What changes everything in moments of lostness is not advice. It’s not solutions. Not even love, necessarily. It’s someone (or something: a song maybe?) naming what is happening inside us before we have found the words for it ourselves. Someone who reads the spin, recognises it, and reflects it back clearly enough that suddenly we can see it too.

That is attunement.

And once it’s been experienced, like reeeeeally experienced, we might start to notice when it’s missing.

Understanding Attunement

Attunement is the act of bringing ourselves into harmony with another. [source]

In relational terms, attuning to someone is equivalent to accurately sensing – through listening and recognition – and adjusting your response to meet them there in harmony.

Attunement moves in two directions: toward others, which we call other-attunement, and toward ourselves, which we call self-attunement. This article is primarily concerned with the first, but the second makes the first possible.

When another person attunes to us, there are often three simultaneous things cooking together in the cauldron:

Perception

When we’re really connecting to someone’s current state, we tend to pick up external cues of what the other person might be experiencing internally. We may be able to identify the intention behind their tone, micro-shifts, body language, and emotional shifts in the ways they interact, all of which help us really see through their behaviour in a way that others might miss.

To exemplify, perhaps, in a lighthearted connective conversation, someone we deeply care about has gone awfully quiet. With the silence brimming, it’s now up to us to respond to them in order to bring the conversation back to connection.

Interpretation

As we process their external cues, we might find a deeper understanding of the state of their silence and how it shows up in them specifically. This understanding sharpens overtime and across contexts. The more time we might have spent witnessing this someone in different situations, the more accurately we can read what this particular shift, in this case silence, means for them.

Maybe they have been feeling offended by something we said, or perhaps they are suddenly reminded of someone close to them who is no longer in their lives. The context we carry for their current and past or shared experiences in our memory will help us relate to them with curiosity rather than confusion.

Response

Knowing why someone has gone quiet has a direct impact on how we respond to their silence. If they are silent because they are angered by us, we would know that they might need us to hold space for them to express that anger or rather, knowing who they are, need us to give them some space to process on their own without us being pushy about it.

If they seem overwhelmed, we might use a softer voice to approach them. if they seem guarded, we might approach them with curiosity rather than solutions. If they seem to be flooded with emotions, they might need a hug or rather some space and time instead.

It is rarely one gesture or one perfectly chosen word. It is several things happening at once, often invisibly, often without either person fully registering the effort involved.

The Attunement Tiramisu

Attunement is layered, kind of like a good tiramisu with the right amount of complexity in flavour. And just like a good tiramisu, the order of the layers matters. You can’t pour the espresso after the cream has set and expect the same result.

When we attune to another person, we’re doing several things at once across three distinct levels: emotional, somatic, and cognitive. They’re part of the same whole but distinct enough to notice when a layer is missing. Let’s take a look at how they mingle together.

Emotional attunement

Emotions are data. Feelings are not facts but they are true. Though we know this intellectually, it’s easy to forget when emotions rampage our system, flooding us with an indescribable sense of overwhelm, and suddenly the knowing doesn’t help much at all.

When someone attunes to our emotions, they can soften the blow by simply recognizing the impact the emotion is having on us rather than intending to resolve it.

“Hey, I didn’t mean it like that. You don’t need to feel small.”

Okay… but I do feel small????

For instance, when we feel small, if our companion responds with curiosity about that smallness rather than resolution, it leaves us feeling held and validated in our experience. The difference between “you don’t need to feel small” and “tell me about feeling small” is enormous, even when both are offered with care.

Emotions enjoy being seen and recognized, not made to go away. When we try to fix the problem or reason with an emotion into resolution, we tend to find it growing larger as though it is trying harder to be heard.

When someone emotionally attunes to us, they might do so by mirroring back the emotion we’re experiencing, which inevitably enables our minds to recognize it in them even if we haven’t yet been able to name it ourselves.

These emotions we experience don't just exist in the mind. They live in the body first. Some of our bigger feelings can come with a tightened chest, shallow breath, the body closing inward before we've even found the words for what we're feeling. Which is why emotional attunement alone is sometimes not enough. Someone can hold our feelings with care and still miss what our body is asking for.

Somatic attunement

Somatic attunement is when someone reads our physical state and responds to it directly. When someone interprets our internal state correctly, they may respond to us by matching the tone and pace of our voice, slowing down if we’re overwhelmed, offering stillness if we’re closing inward, or creating space if we’re contracting.

Needing touch (or the lack of touch) to regulate when things don’t make sense is a trick as mammalian as it gets. When a friend cries, we don’t open with analysis. We offer a hug. We breathe together. We help them feel held inside the emotion before we do anything else with it. When done right, we can appropriately shift our companion back into connection with themselves through connection with us.

Meeting someone at the level of the body is the most foundational form of attunement. Everything else builds on whether this layer was met first.

Cognitive attunement

Once the nervous system settles, and there is space for emotions to flow through the body, meaning-making becomes easier. This is where cognitive attunement lives.

Cognitive attunement is perhaps the most complex and intimate form of attunement. This is when someone understands the story, the context, and the significance behind our feelings and not just what we’re experiencing, but why it matters to us specifically.

“When you joke about eating the last pickle, it hurts me.”

“Hmm… is it because it makes you feel like I will never consider your preferences over mine?”

Being met in a moment of vulnerable expression builds a deeper bond because they are witnessing us not just right now but across time, having registered details about us that add up to an elaborate understanding of our experience of life which is separate from their own.

When someone does this for us, it feels like they have tracked the inner logic of our experience. And that is a rare and particular kind of being known.

When someone attunes to us consistently and accurately, in the immediate moment, our nervous system finds a partner in the processing. This is co-regulation. Over time, being witnessed accurately builds a sense that there is room for us, that we belong. And belonging, confirmed repeatedly, forms into a bond, a relationship that stabilises rather than depletes.

These three consequent experiences of being attuned to are sequential. Each one makes the next possible.

Co-regulation

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When we are struggling, many of us retreat into a cavern of our own suffering. The chaos of our internal world begins to feel like a burden we want to shelter our loved ones from. So we attempt to resolve our chaos alone. And yet there is something that happens when a trusted person makes us feel safe enough to express ourselves and reflects the chaos back at us, gently, sometimes simply through holding a safe container within which to unravel.

And suddenly we can see it.

What was tangled and invisible inside us becomes external, observable, almost workable. We are better at solving problems that exist outside of ourselves. A witnessing of our internal world hands us our own experience in a form we can finally hold.

Humans are not built to process everything alone. Our mammalian instinct supports regulating our minds and bodies through each other’s presence, through being read accurately, through having our state met rather than managed. When someone attunes to us, our nervous system does not have to carry the full weight of its own distress. It finds a partner in the processing.

For those of us who grew up in environments where our signals were misread, dismissed, or treated as inconvenient, co-regulation through attunement does something more than calm the nervous system. It restores trust in it.

Receiving confirmation that our experiences are valid solidifies the belief that our human experience is real, our nervous system is not broken, we are not too much. Over time, this builds a body that feels safer expressing itself, in relationship, without masking or shrinking to make others comfortable.

Belonging

٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و

According to researchers Baumeister and Leary, the need to belong is as fundamental as the need for food, and crucially, belonging is not about the quantity of relationships but the quality of the emotional connection within them. Being consistently recognised in the state that feels most honest to us, repeatedly, is how that quality is built.

Through regularly co-regulating with someone, we begin to form a sense of belonging and safety in their company. The key difference between co-regulation and belonging is the permission to expand.

When we are accurately witnessed, and responded to by another person, overtime, we begin to feel that there is room for us here. Room to grow into our own skin as we feel inspired to by the people around us, to learn from them and offer something worth learning in return. The relationship becomes generative. Not just safe, but rather alive.

This happens because attunement validates experience in a specific sequence. Someone believes what we are going through and responds to it as real, leaving no room for us to doubt it. What was previously trapped inside us, subject to the chronic interrogation of am I overreacting, am I too much, is this even real becomes external. And once an experience exists outside the prison of our own uncertainty, we can move toward resolution. The self-doubt moves out of the way. Over time, this builds a nervous system that has accumulated evidence that the external world can be trusted to receive us. That our signals mean something. That we are not making it up.

It’s the difference between showing up at a party where we could wear our favourite dinosaur-clown costume and have people smile at us versus have people show us their favourite dinosaur-clown memes, make t-rex noises with us, and cheer us on. One tolerates us, the other meets us in our absurdity, ideally encouraging our inner weirdo to freely self express, creating an internal sense of:

“oh.. I GO here”

Bonding

⋆˚✿˖°

If belonging is the feeling, then bonding is what forms when that feeling is consistently confirmed through accumulated attunement. Bonding is somatically felt trust within a nervous system that has learned, through repeated experience, that this particular person is safe to be unmasked around. That we do not have to perform a more manageable version of ourselves in their presence.

