other.
A lot of couples break apart, reconnect, separate again, and convince themselves that this time things will somehow be different — even though neither person has truly done the deeper emotional work necessary to change the dynamic itself.
I remember watching my own daughter go through this with her high school boyfriend. They broke up and got back together more times than either of them could probably count. And every time they reunited, there was genuine love, hope, relief, and belief that this time would somehow be different.
But eventually the same emotional patterns resurfaced because the deeper work had not really changed yet.
And I think that is something so many people experience in relationships. Sometimes what keeps pulling us back is not only love — it is familiarity, attachment, hope, chemistry, unfinished emotional loops, and the belief that maybe this version of the relationship will finally become the one we always wanted it to be.
And for a while, reconnection can absolutely feel different.
There is relief.
Longing.
Hope.
Nostalgia.
Chemistry reignites.
People temporarily soften because they fear losing one another again.
But eventually, unresolved patterns almost always resurface.
Because relationships tend to return to the emotional level of awareness, healing, communication, and maturity that both people are actually capable of sustaining — not simply what they promise during moments of emotional intensity.
If the underlying wounds, attachment patterns, communication problems, emotional immaturity, avoidance, defensiveness, inconsistency, lack of accountability, or inability to regulate emotions remain unchanged, the relationship often falls back into the exact same cycle.
Different week.
Different argument.
Different trigger.
Same dynamic.
That is why people sometimes confuse reconciliation with healing.
But reconciliation without growth often just recreates the same pain with brief moments of temporary relief in between.
Real change usually requires both people to become deeply honest with themselves.
Not performative change.
Not panic-driven change after a breakup.
Not temporary behavior shifts fueled by fear of loss.
Actual self-awareness.
The kind that asks:
Why do I react this way?
Why do I shut down?
Why do I chase?
Why do I avoid vulnerability?
Why do I need control, validation, reassurance, distance, or emotional intensity in order to feel secure?
What wounds am I still operating from?
How do my behaviors impact the person I love?
Because insight without behavioral change rarely transforms relationships long term.
And sometimes the hardest thing to accept is this:
Love can be genuine and still not be enough to overcome unhealed patterns.
Two people can absolutely care deeply for one another and still continue retraumatizing each other if neither person develops the emotional awareness, accountability, communication skills, boundaries, and nervous system regulation required to create something healthier.
This is also why some people stay emotionally attached to potential instead of reality.
They fall in love with who the relationship could become if both people healed, communicated differently, became emotionally available, or finally aligned emotionally.
But potential is not the same thing as reality.
And sustainable relationships are built on what consistently exists in the present — not solely on what we hope might eventually happen someday.
Real healing changes patterns.
Not just promises.
Conscious Love and Learning to Swim
One of the greatest opportunities heartbreak gives us is the chance to become more conscious before we choose again.
Because healing is not just about getting over someone.
It is about understanding ourselves more deeply so we stop repeating the same painful patterns in different forms.
That is why self-awareness matters so much.
Not to become perfect.
But to become conscious.
To slow down long enough to ask:
Why am I drawn to this person?
How do I feel around them consistently?
Do I feel emotionally safe or emotionally activated?
Am I observing reality, or attaching to potential?
Are their words and actions aligned?
How do they handle conflict, accountability, boundaries, disappointment, stress, and emotional responsibility?
Because attraction alone tells us very little about long-term compatibility.
Character tells us far more.
One of the most important things we can learn is to stop confusing emotional intensity with emotional intimacy.
Intensity can feel powerful.
But intensity is not always safety.
It is not always compatibility.
It is not always love.
Healthy love usually feels steadier than that.
More grounded.
More reciprocal.
Less confusing.
Another important lesson is learning to pay attention to patterns instead of isolated moments.
Almost anyone can show up beautifully occasionally.
The real question is:
Who are they consistently?
And equally important:
Can we?
Because conscious relationships require both people to do the work.
The goal is not perfection. Every person has wounds, flaws, fears, and blind spots. The goal is willingness. Willingness to self-reflect. Willingness to communicate. Willingness to grow. Willingness to care not only about our own emotional experience, but about the emotional impact we have on the person we love.
Over time, healing teaches us something incredibly valuable:
Peace is not boring.
Consistency is not lack of passion.
Emotional safety is not weakness.
And relationships that do not constantly destabilize our nervous system often leave far more room for trust, intimacy, joy, creativity, friendship, and authentic connection to grow.
As a Buddhist, I also believe we are born to learn lessons through the people who enter our lives. Relationships can trigger our deepest wounds, but they also hold enormous potential for growth, awareness, compassion, and transformation.
Over time, I have learned to ask myself:
“Why is this happening for me?”
instead of
“Why is this happening to me?”
Because “Why is this happening to me?” often places us in a powerless position, as though life is simply acting upon us while we remain helpless underneath it.
But “Why is this happening for me?” shifts the experience entirely.
It returns agency, awareness, curiosity, and growth back into the experience.
Not because pain is pleasant. Not because heartbreak does not hurt. But because sometimes relationships are not punishments. Sometimes they are mirrors. Teachers. Invitations into deeper self-awareness.
Sometimes the people who trigger us most are revealing the very places within ourselves that still need healing, boundaries, honesty, accountability, or growth.
Eventually, life throws all of us into deeper water.
And that is when we discover whether we have actually learned how to swim.
The older I get, the more I realize that conscious relationships are not about finding someone to save us. They are about finding someone willing to meet us in the deep end — both people capable of staying emotionally present, honest, self-aware, and willing to grow.
Because love may bring us into the water.
But emotional maturity is what keeps us from drowning.
The most powerful skill I’ve learned over the years isn’t how to argue well or even how to solve problems quickly. It’s learning when to pause.
Every workplace, every relationship, and every leadership role eventually presents the same moment: someone becomes overwhelmed, emotions surge, and suddenly a small issue becomes a crisis.
At first it can feel confusing. You try to reason through the situation. You explain the facts. You attempt to calm the person down.
Eventually, though, something becomes clear.
The problem is often not the problem.
What you are actually witnessing is emotional dysregulation.
Emotional dysregulation occurs when someone becomes so overwhelmed by their feelings that their ability to process information rationally begins to shut down. The brain shifts into a stress response. Logic moves to the background while the nervous system takes over.
When that happens, the conversation stops being about facts and becomes about emotional survival.
Certain patterns begin to appear.
The tone escalates quickly. Small situations become catastrophes. Blame is directed outward. Clarification is interpreted as criticism. Facts are rejected because they do not align with the emotional narrative.
In those moments, the person is not really looking for a solution.
They are looking for relief from the emotional discomfort they are experiencing.
And very often they begin searching—consciously or unconsciously—for someone else to regulate those emotions for them.
Modern workplace research suggests these patterns are more common than many people realize. Surveys conducted by the American Psychological Association have found that nearly 60 percent of employees report experiencing significant stress at work, and many say they feel unprepared to navigate difficult interpersonal conflict.
Stress alone does not cause emotional dysregulation, but it often exposes the coping skills—or lack of coping skills—that people bring into challenging situations.
Seeing the Pattern
My understanding of this didn’t come only from textbooks.
I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and earlier in my career I worked in the mental health field with girls who had been removed from their homes and placed in DFS custody.
Those environments were anything but theoretical.
They were intense, emotionally charged, and sometimes dangerous. Situations unfolded in real time, often without warning.
Working with teenage girls already means navigating a stage of life filled with rapid emotional development and hormonal shifts. Adolescence is a time when identity and emotional regulation are still forming.
Add family trauma, abuse, and dysfunction to that already complicated developmental stage, and it often becomes the perfect storm.
Many of the girls we worked with were trying to process years of instability while still learning the most basic tools of emotional regulation. Their reactions were often big, immediate, and deeply connected to experiences that had shaped them long before they arrived in our care.
Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) helps explain why these patterns appear so frequently. According to the CDC, nearly two-thirds of adults report experiencing at least one significant adverse childhood experience, such as abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction. Individuals with multiple ACEs are significantly more likely to struggle with stress regulation, emotional reactivity, and interpersonal conflict later in life.
Later, during my master’s program—where I completed 36 hours of graduate-level coursework in criminal psychology—the work centered on a fundamental question: what causes one person to act destructively while another, often facing similar circumstances, chooses a different path?
Much of the study focused on patterns—family trauma, environmental influences, and the subconscious motivations that shape outward behavior.
What people say on the surface is rarely the entire story.
Behavior is often the visible expression of something happening underneath.
Once you begin to see those emotional currents, it becomes difficult to stop noticing them.
The Rescue Trap
There is a psychological framework often called the Drama Triangle, which describes a dynamic that appears in many conflicts.
It consists of three roles: the Victim, the Persecutor, and the Rescuer.
Someone who feels overwhelmed casts themselves as the victim. Someone else—often the person delivering information, naming a truth, or setting a boundary—quickly becomes the persecutor.
And then a third role appears: the rescuer.
The person expected to smooth things over. To soften the message. To repair the emotional fallout.
What often goes unnoticed is that the rescuer is frequently the same person who set the boundary in the first place.
You say what needs to be said.
The other person reacts.
And suddenly you find yourself managing their reaction—backtracking, clarifying, softening, or trying to calm the emotional wave that followed.
At first this can feel compassionate.
It feels like you are helping.
But over time it becomes exhausting.
Because when you repeatedly rescue someone from their emotional responses to boundaries, you unintentionally prevent them from learning how to regulate those responses themselves.
And eventually you come to a difficult realization.
You can speak honestly. You can set boundaries. You can offer care.
But you cannot be responsible for stabilizing every emotion that those truths awaken in someone else.
At some point compassion stops meaning “fix it” and starts meaning “allow them to feel what they feel.”
When the Rescue Stops
At one point I found myself caught squarely in the rescue trap.
I had an employee who I also considered a friend. In many ways she was an excellent worker. She was helpful, willing to work hard, reliable, funny, and engaging.
But emotionally, she was constantly in crisis.
Every day there seemed to be some new cliff she needed to be talked down from. Situations that most people would see as minor inconveniences quickly became full-blown emergencies in her mind.
At first, I tried to help.
I listened. I explained. I reassured.
Without realizing it, I had slowly become her emotional landing pad—the place where every frustration, fear, and grievance was unloaded.
Eventually I asked something different of her.
Instead of immediately validating the emotional reaction, I asked her to look at the situation rationally.
That moment created a choice.
She could pause and reconsider.
Or she could double down.
She doubled down.
The messages grew longer. More emotional. The accusations more dramatic. The narrative drifted further away from the reality of the situation.
So I stopped responding.
As the younger generation might say, I simply left her on read.
Not out of cruelty, but because continuing the exchange would have meant stepping back into the rescuer role.
The messages became more indignant. More defensive. More irrational.
When others tried to calmly explain the situation, she insisted she was being attacked.
At that point the pattern became unmistakable.
Some people, when given the space to reflect, eventually step back and see the situation more clearly.
Others cannot.
When Boundaries Are Misread
At one point she said something that revealed the dynamic more clearly than anything else.
“I thought you were my friend.”
For a moment I considered responding.
Part of me wanted to say that friends don’t treat each other the way she was treating me.
But I also knew something else.
That response would not lead to clarity.
It would lead to defensiveness.
The conversation would become a battle over who was right rather than an opportunity for reflection.
And I don’t do that.
So I left it alone.
I know what friendship looks like.
It includes respect, accountability, and the ability to hear difficult truths without turning them into personal attacks.
Someone who is deeply caught in emotional dysregulation rarely has the ability to hear that message in the moment anyway.
Trying to force the realization would only create more conflict.
So instead I did the thing that had become the central lesson of the entire experience.
I paused.
And I left her with her own words.
Where I Learned It
Part of the reason I eventually learned the value of the pause is because I grew up in an environment where it didn’t exist.
In my family, conflict was immediate and intense. If something was wrong, it was addressed right away. Voices were raised. Emotions ran high. Harsh words were sometimes exchanged.
Eventually there would be resolution.
But usually only after the emotional storm had already passed.
Once everyone cooled down, apologies were often made and the situation would seem settled. At least until the next disagreement surfaced and the old argument found its way back into the conversation again.
Nothing was ever truly let go.
Psychologists sometimes refer to this pattern as grievance collecting or scorekeeping. Instead of conflicts being repaired and released, they remain stored away—ready to reappear during the next moment of tension.
