For most of my life, I wanted my mother to admit to what had happened to me.

I wanted her to say it out loud that my childhood had been riddled with abuse, that her choices (or her silence) shaped so much of the shame I carried, that my pain was real and not exaggerated. I spent years either pleading for acknowledgment or steeling myself against the reality that it might never come. And every time she told her version of the past... sanitized, selective, drenched in denial, it felt like another violation.

Like my experience was being erased.

But then something changed.

It wasn’t that she finally came around.
It was that I did.

There came a moment in my awakening when I realized:
We’re not all living in the same reality.

There’s a stage in the healing journey where things get subtler, gentler—yet still powerful.

You’re not actively digging through shadow anymore.
You’re just living. Creating.

And suddenly—something opens.

That’s what happened to me this weekend.

I’ve been deep in edits for The Temple of I, Book 3 of the Hieros Codex I’m writing. These books are designed to be energetic activations. Every time I return to them, I’m pulled through another layer of my own healing, integration, and expansion.

I rarely realize it's happening in the moment anymore, but the shifts are still very real, and embodied.

By the weekend, I was deep in a grief I couldn’t name. It didn’t come from a single event. It just was—an aching, quiet sadness without story.

For most of my life, I have met people where they were. It was part of what made people feel safe with me.

I could sense what someone needed—softness, reflection, permission—and shape myself to deliver it.

But I’ve come to see that I wasn’t just meeting people where they were out of love, I was doing it because I was conditioned to believe I had to be smaller to BE loved.

That belief was formed early—like so many of ours are.

If I was too radiant, too much, too intense, it might cost me connection.

So I learned to dim. To adjust. To make myself palatable.

Even in my sacred work—as a healer, mystical guide, or as a bridge to a person’s next level self—I carried that trace of smallness with me.

Your relationships are echoes of your Inner dialogue.

It’s not them.
It’s you.

Specifically, it’s the way you speak to you.

I know that’s a hard truth to hear, especially if you’ve been hurt, dismissed, ghosted, misunderstood, or betrayed.

It’s easier to point outward.

It’s harder to own that every person in your life is playing out a conversation you are already having with yourself.

Not consciously, of course.
But energetically.

You are the Creator of your reality. So if your inner voice is still cruel to you when you’re sad, overwhelmed, needy, jealous, or scared…

I grew up hearing that addiction was a genetic trait.

My grandfather was an alcoholic.
My grandmother too.
My uncle died of it.

By the time I was four, they were all gone —

leaving behind only stories, warnings, and the silent fear that it might be in my blood too.

So when I grew up and never got into drugs, or alcohol, or food addiction, I thought I had beaten it.

I thought I had outrun the inheritance.

But the truth is, I was addicted. Just not in the way anyone ever warned me about.

For a long time, I described myself as a “walking trigger” because, even in my youth, my presence had a way of activating hidden fears, old wounds, and unprocessed emotions in the people around me.

I know juuuust enough about Tarot to describe this impact on others as the Tower— the card of sudden upheaval, destruction, and forced transformation.

It felt accurate.
It felt like people had to survive me.
Oof.

But what I see now — and what feels so important to name — is that even that description carried the last remnants of victim-consciousness inside me.

This past year, I learned something that changed everything:

if you don’t do your own energetic hygiene, someone else’s energy will do it for you.

Not on purpose, of course. Most of the time, people don’t even realize they’re leaking—or siphoning.

But before I knew how to tell the difference between my energy and someone else’s, I was constantly absorbing feelings, doubts, fears, and projections that didn’t belong to me. I just didn’t know it.

They felt like mine.
They sounded like my inner voice.

But they weren’t.

There’s a reason so many people resist the idea that we create our own reality.

It’s not because they don’t believe in manifestation.
It’s not because they don’t want to feel powerful.

It’s because they’re still stuck in an old paradigm that says if something painful happened, someone has to be blamed—and if they take accountability, they fear that someone is them.

It’s not hard to see where this comes from. We’re raised in a culture obsessed with blame.

We’re trained to identify the villain.

Think of your spiritual journey like the beautiful art of Shibari rope bondage.

It’s not about the ropes themselves—it’s about how they’re tied.

Too tight, and you cut off circulation.
You numb sensation.
You lose the ability to feel anything but pressure.

Too loose, and you float—disconnected, ungrounded, never really dropping in.

Spiritual growth works the same way.

If you spend all your time diving into shadow work—endlessly revisiting the past, trying to fix and heal and understand—you’re tying your knots too tight.

When life shifts—especially when it feels like everything’s unraveling—it’s easy to slip into the story that the universe is doing something TO you.

Maybe you’ve lost something. A relationship, an identity, a version of your life that once felt solid.
Maybe you feel blindsided, like the rug’s been pulled out from under you.
Maybe part of you wants to scream, “Why is this happening?”

But here’s the truth most of us forget in those moments: YOU wrote this storyline.

Not from the part of you that’s afraid or uncertain.

I think I finally understand something that’s been confusing me for years.

It has to do with unconditional love—and the way I used to think I had to balance it with having boundaries.

I couldn’t quite reconcile how I could love someone without conditions and still protect myself when they showed up in ways that didn’t feel good. I thought BOUNDARIES were the answer. That I needed to keep certain people at arm’s length in order to love them, and MYSELF safely.

But something clicked recently. And it went deeper than anything I’ve ever felt before.

Let’s clear something up:

A turned on life isn’t about being sexually aroused 24/7. (Though hey, no shame if that happens.)

It’s about being alive.
Plugged in.
Lit from the inside.
Connected to your own rhythm and presence.

A turned on life is one where you’re in relationship with your desire—not just the sweet and shiny ones, but the edgy, gritty, wild ones, too.

It’s where your body isn’t just a vehicle you drag around—it’s your oracle, your compass, your ritual site.