Being known is distinct from being liked, or loved, or admired. When we like or admire someone we are often in a kind of mirror relationship with them where we respond to traits they reflect back in us, or traits we wish we had more visibility of within ourselves. There is a pull toward resonance.

But knowing is different.

Knowing is archival. It accumulates through many reps of accurate attunement, until we carry a working model of the other person inside our mental models, enough to simulate how they will respond to something as small as a gesture or a gift. Not because we are projecting our own preferences, but because we have genuinely tracked them.

Psychologist John Bowlby, whose foundational work on attachment theory reshaped how we understand human connection, found that secure attachment is built through consistent, attuned presence and gives us the capacity for emotional resilience, self-regulation, and trust. Bonding, thus, becomes the infrastructure of a functioning emotional life.

This is what deep attunement makes possible over time. Not just comfort, but a particular quality of closeness that comes from being perceived accurately, repeatedly, until our nervous system stops bracing and connection becomes the thing that stabilises us rather than the thing we have to survive.

There’s attunement and then there are impostors pretending to be attunement. Our mind might trick us to believe we are truly in sync with someone’s inner world, when in truth we’re both at opposite ends of the same see-saw. One is far too high and one is far too low to meet in the middle.

The not Attunement platter

Attunement requires knowing where we end and someone else begins. Without that clarity and without a sense of our own desires, limits, and identity as separate from theirs, what looks like reaching toward someone is often just reaching toward a version of ourselves.

When someone responds to us in the following ways instead of attuning, especially in a moment of dysregulation, it feels like they’re bringing us a collection of lost socks from the washing machine when all we needed was the other sock to our favourite sock pair. There are three prominent sock-mismatches when someone is aaaalmost attuned to us but not quite:

≠ Assuming

Care without curiosity is still just a guess. Assuming is what happens when someone skips the most important step, asking or identifying what the person needs, and they go straight to response. They have taken in the information. They are trying. But they are working from their own experience of what this situation would require, their own sense of what help looks like, and they offer it with confidence and sometimes with persistence.

The intention is care. The effect is erasure.

When someone assumes what we need without confirmation and delivers it with certainty, something particular happens. We don’t just feel unmet, we feel at fault for it. The logic goes: they tried, they offered, they pushed through our resistance, and it still didn’t land. Which must mean we are difficult, broken and unable to communicate what we need clearly enough to be helped.

The loneliness of receiving assumed care feels like being stranded in a wheat field during a thunderstorm watching a friend drive over, run into the middle of the maze and hold an umbrella over the scarecrow 12 feet away from you while smiling only to say

“But you love rain, don’t you?”

Attunement asks before it offers and checks before it moves. Not because it doesn’t care, but because it cares enough to know that assuming makes an ass out of you and me. But, and, also, there’s a limit to how many times the same question can be asked before it’s just Topping from the bottom.

≠ Merging

On the other hand, the great desire for union or completion within each human being often propels us to seek a state of mutual existence that can be called merging. We merge when the distance between us collapses without outlines. It can feel like profound intimacy, like the sense that someone truly gets us, but often one person has overlaid their own experience onto the other, and is responding to their own projection rather than the actual person sitting across from them.

When someone cannot locate the boundary between their experience and ours, they default to treating our inner world as an extension of theirs. This collapse is the result of empathy without differentiation. If in a scenario, the empathiser would feel a certain kind of hurt, then in the same scenario the empathised must feel the same kind of hurt. If the empathiser would want space, then they may offer space. If they would want to talk, they might push to talk.

Attunement is not doing to another what you would want done to you, without connecting to the other person outside of your own experience. True attunement requires holding ourselves as separate individuals in relation to the other person, grounded and boundaried.

≠ Defending

We all carry a story about who we are. When that story feels threatened, the instinct to protect it can override the capacity to connect.

The moment someone says “that’s not what I meant” before we’ve asked how it landed, the conversation has already shifted. It’s no longer about the internal state of the person we are trying to attune to. It has become about preserving the version of self that does not cause harm, does not miss people, does not get it wrong.

We defend our intentions because our self-concept keeps our internal narrative coherent without which making sense of our reality is far more challenging. But for the person we are trying to attune to, our defensiveness puts their experience on trial in a courtroom instead of wrapping them in a towel after their very cold icebath.

Attunement requires setting the self-concept down temporarily. Not abandoning it but loosening the grip enough to ask:

‘What is actually happening for this person right now?’

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Most of the time, the people who miss us are not doing it on purpose. They miss the bat signal because it’s a cloudy night.

Common blockers to attunement

Presumably, we have all failed to accurately align ourselves to another human’s experience at some point in our lives. What follows are some of the most common reasons we might miss the signals.

Self-attunement

To read another, we first must read ourselves. Not perfectly, and not always in real time, but with enough awareness to notice when something is happening inside us. If we refuse to name our experiences, and shape our hedge labyrinth with intention, then those who visit will experience exactly that. An unintentional maze, easy to get lost in but not surrender to.

There are times when our hands are too full of circumstance or perhaps we are somehow unable to connect to our own internal state. Our triggers, our patterns, the particular ways our nervous system responds might all slip through like sand before our mind has caught up.

Maybe, perhaps our upbringing gave us no opportunity to develop that awareness at all. If this is the case, we are more likely to experience what is happening inside us as something being done to us by the other person. Our discomfort becomes their fault. Our unprocessed feelings become their problem to manage. The less we know we are actively enacting a behavioural pattern, the more we will see the other person as the source of it. Here, attunement becomes nearly impossible because instead of perceiving them, we have begun to resolve ourselves through them.

When we cannot read ourselves, we cannot read the room. And when the room feels threatening, something else takes over.

Nervous system threat

In a state of threat, our emotional state feels louder than the room. There is no choice but to listen at the screaming cry of everything is WRONG! That is indeed the entire point of the nervous system!

Fires! Alarms! Riot!

But this also means, there is no longer room to connect with another person’s internal state because the noise of our own is so loud. In an argument, this might behaviourally look like defending, arguing the facts of what happened, insisting on what they meant rather than what they felt. It can feel like being asked to maintain peace when our internal peace is in pieces and we want to hold on to our worldview, keep it safe, let it cradle us into a sense of certainty so maybe our nervous system can calm down by the familiarity of its lullaby.

But maybe we still need to be in conversation with someone.

‘Ugh! How can I make this go away?’

Sometimes it arrives as a personal agenda: fixing, seeking validation, reassurance, or affection. Anything that redirects the conversation away from our state and toward theirs. At its core, all of it is a bid to restabilise our own reality. And the fastest way to do that is to reframe theirs.

When the nervous system is overwhelmed and there is no tool to regulate it, the charge has to go somewhere.

Emotional flooding

Emotional flooding is what happens when our internal state exceeds our capacity to hold itself. The emotions need somewhere to go, and without the tools or awareness to regulate through breath, movement, touch, a deliberate pause, they go outward. Often…towards the other person in conversation with us.

When we feel flooded, and are being asked to connect with another, it feels like steeping two teas in a tiny teapot at the same time. It’s chaotic, there’s not enough room, and it will probably taste bad at the end.

In a state of emotional flooding, we’re not withholding connection intentionally. We simply do not have the bandwidth for two internal worlds at once. We can barely hold our own internal world. And rather than recognising that we need to step away and return to the conversation once regulated, if we push through, we are more likely to end up reacting rather than responding. Expelling erratically rather than feeling through and allowing it to pass.

The difference between a reaction and a response is space. Reactions happen when there is no space. What comes spilling out often has little to do with the other person and everything to do with us. This is where projection builds a home.

Projection

Some of us may assume that another person’s feelings work like ours. So instead of reading them, we offer a shortcut, skipping the step of perceiving their actual state and replacing it with what we would feel if we were in their position.

“If I were in that situation, I would feel X. So that must also be what you feel.”

Using ourselves as the map is often the fastest route we know to empathy. The sticky truth though? No matter how similar the circumstance, someone else’s experience is wholly theirs but not wholly ours. Their history, their nervous system, their particular relationship to this situation is not ours. When we respond to the version of them we have created in our minds rather than the version that is actually present, the effect is a quiet question that leaves them wondering if they’re visible to us at all.

Projection can be easy to miss because it often feels, in the moment, like we are seeing something, someone. We are engaged, we are responding, we seem to get it. It is only later, when the resolution we offered does not land, that it becomes clear we were talking to ourselves the whole time, although, sometimes the miss is not about what we bring to the conversation but about the pace at which we arrive.

Asynchrony

Attunement requires a certain rhythmic match. When one of us processes slowly and deliberately while the other moves quickly and intuitively, we can keep missing each other’s timing even when both of us are genuinely trying.

