ME, MYSELF, & I

ME

How do you get through the moment when heartbreak, disillusion, and disappointment are so prevalent, it feels like you can't see clearly?

Like your chest is caving in, and you have to actively remind yourself to keep breathing?

How do you move forward when it feels like life has come to a standstill, and all your choices force you to confront that you've been the common denominator all along?

How do you take radical responsibility without self-blaming?

How do you proclaim yourself a survivor, without perpetuating the notion of victimhood?

How do you empower yourself, while surrendering to the reality that you have no control over how others treat you?

How do you overcome the pain of disappointment + failure, while still allowing the emotions they entail to spill through you?

These are not easy questions with easy answers. They are all rife with polarities that ask us to balance human nature with higher nature.

Gut instinct with divine intervention.

Pain with pride.

Fear with freedom.

It's a constant tight rope walk that demands the impossible task of balancing the external noise with internal poise. It feels unreasonable, and discouraging, like setting One's self up for failure.

But we hear about it all the time:

The beauty is in the breakdown.

What does the notion really mean though? What does it mean to find beauty in destruction, pain, trauma, failure, disappointment?

For me, finding beauty in the breakdown is about letting go of the need to understand the circumstances and instead, seek to understand yourself.

It means surrendering to the fact that sometimes you have to experience a breakdown of your own paradigms in order to have a major breakthrough.

It's about honoring that space in-between the breakdown + the breakthrough, by earnestly reflecting on your inner world, beliefs, and paradigms that contributed to the unfolding of the seemingly undesirable event.

It's about slowing down, being kind to yourself, and allowing your raw humanness to flash in living color.

And yet, it's also about allowing yourself to feel rage against the injustice. Because rage is a notch above depression, it motivates the change necessary to shift your perception/beliefs, and thus your circumstances.

It's about allowing yourself to vacillate between the frequencies of higher perspective, and base human emotion.

It about tuning into the natural order of (your) nature, and becoming the wave that flows through the current. To allow. To unfold. To self-correct through unlimited intervals of anchor + flow.

It's about (re)pairing polarities, and being all you have the capacity to be as Mind, Body, and Spirit.

It's about not rejecting any aspect of what is, and opening yourself to the natural progression of breaking + building that is creation itself.

MYSELF

"I refuse to teach my daughter fear of loss."

You heard the words echo through the chambers of your mind.

Never in your life had you had a realization so profound.

It was only a moment earlier that you looked over at your sleeping daughter from the seat of your makeshift office (a lawn chair + black folding table). You asked yourself what you feared most. A question you avoided contemplating, and the answer rang out in your ears: Losing someone loved.

It's a fear that haunted you your entire life. One that left you staring out the living room window in tears when you were eight years old, and mommy didn't make it home from work at exactly 6:08pm. Your mind would spiral into a flurry of worry, as you imagined scenarios of her demise. Relief would only come when you saw her champagne colored Pontiac Bonneville pass through a dry dirt lot in the distance.

Although you learned to mask it most of your adult life, you’ve lived with a vague sense of anxiety. That at any moment, someone you loved could leave you.

Your solution was to put on your rose colored glasses, and walk around with blinders on as a means to protect yourself from pain.

And then, in 2018, you became a mother.

And then, in 2020, the pandemic happened.

Mortality was a thing that you could no longer ignore. ‘Relentless optimism in the face of sheer panic and exhaustion’ became your reality.

2020 stripped you of your belief systems, laying bare your dormant fears. It challenged you to slay your inner dragons and shed your outdated mindsets, revealing the supple psyche of a mind humbled by grief.

It asked you what you valued most, and a simple answer emerged:

To achieve + maintain freedom from mental bondage.

Which lead to another critical question you needed to ask yourself:

Are you the master of your own mind? If not, who is? —

I

The journey out of anxiety has been one of learning: learning about myself, but also learning life skills such as managing stress and coping with disappointments, and learning to rediscover the little things that make life worth living and loving.

But I’m ready to transcend mere survival to a level of peace that comes from from a dissolution of inner walls, secrets, and willful self-denial.

What I’m talking about is alchemy of the mind. It may seem like an abstract concept but in truth, We can’t afford not to think about the way our mental mechanisms operate.

I’m not talking about another self-help productivity formula, I’m talking about making Our efforts add up by way of subtraction. By simplifying Our mental load, so that We can find more peace, patience, and pleasure in Our life.

How can this be achieved? By learning how to learn, how Our mind works, and then using that knowledge to understand Ourselves.

ONE Methodology

Among many things, I am a mother but since becoming one nearly two years my sense of self/identify have shifted drastically. Always a voracious reader/researcher/thinker, sometimes it feels like my head is going to explode from the sheer amount of mental churn/processing happening in my brain.

Enter mind maps.

I’ve always had a fascination with them, and the scientific facts around how they increase creativity, memory, and focus - but I’m only now truly motivated to create them. I’ll also use this space for processing revelations + insight to my own mind. My motivation in sharing my mind maps are two fold: to demonstrate a model for mind mapping inner wisdom that can be personalized to your own practice, and to 2) reinforce my learning.

In addition to the above, this platform is dedicated to creating an organized system for processing learnings across media (courses, coaching programs, books, films, music, art, tv, etc) and themes (mythology, creativity, positive psychology, spirituality, storytelling etc). I will also try my hand at blending mapping with analysis, and multimedia interjections.

This platform is the space for my life-long quest for cultivating a compassionate mind within myself, so that I can raise a child that values empathy, kindness, and care for self/of others. My hope that anyone who reads my work comes away with a sense of how to navigate change with grit, gratitude, and grace.