Over time, this kind of environment can teach people that confrontation must always be intense in order to be honest.
But what makes this interesting is that I did not grow up learning emotional regulation.
I learned it later.
Psychologists studying resilience have found something hopeful: roughly one-third of people raised in high-conflict or unstable environments consciously develop healthier coping and communication patterns as adults.
In other words, people are not doomed to repeat the emotional patterns they grew up with.
Some people repeat them.
Others learn from them.
Over time I began to notice the patterns around me. I saw how quickly conflicts escalated when emotions took control and how much unnecessary damage those moments could cause.
So I began teaching myself something different.
To pause.
Emotional Regulation on the Field
Later in life, I saw another version of these lessons while coaching young girls in cheerleading.
Some of them joined because they imagined cheerleading as the world they saw from the outside—cute skirts, bright smiles, and the idea of being one of the popular girls. I understood that perspective. I had been a cheerleader myself in high school and made varsity my sophomore year.
But they learned quickly that a cheerleader is much more than the skirt she wears.
Cheerleading is a physical sport. Flyers and back spotters lift and support one another, and in many moments one athlete is literally placing her safety in the hands of another.
Before every stunt there has to be communication.
“Ready?” “5, 6, 7, 8.”
That rhythm isn’t just about starting a routine.
It’s about synchronization.
Everyone has to move together. If one person is early or late, the stunt can collapse.
Because of that, the team had to learn emotional regulation just as much as physical coordination.
Conflicts happened—as they do with any group of young people. But the rule was simple: if something needed to be addressed, we handled it right there. It didn’t bleed into the next practice. It didn’t become hallway gossip or a topic of conversation weeks later.
We worked it out. We repaired it. And then we moved forward together.
I used to joke that my coaching style was somewhere between Mary Poppins and General Patton—firm expectations wrapped in encouragement.
Over time something beautiful happened.
The girls learned to communicate clearly, rotate leadership roles, and lift one another up—not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
And I’ll admit, even now I get a little misty-eyed remembering those moments when they walked out onto the field ahead of me.
I didn’t lead them.
They led the way.
I walked behind them.
A leader sometimes needs to stay behind the flock, letting the most nimble move forward while quietly guiding the direction. From the outside it may look as if the group is simply moving together, not realizing that someone steady is helping hold the path.
Watching those girls step onto the field—confident, focused, and ready—was one of the greatest moments of my teaching life.
Because what they were really learning out there wasn’t just cheerleading.
They were learning trust.
Communication.
Leadership.
And the discipline of pausing long enough to move forward together.
Even years later I still receive messages from former students that simply say:
“Thank you, Coach Steph.”
Those notes remind me that emotional regulation is not just a psychological concept.
It is a life skill.
Skills That Used to Be Taught
Recently I walked into a fast-food restaurant and stepped up to the counter.
The young woman behind the register simply stared at me.
No greeting. No “hello.” No “welcome in.” No “can I take your order.”
Just silence.
It struck me in that moment that we may be living in a different world.
People often joke that each generation is gradually losing manners, work ethic, and moral values. It’s easy to laugh about that idea, but the moment stayed with me because it reflected something deeper.
Many of the small skills that once helped people navigate daily interactions are simply no longer being taught.
How to greet someone.
How to make eye contact.
How to communicate clearly.
Even simple practical habits—like counting back change from a bill instead of just staring at the number on a register—are becoming less common.
It isn’t necessarily a lack of intelligence or ability.
More often, it’s a lack of training.
Work ethic, communication, emotional regulation—these are not traits people are born with. They are skills that used to be taught by families, schools, mentors, and early workplace experience.
When those lessons disappear, people enter adult environments without the tools needed to navigate stress, disagreement, or responsibility.
And when that happens, even small conflicts can escalate quickly.
Which makes something as simple as a pause even more important.
Because sometimes the difference between chaos and clarity isn’t intelligence or authority.
It’s whether someone in the room knows how to slow things down long enough for reason to return.
The Quiet Strength of Steadiness
Over time people begin to recognize steadiness.
When situations become tense—when emotions run high and something needs calm resolution—I often find that I am the person people turn to.
Not because I ask for that role.
But because calm is noticeable.
Organizations and teams tend to recognize people who can remain steady when others are overwhelmed. Those individuals are often entrusted with leadership not simply because of their technical ability, but because they bring stability into chaotic situations.
In my own work life, that steadiness has led to opportunities I am deeply proud of.
I was chosen to run the front of the house in my workplace—responsible not only for operations but for managing people, personalities, and pressure in real time.
I was also selected as a hole captain at a major PGA golf tournament, overseeing a team of seventeen people. Anyone who has worked around a major sporting event knows how quickly things can become stressful when the pace is fast and the expectations are high.
In those moments, what people need most is not someone who reacts.
They need someone who remains calm enough to think.
Leadership research increasingly confirms what experienced managers often observe: emotional regulation is one of the most important leadership skills a person can develop. Studies on emotional intelligence suggest that as many as 90 percent of top-performing leaders score high in emotional self-awareness and emotional regulation.
A steady presence slows the emotional momentum of a room.
It allows rational thinking to return.
Leadership is not about control.
It is about remaining grounded while others are overwhelmed.
And when people repeatedly trust you to hold that role, it becomes a quiet affirmation that the discipline of the pause matters.
The Lesson
Helping someone does not mean absorbing the full weight of their emotional reactions.
You can listen.
You can clarify.
You can offer solutions.
But emotional responsibility ultimately belongs to the person experiencing the reaction.
Sometimes people learn.
Sometimes they don’t.
And sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is step back and allow the moment to unfold.
Because between reaction and response there is a small space.
And in that space lives something incredibly powerful.
Clarity.
Choice.
And the quiet strength of the pause.
Quick Pickled Vegetables
In the kitchen, I’ve learned that not everything needs to be fixed immediately. Some things simply need a moment to settle.
Pickling is a lot like that.
The vegetables go in sharp and raw. The brine is bright and intense. But when you give it a little time, something changes. The edges soften. The flavors balance. What first felt harsh becomes something vibrant and alive.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is pause and let the moment transform itself.
Just like people, vegetables settle once the moment has had space to breathe.
Quick pickled vegetables add brightness and crunch to:
grain bowls and Buddha bowls
sandwiches and wraps
tacos or rice bowls
avocado toast
charcuterie or snack boards
salads needing a little acidic lift
They also make a beautiful garnish for soups and noodle dishes.
Ingredients
Scale
1 cup rice vinegar or apple cider vinegar
1 cup water
1 tablespoon sugar (optional but recommended for balance)
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1–2 cloves garlic, smashed
½ teaspoon mustard seeds
½ teaspoon black peppercorns
Vegetables (mix and match):
cucumbers, thinly sliced
carrots, shaved or cut into matchsticks
radishes, sliced
red onion, thinly sliced
bell peppers, thin strips
green beans
Instructions
Pack the vegetables into a clean jar.
In a small saucepan, combine the vinegar, water, sugar, salt, garlic, mustard seeds, and peppercorns. Bring just to a simmer until the salt and sugar dissolve.
Pour the warm brine over the vegetables until fully covered.
Let the jar sit on the counter for about 20–30 minutes to cool slightly, then place in the refrigerator.
The vegetables will be lightly pickled in about one hour, but they become even better if you let them sit overnight.
Notes
• Thin slicing is key for quick pickles. The thinner the vegetable, the faster it absorbs the brine. • These pickles keep well in the refrigerator for up to 2 weeks. • Feel free to experiment with spices—dill seeds, coriander, chili flakes, or fresh herbs can add wonderful variation. • The brine should taste slightly stronger than you expect; the vegetables will mellow the flavor as they absorb it.
Let’s just say I’m looking forward to a few weeks off from work.
Even when you love what you do, stepping away for a bit can be good medicine. Life moves quickly, and sometimes the only way to hear your own thoughts again is to step out of the current for a moment. A little quiet. A little space. Time to reflect.
Interestingly enough, the timing lines up with Mercury being in retrograde. Most people think of Mercury retrograde as a nuisance—lost emails, delayed flights, technology acting strange—but for some of us it works more internally. It slows the mind down and asks you to look again. Old conversations resurface. Patterns become clearer. Things that didn’t quite make sense the first time around sometimes reveal themselves more clearly the second time around.
My relationship with Mercury has always been an interesting one.
My own chart leans heavily toward Scorpio: Sun, Venus, and Mercury all sitting there in the same deep water—what astrologers call a stellium, when several planets gather in the same sign and amplify its influence. Scorpio energy has never been particularly afraid of shadow. It tends to look directly at the things most people would rather avoid, especially when it comes to relationships, emotional truth, and the psychological currents moving underneath everyday life.
With the Sun there, identity itself tends to be shaped by transformation and depth. With Mercury there, the mind naturally notices what lies beneath the surface. And with Venus in Scorpio, relationships are rarely casual experiences—they ask for honesty, emotional intensity, and the kind of understanding that only comes from being willing to look at the deeper layers of connection.
And with Mercury there in particular—the planet that governs the mind, perception, and communication—the instinct is often to notice the subtext of things. Not just what is said, but tone, symbolism, placement, and what might be left unsaid. Scorpio Mercury has a way of reading the emotional and psychological undercurrents beneath the surface.
There is also a certain power in that placement. Mercury rules communication, and when it moves through Scorpio the words themselves tend to carry weight. They’re rarely casual. They come from somewhere deeper, shaped by reflection, emotion, and lived experience. Scorpio Mercurys often have the ability to take experience—especially the difficult or transformative kind—and put it into words in a way that resonates with others.
Which is probably why Mercury retrograde tends to feel less like chaos to me and more like clarity.
Retrogrades slow everything down just enough that you can look again. Sometimes what you see the second time around is the difference between the work itself and the way people respond to it.
When someone writes from lived experience—especially experience that involved pain, healing, and genuine inner work—the words carry more than their surface meaning. They are the residue of the process that produced them.
Anyone who has done real inner work knows what I mean.
It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t performative. Sometimes you bleed a little on the page. Sometimes you cry while writing. Sometimes you go to places inside yourself that you would have preferred to avoid but know you can’t if you want to come out whole.
When I finally wrote about that kind of experience, the symbols I used—fire, rebirth, the goddess—weren’t aesthetic choices. They were shorthand for transformation.
And this is where something interesting sometimes happens.
People encounter those symbols and respond to them. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes creatively. That kind of response can actually be lovely. In fact, it can be deeply moving to see your words echo somewhere else—to realize that something you wrote meant enough to someone that it stirred something in their heart and mind.
But context matters.
Symbols that come from sacred or deeply personal work carry a certain gravity. When those same symbols are placed right alongside something impulsive, crude, or lacking in awareness, the contrast becomes revealing.
The sacred and the sensual are not mutually exclusive. In fact, throughout history they have often been intertwined. When held with knowledge, growth, and spiritual awareness, the union of the two can be profoundly transformative—something closer to the tantric understanding of embodiment, where physical experience and spiritual insight deepen one another rather than compete.
It was a somewhat crude awakening, but revealing to see the disparity of the two placed side by side—imagery drawn from transformation and reflection sitting next to something far more impulsive and instinctual in nature. Without restraint, discretion, or reflection, instinctual urges lose their depth and collapse into something careless. What could have been meaningful becomes empty, often leaving the people involved with the quiet feeling that something essential is missing.
And sometimes, with a little distance, you begin to notice something else as well. You start to see the difference between where you were coming from and where someone else might still be in their own process.
You notice patterns—not as judgment, but simply as observation. Different levels of reflection. Different stages of awareness.
And it can make you pause and wonder what exactly resonated with them in the first place.
Was it the meaning?
Or was it the glimpse of a kind of embodiment they may still be learning how to grow into themselves?
Because sometimes people are drawn to the energy of transformation before they are ready for the work that makes it real—the discipline, the reflection, the commitment that real change asks of us.
And that is part of the human journey too.
That realization used to make me angry. Lately, it simply makes me clear.
Because once you’ve done the work—once you’ve sat with the shadow long enough to understand it—no one else’s use of the language can actually cheapen what you experienced.
They can borrow the words.
They can echo the imagery.
They can place something sacred next to something crude and not even notice the difference.
But they cannot replicate the transformation that gave those symbols their meaning in the first place.
That work belongs to the person who lived it.
Finally, sometimes hearing another person’s truth can be difficult—not because it is meant as an attack, but because it touches something uncomfortable. In those moments, the reaction often says more about what the words revealed than about the words themselves.