It’s like two cars indicating a right turn at the same intersection but the speed at which the blinkers light up are ever so slightly off. One of us has already moved through the emotional moment and is ready to resolve while the other is still inside it, still processing, still needing to be met there. By the time one arrives, the other has already left.

This is not a failure of intelligence or care, and the frustration on both sides is real. One feels chronically missed. The other feels like they are always waiting or always rushing. Neither is inherently wrong or ill-intentioned. We are simply not in the same rhythm, and attunement, at its core, requires bridging that gap to create the shared language of safe intimacy and trust.

At other times, the gap is not about timing at all, but about how much closeness we can bear.

Intimacy tolerance

By being genuinely present inside someone else’s internal state without being consumed by it, we can create a shared moment of trust. But we might not always have a secure relationship to the uncertainty that entering someone else’s reality brings into our world. We might fear losing ourselves in them, perhaps because we are still finding who we really are for ourselves.

When we feel a low capacity for closeness, we might tend to deflect the opportunity to be close rather than lean in. We might feel the need to make a joke and create levity at the exact moment the other person needs them to hold their gaze. It might feel protective for us to turn away instead of turning towards.

We may not realise, however, that our self-protection might feel like dismissal to someone else if they cannot see that our capacity to meet them where they are is different from where they might need it to be to feel met. And perhaps the truth of the situation lies in us realising that we might not yet trust ourselves to hold the weight of the moment which keeps us from leaning in.

The perils of dependency

Other-attunement is a gift but receiving it without developing self-attunement in parallel carries its own risks.

When we have not yet built the capacity to witness ourselves, whether because we were never taught, never given the safety to try, or simply never had the conditions to develop it, we naturally seek someone else to do that knowing for us. And when we find someone who does it well, we might lean into it. Deeply.

Over time, without meaning to, we hand them the weight of two people. Our needs become their responsibility. Our internal world becomes something they manage on our behalf.

Our dependency is not a sign of weakness or carelessness but an absence of self-attunement that was never our fault to begin with. The mirror becomes a necessary tool in understanding ourselves. And when the mirror is not there, we cannot find ourselves (cough cough… try therapy).

When two people do this for each other simultaneously, the boundaries between them begin to dissolve. One person’s anxiety becomes the shared climate pulling both people under the tornado of dysregulation. What started as deep other-attunement becomes a closed loop where neither person can regulate without the other. The self becomes harder to locate without the other person present.

And usually the person carrying the weight of two is also the person whose capacity for other-attunement is stronger, more consistent, more generous. Over time, tracking two internal worlds instead of one burns through capacity not just for attunement but also for aliveness.

If we are bearing the burden of holding two inner worlds simultaneously, we may become so fluent in someone else’s experience that we might lose the thread of our own. So naturally, when the person holding up both flags burns out, both people lose sight of the path.

Believe it or not, this might be the best case scenario.

But there is a worst case scenario too…

Someone who can read our internal state accurately knows how we respond, what we need, what makes us trust. As the worst case, they can mirror us to charm us, to gain our confidence, and then slowly, to influence us in ways we might not actually want to be influenced in. Without a stable internal sense of self to return to, we may not notice until we have already drifted far from who we were.

Giving someone else power over our experience of ourselves might be an extension of great trust in some cases, and a grave mistake in others. If we never learn to build our connection to our own aliveness, intuition, and sense of certainty, we might never recognise how to spot ill-intent in the wilderness. And if we do take the time to strengthen our relationship to our own inner world, we can then not only safely connect with others through our self-trust but also offer the space they might need to connect to themselves.

That’s the whole of it, really. The work of seeing others and the work of knowing ourselves are not separate practices. They feed each other like a snake eating its own tail trying to seek oneness with itself through another and vice versa.

Self-attunement is not a destination either. It will always be the ongoing practice of returning to ourselves and learning our signals, our patterns, our desires until we can trust what we find there. And desire, it turns out, is one of the most honest signals we have. If you want to start somewhere, start here.

And if this article has put words to something you have been trying to say to someone, a partner, a friend, someone you love who keeps missing you, consider passing it on. Sometimes the most direct thing we can do is hand someone the language we wish they already had.

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So, why aren’t you?

Defining Desire

First things first. ‘Desire’ derives from the Latin desiderare, ‘to long or wish for’, which itself derives from de sidere, ‘from the stars’, suggesting that the original sense is ‘to await what the stars will bring’. (source)

You can think of desire as an inner compass, guiding you towards what you want most. You are most connected to this inner compass without the distraction of other inputs i.e society, parents, relationships, comparison, self doubt, fear etc.

Defining Empowerment

Empowerment feels like sustainable lightning. Ideas flow, creativity happens, there’s joy in small things, you laugh about how incredible this reality is. At your highest level of empowerment, you will not be afraid of play. Or frolicking, if you will. In fact, you will find that the act of play itself holds the key to your empowerment.

Scientifically, Empowerment is the presence of autonomy and self-determination in an individual. In a state of empowerment, you find it easy to represent your interests in a responsible and self-determined way, and act on your own authority. It enhances the belief that you are controlling your own life and claiming your rights, leaving you without a sense of powerlessness and lack of influence. (source)

The Connection 🤝

When you recognize the desire in you, you become aware of a possibility in your reality: having that desire met. Stifling this desire for fear, guilt, shame, and other negative viewing-lenses creates a gap between you and you desire’s fulfilment. If your desire is unrelenting, and you intentionally stifle it, this gap may manifest itself as a tug of war. On one hand, you are inspired by your desire, on the other, you are cornered by the consequence of following your desire.

Living in this indecision zaps you of your power to create your own reality. I see this as disempowerment. When you exist in a state of disempowerment, your creative energy is drained, and your power to make things happen in your life dwindles in frailty. To cross over to empowerment, you must lean into yourself with trust that you know what is best for yourself. That knowing is desire.

If this is true then following desire must create empowerment. But first, we find ✨desire✨.

Reconciling with Desire

Finding your Kitten

Desire is like a whisper. Especially for those of us who have stayed disconnected for decades. The best way to listen to a whisper is to get quiet. Externally and internally. *cue meditation music*

If your whisper scurries, don’t chase it. You might scare it away. Like a terrified little kitten unsure of where it belongs, allow your whispering desire to explore the space on its own and enter your vicinity. All you have to focus on is creating a safe space inside yourself, where it lives. Then watch your desire kitten scurry closer. I know this sounds like patience at work. It is. It might take you days, it might take you weeks. Depending on how long you’ve spent

Once your kitten decides to come over and play, practice being in a state of observation like you would when getting to know someone new. There’s no need to manipulate the environment yet. Simply notice.

What brings it closer?

What pulls it away?

Is it curious?

Is it skittish?

Is it tired?

Is it playful?

Getting to know your desire kitten is how you will learn to trust it. The more you trust it, the easier it will be when it asks you to follow into adventures together. The adventure that is the human experience, except exactly as you desire it to be.

Training your Kitten

Your kitten is your lifelong friend. Making it feel safe is one of the most important things you can do if you want it to come around again.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve felt lonely and lost without your kitten. You’ve felt the pain of speaking your truth and being denied the opportunity to stand in your power because it makes others uncomfortable. Such an environment is unsafe for your kitten to come out and play until it learns that it is always safe wherever it goes. This takes training. A few questions to ask when train your desire kitten:

What conditions does my desire kitten need to thrive?

An invitation

A clear space, free of mental clutter (journal beforehand), where you can invite your little friend to come join you. It’s important to be present for your kitten for it can sense when you are distracted. It shies away from distracted hosts and only appears before those who are patient.

A space to play

Maybe you have a ritual that helps you lure your kitten out. It could be any practice that connects you to yourself: a bath, interpretive dance, cooking a meal, tidying your space, playing an instrument.

This is a space where judgement is unwelcome. There is no pressure to perform. No audience whose opinion matters. No disappointment because there is no comparison or expectation. It is a place of expression and exploration in it’s truest form. Especially set up to make your desire kitten feel safe to just be.

A space to rest

Exploration can be tiring. Expecting to force the kitten into learning a new trick each time it visits is asking for being ghosted. Honour the need for it to rest, it’s capacity to play, and refrain from asking it to overexert itself. When it is time, it will awaken from it’s slumber and continue playing. Until then, practice what you’ve both learned together.

Keeping the Desire to Empowerment tunnel open

Like everything, practice keeps the neural pathways active. The more you ski on the same slope, the deeper the lines stay even when there is a fresh layer of snow.

If you’ve finally found the joy in connecting with yourself, don’t forget that it is a regular practice to keep the connection thriving. Following at least one desire a day, if not all of them, can create a better relationship with your desire kitten. A better relationship can guarantee a faster decision-making time, consequently, a better reaction time.

And maybe if you practiced hard enough, 5 years from now, when someone asks you “what do you want to eat?” your desire kitten will come running, jump on your shoulder and meow out loud all in under 3 minutes.

Photo by nine koepfer on Unsplash

If you’re a highly sensitive, deep thinker like me, you feel things all the time. There’s nothing wrong with this. Feelings are great information on your environment. They help you recognize that you are alive. Trouble comes when you don’t know why you feel certain things in certain ways. That’s food for the deep thinker in you.

I spent a while struggling to manage emotions when I was younger. I find that having a set time to speak to my emotions is the best way I can learn to have a good, inclusive relationship with them. My secret sauce is meaningful rituals.

Let me explain how this works.

Ritual

According to APA Dictionary of Psychology, a ritual is a practice that is performed as a habit or custom. (source) I suggest that for the purpose of boundary-setting and grounding you do attach meaning to your rituals. Meaning is what validates our existence as individuals so don’t shy away from sprinkling it into your life.

Boundaries

A boundary is a psychological demarcation that protects the integrity of an individual or group or that helps the person or group set realistic limits on participation in a relationship or activity. (source) Your boundaries dictate who has access to your joy, your ideas, your love, and your energy as a whole. Your boundaries are friends. Your friends. Someone else might not want them as their friends and that’s A-ok.

The connect 🤝

Boundary-setting starts with self-reflection. Before you can place the fences to protect your energy, it’s important to decipher between the energy you want to conserve and the energy you want to spend. Lucky for you, deep thinking is your full time job so this won’t be taxing.

Boundaries are easier to set from a place of self love when you’re in tune with who you are. That’s the key. Knowing, implementing and actively noticing yourself because you are constantly changing. Boundaries are a product of paying attention to yourself in a way that is not restrictive but liberating instead.

When you know what you want, you can begin giving it to yourself. Then commit to giving it to yourself consistently. Your consistency becomes a ritual where what you’re doing means something to you. As a consequence, each time you perform this ritual, you will remind yourself of your why.

In this case, it’s love. For yourself.

Creating your own rituals

Talking the talk is cool, but walking the walk is cooler. Which is why, I wrote down a little process to help you create your own version of meaningful rituals.

🧩 Identify your patterns

What is it that your mind wants to think about the most and why do you stop yourself from thinking/doing/practicing that? What is it that your body wants to do that you gatekeep from it? The reasons don’t matter as much as the desires. Knowing your desires is the first step to living a life of authenticity in a way that heals you, the most important person in your life.

🕰 Make space

Create a practice that addresses the parts of you that want to be seen and aren’t being seen. Maybe you want to do yoga and you find that you need a peaceful environment and time of day matters. Find a time of day where you can create space for this practice and schedule it in. It’s important to make space for authentic expression of self and make it a part of your daily life. This creates feelings of wholeness in a way that brings different parts of you together. It’s a shared space for the energies in you that want to be accepted.

🚦Hold boundaries

Tricky to start but satisfying to implement overtime, boundaries are what help you keep your time and energy guarded in a responsible way. At the end of your life, you die alone. Not listening to yourself and your needs ensures you die alone, feeling alone. So start now.

👀 Stay accountable

Now that you’ve thought about what’s important to you and how you want to incorporate it into your life, stay accountable to either yourself or a buddy. Find someone who can remind you to do the things you want to do for yourself. And if they start nagging, revisit the arrangement and tweak it. You can always adjust the environment instead of cancelling the whole thing.

🔁 Stay consistent

Consistency reminds your body of how it feels to be taken care of and feeds into your ability to set boundaries with others. This practice has personally helped me find ways to feel good within myself and filter out things that don’t resonate. Since you are a growing, changing human, things that resonate with you will constantly change. As they change, this system will help you keep up with the changes because you will have a space to express yourself to yourself. How incredible?!

In the end.

During seasons of change, when love seems scarce and hardship seems abundant, having a refuge for recharge is useful. Your rituals can support you by providing a space to think, breathe, be creative, or whatever it is that you need to feel in control again.

‘Desire’ derives from the Latin desiderare, ‘to long or wish for’, which itself derives from de sidere, ‘from the stars’, suggesting that the original sense is ‘to await what the stars will bring’. (source)

You can think of desire as an inner compass, guiding you towards what you want most. You are most connected to this inner compass without the distraction of other inputs i.e society, parents, relationships, comparison, self doubt, fear etc.

Inevitably, there came a time when you became disconnected from some of your desires. This happened when your deep desires were in competition against other basic needs such as belonging, connection, and safety. Once you learned to ‘control’ the desire (I see this as desire silencing) to receive those needs, you may have inadvertantly trained your brain to believe that controlling desire is self discipline and self discipline is rewarded. In the long run.

This mindset shift takes you out of the present and gives you a free hall pass to wander the past, and the future.

Congratulations. You did it. You are no longer connected to the desire you have today!

What does Desire have to do with Access?

If your body has forgotten what asking for something and receiving it feels like, you forget that it was a possibility. Your brain forgets that you could do that thing and struggles to bring it out of your long term memory into the now. You no longer remember how good it feels to ask for something andreceive it.

In the current world, so many of us are caught up in meeting our basic needs that a robust way to have access to desire fulfilment is by sharing them with others. Sometimes, liberally. Once you’ve shared them out loud, you’ve taken the first step to having them met. This is also the first step to creating the lifeyou desire.

A few things happen when you identify, accept, and share your desires…

Awareness of possibilities

As a human with limited knowledge of the Universe, you may know a lot, and yet, know nothing at all. Embracing the idea that probabilities beyond your imagination exist helps you approach different scenarios with curiosity rather than fear.

If you came here alone, and will leave alone, what others think doesn’t matter. The more you lean into your own curiosity, the more connected you will feel to your desires. The more connected you feel to your desires, the more open you will be to exploring them.

This exploration with others can show you new experiences, different perspectives, ideas, and places. All of the above are a gateway into your own mind. Without exploring your mind this way, you cannot challenge your own limiting beliefs about yourself and your worldview. Until you challenge your own mind, you won’t push your limits to see what else is within your reach. Only because you asked.

Meetings with inner demons

What you see in others is already within you. Keeping that in mind, note that when you feel a negative emotion towards someone, it’s usually information on how you feel in your own life. If you look at others and feel love, it’s because you have love within you. Maybe you can’t look at yourself with love yet. And that’s okay. With access to someone else looking at you with love, you can learn to do the same for yourself.

Instead of being afraid of seeing yourself in a different light, embrace the fact that you don’t know yourself all the way. You’re not supposed to know but you are meant to experience yourself in different ways.

Without access to these experiences, you won’t have an opportunity to reckon with things that scare you or learn about your fears which reduces the probability that you will likely do anything to overcome them.

Trust that your desires are in your best interest even when they seem to bring you pain. Pain is information. Without that information, you won’t know where else to pour love in.

Brainstorming your creations

Humans are creators. You are a human. Therefore, you are a creator. You create your morning cup, your bedtime routine, your love life, your career. You create things.

Connecting with your own desires opens the door for you to create things that you want outside of the expectations of others from you. Through meeting your demons, you begin to see what you truly want for yourself. Which demons to keep and which ones to transform.

When you finally decide who’s on your team, you create from a place of ‘moving towards’ and instead focusing on creating from a place of ‘moving away from’. This energy speeds you up because there are less blocks, and more excitement.

What’s stopping you?

An unequal distribution of resource access.

Now…I’m not saying capitalist structures are the devil alone. But they also…aren’t not to blame.

These structures show up in our lives as a routine mindset. If you have to fight tooth and nail to make ends meet, it becomes challenging to want to share your accumulated resources with another person unless you have enough. Everyone’s definition of enough is different. Some of us are future minded when we think of enough; saving for retirement, for instance, is a future minded goal. Others are past minded; mentally believing that they are still living with less because they grew up with less, wanting more by comparison.

The feelings of not enough can lead humans to operate from a place of scarcity: believing that there truly isn’t enough in the world and you must always be prepared to either suffer from lack, or suffer from exhaustion to counter the lack. These emotions can create a disparity between the haves and the have nots.

What’s on the other side?

A quick solution (and I know you know this is not a quick habit to build) is to practice present-mindedness, leaning on the information your body gives you in any given moment. Of course, this means reparenting yourself to connect with your body, believing that your body is telling the truth (which may not be the case — maybe growing up someone primed you into believing that bodies lie because they couldn’t understand the wisdom in yours), and most importantly staying connected to your breath.

All of the things you are wanting lie on the other side of connecting to yourself. And it starts with “mindfulness”. The word we all glaze over because nobody told us what happens on the other side. So here it is. This is one of the things you can look forward to on the other side of mindfully owning your desires.

DMT, chemically known as N,N, Dimethyltryptamine, can rapidly induce an extremely immersive state of consciousness characterized by vivid and elaborate visual imagery. Traditionally, DMT is consumed via drinking ‘Ayahuasca’, a concoction of DMT and β-carbolines that enables DMT to stay in the human body for longer by inhibiting the gastrointestinal breakdown of DMT (source).