You may still feel a little disappointed when you realize that not everyone is ready or willing to do that work for themselves. And if someone needs a little of your wisdom along the way, you can offer it. But that realization doesn’t have to require a response.
It doesn’t have to become a back-and-forth, and it certainly doesn’t have to turn into a competition over meaning.
You simply keep showing up and doing the work. Because this life is the path—the place where we learn, grow, and slowly awaken.
Sometimes, the posts just write themselves…the words come spilling out faster than my hands can type.
This is one of those moments.
There are moments in life when you think you’re circling back…only to realize you’ve arrived somewhere entirely new.
Today was supposed to be simple.
I was going to return to my old gym—part of this health and healing chapter I’ve been gently stepping back into. It’s been years since I’ve walked through those doors, and something in me felt ready.
But when I got there… everything had changed.
New systems. New rules. Two apps just to open the door.
And standing there, phone in hand, I felt it—that quiet inner nudge:
This isn’t your place anymore.
And here’s the thing—
that little voice is always there.
But we don’t always stop long enough to hear it.
I could have just as easily turned around, gone home frustrated, and called it a wash.
That would have been the easy reaction. The automatic one.
But instead… I paused.
And in that pause, something else had space to speak.
I remembered my friend Monica mentioning a detox yoga studio right across the road. So I drove over—not with a plan, just with a willingness to do something different.
And there she was.
Katie.
Ten years ago, we met through yoga at church—two women searching, stretching, asking deeper questions about healing and life. We built something meaningful back then.
Our classes were taught by our mutual friend Dede Schreiner—a pastor’s wife—who had this quiet, powerful way of holding space for people to simply be who they were. No judgment. Just love.
Katie and I both felt that.
And even back then, we spoke about wanting to embody that same presence…
that same kind of love.
The three of us even hosted a small health symposium together—
I screened Forks Over Knives, and Katie brought her Pampered Chef tools. With Dede holding the space, we stood side by side, creating recipes from my kitchen through her lens—food, healing, and community all in one room.
Katie, Dede, MeMe speaking to a group at Morning Star Church
And this morning… Katie walked out of that studio, locking the door after a class she was now teaching.
And it was like meeting both the same woman—and someone entirely new.
We stood there and talked for nearly an hour.
Her path has deepened. You could feel it.
Not in what she said—but in how she was.
Grounded. Open. Transformed.
And in that moment, it felt full circle.
Because now… she’s the one holding that space.
And I realized something even more beautiful:
Sometimes we don’t reconnect to relive the past…we reconnect to witness each other’s becoming.
So here I am.
Not going back to the old gym.
But stepping into something new.
And later today, I am so grateful to say, I’ll be taking her class! Crazy, eh?
A warm vinyasa. Gentle. Intentional. Exactly what my body—and my back—needs.
Because lately, I’ve been feeling the Fire Horse.
The drive. The passion. The go, go, go.
I love my job. I truly do.
But I can also see how easy it would be to burn myself out—working days on end, pouring from a cup that doesn’t always get the chance to refill.
And with dark moon Lilith in Virgo right now… don’t even get me started.
Because if you really understand that energy, you know this isn’t about chaos or rebellion for the sake of it. This is about the body. The quiet knowing. The moment when something simply doesn’t feel right—and you finally listen.
Lilith is that untamed voice inside of us. The one that doesn’t negotiate. The one that says, no… this isn’t aligned, even when everything on the outside looks like it should be.
And Virgo?
Virgo brings it down into the physical. Into the nervous system. Into the daily rituals and routines we either honor… or override.
It’s the difference between pushing through… and paying attention.
It’s realizing that burnout doesn’t happen all at once—it happens in the small moments when we ignore what our body is trying to tell us.
The tension.
The fatigue.
The resistance.
That moment standing outside the gym today—that was it.
I could’ve forced it.
I could’ve figured out the apps, pushed through, followed the plan.
But something in me said no.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just clearly.
And instead of overriding it… I listened.
That’s Lilith in Virgo.
Not destruction—
discernment.
Not rebellion—
realignment.
It’s choosing what actually nourishes you, even when it means changing direction.
Even when it means letting go of what used to work.
Even when it doesn’t make sense on paper.
Because the body doesn’t lie.
And if we’re willing to pause long enough to hear it…
it will always lead us somewhere better.
And that’s where the Chariot comes in.
The Chariot doesn’t move forward with one force alone.
It’s pulled by two energies—two harnesses—often moving in different directions.
One pulls with fire.
The other with feeling.
One says go.
The other says ground.
And the real power…
is in learning how to hold both.
To guide them.
To bring them into alignment.
Meeting Katie today felt like stepping into that second harness.
The one that softens. That steadies. That restores.
Not instead of the fire—
but in devotion to it.
Because I don’t want to lose what I love by running it into the ground.
A plant-based reset, the stacking effect, and coming back to center
The other day I was at work when one of our clients came up to me and quietly asked if I was okay. My eyes were watering. My nose was running. I was in the middle of a full-blown histamine reaction, trying to hold it together and power through. She offered me an antihistamine. Within a short time, I felt noticeably better—and that’s when it clicked.
I had been down this road before. Just not for a while.
For some time now, my body had been trying to get my attention. I was dealing with constant bloating—after meals, after drinks, sometimes even after just a glass of water. It felt like my system was always in a state of overwhelm, like digestion had become more of a burden than a natural rhythm.
I can wake up one day a normal size 2 and go to bed feeling like a size 6. That’s how dramatic the bloating can be. It’s not about vanity—it’s about inflammation, pressure, and the uncomfortable reality of a gut that’s out of balance. For years, I treated it as an annoyance. Eventually, I realized it was information.
Looking back, the story makes more sense. There was a stretch of time when I was put on back-to-back antibiotics for recurring sinus infections. No one ever stopped to ask why I kept getting them—they just treated the symptoms. It wasn’t until later that I realized I had a dairy sensitivity that was triggering those infections in the first place.
By then, the antibiotics had already wiped out much of my beneficial gut bacteria, and my system was deeply out of balance. After that, I was put on an acid reducer, and between the two, my digestion never really had a chance to recover.
Treating Symptoms vs. Restoring Balance
In the conventional medical system, doctors are often working within very tight time constraints. Many appointments are only 10–15 minutes long, which doesn’t leave much room to explore deeper lifestyle factors, stress, diet, or gut health.
The system is largely built around diagnosing symptoms and prescribing treatments that can be implemented quickly, and in many cases that means pharmaceutical solutions.
There’s a place for that kind of care, especially in acute or emergency situations. But when it comes to chronic issues like bloating, fatigue, or mood imbalances, symptom-based treatment doesn’t always address the deeper cause.
In my own experience, one prescription often led to another, and the root imbalance was never really resolved until I began looking at my health from a more holistic, whole-body perspective.
When Bloating Gets Dismissed or Misdiagnosed
Chronic bloating is incredibly common, but it’s also one of the most dismissed digestive symptoms. Many people are told it’s just IBS, stress, hormones, or something they’ll have to live with. Others are put on acid blockers, elimination diets, or medications to manage the discomfort, without anyone really asking why the bloating started in the first place.
In some cases, people are even told they might be dealing with an autoimmune condition or a lifelong digestive disorder, when the real issue is simply an imbalanced gut. The microbiome may have been disrupted by antibiotics, stress, diet, or medications, and digestion just isn’t functioning the way it should.
Instead of looking at that root cause, the focus often stays on managing the symptoms. And when that happens, one treatment can lead to another, creating a cycle where the underlying imbalance never really gets resolved.
For me, the bloating wasn’t random. It was a signal. And once I started treating it that way—something to listen to instead of suppress—the path toward healing became much clearer.
The Stacking Effect
What I’ve come to understand is that gut imbalance rarely comes from just one thing. It’s usually a stacking effect—small imbalances that build on each other over time.
A food trigger causes inflammation.
That inflammation leads to recurring infections.
Those infections lead to antibiotics.
The antibiotics disrupt the gut bacteria.
Then come acid reducers to manage the new symptoms.
Digestion slows down.
Bloating begins.
Energy drops.
Mood shifts.
None of these steps are necessarily wrong on their own. Each one is meant to solve a problem. But when they’re layered on top of each other without ever addressing the root cause, the body can drift further and further out of balance.
That’s how many chronic digestive issues begin—not as one big event, but as a quiet accumulation of small disruptions over time.
Signs your gut may need support:
Frequent bloating
Brain fog
Fatigue after meals
Sugar cravings
Irregular digestion
Histamine Imbalance
Skin flare-ups
Mood swings or anxiety
Chronic sinus issues
Food sensitivities that seem to come out of nowhere
The Emotional Impact of Not Being Heard
There’s also an emotional side to all of this that doesn’t get talked about very often.
When you keep experiencing symptoms and no one can tell you why, it’s easy to start feeling like the problem is you. You’re told everything looks normal. Your labs are fine. You’re just stressed. Or aging. Or sensitive. Or hormonal.
Over time, that can create a quiet kind of anxiety. You begin to doubt your own body. You stop trusting your instincts. You wonder if you’re just being dramatic or difficult.
But the body doesn’t create symptoms for no reason. Discomfort is communication. Bloating, fatigue, mood swings—these are signals, not character flaws.
For me, the real turning point wasn’t just finding a protocol. It was realizing that my symptoms were trying to tell me something, and that it was okay to listen.
The Gut–Brain Connection
The digestive system isn’t just about food. It’s deeply connected to the brain, the nervous system, and our emotional world.
Scientists call this relationship the gut–brain axis—a two-way communication system between the digestive tract and the brain, connected through nerves, hormones, immune signals, and the microbiome itself.
About 90% of serotonin, one of our main mood-regulating neurotransmitters, is produced in the gut. Gut bacteria also influence dopamine and GABA, which help regulate motivation, pleasure, calmness, and stress response.
So when the gut is inflamed or imbalanced, it doesn’t just affect digestion. It can affect:
Mood
Anxiety levels
Energy
Mental clarity
Sleep
Emotional resilience
For me, the connection became obvious over time. When my gut was at its worst, I didn’t just feel bloated—I felt foggy, irritable, congested, and emotionally off-center. And when my digestion improved, my mood and clarity improved too.
The gut and the brain are always in conversation. The question is whether we’re listening.
The Many Factors That Shape Gut Health
One of the most important things I’ve learned as a holistic health practitioner is that gut health isn’t just about what’s on your plate. Diet matters, of course—but the gut responds to everything in your environment, your habits, your stress levels, and your daily rhythms.
The body is an interconnected system. What affects one part almost always affects another.
Chronic stress, for example, can slow digestion, alter stomach acid, and disrupt the natural rhythm of the intestines. When the nervous system is stuck in a constant “fight or flight” state, the body isn’t prioritizing digestion. Over time, that can contribute to bloating, constipation, reflux, or microbial imbalance.
Sleep plays a similar role. Poor or inconsistent sleep can increase inflammation, disrupt hormones, and even change the composition of gut bacteria. When the body doesn’t get proper rest, cravings for sugar and processed foods often increase, which can further aggravate the gut.
Medications can also influence the microbiome. Antibiotics and acid reducers are well known for this, but other common medications—like NSAIDs, steroids, or certain hormone therapies—can affect the gut lining, digestion, or microbial balance as well. These medications have their place, but they can become part of the stacking effect when used repeatedly without addressing the underlying cause.
Then there’s the modern environment itself. We’re exposed to pesticides, plastics, air pollution, and household chemicals every day. Many of these substances can influence gut bacteria, immune responses, and inflammation levels. It’s not something we can control completely, but it does reinforce the importance of supporting the body where we can.
Even lifestyle habits matter. Lack of movement can slow digestion and reduce microbial diversity. Dehydration can affect motility and the health of the gut lining. Hormonal shifts—especially during midlife—can change digestion, sensitivity to foods, and the balance of gut bacteria.
And perhaps one of the most overlooked factors is emotional health. The gut and brain are in constant communication. Long-term anxiety, unresolved stress, or emotional suppression can keep the nervous system in a heightened state, which directly impacts digestion. The gut doesn’t just process food—it processes life.
This is why holistic health matters. True healing rarely comes from one single change. It comes from looking at the full picture:
What you eat
How you sleep
How you manage stress
How you move your body
What you’re exposed to
How you feel emotionally
All of these pieces work together. And when even a few of them start to improve, the gut often follows.