The name ayahuasca is a compound word in Quechua language; a combination of the word aya menaing soul, ancestors or dead folks and wasca (huasca) meaning vine or rope (Luna, 2011). The most prevalent translation of ayahuasca is “vine of the soul”. Of course, there is a skeptical alternative meaning suggesitng that the substance is the “rope of death”, but…that’s subjective to experience.

Ayahuasca has been a central element of many healing ceremonies in the Amazon Basin, most commonly used amongst the indigenous people of the Amazon as a form of traditional medicine and cultural psychiatry. (source)

On a more tangible level, ayahuasca may act against chronic low grade inflammation and oxidative stress via the Sig-1R which can explain its widespread biological therapeutic indications. (source)

In this recollection, I describe my personal experience of the Spirit molecule, DMT, consumed via smoking instead of the traditional ayahuasca concoction.

Subjective Details

As with most things, there are four distinct aspects to the experience: mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. I want to talk about the physical and emotional experiences separately.

But first, some context. I took this trip with a group of women that I built trust with prior to introducing DMT into the mix. I knew that though the environment wasn’t completely familiar, I was safe, guided and taken care of by these women. I chose to control my settings a bit further by playing a soundtrack that helps me connect with myself. I also opted to sit up when I took my dose. While it’s recommended to lie down, I prefer sitting up because it allows me to experience the differences and gives me some control over how, when and who to surrender myself to.

The (meta)physical experience:

While this was by far the most challenging trip to articulate for me, I have some 3D vocabulary to explain this 5D (or more?) experience.

Once seated, with my magical companions around me, I took a guided dose using a DMT vape and breathed out. Another 2 hits and I knew that I was getting there. It takes about 10 seconds to know if you’re there. There being a state of existence that was distinctly not human. And that’s where I was.

I was not a body because I was no longer in a tangible state of existence. It was like being multidimensional but in more ways that I could comprehend at the time.

Put ‘simply’, imagine a simple triangular kaleidoscope as the lens through which you view your surroundings. I was in a sphere of triangular windows. That was what I saw. There were not many colours, mostly just shapes. And a reflection of myself or maybe other beings in those windows but they were too far for me to perceive them.

There was no gravity. I was suspended amidst wherever I was. No pressure or forces keeping me there but I was not standing and I was definitely there at my own will. But I wasn’t one entity. I was split into my surroundings. I… was my surroundings?

At some point I realized I had my bearings and let sounds back into my realm of perception. What was interesting was that the sounds from around me were passing through me as if I were an empty space.

Imagine a corridor with echoes from all around the structure within which it stands. Some sound near, some sounds far. I could understand the words but I couldn’t deduce the source. But I was carrying them through me as if I were the space that held them temporarily. An echo chamber, if you will.

Now imagine… being the corridor. The sounds pass through you, from around you as you hold space for them to do so (I mean…what else can you do at that point).

It was the same with touch. My companions made sure to give me loving touch so I didn’t feel too far from this reality. However, I couldn’t distinguish between the source of touch but I could sense that it was being implemented onto the space that I was.

If someone touched my shoulder from behind, I felt like they were really far behind me and that it wasn’t a shoulder but a random part of the space that I was. My body didn’t really exist as a distinctive combination of limbs or identifiable regions. I was, for the lack of a better explanation, integrated into the Universe. As if suspended amidst. I sure as heck wasn’t a solid. I wasn’t even a liquid. I could pass as a gas but since there was no pressure, I would say I was more complex and dimensional.

Just as I began to grasp at all my senses, I found myself needing to let go of perceiving. It was becoming a burden to be mentally present to the extent that I was. I was tired. So I let go, trusting my company and guide to take care of me if I needed to be taken care of.

This was the beginning of the emotional part of my journey.

The emotional experience:

This part of the trip was impacted by the environment the most for me. My lesson was learning to surrender myself which requires a lot of trust. Trust in my environment, but more than that: in myself. I didn’t know what myselfwas at the time but I also don’t know what myself is in this current reality so really there wasn’t much difference there. But trusting a gigantic unknown, as a primarily cerebral person, was a tug of war within myself. This is where my company helped me feel safe enough outside of myself to then explore the feelings of non-safety inside myself and reconcile.

My personal experience was tears because I was finally facing the emotion of fear. The fear of risk.

The risk of surrender. Learning to trust that everything will fall into place. And that not only will I be held by others but I will be held by myself.

The risk of receiving love. Learning to receive the words of love from my company without needing to intellectualize it. Learning to feel being loved without calculating the probabilities of potential conditions attached to receiving love.

The combined risk of surrendering myself to a purpose that will reveal itself in time and the impact of that surrender on the conditional love I am currently adapted to receiving. As a people pleaser, this one was fucking hardto let go.

I moved through this fear intensely, recognising that my childhood trauma of not feeling in control of my life intersects with the knowledge that I have been in control in multiple different dimensions — literally in that moment — and I am choosing to surrender out of self-trust. If I can have my own back when I’m a fucking room, I can have my own back when I’m a human.

I also recognised my high need justify my existence. I think I can owe this to a lot of conditional love in my life. Having to prove my worth to others over and over again to receive attention programmed me to equate being loved with fulfilling conditions adequately. This is probably one of the most false beliefs I have. Love is not conditional. Love is Universal. More on that at a different time.

As I realized that being space meant my existence was designed to be true, I came to the conclusion that being space also means existence. And that if I exist as a part of the Universe, there is no reason to doubt that I exist for a reason. That I am a part of the whole by design and nothing outside of my existence can comment on it. I am because… I am.

At this point, the weight, the grief, the shame I had carried on my shoulders for upwards of two decades came crashing down and I cried until I laughed at the release. The much needed release of all the bullshit I have learned over the yers about my worth, my purpose, my success, and so many other socially defining aspects that really weren’t up for discussion any longer.

At the end of my laughter, I opened my eyes and looked around at the beautiful, magical souls that carried me through this transformative experience of…7 minutes (I mean, time really is a social construct), and felt like I came home. To them. But mostly, to myself.

I am healing. I am choosing that I deserve to be here. And I am focused on enjoying every fucking minute of being the human I am.

A Shift in Perspective

The integration period of DMT is not like that of other psychedelics. It’s faster. It’s embodied. It’s far simpler because it helped me just ‘be’ the next day. I showed up wanting to be here. I went for walks and stopped to stare at the grass. I called my mother to hear about her day. I messaged my father to ask about his plants. I did this because I decided to reclaim my right to live the way I want to. Unconditionally.

I decided that my joy wasn’t conditional. That I was made to feel the full spectrum of emotions and experience the full spectrum of what it means to be human. I decided that I would no longer shame myself in the name of productivity. Or guilt myself into sitting through one more one-sided conversation. That I would speak up for myself because if I ask for what I desire, I have a higher chance of receiving it than if I stay silent.

After seeing a shift in how I showed up to my day post-trip, I concluded that I have gained two distinct gifts.

Gift of Experience

If what I experienced is where we go when we are no longer human and the default state of existence is multidimensional where there is an absence of physiological reception, then my existence as a human is a fucking gift.

If I am eternally present as a soul and can perceive and witness existence within my bubble in other realities but cannot interact with what I am witnessing then I feel compelled to truly exist in this reality.

I’m lucky to be able to touch my cat every morning and feel his purring run up my arm. Lucky to hold my loved ones close to my beating heart and enjoy the sensation of transmuted energy between us. Lucky to taste the warm butter melting on a freshly toasted slice of bread. Lucky to smell the air in the morning the night after it rained. The ability to experience this shit is a fucking limited time gift.

I want to be here because I’m given the opportunity to experience what it means to be human.

No exchanges.

No returns.

What in the fuck am I doing intellectualising everything with my mind when I’m meant to be in a body.

Gift of Acceptance

If all matter exists as parts of a whole, and I am matter, I am a part of the whole. This realisation helped me come to terms with some deep emotions of unworthiness that have kept me stagnant for a lot of years.

I believe that we all are who we were meant to be when we came here and all we have to do is remember. So much of our childhood is spent on learning about what is expected of us by others that we forget to check in with what we love. We forget that even though the world may attach conditions for its approval of who we are, we aren’t meant to be everyone’s cup of tea. But the one person who will drink from the cup is us. And that we must always return to ourselves.

If this piece intrigues you and you would like to have conversations about my experience on DMT, you can find me on Instagram.

If you would like to showcase this piece in your publication, feel free to reach out!

As a recovering people pleaser, one of the most important — and harrowing — lessons I learned (I’m still learning) was developing the ability to deal with myself outside of all the unsolicited advice I received growing up. Once I learned that half the shit people say is a projection of their own experiences in life, I started recognizing the power I had over my own mistakes.