Holistic health isn’t about perfection. It’s about awareness, balance, and making small, consistent choices that support the body as a whole.
The Role of Diet, Sugar, Alcohol, and Refined Oils
One of the things I’ve noticed in my own body is how sensitive it is to refined oils, excess sugar, and alcohol. When those start creeping back into my diet too regularly, my stomach usually lets me know pretty quickly.
Highly processed oils can promote inflammation and don’t offer anything to the beneficial bacteria in the gut. They contain no fiber, no polyphenols—nothing to actually feed the microbiome.
Refined sugars have a similar effect. They’re absorbed quickly into the bloodstream, causing spikes in blood sugar and insulin. Over time, that can contribute to inflammation, energy crashes, cravings, and imbalances in gut bacteria. Excess sugar can feed the wrong microbes, allowing them to overgrow while beneficial bacteria struggle to thrive.
Chronic inflammation and metabolic imbalance are also associated with many long-term health issues, including heart disease and certain types of cancer. Sugar alone doesn’t “cause” cancer, but diets high in refined sugar and ultra-processed foods can create an internal environment that promotes inflammation and cellular stress.
For me, reducing sugar, refined oils, and alcohol isn’t about strict rules. It’s about paying attention to how my body responds. When I eat in a way that supports my gut, my energy is steadier, my mood is calmer, and the bloating fades.
Processed Foods, Heavy Meat Diets, and Gut Imbalance
Another factor that can influence gut health is the overall composition of the modern diet—especially one high in processed foods and heavy in animal products.
The gut microbiome thrives on fiber-rich plant foods. Vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts, and seeds provide the prebiotic fibers and polyphenols that beneficial bacteria use as fuel. When the diet is rich in these foods, the microbiome tends to be more diverse and balanced.
But many modern diets are built around the opposite pattern:
Highly processed foods
Refined sugars and flours
Low fiber intake
Large amounts of red and processed meats
Processed foods are often stripped of fiber and nutrients, while being high in additives, refined oils, and sugars that can promote inflammation and microbial imbalance.
Heavy meat consumption—especially processed or charred meats—has been associated with shifts in gut bacteria toward more inflammatory strains. Diets high in animal protein and low in plant fiber may encourage bacteria that produce compounds linked to inflammation, while beneficial, fiber-loving bacteria begin to decline.
This doesn’t mean every person who eats meat will have gut issues, but the overall pattern matters. A diet that is low in fiber and high in processed or animal-heavy foods can create an internal environment where imbalance is more likely to develop.
As a vegan, I’ve found that focusing on whole, plant-based foods gives my gut the kind of fuel it actually thrives on. It’s less about labels and more about what the microbiome needs: fiber, diversity, and real, unprocessed nourishment.
Dairy and Digestive Conditions Like IBS and Crohn’s
For some people, dairy isn’t just a minor trigger—it can play a role in more persistent digestive issues, including conditions like IBS or inflammatory bowel diseases such as Crohn’s.
One of the most common reasons is lactose intolerance. Many adults naturally produce less lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose, the sugar found in milk. When lactose isn’t properly broken down, it ferments in the gut and can cause:
Gas
Bloating
Cramping
Diarrhea
These symptoms often overlap with what people experience in IBS.
But lactose isn’t the only concern. Some individuals react to the proteins in dairy, such as casein. In sensitive people, these proteins may contribute to inflammation, immune reactions, or digestive irritation.
In conditions like Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, the gut lining is already inflamed or compromised. While dairy isn’t the root cause of these diseases, it can act as a symptom trigger for some people. Many individuals with inflammatory bowel conditions report that dairy worsens:
Abdominal pain
Diarrhea
Bloating
Flare-ups
Because of this, doctors and dietitians sometimes recommend reducing or eliminating dairy during flare-ups or as part of an elimination diet to see if symptoms improve.
IBS is similar in that it’s often influenced by food triggers. Dairy is one of the most commonly reported ones, especially in people who are lactose intolerant or have a sensitive gut microbiome.
The important thing to remember is that these conditions are complex. Dairy doesn’t cause IBS or Crohn’s on its own, but for many people, it can be part of the stacking effect that aggravates symptoms and keeps the gut in a state of irritation.
That’s why personalized nutrition matters. Some people tolerate dairy just fine. Others feel dramatically better without it. The goal isn’t to follow rigid rules—it’s to pay attention to how your body responds and make adjustments accordingly.
How IgG Testing Can Reveal Food Sensitivities
One of the tools sometimes used in holistic and functional health is an IgG food sensitivity test. This type of test looks at how the immune system responds to certain foods and can help identify patterns of inflammation that might otherwise go unnoticed.
IgG stands for immunoglobulin G, a type of antibody produced by the immune system. When your body repeatedly reacts to a specific food, it may produce elevated IgG antibodies against that food. This doesn’t mean you have a true food allergy, but it can indicate a sensitivity or intolerance.
Food sensitivities are different from food allergies.
Food allergies involve IgE antibodies and can cause immediate, sometimes life-threatening reactions.
Food sensitivities are usually slower and more subtle. They may take hours or even days to show up.
Common symptoms of food sensitivities include:
Bloating
Fatigue
Brain fog
Joint pain
Headaches
Skin issues
Sinus congestion
Digestive discomfort
Because the reactions are delayed, it can be very hard to connect the symptom to the trigger food without some kind of guidance.
IgG testing can help by:
Identifying foods that may be creating an immune response
Highlighting patterns of low-grade inflammation
Providing a starting point for a structured elimination diet
It’s not meant to be a lifelong list of foods to avoid. Instead, it’s a temporary roadmap. Once the gut begins to heal and inflammation is reduced, many people are able to reintroduce some of those foods in moderation. Moderation being the keyword. I can tolerate wheat, but only in small doses.
Like most tools in holistic health, IgG testing isn’t about fear or restriction. It’s about awareness. It gives the body a chance to calm down, reduce inflammation, and restore balance so that food can become nourishing again instead of irritating.
Medications and the Stacking Effect
Another important piece of gut health that often gets overlooked is the impact of common medications. Many pharmaceuticals are necessary and even life-saving, but they can also influence digestion, the gut lining, and the microbiome.
Antibiotics are one of the biggest disruptors. They don’t just kill harmful bacteria—they also reduce beneficial strains and lower microbial diversity. Repeated courses can contribute to dysbiosis, SIBO, and digestive sensitivity.
Acid-reducing medications, like proton pump inhibitors and H2 blockers, change the natural pH of the digestive system. Stomach acid is meant to break down food and control bacteria. When it’s suppressed long term, it can lead to poor digestion, nutrient deficiencies, and bacterial overgrowth.
NSAIDs such as ibuprofen and naproxen can irritate the gut lining and increase intestinal permeability. Steroids, hormonal medications, and some antidepressants can also influence microbial balance, digestion, and inflammation.
None of these medications are inherently “bad.” They all have their place. But when they’re used repeatedly without addressing the underlying causes, they can become part of the stacking effect—small disruptions that build up over time and push the gut further out of balance.
From a holistic perspective, the goal isn’t to reject medicine. It’s to support the body alongside it—through whole foods, stress management, sleep, movement, and habits that help restore balance instead of just managing symptoms.
Nicotine and Gut Health
Another piece of the puzzle that often gets overlooked is nicotine. It’s usually talked about in terms of lungs or heart health, but it also has a real impact on the digestive system.
Nicotine is a stimulant that affects the nervous system, and because the gut is so closely connected to the brain, it changes how digestion functions. It can speed up intestinal contractions in some people, leading to urgency or loose stools, while in others it disrupts the natural rhythm of digestion and contributes to bloating and discomfort. Over time, this inconsistency can make it harder for the gut to maintain balance.
Nicotine can also affect the microbiome itself. Studies have shown that it may reduce beneficial bacteria and increase more inflammatory strains. A less diverse microbiome is associated with digestive issues, lowered immunity, and mood imbalances.
There’s also the inflammation factor. Nicotine stimulates stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. While it may feel calming in the moment, over time it keeps the body in a more stimulated, stress-oriented state. That can increase inflammation, irritate the gut lining, and worsen issues like reflux, bloating, and dysbiosis.
Because nicotine acts directly on the nervous system, it also influences the gut–brain axis. Short term, it can increase focus or suppress appetite. But long term, it can contribute to anxiety, sleep disruption, mood swings, and nervous system imbalance—all of which can affect digestion.
Like many things, nicotine becomes part of the stacking effect. It may not be the sole cause of gut issues, but when combined with stress, processed foods, alcohol, antibiotics, and environmental toxins, it can make it much harder for the body to find its natural balance.
Many people describe cigarettes as calming, but the effect isn’t as simple as it seems. Nicotine is actually a stimulant, and much of the “relaxation” smokers feel comes from relief of withdrawal. But there’s another piece to it: the breathing. Smoking forces you to pause, take slow, deep inhales, and exhale slowly—repeating that rhythm for several minutes.
That pattern closely mimics breathing exercises used to calm the nervous system. So part of what feels soothing about a cigarette may not be the nicotine at all, but the regulated breath and the ritualized pause it creates.
For anyone working on gut healing, it’s another factor worth paying attention to—not from a place of guilt or shame, but from a place of awareness. The body responds to everything we give it, and small changes in daily habits can make a meaningful difference over time.
Understanding FODMAPs
One of the things that surprises people on a gut-healing protocol is how many otherwise healthy foods can cause bloating. This is where the concept of FODMAPs comes in.
FODMAP is an acronym that describes a group of carbohydrates that can be difficult for some people to digest.
It stands for:
Fermentable
Oligosaccharides
Disaccharides
Monosaccharides
And
Polyols
These are types of short-chain sugars and fibers that are poorly absorbed in the small intestine. When they aren’t fully digested, they travel to the large intestine, where gut bacteria ferment them.
In a healthy gut, this fermentation is normal and even beneficial. It produces compounds that support colon health. But in people with gut imbalances—especially conditions like SIBO or IBS—these carbohydrates can ferment too early or too aggressively, leading to:
Gas
Bloating
Abdominal pressure
Digestive discomfort
Brain fog in some cases
Many high-FODMAP foods are actually very nutritious, including:
Onions and garlic
Beans and lentils
Apples and pears
Wheat-based products
Certain nuts and sweeteners
So the goal of a low-FODMAP approach isn’t to avoid these foods forever. It’s usually a temporary strategy to:
Reduce fermentation
Calm inflammation
Give the gut time to heal
Gradually reintroduce foods as tolerance improves
FODMAPs aren’t “bad” foods. They’re simply foods that can be harder to digest when the gut is out of balance.
Gluten, Wheat, and Food Sensitivities
Another important piece of my own journey has been learning my personal food triggers. One of the biggest for me is wheat and gluten. It doesn’t mean I have celiac disease, but it does mean my body doesn’t tolerate it well.
Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition where gluten causes damage to the small intestine. It requires strict, lifelong avoidance.
Gluten sensitivity is different. There’s no autoimmune damage, and tests may come back normal, but symptoms are very real—bloating, brain fog, fatigue, and mood changes.
For me, wheat is one of my biggest triggers. When I eat it, the bloating returns and my digestion slows down. It’s not about fear or labels. It’s about listening to what my body is telling me.
Back-to-Basics Gut Reset Habits
Eat mostly whole, plant-based foods
Drink enough water
Get 7–9 hours of sleep
Move your body daily
Reduce refined sugar and processed foods
Pay attention to personal food triggers
Take time to breathe and regulate your nervous system
What a Holistic Health Practitioner Really Does
As a holistic health practitioner, I’ve learned that health is about much more than just diet and exercise. Those are important, but they’re only part of the picture.
A holistic approach looks at the whole person, including:
Nutrition and digestion
Stress and emotional health
Sleep quality
Hormonal balance
Movement
Environmental exposures
Daily habits and relationships
All of these systems influence one another. A holistic practitioner doesn’t replace a medical doctor. Instead, we focus on identifying imbalances and helping the body restore balance through nutrition, lifestyle changes, stress management, and gut-supportive protocols.
The goal is to ask deeper questions:
What led to these symptoms?
What systems are out of balance?
What does the body need to heal?
Why I Return to the SIBO Protocol
So every so often, I return to a SIBO protocol. It’s strict, and it’s not always the most exciting way to eat. But it’s necessary.
SIBO stands for Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth.
In a healthy digestive system, most bacteria live in the large intestine, where they help break down fiber and produce beneficial compounds that support gut health. The small intestine, on the other hand, is meant to have relatively low levels of bacteria because its primary job is nutrient absorption.
With SIBO, bacteria that normally belong in the large intestine begin to overgrow in the small intestine. When that happens, they start fermenting food too early in the digestive process.
This can lead to symptoms like:
Bloating (sometimes severe)
Gas and pressure
Abdominal discomfort
Brain fog
Fatigue after meals
Constipation or diarrhea
Food sensitivities that seem to appear suddenly
Because the bacteria are fermenting carbohydrates in the wrong place, even healthy foods—like vegetables, legumes, or whole grains—can trigger bloating and discomfort.
SIBO isn’t just about “bad bacteria.” It’s about bacteria being in the wrong location and out of balance.
The goal of a SIBO protocol isn’t to eliminate all bacteria. It’s to reduce overgrowth, restore proper balance, support digestion, and help the small intestine function the way it was designed to.
The protocol I follow comes from Dr. Stephen Cabral, who I studied under while earning my holistic health certification. Like everything he teaches, it takes a deeply holistic, step-by-step approach—using herbs, supportive nutrients, and beneficial bacteria to restore balance.
It’s not about punishment or restriction (although cooking without onion or garlic for a month feels like cooking with one hand behind your back). It’s about creating the right environment for healing.
Each time I do it, I’m reminded that my body is always communicating with me. And when I listen, things start to come back into balance. Aside from stomach discomfort, another—and possibly the most telling—sign for me was my histamine levels.
How bacterial overgrowth affects histamine
Histamine is a natural chemical involved in:
Immune responses
Digestion
Nervous system signaling
Your body both produces histamine and breaks it down. Most of that breakdown happens in the gut.
When the gut is balanced, histamine levels are usually well-regulated. But when there’s bacterial overgrowth or dysbiosis, a few things can happen.
1. Some gut bacteria produce histamine
Certain strains of bacteria are histamine-producing. When they overgrow, they can:
Convert amino acids into histamine
Increase the overall histamine load in the gut
Contribute to symptoms after eating
This is especially common in:
SIBO
Dysbiosis
Post-antibiotic gut imbalance
2. Gut inflammation reduces histamine breakdown
The gut produces an enzyme called DAO (diamine oxidase), which helps break down histamine from food.
Histamine and other inflammatory compounds enter the bloodstream more easily
The immune system becomes more reactive
This can lead to:
Heightened sensitivities
Allergy-like symptoms
Systemic inflammation
Common histamine-related symptoms
When histamine builds up due to gut issues, people may experience:
Flushing
Itchy skin or hives
Headaches
Sinus congestion
Anxiety or irritability
Rapid heart rate
Digestive discomfort
Food reactions that seem unpredictable
The big picture
In many cases, histamine intolerance isn’t just about the foods themselves. It’s about:
Bacterial overgrowth
Gut inflammation
Reduced DAO activity
Microbiome imbalance
That’s why some people notice that:
They react to more and more foods
Low-histamine diets only help temporarily
Symptoms improve when the gut is treated
For many people, the root issue isn’t histamine—it’s the gut.
When:
Bacterial overgrowth is reduced
The gut lining is supported
The microbiome becomes more balanced
Histamine reactions often improve as a side effect.
What I Eat on the Protocol
My meals become very simple:
Plant proteins: tofu or tempeh
Low-fermentation vegetables: zucchini, carrots, spinach, peppers, green beans
Easy starches: white rice, quinoa, small portions of potatoes
Flavor: ginger, herbs, lemon
Cooking methods: steaming, roasting, or sautéing in broth
Clean, warm, grounding food that gives the digestive system a break.
A Quick Note on Vegan Protein
One of the first things people ask when they find out I’m vegan is, “Where do you get your protein?”
Most people only need about 10–15% of their daily calories from protein. To estimate your needs, take your average daily calories, multiply by 10–15%, then divide by 4.
For me, at about 1,800 calories per day, that equals 45–68 grams of protein daily. Breakfast alone usually has about 24 grams—and it is just my first meal of the day.
Back to Basics, Back to Balance
We’re trying to be healthy in an environment that often makes it incredibly difficult. Fast food, ultra-processed products, chronic stress, and thousands of daily chemical exposures have slowly pulled us away from the way our bodies were designed to live and eat. It’s not a personal failure—it’s the reality of the modern world.
But that’s exactly why it becomes so important to return to the basics. Simple, whole foods. Regular movement. Real rest. Clean water. Honest self-awareness.
The body isn’t asking for perfection. It’s asking for consistency and care. When we strip away the noise and come back to what truly nourishes us, health becomes less complicated and more intuitive.
Sometimes the wisest thing we can do is the simplest: feed ourselves well, listen closely, and treat our bodies like the home we have to live in for the rest of our lives.
This is the kind of meal I come back to when I want something comforting, colorful, and deeply satisfying, but still gentle on my digestion. Roasted sweet potatoes add natural sweetness, tofu provides steady plant protein, and fresh leafy greens and cucumber keep everything light and balanced. The tahini drizzle ties it all together with a creamy, nutty finish.
(This post reflects my personal experience and training as a holistic health practitioner. It is not meant to diagnose, treat, or replace medical care. If you’re experiencing persistent symptoms, it’s important to work with a qualified healthcare provider).
Years ago, I was fortunate enough to spend some time in Newport, Rhode Island, and I fell completely in love with the place. I can’t wait to go back someday. As a foodie, of course, my first mission was to find the very best clam chowder I could. So at every restaurant I visited, I ordered a bowl.
The clear winner was from a restaurant called the Black Pearl. Their chowder had the perfect balance of creaminess, texture, and flavor—something I’ve never forgotten.
Now that I’m vegan, I steer clear of seafood, but my love for clam chowder has never faded. And I don’t think I’m the only one. The most-viewed recipe on my blog, with nearly 7,000 views, is my vegan lobster bisque made with lobster mushrooms. That’s when it occurred to me—it might be time to try my hand at a vegan version of clam chowder.
Part of the reason I love creating plant-based versions of old favorites is because it lets me keep the memories without taking anything from the ocean that gave them to me in the first place.
The sea has always felt like something sacred—wide, mysterious, and alive—and these days I’d rather celebrate its flavors than deplete its creatures. If a bowl of chowder made with mushrooms and a pinch of dulse can capture that same coastal comfort, then to me, that feels like a small, delicious way of giving something back.
This recipe uses oyster mushrooms in place of clams and is seasoned with dulse flakes for that subtle taste of the sea. I promise—you’ll be in chow-dah heaven.
A creamy, coastal-inspired chowder made with tender oyster mushrooms, potatoes, and a silky cashew cream. Comforting, nostalgic, and completely plant-based.
Ingredients
Scale
Chowder
1 yellow onion, diced
2 stalks celery, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
6 oz oyster mushrooms, small dice
3 small russet potatoes, small dice
Leaves from 10 sprigs fresh thyme
4 cups vegetable stock
2 Tbsp dulse flakes
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp white miso paste (optional, for depth)
1–2 tsp lemon juice (to finish)
Fresh parsley, chopped (optional garnish)
Cashew Cream
1 cup raw cashews
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp sea salt
Dash white pepper
1 cup water
1 tsp lemon juice or apple cider vinegar
Instructions
1. Make the cashew cream Add cashews, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, white pepper, lemon juice, and water to a high-speed blender. Blend until completely smooth. Set aside.
2. Sauté the mushrooms Warm a Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the diced oyster mushrooms and sauté dry or with a splash of stock until lightly browned, about 5–6 minutes. Add a small splash of tamari or soy sauce (about ½ tsp) and cook 30 seconds more. Remove mushrooms and set aside.
3. Build the base In the same pot, add 2 Tbsp vegetable stock, onions, and celery. Sauté until onions are translucent, about 7–8 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Season lightly with a pinch of salt.
4. Simmer the chowder Return mushrooms to the pot. Add potatoes, thyme, vegetable stock, dulse flakes, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and miso (if using).
Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 15–20 minutes, until potatoes are tender.
5. Thicken naturally(optional but recommended) Mash about ½ cup of the potatoes directly in the pot to create a thicker, chowder-like body.
6. Finish with cream Stir in the cashew cream. Add lemon juice and taste for seasoning. Adjust salt and pepper as needed.
7. Serve Ladle into bowls and top with fresh parsley if desired. Serve with croutons or oyster crackers.
Notes
Chef Steph Tips
For a more traditional New England profile, skip the dill and keep the thyme and parsley.
For extra ocean depth, a tiny pinch of Old Bay works beautifully.
The chowder thickens as it sits—add a splash of stock when reheating.
If you’re parenting in this era, you’re parenting against something we were never trained for: an always-on world. A world where your child can be reached, influenced, evaluated, and emotionally impacted at any hour—without ever leaving their room. Social media changed childhood, and the nervous system is still catching up.
This post is about what constant online pressure does to kids, what happens when trauma gets stuck in the body, and why healing often isn’t about thinking your way through—it’s about learning how to feel safe again.
A few years ago, I went to hear Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg, PhD speak—aka “Aunt Peggy.” She’s a specialist in anxiety and depression, and she’s also my good friend Amy’s aunt. I remember thinking it would just be an informative night—one of those “let me learn something and go home” kind of talks.
But what she spoke about stayed with me: how social media and smartphones are impacting kids, not just socially, but psychologically—how it can amplify anxiety in a nervous system that’s still learning what safety even feels like.
Then she mentioned something I’ve never forgotten. She talked about Monitoring the Future, a long-term national measurement that’s been tracking adolescent outcomes since 1975, including things like dropout rates, teen pregnancy, substance use, and mental health trends like anxiety. https://monitoringthefuture.org
And she said that for decades, the needle on anxiety barely moved.
Until around 2010.
That’s when it spiked—by something like 40%—right around the time social media became a normal part of daily life for kids.
I’ve also been reading The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, and it puts language and numbers to what so many parents have felt in their bones. He describes this shift as a “great rewiring” of childhood—from play-based to phone-based—and connects it to the sharp rise in youth anxiety and depression since 2010.
In that same window of time, rates of self-harm for young girls nearly tripled, and suicide rates for young adolescents increased by 167% from 2010 to 2021. (The Anxious Generation)
Haidt also points out something important: these effects aren’t always the same for everyone. In the book, he describes how social media tends to harm girls more through social comparison, perfectionism, and social pressure—fueling anxiety and depression—while boys are more likely to withdraw into virtual worlds, isolating themselves through gaming and online escapism. (The Anxious Generation)
And I need to say this part too, because it’s honest: I live with the regret that I gave my kids screens too soon.
I didn’t understand what we were dealing with. Most of us didn’t. We were told it was the future. We were told it was normal. We were told it was how the world worked now.
And when everyone around you is doing the same thing, it doesn’t feel like a decision with consequences… it just feels like parenting in the modern world.
But the truth is, we’re learning as we go.
And what’s wild is that even the people who helped build this world were cautious about it. Steve Jobs famously restricted his own children’s access to smartphones and tablets because he was worried about screen addiction, social skill development, and mental health.
That trend—tech leaders limiting their own kids’ exposure—wasn’t random. It reflected a desire to protect developing brains from addictive algorithms and constant stimulation.
When I Realized It Wasn’t Just “Teen Stuff”
Jason, my son, had a rough time online when he was thirteen. He got tangled up with people on the internet, and it turned into bullying.
What hit his nervous system wasn’t just what was happening online—it was what happened because of it.
The police showed up at our door.
It got serious enough that an adult called the police to check on him because they were worried he might hurt himself.
They were called out of concern, not punishment.
But when you’re a kid, your nervous system doesn’t understand nuance.
It only understands fear.
It only understands shame.
It only understands: something is happening and I’m not in control.
Looking back, I can see why it landed so hard. Because the online world kids live in now isn’t one our nervous systems were designed for—and sometimes it follows them into real life in the most terrifying ways.
And here’s the part I want to say out loud, because I know other parents might be carrying it too: I had no idea this was happening. I didn’t know how quickly it could turn, or how deeply it could get into a developing nervous system.
I had parental controls set. I monitored what games he downloaded and what apps he could access. I was paying attention. But where there’s a will, there’s a way—and kids can always find loopholes we didn’t even know existed.