If you’re a 20-something individual like me, on the brink of discovering yourself, and you have trouble stepping out of situations when they make you unhappy, I’m writing this for you (and me).

Saying “no, thank you” is a practice

Remember that bite of broccoli on a spoon as you were sat on a high chair? The airplane that was a BIG CHUNKY LIE? It was a different time then. You had no choice but to comply with the wishes of your caretakers. You may have had to comply for the sake of a balanced diet, or for the sake of your parents needing to feel in control of their own lives. Either way, at some point, you have experienced the unpleasantness of being forced to do shit you don’t fucking want to do. But you did it anyway because it was easier than dealing with the conflict that comes from upholding your own boundaries.

Saying no is hard. Saying no means feeling responsible for how someone else feels because of you. And if they’re hurt because of your actions, it sucks even more. You feel selfish and inconsiderate for hurting someone through the power of your choice. Owning your decisions? What a shitty thing to do to someone who put the ball in your court.

If every situation was a game of tennis, and you knew that not playing it for yourself meant going home with a blackhole for a gut, would you still give up your turn?

The thing about life is that it moves to align you with your blueprint. The longer you take to accept the changes, the heavier it feels. So…trust your gut and say no when you mean it.

Honouring your intuition takes courage

Maybe you’re not making decisions for yourself because you don’t know how to make a decision from a place of grounding. You’re so used to someone else deciding what happens in your life that there is a disconnect between you and your intuition — that grounded inner guide you’ve had since you were born.

Just like a relationship with a new partner takes time, a relationship with your intuition takes time, trust, and effort too.

The first step to understanding your intuition is — lo and behold — connecting with it! Which means getting out of your head and getting into your body.

If you can make time to connect with your body everyday, you can water the intuition and watch it come alive when a new decision needs to be made. The next time someone asks you to eat their frogs, your body will scream loud enough for you to hear it and say NO THANK YOU.

Action breeds motivation, not the other way round

Yes, you’ve read this article. You’ve learned something about yourself. You’ve decided that things will change now. But maybe you think they won’t change just yet because you don’t have the motivation to practice saying no, thank you. Or the time to connect with your body. You think you will live a life of good boundaries when it is magically meant to happen.

What’s going on here is that you’re waiting for ‘the right time’. I see you. You’re afraid of the rejection that comes with standing your ground. You want to feel completely energized before you can create these boundaries around yourself to protect the little energy you have left. That’s not how this works. You may never find an optimal time to create good boundaries that is not NOW.

Think of it this way. Boundaries protect your energy. That energy can then be used to look for other boundaries you can create to further protect your energy.

The momentum you gain from setting one small boundary can help carry you through the next few and the few after that and so on.

In this way, taking small actions can help create a cascade of actions in the same direction. So what’s the first boundary you’re setting and who are you setting it with?

In summary

1. Say no more often

2. Consult with your inner knowing

3. Practice! Radically!

Burnout happens when your body has been running on super extra high- performing hormones for far too long. This accumulation of stress hormones over a period of time can lead to your body feeling in overdrive and no amount of coffee or sugar can help you show up as your best self. In fact, running on adrenaline for too long can create adrenal fatigue which can have adverse effects on your body.

Some signs of burnout include alienation from your work, physical environment, and/or people around you; headaches and/or digestive issues; lack of motivation and general mental fatigue causing you to finish work slower; lack of creativity, negative feelings about tasks, a feeling of needing to ‘run away’. Yep, it’s not pretty.

Who’s fault is it anyway?

Burnout is simply a by-product of capitalism and the rat race. There really is no way to escape it and also be financially stable during this wild global pancetta (at least imo). As a 20-something millennial, I’m still struggling with self-worth, paying bills, impostor syndrome, body image issues, parental expectations, my expectations from myself as a child…and a shit ton more. I cannot stop my racing anxious mind. That’s just how it goes for me. So my burnout is inevitable.

How the f*ck do you get out of burnout?

Getting out of burnout first requires you to understand that you are, in fact, burnt the f*ck out. Check to see if you’re showing the signs of burnout mentioned above. If you’re chronically experiencing more than a few, your burnout might be more severe than mine and you might want to seek medical attention. However, if you’re like me, perpetually exhausted, physically fatigued and mentally checked out, my de-escalation list might be a decent starting point for you.

When your brain and body have been subjected to chronic stress over a long period of time, they really really need a period of de-escalation before they can begin the recovery period. This is why taking a week-long vacation after a burnout doesn’t make you feel like the greener grass you’re trying to become. 7 days is not always enough (or ever lol?) for every human to be born again.

My de-escalation routine heavily revolves around these five key things:

Sleep

As many hours for as many days as required. Sleep is your best friend when you’re way into the deep end. Your body repairs itself in your sleep so make sure you’re catching up to your 56 years worth of sleep debt before anything else.

Personally, I tend to sleep (more like crash) for 18 hours the first day or two. It starts going down to 10-ish hours over the next few days at night but I also cave during the day when I’m yearning for a nap. The best way to get your sleep in is to listen to your body. It will tell you what it needs. And then follow through. Your body is your friend. Don’t fight it all the time.

Hydration

Chug that water, your body needs it to flush out all the chronic stress you’ve been keeping in. Water plays an essential role in helping your body feel well. It regulates your temperature, and keeps your adrenal fatigue at bay. If you’re feeling thirsty, you’re already behind. Keep sipping.

I drink water before going to bed when trying to recover so that my body has access to water while it repairs itself during my sleep. Doing this helps me feel less parched in the mornings.

Movement

Light stretching, yoga, brisk walks, running, whatever works. Your body was meant to move. Without the movement it needs, your muscles are going to feel like shit. With movement, your body starts to connect to itself. Even as much as stretching can help you get rid of those crackles in your neck. It’s important that you move mindfully. The goal is to reconnect with your body because it holds all the knowledge you need to make decisions with grounding.

I prioritize regular movement over other things during de-escalation. I tend to stretch often, do some light yoga, and go for walks with my water tumbler.

Boundaries

Ever had too many cups of coffee and felt your eye twitch because of all the energy and not enough outlets? That’s what your brain feels like when you tell it to slow down after weeks of adrenaline. It’s twitching to do more, be more, think more. It’s not at fault, it’s conditioned to be in overdrive. That’s why it needs to de-escalate before it can rest. Don’t be angry at what it was asked to do. Let it be and it will eventually stop twitching, and ease down.

While you do this though, make sure you give your brain some time to be bored again even if it takes slapping your hand every time you reach for your phone to “read an article on productivity”. The reason why you’re in burnout is because you can’t chill and you’ve been overcommitted for a while. It’s time to let that sh*t go and soothe the feelings of urgency.

Saying “no” plays a big factor in making sure your mind can rest. Whether it’s setting boundaries at work, home, or even yourself, it’s extremely important to recognize that you get to choose your wellbeing over serving others and the people who care will understand.

Mindfulness

When we’re overworked, our brains are rushing past the details during our day to day. These details could potentially help in grounding us to the present moment and realize that there is less urgency than we feel. Being present in the moment can help you connect to the world in a deeper way. This depth can often serve as a bridge between living cerebrally and being fully present in any moment without thinking about the next one. Mindfulness is most effective without distractions which is why meeting your body’s other needs come first.

As an introverted extrovert, I find that spending time alone helps me connect to myself and the world. I am able to zoom out of my day, see the bigger picture, and feel lighter because I feel present in my body. Some of my favourite mindfulness activities include dancing to music that I can truly feel, singing, writing/journalling (great way to braindump and create space), sitting by water and listening to the waves, and spending time with my cat without any distractions.

How do you know you’ve “de-escalated”?

De-escalation doesn’t feel like recovery. It feels like a nauseating motion sickness that doesn’t go away for a hot second (like, a week and change). I’m still in it. And all I’ve done is sleep my ass off until I felt better about my body and mind. After a week of de-escalation, I feel a bit mentally rested and ideas start to flow in because my brain has more room to breathe. I tend to write these ideas down in a safe place (so I’m not worried about forgetting them) and I avoid acting on them.

My body also begins to feel more hydrated and the creaks, crackles and pops subside a bit with regular movement. I begin taking genuine interest in what I’m eating, and how I feel about small details during each new day. Life starts feeling a bit brighter and even if it’s raining, I’ll go for a walk just because.

What’s on the other side?

Rinse and repeat…. It’s not that great on the other side unless you’re committing to change your lifestyle which might mean making some changes in different aspects of your life. And while that seems daunting, knowing that you will eventually find peace can truly help you through the transformation. As you make small changes, overtime your energy will start to return at a more consistent level and you’ll be less likely to suffer from this chronic byproduct of capitalism called Burnout :)

I write about whatever is on my mind. This ranges from my life as a second-gen South Asian immigrant in Canada, multiple career changes, behavioural psychology, UX design, to occasional heartbreak.

If you resonate with my words + feelings, give me a follow and let me know what you loved about my piece. I’d really appreciate it!

The concept of Love Languages was introduced to us by Gary Chapman in the early 90s. Through his book, The Five Love Languages, we understand that each individual values different things that make them feel loved/cared for. Your primary love language is the way you best understand and prefer to receive love from others. Here are the love languages:

1. Quality Time

2. Physical Touch

3. Words of Affirmation

4. Acts of Service

5. Gifts

Although my primary receiving love language is acts of service, I show my love most by giving gifts to others.

I understand the gift-giving love language as a form of serving the ones that I love. While there’s a lot more talk about people who love receiving gifts — ♫ ah, living in the material world ♫ — there isn’t enough thought given to those who love giving them.

A huge part of giving gifts involves paying attention to the needs and wants of the receiver. There is absolutely no point in recycling shitty gifts just because your mother taught you to never show up empty-handed. This is probably why it’s a huge piss-off when someone brings over something that makes no fucking sense to who I am or what I need.

As an act of rebellion, I make an effort to bring the right gift or I avoid the ordeal entirely. If you don’t know someone enough, honestly, just ask them what they need instead of wasting your resources. When I do give a gift, there’s an entire process behind it; planning, saving, purchasing, and presentation aside, I want the receiver to feel seen and heard through my gifts.

What do good gifts say about the giver?

The goodness of a gift is subjective to the receiver. And while gifts not only serve a purpose for the receiver, they also say volumes about the giver.

Here are a few characteristics of the giver of good gifts:

1. Thoughtfulness

They think about you and your needs during their day.

The other thing with giving timely gifts is that I want you to see you’re on my mind. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m always swamped with projects by choice. If I’ve bought you something, it won’t be on a whim. I don’t have the time to mindlessly shop.

To bring you a gift, I would have taken the time to think about your problem, come up with a list of potential contending solutions, and then I would have chosen a winner.

This process takes time and I want you to see that I care about you more than other things going on in my life. I would hope you see that and appreciate it because sharing my attention is a challenge but I love/care about you enough to overcome it.

2. Listening Skills

They listen to you.

When you listen to someone effectively, you’re actively trying to learn about them without waiting for your turn to respond. This key skill can help you get gift ideas even before it’s time to get one. People love talking about themselves, so give them the opportunity and you’ll see how many ideas they give you without your asking.

Example: You’re out with me at a cafe, and you mention how much you love this coffee roast somewhere in the middle of a story you’re telling me. I’ll write it down in my notes app to buy it for you if you’re having a terrible week. Unexpected gifts can usually cheer people up, especially if they’re thoughtful.

Sometimes this isn’t appreciated but the people who don’t get it don't have to be your people. If you have a knack for attention to detail like myself, take pride in it and don’t change for anyone else. It’s a big world.

3. Emotional Intelligence

They pay attention to you, your feelings & circumstance.

When I care about someone, I think about them often. I think about what they like, dislike, how they spend their day, and what can make it better. I study them. I look out for them in more ways than one.

A lot of times there’s more digging to be done if you want to get to the root cause, or in this context, the gift that will solve a problem. Gifts that solve problems without trying too hard can serve as a source of unspoken trust between the giver and the receiver.

Example: We’re hanging out and you tell me about your crystal collection, how much it’s helped your energy, how you take it everywhere but are concerned about damaging them when you carry them around. The first thing I’m going to do when you’re on your way home is to check Amazon for a portable house for your crystals. I want you to be able to carry them without fear of damaging or losing them. It’ll be on your doorstep within a week.

4. Timeliness

They made sure you have this when you wanted/needed it the most.

Like the example above, surprising folks with random things is a different high for me. If I’ve caught you avoiding a purchase that can make your life less miserable (a new card case, wire catchers, a watering can to replace the milk jug you’re currently using to water your plants), you best believe I’m getting it for you as soon as I can.

It’ll show up on your doorstep or I’ll be holding it in my arms the next time I see you and I’ll eagerly watch your face as you unravel the wrappings. Part of me wants your happiness, and part of me wants you to see I was the knight in shining armor who relieved your current pains. (yes, we all see the deeper issue here but that’s for another post)

5. Implicit Sacrifice/Compromise

They adapted their circumstance to afford this.

Not everyone is rich enough to walk into a store, buy what their heart desires, and leave with a handful of goodies. Some of us have to plan our finances far more in advance than others to buy meaningful gifts when an occasion shows up.

As someone who still has a student loan to pay off, I start making Christmas lists in the summer.

Yep! Summer.

In July, I’ll set budgets, create a savings plan (weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc.) so that by the time we’re in November, not only do I have a list of gifts still relevant and ready to be bought but I also have the funds to splurge.

This kind of planning helps me create a sense of financial balance during the holidays, and it doesn’t feel like my bank account is on its last legs.

Are there times when I’m unable to make purchases for others immediately?

Of course!

But that being said, as a 20-something with student loans, rent, and other expenses, it’s not always easy for me to save. When I was younger, and all the important things were taken care of, I would skip spending money on lunch 2–3 times a week to incrementally save up for gifts for the year.

However, this is the part that nobody sees. They don’t see the lists, the math, the scheduling on top of constantly searching our conversations to find out what I can do to make their lives easier. And that is what it takes to be a gift-giver.

So how can you treat a serial gift-giver right?

Start by accepting the gift, no matter how big or small.

In my years of gift-giving, I’ve come across a lot of different types of gift receivers. Some will accept the gift readily, and others will argue about the value and how it’s tOo mUcH and I CaNt aCcEpT tHiS.

If you belong to the tOo mUcH group, don’t do that thing with a serial gift-giver. Now that you’re aware of all that goes into the art of gifting, you can see how having it returned only ever hurts us because all that work was for nothing. It didn’t benefit you, and it wasn’t appreciated the way we hoped it would be.

So start by accepting the gift. Then try to understand how we decided it was the right gift. I love it when someone asks me how I knew that was the right gift because there’s always a story behind my process. And believe it or not, I too love talking about myself. HA.

Reminiscing

A wandering mind can take you where a focused mind won’t

Slightly cold, with a heavy heart, and a feeling of grounding and defeat, I felt a pain I hadn’t felt in about four years. It wasn’t as strong as it used to be but it was vivid enough to send me back in time. I sat on the yoga mat listening to Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Amsterdam” on Spotify. I wondered if this is what healing is supposed to feel like: soft, dulling pain that’s building distance with time.

Feeling

The only way to stop drowning is to swim

As I lost myself in the sweet crooning voice of Gregory Alan Isakov, I was reminded of all the times I felt this way about the voices of other men.

The way my heart would yearn to belong to them.

The way my mind would circle the idea of knowing all of their thoughts.

I thought about how four years ago I broke my own heart and let him go because my gut told me this was for the best. And how it still comes back in aches every now and then, a reminder of what it was, what I went through.

I made my choice and I stand by it. For the sake of myself.

And every time I ask myself if I would have changed my mind, my heart screams:

NO CHANCE

Understanding

Seek to listen if you seek to learn

Knowing that I will never do it differently felt powerful.

Something that was so out of place yet so grounding.

The fact that I decided my future serves as a reminder that my life was lived, my time was spent, and not wasted waiting.

I made the waves I wanted to swim in.

And yet, it’s inevitable that some days a song, a smell, a sound will transport me back to a pivotal moment. Some moments will ring with laughter, and some will put Niagara to shame.

But the moments I cherish the most are when my heart had said:

Enough.

In a minute I became my own guardian. I felt the wind beneath my wings as I propelled myself out of a continuous emotional spiral. At that very moment, I realized I had so much love to give and the hurt came from not being able to share it with anyone else.

That’s when it hit me:

This love is mine.

This love is MINE.

I can give it to whoever I want. Whoever needs it the most. And you best believe I need it the most, a lot of the time.

I wanted this love. I wanted my love.

I wanted to feel embraced in velvety soft protection.

I wanted to hold myself in my own arms and tell myself that it’ll be alright. That it has always been alright when I’ve been around. I’ve always taken care of things and it was time I took care of myself.

It was time to feel at home with all the sweetly knitted socks of love-glue I hand out to cure others’ brokenness while my feet were frigid in the middle of December.

I could be the sand in my own toes, feel the way the waves do when they wash over your feet and engulf you, lapping around your ankles, spraying your knees with a gentle mist.

Seeing the way I stood up to my emotional spiral, I realized I was finally ready to take control of my feelings.

Acceptance

If your heart is a country that stood for its freedom, then its scars are landmarks that tell your story

In the last four years, friends were lost, lovers were gone and I was left with nothing but the remains of my love intended for sharing. A love that cried cold tears, afraid that it will never be spent on a worthy receiver.

All until I was ready to see myself as a worthy recipient.

And now that I see it, there is no going back.