I thought I was doing what most parents do—making sure he was home, making sure he was okay, relying on parental controls on his device, trusting that “quiet” meant everything was fine.
And I missed it.
The World Our Nervous Systems Didn’t Evolve For
Here’s another thing I can’t stop thinking about: it’s not normal for the human nervous system to have this much information, this much access, and this many people in our mental space who aren’t actually in our physical presence.
We were built for real-life proximity.
For tone. For facial expression. For context. For repair. For the natural limits of a day. For the boundaries of a neighborhood.
But online, those limits disappear.
Now you can be exposed to hundreds of opinions, hundreds of interactions, and hundreds of little hits of rejection or approval without ever leaving your room. People can make fake accounts. They can move sideways. They can watch without being seen.
They can say things behind a screen they would never say face-to-face. And when you’re still developing, your nervous system can’t always tell the difference between a real threat and a social threat.
It just registers it as danger.
Psychologically, it creates dissonance.
Because you’re living in two realities at once: what’s happening in your actual life, and what’s being said about you in a digital one. And that split alone can overload the system.
Social media is also private in a way most adults didn’t grow up with. A lot of what happens there is invisible. And because it’s invisible, kids will hold things in.
And even with parental controls on their accounts, kids can still find surreptitious ways around them. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re curious, because they’re social, and because the internet is built to pull them in.
So even the best controls in the world can’t replace something more powerful:
real connection, real check-ins, and paying attention to subtle shifts.
If you notice your child acting differently—withdrawn, irritable, unusually quiet, suddenly emotional, not sleeping, not eating, snapping more than normal—ask.
Even if you asked yesterday. Even if you asked this morning. Ask again.
It’s not just my kids. This is showing up in kids everywhere, in ways we didn’t grow up with. It’s not just happening in our home—this is a real part of parenting now. And so many of us are learning in real time what constant online pressure does to a developing nervous system.
If you’re a parent reading this and nodding quietly, I see you.
It’s so important to stay on top of it, because the truth is… it’s easy to miss. I’m guilty of it too. They’re on their phone doing their thing, the house is quiet, everything looks fine, and quiet can feel like peace.
But sometimes quiet is just what’s happening on the surface.
Underneath, something can be building.
Boundaries Aren’t Punishment, They’re Protection
And while I’m talking about kids here, I also want to say this: I have felt my own anxiety around social media.
I got off Facebook, even though that’s where most of my family and close friends share content. Around election time, I got off entirely. I miss seeing my memories and checking in with folks every now and again—but I also know what it does to my nervous system when I stay on too long.
On my Chefsteph Instagram page, I removed 7,500 people and narrowed it down to people I actually know, or at the furthest, friends of friends. I go offline to rest and restore. I recently made my account private because boundaries are important to me.
And I’m done accepting fake accounts or people coming at me sideways. If someone can’t show up honestly, I’m not accepting them.
Not just for my sake—who is this person, really, and why are they showing up behind a fake account?—but as a matter of principle.
Because I want to practice what I preach and teach my kids that we don’t invite unclear energy into our lives just because it knocks.
I’ve also started thinking about boundaries differently—not as punishment, but as nervous-system protection. A simple rule like two hours of screen time per day can make room for something kids desperately need:
their own life.
Because when the phone goes down, something else has to come up.
Reading a book
Going to the library
Family time
Puzzles (this one is so underrated)
Chores
Cooking
Going outside
Moving their body
Sitting in the same room together without everyone disappearing into a screen
Some way to find connection aside from the phone.
And honestly… sometimes it’s just being bored.
Boredom leads to creativity.
And we are not bored enough anymore. We want to fill every empty moment. But the brain reads all those scrolls and swipes as dopamine hits—tiny rewards that keep us reaching for more.
Over time, it can start rewiring the brain’s pathways, making real life feel dull, making quiet feel uncomfortable, making a normal day feel like it’s missing something.
And that alone can feed anxiety and depression.
And I think about all of this a lot, because I didn’t just hear it in a lecture.
I’ve watched it show up in my own home.
When Trauma Gets Stuck in the Body
My wish is that the person who was worried would’ve contacted me first and let me handle it privately with my son. I understand why they did what they did. I don’t question the concern.
I just wish the first step had been a conversation—because once the police are involved, a kid’s nervous system doesn’t file it under “help.” It files it under fear.
Here’s the part that breaks my heart as his mom:
Five years later… he’s still processing it. Afraid that any little thing he does is going to get him in trouble with the law.
He’s still running the loop.
And he’s not doing it because he’s dramatic. He’s doing it because his nervous system never finished that moment. So he keeps circling it from every angle, trying to settle it with reassurance.
He’s tried to find answers from people who feel like safety—police officers, attorneys, his parents, his therapist, his friends.
And it works… for a while.
Because talking through it can calm the mind. It can bring logic back online. It can make the story feel organized. It can give you the sense that you’re back in control.
But reassurance has a short shelf life when the pain is still lodged in the body.
Eventually, it rises again.
And that’s how you know the trauma isn’t resolved.
It’s just being managed.
Trauma Doesn’t Stay in One Place
This is what trauma does as you grow older when it isn’t fully processed:
It generalizes.
It stops being “that one thing that happened” and starts becoming the lens you see life through.
It can show up as:
Anxiety that doesn’t make sense on paper
Hypervigilance
Irritability
Shutdown
Trouble trusting people
Fear of being in trouble, even when you’ve done nothing wrong
The feeling that you have to prove you’re good
The constant question underneath everything: am I safe now?
And when you can’t get the feeling of safety to stick, you start reaching for substitutes.
Sometimes we don’t run to what’s healthy. We run to what’s familiar.
And familiar can feel like safety—not because it actually is, but because your body already knows the pattern.
Your nervous system hears “familiar” and thinks:
I know this terrain. I know the rules here. I’ve survived this before.
Even if it’s messy. Even if it isn’t good for you. Even if it keeps you stuck.
So familiar people can become a kind of nervous-system medication. They soothe you. They calm you down. They make the panic soften for a minute.
But they can also keep the loop running because they offer temporary relief without requiring the deeper thing:
feeling it all the way through.
The Hardest Part to Explain
The hardest part to explain is that it isn’t something you can think your way through.
You can understand the story intellectually and still have your body respond like you’re back in it.
Healing often means going back—not to relive it, but to finally process what never got processed in real time. It can be uncomfortable and it can be scary, but in the right setting, with the right people, it can be deeply therapeutic.
Because when those feelings finally move through, the nervous system gets the message it missed the first time:
you’re safe now.
Trauma Is Like a Splinter
I tried to explain it to my son like this:
Trauma is like getting a splinter.
At first, it hurts and you know it’s there. But digging it out hurts more, so you avoid it. You leave it alone. And eventually, it calluses over.
Sometimes the pain goes numb. Or you get used to it. It becomes part of your normal, and you stop questioning it.
You start to think: this is just who I am now. This is just how life feels.
But the truth is, it never fully heals if the splinter is still inside.
Healing means digging through the layers, feeling what you didn’t get to feel back then, and finally getting it out.
Because until it comes out, it will keep finding ways to hurt.
You Have to Feel It Through
Until he can go back to that day—not just in memory, but emotionally—and actually feel what his thirteen-year-old self felt…
he’ll keep circling it.
He’ll keep looking for safety in other people’s words. He’ll keep trying to talk it away. He’ll keep trying to logic his way out of something his body is still holding.
And I say this with so much love:
You can’t think your way into feeling safe. You have to feel your way there.
Why This Matters Right Now
Jason leaves for the Navy soon, and it matters to me more than I can even explain that he makes peace with this before he sails off.
Not because I think he’s broken. Not because he can’t handle hard things.
But because I want him to have a fresh start.
I want him to go into the world with a nervous system that knows how to come back to center. I want him to see the world through the eyes of safety and emotional regulation—not through the lens of “I’m in trouble,” “I’m not safe,” or “I’m about to get blindsided.”
The Navy is structure. It’s pressure. It’s new environments and new people and new intensity.
And I want him to meet all of that from a place inside himself that feels steady.
Not braced. Not waiting for the next hit. Just grounded.
Because when you make peace with what happened, you stop living inside it.
And you finally get to live from who you are now.
What I’m Doing Next: Somatic Therapy
This is why I’m working to find him a therapist who works with somatic release—somatic therapy.
Because I don’t think he needs more people helping him figure it out.
I think he needs help letting his body finally release what it’s been holding for five years.
Somatic therapy is different from only talking through the story.
A somatic therapist will still listen, of course—but the focus is on what’s happening inside your body while you’re talking.
Where do you feel it? What changes when you bring it up? Does your chest tighten? Does your stomach drop? Does your jaw clench?
Because trauma isn’t just a memory.
It’s survival energy that got stuck in place.
And the goal isn’t to relive it. The goal is to help the nervous system complete what it never got to complete—so the body can finally understand:
that was then. this is now. you’re safe.
Somatic work can look like noticing sensations, grounding, breathing, learning how to stay present in small pieces, and letting the body discharge what it couldn’t release back then—shaking, tears, deep exhales, warmth moving through the chest… all the things we’ve been taught to suppress.
Not dramatic. Not forced. Just real.
Because that loop of anxiety and reassurance-seeking isn’t weakness.
It’s a body that still believes it’s in danger.
And you don’t talk a body into safety.
You teach it.
Another Tool That Can Help: Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
His therapist diagnosed him with PTSD, and that diagnosis actually helped me make sense of the “loop” he’s been stuck in. Because PTSD doesn’t always look like what people think it looks like.
Sometimes it looks like overthinking.
Replaying.
Reassurance-seeking.
Hypervigilance.
Avoidance.
Shutting down.
Trying to control the outcome before anything bad can happen again.
One evidence-based therapy that’s often used to treat PTSD is Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). CPT is a structured, 12-session form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) designed specifically to help people process trauma by identifying and challenging the beliefs that formed in the aftermath of it.
In other words: CPT helps you find the “stuck points.”
Those beliefs that get written into the nervous system like truth:
I’m not safe. I can’t trust people. If I’m not in control, something bad will happen. Something is wrong with me. I don’t deserve peace. I’m going to get blindsided again.
CPT helps people notice those beliefs, challenge them, and replace them with something truer and more stable. It’s not about pretending the trauma didn’t happen. It’s about updating the brain and body so they stop living like it’s still happening.
CPT also works through five core themes that trauma often damages:
Safety Trust Control Esteem Intimacy
And when you think about it, those five themes are exactly what gets distorted when a kid is scared, overwhelmed, and powerless in a moment they don’t understand.
This is why I’m taking his healing seriously now, before he leaves for the Navy.
Because I want him to walk into adulthood without carrying that day like a shadow behind him. I want him to be able to trust himself. Trust his instincts. Regulate his emotions. And live from a place that feels safe in his body.
Not just for his future.
For his peace.
If You Want a Place to Start
And if you’re reading this and you recognize your own child in any of these patterns, I want you to know you’re not alone. There are real, evidence-based ways to manage anxiety and trauma, and it’s never, ever too late to start healing.
If you want resources you can hold in your hands, I recommend three that are highly rated, easy to understand, and truly effective:
Some of my earliest food memories live alongside music. Some of my fondest food memories are tied to Shakedown Street.
Lot food. Real food.
Veggie burritos wrapped in foil and eaten wherever you landed. Coolers cracked open. Paper plates balanced on knees.
Food made by people feeding each other because that’s what the moment required.
This was vegan food for me before I had language for it.
Plant-based eating before it was curated, branded, or explained.
Food born of conscience, necessity, and community.
That way of eating shaped me as much as the music did.
Months ago, I made a grown-up version of what I once called my Garcia grilled cheese—an echo of those early influences, translated through time.
Sourdough ligthly toasted and brushed with black truffle oil.
Garden pesto piled high.
Heirloom tomatoes layered in.
Vegan feta melted until it was creamy and unapologetic.
Warm, nourishing in every way.
A simple thing, elevated, but still rooted in the same impulse: feed people well, because that’s what the moment asks for.
It came together the same way the lot food always did—intuitively, without performance.
Indulgent and grounding at the same time. A reminder that nourishment doesn’t have to be austere to be honest.
That grilled cheese was about presence. About pleasure without apology. About feeding the moment you’re standing in.
This Bobby Bowl is what I carry forward—a small offering, made while listening to Bobby and the boys.
It’s lighter. Cleaner. More alive.
It honors California food as I’ve always understood it—sun-fed, mineral, honest.
Greens that still taste like the earth.
Sprouts that are actively growing.
A bowl meant to be eaten barefoot, windows open, early light coming in.
This recipe isn’t about nostalgia.
It’s about continuity.
Because what we were being fed wasn’t only food.
The Harmony That Held Us
The last time I saw Bobby was at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2024. It felt like coming home again—not to a place, but to a unifying frequency.
To an extended family bound by vision and a shared knowing that the world is alive with meaning, layered and shimmering, far more mysterious than we’re taught to believe.
I assumed there would be another show. Another tour. Another next time.
You don’t realize you’re standing inside a last moment. You just think you’ll see them again.
That weekend felt like a reunion in the truest sense.
Friends came in from all over the country—people I’d been bound to for decades, not because of proximity or nostalgia, but because of what the music represented.
We picked up right where we left off.
Because when a bond is formed around shared vision instead of circumstance, it doesn’t erode. It doesn’t require maintenance.
It simply is.
In 1990, my freshman year at Mizzou, there was a group of us who all landed on the Dead at the same time.
Looking back now, it feels less like something we discovered and more like something we were led toward.
It became everything we did—listening to music, hanging out, going to shows, and slowly learning how to look at the world through a different lens.
What started as music became a way of seeing.
A shared orientation.
A quiet agreement that there was more going on here than we’d been told, and that paying attention mattered.
That orientation felt familiar even then—like an inheritance.
It echoed the generation before us, the people of the 1960s who challenged authority, questioned consensus reality, and cracked open the idea that consciousness itself could expand.
The music carried that lineage forward.
Not as nostalgia for a past we hadn’t lived, but as a continuation of the same inquiry—translated into our own moment.
Psychedelics certainly played a role in that widening of perception.
They weren’t an escape so much as an opening—a way of loosening the grip of what we’d been told was fixed or unquestionable.
Around the same time, I was reading Ken Kesey, discovering meditation, and finding others who were asking the same kinds of questions.
The music, the books, the inner work, the community—they braided together.
The Grateful Dead connected me to a sense of Godliness in a way no church ever could.
It wasn’t about doctrine or rules—it was about direct experience—a feeling, a subtle knowing and recognition, a connection to joy, love, and a humbled reminder of our shared humanity.
A hug, and an I love you, man.
An I dont know you, friend, but I love you.
Strangers hugging strangers.
Whatever you want to call it—each of us names it differently, but the understanding is the same thing: the Source, the flow, the other side, the way, it’s always there; it just gets buried.
Their music helped clear a path back to it, not by telling us what to believe, but by reminding us how to listen and how to see it’s shining light in one another.
What emerged wasn’t just a taste in music. It was a way of standing in the world.
A shared understanding that reality is layered, that authority can be interrogated, that lived experience matters.
And within that, I found like-minded people—and a place that felt more like home than any physical place ever had.
What that world gave me wasn’t fantasy. It was learning how to see with clear eyes.
Not from idealism. Not from anger. But from something deeper—almost universal.
A truth that didn’t need convincing or defending. Something that would stay with me for life.
The music taught me to think outside the box—not because boxes are bad, but because most of them are inherited without question. It taught me to pause, look again, listen harder.
To notice who benefits from the rules and who gets left out by them.
That kind of awareness doesn’t make you louder.
It makes you steadier.
Almost overnight, penny loafers became Birkenstocks. Argyle sweaters gave way to tie-dyes. Not as costume—never as costume—but as a shedding.
A declaration.
I never looked back because there was nothing honest to return to.
In the summer of 1991, my dad spent a few months in San Francisco. While he was there, he sent me a tie-dyed postcard from Haight-Ashbury.
By the time I saw the Grateful Dead live that fall—1991, at the Cleveland Coliseum—we’d already shared something that didn’t need explaining.
It was a cool connection to have with my father.
A quiet exchange, young and old, reminding each other what it’s all about.
The postcard had a quote from The Doors on it:
I awoke with the dawn, and put my boots on. I took a face from the ancient gallery and walked on down the hall.
The West is the best. See you in September.
Love, Dad.
It didn’t feel like advice. Or persuasion. Or a lesson.
It felt like recognition.
Like we were meeting each other in the same place from different points on the road.
Seeing the Dead live didn’t start anything. It confirmed what I already knew.
I wasn’t getting off that bus.
What About Bob?
There was something about Bob Weir that always felt steady.
Not flashy. Not transcendent in a way that left the body behind.
He stayed here. In the song. In the rhythm. In the long arc of the work.
He held the middle.
While others burned bright or fell away, Bobby kept showing up—barefoot, weathered, present. He didn’t abandon the experiment when it got hard or when time took its toll.
He kept walking it forward, letting the music age, letting himself age with it.
There was wisdom in that. A kind of faithfulness that didn’t need explaining.
What the Grateful Dead offered wasn’t escape.
It was orientation.
A way to stand inside uncertainty without needing to dominate it.
A way to listen—really listen—to each other, to the moment, to what was trying to emerge.
Bobby carried that forward long after many others were gone.
He kept the door open.
That’s why this loss feels different.
Not because the music stops—it doesn’t. But because one of the living anchors is gone.
And still, what he embodied remains.
In the songs. In the way we gather. In the way we feed each other.
In bowls of food passed across tables. In memories that don’t fade but deepen.
This recipe, this writing, this act of attention—it’s all part of that same lineage.
Not trying to hold on. Not trying to recreate. Just continuing.
Because nothing real is ever lost. It just changes form.
Memphis, 2003
In 2003, I saw Bobby at the New Daisy Theater in Memphis.
That night lives separately in my memory—clear, embodied, intact. He held the center of that room without effort. Barefoot. Sweet-eyed. Steady. He wasn’t trying to transcend life. He was fully in it.
Grounded. Present. Keeping the experiment human.
I was dancing—not watching, dancing—when someone asked if I wanted to meet him backstage.
Backstage wasn’t glamorous. It was quiet.
Human.
We stood together and took a picture.
Nothing ceremonial.
No performance.
Me and Bobby (2003)
At the time, it felt special, but not monumental.
But, somehow I knew.
It felt like alignment rather than novelty. Like something clicking into place without needing to be named.
The kind of moment that doesn’t announce itself— it simply settles in, and remained pure and grateful.
When the Anchors Are Gone
I took it extremely hard when Jerry Garcia died. That loss cracked something open in me. But Bobby was still here. And so was Phil, Mickey, and Bob.
The music kept breathing. The way of being—curious, awake, communal—still had living anchors in the world.
Now Bobby is gone. And Phil is gone.
And with them, something has completed itself.
Not just a band.
Not just an era.
But a way of being that shaped my inner life for decades.
There was simply nothing like it.
And it fucking hurts.
Not in a poetic way. Not in a way that wants to be softened.
It hurts because something real is over. Because what once felt endless is suddenly finite. Because this music didn’t just accompany my life—it helped form it.
When I heard Bobby had died, Brokedown Palace rose up immediately—not as a thought, but as a feeling. A trust in laying the road and the body down together.
In letting the burdens fall away. In being received by something vast enough to call us home.
The Grateful Dead didn’t give me answers. They gave me permission.
Permission to trust experience over approval. Permission to choose conscience over comfort. Permission to live awake, even when it put me on the fringe.
That’s what I mean when I say I never got off the bus.
His death unlocked memories.
When music shapes a very formative time in your life, it doesn’t live only in your ears—it embeds itself in your body, your identity, the way you learned how to see.
So when that music loses one of its living anchors, it isn’t just the person you grieve.
You grieve the version of yourself that was formed in that sound. The time, the openness, the becoming. A whole interior landscape comes back online at once.
That’s what this kind of loss does. It reminds you who you were when everything first cracked open—and that part of you still matters.
We didn’t know then that Bobby had been diagnosed with cancer back in July.
His fans weren’t told.
There was no announcement, no public reckoning with illness.
We only learned after his daughter shared news of his passing.
In typical Bobby fashion, he didn’t ask for sympathy or fuss.
He didn’t make a show of it.
He stepped back the same way he always did on stage—quietly, unassumingly, letting others—or the music itself—take the lead.
No performance. No explanation.
Just a gentle withdrawal into the life he had left.
That restraint was its own kind of generosity. A final act of grace.
What I Carry Forward
So I cook. I feed people. I stay awake.
This bowl—this food—is part of that devotion.
What I carry forward is compassion. Awareness. And the understanding that we are all just walking each other home.
I was reminded of that when I saw Ram Dass’s Instagram feed—a photograph of him and Bobby together.
Two men who understood, each in their own way, that presence matters more than performance.
That love doesn’t require volume.
That you don’t have to dominate a room to shape a life.
It didn’t feel surprising. It felt inevitable.
As if the thread had always been there—visible only to those paying attention.
Aside from his earliest days, I saw Bobby through every chapter his music lived in.
I didn’t follow out of nostalgia or loyalty to a band name—I kept showing up because the music kept meeting me where I was. It changed as I changed.
The music went on until I couldn’t anymore, not because it stopped mattering, but because time and life eventually ask different things of our bodies.
What he gave won’t end as long as the spirit remains. And the spirit doesn’t belong to one body or one lifetime—it moves through all of us.
There’s a thread that connects us, whether we name it or not, and Bobby’s music lived on that thread.
It met people where they were, softened what needed softening, and reminded us—again and again—to come back to the heart.
Now that Bobby has left the body, what he offered is still here. Not as a performer or personality, but as a presence.
It’s the quiet knowing that we are all walking each other home, carried by the same music, the same love, the same shared breath.
It just moved out of the room and into memory, into the way certain songs still land in my chest, into the quiet recognition that something meaningful walked alongside me for decades.
Now that he’s gone, the music lives on the way all real things do—carried by people, by feeling, by the unseen vibrations that keep moving long after the sound itself fades.
As Ripple says, “If I knew the way, I would take you home.” Maybe that’s what he was always doing—walking with us, song by song, until we remembered the way for ourselves.
This recipe is a small token—my way of giving back. I could never repay what the music gave me.
That gift is too large, too formative, too alive.
But I can pass it along. I can feed people. I can keep Bob’s memory moving through the world through my art, the way the music always moved through me.
A way of saying thank you—for the music, for the memories, for the long strange trip, and for the understanding that the end is never the end.
It’s a crossing. A release. A beginning that asks us to keep listening.
River gonna take me Sing me sweet and sleepy All the way back home
🌻
This is a raw vegan, living bowl. Nothing here should feel cooked down, muted, or overworked. If an ingredient looks tired, skip it.
Use the best produce you can find. When a dish is this simple, quality isn’t optional—it’s the point.
Greens should taste alive. If your dandelion greens are aggressive, use less. This bowl rewards restraint.
The dressing should almost disappear. If you can clearly identify “lemon” or “oil,” you’ve gone too far.
Toss the beans first. This grounds the bowl and keeps the greens from wilting.
Layer loosely. Scatter, don’t stack. This bowl needs air.
This bowl is meant to be eaten fresh. It does not travel well and does not want to be prepped hours in advance.
If you feel the urge to add heat or crunch, pause. Ask whether you’re improving the bowl or interrupting it.
Eat it barefoot if you can. Windows open. Light coming in.
The California Sunflower Bowl is a raw vegan, living bowl 🌱 🥣 with —fresh greens, sprouts, tender beans, and a barely-there dressing meant to feel like early morning light. It’s grounding without being heavy, expansive without excess. This is food that stays awake, food that keeps you in your body.
Ingredients
Scale
Living Greens
1½–2 cups watercress or pea shoots
½ cup dandelion greens, finely chopped (light hand)
Crunch & Color
½ cup red cabbage, shaved very thin
½ cup thinly sliced cucumber (English or Persian)
Living Add-Ins
½ cup sprouted sunflower seeds
¾–1 cup white beans (cannellini or navy), drained and rinsed (room temperature or gently warmed)
½ cup microgreens
1 ripe avocado, sliced
Nutritional yeast, just a touch.
Morning-Dew Sauce
3 Tbsp best olive oil
1½ Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
¼ tsp fine sea salt, or to taste
Optional: ½ tsp white miso or a few drops of maple syrup
Instructions
Toss the beans first with a small spoonful of the dressing to ground the bowl.
Layer greens loosely in a wide bowl. Do not compress.
Scatter cabbage, cucumber, sunflower sprouts, and microgreens.
Nestle in avocado slices.
Drizzle lightly with remaining dressing.