Through my moments of reflection, I have come to believe that at the end of the day, you live longest with yourself.

If you were told you would live with your cat for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you think of keeping the peace between both of you? To keep the peace, you will need to take the time and understand your cat’s language.

In that regard, maybe you should take the time to learn your language.

Imagine being the best friend to yourself that you are to others. Imagine appreciating your own words the way you wish someone else did. You could quite literally be your own best friend, always there to hear yourself out in times of trouble.

Wouldn’t it be nice to always have someone on your side? Wouldn’t it be even better if they stayed with you for the rest of your life?

Having a set of predefined core values definitely helps in answering this question without feeling ambushed. This is because your self-identity is directly linked to your observation of self and others and it guides your values, behaviors, decisions, making you more of who you want to be.

Taking inspiration from Darius Foroux’s article, I decided to write the 8 core values that guide me in my everyday life:

Empathy

Take the time to understand the people around you. Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind to them as you would like them to be kind to you. Finding empathy has added value to my interpersonal relationships with family, friends, colleagues, clients and other humans in general.

Self-Respect

Having a healthy relationship with your mind can help you feel grounded and face daily challenges head-on. When you treat yourself with dignity, respect, and compassion, it not only tends to boost self-confidence but in turn teaches people how you expect to be treated. One of my high-school teachers would often say ‘commanding respect is more effective than demanding respect’. I wasn’t too clear on this until I worked on my self-image and saw my relationships at work and home drastically improve.

Autonomy

Realize that you have control over your actions; you decide your path with authority but also with responsibility. Owning your actions is part of being a responsible, autonomous adult. And similar to what Darius Foroux says in his article, while you’re making decisions that affect you, don’t forget that what other adults do is not under your control or your responsibility. This had been a really important lesson in my life as an empath. Before truly understanding this, I felt responsible for people I cared for in an unrealistic way, continually driving myself to emotional exhaustion.

Authenticity

Remind yourself of who you are and why you believe in your values. You have a unique combination of skills, talents, ambitions. Not only does this improve morale, but it also holds you accountable to your personal values. There was a time I was afraid of being judged by others, not feeling good enough for partners or employers until I realized that both ends must match for it to be a fit. Sometimes, you will not fit in, you will not find what you are looking for and that’s okay. Take this process as a method to filter out where you don’t belong. It’s okay to not belong everywhere. If you belonged everywhere, you wouldn’t have a distinct personality. Be proud of who you are and you will find your place.

Growth

Learn from your past and your present for your future. Growth isn’t restricted to your anatomy, it spans throughout your being from mindset to mentoring. Teach what you learn and you’ll learn a lot more in return. Believing that there’s always room to grow has helped me become more open-minded and enabled me to listen actively rather than relentlessly striving to be heard.

Openness

Be honest, be truthful, be frank. I’m a hardcore believer in open communication. To have a voice is to have the ability to express yourself. We’re allowed to have opinions, we’re allowed to have feelings regardless of gender, shape or colour. By explaining our perspective to others, we illustrate that we’re letting our guard down, that we trust them, which in turn sends the message that they too can trust us. Having an open communication system enables better understanding and this has helped me successfully collaborate in a team setting, with my supervisors, and in my personal life.

Curiosity

Dig in deeper, follow the lead until you can’t and then let it be. Sometimes you can’t figure out every detail and that’s part of what makes life beautiful. While chasing down an idea, delving into possibilities, knowledge and exploring questions is fun, knowing when to stop can keep you from going down a looping rabbit hole.

Loyalty

Strong bonds help us feel grounded and supported. Making sure I invest in my relationships with others as well as myself makes me feel cared for, and gives me the encouragement I need to pursue the meaningful work I need to feel part of the global community.

Those are the right values I live by every day. Values can build habits that make you who you want to be but working it the other way round isn’t entirely as organic as you’d hope.

‘only speaking out loud what you believe is the truth’

At first, my heart went like ‘oh!’, and then my brain went like ‘oh…’

Which brings me to this post, written under a lot of mental confusion.

Let’s say speaking your truth is essentially just saying what you think is true, which sounds like a heartwarming feeling of freedom and empowerment. But is that how it really feels?

Not for me.

I feel a powerful flood of emotion running through my chest all the way to my tailbone. You might think it’s terrible posture (and you might be terribly correct) but it’s mostly fear.

Yep, fear.

That purple guy from Disney’s Inside Out. I’m terrified of someone pointing at me and saying,

“Hey, guys! look, it’s stupid from ‘speak your truth’ day.”

It’s me. I’m stupid because I didn’t fact-check my sources and I spoke with emotion or reflex rather than being intrinsically correct.

One instinct screams:

‘YOU'RE ONLY HUMAN!’

and another one sternly says,

‘These are all excuses, you’re a responsible adult who should have their shit together ffs, how can your mouth utter words that paint you in a negative light? Have your parents taught you nothing? What will their social circle say about you? About them?’

This instinct likes to go on for longer most days.

It’s almost as if there was an internal war about something.

As if…I wasn’t perfect.

Almost as if…I was…human…

But being human translates into being imperfect such that you’re constantly learning through experience. So I guess I could ‘only speak out loud what I believe is the truth at that time’ because “that time” will be a compounded chance occurrence based on past events unforeseeing the future.

If this is true, then I’m probably able to apologize for ‘speaking my truth’ after I’ve offended somebody with it. But WHY would I even speak my truth instead of the politically correct form of language?

And will I be forgiven?

Miley Cyrus wasn’t forgiven for wearing (rather, not wearing) her truth. Is that the same? Or is my truth lower value on the regular, only amplified when it’s political because my social net worth is lower value on the regular?

Seems a little unfair to me.

I’m thinking of weaving capitalism into this web but I suddenly saw the face of an orange man with tiny hands in my mind’s eye and I’d like to move past that conversation.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is…

I’m scared of saying things I believe in out loud sometimes because I think someone will bring this up against me later on in life.

They could twist it and turn it and take something cool away from me and it will suck.

Who wants to suck? That’s right. Nobody.

But you know what? Writing this felt great. I didn’t find it difficult.

I found it empowering as hell.

I’m a little less scared of being called stupid today. Even if another human being reads this. Especially, if another human being reads this.

It bothers me when people posses so much talent still never explore the greatness potential it comes with. The satisfaction in being truly who you are through words, art, dance, theatre, or any form of creativity is unmatched by the salary you’re paid for selling your time and effort to a job that does nothing but drain your, in the words of Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, “muchness”. Having grown up believing I had super powers (as all kids do..?), coming to terms that I am one of the masses was unequivocally challenging: dependent on an income derived from selling my soul to a corporation. It really is just that for a major percentage of the working population, especially the ones just out of school.

In my younger days I idolised J. K. Rowling with all the articulacy and eccentricities in her character development scheme. I was enthralled to consider myself a part of the Harry Potter fandom, and the 13 year old in my heart still holds on to he emotion. It’s where I have felt most at home, not simply because of how badly I sought an escape from my real life but mainly by observing Rowling’s art of storytelling. Inspired by her words, I began to write fictional narratives as a channel to encapsulate my frequent daydreaming. Since then, writing has served me with a sense of control even though my own story might display a lack thereof.

Yet here I am a decade and change later, sitting at a corporate work desk, wondering what happened to the dream? Here’s what happened: it was brutally assaulted by self-esteem and societal pressures to accept that more money means less problems. In fact, this is what we teach our kids from the get go: find a career that pays and you will experience eternal happiness quite like the promising testimonials of using *insert any drug ever*. The misfortune of this recurring cycle exhibits itself in the youth as they grow older but somehow more miserable than we ever could be. With the advancements in technological fields, kids find themselves alluded to a surplus of time unintentionally used to chase self-gratification rather than self-development. Unfortunately due to accessibility, sometimes, the choice means of self-gratification are drugs.

At the end of the day we can blame the parenting, the society, the friendships, workplace pressures, economy and even Freud for how we behave the way we do. These, we are convinced, are the realities of life until we observe how often we ourselves selectively escape reality in thoughts, interactions, music and the media. We forget what our lives are about while staring at the perfect pictures of everyone else’s life. Whether their struggle is invisible or otherwise, it does exist, not quite unlike our own and the only way we can connect with our truth is to live in our moment, to see the things happen around us and realise that we, as an individual, have the power to touch the lives of the people in the direct vicinity of our presence. The key to being mindful of ourselves is to bring back our attention to things we can see in 3D, things we can hear without digital modification, things we can touch as we go by our day. By paying more attention to ourselves, we can change the way we see things and respond to our environment using the best of ourselves. As time goes by, all of us must realise that at the end of the day the most dependable person in our life will always be us. This means that there is only one place to start your journey, and that is: yourself.

If you have ever felt stagnant, how did you/would you start to make your way out of it? Let me know in your comments.

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