Finish with a soft dusting of nutritional yeast.
Stop before it feels finished. This bowl wants space.
I turned to Like Water for Chocolate after watching Chocolat.
Chocolate for chocolate.
The pairing wasn’t nostalgic; it was intuitive. The same substance appeared in two different worlds, doing two very different kinds of work.
Chocolate as a carrier of desire.
Chocolate as a revealer of appetite.
Chocolate as heat—sometimes held, sometimes allowed to run unchecked.
What differs between the two stories is not the intensity of feeling, but the container around it.
One asks what happens when desire is forbidden until it combusts.
The other asks what happens when desire is welcomed early enough to be held.
Only one survives.
Like Water for Chocolate: Desire Without Shelter
Based on the 1989 novel by Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate is a landmark work of magical realism—a genre that refuses to separate the emotional from the physical. In this world, feeling does not remain private.
It alters reality.
Tita De la Garza is born into a system that equates structure with sacrifice. As the youngest daughter, she is forbidden to marry and destined to care for her mother until death.
Love is not immoral—it is destabilizing.
Desire is not sinful—it is inconvenient.
What threatens the system must be contained or erased.
Cooking becomes Tita’s only sanctioned outlet.
Her emotions—grief, longing, erotic desire—have nowhere else to go, so they move through food. What cannot be spoken enters the body by other means.
The meals overwhelm not because they are excessive, but because the feeling behind them has been denied recognition.
This is not romance. It is pressure.
Psychologically, Like Water for Chocolate shows what happens when desire exists without permission, support, or relational structure.
There is no gradual expression, no mutual negotiation, no space for choice.
Feeling must either disappear or become absolute.
When desire is denied a container, it doesn’t resolve. It accumulates.
The story carries this logic all the way to its conclusion.
Love is finally consummated only when nothing else remains to be protected, and the fire that was denied containment consumes the house along with the lovers themselves.
The ending is beautiful, devastating, and terminal—not because love is dangerous, but because it was never allowed to live incrementally.
This is desire without shelter.
Fire with nowhere to rest.
Tita and the Language of Food
At the center of Like Water for Chocolate is Tita—a young woman whose inner life has no sanctioned outlet.
From birth, she is bound by an inherited rule that forbids her from marrying or forming a life of her own. Her role is predetermined: service, obedience, care without reciprocity.
Desire is not something she is allowed to explore, negotiate, or even name.
What Tita is allowed to do is cook.
And because everything else is denied expression, food becomes the only place her emotional life is permitted to exist.
In this story, the meals Tita prepares carry the exact emotional state she is in while making them.
When she is grieving, those who eat her food are overcome with sorrow.
When she is longing, desire ripples through the bodies of the diners.
When her heart breaks, the food induces illness, tears, and collapse.
This is not metaphor layered gently on top of realism. This is the logic of the world.
Feeling does not remain private. It moves outward.
Emotion is transmitted somatically, entering the bodies of others through taste, heat, and texture.
What Tita cannot say is still communicated—chemically, viscerally, involuntarily.
Food becomes the nervous system’s last available language.
The power of this device is not that Tita is magically gifted, but that she is psychologically trapped.
Her emotions overwhelm because they have been denied containment.
There is no place for desire to be held, so it spills into the one medium left open to her.
Her cooking is not expressive by choice.
It is expressive by necessity.
This is what makes Like Water for Chocolate so devastating.
The food does not cause chaos because emotion is dangerous.
It causes chaos because emotion has been exiled from every other relational space.
The body finds a way to speak when it is no longer allowed to be heard.
Chocolat: Desire With Witness
Chocolat tells a different story using the same language.
Vianne arrives in a rigid French village during Lent, opening a chocolate shop where restraint has been mistaken for virtue.
But she does not challenge the town through force or argument.
She listens.
Her chocolate is not expressive overflow; it is attunement.
Each offering is adjusted to the person receiving it—bitterness, sweetness, spice, texture.
Nothing is imposed.
Desire is neither forced underground nor allowed to dominate.
It is acknowledged early, while it can still be integrated.
This is the crucial difference.
Where Tita’s chocolate absorbs what cannot be spoken, Vianne’s chocolate reflects what has been denied attention.
Feeling is invited before it becomes crisis.
Pleasure is paired with care.
Appetite is not severed from responsibility.
Roux moves through the story as wind rather than anchor.
He does not promise permanence, nor does he demand it. Desire here is not framed as destiny or deprivation.
It is experienced, then allowed to remain fluid.
The village survives not because structure is destroyed, but because it loosens enough to breathe.
Chocolate, in this story, does not burn the house down.
It warms it.
The False Choice: Desire or Structure
These two films are often framed as opposites—passion versus restraint, indulgence versus order. But that reading misses the psychological truth beneath both stories.
Many people are taught—implicitly or explicitly—that they must choose between desire and structure.
That wanting threatens stability.
That safety requires suppression.
This is a false choice.
Desire itself is not the problem.
Wanting—physical, emotional, creative, erotic—is evidence of vitality.
What determines whether desire becomes destructive or connective is not its intensity, but the system’s ability to hold it.
In Like Water for Chocolate, desire is denied any container.
It is forbidden, unmanaged, forced underground. With no relational structure to support it, longing has nowhere to rest.
It leaks sideways. It accumulates pressure. Eventually, it erupts.
In Chocolat, desire is welcomed but witnessed.
Pleasure is paired with care.
Feeling is allowed to move early, while it can still be integrated.
Psychologically, this is the difference between intensity and intimacy.
Intensity without containment feels consuming, fated, destabilizing.
Intimacy with containment feels alive, grounded, sustainable.
Capacity Must Be Mutual
There is another truth both films quietly reveal.
This kind of desire—the kind that is alive but regulated—requires two people who both have the capacity to hold it.
One person cannot do this work alone. One nervous system cannot regulate for two.
When one person can stay present with desire and the other cannot, the fire burns unevenly.
One leans in while the other recoils, controls, or disappears.
What begins as connection becomes destabilizing—not because the desire was wrong, but because the capacity was mismatched.
You cannot have desire without the ability to handle it.
Fire itself is not dangerous.
Wildfire is.
Wildfire is not caused by too much heat, but by heat without boundaries, without stewardship.
Fire that has learned where it belongs warms, feeds, and transforms.
Fire that has not learned consumes indiscriminately.
This is the difference between passion that must be survived and passion that can be sustained.
The Difference That Determines the Ending
A final synthesis throughLike Water for ChocolateandChocolat
When everything is held together—the two women, and the man they love, and the cultures that shape what desire is allowed to be—the difference becomes unmistakable.
These are not competing loves. They are two fundamentally different structures of meaning, and structure determines outcome.
In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita’s life is organized almost entirely around Pedro.
Love is not one aspect of her existence; it is the only place where her existence is permitted to matter.
Because her autonomy is denied—choice, movement, authorship—love is forced to carry what a self cannot.
Pedro becomes the container for identity, purpose, and survival itself. This is not weakness; it is deprivation.
When love must hold the full weight of meaning, it cannot breathe.
It cannot evolve.
It can only endure until it breaks.
Desire, confined and postponed, turns inward and accumulates pressure.
When it finally releases, it does so as fire.
The man does not live through it. He is not punished—he is consumed.
Love arrives too late to be integrated, and so the story ends in tragedy.
In Chocolat, Vianne begins elsewhere.
She arrives with a life already in motion—work, appetite, values, community.
Love enters her world, but it does not replace it.
She does not need a man to complete her story; she chooses connection because it adds warmth, not because it supplies identity.
Desire here is acknowledged early enough to circulate, to be shared, to be held.
This difference becomes clearest through Roux.
Roux does not want to be interpreted, rescued, or defined.
Each time Vianne offers to name him—to tell him what his favorite chocolate is—he gently steps back.
“It’s good,” he says. “But it’s not my favorite.”
What he asks for is not insight, but recognition.
And Vianne listens.
She stops trying to define him to himself.
She gives up the role of savior.
She does not project a story onto him or attempt to complete him.
In doing so, she allows him to show her—quietly, clearly—that he does not need saving.
Love here is not rescue.
It is respect.
Because neither needs the other to exist, they are free to choose one another.
The man lives.
The story continues.
Culture matters here.
In the French village of Chocolat, pleasure—while resisted—is ultimately social. It can be discussed, shared, woven into daily life. Desire is not eliminated; it is negotiated.
Because it is allowed some daylight, it does not have to erupt.
Fire becomes hearth.
In the Mexico of Like Water for Chocolate, desire is private, secret, bound to duty and silence.
What cannot be spoken moves into the body, the kitchen, the heat.
Emotion does not circulate; it accumulates.
When release finally comes, it is total.
The fire consumes everything.
Seen together, the films clarify the same truth from opposite ends:
Repression does not eliminate desire. It only delays it.
One woman loves because love is the only place she is allowed to live.
The other loves because she already lives, and love is something she welcomes.
One story burns because love is asked to replace a self.
The other endures because love is allowed to meet another self, intact.
This is why one story ends in tragedy and the other in joy.
This is why one man dies and the other lives.
The difference is not how deeply anyone feels.
It is when feeling is allowed to live—and whether love is asked to save, or simply allowed to be seen.
Cooking as Practice
This is why cooking matters to me—not as performance, but as practice.
Heat teaches timing.
Fat teaches patience.
Chocolate teaches restraint.
What you add first, what you soften, what you hold back—all of it determines the outcome.
I no longer cook to prove competence.
I no longer write to justify my place in the room.
Feeling moves through what I make because it has been welcomed home—not because it is demanding escape.
Before, emotion leaked through the food because it had nowhere else to live.
Now, emotion moves through the food because it is integrated.
This is not productivity. It is attunement.
Like water brought just to the point of boil, fire no longer defines itself by danger.
It becomes medicine.
Transmission.
Nourishment.
Chocolate, finally, with a container.
The Fire Was Already There
There’s something humbling about realizing you didn’t arrive at a truth—you returned to it.
Years ago, long before I could articulate what I now understand about desire, containment, and fire that knows where it belongs, I made this chili.
I didn’t think of it as symbolic at the time.
I just knew it needed depth.
Heat needed ballast.
Something dark and steady beneath the spice.
And I knew instinctively that the chocolate mattered.
I used Scharffen Berger—not because it was fancy, but because it was real.
Proper cacao.
Clean bitterness.
Chocolate with integrity.
The kind that doesn’t sweeten or soften heat, but anchors it.
The kind that can stand up to chili powder without disappearing or hijacking the dish.
Little did I know I had already created the very thing I would one day write about: chocolate not as indulgence, but as structure.
This is a chili built on depth rather than aggression. The heat is present, but it’s rounded. The cacao doesn’t announce itself—it anchors everything else.
It’s the kind of food that feels steady in the body. Nourishing without being heavy. Warming without being chaotic. A long-simmered reminder that intensity doesn’t have to shout to be felt.
This is fire that has learned.
Ingredients
Scale
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium green bell pepper, chopped into small pieces
Warm a Dutch oven over medium heat for 2–3 minutes. Add the olive oil. Once warmed, add the onion and green pepper and cook for 5–6 minutes, stirring frequently, until softened.
Add the garlic and cook for another 1–2 minutes, stirring constantly and taking care not to let it brown.
Add the chili powder, cocoa, cumin, salt, pepper, and oregano. Stir well to coat the vegetables and let the spices bloom for about 1 minute.
Add the vegetable broth, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and all of the beans. Stir, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Increase the heat and bring the chili to a gentle boil.
Reduce the heat to low and simmer uncovered for at least 30 minutes. For deeper flavor, allow the chili to simmer gently for 1–2 hours, stirring occasionally. If it thickens too much during a longer cook, add a splash of broth or water as needed.
Taste and adjust seasoning. Remove from heat.
Serve warm, garnished with vegan sour cream, sliced green onions, avocado, or any favorite toppings.
Enjoy.
Notes
Cacao is not here to make this “chocolatey.” It adds bitterness and bass notes, giving the chili a grounded spine that keeps the heat from running away.
This is a slow chili. It gets better the longer it cooks. Thirty minutes is good. An hour is better. Two hours, if you can manage it, is transformational.
This dish mirrors emotional regulation. You soften first (onion, pepper), bloom the spices gently, then let everything integrate over time. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is suppressed.
If it thickens too much, add a splash of broth or water. This chili likes to be held, not forced.
